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  • These 26 words ‘created the internet.’ Now the Supreme Court may be coming for them | CNN Business

    These 26 words ‘created the internet.’ Now the Supreme Court may be coming for them | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Congress, the White House and now the US Supreme Court are all focusing their attention on a federal law that’s long served as a legal shield for online platforms.

    This week, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on two pivotal cases dealing with online speech and content moderation. Central to the arguments is “Section 230,” a federal law that’s been roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats for different reasons but that tech companies and digital rights groups have defended as vital to a functioning internet.

    Tech companies involved in the litigation have cited the 27-year-old statute as part of an argument for why they shouldn’t have to face lawsuits alleging they gave knowing, substantial assistance to terrorist acts by hosting or algorithmically recommending terrorist content.

    A set of rulings against the tech industry could significantly narrow Section 230 and its legal protections for websites and social media companies. If that happens, the Court’s decisions could expose online platforms to an array of new lawsuits over how they present content to users. Such a result would represent the most consequential limitations ever placed on a legal shield that predates today’s biggest social media platforms and has allowed them to nip many content-related lawsuits in the bud.

    And more could be coming: the Supreme Court is still mulling whether to hear several additional cases with implications for Section 230, while members of Congress have expressed renewed enthusiasm for rolling back the law’s protections for websites, and President Joe Biden has called for the same in a recent op-ed.

    Here’s everything you need to know about Section 230, the law that’s been called “the 26 words that created the internet.”

    Passed in 1996 in the early days of the World Wide Web, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was meant to nurture startups and entrepreneurs. The legislation’s text recognized that the internet was in its infancy and risked being choked out of existence if website owners could be sued for things that other people posted.

    One of the law’s architects, Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, has said that without Section 230, “all online media would face an onslaught of bad-faith lawsuits and pressure campaigns from the powerful” seeking to silence them.

    He’s also said Section 230 directly empowers websites to remove content they believe is objectionable by creating a “good Samaritan” safe harbor: Under Section 230, websites enjoy immunity for moderating content in the ways they see fit — not according to others’ preferences — although the federal government can still sue platforms for violating criminal or intellectual property laws.

    Contrary to what some politicians have claimed, Section 230’s protections do not hinge on a platform being politically or ideologically neutral. The law also does not require that a website be classified as a publisher in order to “qualify” for liability protection. Apart from meeting the definition of an “interactive computer service,” websites need not do anything to gain Section 230’s benefits – they apply automatically.

    The law’s central provision holds that websites (and their users) cannot be treated legally as the publishers or speakers of other people’s content. In plain English, that means that any legal responsibility attached to publishing a given piece of content ends with the person or entity that created it, not the platforms on which the content is shared or the users who re-share it.

    The seemingly simple language of Section 230 belies its sweeping impact. Courts have repeatedly accepted Section 230 as a defense against claims of defamation, negligence and other allegations. In the past, it’s protected AOL, Craigslist, Google and Yahoo, building up a body of law so broad and influential as to be considered a pillar of today’s internet.

    “The free and open internet as we know it couldn’t exist without Section 230,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, has written. “Important court rulings on Section 230 have held that users and services cannot be sued for forwarding email, hosting online reviews, or sharing photos or videos that others find objectionable. It also helps to quickly resolve lawsuits cases that have no legal basis.”

    In recent years, however, critics of Section 230 have increasingly questioned the law’s scope and proposed restrictions on the circumstances in which websites may invoke the legal shield.

    For years, much of the criticism of Section 230 has come from conservatives who say that the law lets social media platforms suppress right-leaning views for political reasons.

    By safeguarding platforms’ freedom to moderate content as they see fit, Section 230 does shield websites from lawsuits that might arise from that type of viewpoint-based content moderation, though social media companies have said they do not make content decisions based on ideology but rather on violations of their policies.

    The Trump administration tried to turn some of those criticisms into concrete policy that would have had significant consequences, if it had succeeded. For example, in 2020, the Justice Department released a legislative proposal for changes to Section 230 that would create an eligibility test for websites seeking the law’s protections. That same year, the White House issued an executive order calling on the Federal Communications Commission to interpret Section 230 in a more narrow way.

    The executive order faced a number of legal and procedural problems, not least of which was the fact that the FCC is not part of the judicial branch; that it does not regulate social media or content moderation decisions; and that it is an independent agency that, by law, does not take direction from the White House.

    Even though the Trump-era efforts to curtail Section 230 never bore fruit, conservatives are still looking for opportunities to do so. And they aren’t alone. Since 2016, when social media platforms’ role in spreading Russian election disinformation broke open a national dialogue about the companies’ handling of toxic content, Democrats have increasingly railed against Section 230.

    By safeguarding platforms’ freedom to moderate content as they see fit, Democrats have said, Section 230 has allowed websites to escape accountability for hosting hate speech and misinformation that others have recognized as objectionable but that social media companies can’t or won’t remove themselves.

    The result is a bipartisan hatred for Section 230, even if the two parties cannot agree on why Section 230 is flawed or what policies might appropriately take its place.

    “I would be prepared to make a bet that if we took a vote on a plain Section 230 repeal, it would clear this committee with virtually every vote,” said Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse at a hearing last week of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The problem, where we bog down, is that we want 230-plus. We want to repeal 230 and then have ‘XYZ.’ And we don’t agree on what the ‘XYZ’ are.”

    The deadlock has thrown much of the momentum for changing Section 230 to the courts — most notably, the US Supreme Court, which now has an opportunity this term to dictate how far the law extends.

    Tech critics have called for added legal exposure and accountability. “The massive social media industry has grown up largely shielded from the courts and the normal development of a body of law. It is highly irregular for a global industry that wields staggering influence to be protected from judicial inquiry,” wrote the Anti-Defamation League in a Supreme Court brief.

    For the tech giants, and even for many of Big Tech’s fiercest competitors, it would be a bad thing, because it would undermine what has allowed the internet to flourish. It would potentially put many websites and users into unwitting and abrupt legal jeopardy, they say, and it would dramatically change how some websites operate in order to avoid liability.

    The social media platform Reddit has argued in a Supreme Court brief that if Section 230 is narrowed so that its protections do not cover a site’s recommendations of content a user might enjoy, that would “dramatically expand Internet users’ potential to be sued for their online interactions.”

    “‘Recommendations’ are the very thing that make Reddit a vibrant place,” wrote the company and several volunteer Reddit moderators. “It is users who upvote and downvote content, and thereby determine which posts gain prominence and which fade into obscurity.”

    People would stop using Reddit, and moderators would stop volunteering, the brief argued, under a legal regime that “carries a serious risk of being sued for ‘recommending’ a defamatory or otherwise tortious post that was created by someone else.”

    While this week’s oral arguments won’t be the end of the debate over Section 230, the outcome of the cases could lead to hugely significant changes the internet has never before seen — for better or for worse.

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  • Key senators torn over retirement decisions as party leaders try to fortify 2024 standing | CNN Politics

    Key senators torn over retirement decisions as party leaders try to fortify 2024 standing | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Sen. Joe Manchin, torn over whether to run for reelection, says he’s “given everything I possibly can” over four decades of holding public office. Sen. Jon Tester is close to making his final decision on a 2024 bid and concedes there’s a risk of his seat flipping next year.

    “It’s a commitment,” the Montana Democrat said of another run.

    They’re not the only ones in a tough spot.

    Sen. Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, is weighing health considerations after treatment for prostate cancer. Sen. Bernie Sanders, 81, says he’ll make a decision about whether to run for a fourth Senate term in Vermont “at the appropriate time.”

    And Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican who has gone to battle with former President Donald Trump, says he’ll decide whether to run for a second term by mid-April, sounding ready to take on his party’s MAGA wing if he runs again.

    “People understand that every action has a consequence, and you accept the consequences for the actions that you think are right,” Romney, 75, said of potentially facing a stiff challenge from the right. He then added bullishly: “If I run, I’ll win.”

    As the 2024 landscape begins to take shape, the senators’ decisions about their political futures will dramatically alter the map and hold major ramifications for the makeup of the institution itself.

    For Democrats, the concern is the most acute. They already have a difficult road to maintain their slim 51-49 majority, with 23 seats to defend compared to just 11 for the GOP.

    Plus they’ll have to hold onto Democratic seats in GOP terrain, such as in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia – not to mention keep their seats in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada. The map provides them with scant pickup opportunities, since Republican incumbents are mostly running in ruby-red states or states that have trended to the GOP, like Florida.

    Then there’s the complicated dance for both parties in Arizona, if Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, now an independent, decides to run again for a seat that would put her up against a Republican and Democrat in a messy, three-way race. For Republicans, fear is growing that the hard-right Kari Lake may mount a bid and put their hopes for a pickup in jeopardy.

    And with few pickup chances, Senate Democrats recognize they’ll have to limit losses – and prevent retirements – in order to cling to power.

    “I’m doing everything I can to help Manchin in West Virginia,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told CNN when asked if he were concerned that the conservative Democrat might hang it up, referring to legislative actions.

    After Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow announced she’d retire, Schumer and his top deputies are hoping to prevent others from following suit, recognizing that an open seat would give Republicans an even better chance of seizing control of the chamber they lost in the 2020 elections. The exception is California, where the 89-year-old Dianne Feinstein announced her retirement this week, something widely expected, as Democrats are expected to keep the seat in their control in the blue state.

    In particular, Democratic leaders are urging Tester and Manchin to run again, knowing full well that finding another Democrat to win in those conservative battlegrounds will be an extremely tall order in 2024.

    “Clearly, it’s important for them to run,” said Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate Democratic campaign arm, when asked about Tester and Manchin. “I don’t know where they are. I’ve talked to them, but they’re just working through issues, personal issues for themselves as to what they want to do. So we just have to give them time to think that through and I look forward to their answers.”

    Peters acknowledged that his party’s effort to keep the Senate will grow bleaker if either or both men retire.

    “Those are states that are very Republican,” Peters told CNN, referring to Montana and West Virginia. “And I know they can win again, but they’re without question the strongest candidates in those states. It’d be more difficult without them running.”

    Democrats acknowledge they have close to no backup plans in Montana or West Virginia. But they have been heartened by the polls that are being released publicly by Republican groups in those states, showing their numbers have been better than expected – and perhaps encouraging – for the incumbents.

    But neither Manchin nor Tester seem concerned that the seat could turn red if they retire.

    “That’s not my factor,” Manchin said in the interview. “I’m not weighing that because of my, what it might do to the numbers as far as up here. No, I’ve been at this for quite some time. This term being up, there’ll be 42 years I’ve been in public service so I’ve given everything I possibly can.”

    Several Democratic operatives involved in planning for Senate races tell CNN they expect that ultimately, Tester will run and that Casey will as well after his successful surgery this week. Manchin has them more on edge, and they anticipate that’s how they’ll remain for almost a year: the West Virginia filing deadline isn’t until next January.

    That, after all, is what he did in 2018.

