Tag: us federal government

US increases pressure on Ukraine to do more to counter corruption | CNN Politics

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The US is increasingly urging Ukraine to do more to combat governmental corruption, issuing several notices to Kyiv in the last few weeks indicating that certain kinds of US economic aid will be linked to Ukraine’s progress in reforming its institutions, multiple US officials told CNN.

The Biden administration’s commitment to supporting Ukraine’s military remains undiminished. But officials have made clear recently that other forms of US aid are potentially in jeopardy if Ukraine does not do more to address corruption.

Congress has not yet approved the administration’s request for $24 billion in additional funding for Ukraine, with some Republicans wary of providing so much money without robust oversight and conditions attached.

“The message to the Ukrainians has always been that if any of these funds are misappropriated, then it jeopardizes all US aid to the country,” one US official familiar with the efforts told CNN.

The State Department issued a formal diplomatic note, also known as a demarche, to Ukraine in late summer that said the US expects Ukraine to continue pursuing various anti-corruption and financial transparency efforts in order to keep receiving direct budget support, three officials familiar with the matter told CNN. The demarche has not been previously reported.

The US has provided Ukraine with over $23 billion in direct budget support since the war began, according to the Congressional Research Service. This money is separate from military aid and allows Ukraine to continue providing essential services to its citizens like emergency first responders, health care, and education. It is disbursed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the World Bank to the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance.

The demarche also emphasized the need for Ukraine to implement critical reforms under Ukraine’s International Monetary Fund program, including those related to anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT), a source familiar with the matter said.

In a statement to CNN, the Ukrainian embassy in Washington said that Ukraine has moved “ambitiously” to pass reforms, including on its IMF program.

“We have conducted these reforms initiated by Ukraine with the help and support from the US, EU and other friends,” the statement says. “And their practical support to our Cabinet of ministers as well as our (National Bank of Ukraine), General Prosecutors office and anticorruption agencies is appreciated and valued…In all our obligations with IMF, EU and other international donors as well as USA, Ukraine delivers on this front.”

The administration has been public about its desire to help Ukraine fight corruption throughout its war with Russia. But private diplomatic discussions about the issue have ramped up in recent weeks, as questions have swirled about whether Congress will approve the administration’s funding request for Ukraine.

National Security adviser Jake Sullivan met with a delegation of Ukrainian anti-corruption officials to discuss their efforts just last month, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken discussed the issue with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while in Kyiv in early September, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Monday.

Asked by CNN about the US push to get Ukraine to tackle corruption, Miller said that he would not detail “specific conversations, other than to say that it continues to be a high priority for us that we raise with our Ukrainian counterparts, and it continues to be a priority for Ukraine. And we have seen them take action in response to specific requests that we have made as recently as the past few weeks.”

Separately, the White House has drafted a list of reforms Ukraine should implement in order to continue receiving US financial assistance and move toward integrating into Europe.

The draft, first reported by Ukrainska Pravda, was shared with the US embassy in Kyiv and members of the Donor Coordination Platform, a mechanism launched in January to better coordinate international financial support flowing into Ukraine. The reforms are not a condition for receiving military aid, a US official said.

“This list was provided as a basis for consultation with the Government of Ukraine and key partners as part of our enduring support to Ukraine and its efforts to integrate into Europe, a goal the United States strongly supports,” the US embassy in Kyiv said in a statement.

The White House document outlines changes Ukraine could make within three months, six months, one year and 18 months.

Many of the proposals – including strengthening the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, enhancing the independence of the supervisory boards of Ukrainian state-owned companies, and constitutional court reform – are also requirements for EU membership and benchmarks for the IMF.

“Reforms in the energy sector, a bastion of corruption and oligarchic control, are essential to cementing Ukraine’s European integration,” the State Department said in a strategy memo for Ukraine posted on its website in August.

The memo added that “Ukraine must maintain stable financial management of its economy in order to continue to fight the war, rebuilt the economy, and achieve its goal to become a prosperous, democratic, western country. Ukraine must slay the corruption dragon once and for all.”

The Ukrainian embassy said in its statement to CNN that Ukrainian officials signed an “energy memorandum” during their visit to Washington last month, and that Ukraine has passed a European-style law aimed at preventing abuses in wholesale energy markets. The White House document says implementation of that law should occur by April 2024.

Zelensky, for his part, has been eager to show the US, EU and NATO that he is cracking down on corruption, particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He recently cleaned house at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, firing his defense minister and several senior defense officials, and launched a number of high-profile raids earlier this year against officials suspected of graft.

Ukraine considers the direct budget support it gets from the US and other foreign allies to be vital to keeping its economy afloat.

“We are grateful that this money arrives as grants, because this does not affect the state debt of Ukraine, and this is a very important factor in these difficult times,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told Blinken last month, referring to the US’ direct budget support for Ukraine.

That money is also the “most closely scrutinized” form of aid to Ukraine, a senior Democratic Senate aide told CNN. “The Ukrainians know they have to account for every single penny. The Ukrainians making the decisions know that accountability is a key to their continuing to get funds. It’s been a consistent point of messaging from the administration. Which is fair considering all the support we’re giving them.”

USAID’s inspector general and Ukraine’s Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor signed a memorandum of understanding in July aimed at strengthening USAID’s ability to probe any misuse or abuse of funds by Ukraine, including the direct budget support.

The US intends to provide up to $3.3 billion in direct economic aid to Ukraine if Congress authorizes its $24 billion supplemental request for Ukraine.

That supplemental request is now in limbo, however.

Congress passed a short-term bill on Saturday to continue funding the government through mid-November, but the legislation does not include additional money for Ukraine. Republicans have increasingly questioned the wisdom of the funding and called for greater oversight of it, though some remain opposed to supporting Ukraine as a matter of principle, regardless of Kyiv’s anti-corruption efforts.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, is also taking new steps to better monitor US military aid flowing to Ukraine. The Defense Department inspector general announced last month that it will be establishing a new team in Ukraine to monitor ongoing US security assistance to Kyiv, which has totaled more than $43.7 billion since the start of the Biden administration.

It will mark the first time the DoD IG will have personnel based in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, said spokeswoman Megan Reed.

The White House noted in its draft list of priorities for Ukraine that the Ukrainian MoD should “redesign” its armament and procurement processes to better reflect NATO standards of “transparency, accountability, efficiency and competition in defense procurement.”

Another issue that has come up in recent weeks is the question of whether Zelensky will move to hold a presidential election in March 2024. Sen. Lindsey Graham has pushed for an election, saying it will demonstrate Ukraine’s commitment to freedom and democracy in the face of Russia’s invasion.

Zelensky has said that holding an election in wartime would be complicated and expensive, noting that international observers must be allowed in to ensure the results are internationally recognized. But he said last month that he is ready to do so “if it is necessary.”

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August 2, 2023
Special counsel probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents appears to be nearing end | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Special counsel Robert Hur’s interview of President Joe Biden is a sign that the classified documents investigation is nearing conclusion after casting a wide net that included dozens of witnesses during the ten-month long probe, multiple sources told CNN.

The White House announced this week that Biden was questioned by Hur and his team over two days in a voluntary interview that CNN has reported was scheduled weeks earlier. While the White House has declined to discuss details of the questioning, including whether Biden invoked executive privilege, the interview is the first public development in months.

One source told CNN that investigators have indicated they hope to wrap by the end of the year. As of now, it’s unclear if the probe will result in charges being filed, but sources familiar with the investigators’ line of questioning said they got the impression that’s unlikely, and there has been no discernible grand jury activity.

The Justice Department has said that Hur will produce a final report explaining his findings from the investigation, a standard part of a special counsel’s work.

“The breadth and depth of Hur’s work suggests that he is going to compile a detailed report to explain exactly how he conducted this investigation,” one source familiar with the investigation told CNN.

Hur was appointed in January to investigate after classified documents were found at Biden’s former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC, and at his Wilmington, Delaware, home.

Compared to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into classified materials found at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, including the indictment handed down in June, Hur’s probe into Biden has continued to operate quietly behind the scenes.

Still, the protracted length and exhaustive nature of the investigation has frustrated top Biden aides who expected it to wrap up months ago given the relatively small number of classified documents involved, according to a person familiar with the White House’s thinking.

That person said some Biden aides believe Attorney General Merrick Garland was overly cautious in selecting Hur, an appointee to two top Justice Department roles during the Trump administration, to ensure the investigation was politically unassailable.

Investigators working for Hur have interviewed a broad spectrum of witnesses — from longtime advisor and current counselor Steve Ricchetti, to former White House legal and communications aides, to a former low-level aide who helped pack up the vice president’s residence at the end of the Obama administration, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

Hur’s team also has reached out to people who worked in the Senate during the time Biden served in that chamber, sources said. That’s because some of the documents with classified markings date back to Biden’s time in the Senate, according to a statement from Biden’s personal attorney.

As part of the investigation, Hur has sought to examine the handling of classified documents during Biden’s time in the Senate, a period before many of the strict procedures now used for handling classified documents, according to sources.

That has caused Hur to confront the delicate issues of the Senate’s constitutional speech or debate protections, which limit the Justice Department’s ability to interview Senate staff without coordination with Senate lawyers, people briefed on the matter said.

It’s unclear whether and how the Senate and Justice Department’s discussions over Senate-related interviews have been resolved. A special counsel spokesman declined to comment on the idea of no charges or on any discussions with the Senate.

One person familiar with the investigation described members of Hur’s team as being professional but tedious in the level of detail they have sought in witness interviews. Investigators have asked about where staffers sat in the office, where they stored briefing books, and how they operated an office safe.

Another person described a lengthy interview with FBI agents and lawyers focused on understanding everything surrounding specific documents. Investigators appeared to be following a process that identified meetings connected to specific classified documents or notes recovered from Biden properties, the person familiar with the interview said. Everyone who attended a meeting or briefing connected the document is being interviewed, the person said.

Investigators appear to be trying to establish a chain of custody for the documents and the circumstances surrounding them to discern how the classified documents ended up in Biden’s office and home.

Another source said: “The central question in this case is: Did the vice president of the United States intentionally take classified documents for personal use?”

The challenge for investigators is how they assess culpability and the circumstances surrounding how the documents got to the Penn Biden Center and the president’s house in Delaware, the source said.

A lawyer for one witness also described Hur’s process as being slow and methodical. Investigators interviewed this lawyer’s client earlier this year, but recently came back and asked his witness for additional documents.

“They are certainly being sufficiently thorough, and there is a temptation to think they are doing some things twice,” the lawyer said.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to say Tuesday if the president answered all questions posed to him or invoked executive privilege during the interview with Hur. Jean-Pierre also wouldn’t say if the Biden administration requested that the interview be postponed following Hamas’ attack on Israel over the weekend.

“He’s been very much focused on the issues of the – you know – horrific events that we have seen in Israel,” she said. “As president, he has to do multiple things at once, and that’s what you saw him do this weekend.”

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August 2, 2023
Trump shows in Iowa he still rules the GOP — despite his deepening criminal peril | CNN Politics

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Donald Trump only needed 10 minutes to show why his growing pile of criminal charges is not yet loosening his grip on the Republican presidential race and why his opponents will find him so hard to beat.

The ex-president’s growing legal peril hung Friday over the first showcase featuring all poll-leading GOP candidates on the same stage – an American Idol-style audition in Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state.

But his closest rivals didn’t dare bring up a legal quagmire that threatens to be a liability in a general election if Trump is the nominee for fear of alienating his still-massive support in the grassroots. Minor candidates with much less to lose did take on the stampeding elephants in the room – but were rewarded with silence or a torrent of boos.

