President Joe Biden on Thursday expanded restrictions on American investments in certain Chinese companies with alleged ties to the country’s military and surveillance efforts, adding more firms to a growing blacklist.
In an executive order, Biden barred U.S. investors from financial interests in 59 Chinese companies over fears of their links to the Chinese government’s geopolitical ambitions, continuing some portions of the tough tact former President Donald Trump took in discussions with Beijing.
“This E.O. allows the United States to prohibit – in a targeted and scoped manner – U.S. investments in Chinese companies that undermine the security or democratic values of the United States and our allies,” the White House said in a press release.
The measure bars U.S. dollars from supporting the “Chinese defense sector, while also expanding the U.S. Government’s ability to address the threat of Chinese surveillance technology firms that contribute — both inside and outside China — to the surveillance of religious or ethnic minorities or otherwise facilitate repression and serious human rights abuses,” the administration added.
Among the 59 companies barred are Aero Engine Corp. of China, Aerosun Corp., Fujian Torch Electron Technology and Huawei Technologies.
The prohibitions take effect at 12:01 a.m. ET on Aug. 2.
The move is one of the most forceful to date against the top U.S. rival and another sign that the Biden administration may adopt or advance many of the tactics used by the Trump administration in its own effort to stay competitive with China.
Biden and his economic advisors must also determine what to do with a raft of tariffs, as well as whether to increase sanctions against Chinese officials involved in the mass detention of mainly Muslim ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.
A representative for the Chinese Foreign Ministry challenged the move by the Biden administration, telling members of the press that the Trump administration’s original order was executed with “total disregard of facts.”
“The U.S. should respect the rule of law and the market, correct its mistakes, and stop actions that undermine the global financial market order and investors’ lawful rights and interests,” spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters in Beijing.
The Trump administration’s previous order created a list of 48 firms.
Even with the new concession on taxes, though, the White House’s roughly $1 trillion plan still amounts to four times as much as Republicans have been willing to spend to improve the country’s roads, bridges, pipes, ports and Internet connections. Entering the meeting, GOP leaders had endorsed roughly $257 billion in new spending, while maintaining an unwavering opposition to any tax hikes to finance infrastructure reform.
Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas, the company hired by the Republican-led Arizona state Senate, examine and recount ballots from the 2020 general election on May 3.
Courtney Pedroza/The Washington Post via Getty Images
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Courtney Pedroza/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas, the company hired by the Republican-led Arizona state Senate, examine and recount ballots from the 2020 general election on May 3.
Courtney Pedroza/The Washington Post via Getty Images
To Matt Masterson, the review of 2020 ballots from Maricopa County, Ariz., that’s underway is “performance art” or “a clown show,” and definitely “a waste of taxpayer money.”
But it’s not an audit.
“It’s an audit in name only,” says Masterson, a former Department of Homeland Security official who helped lead the federal government’s election security preparations leading up to November’s election. “It’s a threat to the overall confidence of democracy, all in pursuit of continuing a narrative that we know to be a lie.”
By lie, he means the assertion from former President Donald Trump and some of his allies that election fraud cost him a second term in the White House.
And, Masterson says, the strategy chosen by the Arizona’s Republican state Senate leaders is working as intended to undermine confidence in the outcome of last year’s vote.
The process is a simple exercise in how disinformation spreads and takes hold in 2021. And experts fear it presents a blueprint for other states and lawmakers to follow, one that is already showing signs of being emulated across the country.
“Now we have a playbook out there,” said Masterson, who is currently a policy fellow with the Stanford Internet Observatory, “where if you don’t like the results — by the way in an election that wasn’t particularly close … you just claim you didn’t lose and in fact the process itself was rigged against you.”
Step 1: Create a false reality
At a basic level, it’s a victory for those looking to sow doubt in the 2020 election results just to have them still being litigated six months after Election Day.
To be clear, Maricopa County’s election results have already been audited multiple times by companies with experience in the field, with no problems being uncovered.
This latest process, however, is being run by a company without election experience that’s led by a CEO who has spread election-related conspiracy theories.
Actual election audits have consistent and transparent procedures, often established in state law, but this has none of that, says Jennifer Morrell, a former election official and a national expert on election auditing. Morrell observed the process in person in Arizona for a week.
“They were sort of making up the process,” Morrell said. “They were improvising as they went along.”
Vote counters used conveyer wheels to tally ballots, often having to grab the wheel to stop it from moving too quickly past them. Other volunteers did data entry into a spreadsheet with no quality-control checks in place to make sure they entered it correctly. Observers from the Arizona Secretary of State’s office have documented a series of ” problematic practices, changing policies, and security threats that have plagued this exercise from the start.”
In short, it has been an unreliable mess. And Morrell says she’s sure whatever count the “auditors” come up with won’t match the official tally.
But by calling it an audit, the process gains credibility in the eyes of people who don’t know better, says Francesca Tripodi, an information studies professor at the University of North Carolina. The title itself is a misinformation tactic.
“The strategy in calling it an audit to begin with creates the illusion of legality — the illusion of a government-backed agency,” Tripodi said. “And when I think of an audit, I think of wrongdoing immediately.”
Step 2: Hit the airwaves
Normally, election audits are mundane, sparsely attended affairs. But this one has its own Twitter account (with 68,000 followers) and a livestream on the pro-Trump One America News Network, which has also raised money on air to fund the audit.
“It’s terrifying,” Morrell said. “We’ve suddenly said it’s OK to hand our ballots over to a third-party organization with political bias, with no experience, who get to make up the rules and then make a decision or a determination based on what they do on whether or not the outcome of the election was correct.”
