The infamous 25th Amendment to the Constitution lays out how a sitting president can be temporarily stripped of his powers, if the vice president and a majority of Cabinet secretaries declare that he is unfit to serve.
Now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a press conference to discuss this topic Friday. But it wasn’t to make any actual attempt to remove President Donald Trump’s powers.
Rather, Pelosi was promoting a bill sponsored by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), which, if signed into law, would create a new bipartisan commission that could, if the vice president agrees, declare the president unable to serve.
Pelosi described that this as a general good government reform proposal for the future, saying it is “not about President Trump,” whom she said will “face the judgment of the voters.” Indeed, there’s no chance this bill will be passed or signed into law this year. For now, it’s just an idea.
But in the context of the Trump era, holding a press conference on the 25th Amendment is akin to waving a red flag in front of a bull. And indeed, Trump soon responded with a tweet baselessly accusing Pelosi of planning to invoke the amendment to replace an eventual President Biden with his vice president, Kamala Harris.
Crazy Nancy Pelosi is looking at the 25th Amendment in order to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris. The Dems want that to happen fast because Sleepy Joe is out of it!!!
As often discussed in the Trump era, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment lets the vice president and a majority of Cabinet secretaries temporarily deprive the president of his powers, if they declare his inability to serve in office. The amendment does not define what “inability” entails, but it has often been discussed in terms of physical incapacitation, dementia, or even just erraticism. (The president can also fight to reclaim his powers if he disagrees that he’s unfit, it would take a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate to keep him sidelined.)
However, the 25th Amendment says it doesn’t necessarily have to be the Cabinet that makes the call on presidential inability. It says that the vice president can also work with some “other body as Congress may by law provide” to deem the president unfit, and take over his powers.
But Congress never ended up creating this other body. So that’s what this bill from Rep. Raskin would do: it would create the “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of the Office.” (The bill isn’t new — Raskin first introduced it in 2017.)
Per Raskin’s bill, this commission would have 17 members. Nine of those members would have to be physicians, and at least four of those nine must specialize in psychiatry. The other eight members will be former high-ranking executive branch officials (former presidents, vice presidents, top Cabinet secretaries, or surgeons general).
As for who picks them, Democratic congressional leaders get to fill eight of the seats, and Republican congressional leaders get to fill the other eight. Then, somehow, those a majority of those 16 appointees must pick the final appointee, who will be the commission’s chair.
This commission could then be empowered by Congress to conduct “an examination of the President to determine whether the President is incapacitated, either mentally or physically.” Then they’d have to tell Congress their findings.
Finally, the vice president would have to say whether he agrees or disagrees with the commission’s findings. If he agrees, then the president would temporarily lose his powers, and the vice president would become acting president. If he disagrees, then the president stays on.
The point of all this would be to take away this decision-making power on presidential inability from the president’s own appointees, who may be hesitant to defy him (and who he could fire), to a group of mostly medical professionals.
Still, most of those medical professionals would be appointed by congressional leaders of both parties (currently Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Chuck Schumer, and Pelosi), so politics clearly would not be removed from the process. That means the very high bar to deprive a sitting president of his powers would remain quite high.
Perhaps the most challenging thing about all this, though, would be convincing a president of the United States to sign a bill into law that would create a new way he could be stripped of his powers.
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Declaring himself “healed” from the coronavirus, President Donald Trump on Friday did a two-hour appearance on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, during which he attacked the Justice Department, Hillary Clinton, Fox News and mail-in ballots, and dropped an F-bomb while talking about Iran.
The president sounded short of breath a few times at the start of the lengthy phone-in appearance of what had been billed as a “guest hosting” role, but sounded steadier as the program went on. The conservative commentator welcomed Trump to his “radio rally” with audio of a crowd chanting, “We love you!”
Trump, who tested positive for the coronavirus a week earlier, said doctors were initially more concerned about his prognosis than they’ve said publicly.
“They said you were very bad,” Trump said. “This looked like it was going to be a big deal. And you know what that means.”
He touted the medication. “I was in not great shape and we have a medicine that healed me, that fixed me,” he said, adding that he had “a little lingering thing” afterwards. He said he’s now not on any drug treatment.
Limbaugh also asked the president about a report in Axios that Attorney General William Barr told top Republicans that a review into the origins of the Russia investigation won’t be completed before the election, and that they shouldn’t expect any new indictments before then either.
In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump complained about the lack of indictments against Obama officials as a result of the Russia investigation, and said Barr has “all the information he needs” and would be remembered as a “sad case” if he didn’t act.
Trump told Limbaugh that if the Axios report is accurate, “I’m very disappointed. I think it’s a terrible thing, and I’ll say it to his face,” referring to Barr.
The president, who said the United States’ nuclear program “is all tippy-top now,” also cursed while discussing Iranian sanctions in the nationally-broadcast interview.
“They’ve been put on notice. If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before. And they understand that,” Trump said.
The president also continued his whipsaw approach to another coronavirus relief package, saying “I would like to see a bigger stimulus package, frankly, than either the Democrats or the Republicans are offering. I’m going to the exact opposite now, OK? I mean, I’m telling you this. I’m telling you something I don’t tell anybody else, because maybe it helps, or maybe it hurts negotiations. I would like to see a bigger package.”
He’d tweeted earlier this week that he was ending talks with the Democrats on another stimulus package until after the election.
Much of the rest of the interview was dedicated to Trump re-airing now familiar complaints.
Rival Joe Biden “is out of it” and “in no condition to be a candidate,” while 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for her deleted emails, Trump said.
He also complained about mail-in voting (“Who are they sending them to? Where are they going?”), the mainstream media and even Fox News, where he was interviewed yesterday and was scheduled to make another appearance Friday night.
“Fox is a whole different ballgame. Fox is a much different thing than it was four years ago,” he complained. “They’re going the way of CNN. They’re going the way of the MSDNC,” he said, using his nickname for MSNBC. “And, it’s a shame; I mean, it’s a shame.”
He then added that “Fox is 50 percent of what they were … [but] that’s still better than nothing.”
Trump, who Thursday backed out of next week’s presidential debate because he didn’t want to appear virtually, didn’t indicate any interest in revisiting that decision, telling Limbaugh, “I don’t think the debates mean that much” but added that, “I’ve done well with debates.”
Throughout the interview, Limbaugh repeatedly praised the president and urged his listeners to vote for him.
“If you love this country,” Limbaugh said, “you have no choice but to vote for” Trump.
Trump is close with Limbaugh, a conservative commentator with a long history of racist, sexist and homophobic remarks. The president awarded Limbaugh the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, days after Limbaugh announced he’d been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.
Trump called Limbaugh “a special man” and thanked him for his “tireless devotion to our country.”
President Donald Trump said Mike Pence‘s best answer during this week’s vice presidential debate was his evasive response to the question of what he would do should his boss refuse to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event Joe Biden wins the 2020 election.
Trump praised Pence’s dodging of the question at Wednesday’s head-to-head in Utah as he appeared on Fox News on Thursday to discuss his health. He tested positive for COVID-19 last week.
Speaking to the Hannity show last night, Trump said: “And then they talk about we want a peaceful transition of power. Peaceful transition. Mike Pence’s best answer was that answer last night.
“Peaceful transition? Look what they did. They spent three and a half years trying to terminate a president.”
Appearing at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City earlier this week, Pence was asked by debate moderator Susan Page what he would personally do in the event that President Trump refused to accept a peaceful transfer of power after November 3.
“Well Susan, first and foremost I think we’re going to win this election,” Pence said. He later added: “I have every confidence that the same Americans who delivered that historic victory in 2016. They see this president’s record… and I think that movement of Americans has only grown stronger over the past four years.”
He then told Senator Harris that her party had spent three years trying to “overturn” the results of the 2016 election, and accused the FBI of spying on the Trump campaign under the Obama administration.
The vice president also pointed out that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had called on Biden not to concede to Trump under any circumstances earlier this year.
“We have a free and fair election, we know we’re going to have confidence in it and I believe with all my heart that President Donald Trump’s going to be re-elected for four more years,” Pence concluded.
When asked what she would do in the event that Trump refused to peacefully concede power to a Biden administration, Harris said the campaign would not allow the president to “subvert democracy” after election day.
President Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the presidential election in less than a month’s time.
Speaking at a press briefing at the end of September, he said: “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens. You know that. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster.”
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Friday that the White House held a “superspeader event,” apparently referring to the Rose Garden ceremony where President Donald Trump announced the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and where multiple attendees later tested positive for the coronavirus.