    Manchin, a former governor and state legislator who has served in the Senate since 2010, insists he’s not concerned about the prospects that the GOP governor, Jim Justice, is strongly considering a run against him, though Justice would have to escape a difficult primary against Rep. Alex Mooney and potentially the state’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, who may run as well. He has acknowledged that Justice would be the toughest candidate to face, though he insists he could still pull off a victory.

    Manchin, 75, just doesn’t know if he wants to do it again as he looks back at the last several years – especially in the 50-50 Senate in the last Congress where he was at the peak of his power in the chamber and played a central role shaping major laws. The question Manchin is weighing: whether he’ll have the same kind of impact with another six years.

    “I make a decision based on if I’ve been able to deliver for the state, have I been able to support the Constitution and the oath I’ve taken, I think I have,” Manchin said, confirming he’s been urged by Biden and Schumer both to run. “Is there more I can do in different, other areas? I don’t know.”

    Tester, who also said Schumer has been urging him to run, conceded that his seat could flip if he bows out.

    “Oh, absolutely there’s a risk of flipping there’s no doubt about that but so are all of them,” Tester said.

    But he contended other Democrats could mount a vigorous challenge for the seat.

    “Actually, we’ve got some really good folks in the wings that can run,” Tester, 66, said before he noted that things have gotten dire for Democrats in recent cycles. “We haven’t had the best of luck the last few cycles in Montana but I think that’s as much self-inflicted as it is the state turning red.”

    But Tester pointed to key positions he holds – chairing a subcommittee on Pentagon spending and running the veterans panel – as he weighs another run.

    “I’m at a point and time where we can get a lot of good things done because of my position on Veterans Affairs and defense chairman but it’s just something where I think you just need to take the time to think over,” he said.

    Yet Democrats could benefit from a potentially divisive GOP primary in Montana – with the possibility of candidacies from two House members, the governor and the state attorney general. That will put the other Montana senator, Republican Steve Daines, to the test as he plans to use his National Republican Senatorial Committee to be more assertive in GOP primaries to root out lackluster general election candidates, though it’s unclear how he would handle his home state.

    In an interview, Daines was noncommittal when asked about one candidate in particular – Rep. Matt Rosendale – a hard-right Republican who lost to Tester in 2018 and is considering running again. He said “it’s early” since candidates have yet to declare and that the field will get “sorted out,” contending the race is “winnable.”

    “These are three red states where the only statewide elected official left that’s a Democrat is a US Senator. That’s Montana, it’s West Virginia, it’s Ohio,” Daines said. “These are going to be spirited races.”

    And after last cycle’s GOP debacle, where several Donald Trump-aligned candidates petered out in the general election and effectively cost them winning the majority, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell is determined not to allow that to happen again.

    “I just think we need to focus on candidates who can win in the general election,” said Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas and close McConnell ally. “We had some great primary candidates, but that won’t get the job done. You got to have somebody who can have a broader appeal than just the base. That was one of the most important lessons of this last cycle.”

    Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, at left, is challenging Sinema, at right, for her US Senate seat in 2024.

    Senate leaders in both parties see Arizona as the biggest wildcard – depending on what Sinema decides to do and which Republican decides to run.

    Lake, the Trump-aligned Republican who lost one of the nation’s premier governor’s races last fall, recently met with officials at NRSC headquarters – even though many Republicans are nervous about her potential candidacy and one GOP strategist called the potential of a Lake Senate run “disastrous.”

    As she made the rounds in Washington, Daines told CNN that he spoke with Lake.

    “I want to see a candidate who can not only win a primary, but can win a general election,” Daines said when asked about that visit, not commenting on Lake directly.

    Other top Republicans are unnerved about Lake – and her evidence-free claims of widespread election fraud – and are pushing for other candidates to jump into the race.

    “I’ve just said to any of our candidates or potential candidates in 2024, that you got to talk about the future, not the past,” said Senate Minority Whip John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican. “And I think if you’re building your campaign around the theme of a stolen election, that’s not a winning strategy. We’ve seen that. So if she does decide to do it again, I think she’s gonna have to talk about the things that are on the hearts and minds of American people.”

    Schumer and Democratic leaders, themselves, are in a bind in the state, refusing to say if they’ll back their party’s nominee with Sinema still undecided on a run. The reason: They need Sinema to continue to organize with them in order to maintain their 51-49 majority and are in no mood to alienate her.

    But some Democrats are angry at their leaders for refusing to say if they’ll back their nominee, especially backers of Rep. Ruben Gallego, the party’s leading candidate in the race.

    “At some point, they’re going to have to endorse a Democrat,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, a fellow Arizona Democrat who backs Gallego, noting it would be “problematic” if party leaders didn’t dump huge resources to help their party’s nominee win a general election.

    “If they don’t, that would be an insult at many levels,” Grijavla said.

    While some Democrats are nervous that Gallego and Sinema would split the vote and give Republicans a victory, Gallego dismisses the possibility and says only a “strong Democrat” can win.

    “No matter what happens, Kyrsten Sinema is always going to be in third place,” Gallego said. “I also doubt she fully runs.”

    As she’s grown more alienated from her former party, Sinema has grown closer to Republicans, including one – Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – who told CNN she would endorse the senator if she ran again.

    “I absolutely support Sen. Sinema,” Murkowski said, noting she’s also backing Manchin. “She’s not afraid to take on hard things, and I’m gonna be supporting her too.”

    Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan speaks to members of the media at the U.S. Capitol on August 03, 2022 in Washington, DC.

    Even in safe Democratic seats, there’s the potential for a shakeup that could bring more diversity and younger members into the ranks, including in Maryland and Delaware where Sens. Ben Cardin and Tom Carper, respectively, have not made a final decision to run yet.

    Cardin, 79, who hasn’t spent much time fundraising yet, said he would make his decision sometime in the spring, while Carper, 76, said he’d be ready to run but noted that campaigns are “way too long.”

    In Hawaii, Sen. Mazie Hirono said she plans to run again, as did Maine’s Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats.

    “There’s only two ways to run: Scared or unopposed,” King said.

    In more contested states, Nevada’s Jacky Rosen said she is running, as did Ohio’s Sherrod Brown. And in Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin said she’d make her announcement about her plans in the spring after upcoming elections in the state.

    In Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz has announced plans to run for a third Senate term, and Democrats are weighing whether to mount a serious effort to try to unseat him in the red state – with a focus on whether Democratic Rep. Colin Allred will try to mount an upset bid against the conservative senator.

    In Michigan, where Stabenow’s retirement is leaving Democrats with an open seat in a swing state, Rep. Elissa Slotkin is eying a run and could get some implicit help from the outgoing senator herself. Stabenow has spoken by phone with several prominent Michigan Democrats, and while some have perceived that as dissuading some weaker candidates from running, a Stabenow spokesperson says she’s just been giving everyone advice on the challenges of running statewide in Michigan and not trying to clear the field.

    Republican recruitment efforts in the state are also up in the air, with a push for newly elected Rep. John James, who has lost two previous bids for the Senate. If he passes, GOP leaders believe other contenders will emerge, potentially former Rep. Peter Meijer and even some current members of the House delegation or local officials.

    While several potential Democratic candidates have decided not to run, other political players in the state remain unsure about Slotkin’s statewide strength and have continued talking privately about finding an alternative.

    Given how much Democrats in the state rely on high turnout in heavily African-American Detroit, finding a candidate who could run strong there has been a major topic in those discussions. Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, who got his start in Detroit politics is “very seriously thinking about making a run” and is expected to make a decision over the next month, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

    Meanwhile, several Democrats in Michigan tell CNN they have been surprised by outreach they’re getting from “The Good Doctor” actor Hill Harper, whose political experience mostly relates to being Barack Obama’s law school roommate, but who owns a coffee shop in Detroit and has gotten involved with the local business community there. Harper did not return a request for comment.

    Stabenow said she’s not endorsing any candidate in the primary to replace her.

    “What I’m saying to folks is that I want somebody that is strong, effective, who can raise money, who can win,” Stabenow said. “But I’m talking to everybody.”

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  • Pence says he’s willing to take fight against DOJ subpoena in Trump probe to Supreme Court | CNN Politics

    Pence says he’s willing to take fight against DOJ subpoena in Trump probe to Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday that he is willing to take his fight against a subpoena for his testimony in the Justice Department’s 2020 election subversion investigation all the way to the Supreme Court.

    “I am going to fight the Biden DOJ subpoena for me to appear before the grand jury because I believe it’s unconstitutional and unprecedented,” Pence told reporters after making a speech in Iowa.

    He said he expects former President Donald Trump to bring his own challenge to the subpoena that will raise executive privilege claims. Pence, however, intends to fight the subpoena under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which shields legislators from certain law enforcement actions targeting conduct related to their legislative duties.

    While other witnesses have raised Speech or Debate Clause argument in efforts to resist subpoenas in the DOJ probe and in the other investigations into January 6, 2021, Pence plans to invoke the clause in relation to his role as president of the Senate – which is believed to be untrod legal ground.

    In that role, he presided over Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results on January 6, 2021.

    “On the day of January 6, I was acting as President of the Senate, presiding over a Joint Session, described in the Constitution itself,” Pence said. “And so, I believe that that Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution actually prohibits the executive branch from compelling me to appear in a court, as the Constitution says, or in any other place. And we’ll stand on that principle and we’ll take that case as far as it needs to go, if need be to the Supreme Court of the United States, because to me, it’s – it’s an issue of the separation of powers.”

    He said that over the last “several months,” his team had made it clear to the Justice Department that he believed the Speech or Debate Clause precluded a subpoena for his testimony.

    CNN previously reported on Pence’s plans to raise claims under the Speech or Debate Clause.

    Pence also noted that he has written and spoken publicly about the events leading up to the January 6 certification vote. But, he said, “if we were to accede to accept a subpoena for appearance before a grand jury or a trial, I believe that would diminish the privileges enjoyed by any future vice president, either Democrat or Republican. I simply will not do that.”

    Pence first spoke publicly about his plans to fight the subpoena at an event in Minneapolis earlier Wednesday, saying that his fight was about ” separation of powers” and “defending the prerogatives that I had as president of the Senate.”

    “My fight is on the separation of powers. My fight against the DOJ subpoena very simply is on defending the prerogatives that I had as president of the Senate to preside over the Joint Session of Congress on January 6,” Pence told reporters in Minneapolis.

    “For me this is a moment where you have to decide where you stand and I stand on the Constitution of the United States,” he added.

    Pence is one of several former members of Trump’s inner circle whose testimony federal investigators have sought, as they scrutinize the events leading up to and during the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. That probe, as well as the federal investigation into Trump’s handling of documents from his White House that were found at Mar-a-Lago, have taken a more aggressive tack since special counsel Jack Smith took over both investigations.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Banning TikTok in the US ‘should be looked at,’ says Schumer | CNN Business

    Banning TikTok in the US ‘should be looked at,’ says Schumer | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    A proposal to ban TikTok in the United States “should be looked at,” according to US Senator Chuck Schumer.

    “We do know there’s Chinese ownership of the company that owns TikTok. And there are some people in the Commerce Committee that are looking into that right now,” Schumer, the Senate majority leader, told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News in a Sunday interview. “We’ll see where they come out.”

