Media captionBoris Johnson: “We are taking the first careful steps to modify our measures”
Boris Johnson has unveiled a “conditional plan” to reopen society, allowing people in England to spend more time outdoors from Wednesday.
The PM also said people who could not work from home should return to the workplace – but avoid public transport.
He said a new Covid Alert System with five levels would govern how quickly lockdown restrictions could be eased.
He hoped the next step “at the earliest by 1 June” would be for some primary pupils to return to school in England.
In an address to the nation, Mr Johnson said this stage would also involve reopening shops – but he cautioned this would only happen if supported by science.
The next step could see some hospitality businesses and other public places reopen – “if the numbers support it” – but not earlier than 1 July.
He said these steps formed part of a “first sketch of a roadmap for reopening society”.
The PM added: “This is not the time simply to end the lockdown this week. Instead we are taking the first careful steps to modify our measures.”
Mr Johnson also confirmed that fines for the “small minority who break” lockdown rules will increase.
Further details about England’s lockdown are expected in guidance to be published on Monday.
A government official told the BBC the new guidance will say you can meet one person from outside your own household in a park, if you stay two metres apart.
People will also be allowed to drive to parks and beaches in England as long as they observe social distancing while there, according to the official.
However, there will be no change in the advice for those who are shielding and have been asked to stay at home for at least 12 weeks.
BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said that, while the coronavirus has started to come under control, the PM’s cautious announcement was “certainly not some kind of dramatic flinging of the doors open”.
Clarifying the conditions in which schools and shops would reopen, Mr Johnson said: “Throughout this period of the next two months we will be driven not by mere hope or economic necessity.
“We are going to be driven by the science, the data and public health.
“And I must stress again all of this is conditional, it all depends on a series of big ifs.”
The PM explained how the “R” number – the reproduction rate of the virus – would be crucial in deciding whether lockdown could be eased further.
Experts have said that keeping R below 1 – meaning one person with the virus passes it on to one other person – is the priority.
“It depends on all of us – the entire country – to follow the advice, to observe social distancing, and to keep that R down,” he said.
The PM said those who could not work from home would now be encouraged to return to work – but they should avoid using public transport to get there if possible.
Mr Johnson mentioned construction and manufacturing as examples of the sorts of industries where restarting would now be explicitly encouraged.
Workplaces would receive guidance on how to become “Covid secure”, he added.
He said in addition to being able to leave home as many times as they wish for exercise or to sunbathe in parks, people in England would also be able to drive to other destinations.
The PM also said he was “serving notice” that it would soon be the time to impose a quarantine on people coming into the country by air.
In a joint statement later, Mr Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron agreed quarantine measures would not apply between France and the UK “at this stage”.
‘Trying to pull off the impossible’
The prime minister is effectively trying to pull off the impossible. He wants to try to restart normal life, while keeping the virus at bay with limited means to do so.
With no vaccine, the government is reliant on containing any local outbreaks.
But the problem is that even with the extra testing that has been put in place over the past month, there are big holes in the UK’s ability to suppress the virus. It takes too long to get test results back – several days in some cases – and those most in need of regular testing, such as care home staff for example, are still reporting they cannot always access tests.
Our ability to trace the close contacts of infected people remains unknown – the piloting of the system, which involves the use of an app and army of contact tracers, has just started on the Isle of Wight. It means we are effectively fighting this “invisible killer” with one hand behind our back.
We are not alone in struggling, similar problems are being encountered by other countries. But we are still some way behind the best prepared and equipped, such as Germany and South Korea.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Mr Johnson’s speech lacked “clarity and consensus” and raised “as many questions as it answers”.
He told BBC News that millions of people who cannot work from home were effectively being told to go to work with just 12 hours’ notice – and not to use public transport.
“That’s why I say the statement raises as many questions as it answers,” he said.
Acting Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said he did not understand why the government had changed its messaging at this stage.
“It risks what people have fought so hard for,” he said.
Media captionLabour’s Sir Keir Starmer says PM statement “raises as many questions as answers”
Mr Johnson said in his speech he had consulted “across the political spectrum, across all four nations of the UK” and that his plan was a “a general consensus on what we could do”.
Wales’ health minister Vaughan Gething also said there had not been a “four-nations agreement” on the new “stay alert” message and that the advice to “stay at home” in Wales was unchanged.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have powers over their own lockdown restrictions, with England’s measures set by the government at Westminster. While leaders have expressed a wish to move forward as one, they may do so at different speeds.
Previous guidance published by the government said people could leave home once a day to exercise in England.
Image copyright AFP
Image caption
The government has unveiled a new message of “stay alert” in England
A further 269 people have died in the UK after testing positive for coronavirus, taking the total number of deaths recorded to 31,855.
The number of deaths recorded tends to be lower over the weekend because of reporting delays.
China warned that it will take countermeasures in response to the U.S. decision to tighten visa guidelines against Chinese journalists and urged Washington to immediately correct its mistakes.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters during a daily briefing in Beijing that China deplores and rejects the U.S. move, which Zhao called an escalation of suppression against Chinese media.
Economists largely do not share the president’s rosy view, nor his assurances that the third and fourth quarters of 2020 will automatically transition into an economic rebound.
“I remember working in the White House in 2009 and feeling the world was ending when we lost roughly 700,000 job a month,” said Jesse Rothstein, a former senior economist in the Obama administration who is now a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now, we lost 20 million jobs in one month. There is just no comparison.”
For Trump, the pivot to the economy is a messaging play for his White House legacy and his re-election campaign. If he can cast himself as the wartime president who resurrected the economy from a pandemic, that is a far better political narrative than the one the Democrats are pushing: that Trump underplayed the virus’s threat and oversaw an ad hoc and ill-fated response effort.
The president and the White House are looking for ways to boost economic growth by urging Americans to return to work, as well as considering tax cuts for the next relief package — bound to please Wall Street and goose the stock market, which Trump views as its own form of polling.
Many Republicans close to the White House privately believe the markets will rebound long before the employment numbers do. One Republican close to the administration said the White House is “in denial” about the true scale of the carnage to the jobs market, according to interviews with six senior administration officials and close White House advisers.
Publicly, White House officials are keeping up Trump’s optimistic message of a recovery in the last two quarters of the year, even if it seems unlikely that Americans will want to fully participate in large-scale events like concerts or sports games, or attend celebrations, dine out or even travel.