Still, Trump couldn’t escape the reality of a campaign in which he seems to be running as much to recapture the powers of the presidency to sweep away his criminal exposure, as to implement an agenda likely to be even more extreme and disruptive than that of his first term. Every candidate walked out to the Brooks & Dunn hit “Only in America.” But when Trump arrived, the lyrics echoed his uncertain future: “One kid dreams of fame and fortune. One kid helps pay the rent. One could end up going to prison. One just might be president.”

Trump was making his first major public appearance since special counsel Jack Smith slapped him with new charges Thursday over his hoarding of classified documents at his Florida home after leaving office.

But Trump, the only one of 13 Republican hopefuls to get a standing ovation before he even spoke, largely ignored a flurry of cases that could force him to split time between court rooms and the campaign trail next year. He did lash out at the Biden administration for what he claimed was the political weaponization of justice.

“If I weren’t running, I would have nobody coming after me. Or if I was losing by a lot, I would have nobody coming after me,” said Trump, who has tried to turn his precarious position into a campaign trail virtue by portraying himself as a victim of political persecution.

As well as the classified documents case, Trump has said he expects to be indicted in another special counsel investigation – into his attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss and his behavior in the run-up to the mob attack on the US Capitol by his supporters. He is also due to go on trial in March in a case in Manhattan relating to a hush money payment made to an adult film actress.

But such is his strength in Iowa – where he has a huge lead in the polls – and nationally in the GOP that his major opponents avoided risking their own reception at Friday’s dinner and their chances in January by raising the new charges.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did stiffen his criticism of Trump’s legal situation – but did so offstage.

“If the election becomes a referendum on what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago, we are not going to win,” DeSantis told ABC News. “We can’t have distractions.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence implicitly raised questions about Trump’s suitability for future office but also avoided openly criticizing his former White House partner.

“The allegations, including yesterday’s allegations against the president in that indictment are very serious,” Pence told Fox News with the caveat that Trump was entitled to his day in court. “But I’m never going to downplay the importance of handling our nation’s secrets. It literally goes straight to the security of this country.”

Only candidates who are so far behind that they so far look to have little chance to win in Iowa or anywhere else directly took on Trump.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson went there – but it didn’t do him any good.

“As it stands right now, you will be voting in Iowa, while multiple criminal cases are pending against former President Trump,” Hutchinson said. “We are a party of individual responsibility, accountability and support for the rule of law. We must not abandon that.” His comment drew a single clap in an otherwise silent ballroom.

Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, an ex-CIA officer, left his stinging criticism of the former president for the end of his speech.

“Donald Trump is not running for president to make America great again. Donald Trump is not running for president to represent the people that voted for him in 2016 and 2020,” Hurd said to loud boos. “Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison,” he said as jeers started to crescendo.

“I know, I know. I know. I know. I know. Listen, I know the truth. The truth is hard,” Hurd said, adding, “If we (nominate) Donald Trump, we are willingly giving Joe Biden four more years in the White House, and America can’t handle that.”

But judging by the snaking lines to shake Trump’s hand in his post-dinner reception and the much-smaller crowds at events hosted by his rivals, Trump remains the darling of his party. Much can change in the months before the caucuses, and it’s possible the sheer weight of legal threats could begin to weigh down Trump and convince some voters that, despite his hero status, another Republican might be a better bet. But if Trump is to be stopped, there is no sign so far that it will happen in Iowa.

Unlike some of the other GOP candidates, Trump is not using the dinner to also hold multiple Iowa campaign stops. On Saturday, he heads to Erie, Pennsylvania, for a campaign rally before what is likely to be an even friendlier audience.

Friday’s dinner in Des Moines, the state capital, was a rare occasion when the major GOP candidates appeared in the same place, even if they delivered 10-minute speeches one by one and never clashed onstage. Trump has warned he may skip the first Republican presidential debate on Fox News next month – a decision that might make sense given the size of his polling lead. The format of such events makes it hard for any candidate to break out. But it’s not impossible. In 2007, Sen. Barack Obama delivered a stemwinder that rescued his dawdling campaign at the equivalent Democratic event – then known as the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. A few months later, victory in the Iowa caucuses put him on the road to the 2008 Democratic nomination and the White House.

On Friday night, the former president’s strength meant that every other candidate was battling to become the Trump alternative, with a strong showing in Iowa that might set them up for a long duel with the front-runner deep into primary season.

The field came to Iowa with added incentive because of the wobbles of DeSantis, long seen as the top rival to Trump but who was forced to slash campaign staff amid concerns by donors about his profligate spending and his performance on the trail. DeSantis is now running a classic grassroots campaign in the Hawkeye State, holding small events and looking voters in the eye.

Polling is sparse so far as the Iowa campaign speeds up ahead of the caucuses in January, but Trump led in a Fox Business survey this month with 46%. DeSantis had 16%, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott had 11%. No other candidate was in double figures.

Despite the indictments hanging over his head, Trump made the most impressive 10-minute presentation. Showing rare discipline in sticking to the script, he demonstrated how he will use the legacy of a presidency that remains hugely popular among activists to disadvantage his rivals. Unlike most of the other candidates, he also tailored his message to the Hawkeye State.

“Hello Iowa, I’m here to deliver a simple message – there’s never been a better friend for Iowa in the White House than President Donald J. Trump,” the ex-president said, before rattling off a list of economic and other benefits, real and exaggerated, that Iowa enjoyed when he was in office. Trump also said that without him, the state would have lost its position as the first to hold a presidential nominating contest. Democrats have already decided that the mostly White, rural state does not represent the diversity of the rest of America and have changed the order of their primary calendar.

“Without me, you would not be first in the nation right now,” Trump said.

After a grim week filled with stories about chaos in his campaign and panic among donors about his performance, the DeSantis camp will likely be cheered by the Florida governor’s reception, and he won one of the few standing ovations of the evening after his remarks.

He defiantly vowed to visit every Iowa county and to chase every vote, in a message to those wondering whether soaring expectations ahead of the campaign were misplaced. DeSantis turned the focus from his own plight to the Democrats, arguing that his record in Florida would translate to 2024 success.

“I’m not budging an inch. We are going to fight back against these people, and we are not letting them take over our schools any longer. We are going to get this right as a nation,” he said.

“Everything I promised people I would do, we did.”

Scott, who is spoken of warmly by many Republican voters in Iowa and is seen as a bright new voice, also slammed Biden in his remarks.

“He is tearing down every rung of the ladder that helped me climb. I was a kid trapped in poverty, who did not believe that in America all things are possible,” the Senate’s only Black Republican said.

While most other candidates were heard politely, none appeared to boost their fortunes significantly. And former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is planting his flag in New Hampshire, didn’t even show up.

To paraphrase Trump’s opening line, there was one message from Iowa on Friday night. The ex-president is going to be tough to beat, in the adoring world of the GOP primary – however many more indictments come raining down from the special counsel or elsewhere.

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July 28, 2023
Trump’s legal team meets with special counsel as federal indictment looms | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Donald Trump’s defense lawyers and special counsel Jack Smith met Thursday in Washington, DC, without the former president’s team getting any guidance about timing of a possible indictment, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

The meeting happened on the same day that the grand jury hearing evidence from the special counsel’s probe into election subversion efforts by Trump and his allies was seen at the federal courthouse.

A court official said that there will not be any grand jury indictment returns on Thursday. Grand jury proceedings are secret and it’s unclear what Thursday’s developments mean for Smith’s investigation.

Since receiving a letter from Smith indicating he’s a target of the investigation earlier this month, Trump had argued against a meeting between his attorneys and Smith’s team because the former president believed the indictment was already a done deal, two sources familiar with his thinking said.

In seeking a meeting with Smith’s team, Trump’s lawyers hoped to at least delay any potential plans for the grand jury to hand up an indictment Thursday, people briefed on the plans said.

Another source familiar with the legal team’s thinking told CNN they also expected to discuss the logistics of how a potential indictment and arraignment of the former president would work.

“My attorneys had a productive meeting with the DOJ this morning, explaining in detail that I did nothing wrong, was advised by many lawyers, and that an Indictment of me would only further destroy our Country,” Trump said on Truth Social.

Trump’s political and legal strategy has been to delay any possible trials – including until potentially after the 2024 election – and to put the Justice Department in an uncomfortable position where they are pursuing a prosecution of President Joe Biden’s chief 2024 rival even as primary voters are beginning to have their say.

Every day they can push back an indictment is a day that pushes back an ultimate trial date.

The members of Trump’s legal team who attended Thursday’s meeting with Smith were John Lauro and Todd Blanche, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Lauro recently joined the team to handle matters related to the 2020 election and the run-up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Blanche has represented Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case and the Manhattan criminal case stemming from a hush-money scheme.

This is the second time Trump is facing potential charges brought by Smith’s team. Before Trump was charged in Florida in Smith’s probe into the mishandling of classified documents from his White House, he also was notified by prosecutors that he was a target of that investigation.

Prosecutors aren’t required to give investigatory targets such a warning. Around the time Trump was given the heads up about the potential classified documents charges against him, his lawyers also met in early June with prosecutors for Smith’s team. The classified documents indictment was brought against him later that month.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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July 27, 2023
Inside McCarthy’s sudden warming to a Biden impeachment inquiry | CNN Politics

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Speaker Kevin McCarthy in recent weeks has heard similar advice from both a senior House Republican and an influential conservative lawyer: prioritize the impeachment of President Joe Biden over a member of his Cabinet.

Part of the thinking, according to multiple sources familiar with the internal discussions, is that if House Republicans are going to expend precious resources on the politically tricky task of an impeachment, they might as well go after their highest target as opposed to the attorney general or secretary of homeland security.

And McCarthy – who sources said has also been consulting with former House GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich on the issue – has warmed up to an idea that has long been relegated to the fringes of his conference. This week, he delivered his most explicit threat yet to Biden, saying their investigations into the Biden family’s business deals appear to be rising to the level of an impeachment inquiry.

Speaking to CNN on Tuesday, McCarthy signaled that Republicans have yet to verify the most salacious allegations against Biden, namely that as vice president he engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national in order to benefit his son Hunter Biden’s career, an allegation the White House furiously denies. But he said that launching an impeachment inquiry would unleash the full power of the House to turn over critical information, mirroring an argument advanced by House Democrats when they impeached then-President Donald Trump in 2019.

“How do you get to the bottom of the truth? The only way Congress can do that is go to an impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy said Tuesday, stopping short of formally moving to open such a probe.

It all amounts to a consequential shift in thinking among Republican leaders, who were previously reluctant to call for Biden’s impeachment and have instead focused more energy on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland. Those were largely seen as lower stakes fights that could be easier to sell to the party and the public.

Yet as some of the GOP’s investigative lines have lost momentum – border crossings are down in recent weeks, for example – and Republicans believe they have uncovered compelling new information about Hunter Biden, they increasingly see the president as their most ripe candidate for impeachment.

Rep. Mike Johnson, a member of the GOP leadership team from Louisiana, told CNN on Tuesday that “all the evidence leads to the big guy.”

“Speaking as a member of the Judiciary Committee, we’re certainly at the point of an impeachment inquiry. … I feel like we’re there,” Johnson said. “And so we’ll continue to investigate and see if we’re going to follow the facts where they lead we’re not going to use impeachment for a political tool, like the Democrats did in the last administration. We will not do that. But we do have an obligation on the Constitution to follow the facts.”

As another senior GOP source put it: “When you’re going deer hunting, you don’t shoot geese in the sky.”

