President Donald Trump’s baseless and desperate claims of a stolen election over the last seven weeks — the most aggressive promotion of “voter fraud” in American history — failed to get any traction in courts across seven states, or come anywhere close to reversing the loss he suffered to Joe Biden.

But the effort has led to at least one unexpected and profoundly different result: A thorough debunking of the sorts of voter fraud claims that Republicans have used to roll back voting rights for the better part of the young century.

In making their case in real courts and the court of public opinion, Trump and his allies have trotted out a series of tropes and canards similar to those Republicans have pushed to justify laws that in many cases made voting disproportionately harder for Blacks and Hispanics, who largely support Democrats.

Their allegations that thousands of people “double voted” by assuming other identities at polling booths echoed those that have previously been cited as a reason to impose strict new voter identification laws.

Their assertion that large numbers of noncitizens cast illegal votes for Biden matched claims Republicans have made to argue for harsh new “proof of citizenship” requirements for voter registration.

And their tales about large numbers of cheaters casting ballots in the name of “dead voters” were akin to those several states have used to conduct aggressive “purges” of voting lists that wrongfully slated tens of thousands of registrations for termination.

After bringing some 60 lawsuits, and even offering financial incentive for information about fraud, Trump and his allies have failed to prove definitively any case of illegal voting on behalf of their opponent in court — not a single case of an undocumented immigrant casting a ballot, a citizen double voting, nor any credible evidence that legions of the voting dead gave Biden a victory that wasn’t his.

“It really should put a death knell in this narrative that has been peddled around claims of vote fraud that just have never been substantiated,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit legal group, and a former Justice Department attorney whose work included voting cases. “They put themselves on trial, and they failed.”

Yet there are no signs that those defeats in the courts will change the trajectory of the ongoing efforts to restrict voting that have been core to conservative politics since the disputed 2000 election, which coincided with heightened party concerns that demographic shifts would favor Democrats in the popular vote.

The false notions have lived on in Trump’s Twitter and Facebook feeds; on the television programming of Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network; and in statehouse hearings where Republican leaders have contemplated more restrictive voting laws based on the rejected allegations.

In Georgia, Republican legislators have already discussed toughening the state’s rules on voting by mail and on voter identification. In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers are considering reversing moves that had made it easier to vote absentee, and their counterparts in Wisconsin are similarly considering tighter restrictions for mail voting, as well as for early voting.

If anything, Trump has given the movement to limit ballot access new momentum while becoming the singular, charismatic leader it never had.

After declaring outright that high levels of voting are bad for Republicans, he persuaded his base that the election system is rotten with fraud, and to view that fiction as a bedrock party principle. Several recent polls have shown that majorities of Republicans think the election was fraudulent, even as election officials across the country report that it went surprisingly smoothly even in a pandemic, with exceptionally high turnout and no evidence of fraud aside from the usual smattering of lone wolf bad actors or mistakes by well-intentioned voters.

A Losing Streak

Through seven weeks of court rulings, voter-fraud allegations have been rejected again and again as lacking proof or credibility, often by Republican-appointed judges.

Trump and his allies have argued that the 59 losses they faced in 60 lawsuits filed since Election Day were based on procedural rulings, complaining that judges refused to look at the particulars of allegations they have sought to use to overturn an election Biden won by 7 million votes (and by 74 in the Electoral College).

But according to a New York Times analysis, they did not even formally allege fraud in more than two-thirds of their cases, arguing instead that local officials deviated from election codes, failed to administer elections properly or that the rules in place on Election Day were themselves illegal.

In the single case Trump won, his campaign challenged a state-ordered deadline extension in Pennsylvania for the submission of personal identification for mailed ballots, affecting a small number of votes.

In nearly a dozen cases their fraud accusations did indeed have their days in court, and consistently collapsed under scrutiny.

Despite the definitive nature of those rulings, the Republican response has been to hold fast to the president’s fraud fictions.

Republicans in Congress have promoted them, too, as Trump pushes senators and House members to reject the Electoral College results at what is supposed to be a procedural vote to affirm Biden’s clear victory over the president on Jan. 6.

In a Senate hearing on Dec. 16, for instance, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma reprised a series of Trump campaign lawsuit claims about illegal voting in Nevada.

“Forty-two thousand people in Nevada voted more than once, according to your work,” Lankford said during questioning of a Trump campaign attorney, Jesse Binnall. Lankford went on to repeat the Trump campaign’s claims that dead people, out-of-state residents and noncitizens had cast illegal ballots in Nevada in substantial numbers. The campaign had based those charges on analyses that matched voting lists with records from commercial and governmental sources.

But the trial judge in the Nevada case had dismissed the suit nearly two weeks earlier, rejecting those analyses as unsound and unconvincing, declaring that the campaign “did not prove under any standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted.”

Such so-called “list matching,” of the sort states rely on to pare their rolls of invalid voters, takes careful work by longtime experts. It is easy to do poorly. It was ill-conceived or badly executed data analyses that led Georgia and Texas to move recently to wrongfully eliminate tens of thousands of valid registrations, reversing course only after voting rights groups and others called attention to the mistakes.

Conservatives have also used such data analysis to make wild claims about voter fraud over the years, often hitting stumbling blocks in court as they were shown to be badly flawed or incorrect. That pattern held in this year’s torrent of pro-Trump lawsuits, as well.

For instance, in pressing their cases across the country, Republicans have referenced data analyses by a cybersecurity executive and one-time Texas congressional candidate named Russell J. Ramsland Jr. One of his reports alleged that various Michigan counties had vote tallies that exceeded their populations, implying their totals were padded with illegal ballots; the counties in question, it turned out, were in Minnesota, not Michigan.

Likewise, several specific accusations that people illegally cast ballots in the names of dead people have been born of amateurish data analysis that later proved faulty.

In a federal case the Trump campaign brought seeking to delay certification of the results in Michigan, the specific mention of a ballot cast by a dead voter was incorrect: No vote was cast through the dead man’s registration. Rather, a man with his same exact name voted legally. (Trump’s team pulled that case from the docket as Michigan moved forward toward certification).

That is a common issue in claims about “dead voters,’’ “double voters” and “out of state” voters — blind comparisons of official data often lead to “false positives” treating two people with the same names as the same person.

In Georgia, lawyers for the secretary of state are seeking to have the court reject an “expert” analysis declaring that Biden’s winning result included more than 10,000 ballots from dead citizens. The state’s own expert analyst in the case, the MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III, concluded that the Trump campaign only appeared to “identify the unremarkable fact that some Georgians who voted share the name and birth year of a different person who died,” as state lawyers put it. In several other instances, the “dead voters” in whose names the Trump campaign said ballots were cast proved very much alive.

This past week in Pennsylvania, authorities did make one arrest based on an accusation the Trump campaign first leveled in November. Delaware County prosecutors said a man named Bruce Bartman cast an absentee ballot in his deceased mother’s name — for Trump. Bartman’s lawyer said Bartman had done so as a misguided “form of protest,” and the local prosecutor said it was nothing more than “evidence that one person committed voter fraud.”

Implausible Complaints

Trump and his allies have also attacked election officials themselves. In a new twist on voter fraud mythology, they have claimed the officials were either complicit in fantastical fraud schemes or willing participants. In multiple states such accusations were summarily thrown out by judges.

In Arizona, Republicans filed a federal lawsuit claiming that both election workers and Democratic officials overseeing the election “could” have perpetuated any number of fraudulent activities. Judge Diane Humetewa, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, dismissed the suit, saying “these innuendoes fail to meet” standards for fraud allegations.

In Michigan, Judge Timothy Kenny, a state judge, was asked to consider the claim that election officials “coached” people to vote — a claim that was made, the judge noted in dismissing it, without a location or date or other relevant details.

Few Trump-era claims of fraud, however, have quite caught on in conservative media like those involving computerized voting systems allegedly “switching” Trump votes to Biden votes.

One of the wildest of those claims was an accusation that officials in at least four states used ballot tabulators built by Dominion Voting Systems to flip hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of votes from Trump to Biden.

This improbable plot received its fullest airing in four lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell, a onetime lawyer for the Trump campaign.

Her personal record is much like that of all of the other failed Republican voter fraud suits. Despite refutation from judges and election officials around the country, her narrative has been continually repeated in right-wing media, ensuring that the notion of extensive fraud gained traction unimpeded.

A judge in Phoenix called Powell’s complaint “void of plausible allegations.” A judge in Michigan wrote that Powell’s belief that voting machines changed the election outcome was “an amalgamation of theories, conjecture, and speculation.”

The most thorough debunking of Powell’s conspiracies came this past week in a blistering letter from Dominion that affirmed the integrity of its machines, which has been verified in independent audits. The company demanded she retract her statements and accused her of engaging in “a reckless disinformation campaign.”

Dominion indicated that it was also mulling legal action against Rudy Giuliani, who has led Trump’s postelection legal effort, and several prominent conservative media figures.

As she continues to press her fraud myth nationally, Powell has taken her arguments to the Supreme Court, all the while keeping close contact with Trump, meeting in-person at the White House.

The city of Detroit is seeking sanctions against Powell, and the Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel says she is considering doing the same because of “intentional misrepresentations” in Powell’s legal filings.

Yet for all of that, the story line lives on, even on Christmas Eve, when Trump took the time to write on Twitter, “VOTER FRAUD IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY.”

President Donald Trump’s baseless and desperate claims of a stolen election over the last seven weeks — the most aggressive promotion of “voter fraud” in American history — failed to get any traction in courts across seven states, or come anywhere close to reversing the loss he suffered to Joe Biden.

President Donald Trump’s baseless and desperate claims of a stolen election over the last seven weeks — the most aggressive promotion of “voter fraud” in American history — failed to get any traction in courts across seven states, or come anywhere close to reversing the loss he suffered to Joe Biden. But the effort has led to at least one unexpected and profoundly different result: A thorough debunking of the sorts of voter fraud claims that Republicans have used to roll back voting rights for the better part of the young century. In making their case in real courts and the court of public opinion, Trump and his allies have trotted out a series of tropes and canards similar to those Republicans have pushed to justify laws that in many cases made voting disproportionately harder for Blacks and Hispanics, who largely support Democrats. Their allegations that thousands of people “double voted” by assuming other identities at polling booths echoed those that have previously been cited as a reason to impose strict new voter identification laws. Their assertion that large numbers of noncitizens cast illegal votes for Biden matched claims Republicans have made to argue for harsh new “proof of citizenship” requirements for voter registration. And their tales about large numbers of cheaters casting ballots in the name of “dead voters” were akin to those several states have used to conduct aggressive “purges” of voting lists that wrongfully slated tens of thousands of registrations for termination. After bringing some 60 lawsuits, and even offering financial incentive for information about fraud, Trump and his allies have failed to prove definitively any case of illegal voting on behalf of their opponent in court — not a single case of an undocumented immigrant casting a ballot, a citizen double voting, nor any credible evidence that legions of the voting dead gave Biden a victory that wasn’t his. “It really should put a death knell in this narrative that has been peddled around claims of vote fraud that just have never been substantiated,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit legal group, and a former Justice Department attorney whose work included voting cases. “They put themselves on trial, and they failed.” Yet there are no signs that those defeats in the courts will change the trajectory of the ongoing efforts to restrict voting that have been core to conservative politics since the disputed 2000 election, which coincided with heightened party concerns that demographic shifts would favor Democrats in the popular vote. The false notions have lived on in Trump’s Twitter and Facebook feeds; on the television programming of Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network; and in statehouse hearings where Republican leaders have contemplated more restrictive voting laws based on the rejected allegations. In Georgia, Republican legislators have already discussed toughening the state’s rules on voting by mail and on voter identification. In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers are considering reversing moves that had made it easier to vote absentee, and their counterparts in Wisconsin are similarly considering tighter restrictions for mail voting, as well as for early voting. If anything, Trump has given the movement to limit ballot access new momentum while becoming the singular, charismatic leader it never had. After declaring outright that high levels of voting are bad for Republicans, he persuaded his base that the election system is rotten with fraud, and to view that fiction as a bedrock party principle. Several recent polls have shown that majorities of Republicans think the election was fraudulent, even as election officials across the country report that it went surprisingly smoothly even in a pandemic, with exceptionally high turnout and no evidence of fraud aside from the usual smattering of lone wolf bad actors or mistakes by well-intentioned voters. A Losing Streak Through seven weeks of court rulings, voter-fraud allegations have been rejected again and again as lacking proof or credibility, often by Republican-appointed judges. Trump and his allies have argued that the 59 losses they faced in 60 lawsuits filed since Election Day were based on procedural rulings, complaining that judges refused to look at the particulars of allegations they have sought to use to overturn an election Biden won by 7 million votes (and by 74 in the Electoral College). But according to a New York Times analysis, they did not even formally allege fraud in more than two-thirds of their cases, arguing instead that local officials deviated from election codes, failed to administer elections properly or that the rules in place on Election Day were themselves illegal. In the single case Trump won, his campaign challenged a state-ordered deadline extension in Pennsylvania for the submission of personal identification for mailed ballots, affecting a small number of votes. In nearly a dozen cases their fraud accusations did indeed have their days in court, and consistently collapsed under scrutiny. Despite the definitive nature of those rulings, the Republican response has been to hold fast to the president’s fraud fictions. Republicans in Congress have promoted them, too, as Trump pushes senators and House members to reject the Electoral College results at what is supposed to be a procedural vote to affirm Biden’s clear victory over the president on Jan. 6. In a Senate hearing on Dec. 16, for instance, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma reprised a series of Trump campaign lawsuit claims about illegal voting in Nevada. “Forty-two thousand people in Nevada voted more than once, according to your work,” Lankford said during questioning of a Trump campaign attorney, Jesse Binnall. Lankford went on to repeat the Trump campaign’s claims that dead people, out-of-state residents and noncitizens had cast illegal ballots in Nevada in substantial numbers. The campaign had based those charges on analyses that matched voting lists with records from commercial and governmental sources. But the trial judge in the Nevada case had dismissed the suit nearly two weeks earlier, rejecting those analyses as unsound and unconvincing, declaring that the campaign “did not prove under any standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted.” Such so-called “list matching,” of the sort states rely on to pare their rolls of invalid voters, takes careful work by longtime experts. It is easy to do poorly. It was ill-conceived or badly executed data analyses that led Georgia and Texas to move recently to wrongfully eliminate tens of thousands of valid registrations, reversing course only after voting rights groups and others called attention to the mistakes. Conservatives have also used such data analysis to make wild claims about voter fraud over the years, often hitting stumbling blocks in court as they were shown to be badly flawed or incorrect. That pattern held in this year’s torrent of pro-Trump lawsuits, as well. For instance, in pressing their cases across the country, Republicans have referenced data analyses by a cybersecurity executive and one-time Texas congressional candidate named Russell J. Ramsland Jr. One of his reports alleged that various Michigan counties had vote tallies that exceeded their populations, implying their totals were padded with illegal ballots; the counties in question, it turned out, were in Minnesota, not Michigan. Likewise, several specific accusations that people illegally cast ballots in the names of dead people have been born of amateurish data analysis that later proved faulty. In a federal case the Trump campaign brought seeking to delay certification of the results in Michigan, the specific mention of a ballot cast by a dead voter was incorrect: No vote was cast through the dead man’s registration. Rather, a man with his same exact name voted legally. (Trump’s team pulled that case from the docket as Michigan moved forward toward certification). That is a common issue in claims about “dead voters,’’ “double voters” and “out of state” voters — blind comparisons of official data often lead to “false positives” treating two people with the same names as the same person. In Georgia, lawyers for the secretary of state are seeking to have the court reject an “expert” analysis declaring that Biden’s winning result included more than 10,000 ballots from dead citizens. The state’s own expert analyst in the case, the MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III, concluded that the Trump campaign only appeared to “identify the unremarkable fact that some Georgians who voted share the name and birth year of a different person who died,” as state lawyers put it. In several other instances, the “dead voters” in whose names the Trump campaign said ballots were cast proved very much alive. This past week in Pennsylvania, authorities did make one arrest based on an accusation the Trump campaign first leveled in November. Delaware County prosecutors said a man named Bruce Bartman cast an absentee ballot in his deceased mother’s name — for Trump. Bartman’s lawyer said Bartman had done so as a misguided “form of protest,” and the local prosecutor said it was nothing more than “evidence that one person committed voter fraud.” Implausible Complaints Trump and his allies have also attacked election officials themselves. In a new twist on voter fraud mythology, they have claimed the officials were either complicit in fantastical fraud schemes or willing participants. In multiple states such accusations were summarily thrown out by judges. In Arizona, Republicans filed a federal lawsuit claiming that both election workers and Democratic officials overseeing the election “could” have perpetuated any number of fraudulent activities. Judge Diane Humetewa, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, dismissed the suit, saying “these innuendoes fail to meet” standards for fraud allegations. In Michigan, Judge Timothy Kenny, a state judge, was asked to consider the claim that election officials “coached” people to vote — a claim that was made, the judge noted in dismissing it, without a location or date or other relevant details. Few Trump-era claims of fraud, however, have quite caught on in conservative media like those involving computerized voting systems allegedly “switching” Trump votes to Biden votes. One of the wildest of those claims was an accusation that officials in at least four states used ballot tabulators built by Dominion Voting Systems to flip hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of votes from Trump to Biden. This improbable plot received its fullest airing in four lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell, a onetime lawyer for the Trump campaign. Her personal record is much like that of all of the other failed Republican voter fraud suits. Despite refutation from judges and election officials around the country, her narrative has been continually repeated in right-wing media, ensuring that the notion of extensive fraud gained traction unimpeded. A judge in Phoenix called Powell’s complaint “void of plausible allegations.” A judge in Michigan wrote that Powell’s belief that voting machines changed the election outcome was “an amalgamation of theories, conjecture, and speculation.” The most thorough debunking of Powell’s conspiracies came this past week in a blistering letter from Dominion that affirmed the integrity of its machines, which has been verified in independent audits. The company demanded she retract her statements and accused her of engaging in “a reckless disinformation campaign.” Dominion indicated that it was also mulling legal action against Rudy Giuliani, who has led Trump’s postelection legal effort, and several prominent conservative media figures. As she continues to press her fraud myth nationally, Powell has taken her arguments to the Supreme Court, all the while keeping close contact with Trump, meeting in-person at the White House. The city of Detroit is seeking sanctions against Powell, and the Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel says she is considering doing the same because of “intentional misrepresentations” in Powell’s legal filings. Yet for all of that, the story line lives on, even on Christmas Eve, when Trump took the time to write on Twitter, “VOTER FRAUD IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY.”

Trump’s fraud claims died in court, but the myth of stolen elections lives on

Two years ago, Democrats celebrated a sweep of seven Republican-held congressional seats in California as evidence of the party’s growing ability to compete in swing districts here and across the nation.

But this year, Republicans snatched back four of those seats even as Joe Biden swamped President Donald Trump in California. The losses stunned Democrats and contributed to the razor-thin margin the party will hold in the House of Representatives this January.

The turnaround is testimony to how competitive the seats are, particularly in Orange County, once a bastion of conservative Republicanism that has been moving steadily Democratic over the past 20 years.

But by any measure, the results were a setback for Democrats in this state and nationally, signaling the steep obstacles they will face in 2022 competing in the predominantly suburban swing districts that fueled their takeover of the House in 2018.

The Democrats’ losses came for a number of reasons, including forces particular to California and the complications of campaigning during a pandemic. But as much as anything, they reflected the potency of Republican attacks, some false or exaggerated, that Democrats were the party of socialism, defunding the police and abolishing private health insurance.

The attacks — led in no small part by Trump as a central part of his reelection strategy — came at a time when parts of California were swept by street protests against police abuses, some of which turned into glass-shattering bouts of looting and confrontations with law enforcement that were heavily covered on local television.

“Republicans hung around Democrats’ necks that we are all socialist or communist and we all wanted to defund the police,” said Harley Rouda, a Democrat from Orange County who was defeated by Michelle Steel, a Republican member of the Orange County board of supervisors. “In my opinion, we as a party did a less than adequate job in refuting that narrative. We won in 2018 and took the House back because of people like me — moderates — flipping radical Republican seats.”

Republicans said that attempts by Democrats to portray themselves as moderates were undercut by a shift of the party to the left and by the demonstrations.

“It was incredibly easy for us to draw contrasts,” said Jessica Millan Patterson, leader of the California Republican Party. She said the protests “were happening all over. It looked like a war zone.”

For all that, election outcomes are the result of many factors — and that was particularly the case in a campaign that played out against a deadly pandemic and with such a polarizing figure as Trump dominating the political debate.

Democrats said they were also hurt by a national policy, set by the party, to avoid door-to-door canvassing during the pandemic. Presumably, that will not be a factor in 2022.

“The No. 1 issue in our campaign is we didn’t canvass,” said Rep. T.J. Cox, a Democrat who represents the San Joaquin Valley and lost to David Valadao, the Republican he unseated in 2018. “We didn’t do the door-to-door.”

He said it was like playing for a football team that had been told “they can’t pass.”

Christy Smith, a Democrat from northern Los Angeles County who failed to win a district her party captured in 2018, said she had adhered to public health guidelines to her disadvantage. (The Democrat who won in 2018, Katie Hill, stepped down after being accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a staff member.)

“We couldn’t attend a forum or a town hall,” Smith said. “That’s my favorite way to campaign.”

California’s often lurching effort to combat COVID-19 was damaging in Republican-leaning districts where there has been public defiance of mask-wearing mandates and contempt for the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom.

“Everyone is concerned about COVID,” said Sam Oh, a Republican consultant to two of the Republican winners, Young Kim and Steel. “But we are trying to find a path to give small-business owners a way to keep making a life. This is incredibly important, and Democrats are tone-deaf to this.”

And Republicans, analysts said, recruited strong candidates, which is always the most critical task in an election. They included Steel and Kim, who will be among the first Korean-American members of Congress, and Mike Garcia, a former military pilot who won a special election in May to replace Hill and then beat Smith in November.

Democrats set their targets on seven Republican-held seats in 2018 and won all of them, cutting the size of California’s Republican congressional delegation in half. That sweep suggested that Democrats were encroaching on once-Republican areas of the state, presenting a road map for how the party could compete in swing districts across the country.

But Republicans succeeded this time by playing on themes that have long been resonant among moderate voters, particularly in places like Orange County: high taxes, intrusive government and law and order. Democrats said the debates on the national stage hurt them, particularly among Latino and Asian-American voters.

“I think we undervalued the strength of the attack,” said Dan Sena, who was the first Hispanic executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “The national socialism messaging, combined with the crime messaging, was a death by a thousand cuts in a place like California.”

Smith said she was frustrated in trying to campaign in an environment “where Republicans are so persistent in false narratives,” and that Democrats had failed to figure out how to address that.

“We never got our hands around it,” she said.

Republicans argued that the results here — and across the country — were powerful evidence that many voters were rejecting policies that Democrats on the left were advocating.

“Democrats said they were going to pick up 10 to 15 seats in the House,” said Torunn Sinclair, a press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Obviously they are missing something. It has to go back to these far-left policies that people just didn’t want. ‘Medicare for All,’ defunding the police.”

The margins of victory in California’s pivot districts were narrow for the Democratic winners in 2018 — and for the Republican winners in 2020.

“These districts — including mine — were very difficult to flip,” said Rep. Katie Porter, one of the Orange County Democrats who won in 2018 and was reelected in 2020. “These are Republican districts. They were always going to be very competitive races.”

Two years ago, Democrats celebrated a sweep of seven Republican-held congressional seats in California as evidence of the party’s growing ability to compete in swing districts here and across the nation.

Two years ago, Democrats celebrated a sweep of seven Republican-held congressional seats in California as evidence of the party’s growing ability to compete in swing districts here and across the nation. But this year, Republicans snatched back four of those seats even as Joe Biden swamped President Donald Trump in California. The losses stunned Democrats and contributed to the razor-thin margin the party will hold in the House of Representatives this January. The turnaround is testimony to how competitive the seats are, particularly in Orange County, once a bastion of conservative Republicanism that has been moving steadily Democratic over the past 20 years. But by any measure, the results were a setback for Democrats in this state and nationally, signaling the steep obstacles they will face in 2022 competing in the predominantly suburban swing districts that fueled their takeover of the House in 2018. The Democrats’ losses came for a number of reasons, including forces particular to California and the complications of campaigning during a pandemic. But as much as anything, they reflected the potency of Republican attacks, some false or exaggerated, that Democrats were the party of socialism, defunding the police and abolishing private health insurance. The attacks — led in no small part by Trump as a central part of his reelection strategy — came at a time when parts of California were swept by street protests against police abuses, some of which turned into glass-shattering bouts of looting and confrontations with law enforcement that were heavily covered on local television. “Republicans hung around Democrats’ necks that we are all socialist or communist and we all wanted to defund the police,” said Harley Rouda, a Democrat from Orange County who was defeated by Michelle Steel, a Republican member of the Orange County board of supervisors. “In my opinion, we as a party did a less than adequate job in refuting that narrative. We won in 2018 and took the House back because of people like me — moderates — flipping radical Republican seats.” Republicans said that attempts by Democrats to portray themselves as moderates were undercut by a shift of the party to the left and by the demonstrations. “It was incredibly easy for us to draw contrasts,” said Jessica Millan Patterson, leader of the California Republican Party. She said the protests “were happening all over. It looked like a war zone.” For all that, election outcomes are the result of many factors — and that was particularly the case in a campaign that played out against a deadly pandemic and with such a polarizing figure as Trump dominating the political debate. Democrats said they were also hurt by a national policy, set by the party, to avoid door-to-door canvassing during the pandemic. Presumably, that will not be a factor in 2022. “The No. 1 issue in our campaign is we didn’t canvass,” said Rep. T.J. Cox, a Democrat who represents the San Joaquin Valley and lost to David Valadao, the Republican he unseated in 2018. “We didn’t do the door-to-door.” He said it was like playing for a football team that had been told “they can’t pass.” Christy Smith, a Democrat from northern Los Angeles County who failed to win a district her party captured in 2018, said she had adhered to public health guidelines to her disadvantage. (The Democrat who won in 2018, Katie Hill, stepped down after being accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a staff member.) “We couldn’t attend a forum or a town hall,” Smith said. “That’s my favorite way to campaign.” California’s often lurching effort to combat COVID-19 was damaging in Republican-leaning districts where there has been public defiance of mask-wearing mandates and contempt for the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. “Everyone is concerned about COVID,” said Sam Oh, a Republican consultant to two of the Republican winners, Young Kim and Steel. “But we are trying to find a path to give small-business owners a way to keep making a life. This is incredibly important, and Democrats are tone-deaf to this.” And Republicans, analysts said, recruited strong candidates, which is always the most critical task in an election. They included Steel and Kim, who will be among the first Korean-American members of Congress, and Mike Garcia, a former military pilot who won a special election in May to replace Hill and then beat Smith in November. Democrats set their targets on seven Republican-held seats in 2018 and won all of them, cutting the size of California’s Republican congressional delegation in half. That sweep suggested that Democrats were encroaching on once-Republican areas of the state, presenting a road map for how the party could compete in swing districts across the country. But Republicans succeeded this time by playing on themes that have long been resonant among moderate voters, particularly in places like Orange County: high taxes, intrusive government and law and order. Democrats said the debates on the national stage hurt them, particularly among Latino and Asian-American voters. “I think we undervalued the strength of the attack,” said Dan Sena, who was the first Hispanic executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “The national socialism messaging, combined with the crime messaging, was a death by a thousand cuts in a place like California.” Smith said she was frustrated in trying to campaign in an environment “where Republicans are so persistent in false narratives,” and that Democrats had failed to figure out how to address that. “We never got our hands around it,” she said. Republicans argued that the results here — and across the country — were powerful evidence that many voters were rejecting policies that Democrats on the left were advocating. “Democrats said they were going to pick up 10 to 15 seats in the House,” said Torunn Sinclair, a press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Obviously they are missing something. It has to go back to these far-left policies that people just didn’t want. ‘Medicare for All,’ defunding the police.” The margins of victory in California’s pivot districts were narrow for the Democratic winners in 2018 — and for the Republican winners in 2020. “These districts — including mine — were very difficult to flip,” said Rep. Katie Porter, one of the Orange County Democrats who won in 2018 and was reelected in 2020. “These are Republican districts. They were always going to be very competitive races.”