Fauci made the remark after being asked in a CBS News Radio interview what the recent coronavirus outbreak at the White House said about the importance of wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
“I think the data speak for themselves,” Fauci said. “We had a superspreader event in the White House, and it was in a situation where people were crowded together, were not wearing masks.”
More than 20 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the outbreak tied to the White House, including Trump, first lady Melania Trump, senior adviser Hope Hicks and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he hasn’t been to the White House in two months because of what he saw as lax enforcement of measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
“My impression was their approach to how to handle this (pandemic) was different from mine and what I insisted we do in the Senate, which was to wear a mask and practice social distancing,” McConnell said during an appearance in Northern Kentucky on Thursday.
Of the more than 200 people who attended the Sept. 26 White House ceremony for Barrett’s nomination, nearly a dozen have tested positive including the Trumps, McEnany, former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Mike Lee and Sen. Thom Tillis.
Fauci is not the first expert to refer to the ceremony as a superspeader event.
Susie Welty, a contact tracing expert and technical director of surveillance at the University of California-San Francisco, told USA TODAY that because of the attendees went on to attend other large events, the Rose Garden ceremony was “probably several super spreader events mixed up in this one scenario.”
Contributing: Deirdre Shesgreen, Nicholas Wu, Nick Penzenstadler, Dinah Voyles Pulver,Marisa Kwiatkowski and Tricia L. Nadolny,USA TODAY; Randy Tucker, Cincinnati Enquirer
Tax records expose more than $21 million in highly unusual payments from the Las Vegas hotel Donald Trump owns with Phil Ruffin, routed through other Trump companies and paid out in cash.
His “self-funded” presidential campaign was short on funds, and he was struggling to win over leery Republican donors. His golf courses and the hotel he would soon open in the Old Post Office in Washington were eating away at what cash he had left on hand, his tax records show.
And in early 2016, Deutsche Bank, the last big lender still doing business with him, unexpectedly turned down his request for a loan. The funds, Mr. Trump had told his bankers, would help shore up his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland. Some bankers feared the money would instead be diverted to his campaign.
That January, Mr. Trump sold a lot of stock — $11.1 million worth. He sold another $11.8 million worth in February, and $7.5 million in March. In April, he sold $8.1 million more.
And the president’s long-hidden tax records, obtained by The New York Times, also reveal this: how he engineered a sudden financial windfall — more than $21 million in what experts describe as highly unusual one-off payments from the Las Vegas hotel he owns with his friend the casino mogul Phil Ruffin.
In previous articles on the tax records, The Times has reported that, in all but a few years since 2000, chronic business losses and aggressive accounting strategies have allowed Mr. Trump to largely avoid paying federal income taxes. And while the hundreds of millions of dollars earned from “The Apprentice” and his attendant celebrity rescued his business career, those riches, together with the marketing power of the Trump brand, were ebbing when he announced his 2016 presidential run.
The new findings, part of The Times’s continuing investigation, cast light on Mr. Trump’s financial maneuverings in that time of fiscal turmoil and unlikely political victory. Indeed, they may offer a hint to one of the enduring mysteries of his campaign: In its waning days, as his own giving had slowed to a trickle, Mr. Trump contributed $10 million, leaving many people wondering where the burst of cash had come from.
The tax records, by their nature, do not specify whether the more than $21 million in payments from the Trump-Ruffin hotel helped prop up Mr. Trump’s campaign, his businesses or both. But they do show how the cash flowed, in a chain of transactions, to several Trump-controlled companies and then directly to Mr. Trump himself.
The bulk of the money went through a company called Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing that had little previous income, no clear business purpose and no employees. The Trump-Ruffin joint venture wrote it all off as a business expense.
Experts in tax and campaign-finance law consulted by The Times said that while more information was needed to assess the legitimacy of the payments, they could be legally problematic.
“Why all of a sudden does this company have more than $20 million in fees that haven’t been there before?” said Daniel Shaviro, a professor of taxation at the New York University School of Law. “And all of this money is going to a man who just happens to be running for president and might not have a lot of cash on hand?”
Unless the payments were for actual business expenses, he said, claiming a tax deduction for them would be illegal. If they were not legitimate and were also used to fund Mr. Trump’s presidential run, they could be considered illegal campaign contributions.
In response to questions about The Times’s findings, a White House spokesman, Judd Deere, referred to this article as “yet another politically motivated hit piece inaccurately smearing a standard business deal.” He added that “during his years as a successful businessman, Donald Trump was longtime partners with Phil Ruffin and earned whatever payments he received.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Ruffin, Jennifer Renzelman, said Mr. Ruffin was not involved in the day-to-day operations of the hotel, adding that “all tax statements go to the people who work on his taxes.”
It is fair to say that, over the years, Mr. Ruffin has been very generous to his friend. When Mr. Trump took the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013, the two men flew over together on Mr. Ruffin’s private jet. He would contribute more than $2.5 million to Mr. Trump’s campaign, his ill-starred foundation and his inaugural.
And after the inauguration, Mr. Ruffin would ask for a favor. Would the president help revive a dormant project of great importance to a lot of powerful people in Las Vegas — a bullet train that would whisk gamblers from Southern California to The Strip in less than 90 minutes?
Four years earlier, Barack Obama’s administration had considered, but ultimately decided against, a $5.5 billion loan for the train. Mr. Trump loved the idea, Mr. Ruffin told Forbes in a 2017 interview.
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“Obama wouldn’t approve it, but maybe Donald will,” Mr. Ruffin said.
What Mr. Trump did after that is not clear. But around Las Vegas, word of the president’s interest was gratefully received. “Anybody having the president’s ear genuinely — not just to have a meeting and have it fall into an empty basket that is 12 miles deep — I am all in favor of it,” the Las Vegas mayor, Carolyn Goodman, said in an interview.
This past March, a panel composed largely of Trump appointees gave the train company permission to sell $1 billion in tax-free bonds to private investors. Authorities in California and Nevada fell in line, approving additional bonds. Trains could begin running as soon as 2024.
Among the train’s chief beneficiaries will be Mr. Ruffin and the other grandees of gambling who became a vital font of political money for Mr. Trump when he needed it most.
And, of course, Donald Trump himself.
A Friend of the President
In business, Phil Ruffin was a kindred spirit: a wealthy transplant to Las Vegas from Kansas. In politics, he would be crucial cheerleader.
Mr. Ruffin’s patronage of the president has been less lavish, and less examined, than that of his Las Vegas compatriot Sheldon Adelson. But he has long been a wingman for Mr. Trump’s political ambitions — urging him to run, burnishing his image and promising financial support.
In July 2016, he took the podium at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to sing the nominee’s praises.
“Donald’s word is his bond. If Donald tells you something, you can put it in the bank,” he said. “I love the man.”
Mr. Ruffin loved the man so much that when Mr. Trump was considering a White House run back in 2011, he donated the venue for a Las Vegas rally: a ballroom at his Treasure Island Hotel and Casino. After Mr. Trump decided that he would indeed run, in 2015, it was at another Treasure Island rally that Mr. Ruffin expounded on his friend’s charitable good works.
“You won’t hear this in the media, but Donald gave $20 million to the St. Jude children’s home,” he said. “He could have used that $20 million for television ads, but he decided to give it to the children of cancer.”
The Washington Post later reported that it had found no evidence of any such donation. More definitively, there is no mention of it in Mr. Trump’s tax records.
Also in 2015, Mr. Ruffin gave $1 million in seed money to the Make America Great Again super PAC, only to have it refunded when the group was dissolved after news reports that it had improperly coordinated with the Trump campaign.
The two men had been brought together in the early 2000s by Mr. Ruffin’s belief that his business needed some Trump-branded glitter. Mr. Trump, whose Atlantic City casinos were flailing, was looking to expand to Las Vegas. The result, built on the former site of a mall parking lot: a “64-story tower of golden glass” that “soars above The Strip,” according to the hotel website.
Plus, a friendship between men from very different places but with parallel trajectories: Mr. Trump to boldface-name Manhattan from “outer borough” New York; Mr. Ruffin to Las Vegas from Wichita, Kan., where he had become wealthy as a pioneer in self-service gas stations and as owner of the world’s largest manufacturer of hand trucks.