Even some of the more hardline members of McCarthy’s conference said that if the GOP needs to settle on one target, it should be Joe Biden.

“If I had to pick one, I would pick Biden,” said Rep. Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican and member of the House Freedom Caucus.

The White House has maintained that Biden has had no involvement in his son’s business deals, and Republicans have yet to link Biden directly to them.

But even with more Republicans coalescing around the idea, impeachment would still be a complicated and time consuming endeavor, given McCarthy’s razor thin majority and the need to fund the government by September 30. And there’s anxiety about impeachment backfiring with the party’s moderates while energizing the Democratic base, all for an effort that is sure to be doomed in the Senate – a similar concern shared by Democrats in 2019, when they launched their first impeachment into Trump ahead of the 2020 election, proceedings that took about three months to complete in the House.

In moving to potentially make Biden just the fourth president in US history to get impeached, McCarthy could appease some of his sharpest critics in his conference, especially as the House will have to cut a deal in the fall to keep the government funded and prevent a shutdown. Some on his far-right, who have threatened to boot him from the speakership if he strays from their demands, are now praising his embrace of potential impeachment proceedings.

“We probably should have moved to an impeachment inquiry probably sooner than this,” said Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, a former leader of the House Freedom Caucus. But he added: “I understand.”

“He was reticent at first,” Biggs said of McCarthy. “We don’t want to look like our colleagues across the aisle. But as we’ve continued to amass evidence and information, I certainly think (at) a bare minimum, we should be doing an impeachment inquiry.”

Rep. Bob Good, a Virginia Republican who tried to prevent McCarthy from winning the speakership, said of McCarthy: “I don’t think there’s any question that him speaking to that has caused a paradigm shift.”

“I’m just glad to hear that the speaker is recognizing that that we need to follow the evidence and the truth wherever it might lead us,” Good said. “I don’t know how anyone, any objective, reasonable person couldn’t come to the conclusion that this appears to be impeachment worthy.”

But GOP Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, a member of the Judiciary Committee and hardline Freedom Caucus who has been more skeptical of impeachment, shot back at the idea he would take impeachment cues from the speaker: “The Freedom Caucus hasn’t listened to McCarthy in years.”

“I can’t imagine that we would start now,” he told CNN.

With concerns among vulnerable members that impeaching Biden may not be a winning message in their districts, House Republicans would like to wrap up any such proceedings before year’s end, according to senior Republican sources familiar with the party’s thinking. But that means Republicans are going to have to make a decision soon on if – and whom – they want to impeach, given the desire among Republicans for impeachment hearings and a formal inquiry process. The House is slated to leave at the end of this week for a six-week recess.

Getting an impeachment resolution through the narrowly divided House – where McCarthy can lose no more than four of his members on party-line votes – will only get tougher in an election year, Republicans say.

Plus Republicans still appear to be all over the map on their impeachment strategy.

Firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who is not only seeking to expunge Trump’s two impeachments but also introduced a slew of impeachment articles against Biden and members of his Cabinet, told CNN: “I couldn’t prioritize one.”

That sentiment was echoed by Rep. Ralph Norman, a hard-right South Carolina Republican who said impeaching Biden is just “the start of the list.”

“His judgment is wrong on who he has in office,” Norman said. “They got to have to be accountable. And I think you’re seeing the accountability now.”

But with economic concerns expected to dominate voters’ minds in next year’s elections, many in the House GOP have been skeptical about moving forward with charging the president with committing a high crime or misdemeanor.

Nebraska GOP Rep. Don Bacon, whose district Biden carried in 2020, told CNN that the House needs to be deliberate.

“This needs to be thoroughly vetted in the Judiciary Committee,” Bacon said, arguing the approach needs to differ from the two impeachments under then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“The Watergate profile is what we should benchmark off of, not the Pelosi method of putting it on the floor without a single committee hearing,” Bacon said. “Pelosi watered down and lowered the threshold for impeachment, and we should not follow her example. It’s not good for the country.”

In the first Trump impeachment, House Democrats led a number of closed and open hearings before charging Trump with abuse of power and obstructing Congress. In the second impeachment, Democrats charged Trump with inciting the January 6, 2021, insurrection just days after the deadly attack in the Capitol.

Republicans have already had a tough time convincing even members of the House Judiciary Committee, where impeachment articles would originate. Indeed, one GOP Judiciary member who has been skeptical of a Mayorkas impeachment leaned over to share that assessment with a Democrat on the panel during a recent hearing.

During a private leadership meeting on Tuesday, McCarthy stressed the difference between opening an impeachment inquiry and actually voting to impeach someone – an important distinction that could be key to convincing moderates skeptical of impeachment to back a formal inquiry. Still, McCarthy fielded questions from members during the meeting about how this could impact the party’s more vulnerable members.

Democrats say Republicans are just using the threat of impeachment as a political stunt to help boost Trump, who remains their frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary.

“It’s clear that Donald Trump is the real Speaker of the House,” Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Party, said in a statement. “He has made sure the House majority is little more than an arm of his 2024 campaign, and Kevin McCarthy is happy to do his bidding.”

Indeed, McCarthy has been under pressure to placate Trump, particularly after he questioned Trump’s strength as a candidate – comments he quickly walked back. As CNN previously reported, McCarthy told Trump in a private phone call that he supports the idea of expunging his past two impeachments and said he would bring the idea up with the rest of the conference.

But there’s no sign that GOP leadership is planning to bring such a symbolic resolution to the floor any time soon, with many Republicans pouring cold water on the idea. That has privately frustrated Trump, who called Greene earlier this month to complain about the lack of action from McCarthy, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

McCarthy has had to walk a tightrope on the issue of impeachment amid growing frustration from his right flank, which has been itching to launch impeachment proceedings. Last month, McCarthy opted to defer a push from GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado to force a snap floor vote on impeaching Biden over his handling of the southern border and immigration problems, saying they need time to gather the facts and build a case.

On Tuesday, Boebert took notice of the apparent shift in McCarthy’s tone.

“The Speaker of the House is now talking impeachment,” Boebert tweeted. “The Biden corruption has risen to a level that there is no other response that can possibly be leveled against it. Impeachment is a very big deal, but these are incredibly serious crimes. I look forward to holding Joe Biden accountable for all that he’s done.”

Republicans argue that a string of recent developments have generated new momentum that has helped bring McCarthy on board and will even satisfy the remaining holdouts.

Last week, GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa released an internal FBI document containing unverified allegations that both Hunter and Joe Biden were involved in an illegal foreign bribery scheme that Republicans had been trying to make public for weeks, despite serious warnings from the FBI.

The House Oversight Committee held a hearing last week that put a spotlight on two IRS whistleblowers who have claimed that the Justice Department politicized the Hunter Biden criminal probe, and has a deposition with Hunter Biden’s long-time associate and Burisma co-board member Devon Archer next week. And the House Judiciary Committee just secured assurance from the Justice Department that US Attorney David Weiss, who is overseeing the Hunter Biden criminal probe, can testify publicly before Congress this fall.

But Republicans still have yet to tie such allegations directly to the president’s actions, which will be a major hurdle for GOP leaders to clear if they move ahead with impeaching Biden. The White House has repeatedly stated that the allegations launched by Republicans have all been debunked.

Part of the consideration for House Republicans will be figuring out how to delineate or combine the work currently being conducted by House Oversight Chair James Comer and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, who are in constant communication with each other and McCarthy, sources told CNN.

Comer confirmed he has been regularly briefing McCarthy on his Hunter Biden probes, which he thinks helped give McCarthy the “confidence” to publicly raise the idea of an impeachment inquiry. But he said it’s ultimately “McCarthy’s decision.”

With just three days to go before the House stands in recess for six weeks, Greene, who continues to serve as a conduit to Trump in the House and has been relentless in pushing McCarthy toward a Biden impeachment, wasted no time in making her case again on the House floor.

And afterward, the firebrand conservative had this message to her reluctant GOP colleagues: “Any Republican that can’t move forward on impeachment with all of the information and overwhelming evidence that we have, I really don’t know why they’re here to be honest with you.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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July 25, 2023
Special counsel received documents from Giuliani team that tried to find fraud after 2020 election | CNN Politics

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Among the materials turned over to special counsel Jack Smith about supposed fraud in the 2020 election are documents that touch on many of the debunked conspiracies and unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud peddled by former Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

The documents had been withheld by former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who claimed they were privileged, only to be handed over to Smith on Sunday at what appears to be the late stages of the federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The files include affidavits claiming there were widespread “irregularities,” shoddy statistical analyses supposedly revealing “fraudulent activities,” and opposition research about a senior employee from Dominion Voting Systems that are central to civil litigation and a federal criminal probe stemming from a voting systems breach in Colorado.

The documents turned over by Kerik also connect him and other members of the Trump legal team to the efforts to smear a Dominion Voting Systems executive – efforts that are now the subject of both civil litigation and the Colorado state criminal investigation.

The tranche includes a 29-page dossier on the executive, Eric Coomer, detailing his anti-Trump rhetoric on social media, as well as his background working for the voting machine company. The header of the document describes it as written by a lawyer in North Carolina for the “Hon. Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Trump Legal Team, and Other Associated Attorneys Combatting Election Fraud, 2020 Presidential Election.”

Coomer has brought a defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign, Giuliani and others who promoted claims that he was connected to a plot to rig the 2020 election.

The documents turned over by Kerik also include a 105-page report from after the 2020 election compiled by the Trump campaign and Giuliani that contained the campaign’s unfounded allegations of fraud, including witness statements and false allegations of over-votes and illegal votes.

They also include communications between investigators hired by Giuliani – including Kerik – about the debunked report about irregularities in Antrim County, Michigan, that Trump was repeatedly told was bogus but continued to tout up to and on January 6, 2021.

One example is a memo titled “Briefing materials for Senate members” sent by Katherine Friess – a former Trump lawyer – to Kerik, Steve Bannon and an email address known to belong to Giuliani on January 4, 2021.

For months, Kerik had tried to shield some of the documents from investigators in Congress and the Justice Department, citing privilege. Then, in recent weeks, Kerik gave the documents to Trump’s 2024 campaign to review. After that review, the campaign declined to assert privilege, according to Kerik’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who then turned over the documents to the Smith’s office on Sunday.

“I have shared all of these documents, appropriately 600MB, mostly pdfs, with the Special Counsel and look forward to sitting down with them in about two weeks to discuss,” Parlatore said.

That interview with federal investigators in Smith’s office has now been set for early August.

This tranche of documents turned over to Smith further illustrates the scope of unproven fraud claims that were being circulated to high-level Trump allies at the time.

One of the research documents turned over by Kerik was a report on so-called U-Voters, a theory that there is “an army of phantom voters,” who have accumulated on the voter rolls over the last several years, “who can be deployed at will.”

The report was referenced in late December 2020 letters sent to the Justice Department and to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell by Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a top promoter of Trump’s election reversal gambits who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022. The letter to McConnell, signed by other Pennsylvania Republicans as well, asked him to dispute the election’s certification.

The Kerik documents also include several versions of a research memo purporting to analyze the Pennsylvania election and claiming to find an “indication” of fraud. The Trump team’s focus on Pennsylvania, and how its bogus claims of fraud there affected election officials in the state, has been the subject of scrutiny by Smith.

In addition, the internal communications handed over by Kerik suggest Trump’s team attempted to seize on an earlier Government Accountability Office report about the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber arm to undercut what Trump was told – and embraced – during a February 2020 Oval Office meeting about election security.

They include the GAO report and what appears to be a memo highlighting the fact that “DHS Critical Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) failed to fully execute multiple strategies to secure the 2020 Presidential elections.”