“We understand why the economy is slowing down. And we expect that we can reverse it,” senior adviser Kevin Hassett said on Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “Whereas in the Depression, there were a lot of other things, a lot of policy errors and so on, that made the whole thing drag out.” Also on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned that the unemployment rate could go as high as 25 percent.
If the family member doesn’t need hospitalization and can be cared for at home, you should help him or her with basic needs and monitor the symptoms, while also keeping as much distance as possible, according to guidelines issued by the C.D.C. If there’s space, the sick family member should stay in a separate room and use a separate bathroom. If masks are available, both the sick person and the caregiver should wear them when the caregiver enters the room. Make sure not to share any dishes or other household items and to regularly clean surfaces like counters, doorknobs, toilets and tables. Don’t forget to wash your hands frequently.
Vice President Mike Pence is not self-isolating and plans to be back at work in the White House on Monday, his spokesman said. The statement came after Bloomberg reported Pence was self-isolating following his spokeswoman’s positive coronavirus test last week. “Vice President Pence has tested negative every single day and plans to be at the White House tomorrow,” the statement said. Recent coronavirus exposure at the White House has prompted extra precautions to ensure the safety of President Donald Trump and his staff. As part of new protocols, Trump and Pence will be tested daily for the virus, as will every staff member in close proximity to them. Both Trump and Pence have tested negative.
The Walt Disney Company opens its park in Shanghai on Monday, the first worldwide park to welcome guests again. That head start may provide a blueprint for how to reopen safely while preserving the fun. Disney CEO Bob Chapek said to expect temperature scans, and guests and workers at Shanghai will both wear masks. However, characters won’t, so they will need to keep their distance and won’t be dispensing hugs for a while. In order to ensure the park stays below capacity for social distancing, tickets will be good only on a particular day – but Chapek added that he’s not sure the same policy will be in effect when the U.S. parks eventually reopen.
Amtrak is the latest transportation entity to require passengers to wear face masks when traveling to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Starting Monday, all patrons in stations, on trains and Amtrak’s transit buses will have to wear a face covering that covers their nose and mouth. Amtrak employees who interact with customers are also required to wear face masks. Passengers are expected to provide their own face coverings and will be denied boarding if they do not have one. In the skies, American Airlines, Southwest, Alaska and Spirit will also enforce face mask rules starting Monday. Delta, United, JetBlue and Frontier already enacted face covering rules.
With “The Last Dance” really getting to the good stuff, Monday’s episode of The After Party – USA TODAY Sports’ show recapping the documentary on Michael Jordan and the Bulls with former Chicago guard BJ Armstrong – should have no shortage of tantalizing topics. Chief among them? Armstrong’s own role as a motivator for Jordan during that last title run in 1997-98. We look forward to hearing much more about that incident – and many other topics – as Armstrong joins USA TODAY Sports’ Mackenzie Salmon at noon on Monday. The After Party can be viewed live on the USA TODAY Sports Twitter and YouTube accounts.
Apple to begin reopening its stores: Idaho comes first
Apple will reopen stores in some states this week with precautions in place to protect employees and customers such as temperature checks, face masks and social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic. The store in Boise, Idaho, will be the first to open on Monday. Apple will reopen some, but not all, stores in Alabama, Alaska and South Carolina. The vast majority of Apple’s 271 stores in the U.S. will remain closed. When stores reopen, hours will be shorter than normal, so the company advises shoppers to look up their local store for hours. .
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin speaks at a White House coronavirus press briefing in April.
Alex Brandon/AP
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Alex Brandon/AP
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin speaks at a White House coronavirus press briefing in April.
Alex Brandon/AP
The worst of the nation’s historic job losses are yet to come, according to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who told Fox News Sunday that “the reported numbers are probably going to get worse before they get better.”
Mnuchin’s comments followed Friday’s report from the Labor Department showing the U.S. lost a staggering 20.5 million jobs in April, bringing the jobless rate to its highest level since the Great Depression — 14.7%.
But even that figure fails to account for the millions of workers who have stopped searching for jobs or those considered “underemployed.”
Asked by host Chris Wallace whether the nation’s true unemployment rate was close to 25%, Mnuchin responded,“we could be.”
“This is no fault of American business, this is no fault of American workers, this is a result of a virus,” he said before warning, “You’re going to have a very, very bad second quarter.”
Two weeks ago, Mnuchin’s outlook was more optimistic — he told Wallace that the economy would reopen through June and “bounce back” over the summer. On Sunday, he said the economy would “have a better third quarter,” followed by “a better fourth quarter, and next year is going to be a great year.”
The Trump Administration is considering additional stimulus measures, including a payroll tax cut, according to Mnuchin, who also said on Sunday, “We’re not gonna do things just to bail out states that were poorly managed.”But he said the White House would wait a “few weeks” before considering another relief bill.
Fox News Contributor Andrew McCarthy, Fox News Contributor Sara Carter, Wallstreet Journal Columnist Kim Strassel, and Fox News Analyst Lawrence Jones join ‘The Next Revolution’ to weigh in.
President Trump on Sunday intensified his criticism of former President Obama by tying him to the Michael Flynn investigation and blasting his predecessor’s recent criticism aimed at his administration’s coronavirus response.
Last week, Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department dismissed the case against Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, which was seen as the key prosecution from Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign.
Trump, along with other Republicans, seized on the decision and framed it as an example of a Democrat-manufactured plot to remove him from office.
Trump retweeted Eli Lake, a columnist at Bloomberg, who said he has been reviewing the interview transcripts that were recently released in the collusion investigation. Lake wrote, “It’s now clear why every Republican on [Rep. Adam Schiff’s] committee in 2019 called for his resignation. He knew the closed door witnesses didn’t support his innuendo and fakery on Russia collusion.”
Sidney Powell, one of Flynn’s lawyers, told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” that FBI agents did their best to hide their investigation and attempted to entrap Flynn. She mentioned a meeting on Jan. 5, 2017 at the White House that included Obama, then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan.
Powell said the “whole thing was orchestrated and set up within the FBI, Clapper, Brennan and in the Oval Office meeting that day with President Obama,” she told Maria Bartiromo, the anchor.
Bartiromo asked Powell if she believed the scandal reached up to Obama, and Powell responded, “Absolutely.”
Trump later tweeted, “OBAMAGATE,” indicating that he believes that Obama worked to undermine his presidency.
Obama on Friday told supporters that with regards to Flynn’s case, there “is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”
Obama’s criticism of the DOJ has been echoed by fellow Democrats, who have called out what they see as Trump’s influence over Barr. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the House Judiciary chairman, called the decision to drop the charges against Flynn “outrageous.”