It was Mr. Trump who introduced Mr. Ruffin, now 85, to his third wife, Oleksandra Nikolayenko — like Melania Trump, a much younger former model. In 2004, Ms. Nikolayenko represented Ukraine at the Miss Universe pageant. The couple were married in 2008 at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla., with him as best man. The men’s wives are quite close, Mr. Ruffin has said, “like peas in a pod.”
When he flew Mr. Trump to Moscow for the 2013 edition of Miss Universe, Mr. Ruffin also became a bit player in an episode that would, over time, spawn some intrigue and much speculation. Investigations into Kremlin interference in the 2016 election would detail how the president’s Russian partners in the pageant wooed him and then helped broker the meeting where Donald Trump Jr. hoped to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. The partners’ willingness to underwrite the entire pageant made it Mr. Trump’s most profitable Miss Universe. His personal payday, according to his tax records, was $2.3 million.
A report from the Senate Intelligence Committee this August, looking extensively at the pageant, included a “Dear Phil” letter sent by Mr. Trump days after the event.
“It was great spending time with you in Moscow and making the rounds of the city in the hopes of the purchase or development of a project,” Mr. Trump wrote, before concluding, “Let’s see how it all turns out — it is important that we make a good decision.”
Other People’s Money
The campaign was strapped for cash, and many big donors still weren’t sure about Mr. Trump. Then Las Vegas came around.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump frequently boasted that he was so rich he did not need other people’s money. As president, he promised, he would be beholden to no one.
“He’s driving me crazy,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Ruffin at a February 2016 rally after winning the Nevada caucuses. “He said, ‘Donald, I want to put $10 million into your campaign.’ I said: ‘Phil, I don’t want your money. I don’t want to do it. I’m self-funding.’ Every time I see him, it’s hard for me to turn down money, because that’s not what I’ve done in my whole life. I grab and grab and grab.”
In fact, he needed Mr. Ruffin’s money, and then some.
Mr. Trump had promised to pour $100 million of his own money into the campaign, but after an early infusion of more than $35 million in 2015 and early 2016, the flow eventually slowed to a steady $2 million or so near the end of each month. What was at first described as a series of loans became a donation amid the politically uncomfortable perception that the populist billionaire was hoping to have his grass-roots supporters pay him back.
For even as his campaign was building its vaunted internet-powered small-donor operation, much of the Republican fund-raising establishment hung back, still stunned that Mr. Trump had emerged as the party’s standard-bearer. At the low point, in June, the campaign had just $1.3 million in the bank, according to its financial disclosures.
After the convention, the Republican National Committee began pulling in its traditional big donors, but the Trump fund-raising machine still sputtered heading toward Election Day, especially after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape that showed Mr. Trump bragging about groping women.
Then, on Oct. 28, came his surprising $10 million contribution. (That brought his total spending to more than $60 million.)
It was in those final, decisive weeks, too, that the weight of Las Vegas fell in behind him.
After months of hesitation, Mr. Adelson — gambling magnate, Republican megadonor and strident voice for Israel — became the candidate’s biggest contributor. Often along with his wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, he donated $20 million to Mr. Trump’s campaign and political action committees supporting it. He later gave $5 million more to the inaugural. The Las Vegas Review-Journal, which he had recently purchased, gave Mr. Trump a rare newspaper endorsement.
Others gave, too, including the Fertitta family, owners of casinos and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who contributed more than $1.5 million. Steve Wynn, the candidate’s old Atlantic City casino rival, moved over to the friend column after the election, giving $729,217 to the inaugural and becoming the finance chairman of the party. (He resigned in 2018 amid a sexual-assault scandal.)
As for Mr. Ruffin, he didn’t give the $10 million that Mr. Trump had complained was driving him crazy. But he and his wife did contribute almost $1.6 million during the campaign and to the inaugural. And he gave another $1 million in 2016 to Mr. Trump’s foundation, before it shut down amid an investigation into allegations of self-dealing.
Moving the Money
After draining much of the cash he had on hand, Mr. Trump received over $21 million in one-time payments from the hotel he owns with Mr. Ruffin.
Behind the campaign’s fund-raising disarray lay a personal financial storm.
Mr. Trump’s tax records reveal that when he decided to leverage his brand in the political arena, its true bottom line bore little resemblance to the gold-plated success story he was hawking to the American people.
It did not help when NBC, which aired Miss Universe and “The Apprentice,” cut ties with him after he announced his candidacy in 2015 with racist comments about immigrants. Nor did it help when Deutsche Bank turned down his request for a loan for work at Turnberry, the Scottish golf resort that he had bought for roughly $60 million in 2014 and that was on its way to gobbling up almost $80 million more by the end of 2016, according to tax-return information. By year’s end, he would agree to pay $25 million to settle a class-action lawsuit involving allegations that Trump University was a fraud.
Whether for his businesses, his campaign or both, Mr. Trump was furiously moving money, his tax records show.
Since 2012, he had drained a lot of the cash he had on hand. That year, he took out a $100 million mortgage on the commercial space in Trump Tower and received nearly the entire amount as a cash payout. The following year, he took $95.8 million out of a real estate partnership account at Vornado Realty Trust. After selling $38.6 million in stock in the first months of 2016, he ended the year having sold nearly $30 million more.
And there was another maneuver, the one that experts consulted by The Times described as highly unusual: the more than $21 million in one-time payments that the Trump-Ruffin joint venture paid out in 2016.
By analyzing the tax-return information and public records, The Times was able to trace the flow of money — first to companies that Mr. Trump alone controls, and from there to Mr. Trump himself.
To understand how out of the ordinary those payments were, consider the company that became the destination for the bulk of the money: Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing.
It was created in 2004, as Mr. Trump and Mr. Ruffin were drawing up plans for the Trump International Hotel. Precisely what it did, though, is obscure. It had no employees, or at least no payroll. And while the Trump-Ruffin joint venture certainly spent several million dollars a year to promote its room rentals and condominium sales, that money did not go to Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing. The company’s tax records show that it had little income over the years, posting modest profits only twice: $54,924 in 2007 and $420,756 in 2008.
Then, in 2016, came a payment of $13,756,623.
Mr. Trump disclosed the payment in his 2017 federal ethics filings, but only with the tax records is it possible to see the entire chain of transactions. On the ethics filing, he said Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing had a “deal” with a subsidiary of the joint venture, but no other details are given.
The second unusual payment was for $2,685,000, divided between the two companies that hold Mr. Trump’s share of the hotel and then paid out directly to him. He called it one thing for the I.R.S. (a “loan fee”) and another in his public filings (a “sponsor fee”).
The Trump-Ruffin hotel company listed one other large one-time expense on its 2016 tax return: a $4.8 million “development fee.” While The Times was unable to trace the path of all of this money through Mr. Trump’s tax records, his public disclosures say that a company called Trump Las Vegas Development also had a deal to receive development fees from a subsidiary of the joint venture. (That company, according to the filings, actually had revenue of $8.2 million from January 2016 to April 2017. It is not clear where the additional $3.4 million came from.)
The I.R.S. lets companies use business expenses like sales and marketing payments to reduce taxable income — but only if they are “both ordinary and necessary.” The Trump-Ruffin hotel venture wrote off at least $21 million in one-time payments to Mr. Trump.
The tax records do not specify when the payments were made or where the joint venture got the money for them.
But taken together with public records, they may offer some clues.
The Las Vegas hotel had long been a money loser. Between 2010 and 2012, each partner put $23 million into the business. Its losses were narrowing, though, and it began 2016 with $6.3 million in cash reserves.
That might have been a decent cushion, but it was hardly enough to cover the more than $21 million in payments to Mr. Trump. In fact, the payments drove the hotel to its biggest loss ever.
Then, seven weeks before the election, something else unusual happened. The Trump-Ruffin partnership borrowed $30 million from City National Bank in Los Angeles. Mr. Trump signed the loan documents in New York City, but tax records show that Mr. Ruffin personally guaranteed nearly the entire amount, should the company ever be unable to pay.
The partnership was not required to disclose on its tax returns how the borrowed money would be spent. But the timing of the loan, combined with the partnership’s lack of available cash that year, strongly suggests that the loan funded the millions of dollars in payments to Mr. Trump.
The experts consulted by The Times said that in assessing the legitimacy of the payments, the central question was whether they were compensation for actual work done.
To that end, Mr. Shaviro, the N.Y.U. tax law professor, said it would be especially important to examine the deals cited by the president’s financial disclosures to justify some of the payments.
Nathaniel Persily, an election law expert at Stanford Law School, said that if the payments were not legitimate, and were then directed to Mr. Trump’s campaign, they would likely be considered illegal campaign contributions.