The memo seeks to counter CISA’s public statement that the election was “the most secure in American history,” based on security programs officials presented to Trump during the February 2020 briefing. Trump had seemed to embrace the programs in early 2020, to the point of suggesting the agencies hold a press conference so he could take credit for their work, CNN reported Monday.

This headline and story have been updated with additional reporting.

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July 25, 2023
Israeli government passes law to limit Supreme Court power, defying mass protests | CNN

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The Israeli parliament on Monday passed a law stripping the Supreme Court of its power to block government decisions, the first part of a planned judicial overhaul that has sharply divided Israeli society and drawn fierce criticism from the White House.

The controversial bill passed by a vote of 64-0 in the Knesset. All members of the governing coalition voted in favor the bill, while all opposition lawmakers walked out of the chamber as the vote was taking place.

Huge crowds of angry protesters gathered outside, attempting to block access to the building. They were met with barbed wire and water cannons and at least 19 were arrested, according to Israel Police. Thousands of military reservists – including more than 1,100 Air Force officers – said even before the bill passed that they would refuse to volunteer for duty if it did.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said he would file a petition with the Supreme Court on Tuesday to block the law and has urged the military reservists not to refuse to serve until the court delivers its ruling.

The so-called reasonableness law takes away the Supreme Court’s power to block government decisions by declaring them unreasonable. Its passing could trigger a constitutional crisis – if the court declares the law itself is unreasonable.

The Movement for Quality Government, an Israeli NGO, filed a petition with the Supreme Court immediately after the vote took place, asking the court to declare the law illegal on the grounds that it changes the basic structure of Israeli democracy, and requesting that it block its implementation until the court has ruled on it.

In pictures: Israelis protest as lawmakers plan judicial overhaul

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who left hospital on Monday morning after having been fitted with a pacemaker, pushed the bill through despite Israel’s most important ally, the United States, issuing increasingly forceful warnings not to do so.

In a highly unusual step, the US President Joe Biden weighed in on the policy and warned that rushing the changes through without a broad consensus amounts to an erosion of democratic institutions and could undermine US-Israel relations.

“Given the range of threats and challenges confronting Israel right now, it doesn’t make sense for Israeli leaders to rush this – the focus should be on pulling people together and finding consensus,” Biden said in a statement provided to CNN on Sunday.

Biden raised concerns directly with Netanyahu during a phone call last week and then called New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to the Oval Office to make clear his stance on the judicial overhaul.

Speaking after the Knesset passed the bill on Monday, the White House said it was “unfortunate that the vote today took place with the slimmest possible majority.”

The Israeli stock market dropped after the vote, its main index, the TA-35, trading more than 2% lower. The Israeli Shekel was also weaker against the dollar, dropping just under 1%.

The fierce debate over the planned judicial overhaul has turned into a battle over the soul of the Israeli state. It has pitted a coalition of right-wing and religious groups against the secular, liberal parts of Israeli society and sparked the longest and largest protests in the country’s 75-year history.

The fight is happening against the backdrop of some of the worst violence in many years. The number of Palestinians, militants and civilians, killed in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces is at its highest in nearly two decades. The same is true of Israelis and foreigners – most of them civilians – killed in Palestinian attacks.

Israel, which has no written constitution and no upper chamber of the parliament, has had a relatively powerful Supreme Court, which supporters of the changes argue is problematic. At the same time, the Supreme Court is the only check on the power of the Knesset and the government, since the executive and legislative branches are always controlled by the same governing coalition.

Netanyahu and his allies call the measures “reforms” and say they are required to rebalance powers between the courts, lawmakers and the government. Other parts of the planned overhaul which are yet to be voted on by the Knesset would give Netanyahu’s coalition more control over the appointment of judges, and would remove independent legal advisers from government ministries.

Opponents of the plan call it a “coup” and say it threatens to turn Israel into a dictatorship by removing the most significant checks on government actions.

Netanyahu was forced to pause the legislative process earlier this year, but resumed it earlier this month. He has argued that the Supreme Court has become an insular, elitist group that does not represent the Israeli people.

But critics say Netanyahu is pushing the overhaul forward in part to protect himself from his own corruption trial, where he faces charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust. He denies any wrongdoing.

Another bill, already voted through in March, makes it more difficult for a sitting prime minister to be declared unfit for office, restricting the reasons to physical or mental incapacity and requiring either the prime minister themselves, or two-thirds of the cabinet, to vote for such a declaration.

Despite his victory on Monday, Netanyahu is likely to face more pressure over the reforms.

The mass protests that have engulfed Israel since the reforms were first announced in January and are unlikely to stop now. After hearing the law has passed, protesters outside the Knesset began marching around, chanting “We will not give up. We will not give up until it’s better here.”

The Israel Bar Association is already preparing a legal challenge to the bill, the lawyers’ group said Sunday. The Bar is also warning it will shut down “as an act of protest against the anti-democratic legislative process,” the statement said. That means the Bar Association would not provide professional services to its members, not that lawyers would go on strike.

Israel’s umbrella labor union, the Histadrut, warned moments after the government passed the reasonableness bill that if the government continued to legislate unilaterally, there would be serious consequences.

The law still needs to be rubber stamped by Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, a formality under Israel’s political system.

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July 24, 2023
Biden administration announces new labels for gadgets that are less vulnerable to cyberattacks | CNN Business

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The next time you’re in the market for a smart TV, fitness tracker or other connected gadget, you could see a new US government-backed label identifying some products as being particularly hardened against hackers.

On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced it’s moving to implement a cybersecurity labeling program aimed at helping consumers pick out trustworthy tech products that are rated as more secure than the competition.

The program seeks to bolster the nation’s cybersecurity overall by guiding Americans who may be in the market for smart home tech or wearables toward products that meet a high standard for cybersecurity as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The label will appear as a “distinct shield logo,” according to the White House. Products that meet the criteria for the label could include tech that requires strong passwords and that provides regular software updates to guard against the latest threats, for example.

A wide range of products could be covered, the administration said, including smart refrigerators, microwave ovens, thermostats, home voice assistants and — eventually — WiFi routers, after NIST finishes designing cybersecurity standards for them later this year.

For years, cybersecurity has been an afterthought in a market for so-called “internet of things” (IoT) devices that prioritizes low costs over security, according to security experts. One of the more famous examples of IoT security failures came in 2016, when criminal hackers used an army of infected computers, known as the Mirai botnet, to disrupt access to the websites of Twitter, PayPal, and others.

Products certified under the new program may come with a QR code that links to a national database affirming its participation, the administration added in a release.

The launch of the program could still be as far as a year away. But the administration took its first steps toward implementation on Tuesday as the Federal Communications Commission applied for a trademark linked to the effort, known as the “US Cyber Trust Mark.”

The FCC, which regulates wireless devices, also issued a formal proposal that will be open for public feedback on how it should manage the program.

“This new labeling program would help provide Americans with greater assurances about the cybersecurity of the products they use and rely on in their everyday lives,” the administration said in a statement. “It would also be beneficial for businesses, as it would help differentiate trustworthy products in the marketplace.”

The government proposal comes two years after President Joe Biden signed an executive order calling for an “‘energy star’ type of label” for tech products. At the time, the US government was still reeling from a crippling ransomware attack days earlier that had forced a temporary shutdown of Colonial Pipeline, one of the country’s largest fuel pipeline operators.

The executive order highlighted how the administration could use product labeling, combined with the federal government’s immense procurement power, to shape commercial markets and raise the bar for companies that sell technology to both US agencies and ordinary consumers.

Companies including Amazon, Best Buy, Cisco, Google, LG, Logitech, Samsung and others pledged to assist in the government’s labeling push by committing to increase the cybersecurity of their products, the White House said Tuesday.

Dave DeWalt, CEO of the cybersecurity-focused investment firm NightDragon, said the government’s move could help address a “perfect storm” of billions of insecure IoT devices.

“Market forces alone were never going to be sufficient to force manufacturers to step up and deliver more secure devices,” he said. “We’ve taken an essential step now in the right direction to put the power back in the hands of the consumers to choose better security.”

The Consumer Technology Association said Tuesday its next annual trade show, CES 2024, will feature “certification-ready products” once the FCC finalizes its rules.

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July 18, 2023
Manchin refuses to rule out third party presidential campaign, says ‘if I get in a race, I’m going to win’ | CNN Politics

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West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin on Monday defended his flirtation with a third-party presidential campaign, telling voters at a No Labels forum at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire that he had no plans to play “spoiler” in the 2024 election.

“I’ve never been in any race I’ve ever spoiled. I’ve been in races to win,” Manchin said. “And if I get in a race, I’m going to win.”

Sitting beside former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican, Manchin railed against withering bipartisanship in Washington, DC, saying the “business model” of the two major parties “is better if you’re divided.” Huntsman offered a similar critique, as the men complimented one another’s work and blamed the “extremes” of the Republican and Democratic parties on Capitol Hill for holding up popular legislation.

“We’re here,” Manchin told a supportive audience, “to make sure the American people have an option.”

Manchin largely demurred when faced with direct questions about his future plans. He is up for reelection to the Senate in 2024. When asked about a potential pivot to running on a No Labels ticket for the White House, Manchin said people were “putting the cart ahead of the horse” and that the group was only aiming “to make sure the American people have an option.”

“I have no idea what Joe’s gonna do,” Huntsman said. Both men told reporters afterward any talk of a Manchin-Huntsman ticket was premature and a distraction.

Manchin, in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” Monday night, also would not say whether he planned to run for Senate for another term: “I haven’t made any decision, nor will I make a decision until the end of the year.”

The West Virginia Democrat told Collins he believes President Joe Biden has “been pushed too far left,” but “has the strength to fight back.”

Before Manchin and Huntsman stepped onstage before a crowd of a few hundred people, No Labels founding chairman Joe Lieberman, the former US senator from Connecticut and 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee, and national co-chairs Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. and former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, touted the group’s “Common Sense” policy manifesto and warned that a rematch next year between Biden and former President Donald Trump could lead them to launching a candidate of their own.

McCrory described No Labels’ efforts to get on presidential ballot lines in states across the country as an “insurance policy” against that result, but said that the group’s “first goal is to influence the agenda of politicians who are coming to New Hampshire and other states during this primary season.”

He also warned Democrats and Republicans against trying to keep No Labels off the ballot.

“Sadly, we have some operatives out of Washington, DC, who want to just keep the status quo as it is who are trying to stop our efforts,” McCrory said. “But I’m telling you right now, it won’t work.”

He also set Super Tuesday as the date when the group would take stock and make a decision about running a presidential ticket.

“We will present a president and vice president candidate on a No Labels ticket if Biden and Trump are on track to win their parties’ nominations,” McCrory said. “We plan to do that. But only if we see we have an opportunity to win.”

Before the event began, New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley denounced the group, claiming it was a front for right-wing interests hoping to “pave the way for another four years of scandal and division with Donald Trump.”

“Granite Staters aren’t stupid,” Buckley said, “and they won’t be fooled by some out of state dark money group. Whatever they do, New Hampshire will be blue once again in 2024.”

A new bipartisan super PAC, called “Citizens to Save Our Republic,” also announced its plans on Monday to push back against any third-party campaign, noting a recent poll that showed a No Labels candidate effectively swinging the election from Biden to Trump.

“In normal times, we would have no problem with this No Labels effort,” the group, which is being launched by operatives from both parties, said in a statement. “But these are not normal times. As conservative Judge Michael Luttig told the January 6 committee, our democracy hangs on a ‘knife’s edge.’”

