Attorney General Bill Barr publicly pushes back on President Trump’s tweets about the DOJ; reaction and analysis from ‘Fox News Sunday’ anchor Chris Wallace.
“Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace said Friday that President Trump’s tweets about cases before the Department of Justice was causing “turmoil” while Attorney General Bill Barr and rank-and-file attorneys were trying to do their work.
Wallace explained on “Bill Hemmer Reports” that the situation came to a head this week when Trump tweeted harsh criticism of the initial sentence recommendation for longtime Republican political consultant Roger Stone and added that Barr’s response in an ABC News interview Thursday — in which the attorney general said Trump’s tweets were making it “impossible” to do his job — was an appropriate action.
Barr told Thomas that the DOJ made the decision to lessen the recommended sentence before Trump tweeted a similar sentiment, but that the timing gave Democrats the opportunity to crow that there was some undue pressure put on the department by the White House.
Fox News’ John Roberts reported moments before Wallace’s remarks that several Democratic senators have sent a letter to Barr calling for his resignation. Those senators — Patty Murray of Washington, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Ronald Wyden of Oregon, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont — claim that Barr has betrayed the trust of the American people.
Wallace said the attorney general is a nominee of the president’s, certain policy issues and “politically charged” cases can cause tenuous situations, saying: “For the president to weigh in, a lot of people think the criminal justice system should be kept out of politics.”
WASHINGTON – The Trump administration has reached an initial deal with the Taliban for a reduction in the deadly attacks that have ravaged Afghanistan for years, Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters on Friday.
“The United States and the Taliban have negotiated a proposal for a seven-day reduction in violence,” said Esper, who is in Germany for an international security conference.
The seven-day clock has not started ticking, but Trump administration officials hope it will lead to a broader Afghanistan peace deal and a significant withdrawal of U.S. troops.
“We’ve said all along that the best, if not only, solution in Afghanistan is a political agreement,” Esper said. “Progress has been made on this front, and we’ll have more to report on that soon, I hope.”
There are about 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan whose mission is split between training Afghan security forces and conducting counterterrorism missions. The American military presence there dates to 2001 when U.S. troops helped topple the hardline Taliban government that had sheltered al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
“It is our view that seven days, for now, is sufficient,” Esper said. But he cautioned that the next steps will be based on conditions inside Afghanistan, signaling the truce could go awry if Taliban or its allies violate the terms.
“It will be a continual evaluative process, as we go forward – if we go forward,” Esper said.
A senior U.S. official said the seven-day truce will take effect “very soon” and could lead to the withdrawal of an unspecified number of American troops from Afghanistan. The official said the “reduction in violence” agreement will be followed by peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
The official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Taliban had committed to a halt in roadside and suicide bombings, as well as rocket attacks.
A Taliban official familiar with the deal said that the second agreement would be signed on Feb. 29 and that the inter-Afghan dialogue would begin on March 10. The officials said Germany and Norway have offered to host the talks but there has been no decision on the venue.
That Taliban official added that the withdrawal of foreign troops would start gradually and would be phased over 18 months.
Friday’s announcement is no guarantee of peace in the war-torn country. In September, U.S. negotiators hailed a breakthrough in talks only to see hope for peace dissipate after the Taliban claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack that killed an American. President Donald Trump then scrapped a planned meeting with the Taliban at Camp David.
But Trump, visiting troops at Bagram air base north of Kabul, announced in November that he had restarted peace talks.
In 2019, the U.S.-led coalition dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than in any other year of the war, including 2011, the year of peak U.S. involvement with 100,000 troops on the ground. The air campaign was intended in part to force the Taliban to negotiate.
More than 2,400 U.S. troops have been killed there, and more than 20,000 wounded in the fighting. Last year, the Pentagon estimated the cost to taxpayers for the war there at $737 billion.
A withdrawal of American forces also would likely take several months and require that some forces remain to protect the embassy and other U.S. interests.
U.S. officials have not publicly spelled out their timetable for an initial drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But Trump has said he wants reduce the U.S. presence there to 8,600 troops.
The new developments came as Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Friday in Munich with Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani. They spoke on the sidelines of an international security forum in Munich.
A truce had been widely anticipated, and Trump agreed in principle to the deal, according to U.S. officials.
The final details were hammered out in recent days by U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban representatives in Doha, Qatar. Khalilzad was in Munich and attended Pompeo and Esper’s meeting as did Gen. Scott Miller, the commander of the U.S.-led international force in Afghanistan.
“We write to inform you that, after careful consideration, the Government has decided not to pursue criminal charges against your client, Andrew G. McCabe,” prosecutors J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston wrote on behalf of the new U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Tim Shea. “Based on the totality of the circumstances and all of the information known to the Government at this time, we consider the matter closed.”
McCabe expressed great relief at the decision, but sounded bitter about the probe hanging over him and his family for years.
“I have to say that as glad as I am that the Justice Department and the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office finally decided to do the right thing today, it is an absolute disgrace that they took two years and put my family through this experience for two years before they finally drew the obvious conclusion and one they could have drawn a long, long time ago,” he said on CNN, where he serves as a paid commentator.
McCabe’s attorneys also welcomed the development, which they said they first learned about Friday morning in a phone call from the prosecution after months of silence about the status of the probe.
“At long last, justice has been done in this matter,” attorneys Michael Bromwich and David Schertler said in a statement. “We said at the outset of the criminal investigation, almost two years ago, that if the facts and the law determined the result, no charges would be brought. We are pleased that Andrew McCabe and his family can go on with their lives without this cloud hanging over them.”
The confirmation of a formal end to the criminal investigation into McCabe’s conduct came amid a highly public tug-of-war between Trump and the Justice Department over the handling of cases and investigations he has taken a keen interest in. The development also comes just one day after an extraordinary interview in which Attorney General Bill Barr openly rebuked the president for his frequent attacks on the work of federal prosecutors.
McCabe said Friday he was concerned that the president’s recent fusillade of attacks against federal prosecutors could drag out his case even further.
“Certainly, the president’s kind of revenge tirade following his acquittal in the impeachment proceeding has only kind of amplified my concerns about what would happen in my own case,” McCabe said on CNN. “The timing this week — coming on the tails of all the controversy over the Roger Stone sentencing — is curious.”
Trump seems certain to view the abandonment of the McCabe probe as another provocation from Justice and more proof of a “deep state” cabal there working to undercut the president’s allies and aid his enemies.
When a jury convicted longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone last November of lying to Congress and obstructing investigations into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Trump invoked Justice’s failure to charge McCabe as evidence of a double standard.
“So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come,” Trump wrote. “Well, what about Crooked Hillary, Comey, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, Shifty Schiff, Ohr & Nellie, Steele & all of the others, including even Mueller himself? Didn’t they lie?”
After more than 20 years at the FBI, McCabe was fired in 2018 following findings by the Justice Department inspector general and the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility that he displayed a “lack of candor” in his dealings with internal investigators and a top Justice Department official.
The Justice Department watchdog report released in April 2018 found McCabe was not forthcoming with former Director James Comey and with FBI investigators about McCabe’s involvement in the FBI’s handling of media inquiries about an FBI probe into the Clinton Foundation during the 2016 campaign.
The inspector general report said McCabe led Comey to believe he did not authorize disclosing that politically-sensitive investigation and that McCabe affirmatively denied any role in that to internal FBI investigators. McCabe has denied any intentional effort to mislead, but said he was preoccupied with other weighty matters at the time and may have failed to remember some conversations.
While Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s review found McCabe was less than candid, he referred the matter to federal prosecutors to consider whether criminal charges for perjury or making false statements were appropriate.
Justice Department leaders also used Horowitz’s findings to initiate a disciplinary process against McCabe. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions wound up firing McCabe just one day before he would have been eligible for an early retirement pension available to law enforcement officers.
Trump has repeatedly slammed McCabe, even suggesting he was in cahoots with some of those who carried out his firing.