“If it turns out a corporation gave the campaign any money, that is illegal,” he said. “If an individual contributed any money exceeding the legal limits, that is illegal.”
The White House spokesman, Mr. Deere, did not answer The Times’s specific questions about the payments and any deals underlying them.
The subject of the Trump-Ruffin financial relationship came up, albeit obliquely, when the president’s estranged personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, testified before Congress in 2019. Had a businessman from Kansas given Mr. Trump the $25 million to settle the Trump University lawsuit? “I am not familiar with that, no,” he said.
Shortly after that, Mr. Ruffin told The Kansas City Star that he was the Kansas businessman in question. He offered a muddled explanation about some money that had been sent to Mr. Trump in 2016.
“He had $28 million in back fees that he never collected,” Mr. Ruffin said. “The hotel paid him [what] was owed to him. I don’t know what he did. … It was his money.”
Finally, a Train
After being lobbied for years, the Trump administration did what Mr. Obama’s wouldn’t.
The dream shimmered at the edge of vision in the desert heat.
Ever since Amtrak had shut down the last train in 1997 — the Desert Wind, which wound its way north from Los Angeles — Mr. Ruffin and the other moguls who control the Las Vegas Strip had planned, waited, hoped.
Train schemes had risen and, inevitably, fallen — among them a proposal for a maglev, a train levitated and propelled by magnets. But in 2009, with the support of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was then Senate majority leader, the federal government had taken a crucial step, approving a rail corridor between Las Vegas and Victorville, in the California high desert.
Four years later, a proposed $5.5 billion federal loan for a bullet train had come before the Obama Transportation Department, to furious opposition from two powerful Republican lawmakers — Paul Ryan, who was chairman of the House Budget Committee, and Jeff Sessions, then the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee — who considered it an untenable taxpayer risk. Ultimately the loan had been rejected, in part because the project could not comply with buy-American rules.
“We tried and tried and couldn’t get it done,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview. Along the Strip, though, he joked that the only dissension was over whose casino would be closest to where the train would stop. “They know it would be a godsend to their businesses,” he said.
In 2017, Mr. Ruffin glimpsed a way forward in his friend, the new president.
Mr. Ruffin’s loyalty has brought access. He was with Mr. Trump on election night in 2016. He has met with the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross. He and the president speak frequently. Mr. Trump has even sought Mr. Ruffin’s counsel on releasing his tax returns.
“I advised him not to,” Mr. Ruffin said in a 2017 interview with The Associated Press. “It’s a waste of time, and he’ll spend years explaining them and never get to accomplishing any of his goals.”
It was after the inauguration that he mentioned the predicament of his neighbor Anthony Marnell II. Mr. Marnell is an architect and oversaw the building of casinos like the Mirage, the Bellagio and Wynn Las Vegas. He also controlled the company trying to build the high-speed train.
So, a friendly favor for a friend.
“I mentioned it to Donald. And that would be something below his pay grade, so it would have to go to the Labor Department or the Transportation Department,” Mr. Ruffin told Forbes. “He said it sounds like a good deal, especially if it employs 80,000 people.”
Not long after, Mr. Marnell told The Review-Journal that he was considering approaching the Trump administration about a federal loan, like the one the Obama administration had rejected. Las Vegas needed the train more than ever, he argued, now that the Oakland Raiders football team was moving to town.
People in Las Vegas had reason to hope the Trump administration might be more receptive than its predecessor had been. After all, Mr. Trump’s hotel made him one of their own. He had campaigned on investing in infrastructure, even riffing at one rally about America’s lag in high-speed rail.
“You go to China, they have trains that go 300 miles an hour. We have trains that go ‘chug, chug, chug.’ And then they have to stop because the tracks split, right?” Mr. Trump said. “We are like third world.”
For all that, Mr. Marnell’s long-sought federal loan remained elusive, and in the fall of 2018, he sold the business, renamed XpressWest, to a company owned by Fortress Investment Group L.L.C., a big New York financial firm. (Mr. Marnell, who declined to comment for this article, kept an equity stake in XpressWest.) Fortress owns a company named Brightline, which operates a private rail service in Florida. Ben Porritt, senior vice president for corporate affairs at Brightline, said its trains had previously received several allocations of federal tax-exempt bonds.
These bonds, earning interest free of taxes, help companies attract private investors to often higher-risk projects. While they are distinct from the kind of federal loan Mr. Marnell sought, they nonetheless require government approval.
In March of this year, the Transportation Department’s Credit Council approved the sale of $1 billion in tax-free bonds, the final tranche of a $15 billion program begun during the Obama years. The credit panel, made up of heads of the agency’s various branches, is led by Steven Bradbury, the department’s general counsel and acting deputy secretary, who came under fire during his confirmation for his role in providing legal sanction for torture techniques during the George W. Bush administration. Overseeing the panel is Mr. Trump’s transportation secretary, Elaine Chao.
Terry Reynolds, director of the Nevada Department of Business and Industry, said that while many complicated variables had to align, Mr. Ruffin’s lobbying was always seen as a “positive factor.”
A Transportation Department spokesman said Mr. Ruffin’s conversation with the president had had no impact on the review process, which was conducted by career staff members.
As for Mr. Ruffin, his spokeswoman said Mr. Ruffin and the president “are friends and talk about numerous subjects.” She added Mr. Ruffin does not have a financial stake in the train.
Officials in California and Nevada were watching. Less than a year earlier, Mr. Trump, feuding with California’s liberal leadership, had pulled federal funds for a separate high-speed rail project there. Now, with federal approval assured, California and Nevada voted to allow the issuing of an additional $3.2 billion in bonds.
The train company says it hopes to start construction later this year. For now, the route will start in Victorville, 90 miles from Los Angeles, though there are plans to extend it considerably closer, to Rancho Cucamonga. One day, the company hopes, it will run all the way to Los Angeles.
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By The New York Times
The Las Vegas terminal will be on the Strip, a short bus ride from the Trump International Hotel.
“We would benefit some,” Mr. Ruffin told Forbes. “But there are a lot of hotel rooms here. A lot of places they can go.”
David Enrich and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled legislation Friday that would allow Congress to intervene under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove the president, insisting it’s not about President Donald Trump but inspired by the need for greater congressional oversight of his White House.
Pelosi has been raising questions about Trump’s mental fitness since his COVID-19 diagnosis and demanding more transparency about his health. The bill would set up a commission to assess the president’s ability to lead the country and ensure a continuity of government. It comes one year after Pelosi’s House launched impeachment proceedings against Trump.
“This is not about President Donald Trump — he will face the judgment of the voters,” Pelosi said at a press conference at the Capitol.
Just weeks before the Nov. 3 election, with no hopes of the bill becoming law, the rollout was quickly dismissed as a stunt by Trump’s team and top allies.
“It’s an absurd proposal,” said White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Fox.
“Absolutely absurd,” said Senate Majority Leader McConnell during an appearance in Shepherdsville, Kentucky.
The president’s opponents have discussed invoking the 25th Amendment for some time, but are raising it now, so close to Election Day, as the campaigns are fast turning into a referendum on Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Pelosi said Trump needs to disclose more about his health after his COVID-19 diagnosis and when, exactly, he first contracted COVID as others in the White House have become infected. More than 210,000 Americans have died and millions more have tested positive for the virus, which shows no signs of abating heading into what public health experts warn will be a difficult flu season and winter.
The legislation that would create a commission as outlined under the 25th Amendment, which was passed by Congress and ratified in 1967 as a way to ensure a continuity of power in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
It says the vice president and a majority of principal officers of the executive departments “or of such other body as Congress” may by law provide a declaration to Congress that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” At that point, the vice president would immediately assume the powers of acting president.
“Let Congress exert the power the Constitution gave us,” Pelosi said Friday standing before a poster of the amendment.
Pelosi was joined by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a constitutional scholar, who has proposed similar bills in the past.
“In times of chaos we must hold fast to our Constitution,” he said Friday.
Raskin said the commission would be launched “only for the most extreme situations.”
But, as Congress showed by impeaching — and acquitting the president over the past year — the legislative branch is determined to exert itself at times as a check on the executive branch.
“Congress has a role to play,” Raskin said.
Trump says he “feels great” after being hospitalized and is back at work in the White House. But his doctors have given mixed signals about his diagnosis and treatment. Trump plans to resume campaigning soon.
