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Texans can carry handguns without a license or training starting Sept. 1, after Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday signed the permitless carry bill into law.
House Bill 1927 eliminates the requirement for Texas residents to obtain a license to carry handguns if they’re not prohibited by state or federal law from possessing a gun. The signing was reported by the Texas Legislature’s official website, which tracks the progress of legislation. Abbott’s office has announced a ceremonial signing of the bill and other gun-related legislation at 11 a.m. Thursday.
Before approving the bill, the Senate tacked on several amendments to address concerns by law enforcement groups that opposed permitless carry, worried it would endanger officers and make it easier for criminals to get guns.
The compromise lawmakers reached behind closed doors kept intact a number of changes the Senate made to the House bill, including striking a provision that would have barred officers from questioning people based only on their possession of a handgun.
The deal also preserves a Senate amendment enhancing the criminal penalties for felons and family violence offenders caught carrying. Among other Senate changes that made it into the law was a requirement that the Texas Department of Public Safety offer a free online course on gun safety.
Proponents of what Republicans call “constitutional carry” argued that Texas should follow the lead of at least 20 other states with similar laws on the books. Meanwhile, gun control advocates are disappointed the Legislature made it easier to carry firearms after repeated instances of gun violence — including the 2019 massacres in El Paso and Midland-Odessa that left 30 people dead.
“The permitless carry bill will cause more violence and loss,” said U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, in a statement Wednesday. “Despite overwhelming support for common-sense gun violence prevention legislation like universal background checks, Texas Republicans, led by a cowardly governor, are more interested in groveling for the gun lobby’s attention than they are in preventing gun violence and honoring victims and survivors in El Paso and across Texas.”
Before the permitless carry law was signed, Texans generally needed to be licensed to carry handguns openly or concealed. Applicants had to submit fingerprints, complete four to six hours of training, and pass a written exam and a shooting proficiency test. Texas does not require a license to openly carry a rifle in public.
The permitless carry movement saw a breakthrough in April when the House passed HB 1927. Patrick initially said the Senate did not have the votes for permitless carry, but he created a new committee, referred HB 1927 to it and got it to the floor, where it passed in early May.
Some Democrats and state lawmakers from El Paso have denounced the bill, which came during the first legislative session since the 2019 massacres. Abbott and Patrick softened their tones on gun control after those shootings but have been quiet on the issue since.
In 2019, Abbott swore to do “everything we can to make sure a crime like this doesn’t happen again,” raising concerns about state laws allowing private gun sales between strangers without background checks. Patrick went so far as to say he was “willing to take an arrow” from the gun lobby in order to pursue the change.
But this legislative session, Texas Republicans moved in the opposite direction, pushing to loosen gun laws and vowing to defy any new federal gun rules. Laying out his policy priorities in February, Abbott made no mention of either shooting. He said Texas must become a “Second Amendment sanctuary state.”
“We need to erect a complete barrier against any government official anywhere from treading on gun rights in Texas,” Abbott said during his speech.
Of the dozens of gun safety bills lawmakers filed to codify state leaders’ 2019 calls for action, few have advanced.
Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is still trying to secure the cooperation of the would-be star witness in its criminal investigation into the Trump Organization, according to The New York Times, and weighing whether to bring charges against Allen Weisselberg as soon as this summer.
Legal experts told Insider the chief financial officer may not be cooperating yet because he’s holding out for prosecutors to offer him the best possible deal.
“He’s holding out, maybe, because he’s saying to himself, ‘Listen, they need me, so I’m going to cut the best deal that I possibly can instead of taking their first offer out of the box,'” said Randy Zelin, a defense attorney at Wilk Auslander LLP and former New York state prosecutor.
It’s not clear whether Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. will ultimately bring charges against Trump, Weisselberg, the Trump Organization, other company executives — or anyone at all.
As the keeper of the Trump Organization’s and Trump family’s finances, Weisselberg is best-situated to guide prosecutors through financial documentation to make or break a criminal case against Trump or his company. Weisselberg may be using that leverage to get the best deal possible for himself and for his family members, experts said.
Jeffrey Robbins, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw money-laundering investigations, told Insider that prosecutors may be seeking harsh penalties against Weisselberg to demonstrate the severity of the Trump Organization’s conduct to a jury. Weisselberg may be fighting to ensure he doesn’t go to prison, Robbins said.
“The prosecutors know that in a ‘he said, he said’ contest with the former president of the United States, it would be important for the key cooperating witness to serve time — so that the jury is more inclined to believe him,” Robbins, now an attorney at Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr, told Insider. “They may be insisting that Weisselberg agree to serve time — and that may well be something that Weisselberg is unprepared to do.”
There’s a chance Weisselberg may not cooperate at all
Weisselberg may also simply not cooperate, calculating that he’d rather take his chances with the Trumps at the defense table.
It doesn’t make much sense for him to cooperate with prosecutors — which will almost certainly mean pleading guilty to some charges himself — when there’s a chance he could be acquitted. Weisselberg may believe that his loyalty to Trump will pay off and that he has the money to defend himself, Zelin said.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. in 2020.
Richard Drew / AP
While Vance is widely expected to make a charging decision before his retirement at the end of the year — and has impaneled a special grand jury for the inquiry, according to ABC News — there’s a possibility his successor may shy away from the case.
The incoming Manhattan DA may decide that the Trump investigation is too expensive and that New Yorkers would prefer to spend resources on street crime and shootings, which the New York Police Department says are increasing. If Weisselberg were to cooperate and plead guilty only to have Vance’s successor drop the case, Zelin said, he would have lost Trump’s good graces for nothing.
“Now, for Allen Weisselberg, the music is stopped and there were no chairs for him to sit at,” Zelin said. “I’m sure he’s saying to himself, ‘Maybe that could happen, and if I just hold out, maybe this case goes nowhere.'”
Garland’s actions mean that in the meantime immigration judges will be free to again grant asylum to individuals based on threats of domestic abuse or violence from drug gangs that control large swaths of Central America. Some whose claims were already denied could benefit from a Justice Department review of the cases of individuals who went to federal court after being turned down based on the Sessions orders.