A stinging setback in California is a warning for Democrats in 2022

Yearender 2020: Joe Biden triumphs over Trump, road ahead will not be easy in 2021

President Donald Trump on Wednesday granted pardons to his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former adviser Roger Stone, sweeping away the most important convictions from U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

So far, Trump, who has 27 days left in the White House until President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20, has issued 70 pardons since taking office.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that Trump had talked with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani about pardoning him, citing two people briefed on the matter. The Times also said that Trump has asked advisers about the possibility of “preemptively” pardoning his three eldest children - Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump.

In 2018, Trump even said he had the “absolute right” to pardon himself - a claim many constitutional law scholars dispute.

Here is an overview of Trump’s pardon power.

CAN A PARDON BE PREEMPTIVE?

Yes.

Most pardons are issued to people who have been prosecuted and sentenced. But pardons can cover conduct that has not resulted in legal proceedings, though they cannot apply to future conduct.

The Supreme Court said in 1866 that the pardon power “extends to every offense known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.”

Most famously, former President Richard Nixon was preemptively pardoned by his successor Gerald Ford in 1974 for all crimes he might have committed against the United States while he was in office.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter preemptively pardoned hundreds of thousands of “draft dodgers” who avoided a government-imposed obligation to serve in the Vietnam War.

ARE THERE LIMITS ON A PRESIDENT’S PARDON POWER?

The pardon power, which comes from the U.S. Constitution, is one of the broadest available to a president. The nation’s founders saw the pardon power as a way to show mercy and serve the public good.

The&nbsp;president does not have to give a reason for issuing a pardon. In a 1981 case, the Supreme Court said pardons "are rarely, if ever, appropriate subjects for judicial review.”

The pardon power, however, is not absolute. Crucially, a pardon only applies to federal crimes.

COULD TRUMP PARDON HIS CHILDREN AND INNER CIRCLE?

It would be legal for Trump to pardon his inner circle, including members of his family.

In 2001, former President Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger, who was convicted for cocaine possession in Arkansas.

Clinton pardoned about 450 people, including a Democratic Party donor, Marc Rich, who had earlier fled the country because of tax evasion charges.

HOW BROADLY WORDED CAN A PARDON BE?

It`s unclear.

The pardon Nixon received from Ford was very broad, absolving Nixon for all criminal offenses he committed or may have taken part in during his presidency.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on whether such a broad pardon is lawful. Some scholars have argued the nation’s founders intended for pardons to be specific, and that there is an implied limit on their scope.

WHAT WOULD TRUMP PARDON HIS CHILDREN OR GIULIANI FOR?

Trump’s children have not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing, and it is unclear what Trump would pardon them for.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who enforces New York state laws, has been conducting a criminal investigation into Trump and his family company, the Trump Organization. Vance, a Democrat, has suggested in court filings that his probe could focus on bank, tax and insurance fraud, as well as falsification of business records.

It is unclear what stage the investigation is at. No one has been charged with wrongdoing.

Trump, a Republican, has called the Vance probe politically motivated harassment. A presidential pardon, which can only be granted for federal crimes, would not apply to this investigation.

Giuliani’s potential criminal exposure is unclear. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have been investigating his business dealings in Ukraine. Giuliani has denied wrongdoing and denied that he spoke to Trump about a pardon.

“Never had the discussion they falsely attribute to an anonymous source,” Giuliani said on Twitter on Dec. 1, referring to the New York Times report.

CAN PARDON RECIPIENTS "PLEAD THE FIFTH"?

Under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, individuals can decline to speak to investigators if doing so might lead to self-incrimination. If someone receives a pardon and no longer faces legal jeopardy on the federal level, it may make it more difficult for them to assert this constitutional right.

However, since a presidential pardon applies only to federal crimes, pardon recipients can still lawfully refuse to cooperate if the conduct they have been pardoned for can also be prosecuted as a state crime.

CAN TRUMP PARDON HIMSELF?

There is not a definitive answer. No president has tried it before, so the courts have not weighed in.

“When people ask me if a president can pardon himself, my answer is always, ‘Well, he can try,’” said Brian Kalt, a constitutional law professor at Michigan State University. “The Constitution does not provide a clear answer on this.”

Many legal experts have said a self-pardon would be unconstitutional because it violates the principle that nobody should be the judge in his or her own case.

Trump could try to pardon himself preemptively to cover the possibility of prosecution for federal crimes after he leaves office. No pardon could protect him against prosecution for any crimes by a U.S. state.

For a court to rule on the pardon’s validity, a federal prosecutor would have to charge Trump with a crime and Trump would have to raise the pardon as a defense, Kalt said.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday granted pardons to his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former adviser Roger Stone, sweeping away the most important convictions from U.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday granted pardons to his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former adviser Roger Stone, sweeping away the most important convictions from U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. So far, Trump, who has 27 days left in the White House until President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20, has issued 70 pardons since taking office. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Trump had talked with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani about pardoning him, citing two people briefed on the matter. The Times also said that Trump has asked advisers about the possibility of “preemptively” pardoning his three eldest children - Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump. In 2018, Trump even said he had the “absolute right” to pardon himself - a claim many constitutional law scholars dispute. Here is an overview of Trump’s pardon power. CAN A PARDON BE PREEMPTIVE? Yes. Most pardons are issued to people who have been prosecuted and sentenced. But pardons can cover conduct that has not resulted in legal proceedings, though they cannot apply to future conduct. The Supreme Court said in 1866 that the pardon power “extends to every offense known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.” Most famously, former President Richard Nixon was preemptively pardoned by his successor Gerald Ford in 1974 for all crimes he might have committed against the United States while he was in office. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter preemptively pardoned hundreds of thousands of “draft dodgers” who avoided a government-imposed obligation to serve in the Vietnam War. ARE THERE LIMITS ON A PRESIDENT’S PARDON POWER? The pardon power, which comes from the U.S. Constitution, is one of the broadest available to a president. The nation’s founders saw the pardon power as a way to show mercy and serve the public good. The president does not have to give a reason for issuing a pardon. In a 1981 case, the Supreme Court said pardons "are rarely, if ever, appropriate subjects for judicial review.” The pardon power, however, is not absolute. Crucially, a pardon only applies to federal crimes. COULD TRUMP PARDON HIS CHILDREN AND INNER CIRCLE? It would be legal for Trump to pardon his inner circle, including members of his family. In 2001, former President Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger, who was convicted for cocaine possession in Arkansas. Clinton pardoned about 450 people, including a Democratic Party donor, Marc Rich, who had earlier fled the country because of tax evasion charges. HOW BROADLY WORDED CAN A PARDON BE? It`s unclear. The pardon Nixon received from Ford was very broad, absolving Nixon for all criminal offenses he committed or may have taken part in during his presidency. The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on whether such a broad pardon is lawful. Some scholars have argued the nation’s founders intended for pardons to be specific, and that there is an implied limit on their scope. WHAT WOULD TRUMP PARDON HIS CHILDREN OR GIULIANI FOR? Trump’s children have not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing, and it is unclear what Trump would pardon them for. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who enforces New York state laws, has been conducting a criminal investigation into Trump and his family company, the Trump Organization. Vance, a Democrat, has suggested in court filings that his probe could focus on bank, tax and insurance fraud, as well as falsification of business records. It is unclear what stage the investigation is at. No one has been charged with wrongdoing. Trump, a Republican, has called the Vance probe politically motivated harassment. A presidential pardon, which can only be granted for federal crimes, would not apply to this investigation. Giuliani’s potential criminal exposure is unclear. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have been investigating his business dealings in Ukraine. Giuliani has denied wrongdoing and denied that he spoke to Trump about a pardon. “Never had the discussion they falsely attribute to an anonymous source,” Giuliani said on Twitter on Dec. 1, referring to the New York Times report. CAN PARDON RECIPIENTS "PLEAD THE FIFTH"? Under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, individuals can decline to speak to investigators if doing so might lead to self-incrimination. If someone receives a pardon and no longer faces legal jeopardy on the federal level, it may make it more difficult for them to assert this constitutional right. However, since a presidential pardon applies only to federal crimes, pardon recipients can still lawfully refuse to cooperate if the conduct they have been pardoned for can also be prosecuted as a state crime. CAN TRUMP PARDON HIMSELF? There is not a definitive answer. No president has tried it before, so the courts have not weighed in. “When people ask me if a president can pardon himself, my answer is always, ‘Well, he can try,’” said Brian Kalt, a constitutional law professor at Michigan State University. “The Constitution does not provide a clear answer on this.” Many legal experts have said a self-pardon would be unconstitutional because it violates the principle that nobody should be the judge in his or her own case. Trump could try to pardon himself preemptively to cover the possibility of prosecution for federal crimes after he leaves office. No pardon could protect him against prosecution for any crimes by a U.S. state. For a court to rule on the pardon’s validity, a federal prosecutor would have to charge Trump with a crime and Trump would have to raise the pardon as a defense, Kalt said.

Can anything stop Trump from pardoning his family or even himself?

The youngest victim of the 2007 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, committed by Blackwater mercenaries whom Donald Trump pardoned Tuesday, was a 9-year-old boy named Ali Kinani.

In a 2010 documentary, journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed Ali’s father, Mohammed Hafedh Abdulrazzaq Kinani, who spoke of how he’d welcomed the U.S. invasion of his country and brought along his son to greet U.S. soldiers. “The first day the American Army entered Baghdad, I handed out juice and candy in the street to celebrate our liberation from Saddam,” said Kinani. Scahill called him “that rare personification of the neoconservative narrative about the U.S. invasion.”

On Sept. 16, 2007, Kinani was driving toward the traffic circle at Nisour Square with his sister, her children and Ali when guards from Blackwater opened fire with machine guns and grenade launchers. (Blackwater, a private security company, has since changed its name to Academi.) Ali was one of 17 people killed. According to The Washington Post, a U.S. military report found that there had been no provocation. “It was obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong,” a military official told the paper. An FBI investigator reportedly described it as the “My Lai Massacre of Iraq.”

The U.S. Embassy offered Ali’s family a $10,000 condolence payment. After initially refusing the money, they donated half of it to the family of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. “They wanted to do that to honor and acknowledge the sacrifice of those men and women that had come over to Iraq to fight for them and free them from Saddam Hussein,” Paul Dickinson, a lawyer who represented Kinani and others in a civil suit against Blackwater, told me.

Gen. Raymond Odierno, then the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, wrote to Ali’s mother, “In the face of your family’s own personal tragedy, your act of kindness and compassion for grieving American families is truly remarkable.”

Until Tuesday, the American system worked to give Ali’s family a modicum of justice. Blackwater settled with the family. The guards were prosecuted criminally. The process was torturous, with several roadblocks, but powerful figures in the United States were determined to see it through. After a judge dismissed the charges on procedural grounds, Vice President Joe Biden promised, in a 2010 news conference in Baghdad, that there would be an appeal. “The United States is determined, determined to hold accountable anyone who commits crimes against the Iraqi people,” he said.

Eventually three of the Blackwater guards — Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard — were convicted of voluntary manslaughter and other charges. A fourth, Nicholas Slatten, was convicted of murder and last year sentenced to life in prison. Kinani moved to America and became a citizen, though he was back in Iraq when the BBC reached him Wednesday. Until just days ago, he’d felt that the legal system in the United States had been “very fair with me,” he said.

Then came Tuesday’s pardon spree, which included the Blackwater killers along with some Russiagate felons, corrupt ex-congressmen and others. It was perhaps not surprising that the president acted to free the mercenaries; Trump’s enthusiasm for war crimes is well known, and last year he pardoned three men accused or convicted of them. Because of Biden’s words in 2010, some conservatives called the perpetrators of the Nisour Square massacre the “Biden four,” giving Trump an extra incentive to let them go. Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater, is a close Trump ally and the brother of his education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

Neither the predictability of these pardons, however, nor our dulled capacity for shock lessens their grotesqueness. The last days of Trump’s reign have been an orgy of impunity as he hands out indulgences like party favors and rubs America’s face in his power to put his supporters beyond ordinary law. On Wednesday, Trump pardoned even more cronies, including, most egregiously, his former campaign chair Paul Manafort, a likely reward for Manafort’s help undermining Robert Mueller’s investigation. But even in this low moment, the pardons of the Blackwater killers stand out for their depravity.

They also exemplify a core tenet of Trumpism: absolute license for some and absolute submission for others. Nowhere is that truer than in Trump’s conception of the relationship between U.S. soldiers and paramilitaries and foreigners.

Last year, Trump intervened to reverse a demotion of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL special operations chief who took a celebratory photo with a corpse and was described by men under his command as “freaking evil” and “toxic.” But the president didn’t just spare Gallagher. He lionized him, and his movement made him an icon. The New York Times described Gallagher “making appearances at influential conservative gatherings and rubbing elbows with Mr. Trump’s inner circle at Mar-a-Lago.”

You could argue that Trump has simply stripped pretense from the dynamics that always drove the “war on terror.” As Spencer Ackerman wrote in The Daily Beast, “Blackwater fed from the same American logic of occupation — the same impunity — that turned even those Iraqis willing to work for the U.S. into ‘local nationals’ who had to enter dining halls on U.S. military bases through separate doorways.”

But if the approach to Iraq that preceded Trump was infested with hypocrisy, that hypocrisy at least revealed an aspiration to a humane foreign policy. That aspiration did more than flatter the sensibilities of liberals and neoconservatives. It could be leveraged to allow a man like Kinani to make demands of the country that occupied his.

Trump’s pardon, Kinani told the BBC, made him feel as if Ali, who should now be 22, had been killed again. Before, he said, he felt that no one was “above the law.” No more.

“I feel I’m nothing today. I feel I’m nothing. I lost my son, and I feel I’m nothing,” Kinani said. By all indications, the president of the United States agrees.

The youngest victim of the 2007 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, committed by Blackwater mercenaries whom Donald Trump pardoned Tuesday, was a 9-year-old boy named Ali Kinani.

The youngest victim of the 2007 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, committed by Blackwater mercenaries whom Donald Trump pardoned Tuesday, was a 9-year-old boy named Ali Kinani. In a 2010 documentary, journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed Ali’s father, Mohammed Hafedh Abdulrazzaq Kinani, who spoke of how he’d welcomed the U.S. invasion of his country and brought along his son to greet U.S. soldiers. “The first day the American Army entered Baghdad, I handed out juice and candy in the street to celebrate our liberation from Saddam,” said Kinani. Scahill called him “that rare personification of the neoconservative narrative about the U.S. invasion.” On Sept. 16, 2007, Kinani was driving toward the traffic circle at Nisour Square with his sister, her children and Ali when guards from Blackwater opened fire with machine guns and grenade launchers. (Blackwater, a private security company, has since changed its name to Academi.) Ali was one of 17 people killed. According to The Washington Post, a U.S. military report found that there had been no provocation. “It was obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong,” a military official told the paper. An FBI investigator reportedly described it as the “My Lai Massacre of Iraq.” The U.S. Embassy offered Ali’s family a $10,000 condolence payment. After initially refusing the money, they donated half of it to the family of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. “They wanted to do that to honor and acknowledge the sacrifice of those men and women that had come over to Iraq to fight for them and free them from Saddam Hussein,” Paul Dickinson, a lawyer who represented Kinani and others in a civil suit against Blackwater, told me. Gen. Raymond Odierno, then the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, wrote to Ali’s mother, “In the face of your family’s own personal tragedy, your act of kindness and compassion for grieving American families is truly remarkable.” Until Tuesday, the American system worked to give Ali’s family a modicum of justice. Blackwater settled with the family. The guards were prosecuted criminally. The process was torturous, with several roadblocks, but powerful figures in the United States were determined to see it through. After a judge dismissed the charges on procedural grounds, Vice President Joe Biden promised, in a 2010 news conference in Baghdad, that there would be an appeal. “The United States is determined, determined to hold accountable anyone who commits crimes against the Iraqi people,” he said. Eventually three of the Blackwater guards — Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard — were convicted of voluntary manslaughter and other charges. A fourth, Nicholas Slatten, was convicted of murder and last year sentenced to life in prison. Kinani moved to America and became a citizen, though he was back in Iraq when the BBC reached him Wednesday. Until just days ago, he’d felt that the legal system in the United States had been “very fair with me,” he said. Then came Tuesday’s pardon spree, which included the Blackwater killers along with some Russiagate felons, corrupt ex-congressmen and others. It was perhaps not surprising that the president acted to free the mercenaries; Trump’s enthusiasm for war crimes is well known, and last year he pardoned three men accused or convicted of them. Because of Biden’s words in 2010, some conservatives called the perpetrators of the Nisour Square massacre the “Biden four,” giving Trump an extra incentive to let them go. Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater, is a close Trump ally and the brother of his education secretary, Betsy DeVos. Neither the predictability of these pardons, however, nor our dulled capacity for shock lessens their grotesqueness. The last days of Trump’s reign have been an orgy of impunity as he hands out indulgences like party favors and rubs America’s face in his power to put his supporters beyond ordinary law. On Wednesday, Trump pardoned even more cronies, including, most egregiously, his former campaign chair Paul Manafort, a likely reward for Manafort’s help undermining Robert Mueller’s investigation. But even in this low moment, the pardons of the Blackwater killers stand out for their depravity. They also exemplify a core tenet of Trumpism: absolute license for some and absolute submission for others. Nowhere is that truer than in Trump’s conception of the relationship between U.S. soldiers and paramilitaries and foreigners. Last year, Trump intervened to reverse a demotion of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL special operations chief who took a celebratory photo with a corpse and was described by men under his command as “freaking evil” and “toxic.” But the president didn’t just spare Gallagher. He lionized him, and his movement made him an icon. The New York Times described Gallagher “making appearances at influential conservative gatherings and rubbing elbows with Mr. Trump’s inner circle at Mar-a-Lago.” You could argue that Trump has simply stripped pretense from the dynamics that always drove the “war on terror.” As Spencer Ackerman wrote in The Daily Beast, “Blackwater fed from the same American logic of occupation — the same impunity — that turned even those Iraqis willing to work for the U.S. into ‘local nationals’ who had to enter dining halls on U.S. military bases through separate doorways.” But if the approach to Iraq that preceded Trump was infested with hypocrisy, that hypocrisy at least revealed an aspiration to a humane foreign policy. That aspiration did more than flatter the sensibilities of liberals and neoconservatives. It could be leveraged to allow a man like Kinani to make demands of the country that occupied his. Trump’s pardon, Kinani told the BBC, made him feel as if Ali, who should now be 22, had been killed again. Before, he said, he felt that no one was “above the law.” No more. “I feel I’m nothing today. I feel I’m nothing. I lost my son, and I feel I’m nothing,” Kinani said. By all indications, the president of the United States agrees.

Trump’s most disgusting pardons

Philip Esformes acquired a $1.6 million Ferrari and a $360,000 Swiss watch and traveled around the United States on a private jet, a spending spree fueled by the spoils from what federal prosecutors called one of the largest Medicare fraud cases in history.

“Philip Esformes is a man driven by almost unbounded greed,” Denise M. Stemen, an agent in the FBI’s Miami field office, said last year after Esformes, 52, a nursing home operator, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the two-decade scheme that involved an estimated $1.3 billion worth of fraudulent claims.

That prison term ended suddenly this week, when President Donald Trump commuted what remained of Esformes’ sentence.

His rapid path to clemency is a case study in how criminals with the right connections and resources have been able to cut through normal channels and gain the opportunity to make their case straight to the Trump White House.

For Esformes, that involved support from a Jewish humanitarian nonprofit group that advances prisoners’ rights and worked with the White House on criminal justice issues, including clemency and legislation overhauling sentencing laws that was championed by Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and adviser.

Esformes’ family donated $65,000 to the group, the Aleph Institute, over several years starting after his indictment, according to the group.

His name adorns a school in Chicago associated with the Chabad-Lubavitch group of Hasidic Jews, whose leader at the time was involved in the creation of the Aleph Institute in the early 1980s. His father is a rabbi in Florida. His family has also donated for years to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, to which Kushner has long-standing ties.

In the announcement of the commutation, the White House said Esformes had been “devoted to prayer and repentance” while in prison and is in “declining health.”

Alan M. Dershowitz, a longtime supporter of clemency who works with the Aleph Institute on a volunteer basis, said the group “played a significant role” in Esformes’ clemency effort and “put together the papers” for the petition.

Trump has largely overridden a highly bureaucratic process overseen by pardon lawyers for the Justice Department and handed considerable control to his closest White House aides, including Kushner. They, in turn, have outsourced much of the vetting process to political and personal allies, allowing private parties to play an outsize role in influencing the application of one of the most unchecked powers of the presidency.

Among those allies is the Aleph Institute, a well-known force in criminal justice issues that beyond Esformes’ case has also weighed in on less high-profile clemency requests to Trump.

The White House on Wednesday specifically cited Aleph in announcing Trump’s commutation of what supporters had contended was a disproportionately severe 20-year sentence given to Daniela Gozes-Wagner&lt;strong&gt;,&lt;/strong&gt; a single mother and midlevel manager in Houston, in a health care fraud and money laundering case.

Clemency efforts represent a small fraction of the work done by the Aleph Institute, which has championed fewer than 50 such cases, a majority of which involve prisoners who are not Jewish and are indigent, according to the group.

“Aleph has worked with more than 35,000 inmates and their families since its inception,” Rabbi Sholom D. Lipskar, the institute’s founder, said in a statement Thursday. “Almost all of the people Aleph works with are destitute, and the same is true for almost all the clemency cases.”

Aleph has helped advance at least five of the 24 commutations handed down by Trump, including the recipient of the president’s very first commutation — issued in 2017 to Sholom Rubashkin, chief executive of a kosher meat processing company who was convicted in 2009 on fraud charges — and three commutations announced Wednesday.

“They are a major, major force of pushing commutations,” said Dershowitz, who recommended a number of clemency petitions that Aleph supported and said he personally spoke to Trump about Rubashkin’s case.

Dershowitz said donations to Aleph were “absolutely not” a factor in deciding which clemency cases to support.

“The people who make those decisions are completely independent,” he said. “I can tell you categorically that Aleph is supporting people who A, are not Jewish, and B, who have made no contributions whatsoever.”

Like several of the lawyers who work with the Aleph Institute — including Ken Starr, the former independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, and former federal prosecutor Brett L. Tolman — Dershowitz has ties to the Trump White House of the sort that tend to be coveted by clemency seekers hoping for the president’s attention.

He and Starr represented Trump during his impeachment trial, while Tolman advised the White House on the criminal justice reform overhaul pushed by Kushner and signed into law by Trump in 2018.

Dershowitz, Starr and Tolman have all lent their names to clemency efforts championed by the Aleph Institute, as have other prominent Republicans like former FBI director Louis J. Freeh and former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, both of whom are featured on the Aleph Institute’s website endorsing the group’s work.

Freeh and Dershowitz have also worked with Gary Apfel, a lawyer who worked on a volunteer basis with the Aleph Institute, including on the clemency campaign for Esformes. The three lawyers were registered lobbyists for Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire whose assets were frozen by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2017 because of corrupt mining deals in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Apfel, Freeh, Starr and Mukasey did not respond to requests for comment.

Dershowitz said the Aleph Institute’s effectiveness stemmed from the thoroughness of the clemency applications it submits to the White House.

He said that staff members in the White House Counsel’s Office, which has worked with Kushner’s team to vet the applications presented to Trump, told him that “the counsel’s office relies heavily on the credibility of Aleph, and they prove credible repeatedly.”

The Aleph Institute was founded nearly four decades ago by Lipskar of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Hasidic Jews, at the direction of the movement’s leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, who emphasized the rehabilitation of prisoners. The Aleph Institute had a budget of $6.9 million during the 12-month period from fall 2018 to fall 2019. The group takes its name from the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet and supports a range of programs beyond clemency, including criminal justice reforms and expanded religious and social services for prisoners and military personnel.

Lipskar said in an interview in August that the organization was working on a commutation for Esformes but had not yet met with anyone in the White House.

He said he did not remember precisely how he came to learn about the case of Esformes.

Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have their own connections to Chabad-Lubavitch, having chosen a home in Washington within walking distance to a Chabad synagogue where they attend Shabbat services. The weekend before the 2016 election, they visited the grave site of Schneerson. The Kushner family foundation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to projects and institutions associated with Chabad, according to a tally by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

After Esformes was indicted, Lipskar said he visited Esformes in prison at least 25 times and “became almost like his personal rabbi.”

Esformes’ father “ramped up his financial commitment to Aleph,” according to a 2019 court filing by Esformes’ lawyers. They said the money was donated partly “in appreciation for all that Aleph has done for Esformes” and was given to the group “generously, if not exclusively selflessly.”

The donations, which began in 2016 and ended in 2019, totaled $65,000, according to Aleph.

Most donors behind Aleph Institute are not public, but its board members include Miami-based real estate developers Sonny Kahn, Alberto Kamhazi and Russell Galbut, as well as David Schottenstein, a member of the Ohio family that created retail giants like DSW and American Eagle.

Its mission comports with the particular value assigned by the Chabad-Lubavitch tradition on rehabilitating and freeing incarcerated people, stemming partly from the imprisonment of its founding rabbi in late 18th-century Russia on politically motivated charges.

Kushner, who had championed a criminal justice overhaul that Trump signed into law, is seen by supporters of overhauling the criminal justice system as an ally who is willing to consider recommendations on sentencing changes and clemency petitions. The legislation expanded early release programs and modified sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, to more equitably punish drug offenders. But it fell short of more expansive measures sought by many activists.

Kushner also had a personal connection to the issue. His father, Charles Kushner, served 14 months in a federal prison in Alabama for tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal donations. The elder Kushner was among those pardoned Wednesday by Trump.

Jared Kushner played a role in recommending that Trump commute the sentence of Rubashkin, the former kosher meat processing executive whose commutation in 2017 was supported by Aleph Institute.

At the White House Hanukkah party last year, Trump praised one of the group’s leaders, Zvi Boyarsky, a Chabad rabbi, for his leadership in generating support among lawmakers, judges, prosecutors and Jewish groups for the criminal justice reform legislation.

Boyarsky thanked Trump for commuting Rubashkin’s sentence, calling the president “God’s angel.”

In the summer, Lipskar said Boyarsky might approach the White House regarding Esformes’ case.

This year, the Aleph Institute hired Tolman, a former U.S. attorney from Utah, to lobby on criminal justice issues, including the so-called trial penalty, when defendants who refuse plea deals offered by prosecutors receive far longer sentences after being convicted at trial.

Two of the people whose sentences were commuted by Trump on Wednesday, Mark A. Shapiro and Irving Stitsky, were each sentenced to 85 years in prison for their roles in a $23 million real estate scheme after they turned down plea agreements of less than 10 years each.

The White House specifically credited Tolman and the Aleph Institute for supporting the commutations.

Dershowitz, whose brother’s daughter-in-law was paid $110,000 by the Aleph Institute from fall 2018 through fall 2019, the period covered by its most recent tax return, to work on alternative sentencing, called the case “a paradigmatic trial penalty case.”

Tolman, who was paid $50,000 to lobby for the Aleph Institute this year, did not respond to questions about his work for the group or with the White House, except to say in an email, “I have not done any work on behalf of Philip Esformes.” He referred questions about the case to the Aleph Institute.

Esformes was convicted of a scheme in which he directed employees to pay doctors kickbacks in cash, using code words like “fettuccine.”

