Fox News’ Janice Dean says Cuomo and those involved in nursing home cover-up should be prosecuted.
Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was able to skate past scrutiny from reporters during his high-profile visit to the White House on Friday as the nursing home scandal in his state appears to have ensnared him in fresh political trouble.
Cuomo, the chair of the National Governors Association (NGA), joined President Biden, Vice President Harris and other governors and mayors — including the NGA vice-chair, Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson — in the Oval Office to discuss the ongoing national response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden did not take questions from the press pool during the Oval Office event and Cuomo did not join Hutchinson when the Arkansas governor addressed reporters outside the White House later in the day.
Cuomo and Hutchinson later issued a joint statement saying the White House meeting was “productive” and called on Congress to pass a relief package with “sufficient state and local aid”.
“The finish line of this pandemic is in sight, and this support will give states and territories the resources we need to reach it, while continuing to provide the essential services our constituents rely on,” they said.
Cuomo’s own response to the outbreak is facing scrutiny after a pair of bombshell reports from the Associated Press and the New York Post revealed that his administration not only sent more than 9,000 COVID-positive patients into nursing homes in the early weeks of the pandemic, one of his own staffers admitted withholding data about the number COVID deaths in assisted living facilities while offering an apology to state Democratic lawmakers.
The governor is now facing accusations of a cover-up and is receiving backlash even from members from his own party in the New York State Senate, who are calling for the repeal his emergency powers. Other critics are calling for Cuomo’s resignation and for a Justice Department investigation to look into his handling of nursing homes during the pandemic.
Cuomo has been lionized by members of the mainstream media for his daily briefings, which resulted in him receiving a special Emmy award.
CNN and MSNBC skipped over the bombshell reporting on Thursday evening, keeping its focus almost exclusively on the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.
The Biden administration aims to close the controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay by the end of its term, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday.
Speaking at her daily news briefing, Psaki said the administration had launched a process with the National Security Council to examine steps for shutting down the facility. She said it is “certainly our goal and our intention” to close the controversial prison, which was a priority for former President Barack Obama that he failed to fulfill.
Psaki said several sub-cabinet policy roles still need to be filled as the administration moves forward with the effort. The push to close the facility would be a “robust, inter-agency process,” Psaki said.
Trump impeachment defense team shows 9-plus minute compilation of Dems using word “fight.”
Former President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team played more than nine minutes of footage on Friday showing Democrats using the word “fight,” attempting to rebut House impeachment managers’ charge that Trump incited the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
The lengthy compilation of Democrats using the word — which contained many clips with little or no context at all — came after Trump attorney David Schoen accused impeachment managers of selectively editing Trump’s words. Some of the Democrats shown were senators serving as jurors at the impeachment trial, including New York’s Chuck Schumer, New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren, Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, among others.
House impeachment managers have pointed to Trump’s own words before the Jan. 6 insurrection, when he said supporters would lose the country if they didn’t “fight like hell.” Democrats have also argued Trump’s speech was the culmination of a monthslong effort to subvert the election results.
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New York, NY – EXCLUSIVE:New York Assemblyman Michael Montesano said he plans to ask the state legislature to consider impeaching Gov. Andrew Cuomo after a bombshell admission by his top aide that their office allegedly covered up data on COVID-19 nursing home deaths to shake off a Justice Department probe on the matter.
“We’ve been calling for subpoenas and a hearing for quite a while,” Montesano, a Republican member of the state’s Oversight and Investigations Committee, told Fox News. “This news of the last several days is extremely troubling to me and I’m going to be asking today for his resignation and I’m also going to be asking the legislature to look into, to explore filing articles of impeachment against the governor if he doesn’t resign.”
Calls for a criminal probe against Cuomo and his staff mounted after Melissa DeRosa, the secretary to the governor, told top New York Democrats on Thursday that Cuomo’s administration feared the data about COVID-19 deaths could “be used against us” by the Justice Department in the midst of its federal probe initiated against four states regarding nursing home deaths, including New York, and thus the administration withheld the actual death count.
“This is now criminal,” Montesano, a Republican who represents District-15, said. “The governor wants to talk about how our attacks on him are political. They’re not political, this we’ve had an inkling all the while that they were covering stuff up, and now she admitted that she covered stuff up because she knew the Department of Justice has an active investigation going on of the nursing home problems which a lot of us in the legislature, especially in the minority, requested that they do.
“She’s obstructing an investigation. This is what makes it even more troubling,” he added.
“If I had to make an educated guess, I believe she realizes DOJ is doing an investigation, things may be getting close, and she wants to divest herself of whatever wrongdoing she may have done if she’s covered something up and if she’s trying to get out in front of it,” Montesano said of De Rosa’s shocking admission, which she tried to walk back in a statement released Friday.
Montesano said he supports the congressman’s aggressive push to hold Cuomo and top staffers accountable, calling their conduct “very egregious.”
Cuomo had long faced criticism for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic — in early 2020 after he directed nursing homes in the Empire State to accept patients who had or were suspected of having COVID-19. The decision created an onslaught of COVID-19 cases that infected thousands of elderly patients and resulted in hundreds of deaths among the state’s most vulnerable population.
The New York Department of Health reported that as of Jan. 27, 2021, there were 5,957 confirmed deaths due to COVID-19 in nursing homes and an additional 2,783 presumed deaths. In assisted care facilities, there were 160 deaths and 52 presumed deaths.
But on Wednesday, the state revealed the number of deaths was actually 15,049 residents in elder care facilities (nursing homes and assisted living/adult care facilities), according to a letter from the State Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker sent to Senate Democrats.
New York lawmakers at the state and federal levels have been ramping up pressure against the governor calling for him to resign.
“Resignation is one thing and I have to be frank with you, he’s too arrogant to think about doing that. He’s for himself, not for these people,” Montesano told Fox News.
“That’s why I’m asking if there’s a possibility for impeachment under the New York State Constitution,” Montesano said. “It’s worth it for the legislature to explore because this is far-reaching.”
Republican Assemblyman Kieran Lalor also says he supports an impeachment inquiry into Cuomo.
“Because of the massive loss of life, the cover up of nursing home deaths is not worse than the crime. But the cover up is still extremely bad,” Lalor told Fox News in a statement. “There should be an investigation into whether Cuomo and his staff obstructed the US Department of Justice.”