For more than a decade, the No Labels movement has promoted bipartisanship over political extremes in Washington. The group, which registers as a non-profit and declines to disclose its donors, plans to raise $70 million for a candidate-in-waiting.

The group, in its 2024 debut, unveiled what it called a “Common Sense” policy book – aiming to find middle ground on controversial issues from abortion rights to guns to immigration, putting forward an agenda that sounds downright utopian in today’s deeply divided Washington.

What Manchin and other leaders of the No Labels group describe as a unity ticket, many Democrats simply call a spoiler – by siphoning just enough votes from Biden to help Trump win back the White House.

Former Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham of South Carolina, a national co-chair of the group, pushed back on that assertion in an interview on Monday.

“We don’t intend to be a spoiler,” Cunningham told CNN. “If we got in it, we would be in it to win it. It’s that simple.”

No Labels has secured ballot access in Arizona, Alaska, Oregon, Utah and Colorado, aides say, with a goal of reaching 20 states by the end of the year.

“Folks are looking at a rematch of Trump v. Biden,” Cunningham said. “It’s a rematch no one really wants. Two thirds of Americans don’t want to see it.”

While third party efforts have shown little promise in modern American history, deep displeasure with Trump and Biden have shined a brighter light on the prospects this year. Mindful of an enthusiasm shortfall facing Biden, Democrats are increasingly sounding the alarm, haunted by Ross Perot’s independent bid in 1992 and Green Party runs from Ralph Nader in 2000 and Jill Stein in 2016. Cornel West, the leftist professor and political theorist, launched a third-party run in June and is now competing for the Green Party’s nomination in 2024.

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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July 17, 2023
The fight for the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota takes center stage in the documentary ‘Lakota Nation vs. United States’ | CNN

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Jesse Short Bull grew up a mile from an Indian reservation in South Dakota not realizing the ground he was stepping on was once soaked with the blood of his ancestors.

Less than a century ago, the Indigenous people of the Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation were killed defending themselves from the United States government, which broke a treaty that vowed the sacred lands, including the Black Hills, would belong to the tribes forever.

“I was like any other kid in America. The real history didn’t exist to me. I had no clue, and the truth was never taught to us,” Short Bull, whose Lakota name is Mni Wanca Wicapi (Ocean Star), told CNN. “When I became older, I wanted to understand what happened and why, and I started to fill in all the missing pieces.”

These missing pieces, which led to Short Bull’s revelation of the violent injustices that led to the creation of South Dakota, is the topic of his documentary, “Lakota Nation vs. United States,” which was released Friday.

The documentary, co-produced by actor Mark Ruffalo, is an in-depth and seldom-heard account of American history – a history that begins with the theft of land and the sacrifice of the Indigenous people who refused to surrender it.

“This film is very much a push for land back, for the return of land, there’s no misunderstanding that’s what they’re looking for,” said film co-director Laura Tomaselli.

Woven together by interviews with community leaders and activists, historical footage and racist Hollywood film depictions, the IFC Films documentary is split into three parts: extermination, assimilation and reparations.

“It’s not about being angry, it’s not about being bitter. It’s about a lot of people appreciating this country and its constitution. Not realizing our treaty, which was bound to that constitution, is negated to being an old dusty antique that has no meaning,” Short Bull said. “Nothing exists to them from our country or our land or our people. But to us, it exists. We’re real.”

The documentary, elegantly narrated by Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier, begins with a string of broken treaties by the federal government.

Within the land legally protected by these treaties are the Black Hills, a holy site described in the film by Milo Yellow Hair, an Oglala Lakota elder and activist, as “our cradle of civilization, the heart of everything that is.”

The Black Hills are a place of emergence, the birthplace of dozens of Indigenous tribes who consider it to be the most sacred place in the world.

“It is one of the oldest places on the Earth, over 5 billion years old,” Yellow Hair said. “So we say from the Black Hills and the Wind Cave is that place, that opening on this mother Earth that breathes.”

When gold was discovered on this land in 1851, war broke out for 17 years, forcing Indigenous leaders to fight gun-holstered soldiers with bows and arrows.

In 1868, in efforts to make peace after consistently losing battles against Indigenous tribes, the US government signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The treaty designated millions of acres west of the Missouri River for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Great Sioux Nation, which encompasses over a dozen tribes.

The treaty says the US government “solemnly agrees that no person, except those herein designated and authorized so to do…shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in the territory described in this article.”

But it became another broken promise.

In 1980, the US Supreme Court ordered over $100 million to be paid to the Great Sioux Nation because of the broken treaty. But the nation hasn’t taken the money. Since 1980 that original $100 million has accrued interest and grown to more than $2 billion.

But despite the poverty they face, the Great Sioux Nation still refuses the money. Because the land was never for sale.

“We are nothing without the Black Hills, that’s why the Black Hills are not for sale, because we are not for sale,” Sicangu Lakota historian Nick Estes says in the documentary. “How can you sell your very identity of what makes you an Indigenous person?”

The documentary also offers in-depth analysis into forced assimilation tactics deployed by the US government to weaken Lakota Dakota Nakota tribes who were still fighting back. One method was killing off their buffalo and depleting their resources, so they began to starve and had no choice but to depend on the government, according to the film.

Another method was taking away their children and enrolling them in boarding schools, stripping them of their Indigenous names and clothing, banning them from speaking their languages and forcing them to cut their hair. If they resisted, they were punished, often violently.

With the intention of conquering their people by destroying their culture, says Oglala Lakota activist Nick Tilsen, “they outlawed our language, they made our ceremonies illegal, they criminalized us for living our way of life.”

After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2022, “Lakota Nation vs. United States” has played on the screens at Indigenous reservations where the tragic story takes place.

At Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, nearly 200 people, including elders who still carry stories of dark days, attended the screening, and many were in tears, says Hunkpapa Lakota elder Cedric Good House.

“We were impressed with Jesse and everybody else because it took real bravery to do this, a lot of courage,” Good House told CNN. “It’s coming at a time when people think they can know it all in a matter of a minute. They’ll read a little clip on Facebook and that’s it.”

“But here is this lengthy documentary and people are getting captivated by the truth, and after they finish watching they can see this is still applicable to us today. We can point it out for them,” he continued. “Look what’s happening today here and here and here, we are still fighting.”

The Standing Rock Sioux have been recently entangled in another battle against the federal government, mainly the US Army Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for approving the Dakota Access Pipeline.

A violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie, the pipeline is a 1,172-mile underground conduit that would transport some 470,000 barrels of crude oil a day – stretching across North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois.

The Standing Rock Sioux, whose reservation resides near where the pipeline runs, say it will not only endanger their main source of drinking water – the Missouri River – but also their sacred tribal grounds.

“This movie is about our history, but here in the present we see nothing has changed,” Good House said. “This is our sacred land, and we try to get ourselves into the process, but the process still doesn’t address us.”

In a desperate fight to protect their land and Unci Maka, or Mother Earth, Native tribal members alongside non-Indigenous allies and environmentalists demonstrated for years against the construction of the oil pipeline until they were forcibly removed from the protest site in 2017.

“We’re not here to chase people off land. We’re not here to take over their farms and ranches and start charging people for crossing our territory,” Good House said. “We are protecting this Earth, we’re not here to do what the government has done to us.”

In the land where ceremonies were once held and their ancestors bones now lay, Indigenous holy sites are still being exploited for profit, elders and activists say in the film.

After killing those who attempted to protect it, the US government has turned stolen land into tourist attractions, Short Bull says, making money off the ongoing pain and suffering of Lakota Dakota Nakota tribes.

Deep in the Black Hills stands a mountain known as the Six Grandfathers, or Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, whose peaks were blown up to carve the faces of four presidents – now known as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

“Mount Rushmore represents and is the ultimate shrine to White supremacy,” activist Krystal Two Bulls of the Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Lakota says in the film. “Our sacred mountain, the Six Grandfathers, of course they carved four racist White men into our sacred mountain, who believed in slavery, who actually removed us from our lands.”

Today the children of the Indigenous leaders who died to preserve whatever land they could continue their ancestors’ purpose: demanding their land back.

And as the world suffers a climate crisis where Indigenous traditions, like controlled burning, are now being used to fight it, “it’s a no brainer” to return the land to those who can actually care for it, says Tomaselli, the film’s co-director.

“If you are a non Indigenous person and you’re concerned about the climate, it should be obvious to throw all of your energy behind people that were living here before any of our ancestors showed up, tribes who have been taking care of this environment better than anyone has before,” Tomaselli said.

As calamities happen around them for the sake of money, Short Bull says – gold mining, coal mining, the pipeline development, deforestation – the Indigenous people living there still have no say.

But with their demand for land back comes a warning.

“I want people to remember that there is bloodshed on Earth and our relatives’ blood is on this ground,” Short Bull said. “This planet was not created for you to just take, take, take. The Earth is an extension of you, and if you’re not going to take care of it, disaster is coming.”

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July 16, 2023
Giuliani and election fraud promoters didn’t vet claims, new court documents show | CNN Politics

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New court filings in a defamation lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani show the promoters of the election fraud narrative after Donald Trump lost the presidency failed to do basic vetting of the claims they were touting – and didn’t see such vetting as necessary.

For instance, in a December 2020 text cited in Tuesday’s filing, Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn said that the president wanted simple examples of election fraud, which didn’t need to be proven.

“Urgent POTUS request need best examples of ‘election fraud’ that we’ve alleged that’s super easy to explain,” Epshteyn wrote, according to evidence attached to the filing. “Doesn’t necessarily have to be proven, but does need to be easy to understand. Is there any sort of ‘greatest hits’ clearinghouse that anyone has for best examples?”

The documents were among a trove of evidence presented by two Georgia election workers suing Giuliani, a former Trump lawyer, for allegedly smearing them after the 2020 election. They are now asking a federal court to hold Giuliani liable for possibly losing crucial evidence after he pulled out of settlement talks.

Giuliani is feeling legal pressure related to his work for Trump to contest the election in 2020, after he sat for interviews with the special counsel’s criminal investigation in June and faces possible disbarment as an attorney. The evidence in the lawsuit from Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss of Georgia, who were at the center of Giuliani’s claims that vote-counting was fraudulent in the state, includes documents that could be pursued by criminal investigators as well.

Freeman and Moss’s attorneys allege Giuliani never took necessary steps to preserve his electronic data after the election. They say Giuliani testified in a deposition that he had used multiple cell phones, email addresses and other communications applications after the election, but hadn’t looked thoroughly through those records in the course of the lawsuit. Instead, he said his phones had been “wiped out” after the FBI seized them in April 2021 as part of a separate criminal investigation.

“Sanctions exist to remedy the precise situation here—a sophisticated party’s abuse of judicial process designed to avoid accountability, at enormous expense to the parties and this Court. Defendant Giuliani should know better. His conduct warrants severe sanctions,” Moss and Freeman’s attorneys wrote to the federal court on Tuesday night.

Giuliani already was fined $90,000 to reimburse the Georgia workers’ attorneys for a previous dispute they had over evidence gathering.

In recent days, Giuliani’s attorney approached Freeman and Moss’ lawyers to discuss an “agreement,” or at least a partial settlement, according to court filings. On Monday, however, Giuliani told them he couldn’t agree to “key principles” both sides had negotiated, keeping the lawsuit alive, according to the latest filing.

In a statement, Giuliani adviser Ted Goodman said the plaintiffs are attempting to “embarrass” the former mayor.