He then took a cut worth about $37 million of the illegal profits, prosecutors said, using the money to pay for items such as escorts, travel expenses and a bribe to a coach at the University of Pennsylvania to help his son gain admission.

At his sentencing last year, Esformes described himself as “reckless, impulsive” and “arrogant,” and said he had “cut corners without fear of consequences.” He added, “There’s no one to blame but myself.”

The judge overseeing the case called Esformes’ behavior a violation of trust of “epic proportions.”

But supporters of Esformes say he was a victim of misconduct by prosecutors in his case, who were found by a magistrate judge to have improperly gained access to dozens of boxes of documents compiled by his lawyers, material that should have been protected under attorney-client privilege.

“It is a litany of the worst prosecutorial misconduct I have ever seen and fatally damaged any chance Esformes had for a fair trial,” Roy Black, a lawyer for Esformes, said in a statement. “This is why the president decided to commute the sentence.”

In March, Esformes’ lawyers had asked a federal judge to release him, claiming “pulmonary and upper respiratory problems” as well as the threat of the coronavirus. But federal prosecutors strongly objected to his release, disputing the claims of declining health. The judge rejected the request.

“Virtually every person over the age of 50 has some health condition that could conceivably put that person at a greater risk of succumbing to the coronavirus,” Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. wrote in April, “but this does not entitle every inmate over 50 to be released.”

Philip Esformes acquired a $1.6 million Ferrari and a $360,000 Swiss watch and traveled around the United States on a private jet, a spending spree fueled by the spoils from what federal prosecutors called one of the largest Medicare fraud cases in history.

Philip Esformes acquired a $1.6 million Ferrari and a $360,000 Swiss watch and traveled around the United States on a private jet, a spending spree fueled by the spoils from what federal prosecutors called one of the largest Medicare fraud cases in history. “Philip Esformes is a man driven by almost unbounded greed,” Denise M. Stemen, an agent in the FBI’s Miami field office, said last year after Esformes, 52, a nursing home operator, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the two-decade scheme that involved an estimated $1.3 billion worth of fraudulent claims. That prison term ended suddenly this week, when President Donald Trump commuted what remained of Esformes’ sentence. His rapid path to clemency is a case study in how criminals with the right connections and resources have been able to cut through normal channels and gain the opportunity to make their case straight to the Trump White House. For Esformes, that involved support from a Jewish humanitarian nonprofit group that advances prisoners’ rights and worked with the White House on criminal justice issues, including clemency and legislation overhauling sentencing laws that was championed by Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and adviser. Esformes’ family donated $65,000 to the group, the Aleph Institute, over several years starting after his indictment, according to the group. His name adorns a school in Chicago associated with the Chabad-Lubavitch group of Hasidic Jews, whose leader at the time was involved in the creation of the Aleph Institute in the early 1980s. His father is a rabbi in Florida. His family has also donated for years to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, to which Kushner has long-standing ties. In the announcement of the commutation, the White House said Esformes had been “devoted to prayer and repentance” while in prison and is in “declining health.” Alan M. Dershowitz, a longtime supporter of clemency who works with the Aleph Institute on a volunteer basis, said the group “played a significant role” in Esformes’ clemency effort and “put together the papers” for the petition. Trump has largely overridden a highly bureaucratic process overseen by pardon lawyers for the Justice Department and handed considerable control to his closest White House aides, including Kushner. They, in turn, have outsourced much of the vetting process to political and personal allies, allowing private parties to play an outsize role in influencing the application of one of the most unchecked powers of the presidency. Among those allies is the Aleph Institute, a well-known force in criminal justice issues that beyond Esformes’ case has also weighed in on less high-profile clemency requests to Trump. The White House on Wednesday specifically cited Aleph in announcing Trump’s commutation of what supporters had contended was a disproportionately severe 20-year sentence given to Daniela Gozes-Wagner, a single mother and midlevel manager in Houston, in a health care fraud and money laundering case. Clemency efforts represent a small fraction of the work done by the Aleph Institute, which has championed fewer than 50 such cases, a majority of which involve prisoners who are not Jewish and are indigent, according to the group. “Aleph has worked with more than 35,000 inmates and their families since its inception,” Rabbi Sholom D. Lipskar, the institute’s founder, said in a statement Thursday. “Almost all of the people Aleph works with are destitute, and the same is true for almost all the clemency cases.” Aleph has helped advance at least five of the 24 commutations handed down by Trump, including the recipient of the president’s very first commutation — issued in 2017 to Sholom Rubashkin, chief executive of a kosher meat processing company who was convicted in 2009 on fraud charges — and three commutations announced Wednesday. “They are a major, major force of pushing commutations,” said Dershowitz, who recommended a number of clemency petitions that Aleph supported and said he personally spoke to Trump about Rubashkin’s case. Dershowitz said donations to Aleph were “absolutely not” a factor in deciding which clemency cases to support. “The people who make those decisions are completely independent,” he said. “I can tell you categorically that Aleph is supporting people who A, are not Jewish, and B, who have made no contributions whatsoever.” Like several of the lawyers who work with the Aleph Institute — including Ken Starr, the former independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, and former federal prosecutor Brett L. Tolman — Dershowitz has ties to the Trump White House of the sort that tend to be coveted by clemency seekers hoping for the president’s attention. He and Starr represented Trump during his impeachment trial, while Tolman advised the White House on the criminal justice reform overhaul pushed by Kushner and signed into law by Trump in 2018. Dershowitz, Starr and Tolman have all lent their names to clemency efforts championed by the Aleph Institute, as have other prominent Republicans like former FBI director Louis J. Freeh and former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, both of whom are featured on the Aleph Institute’s website endorsing the group’s work. Freeh and Dershowitz have also worked with Gary Apfel, a lawyer who worked on a volunteer basis with the Aleph Institute, including on the clemency campaign for Esformes. The three lawyers were registered lobbyists for Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire whose assets were frozen by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2017 because of corrupt mining deals in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Apfel, Freeh, Starr and Mukasey did not respond to requests for comment. Dershowitz said the Aleph Institute’s effectiveness stemmed from the thoroughness of the clemency applications it submits to the White House. He said that staff members in the White House Counsel’s Office, which has worked with Kushner’s team to vet the applications presented to Trump, told him that “the counsel’s office relies heavily on the credibility of Aleph, and they prove credible repeatedly.” The Aleph Institute was founded nearly four decades ago by Lipskar of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Hasidic Jews, at the direction of the movement’s leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, who emphasized the rehabilitation of prisoners. The Aleph Institute had a budget of $6.9 million during the 12-month period from fall 2018 to fall 2019. The group takes its name from the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet and supports a range of programs beyond clemency, including criminal justice reforms and expanded religious and social services for prisoners and military personnel. Lipskar said in an interview in August that the organization was working on a commutation for Esformes but had not yet met with anyone in the White House. He said he did not remember precisely how he came to learn about the case of Esformes. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have their own connections to Chabad-Lubavitch, having chosen a home in Washington within walking distance to a Chabad synagogue where they attend Shabbat services. The weekend before the 2016 election, they visited the grave site of Schneerson. The Kushner family foundation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to projects and institutions associated with Chabad, according to a tally by Israeli newspaper Haaretz. After Esformes was indicted, Lipskar said he visited Esformes in prison at least 25 times and “became almost like his personal rabbi.” Esformes’ father “ramped up his financial commitment to Aleph,” according to a 2019 court filing by Esformes’ lawyers. They said the money was donated partly “in appreciation for all that Aleph has done for Esformes” and was given to the group “generously, if not exclusively selflessly.” The donations, which began in 2016 and ended in 2019, totaled $65,000, according to Aleph. Most donors behind Aleph Institute are not public, but its board members include Miami-based real estate developers Sonny Kahn, Alberto Kamhazi and Russell Galbut, as well as David Schottenstein, a member of the Ohio family that created retail giants like DSW and American Eagle. Its mission comports with the particular value assigned by the Chabad-Lubavitch tradition on rehabilitating and freeing incarcerated people, stemming partly from the imprisonment of its founding rabbi in late 18th-century Russia on politically motivated charges. Kushner, who had championed a criminal justice overhaul that Trump signed into law, is seen by supporters of overhauling the criminal justice system as an ally who is willing to consider recommendations on sentencing changes and clemency petitions. The legislation expanded early release programs and modified sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, to more equitably punish drug offenders. But it fell short of more expansive measures sought by many activists. Kushner also had a personal connection to the issue. His father, Charles Kushner, served 14 months in a federal prison in Alabama for tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal donations. The elder Kushner was among those pardoned Wednesday by Trump. Jared Kushner played a role in recommending that Trump commute the sentence of Rubashkin, the former kosher meat processing executive whose commutation in 2017 was supported by Aleph Institute. At the White House Hanukkah party last year, Trump praised one of the group’s leaders, Zvi Boyarsky, a Chabad rabbi, for his leadership in generating support among lawmakers, judges, prosecutors and Jewish groups for the criminal justice reform legislation. Boyarsky thanked Trump for commuting Rubashkin’s sentence, calling the president “God’s angel.” In the summer, Lipskar said Boyarsky might approach the White House regarding Esformes’ case. This year, the Aleph Institute hired Tolman, a former U.S. attorney from Utah, to lobby on criminal justice issues, including the so-called trial penalty, when defendants who refuse plea deals offered by prosecutors receive far longer sentences after being convicted at trial. Two of the people whose sentences were commuted by Trump on Wednesday, Mark A. Shapiro and Irving Stitsky, were each sentenced to 85 years in prison for their roles in a $23 million real estate scheme after they turned down plea agreements of less than 10 years each. The White House specifically credited Tolman and the Aleph Institute for supporting the commutations. Dershowitz, whose brother’s daughter-in-law was paid $110,000 by the Aleph Institute from fall 2018 through fall 2019, the period covered by its most recent tax return, to work on alternative sentencing, called the case “a paradigmatic trial penalty case.” Tolman, who was paid $50,000 to lobby for the Aleph Institute this year, did not respond to questions about his work for the group or with the White House, except to say in an email, “I have not done any work on behalf of Philip Esformes.” He referred questions about the case to the Aleph Institute. Esformes was convicted of a scheme in which he directed employees to pay doctors kickbacks in cash, using code words like “fettuccine.” He then took a cut worth about $37 million of the illegal profits, prosecutors said, using the money to pay for items such as escorts, travel expenses and a bribe to a coach at the University of Pennsylvania to help his son gain admission. At his sentencing last year, Esformes described himself as “reckless, impulsive” and “arrogant,” and said he had “cut corners without fear of consequences.” He added, “There’s no one to blame but myself.” The judge overseeing the case called Esformes’ behavior a violation of trust of “epic proportions.” But supporters of Esformes say he was a victim of misconduct by prosecutors in his case, who were found by a magistrate judge to have improperly gained access to dozens of boxes of documents compiled by his lawyers, material that should have been protected under attorney-client privilege. “It is a litany of the worst prosecutorial misconduct I have ever seen and fatally damaged any chance Esformes had for a fair trial,” Roy Black, a lawyer for Esformes, said in a statement. “This is why the president decided to commute the sentence.” In March, Esformes’ lawyers had asked a federal judge to release him, claiming “pulmonary and upper respiratory problems” as well as the threat of the coronavirus. But federal prosecutors strongly objected to his release, disputing the claims of declining health. The judge rejected the request. “Virtually every person over the age of 50 has some health condition that could conceivably put that person at a greater risk of succumbing to the coronavirus,” Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. wrote in April, “but this does not entitle every inmate over 50 to be released.”

Behind Trump clemency, a case study in special access

Donald Trump issues a wave of pardons, including former Blackwater security guards convicted for killing Iraqi civilians in 2007. This has cast a shadow over the most powerful & controversial tool in American constitution. Molly Gambhir explains the U.S. Presidential Power.

Most notable pardons in U.S. history

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US security agencies have said they had highly credible information indicating that Iranian cyber actors were responsible for creating a website earlier this month featuring death threats aimed at American election officials.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Homeland Security Department's Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a statement that the Enemies of the People website demonstrated "an ongoing Iranian intent to create divisions and mistrust in the United States and undermine public confidence in the US electoral process."

The said website had surfaced after the US election but now appears dormant.

The agencies said they had previously warned that "Iranian cyber actors" likely were keen to influence and interfere with the 2020 US election.

The alleged Iranian-created website had accused US officials involved in election security of "treason."

The site, along with several associated social media accounts, included photographs of Republican and Democratic officials, with rifle crosshairs superimposed on them. It also included officials' purported home addresses.

Those targetted by the website included FBI director Christopher Wray and Christopher Krebs, the former CISA director who was fired by President Donald Trump after publically vouching for 2020 election results showing Joe Biden defeated Trump.

The site also targetted several employees of Dominion Voting Systems, a voting-machine vendor that has been the subject of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories of vote manipulation.

Cybersecurity researchers said one of the pages was hosted in Russia, and some records include accounts registered through Yandex, a Russian email platform.

(with inputs)

US security agencies have said they had highly credible information indicating that Iranian cyber actors were responsible for creating a website earlier this month featuring death threats aimed at American election officials.

US security agencies have said they had highly credible information indicating that Iranian cyber actors were responsible for creating a website earlier this month featuring death threats aimed at American election officials. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Homeland Security Department's Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a statement that the Enemies of the People website demonstrated "an ongoing Iranian intent to create divisions and mistrust in the United States and undermine public confidence in the US electoral process." The said website had surfaced after the US election but now appears dormant. The agencies said they had previously warned that "Iranian cyber actors" likely were keen to influence and interfere with the 2020 US election. The alleged Iranian-created website had accused US officials involved in election security of "treason." The site, along with several associated social media accounts, included photographs of Republican and Democratic officials, with rifle crosshairs superimposed on them. It also included officials' purported home addresses. Those targetted by the website included FBI director Christopher Wray and Christopher Krebs, the former CISA director who was fired by President Donald Trump after publically vouching for 2020 election results showing Joe Biden defeated Trump. The site also targetted several employees of Dominion Voting Systems, a voting-machine vendor that has been the subject of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories of vote manipulation. Cybersecurity researchers said one of the pages was hosted in Russia, and some records include accounts registered through Yandex, a Russian email platform. (with inputs)

US suspects Iran created website threatening American election officials

US President Donald Trump has vetoed a broad defence funding bill sent to him by Congress.

The outgoing president took the decision on Wednesday, complaining that it helps Russia and China and objecting to provisions to rename military bases.

The veto of the $740 billion measure to fund the military for fiscal 2021 came a day after the US leader, with less than one month left in office, threw a separate $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill and overall funding for the government into question.

The bipartisan bill was passed by high enough margins in both chambers of Congress for lawmakers to -- in theory -- override the president’s rejection.

Trump criticised the annual National defence Authorisation Act for not responding to his demand to end liability protections for social media companies, known as Section 230 -- an issue with no relationship to the US defence Department. He also objected to a provision in the NDAA to rename military bases bearing the names of generals from the secessionist, slavery-supporting South in the 19th century US civil war.

Another point that led to his objection was a provision which could impede his decision to sharply cut US troop levels in Germany, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The NDAA “fails to include critical national security measures, includes provisions that fail to respect our veterans and our military’s history, and contradicts efforts by my Administration to put America first in our national security and foreign policy actions,” Trump said in a statement.

Without the changes to Section 230, Trump said, the NDAA “is a ‘gift’ to China and Russia.”

Both the House and the Senate set aside time next week to vote to override the veto -- which would be the first such rebuff from Congress in his nearly four years in office.

Trump has repeatedly demanded that the NDAA include changes to Section 230, a part of US communications legislation that protects social media giants like Facebook and Twitter from responsibility for content posted by their users.

Since early this year Trump has become angered by social media for censoring or raising questions about the factuality of his own posts, especially about the coronavirus pandemic.

The veto does not immediately choke off funds to the Pentagon but if the NDAA isn’t passed soon, funding could be tightened.

(with inputs from agencies)

US President Donald Trump has vetoed a broad defence funding bill sent to him by Congress. The outgoing president took the decision on Wednesday, complaining that it helps Russia and China and objecting to provisions to rename military bases.

US President Donald Trump has vetoed a broad defence funding bill sent to him by Congress. The outgoing president took the decision on Wednesday, complaining that it helps Russia and China and objecting to provisions to rename military bases. The veto of the $740 billion measure to fund the military for fiscal 2021 came a day after the US leader, with less than one month left in office, threw a separate $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill and overall funding for the government into question. The bipartisan bill was passed by high enough margins in both chambers of Congress for lawmakers to -- in theory -- override the president’s rejection. Trump criticised the annual National defence Authorisation Act for not responding to his demand to end liability protections for social media companies, known as Section 230 -- an issue with no relationship to the US defence Department. He also objected to a provision in the NDAA to rename military bases bearing the names of generals from the secessionist, slavery-supporting South in the 19th century US civil war. Another point that led to his objection was a provision which could impede his decision to sharply cut US troop levels in Germany, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The NDAA “fails to include critical national security measures, includes provisions that fail to respect our veterans and our military’s history, and contradicts efforts by my Administration to put America first in our national security and foreign policy actions,” Trump said in a statement. Without the changes to Section 230, Trump said, the NDAA “is a ‘gift’ to China and Russia.” Both the House and the Senate set aside time next week to vote to override the veto -- which would be the first such rebuff from Congress in his nearly four years in office. Trump has repeatedly demanded that the NDAA include changes to Section 230, a part of US communications legislation that protects social media giants like Facebook and Twitter from responsibility for content posted by their users. Since early this year Trump has become angered by social media for censoring or raising questions about the factuality of his own posts, especially about the coronavirus pandemic. The veto does not immediately choke off funds to the Pentagon but if the NDAA isn’t passed soon, funding could be tightened. (with inputs from agencies)

Donald Trump vetoes sweeping US defence bill

US President Donald Trump has issued pardons and sentence commutations for 29 people, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law.

The decisions taken on Wednesday bring to 49 the number of people who Trump in the last two days has granted clemency either through pardons or sentence commutations. 
 
Tuesday's list included two people linked to the probe into alleged collusion between his campaign and Russia and four Blackwater security guards convicted over the 2007 killing of 14 Iraqi civilians.

Real estate developer Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to charges including tax evasion and witness tampering in 2004. His pardon had been expected by many, given his family connection. Jared Kushner is married to Trump's daughter Ivanka and is a senior adviser to the outgoing president.

Manafort was among those convicted in connection with the Russia collusion investigation, while Stone was convicted of lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional probe into the role of Russia in the 2016 election.

In addition to these names, Trump also pardoned his longtime ally Roger Stone, the White House said in a statement.

US President Donald Trump has issued pardons and sentence commutations for 29 people, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law.

US President Donald Trump has issued pardons and sentence commutations for 29 people, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law. The decisions taken on Wednesday bring to 49 the number of people who Trump in the last two days has granted clemency either through pardons or sentence commutations. Tuesday's list included two people linked to the probe into alleged collusion between his campaign and Russia and four Blackwater security guards convicted over the 2007 killing of 14 Iraqi civilians. Real estate developer Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to charges including tax evasion and witness tampering in 2004. His pardon had been expected by many, given his family connection. Jared Kushner is married to Trump's daughter Ivanka and is a senior adviser to the outgoing president. Manafort was among those convicted in connection with the Russia collusion investigation, while Stone was convicted of lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional probe into the role of Russia in the 2016 election. In addition to these names, Trump also pardoned his longtime ally Roger Stone, the White House said in a statement.

Trump issues new pardons, including Kushner's father and 2016 campaign chairman

President Donald Trump doesn’t use his pardon power often, but when he does, he abuses it for all it’s worth.

In less than four years in office, Trump has made a mockery of mercy, doling out clemency to some of the most deplorable people in the country, an alarming number of whom happen to be his friends, while ignoring tens of thousands of more deserving applicants.

On Wednesday, Trump once again granted pardons to some of his closest allies: Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman; Roger Stone, his longtime confidant; and Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. These grants, along with 26 others, followed 20 Trump issued a day earlier, many to a rogues’ gallery of wrongdoers who shouldn’t have been on anyone’s mercy list. These included four Blackwater security guards convicted in connection with the killing of Iraqi civilians, three corrupt Republican former members of Congress and two figures who pleaded guilty as part of the special counsel’s Russia investigation.

Sure, Trump has tossed a bone to a few people sentenced under outrageously harsh three-strikes laws, like Weldon Angelos, who got 55 years in prison for selling marijuana while carrying a handgun. But those are the exceptions. In general, if you are not a xenophobic sheriff, a right-wing troll, a homicidal military officer, an old friend or a turkey, your odds of being pardoned by this president hover around zero.

What makes Trump’s clemency record even worse is how paltry it is. As the old joke goes, the food is terrible, and the portions are too small. To date, Trump has issued a not-so-grand total of 94 pardons and sentence commutations — fewer than any president but George H.W. Bush in more than 100 years. He may add a few more to that list, of course, if only by preemptively pardoning his lawyers and family members.

Trump’s stingy, self-serving approach to clemency is due in part to his transactional view of the law as something to punish his enemies and to protect himself, his friends and his allies. But it’s a power that is easy to abuse because it is nearly unlimited. While Trump may be the most flagrant abuser, he’s far from the first. From Bill Clinton’s pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich to Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor Richard Nixon, there are plenty of examples of presidents of both parties exploiting mercy for dubious reasons.

The solution isn’t for presidents to pardon fewer people; it’s to pardon more, with more consideration and more consistency.

As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take over, he has the opportunity to re-imagine this deeply important but long-abused power and make it work more as the founders intended: as a counterweight to unjust prosecutions and excessive punishments. “Without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist No. 74.

If ever there was a moment to reform the system, it is now. The decades-old American prison crisis has dumped millions of people behind bars, many suffering under hugely disproportionate sentences. Last summer, the nation was engulfed by mass protests over criminal-justice abuses, and prisons continue to endure many of the nation’s worst coronavirus outbreaks. Recent federal laws, including one signed by Trump, have alleviated some of the most egregious sentences, but they haven’t done nearly enough. There are currently nearly 14,000 clemency petitions waiting for action. And unlike so many other parts of the federal government, clemency is one area in which presidents can do a lot of good on their own, and fast.

First and most important: Take back control of the pardon process. The power to grant mercy may be the president’s alone, but the office of the pardon attorney operates out of the Justice Department. Under most administrations, before any request for clemency can land on the president’s desk, it has to survive review by a gantlet of people whose job it is to win convictions, not undo them. In some cases, the same prosecutors who sent a person to prison are asked to weigh in on granting that person mercy. It’s “akin to having Yankees fans pick the Red Sox’s starting pitcher,” wrote Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law who advocates for comprehensive clemency reform.

Prosecutors’ built-in biases are exacerbated by the fear of public blowback if any grant of clemency goes wrong — say, if a person commits a crime after being granted relief.

The gulf between presidents and their pardon decisions has confounded executives of both parties. One of the last pieces of advice the outgoing President George W. Bush gave the incoming President Barack Obama was to pick a pardon policy and stick to it. Obama didn’t heed the warning. He dithered for years before finally developing clear clemency standards late in his second term. The result: mercy for more than 1,900 people, many of them serving absurdly long sentences for low-level drug crimes. That was very good, but as long as the Justice Department maintains control over the process, it easily reverts to form.

It’s not enough simply to bring pardons back into the White House. Trump’s near total disregard of any process shows the danger in that. Instead, Osler proposes the establishment of a clemency board or commission with a direct line to the president, and staffed with experts in the field of criminal justice rather than with politicians worried about how their decisions might affect their electoral prospects. Board members should reflect the nation’s diversity in terms of race, geography and political ideology. Nearly all states incorporate the work of a board or commission in their clemency processes; not coincidentally, states generally do a much better job of handling their petitions than the federal government does.

Biden could create and staff a clemency board by executive order. He could also avoid Obama’s mistake by laying out clear, consistent standards for considering petitions early in his administration. What the Justice Department currently considers — the seriousness of the crime, whether the offender has expressed remorse and shown rehabilitation — is reasonable, but it often isn’t reflected in clemency decisions. (Certainly not those of Trump.)

Congress has an important role to play too. The pardon power is vast but not without limits. For instance, presidents may not violate core constitutional rights with their pardons, dangle pardons as a way to evade the justice system or offer mercy in exchange for bribes. Some constitutional scholars say they may not pardon themselves, although no president has yet tried to. To remind presidents that they are being watched, Congress can require the White House to issue a regular clemency report, as many states require as part of their process. It may also investigate individual pardons for possible abuse, as it did after Clinton’s pardon of Rich. And it can impose consequences, up to and including impeachment.

Speaking of impeachment, Trump has a few weeks left in office, during which he could choose to make at least some amends for his degradation of the pardon power by, say, considering the petitions of even some of the thousands of people still waiting. We’re not holding our breath. Real reform is more likely to come from Biden, who has his own amends to make. As a senator, Biden helped draft and championed many of the harshest federal criminal-sentencing laws of the 1980s and ’90s, laws that drove the nation’s prison crisis in the first place. He can’t undo the damage these federal laws have inflicted, but he can begin to repair it, and his own legacy on this issue, by reforming the pardon power from the ground up.

President Donald Trump doesn’t use his pardon power often, but when he does, he abuses it for all it’s worth. In less than four years in office, Trump has made a mockery of mercy, doling out clemency to some of the most deplorable people in the country, an alarming number of whom happen to be his friends, while ignoring tens of thousands of more deserving applicants.