    US lawmakers Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida, and Angus King, an independent from Maine, said Friday they had reintroduced new legislation that aims to ban TikTok from operating in the United States, unless it cut ties to its current owner.

    TikTok is owned by ByteDance, one of the most valuable private companies in China.

    US officials have raised concerns that China could use its laws to pressure TikTok or ByteDance to hand over US user data that could be used for intelligence or disinformation purposes.

    Those worries have prompted the US government to ban TikTok from official devices, and more than half of US states have taken similar measures, according to a CNN analysis.

    TikTok has previously pushed back on the claims, saying it doesn’t share information with the Chinese government, and that a US-based security team decides who can access US user data from China.

    The company did not immediately respond to a new request for comment on Monday morning Asia time.

    TikTok’s Singaporean CEO, Shou Zi Chew, is slated to testify before Congress in March, on topics including TikTok’s privacy and data security practices, its impact on young users and its “relationship to the Chinese Communist Party,” according to a House committee statement.

    The company has previously said that it welcomes “the opportunity to set the record straight about TikTok, ByteDance, and the commitments we are making.”

    “We hope that by sharing details of our comprehensive plans with the full Committee, Congress can take a more deliberative approach to the issues at hand,” the TikTok spokesperson added.

    -— CNN’s Brian Fung contributed to this report.

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  • Pence to fight subpoena on separation of powers grounds because he was president of Senate | CNN Politics

    Pence to fight subpoena on separation of powers grounds because he was president of Senate | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to fight a recent subpoena from the special counsel based on the grounds that he was president of the Senate at the time and therefore shielded from the order, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

    Pence is expected to address the subpoena and his response to it during a trip to Iowa on Wednesday, according to a source familiar with his plans.

    Pence has been subpoenaed by the special counsel investigating former President Donald Trump and his role in January 6, 2021, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. Special counsel Jack Smith’s office is seeking documents and testimony, the source said. Investigators want the former vice president to testify about his interactions with Trump leading up to the 2020 election and the day of the attack on the US Capitol.

    The subpoena marks an important milestone in the Justice Department’s two-year criminal investigation, now led by the special counsel, into the efforts by Trump and allies to impede the transfer of power after he lost the 2020 election. Pence is an important witness who has detailed in a memoir some of his interactions with Trump in the weeks after the election, a move that likely opens the door for the Justice Department to override at least some of Trump’s claims of executive privilege.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Here is what we know about the unidentified objects shot down over North America | CNN Politics

    Here is what we know about the unidentified objects shot down over North America | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A high-altitude object was shot down near Lake Huron on Sunday afternoon, marking the fourth time in just over a week that the US military has taken down objects in North American airspace.

    On Saturday, an unidentified object was downed over northern Canada, a day after another object had been shot down over Alaska airspace by a US F-22. Last weekend, a Chinese surveillance balloon was taken down by F-22s off the coast of South Carolina.

    There’s no indication at this point that the unidentified objects have any connection to China’s surveillance balloon, but it seems that national security officials across the continent remain on edge.

    Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan said Sunday that the operation to down the object near Lake Huron was carried out by pilots from the US Air Force and the National Guard.

    CNN initially reported that the object was shot down over Lake Huron based on what sources said to CNN and a public tweet by Republican Rep. Jack Bergman of Michigan.

    The object was first detected by the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the US Northern Command over Montana on Saturday night, and fighter aircraft were sent to investigate, a senior administration official told CNN. At the time, those planes did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits, which led NORAD and NORTHCOM to believe it was an anomaly.

    But on Sunday, defense officials reacquired the radar contact and detected the object flying over Wisconsin and then Michigan. The path of the object and its altitude raised concerns that it could pose a threat to civilian aircraft, but it did not pose a military threat to anyone on the ground, the official said. President Joe Biden ordered the object to be shot down.

    Here’s what we know so far:

    Prior to the takedown of the object near Lake Huron, a US official said Sunday there had been caution inside the Biden administration on the pilot descriptions of the unidentified objects shot down over Alaska and Canada due to the circumstances in which the objects were viewed.

    “These objects did not closely resemble and were much smaller than the PRC balloon and we will not definitively characterize them until we can recover the debris, which we are working on,” a National Security Council spokesperson said, referring to the suspected Chinese spy balloon.

    Earlier Sunday, Deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh also noted the difference between the incidents.

    “These objects shot down on Friday and Saturday were objects and did not closely resemble the PRC balloon. When we can recover the debris, we will have more for you,” she said Sunday

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told ABC News on Sunday morning that he was briefed by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and that the object shot down over Canada was likely another balloon – as was the high-altitude object downed over Alaska on Friday.

    On Saturday, Canada’s chief of defense staff, Gen. Wayne Eyre, also made mention of a “balloon” when describing instructions given to the team that worked to take down the object.

    The unidentified object that was shot down in Canadian airspace had been tracked since Friday evening, according to a statement from Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder.

    The object was detected by NORAD, and two F-22 fighter jets from Joint Base Elemendorf-Richardson, Alaska, were sent up to monitor the object with the help of the Alaska Air National Guard.

    Analyst thinks this is why more unidentified objects are being spotted

    The object appears to be a “cylindrical object” smaller than the Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down previously, Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand said at a news conference on Saturday.

    “Monitoring continued today as the object crossed into Canadian airspace, with Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft joining the formation to further assess the object,” Ryder’s statement said.

    Eyre said Saturday that “the instructions that were given to the the team was whoever had the first best shot to take out the balloon had to go ahead.”

    US President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau both approved the shoot-down on Saturday, according to a statement from the White House.

    “President Biden authorized US fighter aircraft assigned to NORAD to conduct the operation and a US F-22 shot down the object in Canadian territory in close coordination with Canadian authorities,” the White House statement said. “The leaders discussed the importance of recovering the object in order to determine more details on its purpose or origin.”

    The object was shot down with a AIM-9X missile from a US F-22 – the same missile and aircraft that shot down an unidentified object on Friday, and the Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4.

    “The object was flying at an altitude of approximately 40,000 feet, had unlawfully entered Canadian airspace and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight. The object was shot down approximately 100 miles from the Canada-United States border over Canadian territory in central Yukon,” she said.

    Ryder’s statement said that while Canadian authorities conduct recovery operations, the FBI will be “working closely with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

    Sunday’s takedown of the unidentified object near Lake Huron marks the fourth such incident in just over week.

    On Friday, an unidentified object was shot down by a US F-22 over Alaskan airspace after it had been monitored by the US since Thursday evening.

    Pilots gave different accounts of what they observed after coming near the object, a source briefed on the intelligence told CNN; some pilots said it “interfered with their sensors,” but other pilots said they didn’t experience that.

    Colonel Leighton high altitude object nr vpx

    Retired colonel on what he believes ‘high-altitude object’ in Alaska could be

    The object was flying at 40,000 feet, which made it a risk to civilian traffic. That set it apart from the Chinese surveillance balloon, which was traveling “well above commercial air traffic,” Ryder said at the time.

    Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska said Friday, after the unidentified object was shot down over his state, that similar objects have been spotted over Alaska in recent weeks, the Alaska Beacon reported.

    “There were things that were seen on radar but weren’t explained,” the Senate Armed Services Committee member told the publication.

    The Chinese balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina last Saturday after traveling across the US. Biden administration officials said it posed little intelligence gathering and military risk.

    It did, however, pose a risk to people and property on the ground if it were to be shot down, as officials said it was roughly 200 feet tall and the payload weighed more than a couple of thousand pounds.

    The US military is still working to recover debris from the balloon on the ocean floor. Ryder said Friday that they have “located a significant amount of debris so far that will prove helpful to our further understanding of this balloon and its surveillance capabilities.”

    Notably, the US intelligence community’s method to track China’s fleet of surveillance balloons was only discovered within the last year, six people familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The findings have allowed the US to develop a consistent technical method for the first time, which they have used to track the balloons in near-real time across the globe, the sources said.

    Earlier Sunday, before the shooting down of the object near Lake Huron, lawmakers on Capitol Hill offered a range of responses to the recent developments.

    House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner told CNN that the Biden administration does appear “somewhat trigger-happy” in how it dealt with objects over the weekend after allowing the first spotted balloon to fly across the country.

    “What I think this shows, which is probably more important to our policy discussion here, is that we really have to declare that we’re going to defend our airspace. And then we need to invest,” the Ohio Republican added. “This shows some of the problems and gaps that we have. We need to fill those as soon as possible because we certainly now ascertain there is a threat.”

    Turner’s Democratic counterpart on the Intelligence panel, Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he had “real concerns about why the administration is not being more forthcoming with everything that it knows,” before adding, “My guess is that there’s just not a lot of information out there to share.”

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, said Congress needs to investigate why it took so long for the US to catch on to the Chinese government’s use of spy balloons.

    “I do think (Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana) is looking into why it took so long for us, our military, our intelligence, to know about these balloons. That’s something I support. Congress should look at that. That’s the question we have to answer,” he said. “I think our military, our intelligence are doing a great job, present and future. I feel a lot of confidence in what they’re doing. But why, as far back as the Trump administration, did no one know about this?”

    Also Sunday, Rep. Michael McCaul, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he remains unconvinced by assertions from the intelligence community that he suspected Chinese spy balloon did not seriously damage US national security during its flight across the country.

    “They say they mitigated it, but my assessment – and I can’t get into the detail of the intelligence document – is that if it was still transmitting, going over these three very sensitive nuclear sites, I think if you look at the flight pattern of the balloon, it tells a story as to what the Chinese were up to, as they controlled this aircraft throughout the United States,” the Texas Republican told CBS News.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Republican senator warns Congress must take action now to protect Medicare and Social Security | CNN Politics

    Republican senator warns Congress must take action now to protect Medicare and Social Security | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota offered Sunday a stark warning about the future of Social Security and Medicare if Congress fails to take action now.

    “In the next 11 years, we have to have a better plan in place than what we do today. Or we’re going to see – under existing circumstances – some reductions of as much as 24% in some sort of a benefit. So, let’s start talking now because it’s easier to fix it now that it would be five years or six years from now,” Rounds told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

    In recent days, President Joe Biden has made a forceful argument against Republicans by highlighting his support for Social Security and Medicare. The president has specifically seized on a proposal from GOP Sen. Rick Scott of Florida to sunset federal legislation – including Social Security and Medicare – every five years and require Congress to pass them again.

    Referencing his “spirited debate” with Republicans at the State of the Union, Biden called Scott’s proposal “outrageous” and vowed he would veto such a plan during a speech in Florida last week.

    “The very idea the senator from Florida wants to put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block every five years I find to be somewhat outrageous. So outrageous that you might not even believe it,” he said, pulling out a pamphlet detailing Scott’s plan.

    Scott told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins last week that his proposal is intended to eliminate wasteful spending and help ensure the government can “figure out how to start living within our means.”

    “I want to make sure we balance our budget and preserve Medicare and Social Security, and I’ve been clear all along,” he said.

    Rounds also stressed Sunday that Republicans want to better manage Medicare and Social Security in order to improve the programs – not strip them from the American people.