“The evidence against General Flynn is overwhelming. He pleaded guilty to lying to investigators. And now a politicized and thoroughly corrupt Department of Justice is going to let the president’s crony simply walk away,” he said in a statement.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about two separate contacts he had with a former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Rep. Jim Jordan, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, told Fox News last week that Comey displayed “arrogance” and “ego” with the way he spoke about the Flynn case. The department said its continued prosecution of Flynn would “not serve the interests of justice.”
Trump said that Flynn was innocent and was targeted in an attempt to take down his presidency. He told reporters that he was unaware that the DOJ was going to drop its case.
“I felt it was going to happen just by watching and seeing, like everybody else does. He was an innocent man. He is a great gentleman. He was targeted by the Obama administration and he was targeted in order to try and take down a president,” he said.
Trump continued, “What they’ve done is a disgrace and I hope a big price is going to be paid. A big price should be paid. There’s never been anything like this in the history of our country. What they did, what the Obama administration did, is unprecedented. It’s never happened. Never happened. A thing like this has never happened.”
Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, told Fox News’ “The Next Revolution” Sunday that the FBI likely feared that Flynn would uncover illegitimacies surrounding the origin of the Russia probe.
“I think the best way to look at this is what the FBI and the Obama Administration wanted to do here was really audacious if you think about it in terms of the idea of trying to continue an investigation after a new president has come into power and is in a position to shut down the investigation — when the president ultimately is the target of the investigation,” McCarthy said.
Obama told 3,000 members of the Obama Alumni Association that the Trump administration was woefully inept in dealing with the coronavirus outbreak.
“It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government,” he said.
Trump has insisted that his administration was correct in banning flights from China early on in the outbreak, despite being condemned in some segments of the media.
Larry Kudlow, his national economic council director, told ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopolous” that he did not want to engage in a political back and forth with the former president, but said Trump has worked well in incorporating the private sector and parts of the government in the response.
“I don’t understand what President Obama is saying. It just sounds so darn political to me. Look, what we have done may not be 100 percent perfect. These things happen once every 100 years,” Kudlow said.
Fox News’ Joshua Nelson and the Associated Press contributed to this report
An Iranian missile fired during a training exercise in the Gulf of Oman struck a support vessel near its target, killing 19 Iranian sailors and wounding 15, Iran’s state media reported on Monday, amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington.
The statement significantly raised the death toll in Sunday’s incident from that reported hours earlier, when Iran’s state media said at least one sailor had been killed.
The Konarak, a Hendijan-class support ship taking part in the exercise, was too close to a target during an exercise when the incident happened, the reports said. The vessel had been laying targets for other ships when it was struck accidentally, the report said
The friendly-fire incident took place near the port of Jask, 790 miles south-east of Tehran, in the Gulf of Oman.
A local hospital admitted 12 sailors and treated another three with light injuries, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.
Iranian media said the Konarak had been overhauled in 2018 and was able to launch missiles. The Dutch-made, 47 metre (155ft) vessel had been in service since 1988 and had capacity of 40 tons. It usually carries a crew of 20 sailors.
Iran towed the Konarak into a nearby naval base after the strike. A photograph released by the army showed burn marks and some damage to the vessel, though the military did not immediately offer detailed photographs of the site of the missile’s impact.
Iran regularly holds exercises in the region, which is close to the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Gulf through which 20% of the world’s oil passes. The US Navy’s 5th Fleet, which monitors the region, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Iranian media rarely report on mishaps during exercises, signalling the severity of the incident. The incident also comes after months of heightened tensions between Iran and the US since Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers in 2018 and imposed crushing sanctions on the country.
It was the second serious incident involving a misfired missile by Iran’s armed forces this year. After attacking US forces in Iraq with ballistic missiles in January in response to the US assassination of Gen Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jetliner, killing all 176 people on board.
It is never possible to know for certain how justices may vote based on their questions at oral argument, and the new virtual format the court has taken to in response to Covid-19 has made speculating somewhat trickier.
Harrington noted that a general rule of thumb is that justices tend to ask more questions of the side they are less likely to vote for. So far, though, justices have been asking about the same number of questions to each side in arguments conducted by phone, she said.
The doctrine refers to the practice in which courts sometimes decline to rule on heated political issues. If the court says it cannot rule in the congressional cases, that could effectively be a loss for Trump, who is asking the justices to prevent the subpoenas for his records from going into effect.
“I could see, for example, somebody like [Chief Justice John] Roberts, maybe not wanting to rule directly against Trump but saying I do not want to get involved,” said Elliot Mincberg, a former chief counsel for oversight and investigations for the House Judiciary Committee.
Experts say there are other lines of inquiry they will be watching closely.
“I think the key questions to Congress will be: What is the valid legislative purpose for seeking these records?” said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
If the justices seem skeptical of the congressional committees’ reasoning for the subpoenas, that could doom their case.
On the other hand, Chemerinsky said that if the justices focus on the fact that the activity being investigated predates Trump’s time in office, “I think that it would be a bad sign for the president.”
Cole, of the ACLU, said that he will be listening for whether the justices seem to be looking for common ground.
“Are the justices simply lining up on partisan sides, or are they searching for principles that would allow them to rise above partisan division?” he said.
For weeks, Kelly Stanton wasn’t sleeping. She lay in bed gripped with the anxiety of having to go to work at a Washington, D.C.-area hospital not knowing whether she might bring home the coronavirus to her husband and their three children.
It was inevitable, she thought. She wasn’t protected.
Stanton, a nurse for 28 years, had seen federal safety protocols for health care workers begin to crumble amid the pandemic by early March.
Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regarding personal protective equipment, or PPE, changed consistently. At Stanton’s hospital, nurses were told that they would have limited access to an already low stockpile of protective equipment and were being asked to reuse single-use masks multiple times, she said.
“Never in my time as a nurse have I seen this,” she said. “It was a position I could never have imagined I’d be in, even in my wildest dreams.”
Each time a safety regulation changed, she said, she began to feel more like “a sheep sent to slaughter” than a front-line nurse, and she started agonizing between her job and her family.
By late March, the risks weighed too heavily, and Stanton submitted her resignation.
“It was an extremely difficult decision, but as a mother and wife, the health of my family will always come first,” she said. “In the end, I could not accept that I could be responsible for causing one of my family members to become severely ill or possibly die.”