Congress is not in legislative session, and so any serious consideration of the measure, let alone votes in the House or Senate, is unlikely. But the bill serves as a political tool to stoke questions about Trump’s health as his own White House is hit by an outbreak infecting top aides, staff and visitors, including senators.
In a stunning admission, McConnell said Thursday that he had stopped going to the White House two months ago because he disagreed with its coronavirus protocols. His last visit was Aug. 6.
“My impression was their approach to how to handle this was different from mine and what I insisted we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing,” McConnell said at a campaign stop in northern Kentucky for his own reelection.
———
Associated Press writers Bruce Schreiner in Frankfort, Kentucky, and Aamer Madhani, Laurie Kellman and Padmananda Rama in Washington contributed to this report.
———
This story has been corrected to fix the spelling of Rama’s first name in contributor line to Padmananda.
Electoral college map: Who actually votes, and who do they vote for? Explore how shifts in turnout and voting patterns for key demographic groups could affect the presidential race.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Friday that the men charged with plotting to kidnap her and storm the state Capitol should be referred to as domestic terrorists, not members of any militia.
“They’re not ‘militias.’ They’re domestic terrorists endangering and intimidating their fellow Americans. Words matter,” the governor said in a tweet.
On Thursday, federal and state prosecutors charged 13 members of an armed group with planning to kidnap the governor and other violent, anti-government acts as part of an effort to ignite a wider civil war. The group’s organizers face felony domestic terrorism charges.
Multiple news organizations referred to the extremists as “Michigan militia” members. In the 1990s, several anti-government groups in the state united under the name Michigan Militia, but in recent years, the term has been used for all similar organizations there, Amy Cooter, a senior lecturer at Vanderbilt University who has studied such groups, told the Detroit Free Press, which is part of the USA TODAY Network.
Critics have argued the term militia should not be applied to extremist groups such as the one involved in the plot against Whitmer because it appears to lend them legitimacy.
Whitmer herself referred to the alleged domestic terrorist groups as “militia groups” twice Thursday during a news conference about the alleged plot.
Louisville cop who was shot in the leg after entering Breonna Taylor’s apartment WAS hit by her boyfriend, not ‘friendly fire’, ballistics report shows
Sergeant John Mattingly was shot by Kenneth Walker, a ballistics report found
Walker fired a ‘warning shot’ at police after they breached the door on March 13
Sgt Mattingly was wounded in the leg, prompting cops to return fire
Walker said in police interviews he thought the cops were intruders
Published: 09:38 EDT, 9 October 2020 | Updated: 12:29 EDT, 9 October 2020
The Louisville cop who was shot in the leg during a shootout at Breonna Taylor‘s apartment was struck by her boyfriend, not ‘friendly fire’, a newly released ballistics report confirms.
Sergeant John Mattingly was wounded in the deadly late night raid on March 13 after he and two other officers breached the door of Taylor’s home while serving a ‘no-knock’ search warrant.
Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker had mistaken the cops for intruders and fired a ‘warning shot’ at the door, striking Mattingly in the thigh and prompting officers to return fire.
The Louisville Metro Police Department this week released the findings of a Kentucky Police ballistics report that confirmed Mattingly was hit by Walker, not in the crossfire.
Kenneth Walker (left) was charged with attempted murder of a police officer after the shootout, but prosecutors later dropped the charge. Sergeant John Mattingly (right) suffered a gunshot wound to the thigh during the March 13 raid
This Glock 9mm was recovered under the bed inside the apartment, where Walker said that he kicked it after opening fire on the search warrant team
Kentucky Police ballistics report that confirmed Mattingly was hit by Walker, not in the crossfire
The controversy surrounding the case had sparked theories that Mattingly could have inadvertently hit by his own colleagues after cops fired a total of 32 rounds, instead of Walker, who only fired once.
The report, however reveals Mattingly was hit by a 9mm round and only one 9mm casing was found at the scene that was fired from Walker’s Glock handgun.
The officers meanwhile, had been carrying .40-caliber guns.
Walker also admitted to firing the first round in police interviews.
The findings are consistent with Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s statements last month that there was ‘no evidence to support that Sergeant Mattingly was hit by friendly fire from other officers.’
‘Mr Walker admitted that he fired one shot and was the first one to shoot. In addition to all the testimony, the ballistics report shows the round that struck sergeant Mattingly was fired from a .9-millimeter handgun. The LMPD officers fired .40-caliber handguns,’ Cameron said following the grand jury ruling.
Report shows an analysis of the trajectory of the bullets during the March 13 raid
Walker has maintained that the officers did not identify themselves as police when they arrived at the apartment
Walker was charged with attempted murder of a police officer after the shootout but prosecutors later dropped the charge.
The state’s investigation found cops fired a total of 32 rounds during the raid, six of which hit Taylor.
Investigators determined Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove had fired the shots that struck Taylor, but believe Cosgrove was responsible for firing the fatal bullet.
Cameron said Cosgrove and Mattingly were not charged after investigators determined their actions were justified because Walker opened fire first.
A third officer, Detective Brett Hankison, was charged for with ‘wanton endangerment’ after investigators found he recklessly fired shots into the neighboring apartments.
Photos from the scene show the bullet-riddled aftermath inside the apartment, with bullet holes in the walls and shell casings strewn inside and outside the front door.
Photos also show a shattered sliding door, displaying the evidence of the alleged wild shots fired through that door by Detective Brett Hankinson, who was fired from the LMPD in June and charged with wanton endangerment last month.
Gouge marks from bullets are seen in Taylor’s home after cops fired 32 rounds
A discarded battering ram is seen outside of Taylor’s apartment following the March 13 raid
Photos also show a shattered sliding door, displaying the evidence of the alleged wild shots fired through that door by Detective Brett Hankinson
A termination memo released on Wednesday accused Hankinson of ‘blindly firing’ 10 rounds through the sliding glass door without being able to see who was on the other side.
Three of those rounds went though the rear wall of Taylor’s apartment into the neighboring unit, which was occupied, resulting in the wanton endangerment charges against Hankinson.
The files were made public on Wednesday nearly a week after hours of audio from normally secret grand jury proceedings were released by Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron.
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said much of the information in the files was included in the records from the grand jury proceedings.
The files included investigative letters, interview transcripts, officers’ body camera videos, audio and video files of interviews, crime scene unit reports and search warrants.
Some items were redacted, blurred or withheld for privacy or legal reasons. Police said photos and videos of Taylor’s body were ‘blurred out of respect’.
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Michigan has had a long history of groups of armed men and women, which are active in every state, according to Amy Cooter, a senior lecturer at Vanderbilt University, who has studied them for more than a dozen years. Modern armed groups, she said, date to the early 1990s as a response to perceived fears of tyrannical government.
The state “has always been a hotbed for militia activity,” with a strong presence ever since the early 1990s, Cooter said. “The militias in Michigan have always been the kind to which other states’ militias look up to.”
Thursday, law enforcement arrested 13 people, including seven members of the Wolverine Watchmen, which sparked a national conversation about domestic terrorism and the purpose of these private, loosely organized and armed organizations.
The extensive investigation, court documents showed, relied on confidential informants, undercover agents, recorded conversations, text messages and social media. Federal agents detailed a plan to violently overthrow the government, which included a conspiracy to kidnap the Democratic governor, take her to Wisconsin and put her on trial for “treason.”
Authorities said the men’s alleged plot was part of a broader mission to instigate a civil war, and the FBI and Michigan’s attorney general outlined felony domestic terrorism charges against the group’s organizers.
The conspirators, the documents said, were frustrated and upset about many things, including the fact that during the pandemic, the state was controlling the opening of gyms. They called Whitmer a “tyrant” and sought to train and recruit others into their ranks.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel took aim at the Wolverine Watchmen, saying there has been a “disturbing increase in anti-government rhetoric” and she condemned the reemergence of groups that embrace “extremist ideologies” and seek to seize on civil unrest to promote armed resistance.
More than a dozen people, investigators said, met in Dublin, Ohio, and sought to form “a society that followed the U.S. Bill of Rights and where they could be self-sufficient.” They discussed peaceful — and violent — ways to do this.
State governments, they believed, were violating the U.S. Constitution. They singled out Michigan and Whitmer. They talked about “murdering ‘tyrants’ or ‘taking’ a sitting governor.” They planned to recruit others and spread their message.
Then, they met up with members of an armed group, which took the conversations to another level.