“Wow, so many lies by now disgraced acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. He was fired for lying, and now his story gets even more deranged. He and Rod Rosenstein, who was hired by Jeff Sessions (another beauty), look like they were planning a very illegal act, and got caught,” Trump tweeted last February.
Many of Trump’s attacks on McCabe have also focused on the unsuccessful bid his wife, Jill, mounted for the Virginia state senate in 2015. Trump has suggested that McCabe’s role in FBI cases was tainted as a result of her campaign and support it received from a political committee tied to then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-Va.), a longtime ally of President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
McCabe says he sought ethics advice and recused from Virginia-related political investigations while his wife was running. However, the inspector general said that because of questions that arose about McCabe’s role, he should not have been making key decisions for the FBI about how to respond to such criticism, including by confirming the Clinton Foundation probe and telling a reporter that McCabe had clashed with a Justice Department official over the handling of that inquiry.
The decision to drop the criminal probe into McCabe’s actions will not mark the end of legal wrangling over his actions. He is suing the Justice Department, arguing that officials short-circuited long established FBI and DOJ procedures to rush him out in order to appease the president.
The timing of Friday’s letter to McCabe’s lawyers may have been driven by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by a non-profit watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics Washington. U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton, who is handling the FOIA case, had publicly pressed prosecutors to make a final decision about the McCabe prosecution and had set a deadline Friday for them to disclose previously-secret records related to the FOIA litigation.
The newly-disclosed files showed that in private, Walton was even more stern with prosecutors, warning them that Trump’s complaints about McCabe would taint any decision they made.
“The public is listening to what’s going on, and I don’t think people like the fact that you got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted … I just think it’s a banana republic when we go down that road,” Walton told government lawyers behind closed doors in September. “I think there are a lot of people on the outside who perceive that there is undo inappropriate pressure being brought to bear … It’s just, it’s very disturbing that we’re in the mess that we’re in in that regard.
“I just think the integrity of the process is being unduly undermined by inappropriate comments and actions on the part of people at the top of our government,” added Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush. “I think it’s very unfortunate. And I think as a government and as a society we’re going to pay a price at some point for this.”
“As we have noted for years, in jurisdictions where we are not allowed to assume custody of aliens from jails, our officers are forced to make at-large arrests of criminal aliens who have been released into communities,” he said. “When sanctuary cities release these criminals back to the street, it increases the occurrence of preventable crimes, and more importantly, preventable victims.”
But Gil Kerlikowske, the former commissioner of C.B.P., which oversees tactical units along the border, said sending the officers to conduct immigration enforcement within cities, where they are not trained to work, could escalate situations that are already volatile. He called the move a “significant mistake.”
“If you were a police chief and you were going to make an apprehension for a relatively minor offense, you don’t send the SWAT team. And BORTAC is the SWAT team,” said Mr. Kerlikowske, who is a former chief of police in Seattle. “They’re trained for much more hazardous missions than this.”
It was a gun-wielding BORTAC agent who, in April 2000, seized Elian Gonzalez — a Cuban boy who was embroiled in an international asylum controversy — from his uncle’s arms after agents had forced their way into the home where the boy was staying.
The Border Patrol squads will be charged with backing up ICE agents during deportation operations and standing by as a show of force, the officials said.
ICE agents typically seek out people with criminal convictions or multiple immigration violations as their primary targets for deportation, but family members and friends are often swept up in the enforcement net in what are known as “collateral” arrests, and many such people could now be caught up in any enhanced operations.
ICE leadership requested the help in sanctuary jurisdictions because agents there often struggle to track down undocumented immigrants without the help of the police and other state and local agencies. Law enforcement officers in areas that refuse to cooperate with ICE and the Border Patrol — which include both liberal and conservative parts of the country — often argue that doing so pushes undocumented people further into the shadows, ultimately making cities less safe because that segment of the population becomes less likely to report crimes or cooperate with investigations.
The Diamond Princess passenger who tweeted out food reviews aboard the ship quarantined for the deadly coronavirus outbreak is at it again — this time for Valentine’s Day.
American passenger Matthew Smith — who has surprisingly maintained his positive attitude while stuck for 10 days on the cruise ship off the coast of Japan — posted photos of Valentine’s Day gifts passengers received from the Carnival Japan line.
“Valentine’s treats from Princess: Fitting that it was dark chocolate, which I like but my wife does not, because that way we could be in line with the Japanese practice of women giving men chocolate on this day,” Smith tweeted. “How did Japanese men swing that?”
The photos show what looks like two bags of 70 percent-cacao dark chocolate and a single red rose, among a couple other goodies.
But Smith said the Valentine’s Day dinner was “not particularly romantic” in another tweet.
“Not particularly romantic, but still a delicious meal: shrimp and salad, coq au vin, Japanese shrimp and veggies, and chocolate mousse (and pink something) for dessert,” Smith said of the meal, served in takeout containers.
Valentine’s Day dinner. Not particularly romantic, but still a delicious meal: shrimp and salad, coq au vin, Japanese shrimp and veggies, and chocolate mousse (and pink something) for dessert. #QuarantineMeHereThankYoupic.twitter.com/hzYJ5UC56n
After having won the New Hampshire primary on Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders will hold a rally in Mesquite, Texas, on Friday.
Sanders’ campaign will continue to the Mesquite Arena in the Dallas area with a performance by alt-country band the Vandoliers. This is his first stop in the Lone Star State in 2020. Last year, he held a rally in Fort Worth.
Those looking at attend the event can register on Sanders’ campaign website. Doors to the Mesquite Arena open at 6 p.m. CT, and the rally is scheduled for 8 p.m. until 10 p.m. The arena’s capacity is 5,500. Entrance is on a first-come, first-served basis.
The rally will also likely be streamed on the Sanders campaign’s YouTube channel and Facebook page.
The rally is Sanders’ third of the day, first holding two in Charlotte and Durham, North Carolina.
According to a University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, Sanders leads all candidates among Democratic primary voters in Texas with 24 percent. Former Vice President Joe Biden follows the senator with 22 percent. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is in third with 15 percent, with former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg coming in fourth with 10 percent.
On Wednesday, a new survey from The Economist and YouGov showed Sanders as the national front-runner for the Democratic nomination. The senator has 22 percent support among likely Democratic primary and caucus voters, while only 18 percent supported former front-runner Biden.
The rally comes just days before early voting in the Texas primary begins. Texas is one of 11 states voting on Super Tuesday on March 3, along with Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. Super Tuesday falls after the Nevada caucuses, which will be held on February 22, and the South Carolina primary on February 29.
Sanders’ New Hampshire vote count total was the lowest ever for a presidential primary winner. With 26 percent of the vote, Sanders narrowly defeated former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg who received 24 percent of the voters. Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar came in third place with 19 percent of votes, as previously reported.
In 2016, Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton by over 22 percent, but while this margin may have been thinner, Sanders delivered a speech that showed determination for 2020.
“We are gonna win because we have the agenda that speaks to the needs of working people across this country,” Sanders said in a victory speech after the New Hampshire primary. “This victory here is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.”
President Trump and presidential candidate/fellow New Yorker Mike Bloomberg may have gotten into a Twitter spat on Thursday, but according to Trevor Noah, “the real threat to Bloomberg’s campaign is his past.” Earlier this week, an audio recording from 2015 of Bloomberg defending his controversial stop-and-frisk policy, which disproportionately affected minority residents during his time as New York City’s mayor, circulated through the press. “We put all the cops in minority neighborhoods,” he says in the clip. “Yes, that’s true. Why did we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them against the wall and frisk them.”
“Wow, that is not a good look,” said Noah on Thursday’s Daily Show. “Think about it: while Bloomberg is out there trying to win the black vote in 2020, he’s on tape in 2015 talking about black people like they’re crime piñatas.”