The only way it works, however, is if people know about it. And if it gets covered in a way that doesn’t note the audit’s technical shortcomings.
That’s where the conservative media ecosystem steps in.
An NPR analysis of social media engagement data from the online analytics firm NewsWhip found that the 10 most popular stories about the “audit” on social media were all published by conservative publications, many of which have also pushed the false idea that Trump may be the rightful president.
NewsWhip’s engagement data encompasses how many times an article was shared, commented on or liked across Facebook, Pinterest and much of Twitter. The company analyzed a time period from April 1 through May 25 at the request of NPR.
Five of the 10 most popular links came from WesternJournal.com, a conservative clickbait site that furthers right-wing narratives and conspiracies.
“It’s rather odd that we are constantly reassured that every aspect of the 2020 election was entirely safe, secure and kosher, and yet the ongoing election audit process in Arizona’s Maricopa County seems to have been marred with confounding setbacks at every turn,” begins one such articlepublished by The Western Journal. “Are they trying to validate claims that the election was stolen? Because this is how you validate claims that the election was stolen.”
Step 3: Use the doubt to sow more doubt
The audit is a perfect example of how false information can be used to fuel more false information in a seemingly never-ending cycle.
A recent Fox News poll found that 82% of Trump voters believe thatillegal voting is a “major threat” to the stability of the U.S., even though election fraud has never been revealed to be a widespread issue in American politics.
Those fears were surely amplified by Trump’s false rhetoric around election security last year. Now Republican lawmakers are using those fears to justify major changes to state voting laws, as many officials feared they would.
“I don’t know what’s legit, what isn’t legit, but why wouldn’t we want to answer those questions?” Karen Fann, the president of the Arizona state Senate who initiated the review of Maricopa County’s results, said in an interview last week with CNN.
In others, it may mean more of these sorts of “audits.”
Three Republican state lawmakers from Pennsylvania visited the site of the Arizona recount Wednesday to observe the process.
State Sen. Doug Mastriano was among them, and while he declined to talk about the visit with The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal and a local radio station, according to reporter Ali Vetnar, he granted one to OANN.
“The incentive structure that has been created is one in which so far we’ve seen zero accountability for lying and pushing these narratives,” Masterson, the former DHS official, said. “We don’t see anyone really, truly being held accountable.”
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A video of a father and his daughter speaking out against critical race theory has gone viral amid an ongoing national debate on the topic.
The video posted by TikTok user Kory Yeshua shows him sitting next to his unnamed daughter and saying he teaches her she can be anything she wants to be.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or any color,” the girl says while a somber tune plays in the background.
Yeshua regularly posts conservative videos critical of Democratic policies and Yeshua has said the BLM organization is for “the destruction of America and the destruction of our families.”
He tells his daughter in the viral clip, “How we treat people is based on who they are and not what color they are.”
The girl adds “and if they’re nice and smart.”
“This is how children think right here,” Yeshua responds. “Critical race theory wants to end that. Not with my children, it’s not going to happen.”
When the girl tells the viewer they can make friends, Yeshua ties that CRT again.
“We need to stop CRT,” he says. “Period. Point blank. Children do not see skin color, man. They love everybody.”
The video gained 26,000 views since it was posted to TikTok on May 19, but it racked up 1.6 million views on Twitter when it was shared by Republican congressional candidate Robby Starbuck.
CRT, which discusses racism as a social construct, has been a polarizing concept in education and politics with some Republican-led states looking to ban its teaching in schools.
Democrats — and democracy — won what is likely to be a very temporary victory in Texas this past weekend.
On Sunday evening, Texas Republicans expected to pass Senate Bill 7, which contains several provisions making it harder to cast a ballot in Texas. But Democrats took advantage of two procedural constraints to temporarily block the bill.
The legislative session expired at midnight, placing a hard deadline on all bills that Texas lawmakers hoped to enact, and the state House must have two-thirds of its members present to conduct business. So Democrats ran out the clock by abandoning the House chamber before Republicans could call a vote on the bill.
The previous day, however, something even more surprising happened. Though Republicans were united behind passing some kind of voter suppression bill, the state House and state Senate versions of the bill were quite different. On Saturday, a conference committee made up of members of both houses released the version of the bill they expected to pass on Sunday — and it stripped out many of the state Senate bill’s most aggressive provisions.
The Senate’s version of the bill, for example, would have strictly regulated where Texas’s largest counties — the ones that include big cities dominated by Democrats — are allowed to locate polling places. Had this provision passed, it was expected to shut down many polling places in Democratic areas with a large share of minority voters. But this provision was stripped during the conference committee.
Similarly, the conference committee dropped a vague provision that could have removed voters from the rolls after they are ”otherwise determined to be ineligible to vote” — it wasn’t entirely clear how this determination would have been made under the deleted provision.
Observers sit in the House chamber at the Texas Capitol waiting to hear debate on voter legislation on May 6.Eric Gay/AP
So has the fight to protect the right to vote been won in Texas? Hardly. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to call a special session to ensure that new voter restrictions are passed. It’s also possible that some of the deleted provisions will be revived in this session.
But the fact that these provisions did not make it out of the conference committee suggests that there is some internal disagreement within the Texas GOP about how aggressively it plans to restrict the franchise. And this disagreement might offer small-d democrats a path forward when the special session happens.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of voter suppression laws. Many provisions currently being pushed by Republican state lawmakers make it harder to cast a ballot in a certain way — such as by mailing in the ballot or placing it in a drop box. Or they place unnecessary procedural obstacles in the way of voters. These provisions often serve no purpose other than to make it more difficult to vote, but they also are not insurmountable obstacles.