The Wolverine Watchmen was founded by Pete Musico, 42, and Joseph Morrison, 26, who lived together in Munith, Michigan, and are now each charged — among others — with a threat of terrorism, gang membership, providing material support for terrorist acts, and possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
Throughout the summer, law enforcement said, the combined group decided they needed firearms and tactical training and homemade bombs to blow up police vehicles and 200 men to storm the Capitol and take hostages. They also discussed a shooting at the governor’s vacation home.
Some news reports Thursday referred to the group as the “Michigan Militia,” which, according to Cooter, attempted to unite several separate groups in the state under one name in the 1990s. That group was founded by Norman Olson of Alanson to resist perceived encroachment of constitutional rights.
But in recent years, Cooter said, Michigan Militia has become a term for all similar groups in the state.
For the most part, she said, the groups are united in their ideology, and that, in part, is why Michigan has been a place where they have thrived: a rural population, combined with beliefs attributed to individual freedom and self-reliance.
The armed groups, she said, tend to support Second Amendment rights, limited government and a strict — or literal — interpretation of the Constitution. They tend to be somewhat secretive, inwardly focused, and not much of a threat.
Modern armed groups, Cooter said, came into being in the early 1990s after sieges and standoffs that included a shootout at Ruby Ridge, in Boundary County, Idaho, in 1992, and in Waco, Texas, where the religious sect, the Branch Davidians, was based.
Most of the groups, Cooter added, are law-abiding.
In court documents, one of the men who were charged, Adam Fox, talked about sending a bomb to the governor, saying “I just wanna make the world glow, dude,” “we’re just gonna conquer” everything, and it will all “have to be annihilated.”
Cooter said she also worries that President Donald Trump may be stoking fears about the election and the more violent groups are feeding off that. Armed groups, which mostly have been focused on constitutional rights, also may be opening their doors to groups with racial agendas.
Cooter also cited the rise of QAnon, a cult-like far-right conspiracy theory that holds a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles are running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against Trump.
Thursday’s case was the second major case tied to an armed group brought by the federal government in Michigan in a decade.
The last one ended as a major embarrassment for the government when all the defendants, some who had been jailed for years, were vindicated. Seven Hutaree members were charged in 2009 with plotting a revolt that included killing police officers with guns and bombs.
All faced up to life in prison, but their trial ended abruptly in 2012 when U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts concluded that the government failed to prove its case. In the end, the judge said, there was no proof of a real plot to overthrow the government or kill police, only people engaging in unsavory talk.
President Donald Trump said Thursday he may hold campaign rallies this weekend in Florida and Pennsylvania, an announcement that comes a week after he tested positive for COVID-19 as part of a larger White House coronavirus outbreak.
Hours before he told Fox News his plans, White House physician Sean Conley cleared the president to resume public events, saying he had completed his therapy of COVID-19. Trump and the administration have repeatedly declined to say to when the president last received a negative test. That continued Thursday.
“There’s no reason to test all the time, but they found very little infection or virus, if any,” Trump told Fox. “I don’t know that they found any, I didn’t go into it greatly with the doctors.”
Meanwhile, the next presidential debate appears up-in-the-air after Trump said he wouldn’t participate because organizers changed the Miami event to a virtual platform over COVID-19 concerns. The Commission on Presidential Debates said it wouldn’t hold the debate Thursday with just Biden. Trump’s team now wants each of the remaining debates moved back a week, an idea the Biden campaign rejected.
☕ The latest:
25th Amendment: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Jamie Raskin will speak Friday on a bill establishing a commission required under the 25th Amendment , which lays out presidential succession. This comes after Pelosi has expressed concern about President Donald Trump’s mental state in recent days, including that steroids he’s taking to battle COVID-19 may be affecting his brain.
Pence trip canceled: On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence canceled a planned appearance the next day in Indianapolis. His office did not explain why, but did say “nobody’s sick. There’s no positive tests.”
Trump campaign: The Trump campaign is exploring the prospect of an event on Monday in Pittsburgh, an aide said. The aide did not elaborate, saying only it would be an “event” and not a “rally” for the COVID-stricken president.
📆 25 days until Election Day, six days until the second presidential debate, 103 days until Inauguration Day, 85 days left in 2020.
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Trump says he’s considering rallies this weekend
President Donald Trump said Thursday he may hold rallies this weekend in Florida and Pennsylvania, hours after his physicians said he would be cleared to return to the campaign trail on Saturday.
“I think I’m going to try doing a rally on Saturday night, probably in Florida on Saturday,” the president told Fox News, breaking his answer at one point to clear his throat. “Pennsylvania the following night.”
White House physician Sean Conley said Thursday the president had completed his course of therapy for COVID-19 “as prescribed by his team of physicians” and cleared the president to return to public life on Saturday, 10 days since his diagnosis.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines say patients are supposed to quarantine for at least 10 days after the onset of symptoms – in Trump’s case, last Thursday.
Earlier on Thursday Trump said he would bow out of the second presidential debate, scheduled for Oct. 15, after the Commission on Presidential Debates said they would hold a virtual debate out of coronavirus safety concerns.
– John Fritze and Courtney Subramanian
6 charged in plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Whitmer
A team of militia operatives is charged with conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in a plot in which they considered storming the state Capitol in a commando raid that would use Molotov cocktails to keep police cars at bay, according to newly unsealed court records.
Members of the group bought weapons, conducted surveillance, held training and planning meetings, but they were foiled in part because the FBI infiltrated the group with informants, according to a criminal complaint. Six were charged with federal kidnapping offenses and at least seven others face state charges.
The FBI became aware early in 2020, through social media, that a militia group was “discussing the violent overthrow of certain government and law enforcement components” and “agreed to take violent action,” according to a sworn affidavit.
“My impression was their approach to how to handle this (pandemic) was different from mine and what I insisted we do in the Senate, which was to wear a mask and practice social distancing,” McConnell said during an appearance in Northern Kentucky.
McConnell said he maintains regular phone contact with Trump and that the president “seems perfectly fine.”
But McConnell said he doesn’t have first-hand knowledge of the president’s health condition because he hasn’t visited the White House since Aug. 6. McConnell was not at the Sept. 26 event in the Rose Garden announcing Trump’s Supreme Court nominee – which may have become a “superspreader” event.
“I’m not going to waste my time doing a virtual debate,” he told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, calling it a “joke” and an effort “to protect Biden.”
The Commission on Presidential Debates announced Thursday morning the next debate would be remote to “protect the health and safety of all involved” after Trump’s positive COVID-19 diagnosis and the subsequent White House outbreak.
Co-chairman Frank Fahrenkopf said the commission would not host a debate with Biden alone if Trump doesn’t budge. He said the future of the debate rests with Trump: “The ball’s in his court.”
The Trump campaign later said they want to push the remaining two debates back one week each, an idea Biden’s team rejected.
Well, that’s a lot. When you get so many polls on a day like this, it’s somewhat helpful to consider three things: How bad were the worst polls for the president, how good were the good polls, and where does the average stand?
The president’s bad polls were really, really bad. For the second straight day, nearlyeverynational survey showed the president down by 10 points or more. Even Rasmussen, often the most favorable pollster to the president, showed Joe Biden ahead by 12 points nationwide.
The president’s worst state polls showed Mr. Biden tied or ahead in states worth well over 400 electoral votes. Quinnipiac surveys showed Mr. Biden ahead by a (not terribly believable) 11 points in Florida, by 13 points in Pennsylvania and by five points in Iowa. There were polls by Democratic-leaning firms showing Mr. Biden way ahead in North Carolina, ahead in Texas, and highly competitive in Missouri (down by only two points in a state Mr. Trump carried by 19 points in 2016).
In comparison, the surveys showing Mr. Biden leading narrowly in Iowa and Ohio and tied in Texas looked entirely reasonable.
The president’s “best” polls. The president’s very best polls today were basically what average polls for him looked like a few weeks ago, or worse. His best national survey was a nine-point deficit in YouGov/Economist — nothing to brag about. There were a few semi-bright spots for him in the state polling, like a six-point deficit in Nevada in a Times/Siena poll or a five-point deficit in Wisconsin, according to Marquette Law. Maybe you could count the two-point deficit in Arizona from Ipsos, but here again that would have basically just been an average result a month ago.
A few weeks ago, we used to note that the race was teetering between being highly competitive and a landslide. On a given day, the president’s best polls would show a tight race in Pennsylvania and Florida, but also with Mr. Biden within striking distance in Georgia and Ohio. If the polls were off by a couple of points, either way, you could have a pretty close contest or a blowout.