President Donald Trump doesn’t use his pardon power often, but when he does, he abuses it for all it’s worth. In less than four years in office, Trump has made a mockery of mercy, doling out clemency to some of the most deplorable people in the country, an alarming number of whom happen to be his friends, while ignoring tens of thousands of more deserving applicants. On Wednesday, Trump once again granted pardons to some of his closest allies: Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman; Roger Stone, his longtime confidant; and Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. These grants, along with 26 others, followed 20 Trump issued a day earlier, many to a rogues’ gallery of wrongdoers who shouldn’t have been on anyone’s mercy list. These included four Blackwater security guards convicted in connection with the killing of Iraqi civilians, three corrupt Republican former members of Congress and two figures who pleaded guilty as part of the special counsel’s Russia investigation. Sure, Trump has tossed a bone to a few people sentenced under outrageously harsh three-strikes laws, like Weldon Angelos, who got 55 years in prison for selling marijuana while carrying a handgun. But those are the exceptions. In general, if you are not a xenophobic sheriff, a right-wing troll, a homicidal military officer, an old friend or a turkey, your odds of being pardoned by this president hover around zero. What makes Trump’s clemency record even worse is how paltry it is. As the old joke goes, the food is terrible, and the portions are too small. To date, Trump has issued a not-so-grand total of 94 pardons and sentence commutations — fewer than any president but George H.W. Bush in more than 100 years. He may add a few more to that list, of course, if only by preemptively pardoning his lawyers and family members. Trump’s stingy, self-serving approach to clemency is due in part to his transactional view of the law as something to punish his enemies and to protect himself, his friends and his allies. But it’s a power that is easy to abuse because it is nearly unlimited. While Trump may be the most flagrant abuser, he’s far from the first. From Bill Clinton’s pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich to Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor Richard Nixon, there are plenty of examples of presidents of both parties exploiting mercy for dubious reasons. The solution isn’t for presidents to pardon fewer people; it’s to pardon more, with more consideration and more consistency. As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take over, he has the opportunity to re-imagine this deeply important but long-abused power and make it work more as the founders intended: as a counterweight to unjust prosecutions and excessive punishments. “Without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist No. 74. If ever there was a moment to reform the system, it is now. The decades-old American prison crisis has dumped millions of people behind bars, many suffering under hugely disproportionate sentences. Last summer, the nation was engulfed by mass protests over criminal-justice abuses, and prisons continue to endure many of the nation’s worst coronavirus outbreaks. Recent federal laws, including one signed by Trump, have alleviated some of the most egregious sentences, but they haven’t done nearly enough. There are currently nearly 14,000 clemency petitions waiting for action. And unlike so many other parts of the federal government, clemency is one area in which presidents can do a lot of good on their own, and fast. First and most important: Take back control of the pardon process. The power to grant mercy may be the president’s alone, but the office of the pardon attorney operates out of the Justice Department. Under most administrations, before any request for clemency can land on the president’s desk, it has to survive review by a gantlet of people whose job it is to win convictions, not undo them. In some cases, the same prosecutors who sent a person to prison are asked to weigh in on granting that person mercy. It’s “akin to having Yankees fans pick the Red Sox’s starting pitcher,” wrote Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law who advocates for comprehensive clemency reform. Prosecutors’ built-in biases are exacerbated by the fear of public blowback if any grant of clemency goes wrong — say, if a person commits a crime after being granted relief. The gulf between presidents and their pardon decisions has confounded executives of both parties. One of the last pieces of advice the outgoing President George W. Bush gave the incoming President Barack Obama was to pick a pardon policy and stick to it. Obama didn’t heed the warning. He dithered for years before finally developing clear clemency standards late in his second term. The result: mercy for more than 1,900 people, many of them serving absurdly long sentences for low-level drug crimes. That was very good, but as long as the Justice Department maintains control over the process, it easily reverts to form. It’s not enough simply to bring pardons back into the White House. Trump’s near total disregard of any process shows the danger in that. Instead, Osler proposes the establishment of a clemency board or commission with a direct line to the president, and staffed with experts in the field of criminal justice rather than with politicians worried about how their decisions might affect their electoral prospects. Board members should reflect the nation’s diversity in terms of race, geography and political ideology. Nearly all states incorporate the work of a board or commission in their clemency processes; not coincidentally, states generally do a much better job of handling their petitions than the federal government does. Biden could create and staff a clemency board by executive order. He could also avoid Obama’s mistake by laying out clear, consistent standards for considering petitions early in his administration. What the Justice Department currently considers — the seriousness of the crime, whether the offender has expressed remorse and shown rehabilitation — is reasonable, but it often isn’t reflected in clemency decisions. (Certainly not those of Trump.) Congress has an important role to play too. The pardon power is vast but not without limits. For instance, presidents may not violate core constitutional rights with their pardons, dangle pardons as a way to evade the justice system or offer mercy in exchange for bribes. Some constitutional scholars say they may not pardon themselves, although no president has yet tried to. To remind presidents that they are being watched, Congress can require the White House to issue a regular clemency report, as many states require as part of their process. It may also investigate individual pardons for possible abuse, as it did after Clinton’s pardon of Rich. And it can impose consequences, up to and including impeachment. Speaking of impeachment, Trump has a few weeks left in office, during which he could choose to make at least some amends for his degradation of the pardon power by, say, considering the petitions of even some of the thousands of people still waiting. We’re not holding our breath. Real reform is more likely to come from Biden, who has his own amends to make. As a senator, Biden helped draft and championed many of the harshest federal criminal-sentencing laws of the 1980s and ’90s, laws that drove the nation’s prison crisis in the first place. He can’t undo the damage these federal laws have inflicted, but he can begin to repair it, and his own legacy on this issue, by reforming the pardon power from the ground up.

Trump corrupted the presidential pardon. Biden must repair it

With the fate of a federal aid package suddenly thrown into doubt by President Donald Trump, economic data Wednesday showed why the help is so desperately needed.

Personal income fell in November for the second straight month, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, and consumer spending declined for the first time since April, as waning government aid and a worsening pandemic continued to take a toll on the U.S. economy.

Separate data from the Labor Department showed that applications for unemployment benefits remained high last week and have risen since early November.

Taken together, the reports are the latest evidence that the once-promising economic recovery is sputtering.

“We know that things are going to get worse,” said Daniel Zhao, senior economist with the career site Glassdoor. “The question is how much worse.”

The answer depends heavily on two factors: the path of the pandemic, and the willingness of the federal government to provide help.

Congress, after months of delays, acted Monday, passing a $900 billion economic relief package that would provide aid to the unemployed, small businesses and most households. Most urgently, it would prevent millions from losing jobless benefits at the end of this week.

But Tuesday evening, Trump demanded sweeping changes in the bill, throwing into doubt whether he would sign it.

Trump’s criticism of the relief effort, which he called a “disgrace,” was that it was not generous enough: He called on Congress to provide $2,000 a person in direct payments to households, rather than the $600 included in the bill.

Many economists view direct payments as among the least effective measures in the package, because much of the money would go to households that don’t need it. But beyond the merits of any specific measure, the real risk is that Trump’s comments could delay the aid or derail it entirely.

The data released Wednesday underscored the economy’s fragility. Personal income fell 1.1% in November and is down 3.6% since July, as the loss of federal assistance more than offset rising income from wages and salaries.

Consumer spending, which proved resilient in the summer and fall, declined 0.4%, an ominous sign for small businesses trying to survive the winter. Some of the biggest drops came in categories most exposed to the pandemic’s impact: Spending on restaurants and hotels fell 3.8% in November, and spending on transportation, clothing and gasoline also declined.

The pullback in spending is spilling over into the labor market. About 869,000 people filed new claims for state jobless benefits last week. That was down from a week earlier but is significantly above the level in early November, before a surge in coronavirus cases prompted a new round of layoffs in much of the country.

A further 398,000 people filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, one of two federal programs to expand jobless benefits that were set to expire this month without congressional action. Some forecasters expect the December employment report to show a net loss of jobs.

“The data just underscores the importance of fiscal support,” said Aneta Markowska, chief financial economist for Jefferies, an investment bank. Without it, she said, “there would be permanent damage, and it would probably be pretty significant.”

The relief bill was smaller than many economists said was needed to carry the economy through the pandemic and ensure a robust recovery. It won’t revive the hardest-hit industries or undo the damage left by months of lost income for many households.

But the package may be enough to forestall the wave of evictions and small-business failures that many economists warn is inevitable without it. And it should be enough to avoid a fall back into recession, which an increasing number of forecasters have said is likely without a quick injection of federal money.

The stakes are particularly high for the millions of Americans who would be left without an income during what could be some of the worst months of the pandemic.

The relief package passed this week would extend two emergency programs that cover people who are left out of the regular unemployment system or whose benefits have expired. Roughly 14 million people were enrolled in the two programs in early December, according to the Labor Department, although fraud and data-collection issues mean that figure may overstate the true total.

But if the bill doesn’t become law, the two programs will expire at the end of this week. That could push nearly 5 million people into poverty virtually overnight, according to an estimate from researchers at Columbia University.

Carson Noel has spent 35 years in live events, working on cruise ships, on Broadway and at conventions across the country. The pandemic wiped it all away.

“Literally over a one-week period I watched the next six months of my work go away,” he said.

Noel, 51, has reached the end of both his regular unemployment payments and the emergency pandemic benefits, leaving him with no income. The bill passed by Congress would restore his benefits for at least a few weeks, but now those are in doubt.

Even if the bill does become law, Noel said, it was too late to rescue his finances. He has cut back his grocery bill and moved in with his sister in Tucson, Arizona, to save money, but even with his expenses pared to a minimum, his savings are largely depleted.

“I’m good for about another month and then I’m in trouble,” he said. “I’m just trying to survive at this point.”

Even if Trump does sign the relief package, millions of people could temporarily lose their benefits.

By waiting until the last minute to act, legislators forced state labor departments — which administer both state and federal unemployment benefits — to prepare for the programs’ end. Many states won’t be able to reverse course in time to avoid a lapse in payments.

State employment officials said they had been monitoring developments in Washington and were consulting the federal Labor Department so that they could move quickly to reinstate benefits. But some affirmed that at least a brief lapse was inevitable. Any delay in signing the bill would make the lag even longer, said Michele Evermore, senior policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project.

“Every day that this drags on, that’s a day that it’s hard to put food on the table for the kids, it’s another bill missed, it’s just another hardship,” she said.

Even as millions of jobless workers face the prospect of a bleak winter, however, some people and industries are in much stronger shape.

Capital goods orders — a measure of business investment — rose in November, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, a sign that big corporations remain confident even as restaurants and other small businesses struggle to survive.

In addition, household savings are more than $800 billion higher than in February, before the pandemic upended the economy. Economists said those savings were most likely concentrated among white-collar workers who have held on to their jobs while saving money by cutting back spending on travel and leisure. Many have also benefited from the soaring stock market.

High savings levels are one reason that many economists have been skeptical of the need for another round of direct aid to households, let alone the $2,000 a person demanded by Trump. Such payments might help people who have kept jobs but lost hours or income. But much of the money would go to households that are financially secure and would most likely be saved rather than spent.

Those savings could help fuel a rapid recovery once coronavirus vaccines are widely available, allowing Americans to resume traveling, attending concerts and gathering in bars and restaurants. But that prospect only underscores the need for aid to ensure that businesses make it until then.

“Just a few months down the road, things will be dramatically better, but that’s not a reason to suffer in the meantime,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Economics. “It’s just shooting yourself in the foot to allow businesses to go bust.”

With the fate of a federal aid package suddenly thrown into doubt by President Donald Trump, economic data Wednesday showed why the help is so desperately needed.

With the fate of a federal aid package suddenly thrown into doubt by President Donald Trump, economic data Wednesday showed why the help is so desperately needed. Personal income fell in November for the second straight month, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, and consumer spending declined for the first time since April, as waning government aid and a worsening pandemic continued to take a toll on the U.S. economy. Separate data from the Labor Department showed that applications for unemployment benefits remained high last week and have risen since early November. Taken together, the reports are the latest evidence that the once-promising economic recovery is sputtering. “We know that things are going to get worse,” said Daniel Zhao, senior economist with the career site Glassdoor. “The question is how much worse.” The answer depends heavily on two factors: the path of the pandemic, and the willingness of the federal government to provide help. Congress, after months of delays, acted Monday, passing a $900 billion economic relief package that would provide aid to the unemployed, small businesses and most households. Most urgently, it would prevent millions from losing jobless benefits at the end of this week. But Tuesday evening, Trump demanded sweeping changes in the bill, throwing into doubt whether he would sign it. Trump’s criticism of the relief effort, which he called a “disgrace,” was that it was not generous enough: He called on Congress to provide $2,000 a person in direct payments to households, rather than the $600 included in the bill. Many economists view direct payments as among the least effective measures in the package, because much of the money would go to households that don’t need it. But beyond the merits of any specific measure, the real risk is that Trump’s comments could delay the aid or derail it entirely. The data released Wednesday underscored the economy’s fragility. Personal income fell 1.1% in November and is down 3.6% since July, as the loss of federal assistance more than offset rising income from wages and salaries. Consumer spending, which proved resilient in the summer and fall, declined 0.4%, an ominous sign for small businesses trying to survive the winter. Some of the biggest drops came in categories most exposed to the pandemic’s impact: Spending on restaurants and hotels fell 3.8% in November, and spending on transportation, clothing and gasoline also declined. The pullback in spending is spilling over into the labor market. About 869,000 people filed new claims for state jobless benefits last week. That was down from a week earlier but is significantly above the level in early November, before a surge in coronavirus cases prompted a new round of layoffs in much of the country. A further 398,000 people filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, one of two federal programs to expand jobless benefits that were set to expire this month without congressional action. Some forecasters expect the December employment report to show a net loss of jobs. “The data just underscores the importance of fiscal support,” said Aneta Markowska, chief financial economist for Jefferies, an investment bank. Without it, she said, “there would be permanent damage, and it would probably be pretty significant.” The relief bill was smaller than many economists said was needed to carry the economy through the pandemic and ensure a robust recovery. It won’t revive the hardest-hit industries or undo the damage left by months of lost income for many households. But the package may be enough to forestall the wave of evictions and small-business failures that many economists warn is inevitable without it. And it should be enough to avoid a fall back into recession, which an increasing number of forecasters have said is likely without a quick injection of federal money. The stakes are particularly high for the millions of Americans who would be left without an income during what could be some of the worst months of the pandemic. The relief package passed this week would extend two emergency programs that cover people who are left out of the regular unemployment system or whose benefits have expired. Roughly 14 million people were enrolled in the two programs in early December, according to the Labor Department, although fraud and data-collection issues mean that figure may overstate the true total. But if the bill doesn’t become law, the two programs will expire at the end of this week. That could push nearly 5 million people into poverty virtually overnight, according to an estimate from researchers at Columbia University. Carson Noel has spent 35 years in live events, working on cruise ships, on Broadway and at conventions across the country. The pandemic wiped it all away. “Literally over a one-week period I watched the next six months of my work go away,” he said. Noel, 51, has reached the end of both his regular unemployment payments and the emergency pandemic benefits, leaving him with no income. The bill passed by Congress would restore his benefits for at least a few weeks, but now those are in doubt. Even if the bill does become law, Noel said, it was too late to rescue his finances. He has cut back his grocery bill and moved in with his sister in Tucson, Arizona, to save money, but even with his expenses pared to a minimum, his savings are largely depleted. “I’m good for about another month and then I’m in trouble,” he said. “I’m just trying to survive at this point.” Even if Trump does sign the relief package, millions of people could temporarily lose their benefits. By waiting until the last minute to act, legislators forced state labor departments — which administer both state and federal unemployment benefits — to prepare for the programs’ end. Many states won’t be able to reverse course in time to avoid a lapse in payments. State employment officials said they had been monitoring developments in Washington and were consulting the federal Labor Department so that they could move quickly to reinstate benefits. But some affirmed that at least a brief lapse was inevitable. Any delay in signing the bill would make the lag even longer, said Michele Evermore, senior policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project. “Every day that this drags on, that’s a day that it’s hard to put food on the table for the kids, it’s another bill missed, it’s just another hardship,” she said. Even as millions of jobless workers face the prospect of a bleak winter, however, some people and industries are in much stronger shape. Capital goods orders — a measure of business investment — rose in November, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, a sign that big corporations remain confident even as restaurants and other small businesses struggle to survive. In addition, household savings are more than $800 billion higher than in February, before the pandemic upended the economy. Economists said those savings were most likely concentrated among white-collar workers who have held on to their jobs while saving money by cutting back spending on travel and leisure. Many have also benefited from the soaring stock market. High savings levels are one reason that many economists have been skeptical of the need for another round of direct aid to households, let alone the $2,000 a person demanded by Trump. Such payments might help people who have kept jobs but lost hours or income. But much of the money would go to households that are financially secure and would most likely be saved rather than spent. Those savings could help fuel a rapid recovery once coronavirus vaccines are widely available, allowing Americans to resume traveling, attending concerts and gathering in bars and restaurants. But that prospect only underscores the need for aid to ensure that businesses make it until then. “Just a few months down the road, things will be dramatically better, but that’s not a reason to suffer in the meantime,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Economics. “It’s just shooting yourself in the foot to allow businesses to go bust.”

New signs of economic distress emerge as Trump imperils aid deal

Twitter will make Joe Biden's @POTUS account as well as @WhiteHouse account to start afresh with zero followers once he is sworn in as the next president of the United States on January 20.

The micro-blogging platform will not transfer existing the followers of the existing accounts to the new administration, Rob Flaherty, Biden's digital director, was quoted as saying in media reports on Tuesday.

The accounts for @VP, @FLOTUS, @PressSec, @Cabinet, and @LaCasaBlanca will also have their followers gone.

While @POTUS currently has 33.2 million followers, @TheWhiteHouse has 26 million followers on Twitter.

According to The Verge, this is a reversal from what Twitter did in 2017 when the Trump administration took over accounts from the Obama administration.

"Back then, Twitter essentially duplicated the existing accounts, creating an archive of Obama-era tweets and followers and building a new set of accounts for the incoming administration that retained all of those followers without any of the tweets," the report mentioned.

The Wall Street Journal reported that there was contention between the Biden team and Twitter over whether followers would transfer over.

Twitter said it is "in ongoing discussions with the Biden transition team on a number of aspects related to White House account transfers."

The company last month said all existing tweets on those accounts will be archived and it will transfer the accounts -- reset to zero tweets -- to Biden.

Donald Trump's @POTUS account will be renamed @POTUS45 and "frozen as-is".

Trump will be in control of @realDonaldTrump, although with less protections than before.

(with inputs)

Twitter will make Joe Biden's @POTUS account as well as @WhiteHouse account to start afresh with zero followers once he is sworn in as the next president of the United States on January 20.

Twitter will make Joe Biden's @POTUS account as well as @WhiteHouse account to start afresh with zero followers once he is sworn in as the next president of the United States on January 20. The micro-blogging platform will not transfer existing the followers of the existing accounts to the new administration, Rob Flaherty, Biden's digital director, was quoted as saying in media reports on Tuesday. The accounts for @VP, @FLOTUS, @PressSec, @Cabinet, and @LaCasaBlanca will also have their followers gone. While @POTUS currently has 33.2 million followers, @TheWhiteHouse has 26 million followers on Twitter. According to The Verge, this is a reversal from what Twitter did in 2017 when the Trump administration took over accounts from the Obama administration. "Back then, Twitter essentially duplicated the existing accounts, creating an archive of Obama-era tweets and followers and building a new set of accounts for the incoming administration that retained all of those followers without any of the tweets," the report mentioned. The Wall Street Journal reported that there was contention between the Biden team and Twitter over whether followers would transfer over. Twitter said it is "in ongoing discussions with the Biden transition team on a number of aspects related to White House account transfers." The company last month said all existing tweets on those accounts will be archived and it will transfer the accounts -- reset to zero tweets -- to Biden. Donald Trump's @POTUS account will be renamed @POTUS45 and "frozen as-is". Trump will be in control of @realDonaldTrump, although with less protections than before. (with inputs)

Biden won't inherit Trump's millions of Twitter followers

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned 15 people, including Republican allies, a 2016 campaign official accused of involvement in the Russia probe and former government contractors convicted in a 2007 massacre in Baghdad.

The pardons also included George Papadopoulos, a former campaign aide who pleaded guilty as part of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump also pardoned former Republican Reps Duncan Hunter of California and Chris Collins of New York.

The pardons came at the recommendation of Trump allies in Congress and, in some cases, the conservative media.

Papadopoulos, 33, was an advisor to Trump's 2016 campaign. He pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to FBI agents about the timing and significance of his contacts with people who claimed to have ties to top Russian officials.

Hunter was sentenced to 11 months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing campaign funds. Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump to be president, was sentenced to two years and two months in federal prison.

Also included in the batch announced on Tuesday are Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch lawyer who was sentenced to 30 days in jail after pleading guilty to lying to Mueller investigators; two Border Patrol agents convicted in 2006 of shooting and wounding an unarmed undocumented immigrant and then covering it up; and several people convicted of non-violent drug crimes serving lengthy sentences.

Trump also reduced the sentences of three women -- Crystal Munoz, Tynice Nichole Hall and Judith Negron -- convicted of drug crimes at the recommendation of Johnson, who has worked on behalf of other inmates after the President commuted her own sentence.&nbsp;

Trump later granted Johnson a full pardon at this year's Republican National Convention.

Last month, Trump pardoned his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation. The Flynn pardon drew condemnation from Democrats and other critics. 
In July, Trump commuted the sentence of longtime friend and adviser Roger Stone, sparing him from prison after he was convicted of lying under oath to lawmakers investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

(with inputs)

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned 15 people, including Republican allies, a 2016 campaign official accused of involvement in the Russia probe and former government contractors convicted in a 2007 massacre in Baghdad.

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned 15 people, including Republican allies, a 2016 campaign official accused of involvement in the Russia probe and former government contractors convicted in a 2007 massacre in Baghdad. The pardons also included George Papadopoulos, a former campaign aide who pleaded guilty as part of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Trump also pardoned former Republican Reps Duncan Hunter of California and Chris Collins of New York. The pardons came at the recommendation of Trump allies in Congress and, in some cases, the conservative media. Papadopoulos, 33, was an advisor to Trump's 2016 campaign. He pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to FBI agents about the timing and significance of his contacts with people who claimed to have ties to top Russian officials. Hunter was sentenced to 11 months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing campaign funds. Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump to be president, was sentenced to two years and two months in federal prison. Also included in the batch announced on Tuesday are Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch lawyer who was sentenced to 30 days in jail after pleading guilty to lying to Mueller investigators; two Border Patrol agents convicted in 2006 of shooting and wounding an unarmed undocumented immigrant and then covering it up; and several people convicted of non-violent drug crimes serving lengthy sentences. Trump also reduced the sentences of three women -- Crystal Munoz, Tynice Nichole Hall and Judith Negron -- convicted of drug crimes at the recommendation of Johnson, who has worked on behalf of other inmates after the President commuted her own sentence. Trump later granted Johnson a full pardon at this year's Republican National Convention. Last month, Trump pardoned his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation. The Flynn pardon drew condemnation from Democrats and other critics. In July, Trump commuted the sentence of longtime friend and adviser Roger Stone, sparing him from prison after he was convicted of lying under oath to lawmakers investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. (with inputs)

Trump issues series of pardons, including Russia probe figure George Papadopoulos

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, has been appointed to fill the Senate seat held by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday, capping months of intense political jockeying among Democratic factions in the state.

The son of Mexican-born immigrants who settled in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, Padilla, 47, will be the first Latino senator from California, where Latinos are about 40% of the population.

“I am honored and humbled by the trust placed in me by Governor Newsom, and I intend to work each and every day to honor that trust and deliver for all Californians,” Padilla said in a statement.

In an interview, Padilla said he was overwhelmed with emotion Monday evening when the governor offered him the position on a Zoom call. “There is a lot of work to get to, of course, but I couldn’t help but think of my parents, who came here from Mexico in pursuit of the American dream,” he said. “All I ever heard as a child was work hard, study hard, and all I ever wanted to do was honor their sacrifices.”

Padilla, an ally of the governor throughout his political career, has held public office since 1999, when he was elected at 26 to the Los Angeles City Council; he went on to serve two terms in the state Senate and then two terms as secretary of state, heading the office that runs California’s elections.

“Through his tenacity, integrity, smarts and grit, California is gaining a tested fighter in their corner who will be a fierce ally in D.C., lifting up our state’s values and making sure we secure the critical resources to emerge stronger from this pandemic,” Newsom said. “He will be a senator for all Californians.”

The decision followed months of deliberation by Newsom and lobbying by California’s myriad political factions for a position whose occupant will need not only the experience to work effectively in Washington but also the money and political base to hold the seat in 2022, when Harris’ term ends.

California progressives had pushed Newsom to appoint Rep. Barbara Lee or another like-minded Democrat. Newsom was also under pressure to appoint a Black woman to take the place of Harris, the only Black woman in the Senate. Rep. Karen Bass and Lee were at the top of that list.

As weeks passed after the presidential election, the back-channel advocacy that had gone on since Harris was chosen as the running mate of President-elect Joe Biden broke into the open with public endorsements, full-page newspaper ads and open letters. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus strongly backed Padilla. The LGBTQ community and Equality California lobbied for Robert Garcia, the mayor of Long Beach. Black Women United, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and a range of Black elected officials pushed for Bass or Lee.

On Twitter, Lee congratulated Padilla as “a skilled legislator and a steadfast advocate for justice,” Bass cheered “another historic barrier shattered“ and Garcia promised his “100 percent support in his 2022 reelection.”

Nathalie Rayes, president and chief executive of the Latino Victory Fund, which had campaigned for Padilla, called the appointment “a long-overdue milestone for the Latino community” and a “bold step toward having a Senate that looks like the communities it serves.” She added, “His appointment will not only increase Latino representation in the Senate, but it will also open the door for future generations of Latino leaders.”

Leading California Republicans were less impressed. “One of the worst election officials in the nation will go to DC, unelected!!!” tweeted Harmeet Dhillon, a conservative civil rights lawyer and member of the Republican National Committee.

California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, had endorsed Padilla, who had worked in her field office early in his career and on Tuesday she called the appointment “an excellent choice.” In the run-up to his appointment, some interest groups had called for Feinstein herself to step down, so that the governor could pick two senators — a call that gained traction after a New Yorker article this month suggested that Feinstein, 87, was experiencing cognitive decline.

The elevation of Padilla leaves Newsom with a vacancy in the secretary of state’s office, which was viewed throughout the deliberation as a potential consolation prize for at least one disappointed contender.

On Tuesday afternoon, a person close to the governor’s office said he planned to appoint Shirley Weber, a veteran California assemblywoman and chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus. The daughter of Arkansas sharecroppers, Weber presided last week as the state’s 55 electors sealed the presidency for Biden and had pushed hard for a Black woman to be named as Harris’ replacement.

Newsom will also have to appoint a new attorney general if the Senate confirms Xavier Becerra’s nomination as Biden’s secretary of health and human services.

That state post has in recent years served as a springboard for higher office; besides Becerra, recent attorneys general include Harris and California’s previous governor, Jerry Brown.

Alex Vassar, a legislative historian at the California State Library, said the last California governor to fill three statewide offices was Earl Warren, who in December 1952 and January 1953 appointed a new senator, a state controller and a member of the state Board of Equalization. Pat Brown also made three appointments in 1964 and 1965, Vassar said, but one was simply to speed up an incoming senator’s arrival.

In sending Padilla to the Senate, Newsom chose a Democrat from his own generation who stood by the governor and shored up his Latino support in several critical races. He also chose an experienced candidate who has twice been elected statewide and whose work since 2014 has considerably expanded the ease of voting in California and the size of the electorate.

The middle child of a short-order cook from Jalisco, Mexico, and a housekeeper from Chihuahua, Padilla was raised in Los Angeles and graduated in 1994 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working his way through school with janitorial jobs and work-study programs. Though his degree was in mechanical engineering, his plan to become an aerospace engineer was derailed by the anti-immigrant politics gripping his home state during the 1990s.

Inspired by a summer job helping Latino high school students prepare for college and galvanized by Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that would have barred immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally from public services including schools and nonemergency health care, Padilla applied for a fellowship with the leadership development program for Coro, a nonprofit organization.

Before that, “I wouldn’t say I had ever dreamed of running for office, but I knew I’d have to do my part, or our community would continue to be scapegoated,” he said in an interview last month.

Padilla worked as a community organizer for Art Torres, who would later lead the state Democratic Party (and who also mentored Becerra). He went on to run legislative campaigns for two Latino politicians in Los Angeles and work in Feinstein’s field office before winning his seat on the Los Angeles City Council, with support from the city’s Latino-dominated labor unions. By 2001, he was the council’s youngest president.

In 2003, when Newsom was running for mayor of San Francisco, Padilla introduced him to Los Angeles contacts and helped buttress his position against a Latino opponent. A few years later, as a member of the state Senate, Padilla ran Newsom’s 2009 bid for governor before Jerry Brown got into the race and Newsom dropped out, running instead for lieutenant governor.

In 2018, he stood by Newsom yet again, endorsing him early in a crowded primary that included former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles.

As secretary of state, Padilla promised to register a million new California voters; the state has added more than 4 million as a result of legislation he backed that registers Californians to vote when they get their driver’s licenses.

As a state legislator, Padilla also supported universal health care, reproductive choice, expanding green manufacturing and solar power, and laws that tracked stolen guns and prevented felons from possessing body armor.

His first order of business in the Senate, he said, would be “COVID, COVID, COVID.” “There are of course big issues at hand, but we can’t fully address them until we get control of this pandemic,” he said.

A father of three, Padilla and his wife, Angela, live in the San Fernando Valley. His mother died three years ago, he said, but he, his father and his siblings live within five miles of one another. His sister works for the Los Angeles public school system, and his younger brother is chief of staff to the president of the Los Angeles City Council.

“We’re all in public service, and to me that’s not a coincidence,” Padilla said. He cited the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on communities of color, inequities in digital literacy and “the long-standing need for comprehensive immigration reform” as issues that he was “eager to play a role in.”