“The comments by Cuomo’s top aide seems to be an admission of obstruction,” he added. “The public has a right to know how involved the Governor was in the obstruction. Unlike California, New York, unfortunately, has no mechanism whereby citizens can directly attempt to remove a sitting chief executive. In New York, it is up to the people’s elected representatives to use the impeachment process. Impeachment should be on the table.”
Republicans have raised concerns about passing another massive spending bill after lawmakers approved a $900 billion aid plan in December. A group of GOP senators met with Biden earlier this month and put forward a roughly $600 billion counter offer, but Democrats rejected the plan as too small to meet the crisis.
Congress waited months to pass the December relief package after key unemployment benefits and small business programs expired last summer. The inaction contributed to millions of Americans falling into poverty, struggling to afford food and missing rent payments.
Democrats still have to navigate hurdles to get the bill through Congress on their own. They not only have to make the bill comply with Senate budget rules, but also cannot lose a single Democratic vote in the chamber split evenly by party.
The Ways and Means Committee portion of the House plan advanced Thursday contains a huge chunk of the overall rescue proposal. It would direct a $1,400 sum to individuals who make up to $75,000 and couples who earn up to $150,000.
To assuage concerns about effectively targeting the money — which jeopardized the plan’s passage in the Senate — the payments would gradually phase out so no individual or couple making more than $100,000 or $200,000, respectively, would get a check. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Thursday that the structure is “right in the ballpark” of what his caucus would support.
The bill as approved by Ways and Means would increase the current $300 per week federal unemployment supplement to $400, and extend it through Aug. 29. It would also keep programs expanding benefits eligibility and the number of weeks people can receive unemployment insurance in place through the same date.
The plan would also boost assistance to households with children. Americans would get up to $3,600 per child for children under 6 and $3,000 per child for children under 18.
The relief would phase out at $75,000 in income for individuals and $150,000 for couples.
Among key provisions in other parts of the legislation, it would put $20 billion into a national vaccination program, $170 billion into expenses for schools including reopening costs and $350 billion into relief for state, local and tribal governments. Biden met with a bipartisan group of governors and mayors on Friday to discuss the rescue package.
Before the meeting, he said “we need to help the states economically” and “ensure they’re able to get back to schools.” Biden added that he wanted to hear from the state and local officials whether they wanted him to tweak his plan.
House Democrats also advanced a $15 per hour minimum wage, and Pelosi expects the House will pass the provision in final legislation. However, it is unclear if the proposal will comply with Senate budget rules.
Two Democratic senators — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — have also expressed doubts about passing a $15 per hour minimum wage.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that the administration would consider the views of Sinema and other senators while moving forward with the relief plan.
“It is time to move past the lies and finally uncover the full truth,” saidRepresentative Tom Reed, a Republican from the state’s Southern Tier, who called for a federal investigation on Thursday night.
Early on Friday, Ms. DeRosa, the top nonelected official in the state, sought to clarify the context for her remarks, saying she was trying to explain that “we needed to temporarily set aside the Legislature’s request to deal with the federal request first.”
“We informed the houses of this at the time,” she said, referring to the upper and lower chambers of the Legislature.
She added that the administration was “comprehensive and transparent in our responses to the D.O.J., and then had to immediately focus our resources on the second wave and vaccine rollout.”
“As I said on a call with legislators, we could not fulfill their request as quickly as anyone would have liked,” she said.
The revelation of Ms. DeRosa’s remarks comes two weeks after a damning report from Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, who accused the Cuomo administration of undercounting coronavirus related deaths connected to nursing homes by the thousands.
The report forced the state’s health department to make public more than 3,800 previously unreported deaths of residents who died outside a facility, like in a hospital, and had not been included in the state’s official nursing home tally.
The United States will begin allowing in migrants who sought asylum under the Trump administration but were forced to sit in Mexico as they awaited a hearing before a judge, the Biden administration announced Friday.
It was the latest step by President Joe Biden to roll back some of former President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies. But the announcement comes days after the White House said authorities will be turning away a vast majority of migrants seeking asylum at the border.
“As President Biden has made clear, the U.S. government is committed to rebuilding a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.
But Mayorkas added that “changes will take time,” especially given the pandemic, and he cautioned that those not eligible for coming into the United States under the change should not travel to the border.
“Due to the current pandemic, restrictions at the border remain in place and will be enforced,” he said.
The reprocessing for those who were subject to the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols will begin on Feb. 19. There will be three ports of entry where people with asylum cases can be reprocessed. DHS officials, who said this is phase one of tackling MPP, noted more ports of entry may be added later.
The government estimates there are around 25,000 individuals who are waiting in Mexico under the policy. Up to 300 people will likely be reprocessed daily at the three ports of entry, DHS officials said.
Although the Biden administration is not accepting most new asylum cases due to concerns with the COVID-19 pandemic, those who are going to be reprocessed from the MPP policy will be tested for COVID-19. The United States is working with Mexico, in addition to several international nonprofits, to identify those who qualify for reprocessing.
The COVID-19 tests will be issued through one of the international nonprofits and funded by the United States government, according to DHS officials.
Migrant Protection Protocols established in 2019
The Department of Homeland Security, in partnership with the Justice Department, rolled out the Migrant Protection Protocols on Jan. 29, 2019, at the San Diego-Tijuana border region. It was one in a series of measures that the Trump administration implemented to restrict asylum and crack down on unauthorized immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border.
On Biden’s first day in office, the DHS announced it would immediately stop sending asylum seekers to Mexico under the “Remain in Mexico” policy as of Jan. 21. But the department emphasized that would only apply to new enrollments in the program.
Top officials like former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf described the policy as a “game-changer.” An agreement with the Mexican government has allowed U.S. border officials to send back more than 70,000 migrants to Mexico under the program, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
TRAC data showed that 27,000 asylum seekers under the program had been regularly attending their hearings before the pandemic restrictions, while 12,000 more are awaiting a first hearing.
As of April, the first full month when COVID-19 restrictions on asylum at the border began, the U.S. government sent back at least 5,493 migrants to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol statistics showed.
In December, the nonprofit group Human Rights First updated its list of documented instances of violence, kidnapping and extortion of asylum seekers sent to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols in the past two years. There are now over 1,300 entries.