“The requests by these lawyers were deliberately overly burdensome, and sought information well beyond the scope of this case—including divorce records—in an effort to harass, intimidate and embarrass Mayor Rudy Giuliani,” Goodman said. “It’s part of a larger effort to smear and silence Mayor Giuliani for daring to ask questions, and for challenging the accepted narrative. They can’t take away the fact that Giuliani is objectively one of the most effective prosecutors in American history who took down the Mafia, cleaned up New York City and comforted the nation following 9/11.”

The plaintiffs’ lawyers have deposed key players like Bernie Kerik, who was tasked with helping Giuliani to collect supposed fraud evidence; Christina Bobb, the then-OANN correspondent who moonlighted as a legal adviser to the Trump team; and Giuliani himself.

In excerpts of a deposition Giuliani gave in the case, the former New York mayor says that he cannot recall running a criminal background check to firm up a claim he made that Freeman had an arrest record and a history of voter fraud.

“You didn’t think it was important to do that before you accused them of having a criminal background?” the plaintiffs’ lawyer asked Giuliani, referring to his clients.

“I just repeated what I was told,” Giuliani said.

In the litigation, his attorneys have acknowledged that she had no such criminal record, but Giuliani said in the March 1 deposition that he had only in recent days asked Kerik to run a criminal background check on her.

Giuliani was also questioned about a strategic plan – partially tweeted out by Kerik in late December 2020 – that laid out several claims of voter fraud across the country. According to evidence obtained by the plaintiffs described in the Giuliani deposition, Giuliani had noted that the communications plan needed “confirmation of arrest and evidence.”

Giuliani testified that he believed that, before the allegations were handed to the White House, they should be confirmed. But Giuliani could not say for sure whether the uncorroborated version of the claims was ultimately shared with the White House.

“This is so confusing, I don’t know what they told the White House,” Giuliani said in the deposition, adding that “I was not at the meeting, by design.”

In the deposition excerpts, Giuliani goes to great lengths to distance himself from the so-called “Strategic Communications Plan of the Giuliani Presidential Legal Defense Team.” Kerik, meanwhile, testified in his deposition for the lawsuit that Giuliani was aware of the strategic communications plan, which was focused on getting allegations of election fraud in front of state legislators. According to Kerik, the plan and allegations were continually discussed over six weeks.

The plaintiffs are also touting examples of when Giuliani, according to what they have collected, was made aware that some of the allegations he was making about supposed election fraud in Georgia were false.

In one email they obtained that was sent to his assistant in December 2020, a Fox News reporter asked Giuliani for comment on statements by an investigator in the Georgia secretary of state’s office that debunked the claims Trump allies were making about the Georgia election workers.

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July 12, 2023
Biden meets King Charles III for the first time since coronation | CNN Politics

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London
CNN
—

President Joe Biden and King Charles III on Monday met for the first time since the British monarch ascended to the throne, with the US president visiting Windsor Castle for all the pomp and circumstance that comes with a royal meeting.

Biden arrived to inspect an honor guard formed of the Prince of Wales Company of the Welsh Guards – with hundreds of uniformed troops, and its military band – positioned on the grassy quadrangle before a tent. The band played “God Save the King” upon the monarch’s arrival and “The Star-Spangled Banner” upon Biden’s entrance.

The moment marked Biden’s second trip to Windsor Castle since taking office – the president met the King’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, at her home just outside London in June 2021. The Queen met 12 US presidents spanning her reign, all but President Lyndon Johnson. The president said at the time the Queen wanted to know about Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Biden was meeting in Switzerland days after their visit, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Biden said he wished he could have spoken to the Queen for longer. “She was very generous,” he told reporters.

This latest meeting with Charles was a closely watched moment for how the King balances his traditionally apolitical role with a cause he is passionate about that has become a signature priority. Biden has called climate change “the existential threat to human existence as we know it.”

Biden, Sullivan told reporters, “has huge respect for the king’s commitment on the climate issue in particular. He has been a clarion voice on this issue and more than that, has been an actor – someone who’s mobilized action and effort. And so the president comes at this with enormous goodwill at this relationship,” Sullivan said, calling Monday’s engagement an opportunity to “deepen the personal bond” and “harness their shared interest in trying to drive climate progress and climate action.”

Biden, King Charles and special envoy for climate John Kerry met with private sector company leaders at a climate event. The group discussed barriers to private investment, and Biden was expected to encourage those in attendance to “step up to their responsibilities,” while also highlighting public investment, Sullivan said.

In keeping with US tradition, Biden did not travel to London for the coronation, but first lady Dr. Jill Biden and granddaughter Finnegan Biden attended the ceremony. Both the president and first lady did make the trip across the Atlantic for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II last year.

Earlier on Monday, Biden kicked off the first full day of his trip abroad with a London visit aimed at bolstering the US-UK “special relationship” on the eve of a high-stakes summit with NATO leaders.

Biden arrived at 10 Downing Street and was greeted by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ahead of discussions on a range of issues, including Ukraine, a topic on which the two leaders have closely coordinated. Biden recounted all of the places he’s met with Sunak – from San Diego, California, to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Hiroshima, Japan, to Washington, DC – six times in the six months since the prime minister took office.

“Couldn’t be meeting with a closer friend or greater ally. Got a lot to talk about,” Biden said, adding, “Our relationship is rock solid. … And I look forward to our discussions.”

Sunak welcomed Biden back to 10 Downing Street, which he was visiting for the first time as president, saying he is “very privileged and fortunate to have you here.”

He said they would be strengthening cooperation on joint economic security, as well as discussing the NATO alliance.

“We head from here to NATO in Vilnius, where we stand as two of the firmest allies in that alliance and I know we want to do everything we can to strengthen Euro-Atlantic security. Great pleasure to have you here,” Sunak said.

Their meeting came after the US announced Friday that it will be sending cluster munitions to Ukraine for the first time, a rare topic on which the US and United Kingdom publicly disagree. The UK, Sunak told reporters Saturday, is “signatory to a convention which prohibits the production or use of cluster munitions and discourages their use.”

Sunak continued, “We will continue to do our part to support Ukraine against Russia’s illegal and unprovoked invasion, but we’ve done that by providing heavy battle tanks and most recently long-range weapons, and hopefully all countries can continue to support Ukraine.”

National security adviser Jake Sullivan downplayed any concern that Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions would present any “fracture” with allied countries that oppose the use of such equipment, suggesting that Sunak was stating a “legal position” as he highlighted broader US-UK unity.

“The prime minister stated the UK’s legal position, that they are a signatory to the Oslo Convention. The United States is not. That being a signatory means discouraging the use of these weapons. He fulfilled his legal obligation, but I think you will find Prime Minister Sunak and President Biden on the same page strategically on Ukraine, in lockstep on the bigger picture of what we’re trying to accomplish and as united as ever, both in this conflict and writ large,” Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One Sunday.

Sullivan noted that the US has not received any negative feedback from NATO allies regarding the decision.

“That will be repeated, in my view, with all the leaders of the alliance. I do not think you will see fracture, division, or disunity… as a result of this decision. Even though many allies – the signatories to Oslo – are in a position where they themselves cannot say, ‘We are for cluster munitions.’ But we have heard nothing from people saying this cast doubt on our commitment, this cast doubt on coalition unity, or this cast doubt on our belief that the United States is playing a vital and positive role as leader of this coalition in Ukraine,” he said.

A Defense Department release on the US’ latest equipment drawdown also said that the decision was made following “extensive consultations with Congress and our Allies and partners.”

In a readout following the meeting, the White House said Biden and Sunak “reviewed preparations for the upcoming NATO Summit in Vilnius.”

“They reaffirmed their steadfast support for Ukraine in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression,” the White House said, adding the two leaders also discussed last month’s newly announced economic partnership and developments in Northern Ireland, including “efforts to ensure continued progress there.”

Later Monday, the president departs London for Vilnius, Lithuania, where NATO leaders will gather for critical meetings amid the war in Ukraine and last month’s failed coup attempt in Russia, posing the biggest threat to global stability for the alliance in recent history.

Following the NATO Summit, Biden travels to Helsinki, Finland, where he will offer a notable show of support to Nordic countries during a summit with the leaders of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Denmark.

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July 10, 2023
Pence tries wooing Iowans, one Pizza Ranch slice at a time | CNN Politics

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Sioux City, Iowa
CNN
—

In a crowded Pizza Ranch on Wednesday night, former Vice President Mike Pence found himself confronted about his role on January 6, 2021, by an Iowan who blamed him for President Joe Biden being elected president.

“If it wasn’t for your vote, we would not have Joe Biden in the White House. … Do you ever second guess yourself?” Luann Bertrand asked.

Pence, who was on the last stop of his day on a nearly weeklong Iowa swing, listened patiently to Bertrand’s question. “Let me be very respectful of the question,” the former vice president began, as he turned to explaining his role under the Constitution in certifying the 2020 US election results.

The episode encapsulated Pence’s challenge as he runs for the 2024 GOP nomination against former President Donald Trump, who’d wanted him to overturn Biden’s victory and has convinced many of his followers, falsely, that Pence had the power to do so. But the exchange at this intimate campaign stop also revealed what the former vice president hopes will be his winning strategy in the first-in-the-nation caucus state – namely allowing Iowans to question him and see him up close and personal.

For nearly five minutes, he directly answered Bertrand’s question, using the word “respect” and “deep affection” as he weaved in constitutional law and an admonishment of Trump, who’s the front-runner for the nomination.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. But that’s actually what the Constitution says. No vice president in American history ever asserted the authority that you have been convinced that I had. But I want to tell you, with all due respect, I said before, I said when I announced, President Trump was wrong about my authority that day and he’s still wrong,” he said.

When Pence finished his answer, the room of several dozen broke into applause.

For the Pence campaign, visiting all of Iowa’s 99 counties isn’t just a campaign promise – it is central to carving a path for taking on the historic challenge of running against a president he once served.

It may also be the best, and only, chance for a Pence campaign to take off.

“If you want to win the Iowa caucus, it’s a 50-person Pizza Ranch meeting,” Chip Saltsman, national campaign chairman for the Pence campaign and veteran Republican consultant, told CNN.

“Everybody that came here tonight, I guarantee the one thing they have in common – they’re all going to caucus. You’re looking for people that are willing to come out on a cold night, spend an hour and a half listening to everybody else talk, and then vote for your person.”

“The way you build those relationships are in meetings of 50, not rallies of 5,000,” he said, referring to Trump, who has drawn large crowds in his 2024 bid for the White House.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Saltsman was the campaign manager for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, when he concocted what he calls the “Pizza Ranch strategy” – hitting the chain’s 71 locations throughout Iowa, which have private rooms and dining areas conducive to a small town’s biggest events.

“We were at 1% [in the polls] when we announced,” said Saltsman, reflecting on the Huckabee campaign. “We worked really hard for about three months and then we went from 1% to asterisk. So we had to start back over. That’s when the Pizza Ranch strategy started.”

With the Huckabee campaign lacking money and name recognition, Saltsman realized that “for the price of a pizza, you got the meeting room” of the town’s Pizza Ranch – and that Huckabee had an automatic crowd if he showed up around lunch or dinner. “It was more out of necessity than some deep strategy,” he said.

The Huckabee team upscaled this plan to all 99 counties, focusing on finding the Iowa Republicans they needed to convince to caucus for their candidate. Huckabee came from behind to win the 2008 Iowa caucuses, although he ultimately fell well short of the nomination.

Pence is deploying a similar strategy, focusing on intimate settings where he will spend two hours face-to-face with Iowans, even if the crowd is fewer than 100 people. The Pence team is betting on the multiplying effect of these one-on-one encounters – that the voter will feel a kinship with Pence and bring others to caucus for him.