As COVID-19 has infected more than 1 million Americans, nurses working on the front lines with little protective support have made the gut-wrenching decision to step away from their jobs, saying that they were ill-equipped and unable to fight the disease and that they feared for not only their own safety but also that of their families.
Many of these nurses, who have faced backlash for quitting, said new CDC protocols have made them feel expendable and have not kept their safety in mind, leaving them no choice but to walk away from a job they loved.
‘We’re not cannon fodder. We’re human beings.’
As the nation took stock of its dwindling medical supplies in the early days of the pandemic, CDC guidance regarding personal protective equipment quickly took a back seat.
Supplies of N95 masks, which had previously been the acceptable standard of protective care for both patients and medical personnel, were depleting, so commercial grade masks, surgical masks and, in the most extreme cases, homemade masks, such as scarves and bandannas, were all sanctioned by the CDC — which didn’t return a request for comment — to counter the lack of resources.
“Things they were telling us we had to now do, you would’ve been fired if we did that three weeks before,” Stanton said. “How is this suddenly OK?”
Kelly Stanton.Courtesy Kelly Stanton
There had been warning that a pandemic was coming, she said. “Hospital administrators, states and the federal government should have stockpiled PPEs. All three failed.”
COVID-19 patients had only slowly started trickling in, but Stanton could see where things would head. It was almost guaranteed that nurses would be at risk under those conditions, she said.
“We’re not cannon fodder. We’re human beings,” she said.
In many respects, nurses who have had to treat COVID-19 patients with little or no protection, especially in the early days of the pandemic, have become collateral damage.
Nearly 10,000 health care workers on the front lines, including nurses, have tested positive, according to a preliminary survey the CDC conducted from February to April.
Because data collection has been slow and not comprehensive and many people with COVID-19 have been asymptomatic, actual numbers are likely much higher.
At least 79 nurses have died from the coronavirus, the American Nurses Association, which has been independently tracking reports, said Thursday.
“There are huge ethical dilemmas that nurses are now facing,” said Liz Stokes, director of the American Nurses Association Center for Ethics and Human Rights.
“Just imagine having to make decisions every day on whether you’re going to fulfill your professional obligation to care for patients versus sacrificing your personal safety or even that of your family because you’re in a situation where you don’t have adequate resources.”
Nurses have a duty to their patients, but they also have a duty to themselves under the nursing code of ethics, Stokes said. Those are equal obligations, and if you feel morally torn, you have to make the decision that’s right for you, she said.
Stokes added that it’s also important to be thankful for the nurses who have decided to step away because they recognized that they weren’t in the best situation physically or mentally to provide care.
‘No, we didn’t sign up for this’
For Rebecca, a nurse in the Albuquerque, New Mexico, area who didn’t want her full name used for fear that she won’t be rehired, the writing was on the wall when she saw a member of her hospital management collect all N95 masks from her floor and lock them in a cabinet in early March, before the country went into full-blown crisis.
“It’s really demoralizing to see someone lock them up in front of you knowing that you might need one of those,” she said. “The whole scene was very symbolic of how all this was going to go down. And it was a bad sign for what’s to come.”
Rebecca, who has been a nurse for four years, said that communication and infrastructure began to break down fairly quickly and that nurses were expected to make terrible compromises.
Masks were rationed to one per week and sometimes shared. Only nurses who dealt with patients who tested positive for COVID-19 were given an extra N95 mask, even if the patient showed symptoms.
During one 16-hour shift, Rebecca was repeatedly in close contact with a patient who later tested positive — and she wasn’t wearing a mask.
“I knew it was something I could no longer handle,” she said. “I know my limitations.”
Rebecca quit in mid-April, one week after she tested negative for COVID-19 after exposure to the patient.
Since quitting, she has been sensitive to the criticism many nurses like her have faced for stepping away during a pandemic. That’s why many of them have kept their decisions private, she said.
It’s especially hurtful when she reads comments on social media that nurses shouldn’t raise complaints because they “signed up for this.”
“We didn’t sign up to be sacrificial lambs. We didn’t sign up to fight a deadly disease without adequate resources,” she said. “We’re told we’re soldiers. Well, you don’t send soldiers to war without a gun and expect them to do their job, but you are doing that to us.”
The sentiments have been shared by thousands of other nurses who feel they are also being put in dangerous environments.
Last month, the New York State Nurses Association, representing more than 3,000 nurses, filed three lawsuits against the New York State Health Department and two hospitals over the health and safety of nurses treating COVID-19 patients.
Among other things, the lawsuits call out the state for not providing appropriate protective equipment for nurses, not properly training nurses deployed from hospital units and not providing safe enough working conditions for high-risk employees.
While the Health Department declined to comment directly on the lawsuit, it did say it was “deeply grateful for the ongoing efforts of New York’s health care workers to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by testing people who may be infected and treating those who are most in need.”
Quitting has been on the minds of many nurses, said Cara Lunsford, a nurse who founded Holliblu, an online community for nurses.
According to a survey conducted by Holliblu, 62 percent of over 1,000 respondents said they are planning to quit either their jobs or the profession altogether.
“They didn’t sign up to go into work and be unprotected from an invisible enemy, and the pressure is really starting to mount for a lot of nurses,” Lunsford said.
This is an unprecedented time, and nurses weren’t trained to be soldiers or handle biological threats with little protection and resources, she said. And if they leave for their sanity or safety, they shouldn’t be treated as defectors.
Constantly being anointed a “hero” by the public also hasn’t helped the added pressure, Rebecca said. While it’s a nice gesture, it gives the connotation that you should be risking yourself without help and that if you don’t you’re a “coward.”
She added that several colleagues reached out to her about wanting to quit after she left but that many just don’t have the option.
“I’ve realized that I’m very fortunate that I had a choice,” she said. “A lot of nurses have student loans, car loans, and they are single parents. They can’t quit, and that bothers me, because they are being taken advantage of right now.”
‘It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life’
Kate, who didn’t want her full name used for privacy, quit her job at a Virginia hospital in April after she was pulled from her floor as a post-anesthesia care unit nurse and reassigned to critical care after only four hours of training.
Throughout her hospital, protective equipment was siphoned for COVID-19-positive patients, but with testing not fully widespread, she never knew whether someone was infected, and worse she, didn’t know whether she was bringing it home.
Kate would go directly to the attic and quarantine away from her husband and children after getting home from work. But the emotional toll was high, and she could no longer be away from her 1- and 3-year-old children.
She knew she had to walk away from her job.
While putting her family first has got her through the painful decision, she still feels tremendous guilt for leaving.