Other provisions are more virulent. They might disqualify voters for no valid reason. Or allow partisan officials to refuse to certify an election, even if there are no legitimate questions about who won. Or make it so difficult for some voters, who are likely to vote for the party that is out of power, to cast their ballot that it’s nigh impossible for the incumbent party to lose.
These are the sorts of provisions that are most likely to rig an election. Distinguishing between the two can be helpful as voting rights advocates have to choose their battles on multiple fronts.
Not all voting restrictions present the same threat
Last week, the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein reported that the Biden White House is surprisingly sanguine about the latest round of voter suppression bills making their way through various state legislatures. “Although White House officials consider the laws offensive from a civil-rights perspective,” Brownstein wrote, “they do not think most of those laws will advantage Republicans in the 2022 and 2024 elections as much as many liberal activists fear.”
He also quoted an unnamed senior White House official, who summarized the case for optimism in the face of voter suppression. “I think our feeling is, show us what the rules are and we will figure out a way to educate our voters and make sure they understand how they can vote and we will get them out to vote,” this official said.
This feeling is not unique to the Biden administration. Last March, for example, MIT political scientist Charles Stewart offered me a similarly hopeful picture of state lawmakers’ ability to skew elections by changing how they are administered.
“There is very little that politicians can do to alter election administration in such a way that it would have a permanent, obvious effect on turnout or the composition of the electorate,” Stewart told me in an email, adding that “the most important factor influencing turnout, both its level and composition, are the efforts by the campaigns to turn out voters.”
Take, for example, restrictions on absentee voting. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump railed often against voting by mail, often spouting falsehoods about voter fraud. And Trump’s voters appear to have taken his false rhetoric to heart — Democrats were much more likely to cast their votes by mail in 2020 than Republicans.
But it’s far from clear that these new restrictions will actually benefit Republicans in future elections. As Democratic data wizard David Shor told me in March, “if you look at the seven states that went from having very little vote by mail to having massive amounts (AL/CT/MO/MS/NJ/NY/PA), they trended about 0.2 percent toward Trump relative to the other 43 states.” It does not appear that higher levels of absentee voting among Democrats led to higher overall turnout among Democrats, at least relative to their Republican neighbors.
Other studies suggest that Black voters mobilize in response to attacks on the right to vote, potentially neutralizing — or, at least, mitigating — the impact of those attacks.
But not every provision of the latest round of voter suppression bills can be overcome either by vigilant voters or by smart campaigns.
Similarly, a provision of the Texas bill that survived the conference committee requires county election officials to “develop a remediation plan” to conduct “voter roll maintenance” if the “county has a number of registered voters equal to or greater than the number of people eligible to register to vote in the county.” Counties that do not comply with this provision may face fines of $1,000 a day.
There’s nothing nefarious about a county’s list of registered voters exceeding the number of eligible voters in that county — people move and people die, and they typically do not notify election officials when they do so. But this provision of the Texas bill risks purging voters from the election rolls who complied with the law governing voter registration, and who have every right to vote. As my colleague Zack Beauchamp wrote about the provision, “voting rights activists worry that this is a backdoor effort to revive a 2019 voter purge struck down in court, an effort that tried to kick tens of thousands of recently naturalized voters off the rolls by using outdated citizenship status for them.”
State lawmakers in 2021, moreover, haven’t even begun to consider the most common kind of law that seeks to make the results of an election impervious to the will of the voters: gerrymandering. The Census Bureau expects to provide states with the data they need to draw new congressional and state legislative districts this fall. Once that data is available, states like Georgia and Texas are likely to draw maps that seek to entrench Republican rule as much as possible. (Democrats also engage in gerrymandering, but blue states are more likely to use independent commissions to draw district lines, or to have other safeguards that limit partisan redistricting.)
Gerrymanders can potentially make the fight to control a legislative body all but impervious to the will of the voters. In 2018, for example, Democratic candidates for the Wisconsin state assembly received 54 percent of the popular vote, but Republicans won nearly two-thirds of the seats.
So why is it useful to distinguish between two kinds of anti-democratic laws?
To be clear, the point of drawing a distinction between voter suppression tactics that can be overcome through campaigning and voter education and the sort that can only be overcome through legal means, such as a federal voting rights statute, isn’t to diminish outrage over the first kind of law. An attack on democracy is still an attack on democracy, even if it is ineffective.
Rather, the point is that defenders of democracy should be especially vigilant in seeking to defeat the second kind of law using whatever means are available to them.
For the moment, federal voting rights legislation is effectively being blocked by Democratic senators such as Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), who insist on preserving a filibuster rule that allows Republicans to veto nearly all federal bills. Should these senators relent — or should Democrats gain seats in the Senate despite the GOP’s anti-democratic tactics — congressional Democrats will still face a difficult intraparty negotiation over how to address voting rights.
Yes, the House did pass the For the People Act, a comprehensive voting rights bill, earlier this year. But it’s relatively easy to pass an ambitious bill through one house of Congress when it has little chance of becoming law. It’s much harder to convince a majority of the legislature to pass the same bill when the lawmakers will have to live with whatever new law they enact. And, of course, if any bill has a shot of passing the current Congress, it must win the approval of conservative Democrats such as Manchin and Sinema — the former of whom has signaled that he would prefer a different approach to the one taken by the For the People Act.