    “We think that there are possibilities out there of long-term success without scaring people and without tearing apart the system and without reducing benefits. But it requires management. And it requires actually looking at and making things better,” he said.

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  • Fact check: Breaking down Biden’s exchanges with Republican senators over Social Security and Medicare | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Breaking down Biden’s exchanges with Republican senators over Social Security and Medicare | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden has gone on the attack over Social Security and Medicare.

    In speeches and tweets this week, Biden and his White House have singled out particular Republican senators – notably including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin – over proposals from those senators that could affect the retirement and health care programs.

    The Republican senators have responded forcefully, accusing Biden of deceiving the public about where they stand. Here is a fact-check of the exchanges.

    Biden and his White House targeted Lee on Wednesday over a video clip of Lee saying, “I’m here right now to tell you one thing that you probably have never heard from a politician. It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.” The clip has gone viral on Twitter this week; a second viral clip features Lee saying moments later, “Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort and need to be pulled up.”

    The videos are authentic, though Biden didn’t tell his Wednesday speech audience in Wisconsin they are from more than 12 years ago – an event in 2010, when Lee was running for the Senate but before he was first elected. And as Lee noted in Wednesday tweets responding to Biden, Biden didn’t mention that Lee added at the same 2010 event that current Medicare beneficiaries should have their benefits “left untouched” and that “the next layer beneath them, those who will retire in the next few years, also probably have to be held harmless.”

    Still, while Biden could have included more context, he was accurate in saying Lee had called for Social Security to be phased out.

    And while Lee said in a tweeted statement on Wednesday that, during his 12 years as a senator, he has not called for “abolishing” Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits, only for “solutions to improve those programs and move them toward solvency,” he has supported benefit cuts. For example, he has endorsed various proposals over the years to raise the Social Security retirement age.

    Since last year, Biden has criticized Scott over particular components of what Scott calls his “12 Point Plan to Rescue America.”

    In the State of the Union address on Tuesday and in speeches on Wednesday and Thursday, the president referred to a part of Scott’s plan that says, “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” Biden correctly asserted that “all federal legislation” would include Social Security and Medicare, which do not currently require congressional re-approval.

    Scott responded by accusing Biden of being dishonest and confused. Scott argued on Twitter on Wednesday that while his plan does say that “all” federal legislation should sunset in five years and become subject to a new vote by Congress, “This is clearly & obviously an idea aimed at dealing with ALL the crazy new laws our Congress has been passing of late.”

    But the plan itself doesn’t say that.

    The plan’s official text, which remains online on a dedicated website, says “all federal legislation,” period, should be sunset in five years – not all recent legislation, all crazy legislation or all legislation except for the laws that created Social Security and Medicare. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected Scott’s plan last year, McConnell too said that the plan “sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.”

    Last year, Biden sometimes overstated the support for Scott’s sunset proposal among congressional Republicans, which appears very limited. Biden has been more precise in his speeches this week, attributing the proposal to Scott himself or accurately saying in the State of the Union that “some” Republicans – “I’m not saying it’s a majority” – support it.

    Biden may have created an inaccurate impression, however, by mentioning the sunset proposal during the section of the State of the Union in which he discussed the battle over the debt ceiling. There is no indication that House Republicans are pushing this proposal as part of the current debt ceiling negotiations with the Biden administration, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has, more generally, said cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table” in these negotiations.

    Scott, in turn, has tossed a false claim into the debate with Biden this week by repeatedly accusing the president of having cut billions from Medicare in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act did not cut Medicare benefits; rather, it allowed the government and seniors to spend less money to buy prescription drugs – and, in fact, simultaneously made Medicare benefits more generous to seniors. The claim of a Medicare cut was repeatedly debunked last year, when Scott and a Republican campaign organization he chaired used it during the midterm elections.

    On Friday afternoon, the day after McConnell told a Kentucky radio station that Scott’s proposal will be a “challenge” for Scott’s own 2024 re-election campaign in a state with a large population of seniors, Scott announced he is introducing a new bill that would make it more difficult for Congress to make any cuts to Social Security and Medicare and that would send the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80 billion in Internal Revenue Service funding to Social Security and Medicare instead.

    This week and in numerous previous speeches, Biden has castigated Johnson for saying last year that Medicare and Social Security should be treated as discretionary spending, which Congress has to approve every year, rather than as permanent entitlements.

    Biden has accurately cited Johnson’s remarks this week. Here’s what Johnson told a Green Bay radio show in August: “We’ve got to turn everything into discretionary spending, so it’s all evaluated, so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt. Because, again, as long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.” When Johnson faced criticism for those remarks at the time, he stood by them and said that was his consistent longtime position.

    Johnson, however, claimed Wednesday that Biden was “lying” when the president discussed Johnson’s comments shortly after saying that some Republicans want to “cut” Social Security. Johnson has repeatedly said that his proposal to require annual approval for Social Security spending, and to “fix” and “save” Social Security in light of its poor fiscal shape at present, does not mean that he wants to put the programs on the “chopping block” or even to “cut” it.

    “The Democrats have been accusing me, since the first time I ran for office, of wanting to end Social Security, wanting to cut it, wanting to gut it, wanting to – I’ve never said that. I’ve always been consistent: I want to save it,” he said in a radio interview this week.

    It’s impossible to definitively fact-check this particular dispute without Johnson specifying how he wants to “fix” and “save” the program. His office did not respond to a CNN request for comment.

    White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates noted in an email to reporters on Thursday that, though Johnson accused Biden this week of lying about his stance on Social Security, Johnson also said in interviews this week that Social Security is a “legal Ponzi scheme” and that “Social Security might be in a more stable position for younger workers” if the government had proceeded with Republican President George W. Bush’s controversial and eventually abandoned proposal in the mid-2000s to allow workers born after 1949 to divert a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts in which they could buy into the stock market and make other investments.

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  • Washington forges rare political unity in condemning China over balloon drama | CNN Politics

    Washington forges rare political unity in condemning China over balloon drama | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    China’s audacious spy balloon flight across North America has spectacularly backfired by enshrining rare bipartisan unity in Washington.

    The coming together of Republicans and Democrats is certain to stiffen future US strategic, economic and military resolve in the Pacific region and further damage buckled relations with Beijing.

    The fierce congressional reaction to the balloon and the US government’s disclosure of intelligence about it and China’s balloon espionage program, meanwhile, threatened to further damage the world’s most crucial diplomatic relationship – especially after China hit back by accusing the US of being the world’s most gratuitous spy state.

    The unanimity of American anger toward China was exemplified by a House resolution condemning China that passed by a stunning 419-0 margin. It followed a growing realization in Washington, and more broadly across the country, that a long-predicted geopolitical confrontation may now be a reality.

    But despite the united political front in Washington, fury is boiling in both parties over the failure to down the balloon before it traversed the continent amid rising questions about the implications of China’s breach of US airspace. Administration officials faced a gauntlet of criticism from lawmakers during a classified briefing on the issue on Thursday. And Republicans stepped up efforts to brand President Joe Biden as weak over the incursion despite his warning to President Xi Jinping in his State of the Union address earlier this week that he would vigorously defend US sovereignty.

    This growing discord threatens to so politicize China policy that it will drain any efforts to defuse an escalating Cold War. The Biden administration wants to pursue those efforts despite the tensions caused by the balloon crisis.

    There’s also a risk that Republican efforts to leverage the drama for domestic political gain could bust unity over policy toward America’s giant Pacific rival. Such a partisan split would ironically deliver a greater payoff for China’s communist rulers than any information picked up by the balloon over the US.

    The unanimous House vote on the incident had not been assured. It required Republican leaders to omit language critical of Biden and followed unusual bipartisan cooperation fostered by Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the top Democrat on the panel, New York Rep. Gregory Meeks. The resolution describes the balloon flight as a brazen violation of US sovereignty. McCaul said the bipartisan nature of the vote was critical and called on everyone to stand together against a “common enemy.”

    “We wanted it to be America against China – not internal fighting, because China would see that as a moment of weakness, that we’re divided on party lines, and we didn’t want to project that,” McCaul told CNN.

    This strong signal sent to Beijing raises the possibility that the spy balloon mission has demonstrably hurt China’s interests – especially if it results in a bipartisan zeal to increase defense spending, the size of US arms and equipment packages to allow Taiwan to defend against a possible Chinese attack and more resources to US allies.

    While there is agreement on the challenge now posed by China, there was mystification and some anger elsewhere in Congress on Thursday, even as officials held classified briefings and the FBI pushed forward on its effort to evaluate intelligence from the remains of the balloon salvaged from the Atlantic after it was shot down on Saturday.

    In a Senate hearing, Democrats as well as Republicans, criticized Defense Department officials and questioned why they did not tell Americans more once the balloon was spotted.

    “You guys have to help me understand why this baby wasn’t taken out long before,” said Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat who could be facing a tough reelection next year. The balloon floated above his state, which hosts US missile installations. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski was furious that the Chinese balloon crossed her state. “As an Alaskan, I am so angry,” Murkowski said. “If you’re going to have Russia coming at you, if you’re going to have China coming at you, we know exactly how they come. They come up and they go over Alaska.”

    Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, said he understood why the White House might have kept China’s balloon program classified but added, “We all understand that some of the desire to keep things classified, it has to do with not wanting to disclose to the public things that might be inconvenient politically for the department.” The White House has previously explained that it waited until the balloon was off the Carolinas to shoot it down based on Pentagon advice that doing so before could endanger lives and property on the ground. Officials also said they took steps to ensure it was not an intelligence threat as it wafted across the country.

    But some Republicans are accusing the White House of a cover-up that they think exposes Biden as feckless and unfit to be commander-in-chief as he eyes reelection, despite his strong role in standing up to Russia over Ukraine.

    “I think the public, and Congress, would never have known about this if the Billings, Montana, paper hadn’t published a picture that showed the balloon and US assets tracking the balloon. I think their plan was clearly to keep this a secret,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley told CNN after a classified briefing.

    “The United States was grossly unprepared, this administration was grossly unprepared, and frankly I think it was a huge mistake for them not to take down the balloon before it entered the continental United States,” Hawley added.

    While the House vote on the resolution condemning China was unanimous, many Republicans used the debate before the resolution passed to lacerate the Biden administration.

    “We watched in real time from our backyards and workplaces as a foreign aircraft equipped with spyware navigated over our neighborhoods, our military installations and our vital infrastructure,” said Missouri GOP Rep. Ann Wagner, the vice chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

    “The administration again showed the dictatorship in Beijing that they could again be bullied. President Biden’s weakness and indecision sends a dangerous signal to our adversaries like Iran and Russia and North Korea.”

    Still, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said he came away from the classified briefing more confident in the administration.

    “I believe that the administration, the president, our military and intelligence agencies, acted skillfully and with care,” Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, said.

    Besides the classified briefings, Biden administration officials divulged new information about the balloon to the public Thursday, some of it gleaned by flybys by U-2 spy planes before it was downed. A senior State Department official said the balloon had been capable of conducting signals intelligence collection – or intelligence gathered by electronic means – and was part of a fleet that had flown over “more than 40 countries across five continents.”