“I love public service and I’ve been doing it for more than 20 years, and I’d like to continue as long as I’m effective and they’ll continue to have me,” he said.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, has been appointed to fill the Senate seat held by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday, capping months of intense political jockeying among Democratic factions in the state.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, has been appointed to fill the Senate seat held by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday, capping months of intense political jockeying among Democratic factions in the state. The son of Mexican-born immigrants who settled in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, Padilla, 47, will be the first Latino senator from California, where Latinos are about 40% of the population. “I am honored and humbled by the trust placed in me by Governor Newsom, and I intend to work each and every day to honor that trust and deliver for all Californians,” Padilla said in a statement. In an interview, Padilla said he was overwhelmed with emotion Monday evening when the governor offered him the position on a Zoom call. “There is a lot of work to get to, of course, but I couldn’t help but think of my parents, who came here from Mexico in pursuit of the American dream,” he said. “All I ever heard as a child was work hard, study hard, and all I ever wanted to do was honor their sacrifices.” Padilla, an ally of the governor throughout his political career, has held public office since 1999, when he was elected at 26 to the Los Angeles City Council; he went on to serve two terms in the state Senate and then two terms as secretary of state, heading the office that runs California’s elections. “Through his tenacity, integrity, smarts and grit, California is gaining a tested fighter in their corner who will be a fierce ally in D.C., lifting up our state’s values and making sure we secure the critical resources to emerge stronger from this pandemic,” Newsom said. “He will be a senator for all Californians.” The decision followed months of deliberation by Newsom and lobbying by California’s myriad political factions for a position whose occupant will need not only the experience to work effectively in Washington but also the money and political base to hold the seat in 2022, when Harris’ term ends. California progressives had pushed Newsom to appoint Rep. Barbara Lee or another like-minded Democrat. Newsom was also under pressure to appoint a Black woman to take the place of Harris, the only Black woman in the Senate. Rep. Karen Bass and Lee were at the top of that list. As weeks passed after the presidential election, the back-channel advocacy that had gone on since Harris was chosen as the running mate of President-elect Joe Biden broke into the open with public endorsements, full-page newspaper ads and open letters. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus strongly backed Padilla. The LGBTQ community and Equality California lobbied for Robert Garcia, the mayor of Long Beach. Black Women United, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and a range of Black elected officials pushed for Bass or Lee. On Twitter, Lee congratulated Padilla as “a skilled legislator and a steadfast advocate for justice,” Bass cheered “another historic barrier shattered“ and Garcia promised his “100 percent support in his 2022 reelection.” Nathalie Rayes, president and chief executive of the Latino Victory Fund, which had campaigned for Padilla, called the appointment “a long-overdue milestone for the Latino community” and a “bold step toward having a Senate that looks like the communities it serves.” She added, “His appointment will not only increase Latino representation in the Senate, but it will also open the door for future generations of Latino leaders.” Leading California Republicans were less impressed. “One of the worst election officials in the nation will go to DC, unelected!!!” tweeted Harmeet Dhillon, a conservative civil rights lawyer and member of the Republican National Committee. California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, had endorsed Padilla, who had worked in her field office early in his career and on Tuesday she called the appointment “an excellent choice.” In the run-up to his appointment, some interest groups had called for Feinstein herself to step down, so that the governor could pick two senators — a call that gained traction after a New Yorker article this month suggested that Feinstein, 87, was experiencing cognitive decline. The elevation of Padilla leaves Newsom with a vacancy in the secretary of state’s office, which was viewed throughout the deliberation as a potential consolation prize for at least one disappointed contender. On Tuesday afternoon, a person close to the governor’s office said he planned to appoint Shirley Weber, a veteran California assemblywoman and chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus. The daughter of Arkansas sharecroppers, Weber presided last week as the state’s 55 electors sealed the presidency for Biden and had pushed hard for a Black woman to be named as Harris’ replacement. Newsom will also have to appoint a new attorney general if the Senate confirms Xavier Becerra’s nomination as Biden’s secretary of health and human services. That state post has in recent years served as a springboard for higher office; besides Becerra, recent attorneys general include Harris and California’s previous governor, Jerry Brown. Alex Vassar, a legislative historian at the California State Library, said the last California governor to fill three statewide offices was Earl Warren, who in December 1952 and January 1953 appointed a new senator, a state controller and a member of the state Board of Equalization. Pat Brown also made three appointments in 1964 and 1965, Vassar said, but one was simply to speed up an incoming senator’s arrival. In sending Padilla to the Senate, Newsom chose a Democrat from his own generation who stood by the governor and shored up his Latino support in several critical races. He also chose an experienced candidate who has twice been elected statewide and whose work since 2014 has considerably expanded the ease of voting in California and the size of the electorate. The middle child of a short-order cook from Jalisco, Mexico, and a housekeeper from Chihuahua, Padilla was raised in Los Angeles and graduated in 1994 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working his way through school with janitorial jobs and work-study programs. Though his degree was in mechanical engineering, his plan to become an aerospace engineer was derailed by the anti-immigrant politics gripping his home state during the 1990s. Inspired by a summer job helping Latino high school students prepare for college and galvanized by Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that would have barred immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally from public services including schools and nonemergency health care, Padilla applied for a fellowship with the leadership development program for Coro, a nonprofit organization. Before that, “I wouldn’t say I had ever dreamed of running for office, but I knew I’d have to do my part, or our community would continue to be scapegoated,” he said in an interview last month. Padilla worked as a community organizer for Art Torres, who would later lead the state Democratic Party (and who also mentored Becerra). He went on to run legislative campaigns for two Latino politicians in Los Angeles and work in Feinstein’s field office before winning his seat on the Los Angeles City Council, with support from the city’s Latino-dominated labor unions. By 2001, he was the council’s youngest president. In 2003, when Newsom was running for mayor of San Francisco, Padilla introduced him to Los Angeles contacts and helped buttress his position against a Latino opponent. A few years later, as a member of the state Senate, Padilla ran Newsom’s 2009 bid for governor before Jerry Brown got into the race and Newsom dropped out, running instead for lieutenant governor. In 2018, he stood by Newsom yet again, endorsing him early in a crowded primary that included former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles. As secretary of state, Padilla promised to register a million new California voters; the state has added more than 4 million as a result of legislation he backed that registers Californians to vote when they get their driver’s licenses. As a state legislator, Padilla also supported universal health care, reproductive choice, expanding green manufacturing and solar power, and laws that tracked stolen guns and prevented felons from possessing body armor. His first order of business in the Senate, he said, would be “COVID, COVID, COVID.” “There are of course big issues at hand, but we can’t fully address them until we get control of this pandemic,” he said. A father of three, Padilla and his wife, Angela, live in the San Fernando Valley. His mother died three years ago, he said, but he, his father and his siblings live within five miles of one another. His sister works for the Los Angeles public school system, and his younger brother is chief of staff to the president of the Los Angeles City Council. “We’re all in public service, and to me that’s not a coincidence,” Padilla said. He cited the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on communities of color, inequities in digital literacy and “the long-standing need for comprehensive immigration reform” as issues that he was “eager to play a role in.” “I love public service and I’ve been doing it for more than 20 years, and I’d like to continue as long as I’m effective and they’ll continue to have me,” he said.

Alex Padilla will replace Kamala Harris in the US Senate

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is rushing to approve a final wave of large-scale mining and energy projects on federal lands, encouraged by investors who want to try to ensure the projects move ahead even after President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

In Arizona, the Forest Service is preparing to sign off on the transfer of federal forest land — considered sacred by a neighboring Native American tribe — to allow construction of one of the nation’s largest copper mines.

In Utah, the Interior Department may grant final approval as soon as next week to a team of energy speculators targeting a remote spot inside an iconic national wilderness area — where new energy leasing is currently banned — so they can start drilling into what they believe is a huge underground supply of helium.

In northern Nevada, the department is close to granting final approval to construct a sprawling open-pit lithium mine on federal land that sits above a prehistoric volcano site.

And in the East, the Forest Service intends to take a key step next month toward allowing a natural gas pipeline to be built through Jefferson National Forest in Virginia and West Virginia, at one point running underneath the Appalachian Trail.

These projects, and others awaiting action in the remaining weeks of the Trump administration, reflect the intense push by the Interior Department, which controls 480 million acres of public lands, and the Forest Service, which manages another 193 million acres, to find ways to increase domestic energy and mining production, even in the face of intense protests by environmentalists and other activists.

When he takes office Jan. 20, Biden, who has chosen a Native American — Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M. — to lead the Interior Department, will still have the ability to reshape, slow or even block certain projects.

Some, like a planned uranium mine in South Dakota, will require further approvals. Others, like the planned helium drilling project in Utah, face lawsuits seeking to stop them. Still others, like the lithium mine in Nevada, will have the final federal permit needed before construction can begin and will be hard for the next administration to stop.

Whether they are the final word or not, the last-minute actions are just the latest evidence of how the far-reaching shift in regulatory policy under President Donald Trump has altered the balance between environmental concerns and business, giving substantial new weight to corporate interests.

Trump chose former industry executives to run major federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, and industry executives and lobbyists who cycled in and out of government positions were granted substantial influence in setting regulations.

For four years, Trump’s team and its allies have raced to roll back federal rules intended to protect federal lands and the nation’s air and water as well as other safety rules in agencies across the government. The changes were often made in direct response to requests from lobbyists and company executives who were major donors to Trump and frequent patrons at his hotels and resorts.

The final push on the mining and energy projects has come in part from senior Trump administration officials, including the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, a steel industry investor before joining Trump’s Cabinet.

Ross’ calendar shows at least three appointments with top executives at Rio Tinto, the Australia-based mining giant backing the Resolution Copper mine planned for construction in Arizona next to the San Carlos Apache reservation. Ross also made a trip to the mine site this year.

“This is a disaster,” said Wendsler Nosie Sr., a former San Carlos Apache tribal leader who in recent weeks has been camping out at the proposed mine site inside Tonto National Forest to protest the pending decision.

Backers of these projects say they are committed to minimizing the effect on public lands, sacred Native American sites and wildlife.

“Our science-based decisions are legally compliant and based on an extensive process involving input from career subject matter experts and the public,” said Richard Packer, an Interior Department spokesperson, adding that the agency “continues to balance safe and responsible natural resource development with conservation of important surface resources.”

The administration has been seeking to promote more mining of key minerals — including uranium, copper and lithium — to allow the United States to be less dependent on imports.

But the environmental consequences of these projects, if they move ahead as planned, will be considerable.

Last month, the EPA gave its final approval for the construction of a new uranium mine called the Dewey-Burdock project, spread over 12,613 acres near the Black Hills region of South Dakota.

The project would inject a chemical called lixiviant into more than 1,461 wells, sending the chemical into an underground water supply. The chemical would cause uranium trapped in sandstone below the surface to leach into the aquifer, contaminating the water but allowing the uranium to be captured, extracted and transformed into so-called yellow cake that can be used to fuel nuclear power plants.

Nationally, just 174,000 pounds of uranium was produced last year in the United States. The South Dakota project alone would have the potential to produce as much as 1 million pounds of uranium a year, although it is unclear whether there will ever be sufficient demand to justify production at that level, given that there is already excess capacity at uranium mines in the country.

The Oglala Lakota Nation, whose 2.8 million-acre reservation is adjacent to the proposed uranium mine, has sued to block the project. The mine would be built on property that the Sioux tribe has long claimed was illegally taken by the United States.

“The voice of Indigenous people needs to be heard — and federal Indian policy has made us invisible and dehumanized us,” said Kyle White, 34, a member of the Lakota tribe and former director of its natural resources regulatory agency.

A small piece of the project is on Interior Department land. The department has not yet approved the mine and will not act until after Trump leaves office, one of several ways that the Biden administration could slow or block the project.

Azarga Uranium, the Canada-based backer of the project, did not respond to a request for comment.

For the proposed Resolution Copper Mine, east of Phoenix in Tonto National Forest, adjacent to Apache tribal land, the Forest Service is expected to issue its long-awaited final environmental assessment by mid-January.

Sixty days after the assessment is released, a 2,422-acre chunk of the Tonto forest, an area called Oak Flat, will automatically be transferred to the mining companies in exchange for land nearby, a deal mandated by Congress in 2014.

The Interior Department’s National Register of Historic Places lists the Oak Flat area as “a holy place and ancestral homeland to the Western Apache Indians” that is also “a venue for ongoing Apache participation in traditional social activities, and is associated with traditions rooted in the history” of the tribe.

Under the current Forest Service plan, much of Oak Flat would eventually be destroyed. Starting about six years after underground blasting and extraction at the mine begins, the mine will gradually start to cave in on itself, forming a crater nearly 2 miles wide and as much as 1,100 feet deep, according to federal estimates.

The project would create 3,700 jobs and supply as much as 1 billion pounds of copper per year, one-quarter of the current annual demand in the United States.

“That was one of the major reasons why President Trump moved so aggressively to reduce the red tape involved in such projects,” Ross said in remarks during his visit to the site in October.

The companies running the project — Rio Tinto and BHP, also based in Australia — have promised to build a campsite outside the mine area to replace one traditionally used by Native Americans in the Oak Flat area. Rio Tinto said it was also working to ensure there was no damage to a nearby area called Apache Leap where, according to tribal legends, Native Americans being chased by U.S. Cavalry troops in the late-1800s jumped to their deaths.

But the ire of some members of the local San Carlos Apache Tribe toward Rio Tinto only intensified after the company admitted using dynamite to destroy a 46,000-year-old sacred Indigenous site in Australia as it expanded an iron ore mine.

A Forest Service employee working on the Arizona project acknowledged to community leaders in a recent conference call that pressure to get the evaluation of the project done quickly was “coming from the highest level,” mentioning the Agriculture Department, which oversees the service.

Federal records show that the environmental study until recently was expected to continue until the middle of 2021. It is now slated to be finished by mid-January. An agency spokesperson did not respond when asked to comment on claims that the process was being rushed. But Andrew Lye, project manager for Resolution Copper, said the review had actually taken longer than expected and been very thorough.

“It is not being fast-tracked, and Resolution Copper has not sought to apply for programs that are available to expedite projects,” Lye said.

Another mining project expecting imminent action by the Trump administration is in rural Nevada, where Canada-based Lithium Americas intends to build one of the world’s largest lithium mines on 5,500 acres of federal land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management.

Lithium is a vital ingredient in myriad batteries, including for cellphones and electric cars, but almost none of it is produced in the United States.

The project was listed in July by the Interior Department as one that it intended to “fast-track,” and it planned to take the final step in early January, meaning construction of the mine could begin soon.

But the Bureau of Land Management’s own environmental assessment acknowledges that the project will cause harm, including to the habitat of a threatened bird species known as sage grouse. Local ranchers and other families have expressed concern in comments to the agency that the project could cut the available local water supply and create other environmental problems.

The push to approve some of the projects has involved sustained lobbying and legal efforts by hired consultants with close ties to the Trump administration.

Those include Rebecca Watson, who served as the top Interior Department official in charge of oil and gas leasing during the Bush administration, working at the time alongside David Bernhardt, who is now the interior secretary.

Watson worked with other industry players over several years to urge lawmakers and senior officials at the Interior Department to change rules to allow her clients, now including Colorado-based Twin Bridges, to extract helium for more than a decade from federal lands, including land Twin Bridges has leased in Utah.

Watson said in an interview that increasing the supply of helium was critical to the nation. “Helium has a lot of strange little uses that people are not even familiar with, but they’re really important,” she said.

With time running out on the Trump administration, senior Interior Department officials were so determined to see the permit approved that they took control of the project from the local Utah office. Final action is now expected as soon this coming week, two agency officials said, even though the agency itself again acknowledged that the project will harm the area. Environmentalists filed a lawsuit Dec. 14 to try to block it.

David Wallace, an executive at Twin Bridges, said the project could ultimately generate hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of royalty and tax payments to federal, state and local governments.

“We also love these lands and are committed to our project enhancing, and not detracting from, them,” he said in a statement.

Opponents of the projects are keeping up pressure to try to stop them. That includes Nosie, who is camping out most nights on the sacred Oak Flat that could soon be transferred to Rio Tinto.

“As far as I am concerned, this is an invasion by a foreign power,” Nosie said. “We cannot afford to lose our identity and our history. Imagine if the biblical Mount Sinai became a location for mining, and it caved in and disappeared. You would not stand by and watch.”

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is rushing to approve a final wave of large-scale mining and energy projects on federal lands, encouraged by investors who want to try to ensure the projects move ahead even after President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is rushing to approve a final wave of large-scale mining and energy projects on federal lands, encouraged by investors who want to try to ensure the projects move ahead even after President-elect Joe Biden takes office. In Arizona, the Forest Service is preparing to sign off on the transfer of federal forest land — considered sacred by a neighboring Native American tribe — to allow construction of one of the nation’s largest copper mines. In Utah, the Interior Department may grant final approval as soon as next week to a team of energy speculators targeting a remote spot inside an iconic national wilderness area — where new energy leasing is currently banned — so they can start drilling into what they believe is a huge underground supply of helium. In northern Nevada, the department is close to granting final approval to construct a sprawling open-pit lithium mine on federal land that sits above a prehistoric volcano site. And in the East, the Forest Service intends to take a key step next month toward allowing a natural gas pipeline to be built through Jefferson National Forest in Virginia and West Virginia, at one point running underneath the Appalachian Trail. These projects, and others awaiting action in the remaining weeks of the Trump administration, reflect the intense push by the Interior Department, which controls 480 million acres of public lands, and the Forest Service, which manages another 193 million acres, to find ways to increase domestic energy and mining production, even in the face of intense protests by environmentalists and other activists. When he takes office Jan. 20, Biden, who has chosen a Native American — Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M. — to lead the Interior Department, will still have the ability to reshape, slow or even block certain projects. Some, like a planned uranium mine in South Dakota, will require further approvals. Others, like the planned helium drilling project in Utah, face lawsuits seeking to stop them. Still others, like the lithium mine in Nevada, will have the final federal permit needed before construction can begin and will be hard for the next administration to stop. Whether they are the final word or not, the last-minute actions are just the latest evidence of how the far-reaching shift in regulatory policy under President Donald Trump has altered the balance between environmental concerns and business, giving substantial new weight to corporate interests. Trump chose former industry executives to run major federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, and industry executives and lobbyists who cycled in and out of government positions were granted substantial influence in setting regulations. For four years, Trump’s team and its allies have raced to roll back federal rules intended to protect federal lands and the nation’s air and water as well as other safety rules in agencies across the government. The changes were often made in direct response to requests from lobbyists and company executives who were major donors to Trump and frequent patrons at his hotels and resorts. The final push on the mining and energy projects has come in part from senior Trump administration officials, including the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, a steel industry investor before joining Trump’s Cabinet. Ross’ calendar shows at least three appointments with top executives at Rio Tinto, the Australia-based mining giant backing the Resolution Copper mine planned for construction in Arizona next to the San Carlos Apache reservation. Ross also made a trip to the mine site this year. “This is a disaster,” said Wendsler Nosie Sr., a former San Carlos Apache tribal leader who in recent weeks has been camping out at the proposed mine site inside Tonto National Forest to protest the pending decision. Backers of these projects say they are committed to minimizing the effect on public lands, sacred Native American sites and wildlife. “Our science-based decisions are legally compliant and based on an extensive process involving input from career subject matter experts and the public,” said Richard Packer, an Interior Department spokesperson, adding that the agency “continues to balance safe and responsible natural resource development with conservation of important surface resources.” The administration has been seeking to promote more mining of key minerals — including uranium, copper and lithium — to allow the United States to be less dependent on imports. But the environmental consequences of these projects, if they move ahead as planned, will be considerable. Last month, the EPA gave its final approval for the construction of a new uranium mine called the Dewey-Burdock project, spread over 12,613 acres near the Black Hills region of South Dakota. The project would inject a chemical called lixiviant into more than 1,461 wells, sending the chemical into an underground water supply. The chemical would cause uranium trapped in sandstone below the surface to leach into the aquifer, contaminating the water but allowing the uranium to be captured, extracted and transformed into so-called yellow cake that can be used to fuel nuclear power plants. Nationally, just 174,000 pounds of uranium was produced last year in the United States. The South Dakota project alone would have the potential to produce as much as 1 million pounds of uranium a year, although it is unclear whether there will ever be sufficient demand to justify production at that level, given that there is already excess capacity at uranium mines in the country. The Oglala Lakota Nation, whose 2.8 million-acre reservation is adjacent to the proposed uranium mine, has sued to block the project. The mine would be built on property that the Sioux tribe has long claimed was illegally taken by the United States. “The voice of Indigenous people needs to be heard — and federal Indian policy has made us invisible and dehumanized us,” said Kyle White, 34, a member of the Lakota tribe and former director of its natural resources regulatory agency. A small piece of the project is on Interior Department land. The department has not yet approved the mine and will not act until after Trump leaves office, one of several ways that the Biden administration could slow or block the project. Azarga Uranium, the Canada-based backer of the project, did not respond to a request for comment. For the proposed Resolution Copper Mine, east of Phoenix in Tonto National Forest, adjacent to Apache tribal land, the Forest Service is expected to issue its long-awaited final environmental assessment by mid-January. Sixty days after the assessment is released, a 2,422-acre chunk of the Tonto forest, an area called Oak Flat, will automatically be transferred to the mining companies in exchange for land nearby, a deal mandated by Congress in 2014. The Interior Department’s National Register of Historic Places lists the Oak Flat area as “a holy place and ancestral homeland to the Western Apache Indians” that is also “a venue for ongoing Apache participation in traditional social activities, and is associated with traditions rooted in the history” of the tribe. Under the current Forest Service plan, much of Oak Flat would eventually be destroyed. Starting about six years after underground blasting and extraction at the mine begins, the mine will gradually start to cave in on itself, forming a crater nearly 2 miles wide and as much as 1,100 feet deep, according to federal estimates. The project would create 3,700 jobs and supply as much as 1 billion pounds of copper per year, one-quarter of the current annual demand in the United States. “That was one of the major reasons why President Trump moved so aggressively to reduce the red tape involved in such projects,” Ross said in remarks during his visit to the site in October. The companies running the project — Rio Tinto and BHP, also based in Australia — have promised to build a campsite outside the mine area to replace one traditionally used by Native Americans in the Oak Flat area. Rio Tinto said it was also working to ensure there was no damage to a nearby area called Apache Leap where, according to tribal legends, Native Americans being chased by U.S. Cavalry troops in the late-1800s jumped to their deaths. But the ire of some members of the local San Carlos Apache Tribe toward Rio Tinto only intensified after the company admitted using dynamite to destroy a 46,000-year-old sacred Indigenous site in Australia as it expanded an iron ore mine. A Forest Service employee working on the Arizona project acknowledged to community leaders in a recent conference call that pressure to get the evaluation of the project done quickly was “coming from the highest level,” mentioning the Agriculture Department, which oversees the service. Federal records show that the environmental study until recently was expected to continue until the middle of 2021. It is now slated to be finished by mid-January. An agency spokesperson did not respond when asked to comment on claims that the process was being rushed. But Andrew Lye, project manager for Resolution Copper, said the review had actually taken longer than expected and been very thorough. “It is not being fast-tracked, and Resolution Copper has not sought to apply for programs that are available to expedite projects,” Lye said. Another mining project expecting imminent action by the Trump administration is in rural Nevada, where Canada-based Lithium Americas intends to build one of the world’s largest lithium mines on 5,500 acres of federal land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management. Lithium is a vital ingredient in myriad batteries, including for cellphones and electric cars, but almost none of it is produced in the United States. The project was listed in July by the Interior Department as one that it intended to “fast-track,” and it planned to take the final step in early January, meaning construction of the mine could begin soon. But the Bureau of Land Management’s own environmental assessment acknowledges that the project will cause harm, including to the habitat of a threatened bird species known as sage grouse. Local ranchers and other families have expressed concern in comments to the agency that the project could cut the available local water supply and create other environmental problems. The push to approve some of the projects has involved sustained lobbying and legal efforts by hired consultants with close ties to the Trump administration. Those include Rebecca Watson, who served as the top Interior Department official in charge of oil and gas leasing during the Bush administration, working at the time alongside David Bernhardt, who is now the interior secretary. Watson worked with other industry players over several years to urge lawmakers and senior officials at the Interior Department to change rules to allow her clients, now including Colorado-based Twin Bridges, to extract helium for more than a decade from federal lands, including land Twin Bridges has leased in Utah. Watson said in an interview that increasing the supply of helium was critical to the nation. “Helium has a lot of strange little uses that people are not even familiar with, but they’re really important,” she said. With time running out on the Trump administration, senior Interior Department officials were so determined to see the permit approved that they took control of the project from the local Utah office. Final action is now expected as soon this coming week, two agency officials said, even though the agency itself again acknowledged that the project will harm the area. Environmentalists filed a lawsuit Dec. 14 to try to block it. David Wallace, an executive at Twin Bridges, said the project could ultimately generate hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of royalty and tax payments to federal, state and local governments. “We also love these lands and are committed to our project enhancing, and not detracting from, them,” he said in a statement. Opponents of the projects are keeping up pressure to try to stop them. That includes Nosie, who is camping out most nights on the sacred Oak Flat that could soon be transferred to Rio Tinto. “As far as I am concerned, this is an invasion by a foreign power,” Nosie said. “We cannot afford to lose our identity and our history. Imagine if the biblical Mount Sinai became a location for mining, and it caved in and disappeared. You would not stand by and watch.”

In last rush, Trump grants mining and energy firms access to public lands

President Donald Trump has floated naming lawyer Sidney Powell as a special counsel investigating allegations of voter fraud. She notably was booted from his campaign's legal team after pushing unfounded conspiracy theories.

Notably (again), there is no evidence of the kind of mass voter fraud Trump has been alleging since he lost the November 3 election to Democrat Joe Biden.

According to the Associated Press, Trump on Friday went as far as discussing getting Powell security clearance.

Trump and Powell met in the Oval Office Friday night, ABC News has confirmed, and were joined by Trump's former national security advisor, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The meeting was first reported by The New York Times.

"[Trump] could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states," Flynn&nbsp;said earlier this week&nbsp;on the conservative news outlet Newsmax.

Under federal law, the US attorney general, not the president, is responsible for appointing special counsels.

Trump has increasingly entertained conspiracy theories regarding the November 3 vote -- and is duly egged on by allies like&nbsp;Flynn and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney.

Flynn, who Trump recently pardoned for lying to the FBI, has even discussed the idea of imposing martial law and using the military to re-run the election.

(with inputs)

President Donald Trump has floated naming lawyer Sidney Powell as a special counsel investigating allegations of voter fraud. She notably was booted from his campaign's legal team after pushing unfounded conspiracy theories.

President Donald Trump has floated naming lawyer Sidney Powell as a special counsel investigating allegations of voter fraud. She notably was booted from his campaign's legal team after pushing unfounded conspiracy theories. Notably (again), there is no evidence of the kind of mass voter fraud Trump has been alleging since he lost the November 3 election to Democrat Joe Biden. According to the Associated Press, Trump on Friday went as far as discussing getting Powell security clearance. Trump and Powell met in the Oval Office Friday night, ABC News has confirmed, and were joined by Trump's former national security advisor, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The meeting was first reported by The New York Times. "[Trump] could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states," Flynn said earlier this week on the conservative news outlet Newsmax. Under federal law, the US attorney general, not the president, is responsible for appointing special counsels. Trump has increasingly entertained conspiracy theories regarding the November 3 vote -- and is duly egged on by allies like Flynn and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney. Flynn, who Trump recently pardoned for lying to the FBI, has even discussed the idea of imposing martial law and using the military to re-run the election. (with inputs)

Trump floated fired attorney Sidney Powell as special counsel, reports say

US President-elect Joe Biden told Mexico's president Saturday he was committed to addressing the root causes of poor Latino migrants crossing the border into America.

Outgoing President Donald Trump made tightening the southern frontier against what he called the free and dangerous flow of people entering the US from Mexico and Central America a key pillar of his US-centric policy on immigration, including his fitful plan to build a border wall.