If Democrats are able to pass a less ambitious voting rights bill than the For the People Act, they would be wise to identify which state-level voter suppression tactics can be overcome through campaigning and voter education, and which ones are likely to skew elections unless Congress intervenes — and to focus on defeating the latter sort of tactics.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic caucus gather for a press conference addressing the passage of the For the People Act on March 3.J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Similarly, several major companies denounced Georgia’s voter suppression law, and more than 100 corporate executives reportedly met to discuss how to defeat similar attacks on democracy. These companies are likely to have more leverage over Republican state lawmakers than, say, Democratic state lawmakers or voting rights groups. And, while they may not have enough leverage to kill a voter suppression law outright, they may be able to pressure Republican lawmakers into removing some of the most aggressive provisions.
Finally, Democratic lawyers have limited resources to challenge anti-democratic laws. And judges who support voting rights may wish to weaken such laws but may also be cautious about handing down a pro-democracy decision that would be reversed by higher courts — including a Supreme Court that is quite skeptical of voting rights.
The Republican Party wields a tremendous amount of power in the United States, in the Senate, in state legislatures, and especially in the judiciary. It is likely that many of the GOP’s attempts to restrict the franchise will endure.
But that doesn’t mean that all of these laws will survive intact. Both the Democratic Party and small-d democrats have limited ability to challenge such laws. But if they are fortunate, they may be able to eliminate at least some of the worst provisions.
It was an eleventh hour breakthrough, quite literally.
Less than 30 minutes before his midnight deadline, Israeli opposition party leader Yair Lapid announced Wednesday night that he and fellow politician Naftali Bennett — the tech millionaire leading one of Israel’s ultra-right wing minority parties — had reached an agreement to form a governing coalition that could oust long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It’s a big deal. The controversial Netayahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party, is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and is in his 12th year in power despite facing numerous corruption charges, which he denies.
And this newly-formed alliance between his opponents only came together after four inconclusive elections in less than two years.
The arrangement for Lapid and Bennett rests on the agreement that Bennett, who leads the minority right-wing Yamina party, becomes prime minister, with the centrist Lapid as foreign minister, until 2023. At that point, Lapid would take over the premiership.
But it’s not over yet — Netanyahu still has some time to fight back, as the vote confirming the new government is not expected for around 12 days.
And the fragile coalition between Lapid and Bennett, and the parties whose support they had to secure to achieve the magic number of a 61-seat majority in the Israeli Parliament, or Knesset, is baffling to many onlookers. The parties making up the likely future government of Israel represent a vast array of differing political ideologies: right wing, left wing, centrist — and for the first time, Arab and Islamist parties too.
‘Considerable’ limitations to power
Lapid, the 57-year-old former TV anchor and finance minister, is described as being on the center-left politically. He supports a two-state solution with the Palestinians and upholding secular values. Bennett and his right-wing Yamina party, meanwhile, are unapologetically nationalist and support the expansion of Israeli-Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank territory, something that has repeatedly sparked conflict and international condemnation.
Arab Islamist party Raam, an unlikely partner in the alliance, is likely to push for more funding and better treatment for Arab-Israeli communities.
One of the sole things they all have in common is the desire to unseat Netanyahu. Bennett was in fact a protégé of Netanyahu, formerly serving as his defense minister.
But even if he becomes prime minister himself, Bennett will be far more limited in what he can do, given that his power rests on the support of so many other parties of dramatically different ideologies from his.
“Even to the extent that (Bennett’s) ideology is similar to that of Netanyahu, or even somewhat more hawkish on some issues, the limitations are much more considerable than any that Netanyahu has faced,” Ofer Zalzberg, director of the Middle East Program at the Herbert C. Kelman Institute, told CNBC from Jerusalem.
“Any major decision will need to pass Lapid’s veto right,” Zalzberg said. “Lapid is publicly supportive of a two-state solution, and publicly opposed to any form of annexation, so from that point of view Lapid’s party is also considerably larger than Bennett’s and there are other left-leaning parties in the coalition … so Bennett’s ideology will face significant coalition restraints.”
The coalition will also depend on the active support of Raam, the Islamist party, and the passive support of other Arab parties, Zalzberg added — which he says “can lead to its toppling.”
“It’s unprecedented for an Israeli coalition to be based on active support of a non-Zionist Arab party. So this coalition will have an interest in treating Israel’s Arab Palestinian citizens differently,” he said.
A different approach to Washington?
At the same time, “Lapid is pragmatic. He’s not leftist, he’s not rightist, he’s pragmatic,” said Gideon Rahat, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and faculty member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s political science department. “If there will be a settlement that would satisfy Israel’s security, he would support it.”
They both favor liberal economic policies and reforming the judiciary, Rahat said. But “Bennett is more hardline in terms of security … In terms of the Palestinians, it’s clear that Bennet is right-wing and Lapid is pragmatic.”
Importantly, both leaders are keen to improve Israel’s relationship with the U.S. Democratic Party, and vocally criticized Netanyahu’s heavy reliance on the Republican Party — specifically the Donald Trump wing — for support.
“The emerging coalition, unlike Netanyahu, is more interested in fostering bipartisan support for Israel in the U.S.,” Zalzberg said.
“The coalition will want more of a cooperative relationship with the Biden administration … it will likely have to at minimum find ways to advance improvements for the quality of lives of the Palestinians, and these should be done in ways that are visible to gain acceptance and goodwill in Washington.”