“It’s not just a job, it’s a calling, and to walk away from it is extremely difficult and painful.” she said. “I wish I could have stayed with my patients. It’s not like I didn’t want to be there.”
Had masks been available and pre-pandemic precautions preserved, “without a doubt I’d still be working,” Kate said.
Stokes, of the American Nurses Association, said: “One of the issues that we are trying to emphasize is that nurses must be supported in whatever decision they make, whether they take the risk or choose not to take the risk to protect families.
“It’s a heart-wrenching decision, and many nurses have expressed that they feel sadness and sorrow that they are leaving their colleagues and patients. It’s a difficult decision, and that in itself can be emotionally traumatic.”
Stokes believes the psychological consequences of putting nurses in these dilemmas will be profound and long-lasting. She predicts high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder and secondary trauma syndrome trailing the pandemic.
“Nurses were already burned out before, and this pandemic might push many of them completely out,” she said.
The mental health toll on medical workers was put into sobering perspective after New York City emergency room doctor Lorna Breen died by suicide. A hotline created by physicians to help doctors deal with the anxiety of combating the crisis said it averages up to 20 calls a day. Another hotline, For The Frontlines, has also been set up as a 24-hour resource for other health care and essential workers.
“I would anticipate increased apprehension possibly extending into anxiety or mood problems,” said Dr. Sheetal Marri, a psychiatrist, referring not only to nurses who continued to work but also to those who stepped back. “These effects will impact the way nurses and other health care professionals will deal with workplace health hazards even after this pandemic is over.”
Stanton said she would like to return to nursing but only once guidelines are restored and she can feel safe going to work again. While she is taking this time to focus on her family, she still misses her job.
“I loved being a nurse. You do it because you care, you want to help people,” she said. ” But right now, nurses don’t feel like heroes. We feel expendable.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
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WASHINGTON – White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett predicted Sunday the unemployment rate could rise above 20% and the worst job losses would come in “May or June” because of the coronavirus pandemic.
When asked what the “bottom” of the country’s unemployment pain would be, Hassett, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “to get unemployment rates like the ones that we’re about to see … which I think will climb up towards 20% by next month, you have to really go back to the Great Depression.”
“I’m looking for rates north of 20, sadly,” he added.
The economic situation would be different from the Great Depression, when unemployment soared to 25%, he said, because the country has a better understanding of the cause of the current economic slowdown. He said he hoped to avoid the “policy errors” during the Great Depression that prolonged the economic crisis.
Hassett said jobs would “trough” in May or June, and the unemployment rate would continue to rise because of the filing of unemployment claims.
“We’re burning up initial claims for unemployment insurance right now at a rate of about 3 million a week, running through the rest of the month,” he said. “That’s where the extra unemployment comes from.”
The USA lost 20.5 million jobs in April, and the unemployment rate rose to 14.7%, both record-high numbers as the nation felt the economic effects of the coronavirus. Social distancing measures forced the closures of businesses across the country, leading to employee layoffs and furloughs.
Despite these losses, President Donald Trump’s top economic advisers signaled optimism about the economy’s recovery as some states start to lift lockdowns and reopen their economy. Trump expressed an eagerness to reopen businesses even as critics warned that returning to normal too early could cause the disease to spread.
Hassett said the economy would be able to rebound because of the relief legislation passed by Congress and actions by the Federal Reserve.
“We have bought some time with all the money that we’ve thrown at the economy, and we’ve been using the time to do things like develop treatments, improve our treatments, learn more about social distancing and so on,” he said.
In a Fox News Sunday interview, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the “reported numbers are probably going to get worse before they get better, but that’s why we’re focused on rebuilding this economy. We’ll have a better third quarter. We’ll have a better fourth quarter. And next year is going to be a great year.”
White House National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said Sunday that the country faces “very difficult numbers,” but “there’s a glimmer of hope.”
“Eighty percent of it (the unemployment numbers) was furloughs and temporary layoffs,” Kudlow said on ABC News’ “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “That, by the way, doesn’t assure that you will go back to a job, but it suggests strongly that the cord between the worker and the business is still intact.”
Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari struck a more pessimistic tone in a separate interview, telling ABC News’ “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” “What I’ve learned in the last few months, unfortunately, this is more likely to be a slow, more gradual recovery.
“When we look around the world, there’s evidence that when countries relax their economic controls, the virus tends to flare back up again,” he said.
The Federalist publisher Ben Domenech appeared on “Media Buzz” on Sunday saying that a January 2017 Oval Office meeting with former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Vice President Joe Biden and members of the National Security Council to discuss Russian election interference “proves that we need to be asking questions both of former President Obama and of, frankly, Joe Biden.”
Domenech added that those questions should include “what that meeting entailed, about what they were thinking in this time.”
Newly declassified documents, including an FD-302 FBI witness report, revealed that on Jan. 5, 2017, Yates, Comey, Biden, then-CIA Director John Brennan and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, along with National Security Adviser Susan Rice and other members of the National Security Council, attended the meeting.
After the briefing, Obama asked Yates and Comey to “stay behind,” and said he had “learned of the information about [then-incoming National Security Adviser Michael] Flynn” and his conversation with Russia’s ambassador about sanctions. Obama “specified that he did not want any additional information on the matter, but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently, given the information.”
In an article published on Friday in The Federalist, “Obama, Biden Oval Office Meeting On January 5 Was Key To Entire Anti-Trump Operation,” Mollie Hemingway wrote, “Information released in the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the case it brought against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn confirms the significance of a Jan. 5, 2017, meeting at the Obama White House.”
“It was at this meeting that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration.”
The article then noted that “in an unusual email” Rice wrote to herself about the Jan. 5 meeting, “President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”
On Sunday, Domenech weighed in saying the email “opens up a lot of questions.”
“That was the meeting where Sally Yates apparently found out that James Comey was circumventing their normal practices when it came to going through the White House counsel before interviewing Michael Flynn,” he continued. “This creates, I think, a question that really needs to be asked of the Democratic presumptive presidential nominee about what happened in that meeting, what his role might have been in spinning this up.”
Domenech made the comments three days after the Justice Department moved to drop its case against Flynn, in a stunning development that comes after internal memos were released raising serious questions about the nature of the investigation that led to Flynn’s late 2017 guilty plea of lying to the FBI.
Speaking from the White House on Thursday President Trump said Flynn “was an innocent man.”