The comments are definitely not going to go over well with the black voters Bloomberg is trying to court, Noah said. “It’s the same way you would lose white voters if a tape came out of you saying that pets aren’t the same as babies. All the pumpkin spice in the world can’t save you after that.”
Worse still, Noah continued, is that there are more damning comments; in an interview from last year, Bloomberg said white people are disproportionately targeted by stop-and-frisk, while minority residents are under-targeted. “According to Bloomberg, white people were the real victims of stop-and-frisk,” said Noah. “Black people and Latinos spent years – years – saying they were harassed by the police and Bloomberg’s response was: ‘I hear you, we have been unfair – to white people.’”
Facing backlash, Bloomberg has been reticent, dismissing the comments as something said five years ago that “doesn’t reflect what I do every day”.
Noah called bullshit: “Five years? What difference is that supposed to make for you? ‘Look, five years ago I was just a 72-year-old man, I didn’t know any better. I’m much older now, which automatically makes you less racist.’
“Clearly the comments in those clips do reflect what Bloomberg was doing as mayor, for the simple reason that it’s what he did as mayor,” Noah continued. “You don’t have to be a genius to figure this out: as much as Bloomberg is trying to reposition himself now that he needs the support of black voters, he encouraged his police department to treat black people like they were all criminals.”
Bloomberg has tried to dodge and shrug off the bad press, but “reporters won’t let this story go – they keep hassling him at events, questioning him about his motives, just trying to find any little thing that he’s done wrong,” said Noah. “It must be so frustrating for him, and to that I say: Mike Bloomberg, welcome to the world of stop-and-frisk.”
Jimmy Kimmel
“I’ve been thinking a lot today about what President Trump does for Valentine’s,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday night. “I mean, like what does he get the first lady, Melania, and the second lady, Lindsey Graham? What does he get them – flowers, chocolate, taco bowls?”
In other White House news, the attorney general, William Barr, caused a stir on Thursday by telling reporters the president should stop tweeting about pending justice department cases – “in other words, he’s like, ‘Listen, moron, how am I supposed to do your dirty work if you keep telling people about it?” said Kimmel. “I think it’s a PR move,” he said. “If Barr did this without Trump’s OK … he’d be covered in tweet vomit right now. He’d be covered in little orange fist marks all over his face.”
Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly also spoke out against the president for the first time this week, “which is all well and good, but it’s been now a year since he left the White House”, said Kimmel. “This is like a smoke detector that goes off after your house burns down.”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert turned his attention to the next Democratic primary on 29 February in his home state of South Carolina. “As a native son, I’m gonna be on this election like shrimp on grits, like mustard sauce on barbecue, like Confederate flags on more vehicles than I’m comfortable acknowledging,” he said.
The contest is critical for former vice-president Joe Biden, who struggled in Iowa and New Hampshire and has staked his campaign on turning out African American and Latino voters in other states. “Well, sure, that’s because the first two states to vote are Iowa and New Hampshire, which are so white you have to go to the supermarket’s international aisle to buy pepper,” said Colbert.
Biden is currently leading with black voters at 27%, according to Politico, with Bloomberg second. “Now that sounds surprising, but Bloomberg has been out there in the African American community, shaking hands and frisking babies,” Colbert said.
Bloomberg has been dogged by criticism of his former stop-and-frisk policy, but also by stories about toxic work environments for women at his companies; he has refused to release women who sued him from their non-disclosure agreements. “Oh good, yet another New York billionaire with a questionable history with women,” said Colbert.
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers focused on two former Trump chiefs of staffs, John Kelly and Reince Priebus. “Kelly never spoke up when he was Trump’s chief of staff during some of Trump’s worst abuses and lowest moments, but now that he is getting paid to give speeches, [he] seems to have grown a conscience,” Meyers said, in reference to Kelly’s comments defending Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council adviser dismissed by Trump after he testified against him in the impeachment proceedings. Meyers had “the same thing to say to [Kelly] that I say about the president’s spray tan: too little, too late”.
And in one of the “strangest, dumbest things about Trump yet”, a new book called Sinking in the Swamp claims Trump was obsessed with badgers, the state animal of Priebus’s native Wisconsin, and frequently pestered Priebus with questions about them, such as: are they mean to people? How do they work? How aggressive do they get?
“So an imbecile president who’s only interested in his own self-preservation is turning the justice department into a political weapon for his own benefit,” Meyers concluded. “Trump keeps digging himself deeper and deeper – like Trump’s great friend, the majestic badger.”
The intervention has contributed a turbulent period for the prosecutors’ office that oversees the seat of the federal government and some of the most politically sensitive investigations and cases — some involving President Trump’s friends and allies, and some his critics and adversaries.
This week, four line prosecutors quit the case against Roger Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s close adviser, after Mr. Barr overruled their recommendation that a judge sentence him within sentencing guidelines. Mr. Barr’s intervention was preceded by criticism of the original sentencing recommendation by Mr. Trump and praised by him afterward, and Mr. Barr on Thursday publicly asked Mr. Trump to stop commenting about the Justice Department.
The moves amounted to imposing a secondary layer of monitoring and control over what career prosecutors have been doing in the Washington office. They are part of a broader turmoil in that office coinciding with Mr. Barr’s recent installation of a close aide, Timothy Shea, as interim United States attorney in the District of Columbia, after Mr. Barr maneuvered out the Senate-confirmed former top prosecutor in the office, Jessie K. Liu.
Mr. Flynn’s case was first brought by the special counsel’s office, who agreed to a plea deal on a charge of lying to investigators in exchange for his cooperation, before the Washington office took over the case when the special counsel shut down after concluding its investigation into Russia’s election interference.
Mr. Flynn’s case has been bogged down in recent months by his lawyers’ unfounded claims of prosecutorial misconduct; a judge has already rejected those accusations. Mr. Flynn then asked to withdraw his guilty plea, which he first entered in December 2017. His case has become a cause célèbre for Mr. Trump’s supporters.
The Justice Department will not charge Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
The Justice Department will not charge Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Updated at 1:37 p.m. ET
The Justice Department announced Friday that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe will not be charged following an allegation by the department’s inspector general that he lied to investigators about a leak to the media.
In a letter to McCabe’s attorneys, the department said that “based on the totality of the circumstances and all of the information known to the government at this time, we consider the matter closed.”
The decision is not likely to sit well with President Trump.
Trump has repeatedly criticized McCabe online and in public remarks. McCabe has long been the target of Republican leaders who allege political bias within the FBI.
McCabe’s wife ran for the state legislature in Virginia as a Democrat, prompting early attacks that he might be going easy on Hillary Clinton. Later, McCabe was fired after investigators concluded he lacked candor about an episode involving the release of information to a reporter.
McCabe always has maintained he has done nothing wrong and called himself the victim of political vengeance.
“At long last, justice has been done in this matter,” McCabe’s lawyers said on Friday.
“We said at the outset of the criminal investigation, almost two years ago, that if the facts and the law determined the result, no charges would be brought,” they said in a statement. “We are pleased that Andrew McCabe and his family can go on with their lives without this cloud hanging over them.”
The allegations against McCabe stemmed from a Justice Department Office of Inspector General’s report, which found that McCabe “lacked candor” when he told investigators that he did not know who authorized an aide to talk to the Wall Street Journal about the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
McCabe has sued the Justice Department, alleging that his March 2018 firing by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was politically motivated act of retribution by Trump and “unlawful.”
Auto sales in China are expected to fall more than 10% in the first six months of the year as a result of the coronavirus outbreak, Reuters reported Friday, citing China’s top auto industry body. “We predict auto sales will drop more than 10% in the first half of this year, and around 5% for the whole year if the epidemic is effectively contained before April,” Fu Bingfeng, executive vice chairman at China’s Association of Automobile Manufacturers, told Reuters in an interview published Friday. CAAM’s latest forecast reflects a much weaker outlook for auto sales in the world’s largest auto market than it had initially projected. Last month, the industry body said it expected auto sales were likely to dip 2% in 2020.