    Beijing is likely to be irked by more details being made public about its balloon program, as evidenced by comments by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning in a briefing Thursday.

    “I am not aware of any ‘fleet of balloons,’” Mao said. “That narrative is probably part of the information and public opinion warfare the US has waged on China. As to who is the world’s number one country of spying, eavesdropping and surveillance, that is plainly visible to the international community,” she added.

    Lawmakers were told Thursday that the order to send the balloon was dispatched without Xi’s knowledge, sources familiar with Hill briefings said. But the idea Xi was unaware of balloon “is the working theory and an ongoing intelligence gap,” a source briefed on the matter said.

    Intelligence experts in the United States have been perplexed at the political furor stoked by a mere balloon – a comparatively unsophisticated asset that pales in significance compared to multi-pronged Chinese intelligence operations against the United States including economic, cyber and traditional espionage. Indeed, the US mounts a similarly broad collection mission against China, which was exposed when a Chinese jet fighter collided with a US spy plane in international airspace over the South China Sea in 2001.

    But the balloon flight, over US territory, has had a symbolic impact greater than that so far generated amid years of building tensions with China, including over Taiwan.

    “I would never have imagined that my Saturday afternoon would have been disrupted due to a Chinese spy balloon not – only that floated across most of South Carolina, it floated across the entire continental United States,” said freshman Republican Rep. Russell Fry whose South Carolina district contains coastal areas where the balloon was shot down.

    “It does – if you watch it, and you were there on the ground – sound like it was straight out of a sci-fi movie,” he said on the House floor, blasting the Biden administration for negligence and bemoaning an international incident that unfolded off the shores of Myrtle Beach.

    In the Senate, the dramatic events of the past week have caused a reassessment of years of US-China policy, which has seen efforts by the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations to try to usher China peacefully into the global economy degenerate into a brewing confrontation in the Trump and Biden administrations.

    Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said at a hearing that the Biden administration did not “see another Cold War, but we do ask everyone to play by the same set of rules.”

    The problem, however, is that China interprets such US calls as an attempt to thwart what it sees as its rightful rise as a regional and global superpower. Sherman argued that US policy in the 21st century designed to head off confrontation had not failed, but that conditions in China had changed.

    “Xi Jinping is not the Xi Jinping of the 1990’s that we all thought we knew,” Sherman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She added that China under Xi was “the only country that wants to change that rules-based order, that can successfully do so and are trying to make that happen.”

    “It is true that our way of life, our democracy, our belief in our values, in the rules-based international order is being challenged,” she continued. “And we have to meet that challenge.”

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  • Rick Scott: From embattled health care executive to Biden’s top foil | CNN Politics

    Rick Scott: From embattled health care executive to Biden’s top foil | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Florida Sen. Rick Scott has emerged as Joe Biden’s top Republican foil in the days since the president’s State of the Union address, with the White House seizing on a year-old Scott proposal that even GOP leaders recognized at the time as politically toxic.

    As a spending fight looms in Washington and Biden moves toward his 2024 reelection bid, the White House is attempting to make Scott the poster child for the president’s accusations that Republicans are seeking to cut entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare.

    Scott has responded by accusing Biden of lying, airing a misleading ad that alleges Biden cut Medicare and lambasting the president in a barrage of television interviews.

    Biden traveled Thursday to Florida – where Scott was a health care executive and two-term governor – on the latest leg of his post-State of the Union tour.

    The trip was designed in part to stoke a fight with Scott after Biden in his speech Tuesday night seized on the first-term senator’s proposal to sunset all federal programs – including Social Security and Medicare – every five years unless Congress extends those programs.

    Biden’s assertion that some Republicans are seeking to change entitlement programs was met with jeers from Republican lawmakers, who have said spending cuts should be part of any proposal to raise the debt ceiling.

    The president continued pressing that message Wednesday in Wisconsin, telling union workers, “A lot of Republicans, their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare.” He waved a pamphlet with Scott’s proposal as he spoke.

    Ahead of Biden’s speech Thursday in Tampa, White House aides placed copies of Scott’s proposal on every seat.

    In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Thursday, Scott said Biden has misrepresented the proposal he put forward ahead of the 2022 midterm elections while serving as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of the Senate GOP.

    “Nobody believes that I want to cut Medicare or Social Security. I’ve never said it,” Scott said.

    Scott said his proposal is intended to eliminate wasteful spending and help ensure the government can “figure out how to start living within our means.”

    “I want to make sure we balance our budget and preserve Medicare and Social Security, and I’ve been clear all along. So what I want to do is get rid of wasteful programs that we never review up here,” he said.

    But Scott’s proposal would sunset all federal legislation – including the two entitlement programs – every five years and require Congress to pass them again.

    Long before he was a US senator, Scott had first-hand experience dealing with America’s federal health care programs – and it became the source of much criticism as he entered the political arena.

    In the 1980s, Scott founded Columbia Hospital Corporation by purchasing a pair of distressed Texas hospitals. He later merged his company with Hospital Corporation of America to create Columbia/HCA, becoming the largest for-profit hospital chain at the time and gaining notoriety on Wall Street for what appeared like cost-cutting in an industry with ballooning expenses.

    In 1997, federal agents unveiled a sweeping investigation into Columbia/HCA that would roil the company for years. On the day the FBI swooped in to seize records from 35 of its hospitals across six states, Scott shrugged off the probe. “It’s not a fun day, but … government investigations are a matter of fact today in health care,” he said on CNN.

    The investigation would unearth what the US Department of Justice later called the “largest health care fraud case in U.S. history.” According to a press release, Columbia/HCA schemed to defraud Medicare, Medicaid and TRICARE, the military’s health care program, of hundreds of millions of dollars. The company pleaded guilty to criminal conduct, including charges related to fraudulent Medicare billing and paying kickbacks to doctors, and it ultimately agreed to pay $1.7 billion in fines, damages and penalties.

    Scott was pushed out as CEO amid the turmoil. He was never charged with a crime, though much of the alleged financial abuses took place during his watch. His time in the corporate world made Scott a wealthy individual, which he would lean on in 2010 when he decided to kickstart a political career by entering the race for Florida governor.

    Scott’s time at the helm of Columbia/HCA was the subject of negative ads from both Republicans and Democrats, but he fended them off with a self-funded campaign that flooded the airwaves with a jobs-focused message. He told the St. Petersburg Times that “mistakes were made” at his former company and that he had “learned hard lessons,” but he also said during a debate that he was “proud of the company I built.” Regardless of the controversy, the little-known Scott defeated a GOP favorite for his party’s nomination, and Floridians narrowly elected him governor that fall.

    During his eight years leading Florida, Scott fought off attempts to extend safety net benefits to Floridians. He frequently challenged the Obama administration over the Affordable Care Act and blocked expansion of Medicaid in Florida. In his first year as governor, he signed a bill to cut unemployment payments and tied benefits to the state’s unemployment rate.

    Democrats continued to make Scott’s time at Columbia/HCA an issue, to no avail. Scott eked out a reelection victory in 2014. He then narrowly unseated longtime Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson in 2018 after spending more than $70 million of his own money on his campaign.

    Marching to the beat of his own drum, Scott declined to be sworn in with his class in January 2019. Instead, he waited until his term as governor had ended and flew to Washington for a separate ceremony. For a time, it made him the country’s most junior senator, but he nevertheless soon found himself in party leadership.

    Scott and other Republicans are aggressively pushing back against Biden’s assertions that the GOP is seeking to cut spending on entitlement programs.

    However, Republican leaders have long recognized Scott’s proposal to sunset all federal programs after five years as rocky political terrain.

    The tense relationship between Scott and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell burst into public view during the 2022 election cycle as Republicans sought to retake the Senate.

    Scott, as NRSC chairman, released a platform called “Rescue America,” which would have subjected all federally elected officials to a term limit of 12 years and closed the Department of Education, amid a slew of other initiatives. It would also have required millions of low-income and middle-class Americans to pay income taxes, which was later dropped in a revised version of the plan.

    And, in what Democrats immediately recognized as an opening to accuse Republicans of attempting to undercut popular programs, Scott’s plan proposed sunsetting all federal legislation in five years – unless Congress extended it.

    McConnell quickly disavowed Scott’s plan, seeking to make clear that the Florida senator did not speak for Senate Republicans.

    “Let me tell you what would not be a part of our agenda,” McConnell said at a news conference last March. “We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people, and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.”

    Their frosty relationship did not improve as the 2022 election cycle continued, as the two battled over which candidates to support in primaries and in the general election, and Republicans ultimately fell short of winning a majority.

    After the election, Scott challenged McConnell for the top Senate Republican post but lost.

    The Florida senator said last week that he saw McConnell’s decision to remove him from the Senate Commerce Committee as retribution.

    “He didn’t like that I opposed him because I believe we have to have ideas – fight over ideas,” Scott said on “CNN This Morning.”

    When pressed Thursday by CNN’s Collins about why his proposal left open the opportunity for the government to cut funding for Social Security and Medicare, Scott repeatedly referenced a policy proposal from then-Sen. Biden in 1975 to sunset federal legislation periodically.

    Scott said Biden’s old proposal does less to protect entitlements for seniors than the senator’s plan from last year because “he proposed it year after year after year to reduce Medicare and Social Security. Year after year. I’ve never done that. I don’t believe in that.”

    Asked Thursday about the 1975 proposal mentioned by Scott, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “A bill from the 1970s is not part of the president’s agenda.”

    “The president ran on protecting Medicare and Social Security from cuts. And he reiterated that in the State of the Union,” she said.

    A new ad from Scott released this week in advance of the president’s visit to Florida says that “Joe Biden just cut $280 billion from Medicare” – a claim that was previously debunked when Scott and the NRSC made it in 2022.

    Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is expected to reduce Medicare prescription drug spending by the federal government by $237 billion, according to the most recent Congressional Budget Office estimate, because the law allows the government to spend less money to buy drugs from pharmaceutical companies and not because it cuts benefits to seniors enrolled in Medicare. The law makes Medicare’s prescription drug program substantially more generous to seniors while also saving them money.

    Scott, in his interview with Collins, also defended his recent call for Biden to resign, labeling him “a complete failure.” He said his resignation calls did not specifically stem from Biden’s use of his proposal as an avenue to attack Republicans but expressed his displeasure with the president’s repeated references to his plan.

    “He lies about what I want to get done, and I don’t appreciate it,” Scott said.

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  • Fetterman in Washington hospital ‘for observation’ after feeling lightheaded | CNN Politics

    Fetterman in Washington hospital ‘for observation’ after feeling lightheaded | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Sen. John Fetterman is being kept overnight in a Washington, DC, hospital “for observation,” after being admitted earlier Wednesday after feeling lightheaded, his office said in a statement.

    The Pennsylvania Democrat was elected to the Senate in November while recovering from a stroke he had suffered in May. According to his spokesperson, there was no evidence of a new stroke Wednesday, but he was set to undergo more tests during his hospital stay.

    “Towards the end of the Senate Democratic retreat today, Senator John Fetterman began feeling lightheaded. He left and called his staff, who picked him up and drove him to The George Washington University Hospital. Initial tests did not show evidence of a new stroke, but doctors are running more tests and John is remaining overnight for observation,” Fetterman’s communications director, Joe Calvello, said in the statement.