Kennji Kizuka, a senior researcher who helped compile the list remotely by reaching out to shelters, attorneys and migrants themselves, said the true number is much higher.
Esmeralda Siu is the executive director for the Coalicion Pro Defense del Migrante, a collective of six migrant shelters in Baja California’s border with California. She welcomed Friday’s announcement about the processing of some asylum seekers under “Remain in Mexico.”
Since the program rolled out in Tijuana, the U.S. government has returned more than 8,100 asylum seekers to there under MPP, and another 6,900 to the neighboring border city of Mexicali, across the border from Calexico, according to TRAC.
“There are people that have been here since 2019, and other people who left or remain waiting. At the shelters we have people waiting for more than a year,” Siu said.
Based on information from DHS officials, these individuals who have had the longest wait will be prioritized for processing and parole into the U.S.
Although the Biden administration has not released the locations of the three ports of entry where processing will begin next week, San Ysidro in San Diego is essentially guaranteed to be one of them. It is the largest land border crossing at the U.S.-Mexico border and is where U.S. border officials first sent migrants under MPP.
Immigration advocates are hopeful
As Siu waits for more details about how processing will work and who will be eligible to go first, she said she hoped it would be well-managed and that the U.S. government would quickly send out accurate information for MPP participants on how to proceed.
“I hope that … it is controlled and that there is no snowball effect. We have to be very precise and clear so we don’t have any collapses at the border,” she said. “Misinformation has caused a lot of conflict, and in reality some people who are irresponsible will mismanage that info and confuse migrants.”
That is a sentiment echoed by Taylor Levy, an immigration attorney based in El Paso, Texas, who has dedicated much of her time to providing legal advice, as well as accurate information to migrants she encounters, whether at the border bridges of Ciudad Juárez early last year or through WhatsApp messages and Facebook Live, post-pandemic.
“I felt like I could make much more of a difference being somebody who is trying to give honest understandable information to the migrants, because really we are fighting in a way the same marketing that is done by the coyotes and the smugglers, because people are very desperate,” Levy said.
The El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region has the largest concentration of asylum seekers returned to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols.
Levy called Biden’s plan to begin processing some asylum seekers under MPP a “good faith effort.” But she added that more needed to be done.
She noted that Friday’s announcement is limited only to migrants who have “active” MPP cases, numbering about 25,000 migrants. It does not apply to nearly 33,000 migrants who were not present at their hearings or had an absentia ruling against them.
“I’m very eager to see if the administration makes any other announcements in the near future regarding people who have already lost their cases in MPP, because we know that it was fundamentally an unfair process, an unjust process, created by the Trump administration to make sure that asylum seekers did not have a fair day in court,” Levy said. “They were horrific conditions with little to no access to attorneys.”
Osbaldo Estupiñan Garcia, an asylum seeker from Cuba whom the Trump administration sent to Nogales in January 2020, also welcomed the news.
During the past year in Mexico, he has built a life for himself, working temporary jobs — the only type he’s able to find with his temporary humanitarian visa. He has moved in with a girlfriend from Nogales, along with her two children. After Biden’s election, they began having conversations about what they would once it is his turn to be processed.
“The wait is not easy,” he said.
However, he and other asylum seekers under MPP in Nogales might have to wait longer than most for their chance to be processed. The Arizona border was the last stretch where the Trump administration implemented “Remain in Mexico.”
Estupiñan Garcia said he had already seen lots of misinformation in WhatsApp and Facebook groups.
“There are a lot of people on social networks speculating that the border is open, and at the end of the day it’s a lie,” he said.
Each store will receive about 100 doses per week to start, company spokesman Chris Savarese said on Thursday. The company said it could start distributing vaccines as early as Friday.
“These allocations will grow over time and supplement existing supply from state and local governments. Rite Aid will be providing vaccinations in over half of its locations and expects to provide vaccinations in all its locations once supply is available,” he said.
Here is the list (addresses are listed where there is more than one store in a town):
Bergen County: Bergenfield, Washington Township, Hackensack, Waldwick.
Burlington County: Willingboro, Delran, Cinnaminson, Edgewater Park, Lumberton, Marlton, Medford, Wrightstown. There are two in Burlington at 108 East Route 130 South and 2093 Route 130 North.
Camden County: Clementon, Barrington, Haddonfield, Somerdale, Atco, Laurel Springs, Haddonfield, Cherry Hill. There are three locations in Vorhees: 480 Centennial Boulevard; 700 Haddonfield Berlin Road; 11 Route 73 and two locations in Sicklerville: 3403 Sickerville Road and 77 Cross Keys Road.
Cumberland County: Two locations in Vineland: 7 West Landis Avenue and 970 North Main Road.
Essex County: Irvington, East Orange, Newark.
Gloucester County: Woodbury, Deptford, Mantua, Gibbstown, Clayton, Glassboro, Mullica Hill, Paulsboro. There are two in Sewell: 500 Woodbury-Glassboro Road and 490 Hurfville-Cross Keys. And there are two in Williamstown: 1434 South Black Horse Pike and 1881 North Black Horse Pike.
Hudson County: There are two in Jersey City: 2859-61 Kennedy Boulevard and 981 West Side Avenue.
Mercer County: There is one location in Trenton at 1801 Kuser Road.
Middlesex County: New Brunswick, North Brunswick, Fords, Perth Amboy, Highland Park, Parlin and two locations in Edison: 10 Lincoln Highway and 416 Route 1 Edison.
Monmouth County: Hazlet, Neptune, Port Monmouth, Manasquan and there are two locations in Tinton Falls: 596 Shrewsbury Avenue and 4057 Asbury Avenue.
Morris County: Denville, Lake Hiawatha, Morristown.
Ocean County: Point Pleasant, Lakewood, Brick and Jackson.
ATLANTA (AP) — The district attorney investigating whether former President Donald Trump should face charges for attempting to pressure Georgia’s elections chief into changing the results of the presidential race in his favor has a reputation as a tough courtroom veteran, not only as a prosecutor but also as a defense lawyer and judge.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was sworn in last month after winning a resounding 2020 election victory over her former boss, entered the national spotlight Wednesday when letters to top state officials revealed her office is investigating whether illegal attempts were made to influence the state’s 2020 elections. That includes the Jan. 2 phone call in which Trump was recorded asking Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn his defeat.