Bernie Sanders looks more like a frontrunner than ever in the Democratic nomination for president. And the stronger he looks, the more center-left Democrats are nervous about the Vermont senator, an anxiety can be distilled down to three words: Medicare-for-all.
Sanders’s opponents believe his plan to nationalize American health insurance is a political albatross. They’re convinced it’s just too far to the left to win in a general election and Republicans will hammer Sanders for wanting to hike taxes and take away people’s current health insurance.
The data from the 2018 midterms shows House candidates who endorsed Medicare-for-all fared worse than their peers who didn’t. The polling also shows Americans aren’t totally sold on Medicare-for-all. Approval and disapproval are pretty evenly split, voters can be swayed when they hear arguments against it, and a more moderate “public option” proposal polls better. It’s easy to look at the other Democratic presidential candidates who had signed on to Sanders’s plan, from Kamala Harris (who’s already dropped out) to Elizabeth Warren (who seems to be struggling to stay afloat), and conclude it’s a political loser.
But Sanders looks like the exception. He has the strongest favorability rating of any candidate among Democratic voters. He performs well against President Donald Trump in a hypothetical general election matchup, even with Medicare-for-all so tied to his political brand.
“It is a winner for Bernie because it is part of his brand and it feels authentic coming from him,” says Ashley Kirzinger, who helps run the polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation. “I mean, he is the reason why we are discussing it and it has been front and center during the Democratic campaign.”
Sanders was the most trusted Democratic candidate on health care even when he was polling behind former Vice President Joe Biden in the national surveys. Medicare-for-all is most popular among young voters, who are critical to Sanders’s base.
“When you say, ‘I’m for that,’ it says that ‘I’m for equity.’ It says, ‘I’m gonna fight back against the corporate establishment,” Harvard pollster Robert Blendon told me. “It’s symbolic of these other things which appeal to young liberal people.”
In a lot of ways, Medicare-for-all does seem politically dicey. But not for Bernie Sanders.
The evidence on whether Medicare-for-all is a political liability
The best empirical evidence on Medicare-for-all’s electoral chances comes from Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University. He ran through the 2018 House election results to analyze how candidates who endorsed the Sanders plan fared compared to more moderate candidates who did not.
Looking at competitive House elections, 45 percent of Democratic candidates who supported Medicare-for-all prevailed in their race, a much lower success rate than the 72 percent of Democrats who won their race without backing single-payer health care.
Democratic candidates who endorsed Medicare for All did significantly worse than those who did not. The estimated coefficient of -4.6 indicates that support for Medicare for All cost Democratic candidates in these competitive districts almost five points of vote margin — a substantial effect in a close election.
The 2020 primary taught a similar lesson to two high-profile Democratic presidential candidates. Harris struggled to answer the tough questions about eliminating private insurance and raising taxes when pressed about her support for Bernie’s bill. She dropped out before Iowa. The conventional wisdom says Warren fell from her peak in the 2020 field last fall amid scrutiny over her proposal on how to finance single-payer. She eventually tried to split the difference, saying she’d prioritize a short-term public option first and then later try to pass a version of the Sanders proposal. She has finished third and now a disappointing fourth in the first two states.
Polling data indicates why single-payer might be a liability. At first glance, Medicare-for-all does poll pretty well: 56 percent approval and 41 percent disapproval, according to the most recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey. It could be aided by some misconceptions, though: More than half of people, for example, think they’d be able to keep their health insurance plan under the single-payer system. (Under Sanders’s bill, they would not; most private insurance would be prohibited after the four-year transition period.)
But public opinion hinges on how you talk about the issue. Support dropped from 56 percent to 37 percent when voters were told the proposal would eliminate private insurance companies or raise taxes for most Americans. (Support correspondingly surged when voters heard the strongest talking points in favor of the proposal: universal coverage and lower health care costs.)
If you look at swing voters, Medicare-for-all struggles: A survey last year by KFF and the Cook Political Report found just 36 percent of those voters thought the policy was a good idea and 62 percent thought it was a bad idea.
All this evidence explains why establishment Democrats are so nervous about Medicare-for-all overall. They fear Sanders is running a quixotic campaign that would alienate voters they need to win over and be prone to demagogic attacks.
The KFF poll found that support for Medicare-for-all dropped to just 32 percent when voters were told it would threaten the current Medicare program. This is false, by the way — Sanders’s bill would actually improve benefits for existing Medicare enrollees — but that is still the message Trump and the GOP are going to deploy in 2020. They’ve already started making that case.
But while Medicare-for-all might be on shaky ground on its own, Sanders has managed to turn it into a very effective message in the Democratic race.
How Sanders has turned Medicare-for-all into a political winner
Sanders doesn’t raise any particular electability concerns compared to the other Democratic candidates, if you look the hypothetical head-to-head polls of a general election match-up with Trump. He fares about as well as Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg, well-known centrists who don’t support Medicare-for-all, against the president.
So why wouldn’t Sanders pay a price as the owner of the Medicare-for-all issue? Two likely reasons:
His decades-long consistency on health care has built trust with voters on the issue.
Medicare-for-all motivates young voters who are critical to Sanders’s base.
In November, the Kaiser Family Foundation polled Democratic voters and Democratic-leaning independents on which 2020 candidate they trust most on health care. Even though Biden was leading the national polls at the time, and had criticized Sanders by saying his health care plan was too expensive, Sanders was handily the most trusted candidate on health care. Per the KFF poll, 29 percent of those voters said they trusted Sanders the most on health care, 21 percent said Biden, and 19 percent said Warren.
Sanders is seen overall as the most honest and trustworthy Democratic candidate, outpacing Biden and Warren by nearly 10 points by that metric in a January Fox News poll. The exit polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, where Sanders won the popular vote, showed primary voters broadly supported Medicare-for-all.
Sanders’s coalition is built substantially on young voters, though, and they like single-payer health care a lot. The most recent KFF tracking poll in January showed 65 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 say they support Medicare-for-all, and just 35 percent oppose, by far the strongest margin among any of the age cohorts. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake credited Sanders with galvanizing interest in single-payer among the younger voters.
“He had a whole audience who had not been really focused on it, particularly millennials,” she told me.
Sanders is successfully running on the issue where Warren, Harris, and some House candidates stumbled. He wrote the damn bill, as he likes to say.
He has also punted on answering the hard questions about how much taxes would need to be raised to pay for the program, though he acknowledges tax increases are necessary. He says he doesn’t think he needs to spell out all the details while he’s still a candidate.
Some Democrats see a double standard in how Sanders gets treated on Medicare-for-all compared to the scrutiny endured by Warren or Harris. They chafe at comments like those made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most high-profile politician to back Sanders, who acknowledged a public option might be the most likely outcome when it comes time to pass actual legislation. The moderate candidates, and even Elizabeth Warren, have been battered by Sanders supporters for their lack of commitment to full-tilt single-payer health care.
But his perceived credibility has allowed Sanders — and Sanders alone, it seems — to sidestep the pitfalls and turn the issue into a political winner so far in the primary.
The big unknown: What happens when it’s Trump vs. Sanders
Sanders’s odds of winning the Democratic presidential nomination are about as high as they’ve ever been, per the FiveThirtyEight forecast. Looking ahead to a general election matchup, Trump seems to think Sanders’s brand of socialism, as manifested in Medicare-for-all, is a target heading into 2020.
“One hundred thirty-two lawmakers in this room have endorsed legislation to impose a socialist takeover of our health care system, wiping out the private health insurance plans of 180 million very happy Americans,” the president said in his State of the Union speech, a reference to the House version of Sanders’s proposal. “To those watching at home tonight, I want you to know: We will never let socialism destroy American health care.”
Trump will take his message to another audience too: older people, telling them Medicare-for-all would destroy the Medicare they depend on right now.