    Last year, Fetterman checked himself into a hospital in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, several days before the primary. Fetterman won the nomination while in the hospital and underwent a nearly three-hour surgery that same day to implant a defibrillator. He was released from the hospital after a nine-day stay.

    Fetterman’s cardiologist later issued a statement, providing more insight into what caused his stroke and outlining that the Democrat suffers from both atrial fibrillation and cardiomyopathy.

    Calvello said Wednesday night that Fetterman was “in good spirits and talking with his staff and family.”

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  • Initial classified balloon report wasn’t flagged as urgent, drawing criticism | CNN Politics

    Initial classified balloon report wasn’t flagged as urgent, drawing criticism | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    A day before the suspected Chinese spy balloon entered US airspace over Alaska, the Defense Intelligence Agency quietly sent an internal report that a foreign object was headed towards US territory, military and intelligence officials familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The report – also known as a “tipper” – was disseminated through classified channels accessible across the US government. But it wasn’t flagged as an urgent warning and top defense and intelligence officials who saw it weren’t immediately alarmed by it, according to sources. Instead of treating it as an immediate threat, the US moved to investigate the object, seeing it as an opportunity to observe and collect intelligence.

    It wasn’t until the balloon entered Alaskan airspace, on January 28, and then took a sharp turn south that officials came to believe it was on a course to cross over the continental US – and that its mission might be to spy on the US mainland.

    This timeline of events – previously unreported – helps explain why US defense officials declined to act before the balloon had crossed over US territory. That lack of urgency has become a sharp political flashpoint on Capitol Hill, where some Republicans have criticized the administration for not sounding the alarm sooner.

    “Our government knew a Chinese military spy balloon was going to enter the airspace over the continental U.S. at least TWO DAYS BEFORE it happened Yet they failed to act to stop it,” Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, tweeted on Wednesday. “Biden must disclose to Americans when they knew the spay [sic] balloon was headed towards the U.S. & explain why they didn’t stop it.”

    Officials familiar with the original DIA report conceded Rubio’s point that they didn’t see the balloon as an urgent threat until it was already over US territory –  even as fresh revelations have emerged about what the US knew about Chinese spy balloons.

    During a closed door briefing on Tuesday, Senate staff repeatedly pressed military officials about who knew what – and when. On Wednesday, Rubio and Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to President Joe Biden’s top defense and intelligence officials raising questions about the administration’s decision-making after the balloon crossed into Alaskan airspace.

    CNN reported on Tuesday that US officials tracking the balloon’s trajectory recognized it as part of a known aerial surveillance operation run by the Chinese military that officials say has flown dozens of missions world-wide, including half a dozen near or within US airspace. A military intelligence report from April of 2022, exclusively reported by CNN, revealed that the US had tracked previous flights by similar balloons.

    It was only when the balloon turned south that it “got strange,” a senior US official told CNN. “We immediately started talking about shooting it down, then.”

    On January 28, when the balloon entered US airspace near Alaska, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, sent up fighter jets to make a positive identification, according to defense officials, reflecting a subtle shift in urgency.

    Still, officials tracking the balloon saw little reason to be alarmed. At the time, according to US officials, this balloon was expected to sail over Alaska and continue on a northern trajectory that intelligence and military officials could track and study.

    Instead, shortly after the balloon crossed over land, it alarmed officials by making its unexpected turn south.

    On January 31, the balloon had crossed out of Canada and into the Lower 48. And concerns that the balloon had been sent by Beijing explicitly to spy on the mainland US were confirmed when NORAD observed the balloon “loitering” over sensitive military facilities, multiple sources familiar with the intelligence told CNN.

    How much control China exerted over the balloon’s path remains a matter of debate. Although the balloon was equipped with propellers and a rudder that allowed it to turn “like a sailboat,” according to the senior US official, it largely rode the jet stream – one of the reasons US officials were able to predict its path across the US in advance.

    Senior administration officials appear not to have been made aware of the balloon until on or near January 28, when it crossed into Alaskan airspace, including America’s top-ranking general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.

    Biden, according to senior administration officials, was not briefed until three days later, on January 31, when the balloon crossed out of Canada and into the continental United States. At that point, Biden asked the military to present options “immediately” to shoot the balloon down, officials said.

    Military officials said it is not necessarily surprising that the president was not briefed until January 31, given the expectations for the balloon at the time.

    The “tipper” sent by the DIA also goes out across government channels routinely, and although US officials have access to these reports, whether they read them or whether those reports are included in briefings to senior policymakers is a matter of discretion.

    “Some of these places send emails and then count that as someone being informed,” the senior US official said.

    As more information about the administration’s decision-making process on the balloon has continued to trickle out, Congress has taken a keen interest.

    “There are still a lot of questions to be asked about Alaska,” a Senate Republican aide told CNN. “Alaska is still part of the United States – why is that okay to transit Alaska without telling anyone, but [the continental US] is different?”

    Some Republican lawmakers have raised pointed questions about why the Biden administration did not move to shoot down the balloon before it crossed down into the continental US – either while it was over Alaska or sooner.

    Military and intelligence officials who spoke to CNN said that it wasn’t known that the balloon was going to dip south into the Lower 48 until the balloon was already over Alaska. Before that, officials didn’t believe that it posed any real risk to the US, and in fact, presented more of an intelligence-gathering opportunity.

    “The domain awareness was there as it approached Alaska,” NORAD commander Gen. Glen VanHerck told reporters on Monday. “It was my assessment that this balloon did not present a physical military threat to North America… And therefore, I could not take immediate action because it was not demonstrating hostile act or hostile intent.”

    Once it was over US territory, officials have argued that the benefits of gathering additional intelligence on the balloon as it passed over far outweighed the risk of shooting it down over land.

    The US sent up U-2 spy planes to track the balloon’s progress, according to US officials.

    One pilot took a selfie in the cockpit that shows both the pilot and the surveillance balloon itself, these officials said – an image that has already gained legendary status in both NORAD and the Pentagon.

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  • Buttigieg says he won’t seek US Senate seat in Michigan in 2024 | CNN Politics

    Buttigieg says he won’t seek US Senate seat in Michigan in 2024 | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Sunday he will not run for the open US Senate seat in Michigan in 2024, in his most direct answer to date ruling out a potential bid.

    “No,” Buttigieg said when asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” if he would seek to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow.

    Buttigieg had previously indicated he would not pursue the seat, citing his current focus on his job in President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, but had stopped short of ruling it out altogether.

    “I’m planning to vote in that election as a resident of Michigan, but look, the job that I have is, first of all, I think, the best job in the federal government,” he told Tapper on Sunday.

    “This job is taking 110% of my time, and obviously I serve at the pleasure of the president. But as long as he is willing to have me continue doing this work, I’m proud to be part of this team,” Buttigieg added.

    Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, moved last year to Michigan, where the parents of his husband, Chasten, live.

    Democrats are defending 23 of the 34 Senate seats on the ballot next year, including three seats in states that backed former President Donald Trump by at least 8 points in 2020: West Virginia, Montana and Ohio.

    Besides Michigan, the party is also defending seats in other battleground states such as Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Potential Democratic candidates for Stabenow’s seat include Reps. Elissa Slotkin and Debbie Dingell, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who drew national attention last year in a floor speech pushing back against anti-LGBTQ attacks from a Republican colleague.

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  • Balloon drama comes at precarious time in US-China relations | CNN Politics

    Balloon drama comes at precarious time in US-China relations | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Secretary of State Antony Blinken had no choice.

    Diplomatically and for domestic political reasons, it would have been impossible to go ahead with a planned visit to China in the coming days as what US officials have described as a Chinese surveillance balloon floated across the US.

    The drama dashed an attempt by the Biden administration to take some of the heat out of tense US-China relations. And it is yet another incident that will fuel a sense in Washington and Beijing that the world’s strongest superpower and its rising rival are heading toward an inevitable confrontation.

    China took the rare step of expressing regret for the “unintended entry” of what it called a meteorological civilian airship into US airspace.

    “The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation caused by force majeure,” the Foreign Ministry in Beijing said in a statement.

    Had Blinken gone to Beijing, his visit would have been dominated by the balloon incident to the detriment of other key issues in the relationship, including Taiwan and economic clashes. But politically, with Republicans up in arms over the incident, going ahead with the visit would have made President Joe Biden’s administration look like it wasn’t being sufficiently tough on China. Domestic politics in both Washington and Beijing play an important role in defining what is often described as the world’s most crucial diplomatic relationship.

    The Pentagon says it’s been tracking the balloon – the size of three buses, according to a defense official – for several days but made the decision not to shoot it down. It reasoned that the balloon was wafting well above commercial and military air lanes – and that it was not a huge intelligence threat.

    This seems a reasonable position since Chinese surveillance satellites with a far greater capacity for espionage are known to hover in space over the US. And officials said it’s not the first time the US has tracked one of Beijing’s balloons during this and previous administrations.

    This is hardly a DEFCON-1 situation. But the balloon offers a perfect glimpse into one of the most destructive factors driving the US and China toward confrontation. The politics of the world’s most critical geopolitical relationship are so torqued in both countries that any incident can set off a new round of recriminations. That’s what Blinken was traveling to Beijing to address.

    Washington is already in an uproar.

    Republicans – always keen to portray Biden as soft on China, even though he’s actually been at least as tough as ex-President Donald Trump – are up in arms over what they are portraying as a violation of US sovereignty.

    Retired colonel has a theory about why suspected Chinese spy balloon is over Montana

    “Information strongly suggests the (Defense) Department failed to act with urgency in responding to this airspace incursion by a high-altitude surveillance balloon. No incursion should be ignored, and should be dealt with appropriately,” said Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

    House Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy – who has already warned China this week it can’t stop him visiting Taiwan if he wants – demanded a briefing about the balloon for the Gang of Eight congressional leaders.

    “China’s brazen disregard for US sovereignty is a destabilizing action that must be addressed and President Biden cannot be silent,” the California Republican said.

    It is fair to wonder why China sent a surveillance balloon over the US before Blinken’s critical visit, with both sides apparently keen to arrest the dangerous plummet in their relations. It seems far less likely this is a deliberate provocation since there’s reason to think China wants to turn down the heat too. Perhaps Beijing lost control of its balloon. Still, if a US balloon was being blown across the Chinese mainland right now, it’s likely President Xi Jinping’s government would wring maximum propaganda value out of the incident.

    China’s Foreign Ministry said Friday it was aware of reports of the incident but warned against “deliberate speculation.”

    “China is a responsible country. We act in accordance with international law. We have no intention in violating other countries’ airspace. We hope relevant parties would handle the matter in a cool-headed way,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said.

    Meanwhile, Canada said on Thursday evening it is also tracking the balloon’s movements and working with their American partners, including the monitoring of a potential second incident.

    Going into the Blinken talks, there had seemed to be a small window to improve relations between the long, tense period that led up to Xi’s norm-busting securing of a third term in office, which may have contributed to a nationalistic Chinese attitude that worsened tensions with the US, and the next American presidential election. (White House races almost always degenerate into China bashing that angers Beijing.)