Garland’s formal decisions repudiating the Trump-era rulings suggested that the earlier decisions were not well reasoned.
“The opinion begins with a broad statement that ‘victims of private criminal activity’ will not qualify for asylum except perhaps in ‘exceptional circumstances,’” Garland wrote about Sessions’ 2018 decision limiting asylum in gang-related cases. “That broad language could be read to create a strong presumption against asylum claims based on private conduct. As a result, [the ruling] threatens to create confusion and discourage careful case-by-case adjudication of asylum claims.”
Garland’s comments on Sessions’ family-violence ruling were more circumspect, noting that his predecessor acknowledged at the time that the stance he took was “inconsistent with the decisions of several courts of appeals that have recognized families as particular social groups.”
The moves, which effectively broaden asylum standards, carry some political risk for the Biden administration as it struggles to control a surge of migrants illegally crossing the border or presenting themselves at border checkpoints and seeking asylum. Indeed, the executive order Garland said he was responding to with his latest actions was squarely focused on the southern border and migration from Latin America.
However, immigrant rights advocates hailed the developments as a return to a more humane asylum policy.
“Rescinding these cruel decisions is the first critical step to returning to our humanitarian obligations,” said Kate Melloy Goettel of the American Immigration Council. “We urge the Biden administration to adopt rules that reflect the purpose of our asylum laws — to protect refugees fleeing persecution. The Trump administration’s attempt to curtail asylum claims based on gender-based violence, gang violence and family membership reflected the administration’s focus on demonizing Central American asylum seekers and shutting our nation’s doors to those in need of protection.”
One critic of the Biden administration’s immigration policies said Garland’s moves were unsurprising, but moved the U.S. closer to an open-door approach on immigration.
“What this points to is that asylum has the potential to usurp all other immigration laws,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. “The bar for asylum needs to be set very high and what this represents is a further lowering of that bar.”
“There was a while when potentially any women from the Islamic world could claim to be part of a particular social group, or any woman from China or any man married to a woman from China, because of forced abortion,” Krikorian said. “Part of the goal here appears to be to approve an ever climbing share of asylum applications.”
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that several of the state’s law enforcement agencies will send personnel to Texas and Arizona to aid local authorities in addressing an immigration crisis at the southern border.
DeSantis said the directive was a response to requests from Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who asked other governors earlier this month to send “all available law enforcement resources.” The Republican governors have accused the Biden administration of failing to adequately address the crisis, which has resulted in increased drug smuggling and instances of human trafficking.
“America’s border security crisis impacts every state and every American,” DeSantis said in a statement. “The Biden Administration ended policies implemented by President Trump that were curbing illegal immigration, securing our border, and keeping Americans safe.”
“Governors Abbott and Ducey recently sent out a call for help to every state in the nation, needing additional law enforcement manpower and other resources to aid with border security. I’m proud to announce today that the state of Florida is answering the call. Florida has your back,” he added.
A total of 12 law enforcement entities within Florida are sending personnel to the other states. The groups include the Florida Highway Patrol, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and nine county sheriff’s offices.
DeSantis said the Florida-based personnel would remain on assignment in the other states for at least 16 days “across a variety of different functions.” The governor noted Florida was the first state to commit resources in response to the request.
“The states have sent Florida support when we’ve responded to emergencies here in our state and they wanted support so that they could do what the federal government is either unwilling or unable to do: secure the border and protect the people, not just of their states, but of the entire country,” DeSantis said at a press conference.
DeSantis and other GOP leaders have argued that Biden’s decision to reverse several Trump-era immigration policies, including a provision requiring asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting their court date, has exacerbated the crisis. Biden officials say the president inherited an ineffective system and has worked to overturn inhumane policies.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported more than 180,000 migrant encounters at the border in May, compared to about 23,000 encounters in the same month one year earlier.
The Justice Department leaders were losing their patience.
For weeks, President Donald Trump and his allies had been pressing them to use federal law enforcement’s muscle to back his unfounded claims of voter fraud and a stolen election.
They wanted the Justice Department to explore false claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines had been manipulated to alter votes in one county in Michigan. They asked officials about the U.S. government filing a Supreme Court challenge to the results in six states that Joe Biden won. The president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, even shared with acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen a link to a YouTube video that described an outlandish plot in which the election had been stolen from Trump through the use of military satellites controlled in Italy.
“Pure insanity,” Rosen’s deputy Richard Donoghue wrote to him privately.
In the last weeks of 2020 and the first of 2021, the demands from Trump and his allies pushed the department to the brink of crisis. Though most scoffed at their increasingly far-fetched and desperate claims, one relatively high-ranking Justice Department lawyer seemed to entertain Trump’s requests — pushing internally to have the department assert that fraud in Georgia was cause for that state’s lawmakers to disregard its election results and appoint new electors. Trump contemplated installing him as attorney general, as other Justice Department leaders considered resigning en masse.
The new details laid out in hundreds of pages of emails and other documents released Tuesday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee show how far Trump and his allies were willing to go in their attempts to use the Justice Department to overturn Biden’s win — a campaign whose full contours are still coming into view five months after Trump left office.
The endeavor involved the White House chief of staff and an outside attorney, who peppered department officials with requests that they said came on behalf of Trump himself to investigate baseless claims of election fraud. Their efforts intensified in the days before Congress was set to formally recognize the election results Jan. 6 — and culminated in an Oval Office showdown Jan. 3.
This account is based on those documents as well as interviews with several people involved in or briefed on the events of late 2020 and early 2021. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a politically sensitive matter.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows forwarded assertions about alleged irregularities to the acting attorney general. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The White House often interacts with the Justice Department on matters of policy, and Trump’s defenders have argued officials should have done more in response to the overtures. But others say the requests far surpassed the bounds of normalcy, threatening to drag law enforcement into a sitting president’s attempts to overturn the election. Justice Department inspector general Michael E. Horowitz announced in January that his office would investigate whether any current or former department officials tried to improperly “alter the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election.”