Even though it isn’t true, that won’t stop Trump from deploying it. Opinion research that shows seniors don’t support expanding government health insurance, as Vox’s Matt Yglesias covered:
They show that the overall flat levels of support for redistribution actually mask significant shifts among different subgroups. In particular, African Americans and the elderly have become substantially less supportive of redistribution, while non-elderly whites have become moderately more supportive. … For senior citizens, the biggest issue is that the elderly “have grown increasingly opposed to government provision of health insurance.”
The authors posit that “older Americans worry that redistribution will come at their expense, in particular via cuts to Medicare.”
But the polling also indicates that voters generally trust Democrats over Trump on health care, even though all of the Democrats are pushing for more government insurance. And whatever margins Sanders loses with swing voters or older voters could conceivably be made up for by an increased turnout among young voters who support Medicare-for-all. (That’s why the relatively meh turnout in the 2020 primaries so far is a bigger concern for Sanders than the narrow issue of Medicare-for-all.)
“Will it be a loser overall? I am not sure,” Kirzinger said. “We know it alienates some voters, but it also motivates younger voters, and so if the Democratic candidate stops talking about it … does that mean those voters stay home?”
There are plenty of unknowns. Does the health care industry marshal its resources to stop Sanders? What do suburban voters fear most: a second term of Donald Trump or national health insurance? And does Sanders temper his message at all during the general election?
The senator has made recent comments acknowledging it will be a political challenge to achieve his agenda.
Sanders: “I’m not here to tell you ‘Hey vote for me I’ll fix everything tomorrow.’” He said it’s not going to be easy taking on Wall St., drug companies, insurance companies, fossil fuel industry, the Democratic establishment, etc. “Other than that, it’s a walk in the park.”
If Sanders runs on single-payer as an aspirational goal against Trump, while pounding the president for his plans to cut health care, that could mitigate red-baiting by Republicans.
And health care isn’t going to be the only issue litigated in the 2020 election. Trump will try to fearmonger over socialism, but he has his own record to defend. He’s the incumbent.
Working America, a political organizing arm of AFL-CIO, did a recent survey with working-class persuadable voters and found that while Medicare-for-all was not popular with them, the Trump tax bill was even less popular. The Obamacare repeal legislation Trump endorsed was the most unpopular major legislation in a generation.
Another KFF poll found just 12 percent of swing voters said that Trump’s opposition to Medicare-for-all would make them more likely to vote for him. Meanwhile, 9 percent said support for the plan would make them more likely to back a Democrat and 17 percent were more likely to support a Democratic candidate pushing “universal coverage.”
A look at the evidence on Medicare-for-all comes down to this: Generally, Americans actually are okay with the federal government playing a big role in providing health care, so a candidate who wants single-payer someday might not scare them as much as the elite consensus suggests. The idea is still above water in national polls. It’s not ridiculous to believe that Sanders — and probably only Sanders — could use it to his advantage in 2020.
But Democratic primary voters still have to decide if they are ready to put that question to the test.
President Donald Trump is weighing blocking all officials from listening in on his phone calls with foreign leaders.
“I may end the practice entirely,” Trump told the Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera in a radio interview that aired on Thursday.
There are serious risks associated with barring officials from listening in on conversations with foreign leaders.
Trump, in particular, is known to act recklessly with classified matters. He once shared top-secret intelligence from a US ally with Russian officials and tweeted out a photo from a classified briefing.
“Right now, President Trump is a nightmare to every intel and [national-security] officer, and this is all stuff he’s done with their knowledge,” one former senior National Security Agency official told Insider. “Allowing him to conduct these calls in private would be catastrophic for us.”
President Donald Trump said he might block all officials from listening in on his phone calls with foreign leaders.
“I may end the practice entirely,” Trump told the Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera in a radio interview that aired on Thursday.
It is a long-running practice for select White House staffers, national-security officials, and cabinet members to listen in on the US president’s phone conversations with foreign leaders, primarily to take notes and use the talking points to help craft foreign policy.
National-security veterans say there are serious risks associated with blocking officials from listening in on conversations with foreign leaders.
“The practice is indispensable to the coordination and implementation of sound foreign policy and national-security practices,” Edward Price, who served as senior director on the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, told Insider. “No president — but especially not this one — can or should be relied upon to backbrief senior advisers on details that can often be extraordinarily nuanced.”
Trump’s remarks show he’s “willing to forgo the potential utility of these discussions in order to see to it that he can fulfill his agenda, rather than the national interest, without would-be witnesses listening in,” Price added.
The national-security risks associated with Trump, in particular, are also significantly elevated.
The president has repeatedly acted recklessly with classified matters. In May 2017, he revealed top-secret intelligence the US got from Israel, a close ally, to two Russian officials during an Oval Office meeting.
Last year, he tweeted a photo from a classified briefing that intelligence experts said could provide a gold mine for foreign espionage services.
“Right now, President Trump is a nightmare to every intel and [national-security] officer, and this is all stuff he’s done with their knowledge,” one former senior National Security Agency official told Insider. “Allowing him to conduct these calls in private would be catastrophic for us.”
This isn’t the first time the president has sought to keep his conversations with foreign heads of state secret.
The Washington Post, which cited US officials, reported last year that “there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years.”
The report said that after one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017, Trump told his interpreter not to tell other US officials what was said and then seized the interpreter’s notes.
At the G20 summit in 2018, Trump again met with Putin privately and without allowing a US official to attend the meeting and take notes.
Trump’s musing about conducting his calls with foreign leaders in secret come after an anonymous US intelligence official blew the whistle on his phone call in July with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
During the conversation, Trump repeatedly pressured Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, one of Trump’s 2020 rivals, and the Democratic Party as a whole.
Multiple people listened in on the call, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, members of the National Security Council who worked on Ukraine policy, and senior White House officials.
The whistleblower said several people had informed them of the contents of the call and raised concerns that Trump violated campaign-finance laws by soliciting foreign interference in the upcoming election. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the NSC’s former top Ukraine expert, directly listened in on the call and immediately reported it to John Eisenberg, the NSC’s chief lawyer.
Eisenberg told Vindman not to tell anyone else what he’d heard, according to Vindman’s testimony in the impeachment inquiry against Trump. Eisenberg subsequently moved the full transcript of the call to a top-secret code-word NSC server typically used to store sensitive information pertaining to national security.
That phone call was the focal point of the impeachment inquiry, which culminated in the House of Representatives charging Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Both charges were linked to his efforts to strong-arm Ukraine into intervening in the election while withholding nearly $400 million in vital military aid and a White House meeting that Zelensky desperately wants and still hasn’t gotten.
Throughout the course of the investigation, testimony from Vindman and others revealed that the phone call was just one data point in a monthslong campaign by Trump and his allies to bully Ukraine to cave to his personal demands while leveraging US policy and taxpayer dollars to force Zelensky’s hand.
Last week, the Republican-controlled Senate voted to acquit Trump of both charges after refusing to hear new witness testimony or subpoena documents. Just one Republican senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, sided with Democrats to vote to convict Trump of abuse of power.
U.S. Marines stand guard during the change of command ceremony at Shorab military camp in Afghanistan’s Helmand province in January 2018.
Massoud Hossaini/AP
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Massoud Hossaini/AP
U.S. Marines stand guard during the change of command ceremony at Shorab military camp in Afghanistan’s Helmand province in January 2018.
Massoud Hossaini/AP
The U.S. says it has reached a deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan that lays out what could be the first steps toward ending America’s longest-running war.
Administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity at the Munich Security Conference, say there will be a seven-day “reduction in violence,” but did not specify when it would start. The seven days are meant as an initial confidence-building measure.
The next step would involve the Taliban agreeing to intra-Afghan talks that would aim to determine the future of Afghanistan and the role the Taliban could play in it.
Once these two steps have begun to the satisfaction of all sides, a peace deal will be signed by the U.S. and Taliban, likely later this month or early next month. The details of that agreement have not yet been made public.
The U.S. military will monitor the reduction in violence, according to a senior administration official.