Biden spoke Saturday with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and emphasized "the need to reinvigorate US-Mexico cooperation to ensure safe and orderly migration," the Biden transition team said in a statement.

"The two leaders noted a shared desire to address the root causes of migration in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and southern Mexico and to build a future of greater opportunity and security for the region," the team said.

The border is a major crossing point for migrants fleeing poverty, drug-related violence and other woes in Mexico and Central America.

Lopez Obrador, a leftist, had cordial relations with Trump but it was only this week that he finally congratulated Biden on his win in the November 3 US election.

US President-elect Joe Biden told Mexico's president Saturday he was committed to addressing the root causes of poor Latino migrants crossing the border into America.

US President-elect Joe Biden told Mexico's president Saturday he was committed to addressing the root causes of poor Latino migrants crossing the border into America. Outgoing President Donald Trump made tightening the southern frontier against what he called the free and dangerous flow of people entering the US from Mexico and Central America a key pillar of his US-centric policy on immigration, including his fitful plan to build a border wall. Biden spoke Saturday with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and emphasized "the need to reinvigorate US-Mexico cooperation to ensure safe and orderly migration," the Biden transition team said in a statement. "The two leaders noted a shared desire to address the root causes of migration in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and southern Mexico and to build a future of greater opportunity and security for the region," the team said. The border is a major crossing point for migrants fleeing poverty, drug-related violence and other woes in Mexico and Central America. Lopez Obrador, a leftist, had cordial relations with Trump but it was only this week that he finally congratulated Biden on his win in the November 3 US election.

Biden and Mexico leader discuss migration

Social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have been put under immense pressure to weed out fake news and misinformation, especially to set the stage for a peaceful transition of power from incumbent US President Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/nationwide-march-in-support-of-donald-trumps-poll-claims-349459/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

Trump has never been shy to show his disdain - on Twitter on in the real world. He has referred to the election results as rigged, without offering any evidence of the same.

Earlier, Twitter had begun labelling Trump’s tweets that contained “manipulated media” or carried unverified claims. Since then, Twitter has doubled down on its crackdown on fake news, especially coming from big leaders.

Now, the company fact-checked Trump once again. But this time, it went a step further.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/cyber-hack-under-control-says-trump-plays-down-russias-reported-role-351058" hreflang="en">Cyber hack 'under control', says Trump; plays down Russia's reported role</a>

In a tweet, Trump made more claims about election fraud. However, this time it came with a new label - “Election officials have certified Joe Biden as the winner of the U.S. Presidential election.”&nbsp;

<div class="ui-state-default" contenteditable="false">
<div class="twitter-block" draggable="false">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
....discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!). There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA. <a href="https://twitter.com/DNI_Ratcliffe?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DNI_Ratcliffe</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/SecPompeo?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SecPompeo</a>
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1340333619299147781?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 19, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></div>
<a class="close-mark close-div" href="#" id="jqclosemark">×</a></div>

According to Twitter, this is a minute addition to its earlier labels, with the goal to provide latest information.&nbsp;

The previous label claimed the following - “Multiple sources called this election differently”.

But things are different now - The electoral college has voted and Biden is looking at the next four years in the White House, making all Trump’s claims misleading.

Facebook too, is doing the same, by labelling posts with a disclaimer.

As US officials investigate the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/explained-what-is-massive-cyberattack-in-us-all-about-350566">hacking</a>&nbsp;of various government departments, President Donald&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/russia-link-as-trump-remains-mum-on-cyber-attack-us-authorities-scamper-to-investigate-350996">Trump</a>&nbsp;said: "everything is well under control".

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/russia-link-as-trump-remains-mum-on-cyber-attack-us-authorities-scamper-to-investigate-350996" hreflang="en">Russia link? As Trump remains mum on cyber attack, US authorities scamper to investigate</a>

The cyber hack is far greater in the fake news media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed," the US President asserted.

"Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be&nbsp;China&nbsp;(it may!)," he said.

Social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have been put under immense pressure to weed out fake news and misinformation, especially to set the stage for a peaceful transition of power from incumbent US President Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.

Social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have been put under immense pressure to weed out fake news and misinformation, especially to set the stage for a peaceful transition of power from incumbent US President Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. Trump has never been shy to show his disdain - on Twitter on in the real world. He has referred to the election results as rigged, without offering any evidence of the same. Earlier, Twitter had begun labelling Trump’s tweets that contained “manipulated media” or carried unverified claims. Since then, Twitter has doubled down on its crackdown on fake news, especially coming from big leaders. Now, the company fact-checked Trump once again. But this time, it went a step further. Also read: Cyber hack 'under control', says Trump; plays down Russia's reported role In a tweet, Trump made more claims about election fraud. However, this time it came with a new label - “Election officials have certified Joe Biden as the winner of the U.S. Presidential election.” ....discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!). There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA. @DNI_Ratcliffe @SecPompeo — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2020 × According to Twitter, this is a minute addition to its earlier labels, with the goal to provide latest information. The previous label claimed the following - “Multiple sources called this election differently”. But things are different now - The electoral college has voted and Biden is looking at the next four years in the White House, making all Trump’s claims misleading. Facebook too, is doing the same, by labelling posts with a disclaimer. As US officials investigate the hacking of various government departments, President Donald Trump said: "everything is well under control". Also read: Russia link? As Trump remains mum on cyber attack, US authorities scamper to investigate The cyber hack is far greater in the fake news media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed," the US President asserted. "Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!)," he said.

Twitter is now declaring Biden as election winner - on Trump's own tweets about fraud

US President-elect Joe Biden has introduced key members of his environmental team -- tasked with fighting against global warming in what can be called a pillar of his drive to rebuild the pandemic-hit US economy.

Biden, a Democrat who will be inaugurated on January 20, has vowed to make tackling climate change a top priority. But with a slim majority in the House of Representatives and control of the Senate still undecided, his agenda may see little success in Congress and instead rely on rules from his regulatory agencies to enact sweeping change.

The nominees introduced Saturday include Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico to&nbsp;be Interior Secretary -- the first Native American to hold a Cabinet position.

Biden said these nominees would lead his administration's ambitious plan&nbsp;to address an existential threat of our time -- climate change.

"Folks, we're in a crisis," Biden said at the event in Wilmington, Delaware. "Just like we need to be a unified nation to respond to Covid-19, we need a unified national response to climate change."

Biden said his administration would work to modernise water, transportation and energy infrastructure to make it better equipped to resist extreme weather conditions -- and create many jobs along the way.

Biden also said he wanted to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations and 1.5 million energy-efficient homes and public housing units.

The president-elect repeated he would rejoin the Paris climate accord, which outgoing president Donald Trump abandoned, and restore a slew of Obama-era environmental regulations.

Biden's team includes Gina McCarthy, Obama's Environmental Protection Agency administrator, to lead a new White House Office of Climate Policy.

He has also tapped Michael Regan, North Carolina's top environmental regulator, to run the Environmental Protection Agency and&nbsp;Brenda Mallory, an environmental attorney, to direct the Council on Environmental Quality.&nbsp;

Biden's Cabinet will feature six African Americans.

Michael Regan would become the first Black man to run the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) if confirmed by the Senate. Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm will be Biden's energy secretary if confirmed.

"Today's nominees are ready on day one, which is essential because we literally have no time to waste," Biden said.

Biden wants the United States to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which would require the world's second-largest emitter to transform its economy including transportation, power generation and farming.

US President-elect Joe Biden has introduced key members of his environmental team -- tasked with fighting against global warming in what can be called a pillar of his drive to rebuild the pandemic-hit US economy.

US President-elect Joe Biden has introduced key members of his environmental team -- tasked with fighting against global warming in what can be called a pillar of his drive to rebuild the pandemic-hit US economy. Biden, a Democrat who will be inaugurated on January 20, has vowed to make tackling climate change a top priority. But with a slim majority in the House of Representatives and control of the Senate still undecided, his agenda may see little success in Congress and instead rely on rules from his regulatory agencies to enact sweeping change. The nominees introduced Saturday include Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico to be Interior Secretary -- the first Native American to hold a Cabinet position. Biden said these nominees would lead his administration's ambitious plan to address an existential threat of our time -- climate change. "Folks, we're in a crisis," Biden said at the event in Wilmington, Delaware. "Just like we need to be a unified nation to respond to Covid-19, we need a unified national response to climate change." Biden said his administration would work to modernise water, transportation and energy infrastructure to make it better equipped to resist extreme weather conditions -- and create many jobs along the way. Biden also said he wanted to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations and 1.5 million energy-efficient homes and public housing units. The president-elect repeated he would rejoin the Paris climate accord, which outgoing president Donald Trump abandoned, and restore a slew of Obama-era environmental regulations. Biden's team includes Gina McCarthy, Obama's Environmental Protection Agency administrator, to lead a new White House Office of Climate Policy. He has also tapped Michael Regan, North Carolina's top environmental regulator, to run the Environmental Protection Agency and Brenda Mallory, an environmental attorney, to direct the Council on Environmental Quality. Biden's Cabinet will feature six African Americans. Michael Regan would become the first Black man to run the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) if confirmed by the Senate. Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm will be Biden's energy secretary if confirmed. "Today's nominees are ready on day one, which is essential because we literally have no time to waste," Biden said. Biden wants the United States to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which would require the world's second-largest emitter to transform its economy including transportation, power generation and farming.

Biden unveils environment team tasked with tackling 'existential threat'

US President-elect Joe Biden has expressed full confidence in his son Hunter after it was revealed last week that he was under a federal tax investigation.

"We have great confidence in our son," Biden said, sitting next to his wife Jill, in an interview on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," which aired Thursday on CBS.

"I am not concerned about any accusations that have been made against him. It used to get to me. I think it's kind of foul play but... as long as he's good, we're good," he said in his first full remarks on the issue since the tax probe became public.&nbsp;

During his unsuccessful re-election campaign, the outgoing president Donald Trump launched repeated attacks at Hunter and said the Bidens were a "corrupt" family and a "criminal enterprise."

Trump's allies have also regularly assailed Hunter for his business dealings in Ukraine and China.

From 2014 to 2019, while his father was vice president, Hunter, a lawyer and lobbyist, served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.

Trump has also accused Biden of seeking the removal of Ukraine's top prosecutor to protect Burisma -- and his son -- from a corruption investigation.

Hunter, 50, now an artist based in Los Angeles, has admitted to displaying "poor judgment" in some of his business dealings, but denied any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Biden had a sincere response when he was asked about Trump.

Colbert asked Biden if there was anything he could "sincerely" thank Trump for accomplishing during his time in the White House.

After a short pause, Biden responded: "There are some things... Getting the vaccine moving has been positive, but by and large, he has been a president who's decided that the way he succeeds is by dividing us."

Biden also said he believes by next Christmas, life in the US will be "awfully close" to normal, "if not there."

US President-elect Joe Biden has expressed full confidence in his son Hunter after it was revealed last week that he was under a federal tax investigation. "We have great confidence in our son," Biden said, sitting next to his wife Jill, in an interview on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," which aired Thursday on CBS.

US President-elect Joe Biden has expressed full confidence in his son Hunter after it was revealed last week that he was under a federal tax investigation. "We have great confidence in our son," Biden said, sitting next to his wife Jill, in an interview on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," which aired Thursday on CBS. "I am not concerned about any accusations that have been made against him. It used to get to me. I think it's kind of foul play but... as long as he's good, we're good," he said in his first full remarks on the issue since the tax probe became public. During his unsuccessful re-election campaign, the outgoing president Donald Trump launched repeated attacks at Hunter and said the Bidens were a "corrupt" family and a "criminal enterprise." Trump's allies have also regularly assailed Hunter for his business dealings in Ukraine and China. From 2014 to 2019, while his father was vice president, Hunter, a lawyer and lobbyist, served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. Trump has also accused Biden of seeking the removal of Ukraine's top prosecutor to protect Burisma -- and his son -- from a corruption investigation. Hunter, 50, now an artist based in Los Angeles, has admitted to displaying "poor judgment" in some of his business dealings, but denied any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Biden had a sincere response when he was asked about Trump. Colbert asked Biden if there was anything he could "sincerely" thank Trump for accomplishing during his time in the White House. After a short pause, Biden responded: "There are some things... Getting the vaccine moving has been positive, but by and large, he has been a president who's decided that the way he succeeds is by dividing us." Biden also said he believes by next Christmas, life in the US will be "awfully close" to normal, "if not there."

Joe Biden backs son Hunter after US tax probe revealed

Hunkered down in what one former White House official called the "presidential man cave" of the Oval Office, President Donald Trump does not want to talk about what lies ahead once he leaves office next month.

Several people familiar with the situation say he knows his time is up even as he presses the fight against the election outcome, despite having failed in a series of court challenges to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election that made Democrat Joe Biden president-elect.

With Monday`s Electoral College vote certifying Biden`s win, White House staff members are looking for jobs and planning their post-administration futures. First lady Melania Trump has looked for a school in Florida, where the couple is expected to reside, for their son Barron, People magazine reported.

A source close to Trump says he does not want to talk about the future beyond his remaining days in office. Any suggestion that he begin laying the groundwork for another run for president in 2024 is shunted aside, at least for now.

"He wants no conversation about what he`s going to do when he leaves the building," the source said, asking for anonymity to speak candidly. "He`s convinced he`s leaving, but he compartmentalizes things. As long as he`s the president, he wants to be the president."

Although an extrovert through his four years in office, Trump has largely closed himself off from the public in recent weeks, communicating mostly through tweets. He has done little to show he is focused on governing other than speaking at an event to highlight the speed of coronavirus vaccine development.

He has not played a significant role in responding to the computer hack that targeted the U.S. government, one administration official said. "This is not his wheelhouse, and it also involves the Russians, which complicates things."

Trump confers with a coterie of advisers including Vice President Mike Pence and chief of staff Mark Meadows, who update him on vaccine distribution and stimulus talks under way in Congress.

NO CONCESSION

The president has brought in members of his campaign team for updates and to urge them to keep fighting. 
His refusal to concede the election is egged on by endless phone conversations with his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and what the former White House official called&nbsp;"a rag-tag collection of lawyers that has kept the torch lit."

Trump has declined to concede the election. He spends long days in and out of the Oval Office, sometimes not retiring to the residence until after 8 p.m., calling allies and aides to discuss strategy. He has spent weekends at his nearby golf property and done one trip to Georgia to campaign for Republican U.S. Senate candidates.

He frequently emphasizes to advisers that he got 74 million votes, 9 million more than Democrat Barack Obama did in his successful re-election bid in 2012. Biden`s 80 million, he tells them, points to fraud.

Trump is irked at his fellow Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for announcing on the U.S. Senate floor this week that he considered Biden the president-elect, two of the sources said.

The sources said Trump has been brushing off aides urging him not to carry out a threat to veto a massive defense bill, because he does not feel like he should reward McConnell for what he regards as bad behavior.

Trump opposes the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act because it does not repeal a law that gives big tech companies liability from lawsuits. Another source said Trump had been advised his veto would be overridden, though some in his circle still advised him to go through with it.

The White House declined to comment.

PARDON RUSH

Trump and his legal team have been preparing a number of potential pardons for him to carry out before leaving office, including for some close allies who may face legal jeopardy, one of the sources said.

Along Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, a cacophony of noise erupts daily from the construction of platforms for Biden`s Inauguration Day events on Jan. 20.

One source said it was hard to imagine Trump showing up for the inaugural ceremonies and sitting behind Biden, having derided his Democratic rival on the campaign trail as incompetent. Trump has declined to say whether he would take part in the long-standing custom of showing the world a peaceful transfer of power.

What comes next for Trump is a matter of speculation.

A source close to Trump said he has in the past toyed with the idea of announcing a 2024 run on Inauguration Day to divert attention from Biden. That person and another source said Trump is being advised to put off an announcement about running again, and instead simply tease the possibility, because being an official candidate would invite a level of scrutiny he might not want.

The former White House official noted that Trump`s musings about running again would only give Democrats fodder to investigate him in years to come.

Trump faces a range of civil and criminal legal actions related to his family’s businesses and his activities before he took office, which could accelerate once he loses the legal protections granted the occupant of the Oval Office.

“If you want to lessen the chances of there being congressional investigations into 2021 and 2022, the best thing he can do for himself would be to stop these trial balloons," the former official said.

Hunkered down in what one former White House official called the "presidential man cave" of the Oval Office, President Donald Trump does not want to talk about what lies ahead once he leaves office next month.

Hunkered down in what one former White House official called the "presidential man cave" of the Oval Office, President Donald Trump does not want to talk about what lies ahead once he leaves office next month. Several people familiar with the situation say he knows his time is up even as he presses the fight against the election outcome, despite having failed in a series of court challenges to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election that made Democrat Joe Biden president-elect. With Monday`s Electoral College vote certifying Biden`s win, White House staff members are looking for jobs and planning their post-administration futures. First lady Melania Trump has looked for a school in Florida, where the couple is expected to reside, for their son Barron, People magazine reported. A source close to Trump says he does not want to talk about the future beyond his remaining days in office. Any suggestion that he begin laying the groundwork for another run for president in 2024 is shunted aside, at least for now. "He wants no conversation about what he`s going to do when he leaves the building," the source said, asking for anonymity to speak candidly. "He`s convinced he`s leaving, but he compartmentalizes things. As long as he`s the president, he wants to be the president." Although an extrovert through his four years in office, Trump has largely closed himself off from the public in recent weeks, communicating mostly through tweets. He has done little to show he is focused on governing other than speaking at an event to highlight the speed of coronavirus vaccine development. He has not played a significant role in responding to the computer hack that targeted the U.S. government, one administration official said. "This is not his wheelhouse, and it also involves the Russians, which complicates things." Trump confers with a coterie of advisers including Vice President Mike Pence and chief of staff Mark Meadows, who update him on vaccine distribution and stimulus talks under way in Congress. NO CONCESSION The president has brought in members of his campaign team for updates and to urge them to keep fighting. His refusal to concede the election is egged on by endless phone conversations with his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and what the former White House official called "a rag-tag collection of lawyers that has kept the torch lit." Trump has declined to concede the election. He spends long days in and out of the Oval Office, sometimes not retiring to the residence until after 8 p.m., calling allies and aides to discuss strategy. He has spent weekends at his nearby golf property and done one trip to Georgia to campaign for Republican U.S. Senate candidates. He frequently emphasizes to advisers that he got 74 million votes, 9 million more than Democrat Barack Obama did in his successful re-election bid in 2012. Biden`s 80 million, he tells them, points to fraud. Trump is irked at his fellow Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for announcing on the U.S. Senate floor this week that he considered Biden the president-elect, two of the sources said. The sources said Trump has been brushing off aides urging him not to carry out a threat to veto a massive defense bill, because he does not feel like he should reward McConnell for what he regards as bad behavior. Trump opposes the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act because it does not repeal a law that gives big tech companies liability from lawsuits. Another source said Trump had been advised his veto would be overridden, though some in his circle still advised him to go through with it. The White House declined to comment. PARDON RUSH Trump and his legal team have been preparing a number of potential pardons for him to carry out before leaving office, including for some close allies who may face legal jeopardy, one of the sources said. Along Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, a cacophony of noise erupts daily from the construction of platforms for Biden`s Inauguration Day events on Jan. 20. One source said it was hard to imagine Trump showing up for the inaugural ceremonies and sitting behind Biden, having derided his Democratic rival on the campaign trail as incompetent. Trump has declined to say whether he would take part in the long-standing custom of showing the world a peaceful transfer of power. What comes next for Trump is a matter of speculation. A source close to Trump said he has in the past toyed with the idea of announcing a 2024 run on Inauguration Day to divert attention from Biden. That person and another source said Trump is being advised to put off an announcement about running again, and instead simply tease the possibility, because being an official candidate would invite a level of scrutiny he might not want. The former White House official noted that Trump`s musings about running again would only give Democrats fodder to investigate him in years to come. Trump faces a range of civil and criminal legal actions related to his family’s businesses and his activities before he took office, which could accelerate once he loses the legal protections granted the occupant of the Oval Office. “If you want to lessen the chances of there being congressional investigations into 2021 and 2022, the best thing he can do for himself would be to stop these trial balloons," the former official said.

Irritated by loss, Trump hunkers down at the White House and avoids talk of future

The outgoing US President <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a> might not be allowed to shift back to his beloved&nbsp;Mar-a-Lago golf club in Palm Beach, Florida after he shifts out from the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/the-white-house">White House</a> in January.

His neighbours have reminded the Trump family they will not be able to shft back to the golf club according to an agreement signed between him and the town in&nbsp;1993.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/irritated-by-loss-trump-hunkers-down-at-the-white-house-and-avoids-talk-of-future-350655">Irritated by loss, Trump hunkers down at the White House and avoids talk of future</a>

As per the agreement, Mar-a-Lago cannot be taken over for personal use of a family as it&nbsp;"is a social club, and no one may reside on the property," the lawyer representing the family said in a letter sent to&nbsp;the town of Palm Beach and the US Secret Service .

"To avoid an embarrassing situation for everyone and to give the president time to make other living arrangements in the area, we trust you will work with his team to remind them of the use agreement parameters," wrote Reginald Stambaugh, the lawyer.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/biden-faces-challenge-as-us-congress-drops-state-aid-to-secure-stimulus-350713" hreflang="en">Biden faces challenge as US Congress drops state aid to secure stimulus</a>

As per several local reports, it has been rumoured that Donald Trump is getting the&nbsp;Sunshine e club ready for his family to move-in. It has also been reported that the former First Lady Melania Trump has started looking schools in Florida best suited for her 14-year-old son Barron Trump.

The club was earlier a private residential estate of an American socialte&nbsp;Marjorie Merriweather Post. Trump bought the land in 1985 and decided to sign an agreement with the town in 1993, setting limitations on the days he can stay at the property in a year — which is&nbsp;three nonconsecutive weeks annually —&nbsp;and other regulations put forth to protect the property from being exploited for personal use.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/joe-biden-backs-son-hunter-after-us-tax-probe-revealed-350659" hreflang="en">Joe Biden backs son Hunter after US tax probe revealed</a>

Palm Beach lawyer has also offered Trump other estates available in the area. "Palm Beach has many lovely estates for sale," his&nbsp;letter read. "Surely he can find one which meets his needs."

The outgoing US President Donald Trump might not be allowed to shift back to his beloved Mar-a-Lago golf club in Palm Beach, Florida after he shifts out from the White House in January.

The outgoing US President Donald Trump might not be allowed to shift back to his beloved Mar-a-Lago golf club in Palm Beach, Florida after he shifts out from the White House in January. His neighbours have reminded the Trump family they will not be able to shft back to the golf club according to an agreement signed between him and the town in 1993. Also read| Irritated by loss, Trump hunkers down at the White House and avoids talk of future As per the agreement, Mar-a-Lago cannot be taken over for personal use of a family as it "is a social club, and no one may reside on the property," the lawyer representing the family said in a letter sent to the town of Palm Beach and the US Secret Service . "To avoid an embarrassing situation for everyone and to give the president time to make other living arrangements in the area, we trust you will work with his team to remind them of the use agreement parameters," wrote Reginald Stambaugh, the lawyer. Also read| Biden faces challenge as US Congress drops state aid to secure stimulus As per several local reports, it has been rumoured that Donald Trump is getting the Sunshine e club ready for his family to move-in. It has also been reported that the former First Lady Melania Trump has started looking schools in Florida best suited for her 14-year-old son Barron Trump. The club was earlier a private residential estate of an American socialte Marjorie Merriweather Post. Trump bought the land in 1985 and decided to sign an agreement with the town in 1993, setting limitations on the days he can stay at the property in a year — which is three nonconsecutive weeks annually — and other regulations put forth to protect the property from being exploited for personal use. Also read| Joe Biden backs son Hunter after US tax probe revealed Palm Beach lawyer has also offered Trump other estates available in the area. "Palm Beach has many lovely estates for sale," his letter read. "Surely he can find one which meets his needs."

Find another house: Mar-a-Lago neighbours warn Donald Trump

Members of Congress on Thursday hurled withering comments and furious questions at two members of the billionaire Sackler family that owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, seeking to use a rare public appearance to extract admissions of personal responsibility for the deadly opioid epidemic as well as details about $10 billion that records show the family withdrew from the company.

The hearing, before the House Oversight Committee, offered a highly unusual opportunity for the public to hear directly from some members of the family, whose company is a defendant in thousands of federal and state lawsuits for misleading marketing of OxyContin, the painkiller seen as initiating a wave of opioid addiction that has led to the deaths of more than 450,000 Americans. Eight members of the family have been individually named in many state cases.

The singularity of the Sacklers’ appearance on Thursday was underscored by the likelihood that they may never testify in open court, because the ongoing bankruptcy proceedings and nationwide litigation may resolve in settlements rather than trials. Despite millions of dollars in legal expenses racked up by plaintiffs and Purdue alike — and the company’s subsequent filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September 2019 — one obstacle to resolution persists: the refusal of the Sacklers to be held personally or criminally responsible and to turn over substantial portions of their fortune.

During the tense, nearly four-hour hearing, David Sackler, 40, and his cousin, Kathe Sackler, 72, who both served on the company’s board for years, testified remotely and largely sidestepped would-be booby traps and deflected blame to “management” and independent, nonfamily board members.

Or, as David Sackler said, “That’s a question for the lawyers.”

Repeatedly, the committee members pitted hard statistics about the destruction from the epidemic against images of the family’s concurrent gains, including a $22.5 million mansion in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, paid for in cash in 2018 — which David Sackler characterized as a trust investment in which he had not spent a single night.

Throughout the session, both Sacklers voiced regret for the role of OxyContin in the epidemic, but not for their own actions during the years that the company, with the board’s oversight and encouragement, aggressively promoted the painkiller.

Indeed Kathe Sackler cast herself as scrupulously concerned about the well-being of patients. “I thought Purdue was acting responsibly to reduce the incidence of abuse and overdose while still serving those in need of pain relief,” she said.

“I have tried to figure out, was there anything that I could have done differently? Knowing what I knew then — not what I know now?” said Kathe Sackler, who served on the board from 1990 to 2018. “There’s nothing that I can find that I would have done differently based on what I believed and understood then.”

She said that what she subsequently learned from management and reports to the board was “extremely distressing.”

David Sackler, who served on the board from 2012 to 2018, echoed a similar sensibility: “I believe I conducted myself legally and ethically and I believe the full record will demonstrate that I still feel absolutely terrible that a product created to help so many people” is associated with death and addiction, he said.

Deeply skeptical committee members asked the Sacklers whether, in fact, they subscribed to newspapers or had access to cable television.

Addressing the Sacklers, Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., said: “Watching you testify makes my blood boil. I’m not aware of any family in America that is more evil than yours.”

Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.V., asked David Sackler whether he had ever visited Appalachia to see the impact of the crisis firsthand.

“Yes,” he replied, though not with the express purpose of fact-finding.

“I visited with my wife for a vacation,” he said.

In the absence of direct admissions of responsibility by the Sacklers — or by Craig Landau, Purdue’s CEO since 2017, who also testified — committee members used their questions to highlight the most egregious actions over the years by the company and by David Sackler’s father, Richard Sackler, a hands-on executive during the cresting period of the epidemic.

In particular, they explored the actions that followed a 2007 federal fine of nearly $635 million that the company and three executives paid after pleading guilty to federal criminal charges of “misbranding.” The settlement included no admission of liability by any of the Sacklers.

The committee chairwoman, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., asked David Sackler whether in 2008, after the company’s federal settlement, the family was concerned about state investigations. David Sackler denied knowing that investigations had been mounting.

But then Maloney read from an email exchange between David Sackler and other relatives in 2007, just a week after that settlement. Referring to courtroom activity, he wrote: “We’re rich? For how long? Until which suits get through to the family?”

She then asked David Sackler: “Were you trying to cash out profit so that opioid victims couldn’t claim them in future losses?”

He replied, “No, I don’t believe that’s what I meant then.”