Rosen, Donoghue and spokesmen for Meadows and Trump did not respond to requests for comment.
Though the Justice Department took actions before and after the election that critics have alleged were designed to benefit Trump, neither then-Attorney General William P. Barr nor Rosen publicly backed the president’s claims that fraud altered the election results.
The new emails show that three-week period leading up to Jan. 6 was a searing test of senior Justice officials. The department did examine some claims, and top officials forwarded some of the material from Trump allies to U.S. attorneys in Michigan and Pennsylvania. But they resisted the push to file a case with the Supreme Court seeking to challenge the election results.
Ultimately, Trump’s pressure campaign seemed to resonate more with his supporters who came to D.C. to protest Jan. 6 — and then violently overran the U.S. Capitol — than with those in his own Justice Department.
“Washington is being inundated with people who don’t want to see an election victory stolen by emboldened Radical Left Democrats,” Trump tweeted Jan. 5, as his backers were gathering in the capital. “Our Country has had enough, they won’t take it anymore! We hear you (and love you) from the Oval Office. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Attorney General William P. Barr broke with Trump after the election, saying he did not see evidence of widespread fraud. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
‘From POTUS’
Trump and his allies ratcheted up their efforts to discredit the 2020 election almost immediately after it became clear the incumbent president had been beaten by Biden. They mounted dozens of unsuccessful court challenges, while publicly blasting what they claimed to be fraud and other irregularities. They pressed the Justice Department to investigate.
Before the election, Barr had warned repeatedly of possible fraud associated with mass mail-in voting, and afterward he reversed long-standing Justice Department policy and authorized prosecutors to take overt steps to pursue allegations of “vote tabulation irregularities” in certain cases before results were certified. Critics of the administration feared that Trump’s attorney general was essentially laying the groundwork to undercut the election result, using the significant power of federal law enforcement.
But Barr resisted public pressure from House Republicans to have him appoint a special counsel to investigate voter fraud. He privately sought to make sure the Justice Department stayed out of civil litigation regarding election results, people familiar with the matter have said — deeming that an issue for Trump’s campaign. And while he had his department examine allegations of fraud, he ultimately concluded the evidence did not support the kind of far-reaching claims Trump and his supporters were making.
On Dec. 1, Barr gave an interview to the Associated Press breaking with Trump, declaring he had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Trump and Barr’s relationship had already been deteriorating, and about two weeks later — on Dec. 14, the same day the electoral college met to confirm Biden’s win — Trump announced Barr would be stepping down as attorney general.
Barr’s resignation letter indicated his last day would be Dec. 23. The pressure on Rosen began immediately.
On the day Barr’s resignation became public, Trump’s assistant forwarded to Rosen a document produced as part of a lawsuit in Antrim County, Mich., alleging a widespread conspiracy to rig the election in Michigan and beyond. In the subject line, she wrote, “From POTUS.”
By then, the tiny rural Michigan county had become central to assertions by Trump allies that the election had been stolen. An election night error by a clerk had resulted in the heavily Republican county briefly reporting that Biden had beaten Trump. The error was quickly corrected to show that Trump had won. But in late November, a local resident had filed a lawsuit alleging the error showed that election machines in the state had been manipulated to help Biden.
A state judge then ordered that a private Texas company be allowed to review the county’s election machines and ordered the company’s subsequent report be made public.
Election experts and state officials in Michigan have said the report, compiled by the company Allied Security Operations Group, is full of errors. But two minutes after receiving the document from Trump, emails show Rosen’s deputy forwarded it to Michigan’s two U.S. attorneys at the time, Matthew Schneider and Andrew Birge.
The next day, Trump tweeted about the Antrim report, saying the judge — who last month dismissed the lawsuit and declined to order a new election audit — “should get a medal” for ordering its public release.
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, right, walks with then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen at the White House in May 2019. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
A polite ‘brushoff’
On Dec. 21, Barr seemed to try to give his deputy a bit of political cover, again breaking with Trump and asserting at a news conference that he saw no basis for the federal government seizing voting machines. He also said that he did not intend to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud.
Trump had by then intensified his attack on the election results. He sought to lobby state lawmakers and party officials to back his claims, and he and his allies in the House of Representatives privately pressured GOP senators to object when Congress sought to formally affirm the election results Jan. 6.
“The ‘Justice’ Department and the FBI have done nothing about the 2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud, the biggest SCAM in our nation’s history, despite overwhelming evidence,” the president tweeted Dec. 26. “They should be ashamed.”
In a December Oval Office meeting, the president entertained a series of radical measures, including military intervention, seizing voting machines and a 13th-hour appeal to the Supreme Court, people familiar with the meeting have said.
Once in command at the Justice Department, Rosen began to feel intense pressure directly from the White House.
On Dec. 29, Trump aide Molly Michael emailed Rosen, Donoghue and then-acting solicitor general Jeffrey B. Wall a draft of a Supreme Court filing, which would have the Justice Department challenge the election results in six states.
“The President asked me to send the attached draft document for your review,” Michael wrote, adding that she had also shared it with Trump’s chief of staff and the White House counsel.
That month, the Supreme Court had thrown out an effort by the state of Texas to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin over how they conducted their elections, asserting that Texas had not shown a legal interest “in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.” The draft filing would have essentially had the U.S. government take the place of Texas in the case, and also challenge elections in Arizona and Nevada.
That same day, the emails show, a lawyer named Kurt Olsen wrote to Wall, saying the president had “directed me to meet with AG Rosen today to discuss a similar action to be brought by the United States.” Olsen wrote that he had called and texted the acting attorney general multiple times but had not been able to reach him.
“This is an urgent matter,” Olsen wrote.
The Justice Department, though, did not seem to share Olsen’s assessment of the situation. The emails suggest it was Rosen’s chief of staff, John Moran, who got in touch with Olsen, rather than Rosen himself. And though Olsen had asserted the president had directed him to meet in person with Rosen, such a meeting never happened.