A weeklong decline in violence would be an abrupt shift from one of the most violent years of the 18-year conflict. An overall deal with the Taliban would lay-out a four-and-a-half month timetable to 8,600 from around 12,000.
This initial agreement was worked out by U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban over months of negotiations in Doha, Qatar. The U.S. and Taliban had reached an agreement last summer, but President Trump walked away from that near-deal in September after a U.S. service member was killed in a car bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan.
President Trump had indicated that the U.S. was close to working out a deal. “I think we’re very close,” he said Thursday in a podcast interview with Geraldo Rivera. “I think there’s a good chance that we’ll have a deal, and we’ll see. We’re going to know over the next two weeks.”
En route to Munich for a security conference on Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said U.S. negotiators had made significant progress in recent days.
“[W]e hope we can get to the place where we can get a significant reduction in violence — not only on a piece of paper, but demonstrated in the capability to actually deliver a serious reduction of violence in Afghanistan,” Pompeo said. “And if we can get there and we can hold that posture for a while, we may well be able to begin the real serious discussion, which is all the Afghans sitting at a table, finding a true reconciliation path forward — a difficult set of conversations, but one that’s long overdue.”
The announcement follows an ultimatum by the Taliban earlier this week for a U.S. reply to the group’s offer of a weeklong reduction in violence. The Taliban have resisted agreeing to a formal cease-fire until the rest of the deal is in place.
Among the Taliban’s demands is that any members of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s government participating in the negotiations be there only as regular citizens, not as officials, The Associated Press reports: “The Taliban do not recognize the Afghan government and have refused to negotiate directly with Ghani, effectively sidelining Kabul from the process.” Ghani’s future is unclear, as there is still no official winner from last year’s presidential election.
The U.S. conflict in Afghanistan began more than 18 years ago, shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Trump has said it’s time for American troops to come home, but a withdrawal of NATO or U.S. forces could result in further instability and violence in the troubled country.
NPR’s Michele Kelemen and Rob Schmitz contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump on Friday tweeted that he has the “legal right” to meddle in court cases being handled by the Department of Justice, a day after Attorney General William Barr said on national television that the president’s tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job.”
Trump, in direct response to his administration’s top law enforcement official, challenged Barr’s recent assertion that he will not be “bullied” by anyone.
Trump said that while he could interfere in the department’s criminal cases, he has “so far chosen not to!”
The Justice Department declined to comment on the president’s tweet.
Barr has come under intense criticism in the days since he pushed federal prosecutors to revise their sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a longtime friend of Trump’s.
On Monday, those prosecutors recommended that a judge in Washington, D.C., district court sentence Stone to up to nine years in prison for crimes related to lying to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election.
That proposed sentence fell in line with federal sentencing guidelines; defense attorneys argued that Stone should receive a sentence of probation.
After the sentencing memo was filed, Trump took to Twitter in the middle of the night Tuesday to blast the recommendation as a “disgrace,” adding, “Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!”
Hours after that, the Justice Department filed a new sentencing suggestion, calling for Stone to receive “far less” time in prison.
All four prosecutors quit the case in apparent protest on Tuesday — and one resigned from the Justice Department altogether.
Trump praised Barr on social media afterward.
Barr and his department claim that the decision to amend Stone’s sentencing recommendation came prior to Trump’s attacks on social media. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called for the department’s internal watchdog to investigate the matter.
On Friday morning, Trump zeroed in on Barr’s insistence that “the president has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.”
“This doesn’t mean that I do not have, as President, the legal right to do so,” Trump wrote in response. “I do, but I have so far chosen not to!”
Despite the dramatic public rift between the two political leaders, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said that Trump, who famously demands loyalty from his associates, “wasn’t bothered” by Barr’s critique to ABC.
Stone, 67, was convicted in November of crimes related to lying to Congress about his contacts with the document disclosure group WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election, as well as to pressuring an associate, comedian Randy Credico, to corroborate his false claims.
WikiLeaks during the 2016 election published emails that had been stolen by Russian agents from John Podesta, the campaign chief for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and from the Democratic National Committee.
Former Trump campaign official Rick Gates testified at Stone’s trial that Trump had a phone call with Stone about WikiLeaks during the campaign.
Gates’ account contrasts with Trump’s claim in November 2018 that he did not recall speaking to Stone about WikiLeaks. Gates said that less than a minute after finishing a July 2016 call from Stone, Trump indicated that “more information would be coming” from Wikileaks.
Stone is set to be sentenced Feb. 20 in U.S. District Court in Washington.
But unlike the torrent of grief and anger online in response to the death of Dr. Li, news of Mr. Chen’s and Mr. Fang’s disappearances has been swiftly stamped out on Chinese social media. Their names returned almost no results on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, on Friday.
Still, Ms. Cook said the power of Mr. Chen’s and Mr. Fang’s videos, as well as the reporting done by professional journalists in Wuhan, should not be underestimated.
She pointed to the Chinese authorities’ decision this week to loosen diagnostic requirements for coronavirus cases, leading to a significant jump in reported infections, as evidence of their impact.
That decision might not have come “if you didn’t have all these people in Wuhan sending out reports that what you’re hearing is an underestimate,” Ms. Cook said. “These very courageous individuals can, in unusual circumstances, push back and force the state’s hand.”
Mr. Fang, in one of his last videos, seemed struck by a similar sentiment. He thanked his viewers, who he said had been calling him nonstop to send support.
“A person, just an ordinary person, a silly person,” he said of himself, “who lifted the lid for a second.”
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — On the eve of Tuesday’s New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary, hundreds of Democrats packed a Unitarian church in this coastal city to listen to Sen. Elizabeth Warren make her final case.
With her usual energy and bounce, Warren, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, told them she’s the candidate who can take the “fight” to President Donald Trump. Pews were filled. People cheered. A rainbow flag hung from from a balcony in the back. As Warren ripped Trump, the influence of money in politics and corruption with ease and clarity, the scene gave the impression of a liberal to be reckoned with.
But in conversations with several of the New Hampshire voters at Warren’s last get-out-the-vote event before voting started, it was clear they weren’t all fully committed. Some were last-minute shopping, and with Warren sliding in the polls, they were also considering the frontrunner, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and the two surging Midwesterners, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Richard Lemmerman, a 60-year-old investor from Hampton, N.H., sitting toward the back of the town hall, said he’d probably write in his vote for billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, calling him the “strongest possibility to beat Trump.”
As for Warren? “She’d make a great secretary of state, a great attorney general. I just don’t think she’s going to be a good president,” Lemmerman said.
New Hampshirites’ lack of enthusiasm showed in Warren’s final standing, a disappointing, distant fourth place, at 9.2%, not even mustering double-digits, and well below Sanders’ first-place 25.8%, Buttigieg’s 24.5% and Klobuchar’s 19.9%. After earning eight national delegates in Iowa, she left New Hampshire with 0.
Months ago, this would have been a shocking outcome for a candidate from a neighboring state who at one time led nationally and in New Hampshire. But since a rocky rollout of her plan to pay for Medicare for All in October, Warren has lost traction and hasn’t rebounded. She finished a disappointing third in Iowa, where she invested significant resources. Perhaps most amazing of all, her poor showing in New Hampshire was ultimately not a surprise after several days of weak polling.
Following the latest setback, Warren vowed to “fight back” as her campaign takes the long-view, noting 98% of Democrats still haven’t voted and insisting she’s the “consensus choice of the widest coalition of Democrats.” But with early voting already underway in some Super Tuesday states, and the Nevada caucuses looming in a week, a reboot is needed quickly.
“It is a very fluid field, and even knocking on doors in Iowa and New Hampshire right up until Election Day, people were still making up their minds,” said Michelle Wu, a Boston City Councilor at-large and Warren supporter who campaigned for her both states. “Voters are really wanting to think about November. That means that it will be a long race and a long primary, and Elizabeth’s operation is built for the long haul.”