“He is a great gentleman,” Trump continued. “He was targeted by the Obama administration and he was targeted in order to try and take down a president and what they’ve done is a disgrace. They’re scum and I say it a lot. They’re scum. They’re human scum.”
On Sunday, Domenech said that some news outlets will now have to reevaluate their protocols
“There have been so many people who have run away from this story because it would force them to have to go back and look at the leaks that they were basing their earlier stories on about the way that this played out with Michael Flynn,” he said.
“It would also in many instances force them to examine the comments from paid contributors to their networks who have been saying one thing when they go on-air for the past several years, but other things behind closed doors as we’ve learned from the transcripts that have been released this week from the House Intelligence Committee.”
“This is going to be a continually unraveling story as we go forward and I think that a lot of these media entities need to go back and look at the kind of original reporting that they did on this subject and whether they can trust those types of sources in the future, whether they need to make changes in order to vet things more thoroughly,” he added.
Domenech made the comments three days after the media watchdog group NewsBusters determined that the guilty plea from the former Trump official received nearly four times the coverage than the latest developments that virtually reverse the legal drama that took place prior.
Fox News’ Gregg Re, Joseph Wulfsohn and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
Donald Trump continued to fume over the Russia investigation on Sunday, more than a year after special counsel Robert Mueller filed his report without recommending charges against the president but only three days after the justice department said it would drop its case against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.
“The biggest political crime in American history, by far!” the president wrote in a tweet accompanying a conservative talk show host’s claim that Barack Obama “used his last weeks in office to target incoming officials and sabotage the new administration”.
The tweet echoed previous messages retweeted by Trump, which earned rebukes for relaying conspiracy theories. On Sunday afternoon the president continued to send out a stream of tweets of memes and rightwing talking heads claiming an anti-Trump conspiracy. One tweet by Trump simply read: “OBAMAGATE!”
Trump fired Flynn, a retired general, in early 2017, for lying to Vice-President Mike Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding sanctions levied by the Obama administration in retaliation for interference in the 2016 election.
The US intelligence community has long held that such efforts were meant to tip the election towards Trump and away from Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI – which Trump has acknowledged – and co-operated with Mueller, who was appointed to take over the investigation of Russian interference after Trump fired FBI director James Comey.
Flynn sought to change his plea while awaiting sentencing and the president championed his case, floating a possible pardon. On Thursday, in an act that stunned the US media, attorney general William Barr said the justice department would drop the case entirely.
Michael Flynn at a campaign event in Virginia Beach in September 2016. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters
Trump and his supporters have loudly trumpeted the decision and across Saturday and Sunday the president unleashed a storm of retweets of supporters and conservative commentators attacking targets including Obama, Mueller, Comey and House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff.
The talkshow host retweeted by the president, Buck Sexton, is a former CIA analyst who now hosts a show which he says “speaks truth to power, and cuts through the liberal nonsense coming from the mainstream media”.
In another message retweeted by the president, Sexton called former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe – who Trump fired just short of retirement – “a dishonorable partisan scumbag who has done incalculable damage to the reputation of the FBI and should be sitting in a cell for lying under oath”.
In February, the US justice department said it would not charge McCabe over claims he lied to investigators about a media leak.
Like Comey, McCabe released a book in which he was highly critical of Trump, who he said acted like a mob boss. McCabe also wrote that Trump had unleashed a “strain of insanity” in American public life.
In his own tweets, Trump did not directly address comments by Obama himself which were reported by Yahoo News. The former president told associates the Flynn decision was “the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic – not just institutional norms – but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk”.
But Trump’s anger was evident.
“When are the Fake Journalists,” he wrote on Sunday, “who received unwarranted Pulitzer Prizes for Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Scam, going to turn in their tarnished awards so they can be given to the real journalists who got it right. I’ll give you the names, there are plenty of them!”
The president did not immediately name anyone.
But in 2018 the Pulitzer committee did, awarding its prize for national reporting jointly to the Washington Post and the New York Times for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
Trump has further reason to resent the Pulitzer committee and question its choices.
In 2019, for example, a New York Times team won a Pulitzer for an “exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges”.
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, was rewarded for “uncovering President Trump’s secret payoffs to two women during his campaign who claimed to have had affairs with him, and the web of supporters who facilitated the transactions, triggering criminal inquiries and calls for impeachment”.
Trump’s actual impeachment, which he survived at trial in the Senate in February, concerned his attempts to have Ukraine investigate his political rivals. No reporter or news outlet won a 2020 Pulitzer, announced this week, for its coverage of that affair.
Trump’s focus on Sunday remained largely on the Russia investigation despite continuing developments in the coronavirus outbreak, which has infected more than 1.3m Americans and killed nearly 80,000.
With cases confirmed among White House aides close to the president, top public health experts including Dr Anthony Fauci in quarantine and Trump reported by the New York Times to be “spooked”, the president claimed in a rare non-Russia-related tweet: “We are getting great marks for the handling of the CoronaVirus pandemic.”
He also attacked Obama and his vice-president, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president this year, over their response to the “disaster known as H1N1 Swine Flu” in 2009.
As a top economic adviser predicted Sunday that unemployment levels could exceed 20%, three senior health officials and members on the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force – including Dr. Anthony Fauci – said they will self-quarantine after exposure to a person with the virus.
That news came as former President Barack Obama criticized the federal response to the pandemic as a “chaotic disaster” in a call with supporters, according to published audio of the call.
There were more than 78,700 deaths and 1.3 million confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. on Sunday, according to the John Hopkins University data dashboard. Worldwide, the virus has killed almost 280,000 people and surpassed 4 million infections.
Our live blog is being updated throughout the day. Refresh for the latest news, and get updates in your inbox with The Daily Briefing. Scroll down for more details.
Here are some of the most significant developments to know Sunday:
Three children in New York have died from an inflammatory illness that has been linked to the coronavirus, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Saturday. The illness appears to be similar toKawasaki disease or toxic shock syndrome and includes a persistent fever.
The federal government is shipping hundreds of donated cases of remdesivir, an experimental drug shown to be useful in treating COVID-19 patients, to six hard-hit states.
When asked what the “bottom” of the country’s unemployment pain would be, Hassett, who advises the Trump administration on economic policy and is the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told CBS’s “Face the Nation,” “to get unemployment rates like the ones that we’re about to see…which I think will climb up toward 20% by next month, you have to really go back to the Great Depression to see that.”
When asked about the “low point” in the unemployment rate, he said: “I’m looking for rates north of 20, sadly.”