By that same logic, the race today is teetering between a straightforward loss for the president and the worst defeat of an incumbent president since Herbert Hoover.
More about Marquette. It’s worth taking a second to contemplate this Wisconsin number from the Marquette Law poll. It’s the first result from a telephone survey in Wisconsin in several weeks, it’s from one of the best pollsters in the country, and the result is somewhat closer than we would have guessed.
In most of our discussions about the various roads to 270 electoral votes, we have mostly supposed that Wisconsin is part of Mr. Biden’s path of least resistance after several high-quality pollsters showed him solidly ahead in early September, just after the Republican convention. Since then, the national polls have shifted two to three points in Mr. Biden’s favor, so we would have guessed he was even further ahead today — maybe even up by eight to nine points.
Instead, the Marquette poll found an essentially unchanged race, with Mr. Biden up five points among registered and likely voters. That’s two points better for Mr. Trump among registered voters, compared with early September, and one point better for Mr. Biden among likely voters.
Now, it’s been a while since we’ve had many telephone surveys of Wisconsin, so we don’t have a particularly robust average in the state. Most of our assumptions about the race are based on polls that are fairly out of date, mainly conducted during or in the immediate aftermath of the unrest in Kenosha. So it’s possible that the president’s standing is relatively resilient in Wisconsin.
If the president is indeed holding up well in Wisconsin, that would help keep one of his best remaining hopes alive: the chance that he can scratch out a victory in the Electoral College while losing the national popular vote by a much wider margin than he did four years ago. There are limits to what the president can realistically hope to pull off here — winning while losing the national vote by more than five points would be a real stretch. But if Mr. Trump really were down only by five points in Wisconsin, even as he trails by 10 nationwide, it would be one important step toward keeping that possibility alive.
We’ll have a Times/Siena poll in Wisconsin early next week, so that ought to help clarify things.
A daunting deficit. You could go nuts trying to decide whether to believe the really, really bad polls for Mr. Trump or the merely bad polls for him, and that’s where the poll average comes in. By our estimates, he faces an increasingly daunting deficit with under a month until the election. He trails by nearly 10 points nationwide.
Can things still change, starting with the vice presidential debate? Yes. There’s still a month left, and just think about all that’s happened in half that time: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, The Times’s Trump tax story, Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination, a presidential debate, and now the president’s coronavirus diagnosis, hospitalization and eventual release. For all the talk that “nothing matters,” the news has definitely had a material effect on the polls.
It’s quite possible that the news could still turn back in the president’s favor. He’s out of the hospital. The confirmation hearing of Judge Barrett could go well for him. A strong debate performance by Mike Pence and a poor one by Kamala Harris could help change the conversation.
Yes, it’s pretty unlikely that a perceived debate victory by Mr. Pence would sway many voters to the president. But it could help the president in the polls. The news, after all, has been quite bad — and bad news can affect poll results, even without really causing deep-seated changes in public opinion. As we discussed yesterday, it can make the supporters of one candidate less likely to take a survey. It can also make them less likely to voice their support for a candidate they’re almost certain to vote for in the end — not because they’re “shy,” but because they really do feel troubled about their candidate in ways that leave them unwilling or unable to commit to support him at a challenging moment.
It might lead some undecided voters to throw up their hands and back a candidate whom they won’t feel inclined to back just a few days later.
If that’s true — and remember that we’re still talking at the margins — it’s possible that some modicum of good news for Mr. Trump could help bring about a more neutral news environment and help him a bit in the polls. That could be as simple as a solid or even neutral debate performance tonight by Vice President Pence.
“I know he says that he’s cured. I know he says that he doesn’t have COVID anymore, but, the White House has not told us that he is negative. All the scientists say that it is 14 days, which would be within the window of next Thursday’s debate,” Wallace said.
President Trump, in his first interview since his positive coronavirus test, told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo on Thursday that he will not participate in the next debate just minutes after the Commission on Presidential Debates announced the showdown, slated for Oct. 15, will be virtual.
The CPD announced early Thursday that “the second presidential debate will take the form of a town meeting, in which the candidates would participate from separate remote locations.” Steve Scully of C-SPAN is still set to moderate the second presidential debate from Miami.
But, in the FOX Business interview, the president said he would not take part in a virtual debate.
“The commission changed the debate style and that’s not acceptable to us,” Trump said on “Mornings with Maria.” “I beat him in the first debate, I beat him easily.”
The president added that he expected to “beat him in the second debate also.”
“I’m not going to do a virtual debate,” Trump went on. “I’m not going to waste my time at a virtual debate.”
Biden responded to Trump’s claims while talking to reporters in Delaware.
“We don’t know what the president is going to do, he changes his mind every second so for me to comment on that now would be irresponsible,” Biden said. “I’m going to follow the commission recommendations.”
Wallace stressed how a virtual debate is a feasible option under the circumstances.
“One guy is in one studio, one guy is in another. The town hall, the citizens that are picked, supposedly undecided voters are there and they can answer the questions,” Wallace said.
Wallace also noted a historic example of a virtual debate.
“Kennedy-Nixon back in 1960 had a virtual debate where they were in separate studios. Why the president, who is behind, according to every poll, double digits, behind nationally, in Florida, in Pennsylvania would decide not to participate, I think is so self-destructive politically, that I can’t believe he isn’t going to change his mind.”
WASHINGTON — Newly released documents from the internal investigation by Louisville, Kentucky, police of the shooting death of Breonna Taylor show that even after protests erupted nationwide and the case had been turned over to a special prosecutor, the police department was actively gathering negative information about Taylor’s boyfriend.
The Louisville Metro Police Department was pursuing the information about the man, Kenneth Walker, while it was also investigating its own officers for shooting and killing Taylor.
The documents, part of thousands of pages and hundreds of hours of audio and video released to the public Wednesday, also show that an officer involved in the raid continued to search for a justification for it after Taylor’s death.
Taylor, 26, an emergency room technician, was killed after midnight on March 13 when officers used a battering ram to raid her apartment seeking evidence in a narcotics investigation. The target of the investigation, an ex-boyfriend of Taylor’s named Jamarcus Glover, did not live at that address.
Walker, who by then was Taylor’s boyfriend, fired a shot at the front door, striking one officer, according to police. Walker said he believed the raid was a home invasion. Officers opened fire, hitting Taylor six times. Officers insist that they knocked and announced who they were.
On the night of Taylor’s death, Walker was arrested and taken in for questioning. He told investigators that in addition to his licensed handgun, he once owned an AR-15 but “had to sell it because I was broke.” He told police that he smoked marijuana from “time to time,” including on the day of the shooting, but that he had curtailed his use because he had applied for a job with the U.S. Postal Service.
One of the newly released documents, an investigative memo dated July 2, details how an investigator from the Public Integrity Unit, often dubbed the department’s internal affairs team, began examining pictures and text messages from Walker’s phone in late May.
That was two months after the shooting, when Taylor’s death had begun to attract heightened attention from media and activists.
Two pictures from Walker’s phone show Walker and Taylor with an AR-15, according to the memo.
According to the memo, internal affairs officers also found text messages indicating that Walker was selling marijuana and pills from October 2019 through March, according to the memo. The memo quoted a message from Walker’s phone dated March 6, a week before Taylor was killed, that seemed to say Walker had sold “11 pills” for $6 apiece in a restaurant parking lot. The memo quotes a text exchange in February about Walker’s sale of marijuana for “$25 for a half quarter.”
Investigators also indicate that they believed he may have been involved in a robbery, although the message they point to is garbled. They concluded that Walker’s potential drug sales and robbery “may have contributed to Walker’s actions on March 13, 2020.”
Walker’s attorney and law enforcement experts questioned the relevance of the information to the investigation, as well as whether it could indicate a conflict of interest on the part of investigators.
“It’s just a cover-up,” said Steven Romines, the attorney representing Walker in a civil suit against the police department. “And it reflects the fact that over two months into the investigation of Breonna Taylor’s death, LMPD [was] more interested in including unsupported allegations to smear Kenny Walker than it [was] in actually finding the truth.”
Romines denied that Walker had dealt drugs or committed a robbery. “All they are trying to do is smear him after the fact to justify their actions,” he said.
Tyler Izen, a veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, one of the nation’s highest-profile and most scrutinized forces, said Los Angeles police take measures to avoid apparent conflicts of interest during internal investigations of police-involved shootings. Izen, a retired supervising detective and former union president, said the police department divides inquiries into parts handled by different investigators.