Prosecuting Trump would likely prove a career-defining move for Willis — and one fraught with risk, said Atlanta attorney Robert James, a former district attorney in neighboring DeKalb County. Constituents in heavily Democratic Atlanta would demand an aggressive prosecution. The Republican ex-president would likely unleash an army of lawyers to defend him. And news coverage would scrutinize every step, or misstep.
“Nobody should be confused about the fact that you’re going into a whirlwind,” James said. “If this is what she chooses to do based on the facts and the evidence, from what I know about her as a prosecutor, she’s smart enough and tough enough to handle it.”
In her first weeks on the job, Willis has already faced criticism for trying to hand off two high-profile cases against police officers, including a fatal shooting. But fellow lawyers who have faced her in court say she’s a skilled litigator who isn’t afraid of tough cases.
“She is a hard-charging, tough trial lawyer,” Atlanta defense attorney Page Pate said. “I would never question her ethics. I would never question her diligence or her intelligence. She is a bulldog when she thinks she’s on the right side.”
Willis worked 17 years as an assistant district attorney under Paul Howard, who was Georgia’s first Black DA when he took office in 1997. Before challenging Howard for his job in 2020, Willis spent short stints as a criminal defense lawyer and a municipal court judge.
Running an aggressive campaign in which she accused Howard of mismanagement, Willis trounced him in an August runoff election for the Democratic nomination, winning nearly 72% of the vote. With no Republican on the ballot, Willis cruised to victory in November.
In her most high-profile case under Howard, Willis served as the lead prosecutor bringing charges against nearly three dozen Atlanta public school educators accused in a cheating scandal. In April 2015, after an unwieldy trial that spanned months, a jury convicted 11 former educators of racketeering for their role in a scheme to inflate students’ scores on standardized exams.
Pate, who defended one of the accused educators, said Howard bungled the case and should have lost. But Willis and her co-counsel, he said, “pieced that thing together, worked day and night to make it what it was.”
The new district attorney has come under fire for seeking to offload a pair of cases against Atlanta police. One involves officers charged with dragging two Black college students from a car during May protests over racial injustice. The other deals with two officers charged in the July 12 shooting death of Rayshard Brooks, a Black man killed as he tried to flee arrest for drunken driving.
Willis last month asked Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr to reassign the cases to an outside prosecutor, arguing that her predecessor had acted improperly in the cases, including politicizing them during his reelection campaign. Carr declined to transfer the cases.
Though some attorneys said Willis had good reason for seeking to recuse her office, her attempt outraged members of Brooks’ family.
“Not only did you hurt me, but you hurt everyone out here who was counting on you to do the right thing,” Tomika Miller, Brooks’ widow, said at a news conference last week. “You say that you don’t run from hard cases. But, baby, you ran from this one.”
Shean Williams, an Atlanta civil rights attorney who represents the family of a man killed in a different police shooting being prosecuted by Willis’ office, said he understands the desire to have such cases prosecuted by the local district attorney. He applauded Willis for investigating Trump’s phone call, saying it makes him hopeful she will hold police officers and others in power accountable.
It’s uncertain whether Willis will seek charges against Trump or anyone else in relation to the election.
Senior Trump adviser Jason Miller has already decried the investigation, saying it’s a continuation of a “witch hunt” by Democrats against the former president.
Though Willis’ letters to state officials don’t name Trump as a target, the prosecutor’s spokesman, Jeff DiSantis, confirmed that, among other things, investigators are looking into the phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, can be heard on the call rejecting Trump’s repeated calls for him to change the state’s certified results of the presidential election, which President Joe Biden won by about 12,000 votes.
“In most cases, you would have sort of a he-said, she-said case where one person is contending another party said something,” said Cathy Cox, dean of the law school at Mercer University and a former Georgia secretary of state. “But you have a tape of Trump’s actual words. There is no dispute of what he said.”
Regardless, in cases against celebrities and public officials like Trump, even obtaining a grand jury’s indictment that allows a case to proceed to a trial court can be difficult, said James, the former DeKalb County prosecutor. That’s because citizens empaneled to hear such cases often find it difficult to be impartial about famous defendants, he said.
“Ultimately, as a prosecutor, your job is to prosecute cases without fear, favor or affection,” James said. “You look at the law, you look at the facts, and you compare the two.”
___
Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia. Associated Press writer Sudhin Thanawala contributed from Atlanta.
A Sandy Lake, Pennsylvania, woman dubbed “bullhorn lady” during the January 6 Capitol riots was released under house arrest but told she must wear a mask at all times in public.
Judge Beryl Howell offered the mask mandate after it was made clear that Powell had repeatedly refused to wear masks in the past, and had actually been fired from a job for refusing to wear one. In late December she posted “I’m unashamedly a ‘super spreader'” on Facebook, according to The New Yorker.
Speaking to Powell during her release hearing, Howell said that her actions were “so unpatriotic it makes my straight hair curl,” according to The Daily Beast.
The mother of eight was filmed at the Capitol shouting instructions into a bullhorn and directing rioters around the Capitol. She has been charged with depredation of government property, entering restricted buildings or grounds with a dangerous weapon, entering restricted buildings or grounds, and violent entry or disorderly conduct.
According to prosecutors, Powell “picked up a large pipe and used it as a battering ram to break into the United States Capitol. Then, amplified by a large bullhorn, she corralled her fellow rioters and gave instructions on how to ‘take’ the Capitol, including instructions that revealed operative knowledge of the inner-Capitol layout.”
Prosecutors said she ordered rioters to “coordinate together if you are going to take this building,” and alerted them they had “another window to break.”
Powell was the subject of a February 2 New Yorker article by Ronan Farrow, in which she identified photos of herself taken at the Capitol on the day of the siege.
Alluding to her “bullhorn lady” moniker, she told Farrow: “Listen, if somebody doesn’t help and direct people, then do more people die? That’s all I’m going to say about that. I can’t say anymore. I need to talk to an attorney.”
At the time of the interview, Powell was considered a fugitive and was arrested two days later, on February 4, after local authorities received a tip about her whereabouts.
Prosecutors said her decision to given an interview to The New Yorker rather than turn herself in showed a “disregard for the aims of law enforcement.”