Where Warren’s votes peeled away
Warren’s New Hampshire collapse came from competing sides. Her perceived strength among college-educated Democrats fell apart with some in this camp choosing the centrist, unity-driven messages of Klobuchar and Buttigieg over Warren’s pitch to “fight” Wall Street and drug companies, “disrupt” money in politics and not just “nibble around the edges.”
At the same time, Warren lost the party’s far left, in particular young progressives, overwhelmingly to Sanders. These were the voters most likely to gravitate toward Warren’s mantra of “big structural change,” but in Sanders, they picked a democratic socialist offering much the same vision. Warren received votes from just 6% of New Hampshire voters 18 to 29, according to exit polls from Tufts University’s TISCH/CIRCLE, while Sanders got a whopping 51% and Buttigieg received 20%.
In Portsmouth, an ultra-blue city that on paper should have been comfortable ground for Warren, she came in fourth with just 12.9% of the vote. She even finished behind the same trio of Sanders, Buttigieg and Klobuchar in highly-educated Hanover, home of Dartmouth College, with 18%. The former Harvard law professor was unable to place in the top three in New Hampshire’s Ivy League town.
Joe Trippi, a longtime Democratic campaign operative who ran former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s losing presidential bid in 2004, said Warren, along with other campaigns, “underestimated how tough it is to run in a multi-candidate field.” He said they viewed the race through the lens of the last few cycles, which had few viable contenders.
“In the end, as people start to focus on who’s the best progressive that’s got a chanceof going the whole way, Bernie was winning that battle,” Trippi said. “When it came to who was moving at the end among women who really wanted to see a woman get the nomination … it starts to go to Amy.
“She was just drifting down, as was Biden, and the others were basically gaining ground at her expense,” he said.
Warren is perhaps the most disciplined of all the candidates on the stump, often tracing her humble upbringing in Oklahoma and and as a single-mother in Texas to explain how it shaped her economic views. “I’ve got a plan for that,” she’s known to say as she dives into one of her many policy proposals. Her campaign is also credited for having among the more robust ground organizations.
On the trail in New Hampshire, Warren appeared to tweak her message in the final stretch, casting herself not just as a lifelong fighter but also the candidate who can “pull our party together” in November. It seemed like an attempt to differentiate herself from Sanders, who has faced questions about coalescing all Democratic factions against Trump. She told an audience last week in Nashua, N.H., “We cannot repeat another 2016.”
But hurting Warren, according to Rachel Bitecofer, a political scientist and assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University, is that the far-left progressive faction in 2020 has proven smaller than in 2016.
In New Hampshire, the two so-called “progressive lane” candidates, Sanders and Warren, only accounted for 35% of the overall vote. Bitecofer said more moderates and independents are taking part in the Democratic primary than past years, including in New Hampshire, where voters registered as “undeclared” could take part.
“Her problem is there’s really two people in that progressive faction, but the amount of votes to divide between them is smaller and so she’s really struggling,” Bitecofer said.
Neil Levesque, director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, said New Hampshire voters put Warren “on a shelf” when she struggled with her Medicare for All explanation. While they remained uncommitted, Sanders’ steady rise and Klobuchar’s debate performance last week eroded her support, he said.
More so than ideology, Levesque said New Hampshire voters consider traits like personality, style, electability and momentum.
“She worked very hard, she’s an excellent candidate, great staff. Everything was there. But sometimes it just doesn’t add up.”
‘We are in a very frothy place’
Despite not meeting expectations through two contests, Warren is third in the overall delegate count, with 8, behind Buttigieg, 22, and Sanders, 21, but ahead of the suddenly hot Klobuchar, 7.
The day after her New Hampshire defeat, the Warren campaign issued an email to supporters that didn’t sugarcoat the outcome: “Let’s face it: Last night didn’t go the way we wanted it to go,” it began, later encouraging supporters to “take a moment and feel that pain” but to press on.
“Take a walk around the block, eat an extra piece of chocolate, hug your pet, adopt a pet, watch videos of cats and dogs who are friends, call a friend — whatever works,” the email read. “But once you’ve let it all out, take a deep breath, square your shoulders, and make a plan — a plan to fight back and win. A plan to help make sure that we won’t have to feel this way again.”
Wednesday evening, Warren made the rounds on cable television networks to answer questions about her setback in New Hampshire, where as recently as November she was polling ahead, and how she plans to get back in the race.
Warren told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that her campaign raised $5 million since the Iowa caucuses. But she but didn’t have an explanation why her message did not resonate in New Hampshire.
“I don’t,” Warren said. “But I can tell you this: I can tell you that it’s what I fight for. And I’m going to get out there and keep fighting for it and keep talking about it. I think we are in a very frothy place right now, but do keep in mind, we’ve only heard from two states. We have 98 percent of our states and territories left to go.”
In the days leading up to Tuesday’s primary, Warren touted the long-term viability of the campaign when asked about the outlook New Hampshire, pointing to some 1,000 campaign workers she has in 31 states.
But money could be a problem following back-to-back tough losses. Advertising Analytics reported that Warren cut television ad spending in South Carolina but is maintaining a television presence in Nevada through the Feb. 22 Nevada caucuses.
“I need to level with you,” Warren said in a campaign video released Wednesday seeking donations. “Our movement needs critical funds so I can remain competitive in this race through Super Tuesday.”
Campaign manager critiques opponents
Hours before polls closed Tuesday, Warren’s campaign manager Roger Lau sent out a campaign memo that predicted the race would stay “wide open” through voting in Nevada (Feb. 22) and South Carolina (Feb. 29).
“People who are predicting what will happen a week from now are the same people who a year ago predicted that Beto O’Rourke was a frontrunner for the nomination,” Lau wrote.
He offered critiques of several candidates: Sanders has a ceiling that’s “significantly lower” than four years ago. Former President Joe Biden has started to lose support from African American and senior voters, his two greatest strengths. Buttigieg’s “most significant challenge is yet to come,” Lau said, as the primary moves to more diverse states. Bloomberg will “soon be forced to actually debate his record, rather than hiding behind millions in TV ads.” He said Klobuchar lacks campaign infrastructure for the long haul.
Charting the course forward, Lau said the Warren campaign’s internal projections show her performing at the 15% delegate threshold in 108 of 165 congressional districts on Super Tuesday March 3, when 14 states go to the polls, topped by only Sanders and Biden.
“It’s not a straightforward narrative captured by glancing at a map, and the process won’t be decided by the simple horse race numbers in clickbait headlines,” he wrote.
But to show momentum into Super Tuesday, Warren desperately needs a strong performance in Nevada – perhaps first or second – where a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll in January showed her in third place at 11%, behind Biden, 19% and Sanders, 18%.
Warren began her push in Nevada by going on offense against Sanders. It came after the the Culinary Union in Nevada called out Sanders’ supporters as having “viciously attacked” union members for opposing the Vermont senator’s health care plan.
“No one should attack @Culinary226 and its members for fighting hard for themselves and their families,” Warren tweeted. “Like them, I want to see every American get high-quality and affordable health care – and I’m committed to working with them to achieve that goal.”
The senator has an opportunity to shift the race on Feb. 19, when the next televised debate of the primary takes place in Las Vegas. Klobuchar used the debate in New Hampshire to mount her late surge.
But once a candidate starts fading in a large field, it’s “really tough to turn that around,” Trippi said.
He knows first-hand after Dean, for months the frontunner in 2004, nose-dived after Iowa and never regained momentum. He applauded Warren’s strong campaign organization, which he said “pushed the envelope” in a lot of strategies. But he said even that could start working against her by turning out supporters of her opponents.
“Everybody that her campaign has worked tirelessly to identify as Warren supporters after Iowa and New Hampshire, I can guarantee you half of them aren’t for her anymore,” Trippi said. “Now she’s turning out two people, one of whom is going to vote against her, one who is going to vote for her because her organization is that freaking good.