The recent impasse in Israeli politics is also a result of Mr. Netanyahu’s divisive decision to remain in office despite being on trial for corruption.
By doing so, his critics argued, he undermined democratic norms, and by attacking the judges in his case, he risked undercutting the rule of law.
Mr. Netanyahu denied the charges, and said he had the right to remain in office to defend himself against what he presented as a backdoor coup attempt.
But many even in his own base disagreed, leading to a political deadlock in which Mr. Netanyahu retained just enough support to remain in power but not enough to form a stable government — leading to the four inconclusive elections in the past two years, most recently in March.
A desire to avoid a fifth election was what ultimately prompted Mr. Bennett to abandon Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing camp and ally with rivals who, like Mr. Lapid, do not share most of his long-term political vision.
If Parliament confirms his government, Mr. Bennett will start his term just as a new president, Isaac Herzog, begins his. Mr. Herzog, a former leader of the centrist Labor party, was elected president by lawmakers on Wednesday. He will assume office in July, and perform the largely ceremonial role for the next seven years.
Political pilgrimages are nothing new to Arizona, where Republican politicians have long enjoyed photo ops in front of the Mexico border wall. But now, the draw is the Arizona State Fairgrounds, site of a former basketball arena where a Trump supporter who has promoted election conspiracies is overseeing a hand recount of 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County.
The latest visitors are Pennsylvania Sens. Doug Mastriano and Cris Dush, and Rep. Rob Kauffman. They met with Arizona legislators at the Capitol before traveling to the audit site to get a briefing from the auditors.
“We’ll bring the information back to the Senate leadership, we’ll back-brief them on the way ahead and then hopefully we can come up with an approach here to make sure every person in Pennsylvania can rest assured they have one vote and it counts,” Mastriano told a radio host from WEEO-FM.
The Pennsylvania lawmakers and others in their delegation spent about 20 minutes on the arena floor, where volunteers counted and photographed ballots. Doug Logan, the head of Cyber Ninjas, the firm leading the audit, led them around.
Afterward, Mastriano spoke to conservative media outlets but ignored journalists from the Associated Press and other mainstream news sources.
Asked by a reporter if he wants to see the Arizona audit replicated in Pennsylvania, Dush said, “Without question. Absolutely.”
As Trump and his allies claimed without evidence last year that his Arizona loss was marred by fraud, the Arizona Senate GOP used its subpoena power to get access to all ballots, counting machines and hard drives full of election data in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and 60% of Arizona’s voters.
They handed all of it over to a team led by Cyber Ninjas, a small consulting firm with no prior election experience for a hand recount and analysis of vote-counting machines and data.
The effort will not change President Joe Biden’s victory, and election experts have pointed to major flaws in the process. But it’s become a model for Republicans in other states hoping to turn up evidence supporting conspiracy theories.
“It’s my belief that Arizona will be the launch pad for elections audits and election integrity efforts all over this great country,” Gaetz said. He listed the swing states where Trump lost in 2020.
Greene said the audit was the reason she and Gaetz chose Mesa, a Phoenix suburb, for the second stop on their tour of America First rallies.
“Matt said, ‘You been following that Arizona audit?’” Greene said. “I said, ‘Yeah I’ve been following it.’ He said, ‘Lets go to Arizona.’ I said, ‘Count me in.’”
Mastriano has become a one-man force in conservative politics in Pennsylvania, leading anti-mask protests last year, pushing to overturn Trump’s reelection loss and showing up outside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot.
In November, Mastriano organized a hearing in Gettysburg that featured Rudy Giuliani and a phone call appearance by Trump in which the president claimed the election was rigged and urged state lawmakers to overturn the result.
All three visiting Pennsylvania lawmakers were among the 64 Republican legislators who signed a letter asking the state’s congressional delegation to object to Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes being cast for Biden.
Derek Chauvin’s attorney is seeking a sentence of time served for the former officer who was convicted in April of murdering George Floyd, court records filed Wednesday show.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have requested a severe sentence for Chauvin for acting with “particular cruelty” in the death of George Floyd. On Wednesday, the state filed a motion asking for a sentence of 30 years.
In a motion filed Wednesday, defense attorney Eric Nelson proposed a “strict probationary sentence” and prison equal to the time Chauvin has already served.
“In light of Mr. Chauvin’s zero criminal history score, his mature age, low risk to re-offend, and the support of his friends and family, Mr. Chauvin is particularly amenable to a mitigated departure and urges this Court to grant his motions and pronounce a probationary sentence with an incarceration period of time served,” Nelson wrote in the motion.
If that is declined, alternatively, the defense is asking for a prison sentence shorter than what is recommended by Minnesota sentencing guidelines.
Per state law, Chauvin will be sentenced on second-degree murder because it is the most serious charge. Minnesota sentencing guidelines suggest Chauvin is likely to receive up to 15 years, based on his lack of a prior criminal record.
Chauvin’s sentencing has been scheduled for June 25.
Judge Peter Cahill has previously ruled that there were several “aggravating factors” in the case that would support a sentence above the range recommended by state guidelines.
In their latest motion, prosecutors argued for double the maximum sentence due to those factors, writing that “this Court found that Defendant’s abuse of his position of trust and authority was ‘egregious,’ and that multiple aspects of Defendant’s conduct were ‘particularly cruel.'” They also pointed to the “extreme nature” of Chauvin’s conduct, which was witnessed by four children.
“It is especially serious, for example, when a defendant’s abuse of authority or particular cruelty is witnessed by children, as it was in this case,” the motion stated.