In her interview with The New Yorker, Powell admitted that she didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, and had a hard time deciding whether to vote for Trump in the 2020 election.
She also noted that Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, had been one of her primary sources of information, despite his repeated baseless claims about election fraud.
On Thursday, three Republican Senators—Ted Cruz of Texas, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah—reportedly met with former President Donald Trump‘s impeachment defense attorneys, according to Cruz and Trump attorney David Schoen.
Schoen called the three senators “very friendly,” a comment which raised eyebrows seeing as senators are often thought to serve as impartial jurors during impeachment trials. In other criminal and civil trials, jurors are forbidden from meeting with or expressing overt favor to lawyers involved in the case.
Schoen claimed that the senators met with them to ensure that they were “familiar with procedure” before offering their opening arguments on Friday in rebuttal to the House impeachment managers’ case, CNN reported. Schoen considered the mid-trial meeting to be appropriate, adding, “I think that’s the practice of impeachment… There’s nothing about this thing that has any semblance of due process whatsoever.”
However, Cruz said that the meeting wasn’t just about procedure, but rather a chance for “sharing our thoughts” about the defense’s legal strategy “in terms of where the argument was and where to go,” The Hill reported him as saying.
“I think their job is to make clear how the house managers have not carried their burden of proof. They have not demonstrated that the president’s conduct satisfies the legal standard of high crimes and misdemeanors,” Cruz said.
Newsweek reached out to the House impeachment managers, Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin, David Cicilline, Ted Lieu and Madeleine Dean, for comment.
David Schoen (pictured), an impeachment defense lawyer for former President Donald Trump, has admitted to meeting with Republican Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah on Thursday to discuss “procedure.” The meeting, which occurred one day before the defense team is set to make their opening arguments, raised questions about whether senators are supposed to serve as impartial jurors. Andrew Harnik – Pool/Getty
In a tweet published Thursday evening, Cruz also refuted the idea that the senators are jurors, citing a January 2020 Washington Post opinion article by former Democratic Iowa Senator Tom Harkin as proof.
Harkin’s article points to Article III of the Constitution, which states, “The trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury.” Unlike jurors, Harkin pointed out, senators can ask questions, raise objections, discuss the case outside of the courtroom with interested parties and also impose a sentence.
“The Senate sitting in impeachment is a court—a court composed of 100 judges, not 100 jurors,” Harkin wrote. “As judges, they have to make decisions on a wide range of issues—the facts, the public good, how the actions taken by the president impact our democracy, fairness, history, proportionality and the Constitution.”
Before impeachment trials begin, senators are sworn in. The oath, administered by Chief Justice John Roberts, goes: “Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: So help you God?”
But despite this pledge, impeachment remains an “inherently legal process”, according to Robert Peck, founder and president of the Center For Constitutional Litigation. As such, “senators are presumed to have political allegiances and even political interests that may affect their votes,” Peck told WUSA.
“[The Senators] were directly affected by the attack on the Capitol and are witnesses to critical facts,” Peck continued. “They would not normally be able to serve as jurors in a real trial, but are the only people assigned responsibility in the Constitution to try an impeachment.”
But even if a senator is seen as having broken their impartiality pledge, they only face one of two consequences: being voted out of office by their constituents or being expelled from Senate by a two-thirds majority vote.
A Salvadoran girl sits inside a camp for asylum-seekers on Feb. 07 in Matamoros, Mexico, where some 600 people who left Central America have been waiting for immigration court hearings.
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A Salvadoran girl sits inside a camp for asylum-seekers on Feb. 07 in Matamoros, Mexico, where some 600 people who left Central America have been waiting for immigration court hearings.
John Moore/Getty Images
The Biden administration said it will begin phasing in a new asylum process on Feb. 19 to deal with a backlog of migrants seeking asylum on the southern U.S. border, many of whom have been waiting in squalid camps in a state of limbo for court dates because of the Migrant Protection Protocols program.
Under pressure to make good on campaign promises on immigration and facing the prospect that a new wave of migrants seeking to escape desperate situations could flood the border, the Biden team said it plans to start allowing in a trickle of asylum-seekers — about 300 people per day — from among an estimated 25,000 people with “active cases” in the now-defunct MPP program.
Former President Donald Trump called the program “Remain in Mexico” because it forced migrants from Central American countries to await asylum hearings outside the United States. Ending the program was one of Biden’s first actions when he took office, part of a sweeping rollback of Trump’s measures aimed at curbing immigration. Biden promised a more “humane” system.
Senior officials who briefed reporters on a conference call on condition of anonymity said they began work on the new asylum process during the transition, working with international organizations helping migrants and the Mexican government. But they acknowledged it came together very quickly. Many details have not been spelled out, in part for fear of inundating ports of entry and international organizations with a flood of inquiries from desperate asylum-seekers.
“We need to start asylum proceedings and allow … access to asylum proceedings in the United States for people who have been too long kept in Mexico and been unable to pursue their cases,” a senior Biden administration official said of the decision.
“We all want to make sure that we send the message that we are beginning this within 30 days of the inauguration to demonstrate our commitment to legal pathways to migration, but that it does not change the status at the border,” the official said.
“We don’t want people acting on limited information and potentially rushing to different parts of the border. That would not be safe given the current environment,” a second official said. They emphasized that people should take no action until they learn whether they are eligible, and even then should wait for instructions and not travel to the border.
Migrants who believe they are eligible will first register with NGOs, nongovernmental organizations that will identify those who are most vulnerable and stuck in limbo the longest. The Department of Homeland Security is building “electronic portals” for migrants to be able to register and check their status.
Migrants will find out the details of the new system through social networks. “We’ll be doing a huge amount of media. We’ll be working with our international organization partners who have excellent social media networks that reach migrant communities to make sure that people understand who will be eligible for this program and who will not,” one of the officials said.
After initial screening by the NGOs — which are not yet being revealed — migrants will be given an appointment to go through a port of entry. They will first be tested for the coronavirus and will be equipped with masks.
The asylum-seekers will be enrolled in “alternative detention programs” after they cross the border to a final destination inside the country, where their asylum cases will eventually be heard, the officials said. No court proceedings will occur at the border.
WASHINGTON (AP) — His rallying cry to supporters has been dissected. His videos, press conferences and calls to Fox News have played on loop. His Twitter account is once again dominating news coverage, his missives read aloud in the Senate chamber.