    But the atmosphere around the talks had already been soured by a memo by US Air Force Gen. Michael Minihan first reported by NBC last week, which warned that his “gut” tells him to be ready for war with China – and not just in theory, but in two years. That prediction doesn’t track with US government assessments of the geopolitical tussle in the Pacific or necessarily with events in the region. But it showed how isolated events can send Sino-US tensions soaring.

    Now, floating over that inflammatory atmosphere, we have a Chinese surveillance balloon. This incident may well turn out to be innocuous, but it’s another small drama that has not only ruined Blinken’s trip but will further fan the political flames that elevate hawks in Washington and Beijing who see what they want to see – an inevitable march toward conflict – and make that dangerous scenario more likely.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Democratic senator urges Apple and Google to ban TikTok from their app stores | CNN Business

    Democratic senator urges Apple and Google to ban TikTok from their app stores | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee is calling on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores over concerns about national security, in the latest indication of mounting scrutiny on the short-form video app from members of Congress.

    In a letter sent to the two tech giants on Thursday, Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet calls TikTok “an unacceptable threat to the national security of the United States” and cites the same concerns that have prompted the federal government and more than half of US states to restrict TikTok from official devices and networks.

    Writing to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Bennet highlighted fears that China could use its national security laws to force TikTok or its parent, ByteDance, to hand over the personal information of the app’s US users. The laws in question, Bennet wrote, require organizations in the country to “cooperate with state intelligence work” and to allow the government to access company resources. ByteDance’s founder is Chinese and the company has offices in China. TikTok has also disclosed to European users that their data may be accessed by employees based in China.

    China could potentially try to shape what US users see on the app, Bennet warned, with possible implications for foreign policy and democracy.

    “We should accept the very real possibility that [China] could compel TikTok, via ByteDance, to use its influence to advance Chinese government interests,” Bennet wrote, “for example, by tweaking its algorithm to present Americans content to undermine U.S. democratic institutions or muffle criticisms” of China’s handling of Hong Kong, Taiwan or ethnic minorities.

    Apple, Google and TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is expected to testify before a House committee in March to discuss the company’s data security practices.

    There is no evidence that the type of spying or manipulation US officials fear has actually occurred, but security experts have warned that it is a possibility.

    TikTok has denied that it would ever hand over US user data to the Chinese government. It has increasingly moved to wall off its US operations from the rest of its business, technologically and organizationally — part of what the company has described as a good-faith effort to address the national security concerns.

    TikTok has also spent years negotiating a potential national security deal with the US government that would seek to resolve some of the concerns, but the talks have been mired by delays, leading to frustration among some members of Congress. In recent months, multiple US lawmakers have introduced bills that would ban TikTok from all US devices, including personal ones.

    Some other US officials have also called on Apple and Google to voluntarily remove TikTok from their app stores.

    Last year, Brendan Carr, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, wrote a letter to the companies urging them to de-list TikTok. The FCC does not regulate app stores, but Carr has said that his agency’s experience dealing with Chinese telecom companies has informed his views on the matter. The FCC has moved to block Chinese firms including Huawei and ZTE from the US market, over fears that their wireless networking equipment could be used to collect information on US communications.

    Although the leading members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Virginia Democrat Mark Warner and Florida Republican Marco Rubio, have also been outspoken critics of TikTok, the two lawmakers had not been invited to co-sign Bennet’s letter before it was sent, according to a spokesperson for Bennet. Rubio is an author of one of the bills seeking to ban TikTok from the United States, while Warner has said he would prefer to see a bill that targets a broader category of worrisome apps, rather than a single app such as TikTok.

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  • DOJ tells senators it is working to satisfy Trump and Biden document demands without harming special counsel probes | CNN Politics

    DOJ tells senators it is working to satisfy Trump and Biden document demands without harming special counsel probes | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department has told lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee that it is working to satisfy their demands for information about classified documents found at properties of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump without harming ongoing special counsel investigations into both matters, according to a new letter obtained by CNN.

    The DOJ letter, dated Saturday, responds to the committee’s August request for information about the documents recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and follow-up inquiries by the panel about classified material found at the Penn Biden Center as well as Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.

    “We are working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to support the provision of information that will satisfy the Committee’s responsibilities without harming the ongoing Special Counsel investigations,” Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte wrote to Democratic Sen. Mark Warner and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, the Intelligence panel’s top lawmakers.

    “Although one of the Special Counsels was appointed only on January 12, prosecutors on both matters are actively working to enable sharing information with the Committee,” Uriarte said.

    The letter also notes that the DOJ “worked in good faith to schedule a briefing in September 2022,” but since that time, there have been “significant developments, including the appointment of two separate Special Counsels to handle the respective matters.”

    “The Department looks forward to continuing to engage with the Committee to meet its needs while protecting the Department’s interests,” the letter states.

    The DOJ’s response, which was also sent to the top lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, comes with Warner and Rubio reiterating their call for department to share the classified documents obtained from the properties of Biden and Trump.

    In an interview Sunday with “Face the Nation” on CBS, Warner and Rubio objected to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s policy to withhold the documents until the special counsels handling each investigation give authorization. Warner said the DOJ policy “doesn’t hold water.”

    “Our job is to make sure there’s not an intelligence compromise, and while the Director of National Intelligence had been willing to brief us earlier, now that you’ve got the special counsel, the notion that we’re going to be left in limbo, and we can’t do our job, that just cannot stand,” the Virginia Democrat said.

    Rubio called into question the logic behind the Justice Department’s position to not share the documents with the committee, arguing that as members of the Senate Intelligence panel, it’s likely they already have the proper clearance to view the documents.

    “I don’t know how congressional oversight on the document, actually knowing what they are, in any way impedes an investigation,” the Florida Republican said. “These are probably materials we already have access to. We just don’t know which ones they are.”

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Video of Nichols’ beating prompts renewed calls for police reform | CNN Politics

    Video of Nichols’ beating prompts renewed calls for police reform | 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
     — 

    New York to San Francisco. Baltimore to Portland. Boston to Los Angeles, and countless cities in between.

    Protesters once again took to the streets over the weekend to decry police brutality after the release of video capturing the violent Memphis police beating that led to the death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols.

    On Sunday morning, Nichols’ family attorney made note of the outrage as he aimed a simple but pointed message at Washington.

    “Shame on us if we don’t use [Nichols’] tragic death to finally get the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed,” Ben Crump said on CNN’s “State of Union.”

    President Joe Biden referenced the failed legislation in his statement about Nichols on Friday, and many leaders – from the chairs of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio – are acknowledging a potential role for federal legislation.

    The Congressional Black Caucus is requesting a meeting with Biden this week to push for negotiations. “We are calling on our colleagues in the House and Senate to jumpstart negotiations now and work with us to address the public health epidemic of police violence that disproportionately affects many of our communities,” CBC Chair Steven Horsford, a Nevada Democrat, wrote in a statement on Sunday.

    Gloria Sweet-Love, the Tennessee State Conference NAACP president, called on Congress to step up during a Sunday evening news conference in Memphis. “By failing to craft and pass bills to stop police brutality, you’re writing another Black man’s obituary. The blood of Black America is on your hands. So stand up and do something.”

    But with Congress as divided as ever, it appears public outrage is once again on a collision course with Washington partisanship.

    Here’s what you need to know about the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, why it failed, and what chances it stands in the current political climate.

    The legislation, originally introduced in 2020 and again in 2021, would set up a national registry of police misconduct to stop officers from evading consequences for their actions by moving to another jurisdiction.

    It would ban racial and religious profiling by law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels, and it would overhaul qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that critics say shields law enforcement from accountability.

    According to a fact sheet on the legislation at the time, the measure would also allow “individuals to recover damages in civil court when law enforcement officers violate their constitutional rights by eliminating qualified immunity for law enforcement.”

    The fact sheet also states that the legislation would “save lives by banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants” and would mandate “deadly force be used only as a last resort.”

    The bill twice cleared the House under Democratic control – in 2020 and 2021 – largely along party lines. But it never went anywhere in the Senate, even after Democrats won control in 2021, in part, because of disagreements about qualified immunity, which protects police officers from being sued in civil court.

    Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina spent some six months trying to hash out a deal that could win 60 votes in the Senate, but talks were stymied by a number of complicated issues.

    “It was clear at this negotiating table, in this moment, we were not making progress,” Booker told reporters in the spring of 2021. “In fact, recent back-and-forth with paper showed me that we were actually moving away from it. The negotiations we were in stopped. But the work will continue.”

    With the legislation stuck, Biden signed a more limited executive order to overhaul policing on the second anniversary of Floyd’s death. It took several actions that can be applied to federal officers, including efforts to ban chokeholds, expand the use of body-worn cameras and restrict no-knock warrants, among other things.

    But the president cannot mandate that local law enforcement adopt the measures in his order; the executive action lays out levers the federal government can use, such as federal grants and technical assistance, to incentivize local law enforcement to get on board

    And since then, little has happened on the federal legislative front.

    Here’s the reality: the road for police reform has only become more challenging in the new Congress now that House Republicans, who have placed their priorities elsewhere, are in the majority.

    Senate Democrats picked up one more seat in last year’s midterm elections to pad their majority, but they’re still far short of the 60 votes that would be need for such an effort to succeed. That means any policing overhaul that can find meaningful support in Congress will likely be stripped of the kind of measures that protesters are calling for.

    State officials have been initiating investigations into local police departments, recognizing that the federal government can’t take on every case nationwide.

    And, in some cases, local governments have taken their own steps. In the year after Floyd was killed, at least 25 states had considered some form of qualified immunity reform. In 2021, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law a series of police reforms that created a system to decertify law enforcement officers found to have engaged in serious misconduct – joining the majority of states that have similar decertification authorities.

    But, for many, it’s not nearly enough. Read this CNN Opinion piece from Sonia Pruitt, a retired Montgomery County, Maryland, police captain:

    “Many have noted the police assault on Nichols is reminiscent of that on Rodney King, a Black man whose beating at the hands of Los Angeles police officers in 1991 was captured on video. But the beating of Nichols is actually much worse because it shows that after nearly 32 years, the needle of police reform has barely moved, and seemingly minor traffic violations continue to lead to the deaths of Black and other minority men and women in police encounters.”

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  • Brett Kavanaugh Fast Facts | CNN

    Brett Kavanaugh Fast Facts | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

    Birth date: February 12, 1965

    Birth place: Washington, DC

    Birth name: Brett Michael Kavanaugh

    Father: Everett Edward Kavanaugh Jr., president of a trade association

    Mother: Martha Kavanaugh, teacher, prosecutor and judge

    Marriage: Ashley (Estes) Kavanaugh

    Children: Liza and Margaret

    Education: Yale College, B.A., 1987, graduated cum laude; Yale Law School, J.D., 1990

    Religion: Roman Catholic

    Regularly taught courses on separation of powers and on the Supreme Court at Harvard Law School.

    Kavanaugh finished the Boston Marathon in 2010 and in 2015.