For example, an administrative team determines whether the officer broke policies. A second unit examines whether the officer used excessive force and should face criminal charges. A third investigates the actions of the suspect.
“Some of this is just astounding,” Izen said after reviewing the Louisville police memo. “I do not know why you would have an internal affairs investigator also investigating the crime, because all it does is take away your credibility. It’s victim-blaming all over again.”
A day after police began the review of Walker’s phone data, chief Jefferson County prosecutor Tom Wine announced that he was dropping all charges against Walker. According to the newly released internal documents, the police department was not given a heads-up that the prosecutor’s office was dropping charges.
The postal inspector
The investigation of Walker’s phone and suspected drug dealing came only after internal affairs began to uncover serious problems with the warrant for Taylor’s home and how it was executed.
To obtain the warrant, police Detective Joshua Jaynes had written in a sworn affidavit submitted to a Jefferson County judge that, two months earlier, he had seen Glover, the target of the narcotics investigation, leave Taylor’s apartment with a “suspected USPS package in his right hand.” Jaynes added that he had “verified through a U.S. Postal Inspector” that Glover “has been receiving packages” at Taylor’s home.
But Jaynes never spoke to a postal inspector, the documents from the internal investigation reveal. In fact, the documents say, Louisville police do not have a working relationship with the postal inspector’s office “due to previous incidents.”
Instead, the documents say, Jaynes had several colleagues reach out to the nearby Shively Police Department asking officers to contact the postal inspector. Two of the officers who reached out to Shively police were involved in the raid that night, including Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, who was shot in the leg by Walker.
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Shively detectives told Louisville detectives repeatedly that the postal inspector had no record of any questionable packages addressed to Glover, according to interviews detectives gave to the Public Integrity Unit investigators in mid-May.
Jaynes told investigators that Mattingly “nonchalantly” informed him that Glover “just gets Amazon or mail packages there.”
Jaynes told investigators that he did not pursue it further because “what I saw on my own two eyes just reaffirmed that he was getting mail there.”
After Taylor’s death, Jaynes continued to ask about the packages, which were a key justification for the warrant, Shively police Sgt. Tim Sayler said. In April, Jaynes reached out to Sayler, asking again whether packages for Glover were going to Taylor’s address.
“You wrote a search warrant on it saying it was delivered there, but now you’re asking a month later?” Sayler told investigators, describing his thoughts when Jaynes asked about the packages after the shooting. “It looks like you’re trying to cover your ass, is what it appears to me.”
Public integrity investigators ultimately concluded that the wording in Jaynes’ sworn affidavit was “misleading,” according to their report, and that Jaynes’ behavior “should be reviewed for criminal actions.”
Louisville police and a lawyer for Jaynes did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Internal tensions at the LMPD
Interviews with officers released as part of the document dump Wednesday show that even within the police department there were questions about how the raid was carried out.
Lt. Dale Massey of the SWAT team, who arrived on the scene within minutes of the raid, called the fatal shooting “an egregious act.”
“It seemed like there was no target identification whatsoever for those rounds that were shot inside the apartment,” Massey said in an interview with the internal affairs officers, which was first reported by Vice News.
SWAT was working with the department’s Criminal Interdiction Division to execute a warrant that night at another address where Glover was alleged to be selling drugs. (Glover has been charged, and as of September, his attorney was negotiating a plea deal with prosecutors.)
But Massey said SWAT was never told that detectives from the Criminal Interdiction Division planned to carry out a simultaneous raid at Taylor’s home.
Had he known that, Massey said, “I would have advised them 100 percent not to do it until we were done doing what we had to do.”
Related
As they looked into the shooting, Public Integrity Unit investigators felt pressure to reveal details of their investigation to the head of the Criminal Interdiction Division, according to the documents.
On May 14, the internal affairs unit held an online briefing with top brass from the department, according to police documents. Just before the meeting, they were told that among those attending would be the head of the Criminal Interdiction Division, Maj. Kim Burbrink.
The internal affairs officers objected because Burbrink headed up the unit being investigated, but they were overruled. As the briefing began, according to the documents, Burbrink “began asking pointed questions” about whether the Public Integrity Unit had missed evidence, and she defended her officers.
Deputy Police Chief Robert Schroeder, who became interim chief, later apologized to the internal affairs officers for Burbrink’s comments and said that including her was a mistake, according to the documents.
The day after the meeting, Burbrink provided the officers involved in the shooting with an “update,” according to the documents.
“It’s totally improper,” said Kirk Burkhalter, a professor at New York Law School who spent two decades as a New York police detective. “The head of the unit may end up becoming a target. It’s quite possible that’s where the investigation could lead you.”
A woman holds a voucher before receiving food aid in Mudzi, Zimbabwe, in February. On Friday, the United Nations World Food Programme received the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize.
Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP
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Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP
A woman holds a voucher before receiving food aid in Mudzi, Zimbabwe, in February. On Friday, the United Nations World Food Programme received the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize.
Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP
Updated at 7:25 a.m. ET
The 2020 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the World Food Programme on Friday morning with the award committee stating, “The need for international solidarity and multilateral cooperation is more conspicuous than ever.”
The citation says the humanitarian organization, part of the United Nations, is being recognized “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.”
“Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. I can’t believe it!” the WFP’s executive director, David Beasley, said in a video to the organization and its staff following the announcement.
“It’s because of the WFP family,” Beasley said. “They’re out there in the most difficult, complex places in the world. Whether it’s war, conflict, climate extremes — it doesn’t matter. They’re out there, and they deserve this award.”
The WFP is active in 83 nations. The U.N. body says its staff “put their lives on the line every day to bring food and assistance to more than 100 million hungry children, women and men across the world.”
The group said on Twitter that it is “deeply humbled to receive the #NobelPeacePrize.”
The award committee chose the food aid group out of hundreds of nominees, including President Trump.
Trump has touted his nomination by a right-wing Norwegian politician on the campaign trail, but he was not among the favorites to win the peace prize, according to odds listed on the site Gambling.com.
Ahead of Friday’s announcement, betting houses had listed the World Health Organization as the top contender, the site says, followed by climate activist Greta Thunberg and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Another U.N. organization, the refugee relief agency UNHCR, was seen as having the same chance of winning as Trump.
The prize announcement was made by Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, who said that in this time of pandemic “multilateral cooperation is absolutely necessary to combat global challenges.”
In an interview with NPR earlier this year, Beasley, a former governor of South Carolina, said the WFP’s task has grown enormously as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
“Before COVID I had been giving speeches particularly in Europe and some in the United States, that 2020 was going to be the worst humanitarian crisis year since WWII,” Beasley said. He added that “135 million people pre-COVID are on the brink of starvation. Because of COVID we are now looking at an additional 130 million people that will be knocking on the door of starvation for a total of about a quarter of a billion people.”
The 2020 Norwegian Nobel Committee, which names the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. From left: Thorbjorn Jagland, Henrik Syse (vice chair), Berit Reiss-Andersen (chair), Anne Enger, Olav Njolstad (secretary) and Asle Toje.
Heiko Junge/NTB scanpix
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The 2020 Norwegian Nobel Committee, which names the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. From left: Thorbjorn Jagland, Henrik Syse (vice chair), Berit Reiss-Andersen (chair), Anne Enger, Olav Njolstad (secretary) and Asle Toje.
Heiko Junge/NTB scanpix
The U.S. is the largest single donor to the WFP, accounting for $2.7 billion of the $6.3 billion the U.N. organization has received so far in 2020. But the U.S. also made headlines in recent years when it cut funding to the group’s program that had been providing aid to Palestinians.
From 2018 until now, the Trump administration has cut all its WFP funding for the West Bank and Gaza, as well as all other humanitarian aid for Palestinians. The funding cuts came after the Palestinian leadership severed ties with the U.S. in protest of the U.S. Embassy move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
As a result, some 26,000 Palestinians have stopped receiving food aid from the WFP.
The five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee chooses the winner of the Peace Prize. Committee members are named to six-year terms by the Norwegian Storting, or parliament.
The committee considered 318 candidates for the 2020 prize, the fourth-largest number ever. Of the nominations, 211 were individuals and 108 were organizations.
The 2020 Nobel Prizes bring a cash award of 10 million Swedish krona (about $1.12 million).
As is customary, the announcement was made in the Grand Hall of the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo.
Electoral college map: Who actually votes, and who do they vote for? Explore how shifts in turnout and voting patterns for key demographic groups could affect the presidential race.
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