More than three weeks removed from the White House, Donald Trump’s voice is again permeating the nation’s capital — but not on his terms.
Stripped of his social media megaphone, the former president has watched the searing opening days of his historic second impeachment trial unfold on television with none of his former tools for fighting back at his disposal. Instead, he will have to rely on a hastily assembled team of lawyers — whose initial appearance he panned — to present his defense against Democrats’ charges Friday.
“I think the only thing I can remember, frankly, where he’s been in such a weak position and unable really to change the story would be the bankruptcies in the early ’90s,” said Sam Nunberg, a former longtime Trump adviser.
Still, he argued that if Trump had access to Twitter, he would likely dig himself deeper into trouble.
In the days before the trial began this week, Trump was relatively disengaged from developments in Washington, spending his time golfing and plotting his future as he adjusts to the rhythms of a far more placid post-presidential life.
But Trump was quickly snapped out of that disengagement Tuesday as he watched the trial’s opening arguments unfold.
Trump exploded at aides about the shoddy performances of his lawyers, complaining that they seem ill-prepared and looked lousy on television. And he worked the phones, demanding a more aggressive defense, according to people familiar with his reaction.
Trump’s team and allies have assured him that he has more than enough Republican votes to acquit him of the Democrats’ charge that he incited the insurrection on Jan. 6. And they have convinced him that it is better he stay quiet to avoid the risk of saying something explosive that might alienate Senate jurors, including making his unfounded allegations of mass voter fraud a central argument of his defense. That means no media interviews, no blow-by-blow commentary, no call-ins to Fox News.
Trump’s inner circle acknowledged the two days of searing video had been damaging, but thought the Democrats’ case lost momentum on Thursday. Indeed, Trump was spotted back on the golf course by a CNN camera crew. What remained unclear: how and when Trump would respond to the verdict.
Trump’s inner circle remains confident of acquittal, but there are concerns among allies about the lasting damage the trial could do to his already battered reputation, potentially diminishing his future standing and ability to exert influence over a party he has controlled with an iron fist.
Aides know that the powerful images being shown at the trial — and carried live on broadcast networks — are bound to reach beyond cable news-watching political junkies and reach low-information voters, which could further collapse Trump’s standing. In the end, more Republicans may be willing to break from him, and some of his supporters may desert him, his aides fear.
“If he doesn’t make a mid-course correction here, he’s going to lose this Super Bowl,” said Peter Navarro, a former White House economic adviser who remains close with Trump and has been urging him to ditch his current legal team and focus his case on the voter fraud allegations that have been dismissed by dozens of judges and state election officials, as well as Trump’s former attorney general.
Trump is not expected to make any changes to his team, though David Schoen is expected to take the central role. Senior adviser Jason Miller said the legal team is expected to begin and conclude their argument Friday, using far less than their 16 hours of allotted time.
Even Trump loyalists have been surprised at how tight his grip has remained on the party since leaving office, with those who had rebuffed his attempts to overturn the election being met with fierce anger from the former president’s still-loyal base.
But Wednesday’s presentation, in particular, was a damning indictment, filled with searing, never-before-seen video and audio of the riot as Trump’s supporters violently clashed with police, smashed their way into the Capitol building and roamed the hallowed halls of Congress, menacingly hunting for lawmakers and successfully halting the final tally of electoral votes.
That footage was interspliced with Trump’s tweets and excerpts from his speeches as the House Democratic prosecutors methodically traced his monthslong effort to undermine his supporters’ faith in the election results, convince them the election had been stolen and push them to fight.
Through it all, Trump — who for decades described himself as the ultimate counterpuncher and his own best spokesperson — has been cut off from his former platforms. He has been banned from Twitter and Facebook. He no longer has a White House press corps on standby to chronicle his every utterance.
Even his post-presidential team’s effort to communicate via traditional press releases has been hampered by technical difficulties that have resulted in frequent delays in emails landing in reporters’ inboxes.
“It changes the dynamics so much, the fact that the president doesn’t have that platform,” said Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin Republican governor who ran against Trump in 2016, referring to his social media bullhorns.
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close ally of the president’s, said he had stressed to Trump that, while his team “will do better, can do better,” what matters is the outcome.
“I reinforced to the president: The case is over. It’s just a matter of getting the final verdict now,” he said.
Walker said that, in the end, he hoped the trial would help reunite Republicans currently engaged in a fierce debate over the future of the party and the extent to which Trump should be embraced.
“No matter where people are at in terms of the president’s claims or concerns about election fraud or anything else, it’s really easy for Republicans in the Senate — and for that matter, any Republicans, be they elected or otherwise — to be against the impeachment and basing it on the most fundamental reason, which is just it’s a joke to try to impeach somebody who’s not in office anymore,” he said. “I think that’s a great unifier.”
The Proud Boys are having a rough time. The self-described “Western chauvinist” drinking club has long been a refuge for white supremacists, anti-Semites and assorted extremists seeking a veneer of legitimacy.
But in the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last month, the group is in some disarray, as state chapters disavow the group’s chairman and leaders bicker inpublic and in private about what direction to take the Proud Boys in.
Proud Boys chairman Henry Tarrio, who goes by Enrique, was arrested days before the Capitol riot and charged with two federal weapons charges. Three weeks later, Tarrio was outed as a longtime FBI informant,a role he has now admitted to. The news about the Proud Boys leader came as other members of the group were arrested for their involvement in the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Then, on Feb. 3, Canada designated the Proud Boys as a domestic terrorist group.
The barrage of controversy, discord and betrayal seems to have been too much for at least three state chapters of the Proud Boys, who used the messaging app Telegram to denounce Tarrio and proclaim their independence from central Proud Boy leadership. That raises questions about the future of the group, and also has experts concerned about more radical factions of the Proud Boys, or a newly-branded gang, emerging.
“We do not recognize the assumed authority of any national Proud Boy leadership including the Chairman, the Elders, or any subsequent governing body that is formed to replace them until such a time we may choose to consent to join those bodies of government,” read an announcement on a website connected to the Alabama chapter of the Proud Boys.
The same sentiment was shared on Telegram by Proud Boys chapters in Indiana and Oklahoma.