“Her strength is she’s got this great organization, but it’s actually of little use. That alone won’t turn it.”
The US attorney general, William Barr, publicly rebuked Donald Trump on Thursday, saying that the president’s tweets about the case of Roger Stone “make it impossible for me to do my job” and that he would not be “bullied or influenced” over justice department decisions.
In an interview with ABC News, the attorney general acknowledged his comments could leave him open to backlash from the president, who is notoriously intolerant of criticism from his aides. But Barr said he was determined to lead the justice department without being influence by outside forces, including the president.
“I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” Barr told ABC.
The attorney general emphasized Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case”, but he acknowledged the president’s comments undercut his authority.
Despite Barr insisting he will not be “bullied” by Trump on justice department matters, some commentators were skeptical that Barr was actually trying to distance himself from the president.
An Obama-era justice department official, Matthew Miller, wrote on Twitter: “Don’t be fooled by this one, people. Barr is telling the president that his impulsiveness is making it politically harder for him to deliver the results he wants. If Trump would just shut up, Barr could take care of him much more effectively.”
“The best indicator of future performance is past performance,” wrote the US congresswoman Val Demings, of Florida. “Attorney General Barr’s past performance was to mislead the American people (about the Mueller Report) in order to cover up wrongdoing by the president. Why shouldn’t we believe that’s exactly what he’s doing now?”
In his interview with ABC, Barr added that public statements and tweets about the department and its pending cases “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity”.
He added: “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody … whether it’s Congress, a newspaper editorial board, or the president. I’m gonna do what I think is right. And you know … I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.”
The White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, responded by saying the president “wasn’t bothered” by Barr’s comments: “[Barr] has the right, just like any American citizen, to publicly offer his opinions. President Trump uses social media very effectively to fight for the American people against injustices in our country.”
The attorney general’s remarkable rebuke comes amid an intensifying fallout over the Stone case, after the justice department overruled its own prosecutors who had recommended that Stone, a longtime Trump ally and confidant, be sentenced to seven to nine years in prison. The four prosecutors on the case subsequently resigned in protest.
The department has insisted the decision to undo the sentencing recommendation was made on Monday night before Trump’s tweet calling the recommended sentence “very horrible and unfair”.
The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, speaking on Fox News,said the president should heed Barr’s advice. “I think the president should listen,” McConnell told the host Bret Baier. “If the attorney general says it’s getting in the way of doing his job, the president should listen to the attorney general.”
Barr is not the only high-profile figure to have criticized Trump this week. On Wednesday, the former White House chief of staff John Kelly spoke out against the treatment of the firedimpeachment inquiry witness Alexander Vindman.
Stone was convicted in November of tampering with a witness and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia during the 2016 election. He is scheduled to be sentenced next week.
Zeng Yixin, deputy director of the National Health Commission, said the numbers of infected workers represent 3.8 percent of China’s overall confirmed infections. The victims represent 0.4 percent of all deaths nationwide.
Mr. Zeng said that Hubei, the province at the center of the outbreak, recorded 1,502 cases of infected medical workers, with 1,102 of them in Wuhan, the provincial capital. He added that further research was needed to ascertain whether the infections spread throughout the hospital or within the community.
“I think it’s quite concerning,” said Benjamin Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong. “Healthcare workers face the challenge of caring for a substantial number of patients in Wuhan. It’s worrying to discover that a number of them have been infected.”
Medical workers in Hubei, already working round the clock, face a shortage of personal protective equipment such as masks, gowns and safety goggles. They have resorted to begging from friends, putting out frequent calls for donations, and using tape to patch up torn masks and gowns. Many doctors and nurses there say they eat only one meal a day because going to the restroom means removing and discarding safety gownsthat they would not be able to replace.
During the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003, 961 medical workers were infected, representing 18 percent of all infections, according to government data. About 1 percent of the medical workers infected with SARS died, the medical expert Xu Dezhong told Xinhua, China’s official news agency.
Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy on Iran war powers resolution.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., joined “Your World with Neil Cavuto” Thursday to explain why he joined seven of his Republican colleagues in the Senate to approve war powers legislation aimed at limiting President Trump’s authority to launch military operations against Iran.
“Why did I break? Because Congress has to fulfill its responsibility if it comes to declaring open war,” Cassidy told host Neil Cavuto. “We’re not talking about seizing boats with weapons in the middle of the Arabian Gulf. We’re talking about conflict that leaves broken bodies with American boys and girls dead And that’s when Congress should be on the front in fulfilling constitutional responsibility, not ducking behind the president and then pointing fingers when things go bad. This is about Congress fulfilling our constitutional responsibility.”
Cassidy was referencing the announcement by the Pentagon earlier Thursday that crew members from the cruiser USS Normandy seized a huge cache of Iranian-made weapons from a dhow – a small vessel with lateen sails – over the weekend while conducting maritime security operations in the U.S. Central Command area of operations.
The weapons and weapon components were intended for the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, according to officials. But Cassidy says the issues are not related.
The senator also denied that the measure was tied to the president’s controversial strike order that resulted in the death of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani last month.
“We specifically added an amendment saying that we approve of that. We think that it’s good that amendment passed,” Cassidy told Cavuto, declining to say the resolution was “triggered” by the Soleimani strike. “This is about if there’s going to be open warfare, that not a shadow war, open warfare, that the United States Congress should weigh in as its constitutional duty is. And I think that protects the president. It’s too easy for Congress to duck and run and point fingers later.”
The rebuke was the Senate’s first major vote since acquitting Trump on impeachment charges last week. The legislation must still be approved by the House and Trump is expected to veto the war powers resolution if it reaches his desk, warning that if his “hands were tied, Iran would have a field day.’”
The measure, authored by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., says Trump must win approval from Congress before engaging in further military action against Iran. Kaine and other supporters said the resolution, which passed 55-45, was not about Trump or even the presidency but instead was an important reassertion of congressional power to declare war.
“This is not about the president’s ability to do maximum pressure. The ability to seize weapons in the Arabian Arabian Gulf or to apply sanctions in a way which cripple Iran’s ability to export terror,” Cassidy added. “This is about open warfare where America’s boys and girls go and … wind up dead [or] will end up in a hospital bed for the rest of their life or with [a] traumatic brain injury, a wound that cannot be seen but that is even more horrific.”
Cassidy was joined in voting for the measure by Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Jerry Moran of Kansas, and Todd Young of Indiana.
Fox News’ Bradford Betz and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
But Pelosi denied that establishment Democrats are fretting over the presidential nomination process at this point.
“I can hear you all say, oh, we’re all in a panic, the established Democrats. I’m like, is there some establishment that I don’t know about around here?” Pelosi asked reporters in the Capitol.
“We respect the process. The people will winnow the field,” she said. “We’re calm, cool and collected.”
Biden currently leads the field in the number of endorsements from House and Senate Democrats, but former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been steadily rolling out new endorsements from lawmakers as well in recent days.
Pelosi acknowledged that various factions in the Democratic caucuses will have their own opinions over who would be the best candidate, but downplayed that as typical.
“I mean, just because some people may be speaking out about not liking one candidate or the other — that’s the Democratic way. That’s politics. It’s a messy business,” Pelosi said.
“Members will make their endorsements as they see fit on their own in their own communications with their constituents and with the candidates as they choose,” she added.
“We’re calm, we’re cool, we’re collected,” Pelosi repeated. “We have faith in the American people. And we’ll be guided by their judgment as we go forward.”
A number of vulnerable House Democrats openly fretted this week that Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist, would not only lose to Trump in November but lead the party to losing the House majority.
Bloomberg, meanwhile, is building momentum on Capitol Hill as some Democrats start to consider him as a centrist alternative to Biden who may be better positioned to take on Trump.
Biden came in fifth place in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday night, following his fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses last week.
Bloomberg is not competing in the early states and is instead focusing his efforts on the Super Tuesday states that vote on March 3.
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