The United States lost 20.5 million jobs in April, and the unemployment rate rose to 14.7%, both record-high numbers as the nation felt the economic effects of the coronavirus. Social distancing measures have forced the closures of businesses across the country, leading to employee layoffs and furloughs.
– Nicholas Wu
‘Our life is in danger’: Hawaii battles record unemployment
Hawaii is facing it’s highest unemployment rate ever as strict stay-at-home orders and a virtual shutdown of the state’s once mighty tourism industry have left residents reeling, leaning on their savings or unable to pay rent and feed their families. Since March, the state’s unemployment rate has soared from 3% to 34%, one of the highest in the nation.
The pain has been widespread. Charities are encountering unprecedented requests for food and assistance; small-business owners are grappling with plummeting profits. The state’s struggles to keep up with unemployment claims even prompted some residents to come out and threaten violence against state workers.
Roughly 216,000 of the state’s 660,000 workers were employed in jobs supported by tourism in 2019. Airline arrivals to Hawaii have nosedived from more than 30,000 passengers per day to 756. Food service workers, who make up roughly 13% of all employees in the state and earn a median annual income of about $30,000, lost wages as restaurants closed and hotels shuttered.
“Our life is in danger because, of course, we don’t know what will happen,” Julie Gabot, a housekeeper at the Sheraton Waikiki, said. “There’s no real hope for good things in the future.”
Pandemic complicating LGBTQ census outreach
For decades, LGBTQ people have battled for a seat at the census table.
Then in 2020, there came a beacon of hope when same-sex couples living together were included in the 10-year survey for the first time, even though sexual orientation and gender identity questions were absent.
Advocates rallied the LGBTQ community, urging full participation.
“Because of social distancing, people are not out there pushing the census,” said Glennda Testone, executive director of New York’s LGBT Community Center. “My fear is that the response numbers will go down.”
– Susan Miller
As new cases rise, S. Korea’s leader urges calm
After South Korea reported 34 new cases of the coronavirus Sunday, most of which were linked to club goers, President Moon Jae-in urged calm and said “there’s no reason to stand still out of fear.”
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 26 of the 34 new infections were locally transmitted; the others came from abroad. Sunday’s surge marked the first time that the daily rate increased by more than 30 in about a month.
On Saturday, Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon ordered more than 2,100 nightclubs, hostess bars and discos to close.
Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will be “teleworking for the next two weeks” after it was determined he had a “low-risk exposure” to a person at the White House who tested positive, the CDC said in a statement Saturday evening. The statement said he felt fine and has no symptoms.
And the Food and Drug Administration confirmed to USA TODAY on Saturday that commissioner Stephen Hahn will self-quarantine for two weeks after coming into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Hahn has tested negative for the virus, according to FDA press officer Stephanie Caccomo.
The coronavirus pandemic has been creeping closer to the inner circle of the White House in the past week, as two employees there have tested positive. Meanwhile, at least 11 U.S. Secret Service employees were reported to be infected and about 60 other staffers were in self-quarantine, USA TODAY has learned.
– Joel Shannon
Obama: US coronavirus response a ‘chaotic disaster’
In addressing the Trump administration’s response to the global coronavirus pandemic, Obama cited concerns about division and tribalism in the country and internationally. That has contributed to an “anemic and spotty” response to the health crisis, Obama said.
– Joel Shannon
More coronavirus news from USA TODAY
Airport fever screenings: The White House is pushing to restart airport fever screenings for COVID-19, overruling CDC experts.
Do opioids, heart disease and cancer kill more Americans annually than the coronavirus?We checked the facts.
FDA authorizes new type of diagnostic test
The Food and Drug Administration issued its first emergency use authorization for a COVID-19 antigen test, a new type of diagnostic test that provides rapid results and is cheap to produce.
Antigen tests analyze samples collected with a nose or throat swab to search for proteins found on or within the virus. While positive results from antigen tests are highly accurate, there is a higher chance of false negatives, according to the FDA.
The test is different from the two existing types of FDA-authorized tests. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests are diagnostic tests that detect genetic material from the virus to determine whether someone has an active infection. Serological tests detect antibodies to attempt to determine if someone has had the virus and built up an immune response to it.
The FDA issued the authorization late Friday to the California-based Quidel Corporation.
– Grace Hauck
Trump congratulates Dana White for putting on UFC 249 during pandemic
“They’re going to have a big match,” Trump said during the broadcast. “We love it. We think it’s important – get the sports leagues back. Let’s play. We do the social distancing and whatever else you have to do, but we need sports. We want our sports back, and congratulations to Dana White and the UFC.”
UFC 249 at VyStar Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Jacksonville, Fla., was not only the first UFC card in the U.S. since the outbreak of coronavirus forced stay-at-home orders in most of the country but also the first major sporting event of any sort.
Although the UFC paired with the Florida State Boxing Commission and implemented several safety protocols to deal with COVID-19, there’s been plenty of criticism surrounding whether or not professional fighting should resume.
US cuts funding to group studying bat coronaviruses in China
The head of a research group that studies bat-borne coronaviruses in China similar to the COVID-19 strain that’s ravaged the globe has warned that a U.S. government decision to cut funding to his organization imperils American public health.
EcoHealth Alliance’s research grant was abruptly terminated last month by the National Institutes of Health, the primary agency of the U.S. government responsible for biomedical and public health research. EcoHealth Alliance’s research in China is focused on identifying and warning about coronaviruses dangerous to human health.
“I’m really concerned about where this leaves us,” said Peter Daszak, director of the New York-based organization, in a USA TODAY interview.
The National Institutes of Health confirmed EcoHealth Alliance’s $3.4 million grant, distributed over six years, was canceled on April 24. But it would not discuss details about how the decision was made.
But on testing and medical supplies, it was Kushner who took a leading role — efforts that have received mixed reviews.
“What goes through Jared is what Jared cares about,” a former senior administration official said. “He doesn’t meddle in stuff that he doesn’t care about.”
During his three-plus years working for Trump, Kushner has garnered the most attention for successfully pushing a criminal justice bill to relax strict federal sentencing guidelines, as well as for his long-stalled proposals to establish Middle East peace and overhaul the immigration system.
Behind the scenes, Kushner’s influence has extended far beyond those issues to everything from trade negotiations with China to building a wall on the border with Mexico.
“People realize when they go work in the White House, Jared is the shadow chief of staff,” said a former Senate Republican staffer who is close to the White House. “He’s family. He’s been with the president since the campaign.”