At an ice cream shop in Le Mars, Mavis Luther had just listened to Pence speak and answer questions for 90 minutes. The event was small enough that Luther could take a picture with Pence and chat with him. “It’s wonderful!” she exclaimed after she met him. “It’s the only way to have a chance to really know how they feel and answer questions at your level – of the community, country and our state.”

Pence, a former Indiana governor and congressman, shares the Midwest sensibilities of Iowa, as well as the campaigning style the caucus state is accustomed to. At the July Fourth parade in Urbandale, Pence often broke into a run to greet people along the parade route.

“I came to the conclusion over the last few years that I’m well known, but we’re not known well,” said Pence. “We’re going to be able to take our story, take our case, and take our whole record, and the story of our family, to the people of Iowa to great success.”

Matt Thacker, who was watching the parade in his lawn chair, had this to say about Pence’s handshake-to-handshake campaigning – “it matters.”

“The personal touch is very important,” Thacker said. “I think it makes a lot of difference. And recognizing the country isn’t the coasts. It’s the heartland.”

Bertrand, the woman in the Sioux City Pizza Ranch, walked away from the event open to Pence, but unconvinced by the facts he laid out about January 6.

“I believe he’s a good man,” Bertrand told CNN. “I love the fact that he is strengthened by his faith. But I really do feel like he altered history.”

Bertrand said she would consider supporting Pence in the caucuses. “But,” she said, “he has that one hiccup.”

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July 7, 2023
Biden nominates controversial former Trump-appointee to Public Diplomacy Commission | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

President Joe Biden announced Monday his intention to nominate a former appointee under former President Donald Trump with a controversial past in Latin America to the bipartisan United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

Elliott Abrams, who has served in three Republican administrations, most recently acted as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Iran and Venezuela where he was tasked at the time with directing the campaign to replace Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.

The Republican insider’s long history in foreign policy is marked by a 1991 guilty plea for withholding information about the Iran-Contra affair that earned him two misdemeanor counts, two years probation and 100 hours of community service – though his crimes were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.

The secret Iran-Contra operation, which took place during Abrams’ time as an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, involved the funding of anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua using the proceeds from weapon sales to Iran despite a congressional ban on such funding.

Again in his role under former President Ronald Reagan, Abrams was also blasted by a Human Rights Watch report for his attempts in a February 1982 Senate testimony to downplay reports of the massacre of 1,000 people by US-trained-and-equipped military units in the Salvadoran town of El Mozote in December 1981 – the largest mass killing in recent Latin American history. He insisted the numbers of reported victims were “implausible” and “lavished praise” on the military battalion behind the mass killings – stances he doubled down on when they were put on display during a 2019 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing by Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, who used his history in Latin American to call into question his credibility.

He later served as a senior director of the National Security Council and then as a deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser under former President George W. Bush. Abrams currently serves as senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He attended Harvard College, the London School of Economics and Harvard Law School and served under two former US senators.

The United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy is a bipartisan body and does not allow for more than four of its seven members appointed by the president to be from any one political party, according to the State Department.

The commission “appraises the US Government activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics” and “may assemble and disseminate information and issue reports and other publications to the Secretary of State, the President, and the Congress,” according to the State Department.

Current members include Sim Farar, the managing member of JDF Investments Company; William Hybl, former special counsel to Reagan; and Anne Terman Wedner, a political organizer and former foreign service officer – four seats on the commission remained vacant as of March 2023, according to the National Archives.

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July 3, 2023
Trump pressured Arizona governor after 2020 election to help overturn his defeat | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

Following his defeat in the 2020 election, President Donald Trump spoke to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to discuss the results, a source familiar with the call told CNN.

Publicly, Ducey said at the time that the two Republican leaders had spoken, though he did not describe what they had talked about. Behind closed doors, Ducey said that the former president was pressuring him to find fraud in the presidential election in Arizona that would help him overturn his loss in the state, a source with knowledge said. Trump narrowly lost Arizona to Joe Biden by less than 11,000 votes.

There was no recording made of the call between Trump and Ducey, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Trump also repeatedly pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to help him find evidence of fraud and overturn the 2020 election results. Pence told the governor that if there was hard evidence of voter fraud to report it appropriately, one of the sources said.

Pence rebukes Trump: ‘I had no right to overturn election’

Pence spoke to Ducey multiple times about the election, though he did not pressure the governor as he was asked, sources familiar with the calls said.

A spokesperson for Pence declined to comment.

The Washington Post first reported on Trump pressuring Ducey on overturning the election results.

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

A spokesman for Ducey told CNN earlier this week that the former governor had not been contacted by the office of special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 elections.

Those efforts include outreach to various state officials, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whom Smith has interviewed. In January 2021, Trump told Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to win the state, a call that’s at the center of the Fulton County district attorney’s investigation into attempts to overturn the election in Georgia.

The special counsel’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

A Ducey spokesman said Saturday that the former governor “stands by his action to certify the election and considers the issue to be in the rear view mirror – it’s time to move on.”

“This is nothing more than a ‘copy and paste’ of a compilation of articles from the past two years, disguised as something new and relying on shaky and questionable sourcing,” spokesman Daniel Scarpinato said in a statement. “Frankly, nothing here is new nor is it news to anyone following this issue the last two years. Governor Ducey defended the results of Arizona’s 2020 election, he certified the election, and he made it clear that the certification provided a trigger for credible complaints backed by evidence to be brought forward. None were ever brought forward.”

Trump is currently seen as the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination as he seeks a return to the White House.

A Trump spokesperson said in a statement: “These witch-hunts are designed to interfere and meddle in the 2024 election in an attempt to prevent President Trump from returning to the White House to make this country great again. They will fail and President Trump will be re-elected.”

Before his fallout with Trump, Ducey had been seen as a formidable candidate for Senate in 2022, but he ultimately ruled out a bid to challenge Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, who won reelection last year over a Trump-endorsed GOP nominee.

Ducey, who was term-limited as governor last year, endorsed Karrin Taylor Robson, a former member of the Arizona Board of Regents, in the race to succeed him. However, Taylor Robson lost the primary to Trump’s pick, Kari Lake, a former television anchor who said she would not have certified Biden’s 2020 win had she been governor. Lake ended up losing the general election to Democrat Katie Hobbs and has continued to promote election falsehoods, including about her own race.

Ducey, a former CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, served a term as Arizona treasurer before winning two elections for governor.

He announced last month he would be leading Citizens for Free Enterprise, which describes itself as a “new national effort to promote and protect free enterprise.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

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July 1, 2023
‘Race neutral’ replaces affirmative action. What’s next? | CNN Politics

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

CNN
—

When the Supreme Court cut affirmative action out of college admissions programs Thursday, it did not outlaw the goal of achieving diversity, but it set a new “race-neutral” standard for considering applicants.

That term – “race neutral” – does not appear in the opinion of the court, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, which states that colleges and universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin.”

But when Roberts clarifies that students can still refer to their race in admissions essays, explaining challenges they’ve overcome, he and the majority are buying into the idea of race neutrality.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote his own concurring opinion, uses the term “race neutral” repeatedly, offering it as an antidote to affirmative action.

Pointing to efforts in California and Michigan to enroll diverse classes at top universities even after voters in those states ended affirmative action, Thomas says race-neutral policies can “achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without any of the burdens and strife generated by affirmative action policies.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor shot back at Thomas and the majority, rejecting the term.

“The majority’s vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored,” she wrote.

For more on this view, read this piece in The Atlantic by scholars Uma Jayakumar and Ibram Kendi: “‘Race Neutral’ Is the New ‘Separate but Equal.’”

If the experience of California and Michigan – where voters ended affirmative action programs years ago – is any indication, we can expect that the representation of Black and Latino students at top-level universities will fall.

Those states argued in briefings to the court that their race-neutral efforts have not been completely successful, particularly at top-tier, flagship public schools, in creating environments that are inclusive for all.

California has, according to its brief, tried race-neutral measures that “run the gamut from outreach programs directed at low-income students and students from families with little college experience, to programs designed to increase UC’s geographic reach, to holistic admissions policies.”

While it has made strides, it says, there is a shortfall “especially apparent at UC’s most selective campuses, where African American, Native American, and Latinx students are underrepresented and widely report struggling with feelings of racial isolation.”

In California, half of the college-age population – 18-24 – is Latino, according to data from the Public Policy Institute of California. Compare that with just 27% of enrollees for 2022 at the University of California’s nine undergraduate campuses who the UC system categorizes as Hispanic/Latinx.

On the other hand, less than 13% of the college-age population is Asian, compared with 38% of UC enrollees.

A little more than quarter of college-age Californians are White, compared with 18% of UC enrollees.

Five percent of UC enrollees are African American, which is about on par with the 5.6% of college-age Californians who are Black.

The figures change in comparison with the system overall at UC Berkeley, the system’s flagship undergraduate campus, where a smaller portion of entrants in 2022 were categorized as African American / Black (3.6%) and Chicanx / Latinx (21.1%), and more were White (30.7%) and Asian (52.1%).

It’s also interesting to note that the Supreme Court exempted military academies from the decision. They can, presumably, still utilize affirmative action even though they are the higher learning institutions over which the federal government has the most control. The court, according to the majority opinion, feels the academies have “potentially distinct interests.”

Those interests were perhaps outlined by former military leaders who wrote a brief last year arguing affirmative action aided national security.

Meanwhile, even though race is off the table as a determinative factor, schools like Harvard University can and still will very much take into account whether an applicant’s parents went there, how much their parents might be able to donate and whether an applicant can help their sports teams.

“While the actual language of the Supreme Court will come across as very intellectualized and esoteric, as if in a classroom, in reality, how will this work?” wondered Laura Coates, CNN’s chief legal analyst, appearing on the network Thursday.

“How will you be able to have certain color blindedness but then at the same time allowed to take into account one’s experiences when race has been a part of that? That’s the devil in the details of every affirmative action case.”

CNN’s Nicquel Terry Ellis wrote about what the data suggests will happen:

A study by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that colleges and universities are less likely to meet or exceed their current levels of racial diversity in the absence of race-conscious admissions. They are also less likely to reflect the racial makeup of the population graduating from the nation’s high schools.

Zack Mabel, a researcher for Georgetown’s Center for Education and the Workforce, told her race-neutral practices have not driven the diversity many colleges hoped for, and some students are simply not applying. Read more from Terry Ellis.

Creating a more equitable and representative workforce has been a public aim in corporate America, where companies have created diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, departments. Multiple corporations – from Apple to IKEA – asked the Supreme Court to allow affirmative action to continue so that their potential workforce is more diverse.

But efforts to recruit students of color in the race-neutral, post-affirmative-action world will be complicated in states where there is a growing backlash to diversity efforts.

CNN’s Leah Asmelash recently wrote:

More than a dozen state legislatures have introduced or passed bills reining in DEI programs in colleges and universities, claiming the offices eat up valuable financial resources with little impact.

“The ruling by the Court’s six Republican-appointed justices prevents higher-education institutions from considering race in admissions precisely as kids of color, for the first time, comprise a majority of the nation’s high-school graduates,” writes Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst for CNN.

He suggests the decision will “widen the mismatch between a youth population that is rapidly diversifying and a student body that is likely to remain preponderantly white in the elite colleges and universities that serve as the pipeline for leadership in the public and private sectors.”

Rather than ease social tension, he argues, the new race-neutral requirement could actually propel it.

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July 1, 2023
Federal judge slams Supreme Court in gun case while reluctantly ruling in favor of convicted felon | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

A federal judge in Mississippi ruled in favor of a convicted felon in a gun case on Wednesday while simultaneously slamming a recent landmark Second Amendment decision that expanded gun rights and changed the framework lower courts must use as they analyze firearm restrictions.