A person familiar with the matter said that Olsen somehow got Rosen’s private cellphone number, and Rosen picked up the call from an unknown number. The person said Rosen gave Olsen a polite “brushoff.”
Olsen told The Washington Post in an email that while he did not recall all of the specifics, Trump had contacted him about a week after the Supreme Court declined to take the Texas case. He said he and Rosen ultimately had “cordial back and forth phone call exchanges,” in part about whether the United States had legal standing to pursue his complaint.
“With respect to the DoJ’s decision to not pursue the case, you would need to speak to them,” he wrote.
Justice Department official Jeffrey Bossert Clark pushed internally to pursue fraud claims. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Internal upheaval
Around the same time that Rosen was fending off requests for a Supreme Court challenge, he and other top deputies encountered an even more pernicious threat. Through a Pennsylvania lawmaker, Trump had connected with a top Justice Department official: Jeffrey Bossert Clark, who was then running both the Environment and Natural Resources Division and Civil Division. And Clark, unlike others in the department, was more sympathetic to Trump’s claims of fraud.
According to people familiar with the matter, Clark became particularly focused on Georgia, trying to persuade department leaders to issue a letter that argued that state’s elections were affected by fraud, and that — as a consequence — its lawmakers should disregard the results and appoint their own electors.
Unbeknown to all but a few people at the Justice Department, Trump was contemplating installing Clark as attorney general. On New Year’s Eve, the matter threatened to reach a boiling point. Rosen and Donoghue, his deputy, went to the White House for a meeting to see if they could buy more time, people familiar with the matter have said.
They bought a temporary reprieve. But the pressure kept coming.
Over the course of just a few hours on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, Meadows, the chief of staff, sent Rosen three emails flagging possible problems with the election — including fraud allegations in Georgia and New Mexico and the YouTube link with its claim of an Italian plot.
“Can you believe this?” an exasperated Rosen wrote to Donoghue at one point, forwarding a request by Meadows to examine purported signature match anomalies in Fulton County, Ga. “I am not going to respond.”
Rosen also told his deputy that he had been asked to meet with the person in the video: Brad Johnson, president of a group called Americans for Intelligence Reform, who says on the organization’s website he is a retired CIA operations officer.
Rosen told Donoghue he had resisted, asserting that if Johnson had information to share, he could walk into the FBI’s Washington Field Office and turn it over. Rosen said that he had learned Johnson was working with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, who waged a vigorous but unsuccessful campaign to contest election results.
Giuliani “regarded my comments as ‘an insult,’” Rosen told his deputy.
“Asked if I would reconsider, I flatly refused,” Rosen wrote, adding that he would “not be giving special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses.’”
An attorney for Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.
According to two people familiar with the matter, Rosen also tried to convince Clark his theories were misguided. On New Year’s Day, he shared with Clark the cellphone number of Byung J. “BJay” Pak, then the U.S. attorney in Atlanta. Two people familiar with the matter said he was hopeful that Pak — a respected Republican lawyer — could convince Clark there was no widespread fraud in Georgia.
Rosen circled back the next day, asking Clark in an email, “Were you able to follow up?”
But Clark appeared to be focused on chasing a claim about a possible election irregularity.
“I spoke to the source and am on with the guy who took the video right now,” Clark wrote back. “Working on it. More due diligence to do.”
Clark did not respond to requests for comment.
Attorney General William P. Barr, left, and Richard Donoghue, seen in New York in January 2020. Donoghue would later become deputy to acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen. (Mark Lennihan/AP)
‘The cause of justice won’
Trump, meanwhile, was running a separate effort to overturn the results in Georgia, pressing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) personally to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s narrow victory in the state.
The president called Raffensperger on the afternoon of Jan. 2. In an hour-long call, he pushed the secretary of state to pursue his false claims about illegal votes in Georgia — at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking a “big risk” if he didn’t act.
Raffensperger rejected Trump’s assertions, explaining that the president was relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.
The Washington Post published an account of the call around 1 p.m. on Jan. 3.
That same day, Clark approached Rosen and said Trump intended to install him — Clark — as attorney general. Rosen, taken aback, pushed for a meeting at the White House, according to people familiar with the episode.
According to emails and people familiar with the matter, Donoghue and one of his deputies organized a call that Sunday afternoon with other senior Justice Department officials. Those on the call agreed they would resign en masse if Trump proceeded with the plan.
In a previous statement, Clark said: “I categorically deny that I ‘devised a plan … to oust’ Jeff Rosen. … Nor did I formulate recommendations for action based on factual inaccuracies gleaned from the Internet.”
In a high-stakes meeting later that evening, people familiar with the matter said, Rosen, Donoghue and Steven A. Engel, who headed the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, as well as White House Counsel Pat Cipollone sought to talk the president out of installing Clark and sending the letter alleging fraud in Georgia.
Doing so, they argued, would spark a mass resignation at the Justice Department. And it ultimately would not work to overturn the election results.
Trump decided to keep Rosen in place. Justice Department officials, who were earlier facing the prospect of a mass resignation, breathed a sigh of relief.
“It sounds like Rosen and the cause of justice won,” Patrick Hovakimian, Donoghue’s deputy, emailed a small group at 9:07 p.m.
But Trump was not satisfied.
In the meeting, according to two people familiar with the matter, Trump complained that he wanted to fire Pak, the Atlanta U.S. attorney, who he felt was not doing enough to uncover fraud. The people said participants told the president that Pak intended to leave anyway and that he need not take such a step.
Just after 10 p.m. that night, an email shows, Donoghue emailed Pak, writing in the subject line, “Please call ASAP.” Two people familiar with the matter said Donoghue had conveyed to Pak what was said at the meeting about him.
Pak declined to comment for this article.
Early the next morning, Pak informed staff he was stepping down. “You are a class act, my friend,” Donoghue wrote to Pak after the resignation letter went out. “Thank you.”
He was replaced by Bobby Christine, then the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Georgia, whom Trump viewed as more amenable to his voter fraud claims.