A Republican close to the White House says Trump doesn’t listen to Kushner all of the time, noting it can depend on his son-in-law’s recent successes or failures. “Like everything there, it ebbs and flows,” the person said. The recent spate of negative stories about Kushner relying on volunteers with little expertise for the coronavirus response didn’t help, the person said.
That said, Kushner’s fingerprints are all over major decisions during the coronavirus.
Three weeks ago, after Trump tweeted he would suspend immigration into the United States during the pandemic, it was Kushner who persuaded the president in an Oval Office meeting to carve out business-friendly exceptions for hundreds of thousands of temporary workers, including seasonal farm workers, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
A conservative close to the White House encouraged Meadows to be more assertive in Kushner’s areas, arguing Kushner’s policies are not in line with the conservative base that propelled Trump to the White House. If the administration proceeds with Kushner’s policies, the person said, Trump’s reelection bid could fall short.
“Meadows understands this, they don’t,” the person said referring to Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, also a senior adviser.
Another Republican who speaks to Trump said Meadows hasn’t yet brought enough of his own staff with him to be allies in the White House. Thus far, Meadows has installed just a handful of staffers, including a deputy, a scheduler and a communications adviser. Conversely, Mulvaney brought in more than a dozen aides, including an attorney and national security adviser.
Meadows has tried to make his staffing mark in other ways, most notably in the press shop, where he pushed out press secretary Stephanie Grisham and installed several staffers he had worked with previously.
The moves left others worried that a broader shakeup was coming to the West Wing. But three people familiar with the situation say the changes also came at the urging of Kushner, who had complained in recent months that the communications and press officers were too passive.
“Jared was the force behind that,” a former senior administration official said. “But he pushed Meadows to do it.”
The White House official said Meadows shared Kushner’s goal “to be more proactive in the press, institute more long term planning and reestablish a better relationship with reporters.”
Meadows is next positioned to put his stamp on the legislative affairs office, the White House’s main conduit with Capitol Hill. Eric Ueland, the legislative affairs director, appears poised to take a job at the State Department, and Mike McKenna, one of Ueland’s deputies, has already left.
Over at the Domestic Policy Council, however, Meadows didn’t get his way after floating Miller’s name. Giving Miller the DPC job would have technically been a demotion for the senior policy aide who has had a direct channel to the president on a variety of subjects.
Meadows had also contemplated reorganizing the speech-writing team — a stand-alone office led by Miller — but got pushback.
“It is a Jared choice,” a senior administration official involved in the deliberations said last week as the decision was being made. “Meadows does not seem to be in it at all.”
White House spokesman Judd Deere denied that Miller has been or is under consideration for the DPC job. Miller didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In the end, it was a microcosm of the broader lesson for any new Trump chief of staff: You may have one of the most senior roles, but that doesn’t mean you have the final say.
“Why didn’t he realize that before?” wondered one of the Republicans close to Trump.
Daniel Lippman and Gabby Orr contributed to this report.
Donald Trump continued to fume over the Russia investigation on Sunday, more than a year after special counsel Robert Mueller filed his report without recommending charges against the president but only three days after the justice department said it would drop its case against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.
“The biggest political crime in American history, by far!” the president wrote in a tweet accompanying a conservative talk show host’s claim that Barack Obama “used his last weeks in office to target incoming officials and sabotage the new administration”.
The tweet echoed previous messages retweeted by Trump, which earned rebukes for relaying conspiracy theories.
Trump fired Flynn in early 2017, for lying to Vice-President Mike Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding sanctions levied by the Obama administration in retaliation for Russian election interference.
The US intelligence community has long held that such efforts were meant to tip the 2016 election towards Trump and away from Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI – which Trump has acknowledged – and co-operated with Mueller, who was appointed to take over the investigation of Russian interference after Trump fired FBI director James Comey.
Mueller did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia but did lay out extensive links with Moscow and instances of possible obstruction of justice by the president.
Flynn sought to change his plea while awaiting sentencing and the president championed his case, floating a possible pardon. On Thursday, in an act that stunned the US media, attorney general William Barr said the justice department would drop the case entirely.
Trump and his supporters have loudly trumpeted the decision. Across Saturday and Sunday the president unleashed a storm of retweets of supporters and conservative commentators attacking targets including Obama, Mueller, Comey and House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff.
The talkshow host retweeted by the president, Buck Sexton, is a former CIA analyst who now hosts a show which he says “speaks truth to power, and cuts through the liberal nonsense coming from the mainstream media”.
In another message retweeted by the president, Sexton called former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe – who Trump fired just short of retirement – “a dishonorable partisan scumbag who has done incalculable damage to the reputation of the FBI and should be sitting in a cell for lying under oath”.
In February, the US justice department said it would not charge McCabe over claims he lied to investigators about a media leak.
Like Comey, McCabe has released a book in which he was highly critical of Trump, who he says acts like a mob boss. McCabe also wrote that Trump has unleashed a “strain of insanity” in American public life.
In his own tweets, Trump did not directly address comments by Obama himself which were reported by Yahoo News. The former president told associates the Flynn decision was “the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic – not just institutional norms – but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk”.
But Trump’s anger was evident.
“When are the Fake Journalists,” he wrote on Sunday, “who received unwarranted Pulitzer Prizes for Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Scam, going to turn in their tarnished awards so they can be given to the real journalists who got it right. I’ll give you the names, there are plenty of them!”
The president did not immediately name anyone.
But in 2018 the Pulitzer committee did, awarding its prize for national reporting jointly to the Washington Post and the New York Times for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
Trump has further reason to resent the Pulitzer committee and question its choices.
In 2019, for example, a New York Times team won a Pulitzer for an “exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges”.
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, was rewarded for “uncovering President Trump’s secret payoffs to two women during his campaign who claimed to have had affairs with him, and the web of supporters who facilitated the transactions, triggering criminal inquiries and calls for impeachment”.
Trump’s actual impeachment, which he survived at trial in the Senate in February, concerned his attempts to have Ukraine investigate his political rivals. No reporter or news outlet won a 2020 Pulitzer, announced this week, for its coverage of that affair.
Trump’s focus on Sunday remained largely on the Russia investigation despite continuing developments in the coronavirus outbreak, which has infected more than 1.3m Americans and killed nearly 80,000.
In one tweet, the president claimed “We are getting great marks for the handling of the CoronaVirus pandemic” and attacked Obama and his vice-president, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president this year, over their response to the “disaster known as H1N1 Swine Flu” in 2009.
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