    1990-1991 – Law clerk to Judge Walter Stapleton of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

    1991-1992 – Clerks for Judge Alex Kozinski of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

    1992-1993 – Attorney with the Solicitor General’s Office at the Department of Justice.

    1993-1994 – Serves as law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy.

    1994-1997 and 1998 – Associate counsel for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater investigation, which leads to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

    1997-1998 and 1999-2001 – Partner at Kirkland & Ellis in Washington, DC.

    2001-2003 – Serves as associate counsel and then senior associate counsel to President George W. Bush.

    July 25, 2003 – Bush nominates Kavanaugh to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but the Senate doesn’t vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination for almost three years.

    July 2003-May 2006 – Serves as assistant and staff secretary to Bush.

    May 26, 2006 – The Senate confirms Kavanaugh to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals by a vote of 57-36.

    May 30, 2006 – Sworn in by Kennedy.

    July 9, 2018 – President Donald Trump announces Kavanaugh as his nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Kennedy’s retirement.

    September 4-7, 2018 – Confirmation hearings are held on Capitol Hill. A Senate Judiciary Committee vote is tentatively slated for the week of September 17.

    September 16, 2018 – The Washington Post publishes an article about a California psychology professor who accuses Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her when they were both teenagers at a house party during the early 1980s. Christine Blasey Ford says she initially sent a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein about the incident when Kavanaugh’s name was included on a shortlist for the Supreme Court. Ford tells the newspaper she initially did not want to go public but she decided to talk on the record because her letter to Feinstein had been leaked to the media. Kavanaugh denies that such an incident ever took place.

    September 23, 2018 – The New Yorker magazine publishes a report about a second allegation of sexual misconduct, prompting Feinstein to call for a postponement of confirmation proceedings. The magazine article centers on a college classmate from Yale, Deborah Ramirez who says Kavanaugh exposed himself to her while a group of students were drinking at a party in a dorm during the 1983-1984 academic year. Kavanaugh denies the allegation and a White House spokeswoman dismisses the claim as uncorroborated.

    September 27, 2018 – Kavanaugh and Ford testify during an all-day hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    September 28, 2018 – GOP Senator Jeff Flake, a member of the Judiciary Committee, agrees to vote yes, paving the way to a floor vote but he says the FBI should reopen its background investigation of Kavanaugh and spend a week looking into claims made by Kavanaugh’s accusers. Trump later agrees to direct the FBI to reopen its background check but the probe will be limited in scope and must be completed in a week.

    October 3, 2018 – The FBI completes its supplemental background check and sends the information to the Senate late in the day.

    October 4, 2018 – The Wall Street Journal publishes an op-ed by Kavanaugh in which argues that he is an independent, impartial judge. He expresses regret for a few of his statements during the September 27 hearing, explaining that he was frustrated and emotional. He pledges, going forward, that litigants and colleagues will be treated with respect. The same day, retired Justice John Paul Stevens says that Kavanaugh’s comments during his confirmation hearings suggest bias. Stevens says Kavanaugh should not serve on the Supreme Court.

    October 6, 2018 – The Senate confirms Kavanaugh with a 50-48 vote. He is sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts during a private ceremony. The vote takes place amid public protests for and against Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

    September 14, 2019 – The New York Times publishes an article adapted from a forthcoming book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh” that contains a new allegation of college sexual misconduct. According to the report, the FBI did not investigate the new allegation and the bureau did not speak with witnesses to verify Ramirez’s original claim.

    July 2020 – An exclusive CNN report says Kavanaugh urged his colleagues in a series of private memos this spring to consider avoiding decisions in major disputes over abortion and Democratic subpoenas for Trump’s financial records, according to multiple sources familiar with the inner workings of the court.

    October 28, 2020 – Kavanaugh tweaks a line in his controversial opinion on Wisconsin mail-in voting, after he received criticism for incorrectly saying Vermont had not changed its election rules due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

    July 22, 2021 – Senator Sheldon Whitehouse releases a letter from the FBI disclosing that it received more than 4,500 tips on a phone line in 2018 as part of a background investigation Kavanaugh and provided “relevant” ones to former President Trump’s White House counsel.

    October 1, 2021 – The Supreme Court announces that Kavanaugh has tested positive for Covid-19. This is the first publicly known case of coronavirus among the high court’s justices. Kavanaugh was fully vaccinated, according to the court.

    June 8, 2022 – Nicholas John Roske is arrested near Kavanaugh’s house, after calling emergency authorities to say he was having suicidal thoughts, had a firearm in his suitcase, and had traveled from California “to kill a specific US Supreme Court Justice.” The Justice Department charges him with attempting to kidnap or murder a US judge.

    January 20, 2023 – “Justice,” a documentary examining the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh, premieres at the Sundance Film Festival.

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  • Treasury takes more extraordinary measures to avoid debt default | CNN Politics

    Treasury takes more extraordinary measures to avoid debt default | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is taking another step to temporarily delay the US defaulting on its debt.

    Less than a week after announcing that the nation hit its $31.4 trillion debt ceiling set by Congress, Yellen wrote to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday to say that she is adding to the extraordinary measures that will allow the government to keep paying its bills on time and stall the catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences of a default.

    She will stop fully investing the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Thrift Savings Fund, part of the Federal Employees’ Retirement System, in interest-bearing securities of the US.

    This is in addition to the measures announced last week, when Yellen said Treasury will begin to sell existing investments and suspend reinvestments of the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund.

    These funds are invested in special-issue Treasury securities, which count against the debt limit. Treasury’s actions would reduce the amount of outstanding debt subject to the limit and temporarily allow it to continue paying the government’s bills on time and in full.

    Yellen’s actions are mainly behind-the-scenes accounting maneuvers. No federal retirees or employees will be affected, and the funds will be made whole once the impasse ends, she wrote.

    The extraordinary measures should last at least until early June, Yellen has said, though she stressed that her forecast is subject to “considerable uncertainty.”

    Despite Yellen’s warnings to Congress to act promptly, little, if any, progress toward a resolution has been made between House Republicans and the White House.

    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated Monday that the Biden administration is not open to negotiating on the debt limit, pushing back against comments from West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin that the position was “a mistake.”

    “It was done three times in the past, in the past administration under Donald Trump, so this is nothing unusual,” she told CNN during a White House briefing. “This is something that should be done without conditions, and we should not be taking hostage key programs that the American people really earned and care about – Social Security, Medicare should not be put into a hostage situation.”

    McCarthy also blasted the administration’s position, tweeting last week that he’s ready to meet to discuss “a responsible debt ceiling increase to address irresponsible government spending.” He noted that he accepts President Joe Biden’s invitation to sit down, though no such meeting has been set.

    As part of the drawn-out negotiations to win the speaker vote earlier this month, McCarthy promised his conservative members that any effort to lift the debt ceiling would be accompanied by spending cuts.

    The Senate, meanwhile, is taking a back seat in the standoff for now. Senate Republicans say they will wait to see how the House GOP maneuvers a way to raise the borrowing limit before deciding if they need to insert themselves into the process.

    Despite the current situation, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN Monday that “we won’t default,” without elaborating.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday laid out the severe consequences of a default, saying “every single American will pay the price.” He called on House Republicans to reveal the fiscal measures they want to take.

    “Well, I say to my Republican colleagues: If you want to talk about spending cuts, then you have an obligation – an obligation – to show the American people precisely what kind of cuts you are talking about,” he said.

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  • Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego announces Senate bid in challenge to Kyrsten Sinema | CNN Politics

    Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego announces Senate bid in challenge to Kyrsten Sinema | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona on Monday announced his campaign for US Senate, setting up a potential 2024 clash with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who recently switched her party affiliation from Democrat to independent.

    Gallego, a Phoenix-area congressman and retired Marine who served in Iraq, released a video of him telling a group of fellow veterans about his decision to run.

    “You’re the first group of people that are hearing this besides my family. I will be challenging Kyrsten Sinema for the United States Senate, and I need all of your support,” Gallego, 43, told the group at a veterans organization in Guadalupe, Arizona.

    Sinema has faced fierce criticism from Democrats for opposing elements of President Joe Biden’s agenda. Early last year, while the Arizona senator was still a Democrat, Gallego said some Democratic senators were urging him to run for her seat. Sinema said in December she was switching parties, though she continues to caucus with Senate Democrats and has not said publicly whether she will run for reelection.

    “Most families feel that they are one or two paychecks away from going under. That is not the way that we should be living in this country,” Gallego said in his announcement video. “The rich and the powerful, they don’t need more advocates. It’s the people that are still trying to decide between groceries and utilities that need a fighter for them.”

    Gallego, who is of Colombian and Mexican descent, would be Arizona’s first Latino senator, if elected. He spoke in both English and Spanish in his announcement video and described the hardship and financial instability his family faced when he was growing up

    Gallego said his mother, an immigrant, would “cry, like, every night, being stressed out about how she was gonna raise, like, four kids on a secretary’s salary, you know, with an absent father.”

    “Fue una experiencia muy dura,” Gallego added in Spanish, which translates to: “It was a very hard experience.”

    Gallego was first elected to the House in 2014. He is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and also chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ campaign arm, BOLD PAC, during the 2022 cycle.

    The Arizona Democrat in his announcement video described suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following his deployment to Iraq in 2005.

    “Losing all my friends, consistently being shot at and people trying to blow you up all the time – you never really fully come back from war. You’re not the same person,” Gallego said. “Fighting through PTSD, there were some very low moments in my life. But I still didn’t give up. I pushed forward. I found a new way to keep serving.”

    Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, responded to Gallego’s announcement in a statement: “The Democrat civil war is on in Arizona. Chuck Schumer has a choice: stand with open borders radical Ruben Gallego or back his incumbent, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.”

    Several Republicans are considering running for Sinema’s seat. Defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is considering a Senate bid, according to a source close to Lake.

    Lake lost the Arizona governor’s race in November to Democrat Katie Hobbs by less than 1 point and has not conceded, falsely claiming as recently as Sunday that she won the election. An Arizona judge in December rejected Lake’s lawsuit attempting to overturn her defeat, concluding there wasn’t clear or convincing evidence of misconduct. Lake, a serial promoter of election lies who denies the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, has appealed the court’s decision. The source told CNN that Lake will not make a final decision on a Senate run until after her court case is completed.

    Republican Blake Masters, who lost a challenge in November to incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly by almost 5 points, is also “strongly considering” running for Senate in 2024, according to a spokesperson. Masters has also denied the outcome of the 2020 election but, unlike Lake, conceded his race to Kelly.

    Karrin Taylor Robson, who lost to Lake in last year’s Republican primary despite being endorsed by the state’s GOP governor at the time, Doug Ducey, also indicated she could be open to a Senate bid.

    “Instead of providing a check on the radical Biden agenda, our Senators continue to enable his disastrous policies, which have been terrible for Arizona,” the former member of the Arizona Board of Regents told CNN in a statement. “While I’m still deciding how I can best serve the state that I love, I agree with the many Arizonans who have reached out, and who, like me, are hopeful that our party will nominate a strong, authentic conservative who will not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

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