The committee was able to elicit a commitment from the Sacklers to turn over a list of what Maloney characterized as “offshore shell companies.” According to court documents, between 2008 through 2017, the family withdrew approximately $10 billion from Purdue Pharma.

David Sackler said Thursday that the family had paid about half that amount in taxes.

Landau said that under his tenure, the company has halted its promotion of opioids and has turned its focus toward developing drugs that reverse overdoses.

Three generations of family members have overseen Purdue since the 1950s, when three brothers — including Raymond (David’s grandfather) and Mortimer (Kathe’s father) — founded it. (A third brother, Arthur Sackler, sold his shares long before OxyContin was introduced.) During the opioid epidemic, family members served as Purdue board members, and often took a vigorous hands-on approach in urging the sales department to swarm high-prescribing doctors and downplay the addictive properties of the medication, according to extensive court documents.

Last month, Purdue pleaded guilty to three felonies involving kickbacks and fraud related to promotion of its opioid and failure to report aberrant sales. The Justice Department settled with the company for $8.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties, and family members for $225 million in civil penalties. The Sacklers did not admit any wrongdoing. The amount they paid represents about 2% of the family’s net worth.

Maura Healey, attorney general for Massachusetts, the first state to name individual Sacklers in litigation, said that the Sacklers want “special treatment.” In a letter to the House committee, she wrote, “If we let powerful people cover up the facts, avoid accountability, or create a government-sponsored OxyContin business — that’s not justice. This time, we have to get it right.”

In 2019, congressman Elijah E. Cummings, the now-deceased committee chairman, initiated an investigation into the company and the family to examine whether their actions should lead to potential policy or legislative changes. In October, the committee released a trove of documents, underscoring how individual Sacklers urged the company to rev up sales. The committee sought to bring in numerous Sacklers to testify, which, through their lawyers, they refused to do, saying that the appearances would impede ongoing bankruptcy proceedings.

Committee lawyers threatened to issue subpoenas. After considerable wrangling, the Sacklers agreed to present two of the four family members originally requested.

Members of Congress on Thursday hurled withering comments and furious questions at two members of the billionaire Sackler family that owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, seeking to use a rare public appearance to extract admissions of personal responsibility for the deadly opioid epidemic as well as details about $10 billion that records show the family withdrew from the company.

Members of Congress on Thursday hurled withering comments and furious questions at two members of the billionaire Sackler family that owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, seeking to use a rare public appearance to extract admissions of personal responsibility for the deadly opioid epidemic as well as details about $10 billion that records show the family withdrew from the company. The hearing, before the House Oversight Committee, offered a highly unusual opportunity for the public to hear directly from some members of the family, whose company is a defendant in thousands of federal and state lawsuits for misleading marketing of OxyContin, the painkiller seen as initiating a wave of opioid addiction that has led to the deaths of more than 450,000 Americans. Eight members of the family have been individually named in many state cases. The singularity of the Sacklers’ appearance on Thursday was underscored by the likelihood that they may never testify in open court, because the ongoing bankruptcy proceedings and nationwide litigation may resolve in settlements rather than trials. Despite millions of dollars in legal expenses racked up by plaintiffs and Purdue alike — and the company’s subsequent filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September 2019 — one obstacle to resolution persists: the refusal of the Sacklers to be held personally or criminally responsible and to turn over substantial portions of their fortune. During the tense, nearly four-hour hearing, David Sackler, 40, and his cousin, Kathe Sackler, 72, who both served on the company’s board for years, testified remotely and largely sidestepped would-be booby traps and deflected blame to “management” and independent, nonfamily board members. Or, as David Sackler said, “That’s a question for the lawyers.” Repeatedly, the committee members pitted hard statistics about the destruction from the epidemic against images of the family’s concurrent gains, including a $22.5 million mansion in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, paid for in cash in 2018 — which David Sackler characterized as a trust investment in which he had not spent a single night. Throughout the session, both Sacklers voiced regret for the role of OxyContin in the epidemic, but not for their own actions during the years that the company, with the board’s oversight and encouragement, aggressively promoted the painkiller. Indeed Kathe Sackler cast herself as scrupulously concerned about the well-being of patients. “I thought Purdue was acting responsibly to reduce the incidence of abuse and overdose while still serving those in need of pain relief,” she said. “I have tried to figure out, was there anything that I could have done differently? Knowing what I knew then — not what I know now?” said Kathe Sackler, who served on the board from 1990 to 2018. “There’s nothing that I can find that I would have done differently based on what I believed and understood then.” She said that what she subsequently learned from management and reports to the board was “extremely distressing.” David Sackler, who served on the board from 2012 to 2018, echoed a similar sensibility: “I believe I conducted myself legally and ethically and I believe the full record will demonstrate that I still feel absolutely terrible that a product created to help so many people” is associated with death and addiction, he said. Deeply skeptical committee members asked the Sacklers whether, in fact, they subscribed to newspapers or had access to cable television. Addressing the Sacklers, Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., said: “Watching you testify makes my blood boil. I’m not aware of any family in America that is more evil than yours.” Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.V., asked David Sackler whether he had ever visited Appalachia to see the impact of the crisis firsthand. “Yes,” he replied, though not with the express purpose of fact-finding. “I visited with my wife for a vacation,” he said. In the absence of direct admissions of responsibility by the Sacklers — or by Craig Landau, Purdue’s CEO since 2017, who also testified — committee members used their questions to highlight the most egregious actions over the years by the company and by David Sackler’s father, Richard Sackler, a hands-on executive during the cresting period of the epidemic. In particular, they explored the actions that followed a 2007 federal fine of nearly $635 million that the company and three executives paid after pleading guilty to federal criminal charges of “misbranding.” The settlement included no admission of liability by any of the Sacklers. The committee chairwoman, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., asked David Sackler whether in 2008, after the company’s federal settlement, the family was concerned about state investigations. David Sackler denied knowing that investigations had been mounting. But then Maloney read from an email exchange between David Sackler and other relatives in 2007, just a week after that settlement. Referring to courtroom activity, he wrote: “We’re rich? For how long? Until which suits get through to the family?” She then asked David Sackler: “Were you trying to cash out profit so that opioid victims couldn’t claim them in future losses?” He replied, “No, I don’t believe that’s what I meant then.” The committee was able to elicit a commitment from the Sacklers to turn over a list of what Maloney characterized as “offshore shell companies.” According to court documents, between 2008 through 2017, the family withdrew approximately $10 billion from Purdue Pharma. David Sackler said Thursday that the family had paid about half that amount in taxes. Landau said that under his tenure, the company has halted its promotion of opioids and has turned its focus toward developing drugs that reverse overdoses. Three generations of family members have overseen Purdue since the 1950s, when three brothers — including Raymond (David’s grandfather) and Mortimer (Kathe’s father) — founded it. (A third brother, Arthur Sackler, sold his shares long before OxyContin was introduced.) During the opioid epidemic, family members served as Purdue board members, and often took a vigorous hands-on approach in urging the sales department to swarm high-prescribing doctors and downplay the addictive properties of the medication, according to extensive court documents. Last month, Purdue pleaded guilty to three felonies involving kickbacks and fraud related to promotion of its opioid and failure to report aberrant sales. The Justice Department settled with the company for $8.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties, and family members for $225 million in civil penalties. The Sacklers did not admit any wrongdoing. The amount they paid represents about 2% of the family’s net worth. Maura Healey, attorney general for Massachusetts, the first state to name individual Sacklers in litigation, said that the Sacklers want “special treatment.” In a letter to the House committee, she wrote, “If we let powerful people cover up the facts, avoid accountability, or create a government-sponsored OxyContin business — that’s not justice. This time, we have to get it right.” In 2019, congressman Elijah E. Cummings, the now-deceased committee chairman, initiated an investigation into the company and the family to examine whether their actions should lead to potential policy or legislative changes. In October, the committee released a trove of documents, underscoring how individual Sacklers urged the company to rev up sales. The committee sought to bring in numerous Sacklers to testify, which, through their lawyers, they refused to do, saying that the appearances would impede ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. Committee lawyers threatened to issue subpoenas. After considerable wrangling, the Sacklers agreed to present two of the four family members originally requested.

Sacklers deny personal responsibility for opioid epidemic in House hearing

Twitter Inc has reversed changes made to its retweet function intended to curb the spread of misinformation during the US presidential election.

It said it will no longer prompt quote tweets from the retweet icon. "Retweet functionality will be returning to the way it was before," the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

The microblogging site had in October made it difficult for users to retweet a tweet with misinformation and promoted the use of quote tweets, which included commentary from the user.

It had also imposed curbs including labelling and removal of tweets calling for people to interfere with the election process or implementation of results.

Quote tweets instead of retweets was intended to encourage thoughtful amplification, but that has not happened in practice, the company said.

"The use of Quote Tweets increased, but 45% of them included single-word affirmations and 70% had less than 25 characters," it said.

"The increase in Quote Tweets was also offset by an overall 20% decrease in sharing through both Retweets and Quote Tweets."

Facebook has also, in the past few days, rolled back their algorithm that lifted news from authoritative outlets over hyperpartisan sources after November's election, according to a report in the New York Times.

Twitter Inc has reversed changes made to its retweet function intended to curb the spread of misinformation during the US presidential election. It said it will no longer prompt quote tweets from the retweet icon.

Twitter Inc has reversed changes made to its retweet function intended to curb the spread of misinformation during the US presidential election. It said it will no longer prompt quote tweets from the retweet icon. "Retweet functionality will be returning to the way it was before," the company said in a statement on Wednesday. The microblogging site had in October made it difficult for users to retweet a tweet with misinformation and promoted the use of quote tweets, which included commentary from the user. It had also imposed curbs including labelling and removal of tweets calling for people to interfere with the election process or implementation of results. Quote tweets instead of retweets was intended to encourage thoughtful amplification, but that has not happened in practice, the company said. "The use of Quote Tweets increased, but 45% of them included single-word affirmations and 70% had less than 25 characters," it said. "The increase in Quote Tweets was also offset by an overall 20% decrease in sharing through both Retweets and Quote Tweets." Facebook has also, in the past few days, rolled back their algorithm that lifted news from authoritative outlets over hyperpartisan sources after November's election, according to a report in the New York Times.

Twitter switches back to old retweet function after US election

Two days after the Electoral College confirmed President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, a Senate committee provided a platform Wednesday for another round of specious legal arguments and falsehoods about widespread voter fraud that have been repeatedly rejected by courts across the country.

The hearing was the latest effort by the Republican chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, to amplify the claims and concerns of President Donald Trump. Johnson previously used his committee to investigate Biden’s son, Hunter, and to elevate fringe theories about the coronavirus pandemic.

Though Johnson conceded in his opening remarks that fraudulent voting did not affect the outcome of the election, he said that “lax enforcement, denying effective bipartisan observation of the complete election process, and failure to be fully transparent or conduct reasonable audits has led to heightened suspicion.”

“The fraud happened. The election in many ways was stolen,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said at one point.

Those claims are false. The Trump campaign has failed to provide evidence in a number of lawsuits that Republican observers were barred from witnessing vote tabulating. Recounts and postelection audits in several battleground states have either concluded and reconfirmed . Biden’s victory, or are underway. There is no evidence that the election was “stolen.”

Witnesses called by Johnson included three men — two lawyers for Trump and a Pennsylvania state representative — who have unsuccessfully sought to overturn election results. They also included Ken Starr, who represented Trump during the impeachment hearing this year.

Even as several witnesses insisted there was proof of widespread fraud — and as their claims were echoed in viral posts on social media — Christopher C. Krebs, the former head of the government’s cybersecurity agency, testified that the election was the most secure in American history.

James Troupis, a lawyer for Trump in Wisconsin, claimed that 200,000 people had voted improperly in the state. He argued that accepting absentee ballots in Dane and Milwaukee counties — two Democratic bastions — before Election Day violated state law, and that those votes should be thrown out.

But the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected the case Monday, and a conservative justice said that one of Troupis’ four claims was “meritless” and that time had run out on the other three. Justices also noted during the trial that Troupis was not seeking to throw out ballots in other counties that used the same procedures but that Trump had won.

A Republican member of the state’s elections commission observed this month that the Trump campaign “has not made any claims of fraud in this election” but rather leveled “disputes in matters of law.”

Similarly, Trump’s campaign lawyer in Nevada used the hearing to rehash false claims and arguments rejected by courts in the state. The lawyer, Jesse Binnall, said that the campaign’s experts had identified “130,000 unique instances of voter fraud” in Nevada and that their evidence had “never been refuted, only ignored.”

A district court in Nevada rejected those claims and dismissed the lawsuit this month, and the Nevada Supreme Court upheld that decision last week.

The lower court said that it found “no credible or reliable evidence that the 2020 general election in Nevada was affected by fraud” and that the campaign’s expert testimony “was of little to no value.” Binnall and others on the legal team “did not prove under any standard of proof” their claims about double voting, deceased people voting, and noncitizens and nonresidents voting, the court wrote.

The state’s highest court, in upholding that decision, wrote that it asked the Trump campaign to identify findings from the district court that it took issue with, but “appellants have not pointed to any unsupported factual findings, and we have identified none.”

State Rep. Francis Ryan of Pennsylvania also repeated a number of claims that appeared in Texas’ lawsuit seeking to toss out election results in Pennsylvania and other swing states. The Supreme Court rejected that lawsuit last week.

Ryan said that a data portal initially and erroneously listed 508,112 ballots counted in Philadelphia County despite only 432,873 ballots being issued to voters. He then acknowledged that the 500,000 figure was corrected later.

He also claimed that the state reported that 3.1 million mail-in ballots were sent out, but the number was 2.7 million “the day before the election.” Pennsylvania, in a filing responding to the lawsuit, noted that Ryan’s analysis was “fundamentally faulty” and that the 3.1 million figure included 2.7 million mail-in ballots and 400,000 absentee ballots.

Additionally, Ryan expressed skepticism that more than 1,500 voters reported being more than 100 years old. But that figure includes dozens of instances where a birthday is entered as Jan. 1, 1900, as a placeholder. It is also consistent with reports from the census and the Centers for Disease for Control and Prevention on the number of people that age in Pennsylvania and the United States.

Starr separately argued that Pennsylvania “flagrantly violated” state law in expanding mail-in voting. A lawsuit making the same point was rejected by the state’s Supreme Court, which was then upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Johnson and Starr also cited Democratic officials who had previously raised concerns about election security to suggest that Republicans were being unfairly maligned in their efforts to cast light on the issue.

“I don’t recall the media or anyone else accusing these eight congressional Democrats of indulging in, quote, quackery and conspiracy theories, unquote,” Johnson said as he read passages from three letters written by Democratic senators.

Those three letters were about potential foreign efforts to hack election security software and the involvement of private equity firms in companies that make election equipment.

Starr repeatedly referred to a 2005 commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III that issued a “warning” about mail-in ballots.

But Carter urged the expansion of mail-in voting this year and his foundation, the Carter Center, noted that the 2005 report found “there was little evidence of voter fraud” in places with adequate safeguards.

Krebs cited and debunked a number of false conspiracy theories and rumors, including those advanced by Trump and his allies.

The claim about “a CIA supercomputer and program that were flipping votes throughout the country, and in Georgia specifically” — pushed by Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for Trump — is disproved by the paper ballots, he said.

“You can always go back to the receipts. You can check your math, and Georgia did that three times, and the outcomes were consistent over and over and over again,” Krebs said.

Krebs also addressed a false claim, repeated by Trump, of a 68% error rate in vote counting in Antrim County in Michigan. But that, he said, was based on a misinterpretation of the programming language.

“In fact, it was not that there was 68% of the votes that were errors; it was that the election management system’s logs had recorded 68% of the logs themselves had some sort of alert rate,” Krebs said. “The problem is the report itself doesn’t actually specify any of those errors except for one.”

Krebs added: “We have to stop this. It is undermining confidence in democracy.”

Two days after the Electoral College confirmed President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, a Senate committee provided a platform Wednesday for another round of specious legal arguments and falsehoods about widespread voter fraud that have been repeatedly rejected by courts across the country.

Two days after the Electoral College confirmed President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, a Senate committee provided a platform Wednesday for another round of specious legal arguments and falsehoods about widespread voter fraud that have been repeatedly rejected by courts across the country. The hearing was the latest effort by the Republican chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, to amplify the claims and concerns of President Donald Trump. Johnson previously used his committee to investigate Biden’s son, Hunter, and to elevate fringe theories about the coronavirus pandemic. Though Johnson conceded in his opening remarks that fraudulent voting did not affect the outcome of the election, he said that “lax enforcement, denying effective bipartisan observation of the complete election process, and failure to be fully transparent or conduct reasonable audits has led to heightened suspicion.” “The fraud happened. The election in many ways was stolen,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said at one point. Those claims are false. The Trump campaign has failed to provide evidence in a number of lawsuits that Republican observers were barred from witnessing vote tabulating. Recounts and postelection audits in several battleground states have either concluded and reconfirmed . Biden’s victory, or are underway. There is no evidence that the election was “stolen.” Witnesses called by Johnson included three men — two lawyers for Trump and a Pennsylvania state representative — who have unsuccessfully sought to overturn election results. They also included Ken Starr, who represented Trump during the impeachment hearing this year. Even as several witnesses insisted there was proof of widespread fraud — and as their claims were echoed in viral posts on social media — Christopher C. Krebs, the former head of the government’s cybersecurity agency, testified that the election was the most secure in American history. James Troupis, a lawyer for Trump in Wisconsin, claimed that 200,000 people had voted improperly in the state. He argued that accepting absentee ballots in Dane and Milwaukee counties — two Democratic bastions — before Election Day violated state law, and that those votes should be thrown out. But the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected the case Monday, and a conservative justice said that one of Troupis’ four claims was “meritless” and that time had run out on the other three. Justices also noted during the trial that Troupis was not seeking to throw out ballots in other counties that used the same procedures but that Trump had won. A Republican member of the state’s elections commission observed this month that the Trump campaign “has not made any claims of fraud in this election” but rather leveled “disputes in matters of law.” Similarly, Trump’s campaign lawyer in Nevada used the hearing to rehash false claims and arguments rejected by courts in the state. The lawyer, Jesse Binnall, said that the campaign’s experts had identified “130,000 unique instances of voter fraud” in Nevada and that their evidence had “never been refuted, only ignored.” A district court in Nevada rejected those claims and dismissed the lawsuit this month, and the Nevada Supreme Court upheld that decision last week. The lower court said that it found “no credible or reliable evidence that the 2020 general election in Nevada was affected by fraud” and that the campaign’s expert testimony “was of little to no value.” Binnall and others on the legal team “did not prove under any standard of proof” their claims about double voting, deceased people voting, and noncitizens and nonresidents voting, the court wrote. The state’s highest court, in upholding that decision, wrote that it asked the Trump campaign to identify findings from the district court that it took issue with, but “appellants have not pointed to any unsupported factual findings, and we have identified none.” State Rep. Francis Ryan of Pennsylvania also repeated a number of claims that appeared in Texas’ lawsuit seeking to toss out election results in Pennsylvania and other swing states. The Supreme Court rejected that lawsuit last week. Ryan said that a data portal initially and erroneously listed 508,112 ballots counted in Philadelphia County despite only 432,873 ballots being issued to voters. He then acknowledged that the 500,000 figure was corrected later. He also claimed that the state reported that 3.1 million mail-in ballots were sent out, but the number was 2.7 million “the day before the election.” Pennsylvania, in a filing responding to the lawsuit, noted that Ryan’s analysis was “fundamentally faulty” and that the 3.1 million figure included 2.7 million mail-in ballots and 400,000 absentee ballots. Additionally, Ryan expressed skepticism that more than 1,500 voters reported being more than 100 years old. But that figure includes dozens of instances where a birthday is entered as Jan. 1, 1900, as a placeholder. It is also consistent with reports from the census and the Centers for Disease for Control and Prevention on the number of people that age in Pennsylvania and the United States. Starr separately argued that Pennsylvania “flagrantly violated” state law in expanding mail-in voting. A lawsuit making the same point was rejected by the state’s Supreme Court, which was then upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Johnson and Starr also cited Democratic officials who had previously raised concerns about election security to suggest that Republicans were being unfairly maligned in their efforts to cast light on the issue. “I don’t recall the media or anyone else accusing these eight congressional Democrats of indulging in, quote, quackery and conspiracy theories, unquote,” Johnson said as he read passages from three letters written by Democratic senators. Those three letters were about potential foreign efforts to hack election security software and the involvement of private equity firms in companies that make election equipment. Starr repeatedly referred to a 2005 commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III that issued a “warning” about mail-in ballots. But Carter urged the expansion of mail-in voting this year and his foundation, the Carter Center, noted that the 2005 report found “there was little evidence of voter fraud” in places with adequate safeguards. Krebs cited and debunked a number of false conspiracy theories and rumors, including those advanced by Trump and his allies. The claim about “a CIA supercomputer and program that were flipping votes throughout the country, and in Georgia specifically” — pushed by Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for Trump — is disproved by the paper ballots, he said. “You can always go back to the receipts. You can check your math, and Georgia did that three times, and the outcomes were consistent over and over and over again,” Krebs said. Krebs also addressed a false claim, repeated by Trump, of a 68% error rate in vote counting in Antrim County in Michigan. But that, he said, was based on a misinterpretation of the programming language. “In fact, it was not that there was 68% of the votes that were errors; it was that the election management system’s logs had recorded 68% of the logs themselves had some sort of alert rate,” Krebs said. “The problem is the report itself doesn’t actually specify any of those errors except for one.” Krebs added: “We have to stop this. It is undermining confidence in democracy.”

Senate Committee continues false claims of fraud

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden’s allies have begun an ambitious campaign to raise millions of dollars from corporations and individuals by offering special “VIP participation” in reimagined inaugural festivities that will be largely virtual because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Far fewer tickets than normal are being distributed for people to attend the actual swearing-in ceremony outside the Capitol on Jan. 20, which is organized and funded by the government.

To create an air of celebration, Biden’s inaugural committee said it was raising private funds to pay for virtual events that will echo the Democratic convention this year, which featured a 50-state roll call from spots around the nation. There are also plans for a “virtual concert” with major performers whose names have not yet been released — and possibly for an in-person event later in the year.

The contrast between the constraints of putting on inaugural festivities in the midst of a public health crisis and fundraising as usual underscores how donations to an inaugural are not just about getting good seats for the swearing-in or tickets to the glitziest black-tie balls. They are also a way for corporations and well-heeled individuals to curry favor with a new administration, a reality that prompted liberal groups on Wednesday to ask Biden’s inaugural committee to forgo corporate donations.

President Donald Trump’s inauguration nearly four years ago took the practice to a new level. It became an access-peddling bazaar of sorts, and aspects of its record fundraising and spending emerged as the subjects of investigations.

Biden’s inaugural committee is promising corporations that give up to $1 million and individuals who contribute $500,000 — the largest amounts the committee said it would accept — some form of “VIP participation” in the virtual concert.

This special access is among the perks detailed on a one-page sponsorship menu from the committee that circulated among donors Wednesday. Perks include “event sponsorship opportunities,” as well as access to virtual briefings with leaders of the inaugural committee and campaign, and invitations to virtual events with Biden and his wife Jill, the future first lady, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff.

Top donors will also get a fitting memento for the coronavirus era — “virtual signed photos” with the president-elect and the first lady, as well as Harris and her husband, replacing the traditional in-person rope-line photo opportunities for which donors usually pay handsomely at fundraisers and other political events.

Incoming presidents have long raised private funds to organize and pay for inaugural festivities beyond the swearing-in ceremony, which is hosted by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies and funded with taxpayer money.

Top donors typically get intimate in-person access at parties and dinners to celebrate with members of an incoming president’s campaign and administration.

Among the corporate giants who have indicated they are ready to donate despite the lack of in-person events is Boeing, the aerospace manufacturer and military contractor. The company is contributing $1 million to Biden’s inauguration, an amount it said is consistent with its past contributions to inaugural committees. Representatives from Bank of America and Ford Motor Co. also said their companies intended to donate.

“We have supported inauguration events over many administrations on a nonpartisan basis because we view it as part of our civic commitment for an important national event,” Bill Halldin, a spokesman for Bank of America, said in a statement. “The private sector has traditionally done so and we expect to provide support for ceremonies in January as appropriate, given the health crisis and other factors that may impact it.”

A number of corporations that have been major donors to past presidential inaugurations — like Coca-Cola, Google and United Parcel Service — said this week that they still had not decided how much, or whether, to donate, though Google noted it had provided “online security protections for free” to the inaugural committee.

“As you know this is a very different year and as such we have not yet made a decision,” Ann Moore, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola, said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for the investment bank JPMorgan Chase, which has donated to past inaugurations, said that instead of giving to Biden’s committee, it would be donating to food banks in Washington and the hometowns of Biden (Wilmington, Delaware) and Harris (Oakland, California) “to help those impacted by the pandemic.”

An inauguration spokesman would not say how much had already been raised, or what the fundraising goal was.

Funds raised for inaugurations cannot be transferred to federal campaigns or party committees. Past inaugural committees have donated unspent funds to charities including those engaged in disaster relief, as well as groups involved in decorating and maintaining the White House and the vice president’s residence.

The effort by Biden’s inaugural committee to raise funds from corporate donors prompted puzzlement and objections from liberal activists, who have expressed concern about what they see as the Biden team’s coziness with corporate interests.

A coalition of about 50 liberal groups released a letter to the inaugural committee Wednesday, urging it to forgo donations from corporations to prevent them “from wielding undue influence,” and questioning the need for such donations, given the likelihood that Biden’s inauguration would cost less than previous inaugurations.

“The drive to raise so much money without a clear use for it is perplexing, and the appearance of doing so is disconcerting,” said the letter, which was organized by Demand Progress, a group that has also urged Biden not to hire corporate executives and consultants or lobbyists.

Federal law does not require the disclosure of donations to inaugural committees until 90 days after the event, and limited disclosures about expenditures are not required until months after that. But the Biden inaugural committee said it intends to disclose the names of at least its larger donors before Jan. 20.

There are no legal limits on the sizes of donations that inaugural committees can accept, and there are few restrictions on who can give.

Biden’s inaugural committee announced last month that it would voluntarily forgo donations from fossil fuel companies, registered lobbyists and foreign agents, in addition to limiting corporate donations to $1 million and individual donations to $500,000.

Those restrictions are less stringent than the ones adopted by former President Barack Obama for his 2009 inauguration. His inaugural committee refused corporate donations and said it limited individual donations to $50,000, though he loosened the rules for his second inauguration in 2013.

While Trump’s team said it would not accept contributions from lobbyists for his 2017 inauguration, its fundraising was otherwise mostly unrestricted, resulting in a record $107 million haul.

The Biden team has released few specifics regarding plans for the inauguration, other than a statement Tuesday urging people not to travel to Washington to attend the event given the pandemic and noting that the “ceremony’s footprint will be extremely limited.”

In an expression of just how unusual the event will be, the Biden inaugural committee named Dr. David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, as an adviser to help with decisions on what kinds of events it can hold.

“We are asking Americans to participate in inaugural events from home to protect themselves, their families, friends and communities,” Kessler said in a statement.

In a typical inauguration year, a congressional committee that organizes the swearing-in ceremony typically distributes 200,000 tickets to lawmakers for seats on the platform, risers and seating close to the West Front of the Capitol, which are then distributed to constituents and friends who want to attend.

But this year, the committee announced it would give just two tickets to the outdoor festivities to each of the 535 members of Congress, for them and a guest to attend.

Beyond this event, it is largely up to the Biden inauguration committee, where officials have said in recent days they are still working to “reimagine” and “reinvent” the inauguration.

There will still be some kind of an inauguration parade, but it will be considerably pared down and will most likely feature video or live shots of groups performing from spots across the country.