Christine — who did not respond to a message seeking comment — soon brought on board two prosecutors who previously had been assigned to monitor possible election fraud.
But even the president’s preferred replacement ultimately didn’t substantiate his false claims. In mid-January, after the riot at the Capitol, a call leaked in which Christine told his staff the evidence of fraud just wasn’t there.
“Quite frankly, just watching television, you would assume that you got election cases stacked from the floor to the ceiling,” Christine said. “I am so happy to find out that’s not the case.”
Devlin Barrett, Robert Barnes, Josh Dawsey and Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin is holding a press conference after meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in Geneva, Switzerland.
Biden will hold a separate press conference following Putin’s remarks.
On Tuesday, a Kremlin aide said nuclear stability, climate change and cybersecurity were on the agenda for the summit, Reuters reported, as well as the outlook for Russian and U.S. nationals imprisoned in each other’s countries.
Nonetheless, the aide said he was not sure any agreements could be reached.
The meeting between Biden and Putin comes on the heels of Biden’s first international trip as president, where he reaffirmed alliances with G-7 leaders and NATO allies. The American president is expected to strike a different tone with his Russian counterpart compared to his predecessor Donald Trump.
“One of the biggest ways climate change is affecting us is by loading the weather dice against us. Extreme weather events occur naturally; but on a warmer planet many of these events are getting bigger, stronger, and more damaging,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and the Nature Conservancy, said in an emailed statement. “They’re affecting our health, the safety of our homes, the economy, and more.”
As the Delta variant of COVID-19 tore through India last month, there was a lot of concern, but few answers about what would happen when it arrived in the United States.
Now that it accounts for at least 6% of this country’s infections, there are a few more answers.
But it’s still unclear whether Delta will go the mostly harmless way of other variants – or pose a serious threat to people who choose to skip COVID-19 shots.
“Globally, Delta is the most serious development that we know of in terms of the evolution of the virus,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The real danger, if any, will be to people who have chosen not to get vaccinated, he and others said.
“Until a few weeks ago, I would have said they’re probably going to get away with (being unvaccinated),” said Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. But “if Delta really takes off, that choice looks worse and worse.”
Vaccinated people should remain safe, he and others said. Even if they do get infected, they’re likely to get a mild case of COVID-19.
But Wachter said a few new facts have made him worried about Delta’s impact on unvaccinated Americans.
First, he’s now convinced that Delta will take over as the main cause of COVID-19 in the U.S. because it’s more contagious than previous variants.
It’s still unclear whether Delta is also more dangerous, but early data can’t rule that out, and on Tuesday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention upgraded Delta to “a variant of concern,” a more serious category than it had been in before.
With a virus that is more contagious, a larger percentage of the population needs to be protected through vaccination or natural infection to keep the virus from spreading.
A new study shows that vaccinated people are safe against the Delta variant – but only after they get a second dose, meaning it’ll take a minimum of five or six weeks between the time someone decides to get vaccinated and when they’re protected. So anyone who changes their mind after cases start rising probably won’t have time to get protected, said Wachter, who laid out his concerns in a recent Twitter thread.
And he’s concerned about what will happen to the unvaccinated in the fall, when cases are expected to climb, as flu does, with the season.
“Two weeks ago,” he said, he would have predicted minor surges in the fall and the winter. “I’m now much more worried about Michigan-type surges.”
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, shares his concern.
“When people choose not to be vaccinated, they’re essentially contributing to an unfortunate natural experiment” to see what Delta will do, Offit said.
Although COVID-19 cases are way down in the United States – more than 90% since January – there is still enough virus circulating to cause a resurgence with just a small push, like the change of seasons, Offit said. “This is a winter virus at its heart.”
Think of protection as a line, Wachter said. The more protected you are, the further you are over the line.
Two shots probably push people further past the line than a mild case of disease. People who are immunocompromised because of age or a medical condition don’t get as far. And as immunity wanes over time, everyone gets closer to that dividing line.
On the opposite side, a variant like Delta moves the line, making it harder to get and stay protected, Wachter said.
His message to the unvaccinated: “You are less safe than you think you are and less safe than we would have thought two weeks ago now that we’re understanding what’s going on with Delta.”
Message from abroad: UK cases are climbing
In the United Kingdom, where vaccination rates are similar to the U.S.’s, cases are climbing by 64% per week and are doubling each week in the country’s hot spots, according to the BBC. On Monday, U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson delayed his country’s planned reopening until July 19 to allow more people to get fully vaccinated.
Also Monday, Public Health England said the Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccines performed just as well against the Delta variant after two doses as against the original strain, with both more than 90% effective.
Some worry that the United States may be just a few weeks behind the U.K.
Hanage said the U.S. is so big and diverse that different areas are likely to see different outbreaks.
“I don’t think we’re going to get a national surge,” he said. “Countrywide, the number of vaccinations are going to be hard for Delta to evade.”
An area with 90% vaccination may be safe, and not see any outbreak at all, he said. Unless the 10% who are unvaccinated “all work in the same meatpacking plant,” in which case that could spur a serious local problem.
As at the beginning of the pandemic, he said, areas with low vaccination rates will either get lucky – and avoid a super-spreading event – or they’ll get unlucky and face a devastating outbreak.
Thanksgiving, he said, when families travel to spend time together, could spread the misfortune.
The fact that this variant seems more transmissible means it’s more able to cause explosive outbreaks, Hanage said, “and get into people before we are able to get a shot into them.”
Theodora Hatziioannou, a virologist at Rockefeller University in New York, has been helping track 140 people since they were infected with COVID-19 early in the pandemic. She and her colleagues have studied the volunteers at two months after infection, six months and now a year.
The longer out they are from their infection, the more protective antibodies they have, the team’s new study shows.
“Apparently, you need several months up to a year to get these really really good antibodies,” she said.
When people who had COVID-19 get vaccinated, they are even better protected.
“You already had good memory B cells in your body” from the infection, Hatziioannou said. “All you need is something to tickle them and tell them to wake up and start producing antibodies.”