Prosecutors also argued that a more severe sentence would “properly account for the profound impact of Defendant’s conduct on the victim, the victim’s family, and the community.”
“His actions traumatized Mr. Floyd’s family, the bystanders who watched Mr. Floyd die, and the community. And his conduct shocked the Nation’s conscience,” they wrote. “No sentence can undo the damage Defendant’s actions have inflicted. But the sentence the Court imposes must hold Defendant fully accountable for his reprehensible conduct.”
A jury found Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in April for the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.
Last month, Chauvin’s legal team filed a motion requesting a new trial on multiple grounds, including jury misconduct.
On Wednesday, Nelson filed a new document further arguing for a new trial and change of venue, claiming that “cumulative errors, abuses of discretion, prosecutorial and jury misconduct deprived Derek Chauvin of a fair trial.”
Nelson cited interviews two jurors — Lisa Christensen and Brandon Mitchell — gave in the wake of the guilty verdict. He alleged Christensen’s interviews showed a “pressure to convict” Chauvin, and that Mitchell “came to a verdict to further political and social causes.” Christensen was an alternate juror who did not have a role in the final verdict.
The document included a photograph of Mitchell that was widely circulated on social media last month showing him wearing a Black Lives Matter hat and a shirt with a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. that says, “get your knee off our necks,” at an August 2020 march in Washington, D.C.
Mitchell defended his impartiality as a juror after the photo’s circulation. He told the Star Tribune that he was “extremely honest” during the jury selection process.
“I gave my views on everything — on the case, on Black Lives Matter,” he said.
ABC News’ Will Gretsky contributed to this report.
Just over a month remains until July 4, the date Biden set to meet a goal of at least 70 percent of adults receiving at least one coronavirus vaccine shot. To help reach that point, the beverage company announced what it’s calling its biggest beer giveaway ever, one that comes in a “pivotal moment where people are excited to be together again,” the company’s chief marketing officer, Marcel Marcondes, said in a statement.
The media slamming DeSantis over Florida’s new transgender athlete bill, WaPo correcting a story about Tom Cotton and Chris Mathews appearing on MSNBC round out today’s top media headlines
Thousands of emails obtained by BuzzFeed News and The Washington Post through Freedom of Information Act requests show Fauci was repeatedly warned that the virus could have been engineered in a lab, something he publicly denied much of last year. He also appeared to claim wearing typical masks is “not really effective” and dismissive of concerns that China was fabricating its COVID data.
However, while the emails were mentioned during his MSNBC appearance on Wednesday, Wallace lobbed only one softball question regarding an email he wrote acknowledging his lack of appearances at the White House coronavirus press briefings.
“I wonder if you feel like you’re still making up some of that lost ground from many months under the last administration of not just no information but disinformation being out there,” Wallace said. “Do you still see some hardness among his supporters around the vaccine or around some of these messages that you’re sharing today?”
Fauci acknowledged that some people “resent” him for his conduct in the last administration but insisted he was never “anti-Trump.”
“What they didn’t seem to understand… is that science is a dynamic process,” Fauci told Wallace. “So something that you know in January, you make a recommendation or comment about it, but as you get more and more information, the information leads you to change because that’s what science is, it’s a self-correcting process. So when you hear someone say something at one point and then two or three months later, if you stick with what you said at the original time when you had one-fifth of the data that you have now, I think that would be inappropriate.”
He later added, “You’ve got to continue to evolve with the data and that’s what I was trying to do is to always tell the truth on the basis of what the data is and it was never deliberately against the president.”
“Well, the true mark of someone is if they look good even when their personal emails come out, so you pass the test very few of us would pass,” Wallace gushed before ending her interview.
Trump has rebuffed calls from some advisers to drop the matter, instead fixating on an ongoing Republican-commissioned audit in Arizona and plotting how to secure election reviews in other states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Georgia, according to advisers. He is most animated by the efforts in Fulton County, Ga., and Maricopa County, Ariz., according to two advisers who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Chad Pergram on GOP members pushing riot commission: ‘It’ll prime the pump for Democrats to alter the filibuster to pass their agenda’
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday re-upped her calls for the Senate to eliminate the legislative filibuster so Democrats can pass sweeping reforms while in control of Congress and the White House.
The New York Democrat voiced her support for getting rid of the 60-vote threshold in response to a tweet from President Biden on Wednesday. Biden called for the passage of major federal voting rights legislation to combat the “all-out assault on our democracy” as GOP-led states change their election laws.
“Abolish the filibuster,” the progressive Squad member posted in response to Biden’s tweet.
The House already passed the massive election overhaul legislation, known as H.R. 1. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he’d bring the election legislation up for a vote in the Senate later this month, which would set the stage for a big clash on whether Democrats jettison the Senate tradition of a 60-vote threshold.
Tensions around the filibuster debate escalated when Republicans last week used their first legislative filibuster during the Biden presidency to block consideration of forming a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Democrats needed 10 Republicans to join them in a procedural vote to start debate on the legislation, but just six Republicans broke rank, effectively killing the commission legislation that former President Donald Trump opposes.
Now Democrats want to pass their top legislative priority, the election reform bill known as the For the People Act, which would set federal standards for voting access and establish publically financed congressional elections. It’s a priority for Biden, as well.
Republicans are united in their opposition to the legislation, which they’ve panned as a federal takeover of elections. But it’s not even clear that Democrats could get all 50 of their members on board to pass S.1, with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a holdout and repeat defender of the filibuster.
WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 20: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks at a news conference to reintroduce the Green New Deal and introduce the Civilian Climate Corps Act at the Capitol Reflecting Pool near the West Front of the U.S. Capitol Building on Tuesday, April 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) ( (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images))
Even Biden Tuesday issued a veiled rebuke of Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a moderate from Arizona, who has also resisted nuking the filibuster. Biden laid blame Tuesday on two Democrats for failure to pass the voting rights legislation.
“I hear all the folks on TV saying why doesn’t Biden get this done?” the president said in an address after meeting survivors of the Tulsa race massacre.
“Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” he added, a rare public rebuke of members of his own party.
Ocasio-Cortez and her progressive colleagues in the House have long been in favor of abolishing the filibuster so Democrats can deliver on big agenda items they say voters elected them to enact, including D.C. statehood, police reform, gun control legislation and social safety net programs.
“Preserving the filibuster is not worth letting millions of people in this country go hungry, sleep in their cars, or struggle to afford baby formula,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted back in February.
Members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, moved a step closer to winning immunity from opioid lawsuits.
Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
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Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
Members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, moved a step closer to winning immunity from opioid lawsuits.
Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
After more than a year of high stakes negotiations with billions of dollars on the line, a bankruptcy plan for Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, cleared a major hurdle late Wednesday.
Federal Judge Robert Drain in White Plains, N.Y., moved the controversial deal forward despite objections from dozens of state attorneys general, setting the stage for a final vote by the company’s creditors expected this summer.
The drug maker filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2019 facing an avalanche of lawsuits tied to its aggressive opioid sales practices.
Public health experts and many government officials say the introduction of Oxycontin fueled the nation’s deadly opioid epidemic.
This development brings members of the Sackler family, some of whom own Purdue Pharma and served on the company’s board of directors, a step closer to winning immunity from future opioid lawsuits.
According to legal documents filed as part of the case, that immunity would extend to dozens of family members, more than 160 financial trusts, and at least 170 companies, consultants and other entities associated with the Sacklers.
“The Sacklers are paying $4.275 billion and they very much plan and expect to be done with this chapter,” said Marshall Huebner, an attorney representing Purdue Pharma, during a hearing last week.
One of the firms that would secure protection from future opioid lawsuits under the deal is Luther Strange & Associates, founded by former U.S. Sen. Luther Strange (R-Alabama) who helped Purdue Pharma pitch the bankruptcy plan to Republican state attorneys general.
While Purdue Pharma has twice pleaded guilty to federal crimes relating to its opioid marketing schemes, no member of the Sackler family has faced criminal charges.
Appearing before a congressional panel last December, members of the Sackler family said they had done nothing wrong. “The family and the board acted legally and ethically,” testified David Sackler, who served on Purdue Pharma’s board for six years.
In addition to contributing money from their personal fortunes, the Sacklers have agreed to give up control of Purdue Pharma. They will, however, retain ownership of other companies, admit no wrongdoing and will remain one of the wealthiest families in America.
Two dozen states still oppose the bankruptcy deal that’s been negotiated largely behind closed doors. They argue it would improperly strip them of authority to sue members of the family for alleged wrongdoing.
“I don’t believe … at this point the plan is confirmable,” said Andrew Troop, an attorney representing a coalition of “non-consenting” states, during a hearing last week.
But Judge Drain said this stage of the bankruptcy process wasn’t focused on final approval of the plan.
Instead, the court evaluated whether Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers had provided enough information and transparency to allow creditors to make an informed decision on the deal’s financial merits.
Despite a significant veil of secrecy surrounding the proceedings — which included an expansive investigation of the Sacklers that will likely never be made public — Drain signaled the so-called “disclosure statement” was adequate.
“I found the disclosure statement to contain adequate information,” he said Wednesday.
Attorneys representing Purdue Pharma and other parties in the bankruptcy process said negotiations continue.
“We are mediating as we speak with the non-consenting states,” Huebner said on Wednesday. “We continue to be open and listen as hard as we can to all other remaining objectors between now and confirmation.”
A vote and final approval expected by August
In the coming weeks, more than 600,000 individuals, companies and governments with claims against Purdue Pharma will vote on the package, described by attorneys involved in the process as one of the most complicated and controversial bankruptcies ever.
A final confirmation hearing is scheduled for Aug. 9. Judge Drain has indicated he believes this plan offers the best chance at financial relief for those harmed by Purdue Pharma’s Oxycontin business.
Supporters of the bankruptcy deal say the alternative would be a chaotic scrum of risky and expensive litigation. “Billions would be spent on legal fees,” Huebner said last week. “It would be years until claimants might get a recovery.”
The reorganization plan also includes a detailed formula that would be used to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars each year in aid to communities and individuals harmed by opioids.
A growing number of government officials have signaled they expect to vote in favor of the deal.
But critics, including more than 20 mostly Democratic state attorneys general, say the Sacklers are improperly piggybacking on their company’s bankruptcy without actually filing for bankruptcy themselves.
“The bankruptcy system should not be allowed to shield non-bankrupt billionaires,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey in an interview with NPR last month.
Some legal scholars have also questioned whether bankruptcy court is the proper venue for a case that involves a addiction crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
“[T]he most socially important chapter 11 case in history will be determined through a process that does not comport with basic notions of due process,” wrote Adam Levitin, who teaches law at Georgetown University, in an article published last month in the Texas Law Review.
“These cases have been overshadowed by a single, critical question: who is responsible for [Purdue Pharma’s] confessed crimes and the harm they caused?” Lipson wrote in his motion.