The inaugural committee this week disclosed that it had retained Ricky Kirshner, a New York-based entertainment industry television and events producer. His past experience includes the Super Bowl halftime show this year that featured Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, as well as past Tony Awards and Kennedy Center Honors events, and the largely virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, among many other events.

Major donors will also get “VIP tickets” to some kind of future event to celebrate the start of the new administration in person, according to the one-page menu of donor perks.

But given the continued uncertainty associated with the pandemic, that event is listed as “date to be determined.”

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden’s allies have begun an ambitious campaign to raise millions of dollars from corporations and individuals by offering special “VIP participation” in reimagined inaugural festivities that will be largely virtual because of the coronavirus pandemic.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden’s allies have begun an ambitious campaign to raise millions of dollars from corporations and individuals by offering special “VIP participation” in reimagined inaugural festivities that will be largely virtual because of the coronavirus pandemic. Far fewer tickets than normal are being distributed for people to attend the actual swearing-in ceremony outside the Capitol on Jan. 20, which is organized and funded by the government. To create an air of celebration, Biden’s inaugural committee said it was raising private funds to pay for virtual events that will echo the Democratic convention this year, which featured a 50-state roll call from spots around the nation. There are also plans for a “virtual concert” with major performers whose names have not yet been released — and possibly for an in-person event later in the year. The contrast between the constraints of putting on inaugural festivities in the midst of a public health crisis and fundraising as usual underscores how donations to an inaugural are not just about getting good seats for the swearing-in or tickets to the glitziest black-tie balls. They are also a way for corporations and well-heeled individuals to curry favor with a new administration, a reality that prompted liberal groups on Wednesday to ask Biden’s inaugural committee to forgo corporate donations. President Donald Trump’s inauguration nearly four years ago took the practice to a new level. It became an access-peddling bazaar of sorts, and aspects of its record fundraising and spending emerged as the subjects of investigations. Biden’s inaugural committee is promising corporations that give up to $1 million and individuals who contribute $500,000 — the largest amounts the committee said it would accept — some form of “VIP participation” in the virtual concert. This special access is among the perks detailed on a one-page sponsorship menu from the committee that circulated among donors Wednesday. Perks include “event sponsorship opportunities,” as well as access to virtual briefings with leaders of the inaugural committee and campaign, and invitations to virtual events with Biden and his wife Jill, the future first lady, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff. Top donors will also get a fitting memento for the coronavirus era — “virtual signed photos” with the president-elect and the first lady, as well as Harris and her husband, replacing the traditional in-person rope-line photo opportunities for which donors usually pay handsomely at fundraisers and other political events. Incoming presidents have long raised private funds to organize and pay for inaugural festivities beyond the swearing-in ceremony, which is hosted by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies and funded with taxpayer money. Top donors typically get intimate in-person access at parties and dinners to celebrate with members of an incoming president’s campaign and administration. Among the corporate giants who have indicated they are ready to donate despite the lack of in-person events is Boeing, the aerospace manufacturer and military contractor. The company is contributing $1 million to Biden’s inauguration, an amount it said is consistent with its past contributions to inaugural committees. Representatives from Bank of America and Ford Motor Co. also said their companies intended to donate. “We have supported inauguration events over many administrations on a nonpartisan basis because we view it as part of our civic commitment for an important national event,” Bill Halldin, a spokesman for Bank of America, said in a statement. “The private sector has traditionally done so and we expect to provide support for ceremonies in January as appropriate, given the health crisis and other factors that may impact it.” A number of corporations that have been major donors to past presidential inaugurations — like Coca-Cola, Google and United Parcel Service — said this week that they still had not decided how much, or whether, to donate, though Google noted it had provided “online security protections for free” to the inaugural committee. “As you know this is a very different year and as such we have not yet made a decision,” Ann Moore, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola, said in a statement. A spokeswoman for the investment bank JPMorgan Chase, which has donated to past inaugurations, said that instead of giving to Biden’s committee, it would be donating to food banks in Washington and the hometowns of Biden (Wilmington, Delaware) and Harris (Oakland, California) “to help those impacted by the pandemic.” An inauguration spokesman would not say how much had already been raised, or what the fundraising goal was. Funds raised for inaugurations cannot be transferred to federal campaigns or party committees. Past inaugural committees have donated unspent funds to charities including those engaged in disaster relief, as well as groups involved in decorating and maintaining the White House and the vice president’s residence. The effort by Biden’s inaugural committee to raise funds from corporate donors prompted puzzlement and objections from liberal activists, who have expressed concern about what they see as the Biden team’s coziness with corporate interests. A coalition of about 50 liberal groups released a letter to the inaugural committee Wednesday, urging it to forgo donations from corporations to prevent them “from wielding undue influence,” and questioning the need for such donations, given the likelihood that Biden’s inauguration would cost less than previous inaugurations. “The drive to raise so much money without a clear use for it is perplexing, and the appearance of doing so is disconcerting,” said the letter, which was organized by Demand Progress, a group that has also urged Biden not to hire corporate executives and consultants or lobbyists. Federal law does not require the disclosure of donations to inaugural committees until 90 days after the event, and limited disclosures about expenditures are not required until months after that. But the Biden inaugural committee said it intends to disclose the names of at least its larger donors before Jan. 20. There are no legal limits on the sizes of donations that inaugural committees can accept, and there are few restrictions on who can give. Biden’s inaugural committee announced last month that it would voluntarily forgo donations from fossil fuel companies, registered lobbyists and foreign agents, in addition to limiting corporate donations to $1 million and individual donations to $500,000. Those restrictions are less stringent than the ones adopted by former President Barack Obama for his 2009 inauguration. His inaugural committee refused corporate donations and said it limited individual donations to $50,000, though he loosened the rules for his second inauguration in 2013. While Trump’s team said it would not accept contributions from lobbyists for his 2017 inauguration, its fundraising was otherwise mostly unrestricted, resulting in a record $107 million haul. The Biden team has released few specifics regarding plans for the inauguration, other than a statement Tuesday urging people not to travel to Washington to attend the event given the pandemic and noting that the “ceremony’s footprint will be extremely limited.” In an expression of just how unusual the event will be, the Biden inaugural committee named Dr. David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, as an adviser to help with decisions on what kinds of events it can hold. “We are asking Americans to participate in inaugural events from home to protect themselves, their families, friends and communities,” Kessler said in a statement. In a typical inauguration year, a congressional committee that organizes the swearing-in ceremony typically distributes 200,000 tickets to lawmakers for seats on the platform, risers and seating close to the West Front of the Capitol, which are then distributed to constituents and friends who want to attend. But this year, the committee announced it would give just two tickets to the outdoor festivities to each of the 535 members of Congress, for them and a guest to attend. Beyond this event, it is largely up to the Biden inauguration committee, where officials have said in recent days they are still working to “reimagine” and “reinvent” the inauguration. There will still be some kind of an inauguration parade, but it will be considerably pared down and will most likely feature video or live shots of groups performing from spots across the country. The inaugural committee this week disclosed that it had retained Ricky Kirshner, a New York-based entertainment industry television and events producer. His past experience includes the Super Bowl halftime show this year that featured Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, as well as past Tony Awards and Kennedy Center Honors events, and the largely virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, among many other events. Major donors will also get “VIP tickets” to some kind of future event to celebrate the start of the new administration in person, according to the one-page menu of donor perks. But given the continued uncertainty associated with the pandemic, that event is listed as “date to be determined.”

Biden’s inaugural will be mostly virtual, but money from donors will be real

I was speaking recently to Matt Dunne, founder of the Center on Rural Innovation, which promotes digital economic development in small-town America, and he was telling me about a Vermont community near his home with a great public library: “You could drive by on any Sunday and the parking lot would be full,” he said. “There was just one problem: The library was closed on Sundays.”

The parking lot was full of cars with kids doing their homework and adults doing their office work — using the wireless connectivity spilling out of the empty building because their rural homes lacked high-speed broadband. Alas, stories abound of rural Americans going to Subway sandwich shops and Dairy Queens in search of free Wi-Fi.

And that is why I want to talk today about Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

Harris is too smart and energetic to be just the vice president, a position with few official responsibilities. I’d love to see President-elect Joe Biden give her a more important job: his de facto secretary of rural development, in charge of closing the opportunity gap, the connectivity gap, the learning gap, the startup gap — and the anger and alienation gap — between rural America and the rest of the country.

President Donald Trump feasted off those gaps in our last two presidential elections to dominate Democrats in rural America. Putting Harris in charge of fixing them would be a real statement by the Biden team.

It would provide a vision for American renewal and signal that Democrats were no longer going to cede rural America to Republicans but were instead going to seize it from them. And it would make Harris a super-relevant vice president from Day 1.

Democrats must not kid themselves. Biden won this election by narrowly winning the suburbs and urban centers in key battleground states, where just enough people decided that they wanted to “de-Trump” the White House but not “defund” the police.

That is, a lot of suburban voters rejected Trump personally but also rejected far-left Democratic ideas that had percolated up in the past few years. Democrats won the presidency but took a beating from those same suburban voters in many statehouse, U.S. House and U.S. Senate races.

If Democrats go into 2022 — let alone 2024 — appealing only on the cities and suburbs, they’re crazy. They will be highly vulnerable if the GOP is led by a smarter, less offensive populist than Donald Trump.

Most important, lifting rural America is the right thing to do for all of America and fulfills Biden’s vision of a nation that “grows together” in every way.

That concept remains in the DNA of the Democratic Party, which in my home state, Minnesota, is still known as the “DFL” — the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The party needs to reconstitute that coalition.

“One way to do that is by reconnecting with its populist roots — when it really was a party focused on the empowerment of workers and farmers and ordinary citizens,” argued Harvard’s Michael Sandel, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” “Trump gave populism a bad name. Democrats should provide an alternative to Trump’s xenophobic, plutocratic populism by showing how populism can be a source of civic activism, engagement and renewal across urban and rural America.”

That should be Harris’ mission, and it’s one worthy of a vice president. And it starts in rural America.

“I fear the word ‘rural’ connotes a geography that is not my problem,” Beth Ford, president of Land O’Lakes, the influential farmer-owned cooperative headquartered in Minnesota, said to me. But, in fact, spreading connectivity and technology to rural America “is an American issue, an American competitiveness issue and an American national security issue,” she argued.

Persistent “underinvestment in rural America will leave us less secure and less prosperous as a nation” — and less competitive with China, which is rapidly connecting its rural heartland, Ford said. “Some 35% of farmers lack enough bandwidth to run the equipment on their farms, ensure their kids get a good education and that Grandma has access to telemedicine.”

What should a Biden-Harris rural strategy look like? It would start with showing up regularly. “Showing up” and “just listening to people” with respect goes a long way in rural America, Emily Larson, the mayor of Duluth, Minnesota, told me. Actually, nothing earns more respect than listening to people respectfully.

“Rural areas have their own social networks,” Larson said, but they’re different from the metropolitan ones. “Here, people will show up for you in the middle of the night, but they don’t post about it on Facebook.”

On policy specifics, the Biden-Harris team should commit that in four years every rural community in America will have access to broadband — the basic infrastructure needed for an inclusive modern economy.

Dunne suggests a new federal loan program that would offer 50-year, no-interest loans to communities and co-ops (and ease regulations) so rural public-private coalitions can build broadband networks with a minimum 100 megabits per second of speed for downloading and uploading all kinds of remote learning tools, work tools and telehealth tools. Rep. James Clyburn has already won passage of a bill in the House with a similar approach.

Traveling with Dunne last year to Red Wing, Minnesota, to see how gigabit networks can support high-tech startups and traditional farmers, I wrote about a couple of inventors we met who had created a robotic rooster that patrols the poultry house for dead birds and tills the bedding, but with an unexpected byproduct: The birds exercise more and gain weight faster, because they are constantly running away from or pecking at the robot.

While these “Poultry Patrol” robots work autonomously 80% of the time, said Dunne, “there are significant periods when they need to be remotely operated and receive coding updates from afar, which is only possible with very fast broadband.”

But while better connectivity is necessary, it’s not sufficient. “We also need to ensure investment in digital skills training in rural communities and incentives for tech companies to hire remote workers in small towns,” added Dunne. “Today rural America represents 15% of the nation’s workforce, but only 5% of digital economy jobs of the future. But the pandemic has opened people’s eyes to the idea that digital economy jobs can be created anywhere.”

Kamala Harris is a natural for that task. Who better to bridge Silicon Valley and the rural valleys of America?

She is also a natural bridge builder to a more inclusive American heartland, because &lt;em&gt;rural America is not white America.&lt;/em&gt; According to a report by the Urban Institute, “1 in 5 Americans lives in rural communities, and more than one in five (22%) rural residents are people of color.” I wrote last year about Willmar, Minnesota, a town that was all white back in the 1950s and today is nearly half Hispanic, Somali, Asian and Native American.

In Minnesota, small towns like Willmar that can manage inclusion and diversity are the ones now thriving, because they can attract new labor and homebuyers when so many of the young white adults have left for the big cities.

Harris will soon be the first woman, the first Black and the first Indian American vice president, which certainly resonates with a lot of urban voters. However, if she could make herself the person in the Biden cabinet who always shows up FIRST to listen in rural America and the FIRST to appreciate its concerns and the FIRST to make sure its concerns are addressed, she and the Democrats could make themselves competitive in a lot more rural counties.

Even if it is just 10 or 15% more competitive, it might be enough to deprive today’s deeply warped Trump-led GOP from taking back the White House or the House in the next four years — and maybe force it back to sanity. The Republican Party needs shock therapy, and nothing would shock this GOP more than losing its automatic hold on rural America.

I was speaking recently to Matt Dunne, founder of the Center on Rural Innovation, which promotes digital economic development in small-town America, and he was telling me about a Vermont community near his home with a great public library: “You could drive by on any Sunday and the parking lot would be full,” he said.

I was speaking recently to Matt Dunne, founder of the Center on Rural Innovation, which promotes digital economic development in small-town America, and he was telling me about a Vermont community near his home with a great public library: “You could drive by on any Sunday and the parking lot would be full,” he said. “There was just one problem: The library was closed on Sundays.” The parking lot was full of cars with kids doing their homework and adults doing their office work — using the wireless connectivity spilling out of the empty building because their rural homes lacked high-speed broadband. Alas, stories abound of rural Americans going to Subway sandwich shops and Dairy Queens in search of free Wi-Fi. And that is why I want to talk today about Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Harris is too smart and energetic to be just the vice president, a position with few official responsibilities. I’d love to see President-elect Joe Biden give her a more important job: his de facto secretary of rural development, in charge of closing the opportunity gap, the connectivity gap, the learning gap, the startup gap — and the anger and alienation gap — between rural America and the rest of the country. President Donald Trump feasted off those gaps in our last two presidential elections to dominate Democrats in rural America. Putting Harris in charge of fixing them would be a real statement by the Biden team. It would provide a vision for American renewal and signal that Democrats were no longer going to cede rural America to Republicans but were instead going to seize it from them. And it would make Harris a super-relevant vice president from Day 1. Democrats must not kid themselves. Biden won this election by narrowly winning the suburbs and urban centers in key battleground states, where just enough people decided that they wanted to “de-Trump” the White House but not “defund” the police. That is, a lot of suburban voters rejected Trump personally but also rejected far-left Democratic ideas that had percolated up in the past few years. Democrats won the presidency but took a beating from those same suburban voters in many statehouse, U.S. House and U.S. Senate races. If Democrats go into 2022 — let alone 2024 — appealing only on the cities and suburbs, they’re crazy. They will be highly vulnerable if the GOP is led by a smarter, less offensive populist than Donald Trump. Most important, lifting rural America is the right thing to do for all of America and fulfills Biden’s vision of a nation that “grows together” in every way. That concept remains in the DNA of the Democratic Party, which in my home state, Minnesota, is still known as the “DFL” — the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The party needs to reconstitute that coalition. “One way to do that is by reconnecting with its populist roots — when it really was a party focused on the empowerment of workers and farmers and ordinary citizens,” argued Harvard’s Michael Sandel, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” “Trump gave populism a bad name. Democrats should provide an alternative to Trump’s xenophobic, plutocratic populism by showing how populism can be a source of civic activism, engagement and renewal across urban and rural America.” That should be Harris’ mission, and it’s one worthy of a vice president. And it starts in rural America. “I fear the word ‘rural’ connotes a geography that is not my problem,” Beth Ford, president of Land O’Lakes, the influential farmer-owned cooperative headquartered in Minnesota, said to me. But, in fact, spreading connectivity and technology to rural America “is an American issue, an American competitiveness issue and an American national security issue,” she argued. Persistent “underinvestment in rural America will leave us less secure and less prosperous as a nation” — and less competitive with China, which is rapidly connecting its rural heartland, Ford said. “Some 35% of farmers lack enough bandwidth to run the equipment on their farms, ensure their kids get a good education and that Grandma has access to telemedicine.” What should a Biden-Harris rural strategy look like? It would start with showing up regularly. “Showing up” and “just listening to people” with respect goes a long way in rural America, Emily Larson, the mayor of Duluth, Minnesota, told me. Actually, nothing earns more respect than listening to people respectfully. “Rural areas have their own social networks,” Larson said, but they’re different from the metropolitan ones. “Here, people will show up for you in the middle of the night, but they don’t post about it on Facebook.” On policy specifics, the Biden-Harris team should commit that in four years every rural community in America will have access to broadband — the basic infrastructure needed for an inclusive modern economy. Dunne suggests a new federal loan program that would offer 50-year, no-interest loans to communities and co-ops (and ease regulations) so rural public-private coalitions can build broadband networks with a minimum 100 megabits per second of speed for downloading and uploading all kinds of remote learning tools, work tools and telehealth tools. Rep. James Clyburn has already won passage of a bill in the House with a similar approach. Traveling with Dunne last year to Red Wing, Minnesota, to see how gigabit networks can support high-tech startups and traditional farmers, I wrote about a couple of inventors we met who had created a robotic rooster that patrols the poultry house for dead birds and tills the bedding, but with an unexpected byproduct: The birds exercise more and gain weight faster, because they are constantly running away from or pecking at the robot. While these “Poultry Patrol” robots work autonomously 80% of the time, said Dunne, “there are significant periods when they need to be remotely operated and receive coding updates from afar, which is only possible with very fast broadband.” But while better connectivity is necessary, it’s not sufficient. “We also need to ensure investment in digital skills training in rural communities and incentives for tech companies to hire remote workers in small towns,” added Dunne. “Today rural America represents 15% of the nation’s workforce, but only 5% of digital economy jobs of the future. But the pandemic has opened people’s eyes to the idea that digital economy jobs can be created anywhere.” Kamala Harris is a natural for that task. Who better to bridge Silicon Valley and the rural valleys of America? She is also a natural bridge builder to a more inclusive American heartland, because rural America is not white America. According to a report by the Urban Institute, “1 in 5 Americans lives in rural communities, and more than one in five (22%) rural residents are people of color.” I wrote last year about Willmar, Minnesota, a town that was all white back in the 1950s and today is nearly half Hispanic, Somali, Asian and Native American. In Minnesota, small towns like Willmar that can manage inclusion and diversity are the ones now thriving, because they can attract new labor and homebuyers when so many of the young white adults have left for the big cities. Harris will soon be the first woman, the first Black and the first Indian American vice president, which certainly resonates with a lot of urban voters. However, if she could make herself the person in the Biden cabinet who always shows up FIRST to listen in rural America and the FIRST to appreciate its concerns and the FIRST to make sure its concerns are addressed, she and the Democrats could make themselves competitive in a lot more rural counties. Even if it is just 10 or 15% more competitive, it might be enough to deprive today’s deeply warped Trump-led GOP from taking back the White House or the House in the next four years — and maybe force it back to sanity. The Republican Party needs shock therapy, and nothing would shock this GOP more than losing its automatic hold on rural America.

Kamala Harris deserves a more important job

WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders scrambled Tuesday to reach agreement on a stimulus bill and a catchall omnibus financing package to keep government funding flowing, meeting to try to hammer out critical spending deals before a Friday deadline.

The meeting of the top two Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate were the first in-person spending talks in months for the leaders, with a final deal still elusive on both the dozen must-pass spending bills and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic aid for individuals and businesses struggling amid the pandemic, and to fund the distribution of a vaccine.

It took place in the Capitol office suite of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who hosted Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and the Republican leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California.

The group met for a little under an hour to discuss how to resolve their differences before government funding is scheduled to lapse at week’s end, agreeing to reconvene later in the evening for a second session, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin joined the session by phone, after speaking separately with Pelosi for more than an hour.

Leaving the meeting, McCarthy signaled some degree of optimism, saying, “We’re continuing to work,” and, “I think there’s progress.”

The four leaders have agreed that any additional pandemic aid should be wrapped into the year-end spending measure, and that Congress should not adjourn without approving some pandemic relief as COVID-19 cases continue to rise across the country and the government works to distribute the vaccine to essential workers and others.

Even if Congress were to pass a bill this week, it may not be in time to prevent millions of Americans from going weeks with no source of income, given that many state unemployment offices have already programmed their systems to cut off benefits after next week, when the current pandemic programs expire.

Reinstating the benefits in those states will take time, especially because the plan being considered by Congress would make several technical changes to the programs, which the Labor Department must then incorporate into formal regulations, said Elizabeth Pancotti, a policy adviser for Employ America, an advocacy group. The Christmas and New Year’s holidays, when state offices are shut, will add further delays, she warned, though workers would eventually receive back pay for the weeks where their benefits lapsed.

There are still hurdles to a final agreement, particularly without a bipartisan consensus on the two thorniest policy impediments: a Democratic demand for additional aid to support state and local governments and a Republican push for sweeping liability protections for businesses, hospitals, schools and other institutions open during the pandemic.

It was unclear whether leaders of either party would embrace a $748 billion version proposed on Monday by a group of moderates in both parties, which separated out $160 billion for state and local governments and coronavirus liability protections for businesses and other entities, leaving them for another bill.

Before the meeting Tuesday, McConnell pointed to the bifurcated plan as he continued to push for lawmakers to jettison the two items and approve a narrow package with money for vaccine distribution, unemployment funds and help for schools and small businesses. After months of insisting that a sweeping liability shield was a “red line” for another package, McConnell said again that he was willing to drop the demand if Democrats would agree to abandon their top priority, as well.

“We all know the new administration is going to be asking for yet another package,” McConnell said at a weekly news conference. “It’s not like we won’t have another opportunity to debate the merits of liability reform and of state and local government in the very near future.”

Even if the four leaders were to reach an agreement, it would most likely face hurdles among some rank-and-file lawmakers, as Republicans chafe at the prospect of spending billions of dollars in taxpayer funds and Democrats argue that an agreement amounting to less than $1 trillion would be insufficient.

Some lawmakers are also mounting a pressure campaign to include direct payments for all working Americans in the stimulus deal. Two senators, Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have threatened to hold up the broader government funding bill if Congress failed to ensure that Americans receive payments of $1,200 per adult and $500 per child in the stimulus measure.

In a letter sent to the leaders, liberal Democratic lawmakers, led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Ro Khanna and Katie Porter, both of California, argued that such payments “are a crucial part of any COVID relief package.” They pressed for at least $2,000 in direct payments and at least six months of unemployment benefits, including enhanced supplemental benefits that expired earlier this year.

“There is absolutely no reason why we can’t put the direct payments in, and dare the Senate to take them out,” Jayapal said.

The White House has voiced support for another round of direct payments, and Mnuchin’s included a $600 stimulus check in his latest offer to Pelosi. But Democrats panned that $916 billion proposal because it failed to revive supplemental unemployment benefits that lapsed over the summer.

“I’m not going to say if that’s a red line or not,” Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said when pressed on whether President Donald Trump would approve a stimulus package without direct payments. “We’re hopeful there is a deal there that the president can then look at and support.”

WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders scrambled Tuesday to reach agreement on a stimulus bill and a catchall omnibus financing package to keep government funding flowing, meeting to try to hammer out critical spending deals before a Friday deadline.

WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders scrambled Tuesday to reach agreement on a stimulus bill and a catchall omnibus financing package to keep government funding flowing, meeting to try to hammer out critical spending deals before a Friday deadline. The meeting of the top two Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate were the first in-person spending talks in months for the leaders, with a final deal still elusive on both the dozen must-pass spending bills and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic aid for individuals and businesses struggling amid the pandemic, and to fund the distribution of a vaccine. It took place in the Capitol office suite of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who hosted Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and the Republican leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. The group met for a little under an hour to discuss how to resolve their differences before government funding is scheduled to lapse at week’s end, agreeing to reconvene later in the evening for a second session, according to a person familiar with the plans. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin joined the session by phone, after speaking separately with Pelosi for more than an hour. Leaving the meeting, McCarthy signaled some degree of optimism, saying, “We’re continuing to work,” and, “I think there’s progress.” The four leaders have agreed that any additional pandemic aid should be wrapped into the year-end spending measure, and that Congress should not adjourn without approving some pandemic relief as COVID-19 cases continue to rise across the country and the government works to distribute the vaccine to essential workers and others. Even if Congress were to pass a bill this week, it may not be in time to prevent millions of Americans from going weeks with no source of income, given that many state unemployment offices have already programmed their systems to cut off benefits after next week, when the current pandemic programs expire. Reinstating the benefits in those states will take time, especially because the plan being considered by Congress would make several technical changes to the programs, which the Labor Department must then incorporate into formal regulations, said Elizabeth Pancotti, a policy adviser for Employ America, an advocacy group. The Christmas and New Year’s holidays, when state offices are shut, will add further delays, she warned, though workers would eventually receive back pay for the weeks where their benefits lapsed. There are still hurdles to a final agreement, particularly without a bipartisan consensus on the two thorniest policy impediments: a Democratic demand for additional aid to support state and local governments and a Republican push for sweeping liability protections for businesses, hospitals, schools and other institutions open during the pandemic. It was unclear whether leaders of either party would embrace a $748 billion version proposed on Monday by a group of moderates in both parties, which separated out $160 billion for state and local governments and coronavirus liability protections for businesses and other entities, leaving them for another bill. Before the meeting Tuesday, McConnell pointed to the bifurcated plan as he continued to push for lawmakers to jettison the two items and approve a narrow package with money for vaccine distribution, unemployment funds and help for schools and small businesses. After months of insisting that a sweeping liability shield was a “red line” for another package, McConnell said again that he was willing to drop the demand if Democrats would agree to abandon their top priority, as well. “We all know the new administration is going to be asking for yet another package,” McConnell said at a weekly news conference. “It’s not like we won’t have another opportunity to debate the merits of liability reform and of state and local government in the very near future.” Even if the four leaders were to reach an agreement, it would most likely face hurdles among some rank-and-file lawmakers, as Republicans chafe at the prospect of spending billions of dollars in taxpayer funds and Democrats argue that an agreement amounting to less than $1 trillion would be insufficient. Some lawmakers are also mounting a pressure campaign to include direct payments for all working Americans in the stimulus deal. Two senators, Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have threatened to hold up the broader government funding bill if Congress failed to ensure that Americans receive payments of $1,200 per adult and $500 per child in the stimulus measure. In a letter sent to the leaders, liberal Democratic lawmakers, led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Ro Khanna and Katie Porter, both of California, argued that such payments “are a crucial part of any COVID relief package.” They pressed for at least $2,000 in direct payments and at least six months of unemployment benefits, including enhanced supplemental benefits that expired earlier this year. “There is absolutely no reason why we can’t put the direct payments in, and dare the Senate to take them out,” Jayapal said. The White House has voiced support for another round of direct payments, and Mnuchin’s included a $600 stimulus check in his latest offer to Pelosi. But Democrats panned that $916 billion proposal because it failed to revive supplemental unemployment benefits that lapsed over the summer. “I’m not going to say if that’s a red line or not,” Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said when pressed on whether President Donald Trump would approve a stimulus package without direct payments. “We’re hopeful there is a deal there that the president can then look at and support.”

Leaders in Congress meet in search of spending and stimulus deals

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