Seeing the body’s response to natural infection and vaccination put Hatziioannou among the “small minority” of virologists not concerned about the Delta variant. “Everybody’s panicking about every variant being more transmissible and I don’t buy it,” she said. There are other reasons to explain why those variants have taken off and appear more dangerous than the original strain.
She’s more concerned, she said, about half-vaccinations and what might happen if the virus is allowed to surge again in a population that’s only partially protected. That might drive the virus to mutate to avoid beingthwarted by vaccines.
“It’s very important to keep the virus at bay until everybody is fully vaccinated. One dose is not sufficient,” she said.
The bottom line: If everyone was vaccinated, no one would need to worry about the variants.
“But if we continue allowing this virus to spread, eventually, we will have a variant we have to worry about,” Hatziioannou said. “That’s the issue.”
Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
Biden and Putin were seen again a few minutes later, seated next to their respective countries’ top diplomats inside what appeared to be a vast library within the villa. A globe was positioned directly between the two leaders, with large American and Russian flags erected on either side.
Their remarks were difficult to make out over the din of assembled journalists, but Putin — joined by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov — thanked Biden “for the initiative to meet today” and said he hoped their summit “will be productive.”
Biden, sitting beside Secretary of State Antony Blinken, thanked Putin and responded: “As I said outside, I think it’s always better to meet face-to-face.” The four men were mostly expressionless throughout the photo opportunity, although Biden did crack a smile as reporters jostled for better positions.
The throng of press covering the summit quickly devolved into a chaotic scene, with Russian security shoving members of the media while reporters and White House officials screamed at Putin’s forces for their treatment of the journalists. One Russian media outlet, the state-owned RIA Novosti, blamed the scuffle on its U.S. counterparts, falsely reporting that “American journalists staged a stampede.”
Following the initial meeting of Biden, Putin, Blinken and Lavrov — as well as interpreters — the two leaders will each be joined by four additional aides in a second session. The U.S. delegation will include National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan and National Security Council Russia director Eric Green.
Biden and Putin are expected to take breaks throughout the meetings as needed, butthey will not share a meal together. “No breaking of bread,” a senior administration official said.
Biden’s aides said he plans to press Putin directly on a recent spate of cyberattacks, human rights abuses and a buildup of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border. But they also say Biden hopes to speak to him about areas where they might have common ground, including nuclear arms control and climate change.
Other potential topics of discussion include Moscow’s detainment of American citizens, including two former Marines, as well as the possible return of U.S. diplomats to Russia and vice versa.
“When the other side tries to say that there are issues that are off the table or that won’t be on the agenda, for the American president, nothing is off the table,” a senior administration official said. “Certainly human rights are not off the table, and individual high-profile cases are not off the table.”
Back home, the president has continued to face criticism from Republicans that the summit, first proposed by Biden, rewards Putin and elevates Russia to the same diplomatic playing field as the U.S. Even some Democrats are urging Biden to take a tougher line.
The White House has said it does not not expect the summit to produce to any major policy agreements, but argues it is the first step toward establishing a “stable, predictable” relationship with Russia and a personal dialogue between the two men, who last met a decade ago.
Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who often boasts of his expertise in diplomacy, has long expressed a distrust of Putin on the world stage.
“We’re not expecting a big set of deliverables out of this meeting,” the administration official said. “I think we expect that there will be areas where the presidents will task out further work to their teams.”
One small exception: Both Russia and the U.S. have left open the possibility that their ambassadors could return to each other’s capitals. The ambassadors came back to their home countries in the wake of U.S. sanctions on Moscow for the SolarWinds hack and the poisoning and imprisonment of opposition figure Alexey Navalvy. Russia levied a slate of reciprocal sanctions on Washington, but both ambassadors are now in Geneva on Wednesday for the meeting.
In recent weeks, Putin has continued to face allegations that he has amassed troops along the Ukrainian border, allowed Russian actors to engage in cyberaggressions, cracked down on political dissent and signed deals with Iran to provide them with satellite technology.
Earlier this week, Putin told NBC News he could not guarantee that Navalny, one of Putin’s fiercest critics, would leave prison alive. Navalny was sentenced to prison after returning to Russia from Germany in January following his recovering from poisoning with a nerve agent.
The Biden administration has imposed sanctions but members of both parties want him to do more on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline nearing completion, which will bring natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
The last four presidents have sought to re-engage with Russia to varying degrees and with limited success. George W. Bush infamously said he had looked Putin in the eye and peered into his soul. Obama dubbed his attempt a reset. In 2018, then-President Trump provoked a firestorm for blindly accepting Putin’s denial of election interference, countering multiple assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies, when the two leaders met in Helsinki.
Michael McFaul, the former ambassador to Russia under Obama, who was present during Biden’s last meeting with Putin in 2011, said Biden needs to be careful about Putin’s tendency to equate his own behavior with those of others.
Biden’s comment earlier this week appearing to suggest he would be open to an exchange of cybercriminals left some Russia experts worrying Biden was falling for Putin’s tactics — the same way Trump did when he said Moscow might extradite criminals to the U.S. if the Washington made Americans available to Russia for questioning.
Sullivan, the national security adviser, quickly tried to clarify Biden’s remarks, noting that the president “was not saying, ‘I’m going to exchange cyber criminals.’”
The summit on Wednesday comes on the final day of Biden’s week-long trip to western Europe, during which U.S. allies in the G-7, NATO and the European Union welcomed him warmly following four years of Trump’s “America First” policies. Biden consulted other world leaders about his meeting with Putin and prepped for the bilateral session with Blinken, Sullivan and other policy experts.
Biden aides say the president will outline areas of America’s vital national interests and will convey that where Russian activities run counter to those interests, they will be met with a response.
“He’s been preparing for this like he prepares for every significant international engagement. He reviews the issues — written material; he cares about digging into the details,” the official said. “That very much matters to him. And he’s also had the opportunity to engage with a wide variety of advisers across the government who have deep expertise on Russia, as well as to hear from some outside experts as well.”