“They’re radioactive now,” said Daryle Lamont Jenkins, executive director of the One People’s Project, who has been exposing far-right extremists for three decades. “Any air of respectability is gone. They can no longer say that they were being misrepresented by the liberal media as extremists, because people are now looking at them and just saying, ‘You’re dirty.'”
Jared Holt, a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who studies extremism, agreed. He noted that the most popular Telegram channel used by members of the Proud Boys was recently renamed, removing the Proud Boys moniker altogether.
“The Telegram channel dropping the name, different chapters breaking off from the national leadership, it all speaks to a rift that’s occurring in the Proud Boys,” Holt said. “That brand has become too toxic.”
Experts who monitor the Proud Boys agreed the group is undergoing the sort of transition that happens to most hate groups at some point.
“Extremist groups very frequently split, or people will abandon these groups when the leadership behaves in ways that aren’t in keeping with the stated values of the organization,” said Brian Hughes, associate director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University. “Those splits are inevitable because exploitation, abuse and informing to law enforcement just go with the territory.”
The question now is where members of the Proud Boys will go.
Proud Boys chapters that have so far denounced Tarrio have not completely turned away from the group. They say they will operate as independent Proud Boys organizations that won’t take orders from a central leadership.
But different personalities within those chapters represent radically different versions of how the Proud Boys brand might survive and morph into the future.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the leader of the breakaway Proud Boys chapter in Indiana, William Brien James, is a longtime violent white supremacist who co-founded a neo-Nazi drinking club in 2003. In an interview, James claimed he left the white supremacist movement 10 years ago, but Jenkins and other experts doubt his sincerity.
“I’m watching that guy really closely,” Jenkins said.
In St, Louis, the Proud Boys chapter leader Michael Lasater said his group wants to get back what he said were the founding principles of the Proud Boys: “brotherhood and beer.”
The St. Louis Proud Boys are still figuring out where they stand vis-à-vis Tarrio and central leadership, Lasater said, but they want to get away from the “political stuff” — rallies and street brawls with Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist activists.
Jenkins, who has watched extremist groups fragment and reform many times over the years, said he expects more radicalized groups to emerge from the breakup of the Proud Boys. While some people will leave the movement, he predicted the core members will keep reinventing themselves into ever-more-nuanced versions of the same fundamental concept.
“The critical mass will stay the same,” Jenkins said. “It’s still the same people with the same motivations and same agenda, and that’s why we will continue to follow them.”
Whitewashing their past
The schism within the Proud Boys likely doesn’t just represent a lack of faith in Tarrio or a desire to change the group’s direction, said Amarnath Amarasingam, associate fellow at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology. He believes it also revealsa sense of fear within the organization.
“Jan. 6 was a major turning point,” Amarasingam said. “Seeing their friends getting arrested will have been a major shock to the system for people who just wanted to go out and get drunk and brawl.”
In the wake of the clampdown on the Proud Boys, its members have a vested interest in whitewashing their past, Jenkins said.
The last few months have revealed the Proud Boys for what they really are, Jenkins said: a dangerous, largely racist domestic hate group masquerading as a bunch of guys who just want to get drunk, say edgy things and have fun. The concept of “Western chauvinism” is really just code — a dog whistle to other white supremacists, he said.
“They weren’t really ever fooling anyone, but now everybody sees what we’ve been talking about,” Jenkins said.
So, when members of the Proud Boys post messages denouncing Tarrio or the direction the gang has taken, that likely also represents an effort to distance themselves from an organization that is now squarely in the sights of law enforcement and anti-fascist activists.
Chapter presidents can argue they want to break away to return to their original mission as a drinking club, but experts on extremism aren’t buying it.
Hughes said there’s only one true exit strategy for Proud Boys who find themselves in an organization whose values they don’t endorse: Leave the movement entirely, just as thousands of neo-Nazis, skinheads and assorted extremists have done for decades before them.
“These groups are chock-a-block full of power struggles, petty tyrants and snitches,” Hughes said. “That said, there’s always hope for people. When you look around yourself and you see that you’re surrounded by these would-be führers, who don’t actually have any principles beyond their own aggrandizement, well maybe that’s an opportunity for people to start checking themselves.”
A series of violent crimes against Asians and Asian Americans has prompted activists and experts to warn that racist rhetoric about the coronavirus pandemic may be fueling a rise in hate incidents.
Police in Oakland, California, announced this week that they arrested a suspect in connection with a brutal attack of a 91-year-old man in Chinatown that was caught on camera. In less than a week, a Thai man was attacked and killed in San Francisco, a Vietnamese woman was assaulted and robbed of $1,000 in San Jose, and a Filipino man was attacked with a box cutter on the subway in New York City.
It’s unclear whether the crimes were racially motivated, but advocates calling for more to be done to address violence against Asian Americans say racist crimes against the community are historically underreported for a variety of reasons.
Meanwhile, police departments across the country are warning residents of increased crime around Lunar New Year, in part because of the threat of robberies during the multi-day celebrations that begin Friday. Cash is a customary gift.
Violence against Asian Americans sharply increased in March as COVID-19 began spreading across the country, and some politicians, including former President Donald Trump, blamed China for the pandemic, said Russell Jeung, who created a tool that tracks hate incidents against Asian American Pacific Islander communitiescalled the Stop AAPI Hate tracker.
“When President Trump began and insisted on using the term ‘China virus,’ we saw that hate speech really led to hate violence,” said Jeung, chair of the Asian American studies department at San Francisco State University. “That sort of political rhetoric and that sort of anti-Asian climate has continued to this day.”
Acts of racist violence lead to increased anxiety and fear in a population that already has higher rates of anxiety and depression related to COVID-19 than other racial groups, Jeung said.
Stop AAPI Hate, Jeung’s website, which includes a self-reporting tool for harassment, discrimination and violent attacks, recorded 2,808 incidents of anti-Asian discrimination across the U.S. from its inception on March 19 to Dec. 31, 2020. Another organization, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, recorded more than 3,000 hate incidents in their self-reporting system since late April 2020 – by far the highest number in the tool’s four-year history.
The FBI collects national hate crime data, but data for 2020 and 2021 has not yet been released. Two hundred sixteen anti-Asian hate crimes were reported in 2019, according to the latest data available.