Lipson requested an independent examiner be appointed to review whether the Chapter 11 process has been handled appropriately.
Again, the Sacklers have denied any wrongdoing, have never been charged with crimes. As part of their settlement with the DOJ, members of the Sackler family paid $225 million while denying the allegations.
Sackler family pushes back against “false allegations”
During last week’s hearing an attorney representing the Raymond Sackler branch of the family said they have created a website designed to offer a rebuttal to critics of the Sacklers.
“Raymond Sackler family members have consistently expressed their regret that OxyContin, which continues to help patients suffering from chronic pain, unexpectedly became part of the opioid crisis,” the family said in a statement.
The DOJ settlement with the Sacklers also included the allegation some family members engaged in “fraudulent” transfers of wealth and approved a marketing plan that focused on pushing Oxycontin sales to “extreme, high-volume prescribers.”
According to the Justice Department statement, that program led “health care providers to prescribe opioids for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary, and that often led to abuse and diversion.”
The Sacklers maintain they did nothing wrong and acted ethically. If this bankruptcy plan is approved and upheld on appeal, it’s unlikely the allegations will ever be tested in court.
More than 400 civil cases already filed against members of the Sackler family for alleged wrongdoing would be halted.
Disturbing video footage shows the moment a pair of children who had escaped a group home fired stolen guns at police in Enterprise, Florida.
Deputies shot a 14-year-old girl after she and a 12-year-old boy broke into a home, found several firearms, including an AK47 and a shotgun, and started shooting at police, Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said.
The girl was shot in the abdomen and the arm and is being treated at a hospital. She’s reportedly in a stable condition. The boy surrendered and was not injured in the stand-off. The two foster children repeatedly fired at deputies for around 30 minutes, according to law enforcement officials.
The sheriff’s office said the children face felony charges, including attempted first-degree murder of law enforcement officers and armed burglary, ClickOrlando reported.
Sheriff Chitwood said the children ran away from Florida United Methodist Children’s Home around 5pm on Tuesday, managing to evade the police for hours. A passerby told law enforcement that he heard breaking glass at a home in the vicinity around 8pm. Deputies discovered that someone had broken into the home, the sheriff said.
The owner of the home had left just 15 minutes before, and according to the Sheriff, told authorities: “Nobody should be home, but I have three firearms in the house – an AK-47, a pump shotgun and a handgun – and 200 rounds of ammunition.”
Deputies surrounded the home and tried to speak to the boy and girl, but were met with gunfire. Sheriff Chitwood said that the girl, 14, at one point came outside and threatened to kill Sgt Donnie Maxwell.
“We try to deescalate, we throw a cell phone into the house to try to talk to them. The 14-year-old comes out of the garage with a pump shotgun, levels it at deputies, and despite warnings to drop it, she walks back into the garage. She comes back a second time, and that’s when deputies open fire,” the sheriff said.
Bodycam footage shows how the tense moment unfolded. Officers approach the dark house where the children are holed up, lighting their way with flashlights. Then the girl emerges.
“She’s pointing a gun. She’s pointing a gun behind the trash can,” an officer can be heard saying.
Shortly afterward, an exchange of gunfire can be seen in aerial footage. An officers shouts “Cease fire!”
The boy soon walks out of the house with his hands up, but the girl remains hidden.
“Light her up,” one officer says – and then quickly clarifies what he means. “With a light! With a light!”
The officers finally approach the girl, who is lying on the ground, remove her shotgun, and begin providing medical assistance.
Sheriff Chitwood said deputies took several rounds of gunfire before “they were left with no other choice but to return fire”, with nowhere to hide except behind trees. At least eight deputies were involved in the ordeal.
Sheriff Chitwood praised his deputies while speaking to reporters, lauding their restraint despite being repeatedly shot at. The sheriff harshly criticised the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, calling the department a “failure” and a “fraud”.
“The 14-year-old was arrested for stealing dogs, for larceny, she then got teen court, and was sentenced to a halfway house in Flagler County,” Sheriff Chitwood said. “She burned that halfway house down on April 10 of 2021 and the Department of Juvenile Justice placed her in Florida United Methodist Children’s Home.”
The 12-year-old boy has diabetes, leading police to go look for the children because “if he doesn’t get his medication within four hours, it’s going to be a critical medical emergency”, the sheriff said.
He added that deputies didn’t do what he would have done when approaching the home the children had broken into.
“I would have walked in because I have an eyewitness telling me two juveniles just forced their way into the home,” Sheriff Chitwood said. “They take a step back and contact the homeowner and say, ‘Should anybody have access to your home?’ as resources are pouring in to surround the property.”
According to authorities, the children also used bats to destroy furniture, toilets and a tub.
“Their conversation was they were going to kill my sergeant. They were coming out to kill cops. They were coming out to kill deputies, that’s the conversation,” the Sheriff said of the children.
He noted that a security guard was killed at the Florida United Methodist Children’s Home earlier this year, and added that police have been called to the foster home 289 times in the past year.
Kitwana McTyer, the president and CEO of the Florida United Methodist Children’s Home, said in a statement: “This situation is tragic and is the result of the system failing our children. These children are in desperate need of care in the appropriate setting, which is a higher level of care than we provide.
“As we have partnered with our lead agency in this program since 2007, we have found in recent times that we are seeing a higher level of children who repeatedly come through the system with escalated behaviours. We simply cannot continue to be ‘everything to everyone’.”
The Independent has reached out to the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice for comment.
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