After the meeting, Biden and Putin are each expected to hold separate news conferences. Biden will wait until Putin is finished before he begins. Late Wednesday, Biden is expected to return to Washington.
Jewish ultranationalists wave Israeli flags participate in the “Flags March” next to Damascus gate, outside Jerusalem’s Old City, Tuesday.
Mahmoud Illean/AP
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Jewish ultranationalists wave Israeli flags participate in the “Flags March” next to Damascus gate, outside Jerusalem’s Old City, Tuesday.
Mahmoud Illean/AP
Overnight, tensions between Israel and Hamas erupted into violence, posing a potential threat to the brief period of peace reached between the twojust weeks ago.
The IDF said it’s “prepared for any scenario, including a resumption of hostilities, in the face of continuing terror activities from the Gaza Strip.”
It’s unclear if there are any injuries or deaths tied to the airstrikes.
The IDF launched this attack evidently in retaliation for a series of incendiary balloons that were launched by Hamas hours before. The balloons caused at least 20 fires on Israel’s southern border.
Those balloons were in response to a Flag March in Jerusalem earlier that day during which Israeli nationalists marched through Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem waving flags, with some yelling “Death of Arabs.”
Palestinian leaders, who see the march as a provocation, called for a “Day of Rage.” Israeli police responded to Palestinian demonstrators by attempting to disperse them with rubber bullets.
The Jerusalem Day flag march, that appears to have ignited tensions on Tuesday, is an annual event that marks Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East War.
Israel’s new right-wing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett aligned with the marchers. He approved the twice-postponed event, but altered the route to reduce confrontations with Palestinian residents of Jerusalem.
The event still led to 17 arrests and 27 injuries of Palestinians after clashes with Israeli police.
Police officers clash with a Palestinian man as they force Palestinians out of Damascus Gate area before the far right flag march on June 15 in Jerusalem.
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Police officers clash with a Palestinian man as they force Palestinians out of Damascus Gate area before the far right flag march on June 15 in Jerusalem.
Amir Levy/Getty Images
What does this mean for Bennett’s new government?
Israel is in the middle of a major transition. The events of the past 24 hours comes just three days into the nation’s new government.
New right-wing Bennett was sworn in on Sunday after his diverse coalition unseated longtime Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.
Feelings within the coalition toward the flag day march are split.
While Bennett supported the march, Yair Lapid, the new Foreign Minister, condemned the event. Lapid said chants of “Death to Arabs” is “not Judaism and not Israeli.”
Bennett and his new government, which is under pressure from the right to be tough on Hamas, must now navigate increasingly tense relations with the Palestinian organization just days into their new roles.
North Korea’s grain production was estimated to have dropped from 4.64 million tons in 2019 to 4.4 million last year, the Korea Development Institute of the South said in a report published this month. That creates an overall grain shortage of 1.35 million tons this year. North Korea has always suffered annual grain shortages, though the country has tried to fill the gap with trade and international aid, especially from China.
“This year, the North’s food shortage is of a scale that it cannot handle on its own,” said Kwon Tae-jin, the author of the Korea Development Institute report. North Korea must relax its control on market activities and ask for “large-scale food aid” from Beijing to help relieve the food shortage, Mr. Kwon said.
The North also indicated on Wednesday that the party meeting would include a discussion on how to respond to the Biden administration’s recent North Korea policy statements, saying the agenda included “analyzing the current international situation and our Party’s corresponding direction.”
During a summit in Washington last month, President Biden and his South Korean counterpart, Moon Jae-in, agreed to seek “diplomacy and dialogue” with the North, and to build on the 2018 Singapore agreement, which Mr. Trump signed with Mr. Kim. Washington also said it would take a “calibrated” and “practical” approach toward the country and appointed a new special envoy on North Korea.
Mr. Kim’s government has yet to respond to the overtures.
The European Union is expected to recommend lifting the ban on nonessential travel for visitors from the United States on Friday, opening for American tourists just in time for the summer season, which is crucial to the economy of many members of the bloc.
On Wednesday, ambassadors of the E.U. countries indicated their support for adding the United States to the list of countries considered safe from an epidemiological point of view, a bloc official confirmed. The decision is expected to be formally adopted on Friday and would come into effect immediately.
In principle, all travelers from countries on the safe list, not just citizens or residents, would be allowed to enter the bloc for nonessential reasons, such as tourism or visiting family, even if they are not vaccinated, without any further restrictions. The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, recommended that a PCR test should be required, but it is ultimately up to national governments to set out the specific rules, including any need to quarantine.
The move is part of a broader attempt to restore tourism flows within and from outside the European Union. Travel from outside the bloc was practically suspended last year to limit the spread of the coronavirus, with the exception of a handful of countries that fulfilled specific criteria, such as low infection rates, number of tests performed, and their overall response to Covid-19.
The Biden administration has said it will not develop a federal vaccine passport system, but allow the private sector or local jurisdictions to develop verification systems or require proof of vaccination at their own discretion.
Some states, including Florida and Texas, have placed bans or limits on vaccination certificates, such as prohibiting their issuance or use, forbidding businesses or government from requiring them, or barring mandatory use by individuals. Most neither forbid nor require them.
Newsom worded his announcement carefully Monday.
“It’s not a passport, it’s not a requirement, it’s just the ability now to have an electronic version of that paper version, so you’ll hear more about that in the next couple of days,” he said.
Here’s what we know about the plans for a vaccination verification system in California:
What will California’s vaccine verification system look like?
The details won’t be available until at least later this week, but Newsom said Monday that the system would essentially provide people with an electronic version of their vaccine cards.
Programs currently in use or in development usually have users download an app on their phones, create an account with biometric data, upload vaccination information or coronavirus test results, and show a QR code upon entry into an event or at checkpoints.
This system would replace the need to carry around vaccine cards, which are 3-by-4-inch pieces of cardstock that can easily be lost or damaged, and do not fit in traditional wallets.
Would I be required to use the vaccine verification system?