That number may be just a fraction of the true total given that fewer than half of the victims of a hate crime ever report it to the police, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Jeung said the increase in hate incidents is a particular concern in urban areas. In New York City, police data shows there were 24 anti-Asian hate crimes related to the coronavirus between Jan. 1 and Nov. 29, 2020, compared with just three anti-Asian hate crimes in the same period in 2019.
“This increase was cultivated due to the anti-Asian rhetoric about the virus that was publicized, and individuals began to attack Asian New Yorkers, either verbal attack or physical assault,” Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison told reporters in August.
Activists including Amanda Nguyễn, co-founder of Rise, a sexual assault survivor advocacy organization, are raising awareness of the Oakland case and the other violent incidents involving Asian Americans. Nguyễn said she created an Instagram video about the attacks, which has since gone viral, because she was angered not only by the violence but by the lack of media attention the cases received.
“When I made that video I was tired of living in fear and I wanted to scream,” she told USA TODAY. “It’s so absurd that I have to say ‘Stop killing us.’ … We are literally fearing for our lives as we walk out of our door, and your silence, your silence rings through our heads.”
In the Oakland assault, the district attorney’s office is investigating whether there is enough evidence to support hate crime charges, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley said in a statement to USA TODAY.
The suspect in the Oakland assault, Yahya Muslim, was charged with three counts of assault, inflicting great bodily injury and committing a crime against an elderly person, O’Malley announced at a news conference Monday.
Police said Muslim is believed to have attacked a 60-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman the same day of the Chinatown attack.
Meanwhile, actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case and are donating that money to community organizations like Stop AAPI Hate.
“The skyrocketing number of hate crimes against Asian Americans continues to grow, despite our repeated pleas for help,” they said on Twitter. “The crimes ignored and even excused.”
On Jan. 28, Vicha Ratanapakdee was attacked and later died in San Francisco. Eric Lawson, his son-in-law, told USA TODAYhe believes the 84-year-old was targeted because he was Asian. Lawson adde that his wife, who is Thai, was verbally assaulted twice and told to “go back to China” before the attack.
“Everyone is dancing around the issue, and no one’s addressing it,” he said.
In San Jose, a 64-year-old Vietnamese woman was assaulted last Wednesday and robbed of $1,000 in cash she had withdrawn for the holiday. No arrest has been made, and there is no indication the robbery was race-related, said public information officer Sgt. Christian Camarillo.
That same day in New York, 61-year-old Noel Quintana, who is of reportedly Filipino descent, was slashed in the face with a box cutter on the subway. Spokesperson Detective Sophia Mason told USA TODAY police were investigating but did not answer questions about whether the incident may have been motivated by race.
Although it’s unclear whether the particular cases are racially motivated, they are certainly “related” and “horrific,” Jeung said.
“What makes it worse is we see our elderly and youth also targeted,” he said. “It seems like people are attacking vulnerable populations.”
John C. Yang, president and CEO of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said his organization has been tracking anti-Asian hate incidents and crimes for nearly 30 years and has received hundreds more hate incident reports in 2020 than in previous years. He said polls by IPSOS and Pew Research Center indicate that the true scope of hate Asian Americans are experiencing is probably much larger, and better data is needed.
“Although these reports are clearly incomplete, clearly just the tip of the iceberg that shows us that there is this dramatic increase in hate incidents,” he said, noting that it’s too soon to tell if that increase is continuing in 2021.
There are several reasons victims of a hate crime may not report it to the police, according to Yang.
Yang said victims may not be aware of the resources available for them, and there may be language barriers to accessing those resources for older Asian Americans in particular. He said there may be cultural barriers to reporting as well, including shame around being perceived as a victim. Some victims may also be concerned about interacting with law enforcement because of their immigration status.
Yang added that not all hate incidents rise to the level of crime, but they still “clearly inflict a level of mental trauma.” He estimated that only about 10% of the incidents reported to his organization could be considered crimes.
Jeung, of Stop AAPI Hate, said that in addition to crimes such as physical violence, Asian Americans have reported experiencing violations of their civil rights including being denied service by businesses or rideshares, being verbally harassed with racial slurs and facing vandalism and property damage.
He said his wife was deliberately coughed on while jogging, noting the similarities to a New Jersey incident where a man was charged with making a terroristic threat after coughing on a supermarket employee and saying he had the coronavirus.
“There is such a climate of hate and anger that we need to again lower the temperature and remind people to treat others with respect,” he said.
President Joe Biden signed a memorandum in late January denouncing xenophobia and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Yang said the Biden administration’s words have made a difference, but the recent violence has caused the community to “hunker down again” during a normally celebratory time.
He said more needs to be done to ensure victims have support systems and to educate bystanders about safe intervention. He warned against relying too heavily on law enforcement.
Despite the horrific crimes, Jeung was excited to see the Oakland community organizing efforts to reduce crime in the neighborhood.
“What I’m really heartened by is the Asian American community is really standing up,” he said. “I want people to know we’re not simply victims of discrimination, but we’re advocating for racial justice for everyone in the United States and we’ll continue to do so.”
“By the time we get to April, that will be what I would call, for better wording, ‘open season,’” Dr. Fauci said in an interview with NBC’s “Today.” “Namely, virtually everybody and anybody in any category could start to get vaccinated.”
But the issue might be getting doses to people who do not readily seek them.
Mr. Biden has carefully avoided having his White House become consumed in criticism of his predecessor, but on Thursday he took direct aim at Donald J. Trump for what he said was a failure to create a process for mass vaccinations. The president, who said he had promised to speak openly to Americans about the challenges of the pandemic, blamed Mr. Trump for creating a significant one by failing to oversee the creation of a streamlined vaccine distribution program. “The vaccine program was in much, much worse shape than my team and I anticipated,” Mr. Biden said.
“While scientists did their job in discovering vaccines in record time, my predecessor — I’ll be very blunt about it — did not do his job in getting ready for the massive challenge of vaccinating hundreds of millions,” Mr. Biden added.
“It was a big mess,” he said. “It’s going to take time to fix, to be blunt with you.”
Health officials in the Trump administration have pushed back on those suggestions, pointing to hundreds of briefings that officials at the Department of Health and Human Services offered the incoming health team, including on vaccine allocation and distribution.
The highly decentralized plans to distribute and administer the vaccines, giving state and local health departments authority once doses had been delivered, were developed with career staff members at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Defense Department.
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