In his ruling, Judge Carlton Reeves, an Obama appointee who has previously been critical of the Supreme Court decision, dismissed a federal criminal case against a man prosecuted for possessing a firearm despite a past felony conviction prohibiting further gun ownership. The apparent reluctant decision announced by Reeves in his 77-page opinion included a blistering assessment of recent Supreme Court precedent pertaining to guns and public safety.

At issue was a case involving Jessie Bullock, a Mississippi man who was previously imprisoned for approximately 15 years after being convicted for aggravated assault and manslaughter following a bar fight in 1992.

Bullock was indicted 26 years later after being found to be a past felon in possession of a firearm, according to the ruling, but petitioned for his case to be dismissed following a landmark Supreme Court ruling last summer.

That decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, changed the framework judges must use to review gun regulations and determined that modern-day laws restricting gun ownership are only constitutional if similar regulations were in place when the Constitution was drafted.

Going forward, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a gun law could only be justified if it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Last November, Reeves released a scorching order expressing frustration with the high court’s new historical legal standard, insisting it had inflicted confusion upon lower courts, and ordered the Justice Department to brief him on whether he needs to appoint an historian to help him decipher the landmark opinion.

“This court is not a trained historian,” Reeves wrote last year.

“The justices of the Supreme Court, as distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” he continued.

“And we are not experts in what white, wealthy and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” he said.

In response to Reeves’ request to the Justice Department for clarity, the Biden administration last year defended a federal statute barring felons from possessing firearms and urged the court not to hire an historian, arguing that the government should win the case without such an intervention.

In his decision Wednesday dismissing the case against Bullock, Reeves acknowledged the government was in the “unenviable position” of pointing to certain past laws barring felons from possessing firearms, but nevertheless ruled that the Justice Department had not met the burden required to show laws barring felons from possessing firearms met the Bruen decision’s historical test.

But Reeves repeated his past complaints blasting the entire process courts must now use to determine whether a present-day law had a historical analogue at the time of the founding of the nation.

“Judges are not historians,” he once again wrote. “We were not trained as historians. We practiced law, not history. And we do not have historians on staff.”

Reeves also appeared to criticize the very notion of deciding modern laws through the lens of colonial times.

“Bruen shows us that originalism is now the Supreme Court’s dominant mode of constitutional interpretation,” he wrote. “This Court is not so sure it should be.”

Reeves added, “This Court is also not sure that ceding this much power to the dead hand of the past is so wise.”

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June 29, 2023
Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson criticize each other in unusually sharp language in affirmative action case | CNN Politics

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Washington
CNN
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The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling Thursday on affirmative action pitted its two Black justices against each other, with the ideologically opposed jurists employing unusually sharp language attacking each other by name.

The majority opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts said colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission, saying programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause because they failed to offer “measurable” objectives to justify the use of race.

Justice Clarence Thomas and the court’s other four conservatives joined Roberts’ opinion. But Thomas, who in 1991 became the second Black person to ascend to the nation’s highest court, issued a lengthy concurrence that attacked such admissions programs and tore into arguments posited by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to join the court, who penned her own fiery dissent in the case.

Thomas has previously acknowledged that he made it to Yale Law School because of affirmative action, but he has long criticized such policies. He spoke in personal terms in his concurrence as he put forth his argument against the use of the policies, which he described as “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”

“Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color,” Thomas wrote.

“While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination,” he added, “I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.”

As he read his concurrence from the bench on Thursday, Jackson, who joined the court last year, stared blankly ahead. Though Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, Jackson did not read her own dissent, in which she went after Thomas’ concurrence and accused the majority of having a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in how the ruling announced “‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”

A footnote near the end of Jackson’s dissent went after the concurrence by Thomas, with the liberal justice accusing her colleague of demonstrating “an obsession with race consciousness that far outstrips my or UNC’s holistic understanding that race can be a factor that affects applicants’ unique life experiences.”

“Justice Thomas ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here,” Jackson wrote. “The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room – the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”

In her broader dissent, Jackson said that the argument made by the challengers that affirmative action programs are unfair “blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count.”

“But the response is simple: Our country has never been colorblind,” Jackson said.

(While Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case, she did hear the UNC case, and her dissent was focused on the latter.)

Thomas then explicitly attacks Jackson’s opinion.

“As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today,” Thomas wrote.

“Worse still, Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims,” Thomas wrote at another point in his concurrence. “Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me.”

‘You don’t have to be perfect’: Watch Judge Jackson’s emotional message to her girls

Thomas, one of the court’s most conservative members, has long been known for his distaste for affirmative action policies. He has been open about the fact that he made it to Yale because of affirmative action, but says the stigma of preferential treatment made it difficult for him to find a job after college.

In his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” Thomas says he felt “tricked” by paternalistic Whites at Yale who recruited Black students.

“After graduating from Yale, I met a black alumnus of the University of Michigan Law School who told me that he’d made a point of not mentioning his race on his application. I wished with all my heart that I’d done the same,” he wrote.

“I learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for White graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it,” Thomas wrote. “As a symbol of my disillusionment, I peeled a fifteen-cent price sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it one the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I’d made by going to Yale.”

He dissented in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, which allowed for the limited use of race in college admissions.

“I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators,” he wrote in his dissent.

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June 29, 2023
Biden administration announces more than $3 billion in funding to tackle homelessness with veterans focus | CNN Politics

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The Biden administration announced new actions Thursday to help prevent and reduce veteran homelessness across the country, including $3.1 billion in funding to support efforts to quickly rehouse homeless Americans.

“These funds can be used for a wide range of critical interventions from rental assistance to supportive services to technology and data sharing,” said White House domestic policy adviser Neera Tanden, referring to the funding that will be made available through the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Continuum of Care program.

Additional actions being announced Thursday, according to a White House fact sheet, include: $11.5 million in funding for legal services for veterans experiencing homelessness; $58 million worth of funding to help homeless veterans find jobs; and a new series of “boot camps” by HUD and Veterans Affairs to help VA medical centers and public housing agencies more quickly rehouse veterans. The more than $3 billion in funding being announced by HUD is not specifically earmarked for veterans, although it will also go toward helping veterans struggling with homelessness, according to senior administration officials.

“We like to say here that the phrase, homeless veteran, should not exist in the English language. Ending veteran homelessness has been and continues to be a top priority of the president and his relentless advocacy for that goal has led to very important investments and advancements, including robust funding,” said Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough, who added that the VA is currently on track to meet its goal of rehousing 38,000 veterans in 2023.

The VA put 40,401 homeless veterans into permanent housing last year with 2,443 of them returning to homelessness at some point that same year, according to the VA.

While Thursday’s actions focus on the issue of homelessness for veterans, administration officials hope that progress made in rehousing former service members will help improve efforts to tackle the issue for all Americans experiencing homelessness.

“Homelessness is a challenge we face as a nation. But most importantly, it is a solvable one,” Tanden told reporters, adding: “There are so many lessons there, that can help us tackle this problem for all Americans.”

The $58 million in grant funding comes from the Department of Labor Veterans’ Employment and Training Service and will help veterans learn occupational skills, participate in on-the-job training or apprenticeships and provide other support services to reintegrate into the workforce.

The $11.5 million in legal services grants is a “first-of-its-kind,” according to the White House, and will help veterans obtain representation in landlord-tenant disputes, as well as assist with other court proceedings like child support, custody or estate planning.

“Legal support can be the difference between becoming homeless in the first instance, or having a safe stable house and a roof over their heads,” McDonough said.

President Joe Biden has made it a goal of his administration to reduce homelessness by 25% for all Americans by 2025, calling on the country in his State of the Union address this year to do more, including “helping veterans afford their rent because no one should be homeless in this country, especially not those who served it.”

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June 29, 2023
What we know about the document Trump mentioned in the taped Bedminster meeting | CNN Politics
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Washington
CNN
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The tape of a conversation with Donald Trump and others made at his golf club in New Jersey has become perhaps the most critical publicly known evidence in the federal indictment against the former president.

Special counsel Jack Smith has charged Trump with mishandling classified information after leaving the White House. And the recording – parts of which were made public by CNN earlier this week – features Trump in July 2021 discussing what he called a “highly confidential” Pentagon document that contained “secret” US military plans to attack Iran.

Trump has offered a firehose of differing and contradictory explanations of what he claimed happened. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Here’s a breakdown of what we know about the document, and what Trump has said about it.

Prosecutors revealed some key details in their 44-page indictment against Trump. Importantly, prosecutors said Trump “showed and described” the document during the recorded meeting.
The audiotape was recorded on July 21, 2021.

The meeting was at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Trump attended the meeting with two of his staffers, plus a writer and a publisher.

None of the people in the room with Trump had security clearances.
CNN and other news outlets reported that one of the Trump staffers was Margo Martin, a communications specialist, who previously worked with Trump during his presidency. The other staffer in the room was Liz Harrington, a Trump spokesperson.

The writer and publisher were there to interview Trump for the then-upcoming autobiography of Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s final chief of staff.

Meadows’ memoir, which was released in December 2021, appears to reference the meeting.

“The president recalls a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself,” Meadows’ book says, referring to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. “It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency. President Trump denied those requests every time.”

The book additionally bashes Milley for bad-mouthing Trump in the press. During the taped meeting, Trump is heard using the “highly classified” Iran attack plan to push back on Milley’s public comments that Trump tried to start a war.

Before indicting Trump, federal investigators asked witnesses about the Bedminster tape and the Pentagon document, while they were testifying to the grand jury. Investigators also questioned Milley.

The special counsel’s grand jury also heard from Martin, the Trump aide who attended the Bedminster meeting. Immediately after her testimony, prosecutors issued a new subpoena to Trump, demanding that he return the Pentagon document about Iran, and related material.

Trump’s team turned over some Milley-related documents, but said it couldn’t find the specific document that Trump mentioned during the meeting with Meadows’ biographers.

Prosecutors charged Trump with mishandling 31 sensitive documents, though it’s unclear if any of the charges pertain to the Iran attack plan. Regardless, prosecutors quoted extensively from the Bedminster tape in the indictment, demonstrating that after leaving the White House, Trump knew he still possessed sensitive government secrets, and that they hadn’t been declassified.

George Conway reacts to newly obtained audio of Trump discussing classified documents

Trump has offered several convoluted and contradictory explanations about the Bedminster meeting.

At a CNN town hall on May 11, Trump was asked if he showed classified documents to anyone after leaving office. He said, “Not really. I would have the right to. By the way, they were declassified.” When pressed again on the same question, he said, “Not that I can think of.”

After his indictment, but before the tape became public, Trump ramped up his denial, telling Fox News “there was no document” shown at Bedminster, just news clippings.

“There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” Trump said in the interview which aired on June 19. “And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”

But CNN’s report Monday about the Bedminster tape revealed that Trump told those in the room, “These are the papers,” while discussing the Iran plans. That line was not in the indictment.

After a 2024 campaign event Wednesday in New Hampshire, Trump told Fox News that after leaving the White House, he held onto “copies of different plans” as well as “newspaper articles” and magazine clippings. His comment about possessing “plans” raised eyebrows, because it was seen as an indication that he did in fact mishandle the US attack plan for Iran.

Shortly after those comments, a Trump campaign spokesperson told CNN Trump was referring to “political plans.”

Trump later told reporters he was actually referring to “plans for a golf course” and “building plans.” He also repeated his denial that he “didn’t have documents.”
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June 28, 2023