California officials say signing up for the program would be voluntary, and the state is not requiring individuals to show proof of vaccination to engage in activities. But some employers and businesses may require verification for workers and patrons.
As the country reopens, more sporting arenas and concert venues are requiring proof of vaccination. In California, indoor “mega events” defined as more than 5,000 people require either proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test for entry, and the requirement is strongly recommended for outdoor events with more than 10,000 people.
Some cruise lines require passengers to be fully vaccinated before boarding, and a number of companies are testing health passport apps for international travel including VeriFLY, the IATA Travel Pass and CLEAR Health Pass.
Where are vaccine passports required if I want to travel?
Among U.S. states, only New York and Hawaii have implemented verification programs. New York’s voluntary program allows businesses to scan a QR code on smartphones that verify full vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test. It is not yet known what California’s verification system will look like on smartphones.
In Hawaii, the state has an inter-island passport program that allows residents to skip testing and quarantine requirements if they are traveling to another island. Domestic travelers can skip quarantine if they get tested at a “trusted partner” site. When the state reaches 60% immunization, it will lift pre-testing and quarantine requirements for domestic travelers who are vaccinated and upload their status to the Safe Travels website.
A number of countries have introduced or are developing passport systems that would allow citizens to enter businesses, travel, attend sporting events and do other activities. Israel introduced an internal program called the Green Pass in February, allowing fully vaccinated citizens into certain places and events.
The European Union recently endorsed a new electronic vaccination travel certificate allowing people to travel between European countries without quarantine or extra testing. It will be recognized by all 27 member nations starting July 1, and several countries have already started using it. Travelers will receive their passes from their own country, not from a centralized European system.
(CNN)As US states lift more coronavirus restrictions, experts are worried people who aren’t fully vaccinated could contribute to further spread of the virus.
CNN’s Laura Ly, Kelsie Smith, Virginia Langmaid, Christina Bowllan, Alec Snyder, Deidre McPhillips and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed to this report.
President Biden steps off Air Force One at Geneva Airport on Tuesday. Biden is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.
Patrick Semansky/AP
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President Biden steps off Air Force One at Geneva Airport on Tuesday. Biden is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.
Patrick Semansky/AP
President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet Wednesday in Geneva. Here’s what you need to know:
Putin is expected to arrive at 7 a.m. ET. Biden arrives shortly afterward.
The closed-door meeting is expected to last four to five hours.
Putin will give his own press conference. Then Biden will give his.
We’ll stream Biden’s press conference live here when it starts.
It will be the first formal meeting between the leaders of the two nations in three years, a stretch in which U.S.-Russian relations have grown increasingly strained.
Aides say Biden isn’t there to make friends or build trust with a rival he describes as “bright,” “tough” and “a worthy adversary.” There’s much on the U.S. agenda — from recent ransomware attacks perpetrated by Russian cybercriminals and the air piracy in Belarus to arms control and climate change. There are concerns to be voiced about human rights abuses, strongman tactics against opposition leaders and the imprisonment of two Americans.
There won’t be a repeat of that scene this time, not least because Biden and Putin won’t be holding a joint press conference after their meeting. Aides say the meeting is expected to last four to five hours but won’t include a meal, “no breaking of bread,” a senior administration official told reporters.
Biden refused to say what exactly he hopes to get out of the meeting, what he intends to push Putin on or what success would look like, saying it wouldn’t make sense to negotiate in the press.
“I will tell you this: I’m going to make clear to President Putin that there are areas where we can cooperate, if he chooses,” Biden said in a press conference Monday. “And if he chooses not to cooperate and acts in a way that he has in the past, relative to cybersecurity and some other activities, then we will respond. We will respond in kind.”
Biden met Putin when he was vice president, and he has openly criticized the Russian leader, once calling him a “killer.” Asked about those comments in an NBC interview ahead of the summit, Putin laughed it off. He also downplayed hacking concerns as he has with other cyber intrusions blamed on Russia.
“[Biden’s] view is that this is not a meeting about trust, it’s not a meeting about friendship — it’s a meeting about figuring out where we can find common ground, and also being straightforward and candid about areas where we have concern,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a midair briefing on Air Force One.
Biden told reporters he didn’t want to have a joint press conference with Putin to avoid breathless analysis of body language. That’s likely unavoidable since reporters and photographers are expected to be on hand for an exchange of pleasantries and a handshake at the top of their bilateral meeting.
But the lack of a joint press conference does mean that Biden won’t have to stand next to Putin with an open mic. Instead, in a highly choreographed sequence of events, Putin will hold his press conference first. Then Biden will take questions from reporters. This setup will allow the American president to characterize the meeting and if necessary counter the narrative unspooled by Putin.
Republican critics are already preparing to paint Biden as weak following the meeting.
California has been in better shape economically than most states, although its tourism sector “really had the sledgehammer taken to it,” Mr. Newsom had noted on Monday. The state’s unemployment rate remains about 4 percentage points higher than before the crisis and higher than the national average, largely because of layoffs at restaurants, hotels and tourist attractions.
Spending on California tourism fell 55 percent last year. Half of the industry’s work force — some 600,000 employees — lost their jobs in the first month after the pandemic hit.
But overall, California’s economy has emerged from the pandemic with preternatural strength. The state budget is running a record surplus, largely because so many tech start-ups went public and so many white-collar employees were able to continue to work remotely. Mr. Newsom is preparing to issue his second round of statewide stimulus checks, this time including taxpayers earning less than $75,000 annually.
And tourist attractions, such as the Universal Studios theme park, are bracing for a rebound. Disneyland, which had reopened to in-state visitors before this week, was jammed on Tuesday as the park expanded its rules to welcome out-of-staters and announced its fireworks shows would return in July.
Jerry Nickelsburg, an adjunct professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the director of an economic outlook called the U.C.L.A. Anderson Forecast, said that the state’s relative economic health appeared to be linked to its public health measures. He added that the data supported the governor’s repeated claims that California had economically outperformed Texas and Florida, both of which were largely open throughout the pandemic.
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