James.galbraith

American sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson will not be allowed to run in the Olympic 100-meter race because of a one-month ban handed down for testing positive for marijuana. The issue is not that the suspension overlaps with the Tokyo Olympics, it is that the positive test comes so close to the U.S. Track and Field time trials that her times have been voided per the rules laid out. Richardson’s times are the second fastest of any woman in the world for the 100-meters, and the fastest in the United States. But USA Track and Field relies entirely on time trial results to select the Olympic team. According to the USADA, the reason that cannabinoids on the WADA Prohibited List are:

1. “Athletes who smoke cannabis or Spice in-competition potentially endanger themselves and others because of increased risk taking, slower reaction times and poor executive function or decision making.”
2. “Based on current animal and human studies as well as on interviews with athletes and information from the field, cannabis can be performance enhancing for some athletes and sports disciplines.”
3. “Use of illicit drugs that are harmful to health and that may have performance-enhancing properties is not consistent with the athlete as a role model for young people around the world.”

According to Sports Illustrated,  the “USATF has discretion in choosing the 4x100 relay team,” which leaves hope that Richardson may still be allowed to compete for U.S. gold this summer, albeit in a single event. Richardson told NBC in an interview on Friday that she had indeed used marijuana as a way to cope with the unexpected death of her biological mother, something that as reportedly revealed to her by a reporter during an interview one week before the Olympic Team trials in Oregon.

She told NBC that the news of her mother’s death “sent me into a state of emotional panic. I didn’t know how to control my emotions or deal with my emotions during that time.” Richardson apologized for letting people down and owned the decision to use marijuana therapeutically. Her interview, which you can see below, might give you a better understanding of how well she is handling this situation.

Responses of support for Richardson came fast. Nike, her sponsor, released this statement saying: “We appreciate Sha’Carri’s honesty and accountability and will continue to support her through this time.”

Many responded by bringing up Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps’ suspension for three months after a photo leaked to the press purporting to show the olympian smoking marijuana out of a bong. Sporting News points out that one of the differences was that Phelps never tested positive for marijuana use, which is the reason there was no movement to delete his times. But let’s be clear, responses of racial inequity in this case are not unfounded. Marijuana laws in our country were created by racists, for racists, and continue to be used in promotion of a white supremacist system of “justice.”

As for whether this might be reversed, Sports Illustrated’s Michael Rosenberg explains that because of the exclusive trial time criteria of the U.S. team, allowing Richardson to still compete would potentially open up a whole host of logistical issues for U.S. Track and Field.

This is why Donavan Brazier won’t run the 800 in Tokyo—he is the best in the world in the 800, but he faltered in the trials and didn’t make the team. If USATF makes an exception for Richardson, that would create a lot of problems. For one, Brazier would have been better off skipping the trials to smoke weed.

Here is Sha’Carri Richardson being America’s fastest woman.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I call dibs on that button.

Today's News:

Former Virginia police officer Thomas Robertson, seen above giving the camera a middle finger while posing in front of a statue of John Stark, after illegally entering the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, is facing a lot of federal charges. He reportedly went and posted: “CNN and the Left are just mad because we actually attacked the government who is the problem and not some random small business ... The right IN ONE DAY took the f***** U.S. Capitol. Keep poking us,” on a social media site, as has been detailed in the charges against him. The former law enforcement officer, in response to the above image making its way around the internet, responded on Facebook by writing: “Lol to  anyone who’s possibly concerned about the picture of me going around... Sorry I hate freedom? ...Not like I did anything illegal...y’all do what you feel you need to...” But you did do something illegal. 

Robertson and Fracker were are just two law enforcement officials out of at least 30 who have been tied to the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Robertson was arrested for his connection to the raid on the Capitol building in D.C. back in January. He was subsequently released pending his upcoming court date. His release was “conditional,” and one of those many conditions included that Robertson can possess no firearms while he awaits his days in court. Guess which former law enforcement officer who doesn’t understand the law seems to have once again not followed … the law? If you guessed Thomas Robertson, you get 34 guns! According to FBI agents investigating Robertson, he’s been buying and selling guns online. Now prosecutors are asking a judge to send Robertson back to jail as he seems to have broken the conditions of his release.

The arrest order, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia states: “On June 29, 2021, following a lawfully authorized search of the defendant’s residence, law enforcement discovered that the defendant violated his release conditions by possessing a loaded M4 rifle and a partially-assembled pipe bomb at his home, and by purchasing an arsenal of 34 firearms online and transporting them in interstate commerce while under felony indictment, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(n). Because the defendant has shown utter disregard for the Court’s orders prohibiting his possession of firearms and other weapons during the time he has been on pre-trial release, and because he has further flouted his release conditions through repeated violations of the federal firearms laws, the defendant presents a danger to the community that no release conditions will adequately mitigate.”

According to the The Washington Post, Judge G. Michael Harvey’s release conditions included Robertson needing to “relocate” any firearms or “destructive devices or dangerous weapons” within two days of his release. Robertson was given a second chance after “authorities found eight firearms at his Ferrum, Va. home” two days past the time he was supposed to have relocated them. They also found “large amounts of ammunition” in an outbuilding on the property where Robertson lived.

According to prosecutors, while investigating Robertson for the added felony charges of his indictment, the FBI began to find evidence that he was buying and selling firearms, and possibly ammunition, online and shipping them in “interstate commerce.” This act by itself was in violation of 18 U.S. Code § 922 for unlicensed importers, manufacturers, or dealers to “engage in the business of importing, manufacturing, or dealing in firearms, or in the course of such business to ship, transport, or receive any firearm in interstate or foreign commerce.” It’s super not good when you have been released from jail pending a trial by a judge who specifically told you not to even have firearms in your possession.

The FBI got a warrant to go through Robertson’s email correspondence, where they found clear evidence of firearm purchases being negotiated, subsequent searches on Gunbroker.com (an online gun auction site), and numerous orders for firearms made between April and May of this year. All of this evidence led to a search warrant being issued and acted on at Robertson’s home on June 29. “In connection with this search, the FBI not only found evidence that Robertson had amassed an arsenal of 34 firearms through a local FFL in Roanoke, but agents also found a loaded M4 rifle, ammunition, and a partially assembled pipe bomb in Robertson’s home.”

According to the court documents, the FBI found a black box with blue tape on it that had “boobytrap” written on it. Inside of this black box was the making of a pipe bomb, sans explosive powder. Explosive “powder was found nearby in the out-building’s reloading station.” According to the prosecutors, Robertson was served the search warrant at a different location from his home and, though he was reminded he need make no statement as he had representation for the Capitol riots case: “After serving the warrant, the agents told Robertson he was free to leave. Robertson responded that he wanted to make a statement of his own accord. The agents interrupted him, noting that he was represented by counsel in the Capitol riots case. Robertson then stated that if this search warrant related to him buying guns, he had bought them online and hadn’t even picked them up yet.” 

The defense rests? According to prosecutors, the guns are located at a FFL in Roanoke (a location with a Federal Firearms License allowed to engage in the interstate or intrastate sale of firearms). The owner of the FFL told authorities that while Robertson had explained to him that he could not yet pick up the firearms because of his current bond conditions he had come by to handle the guns in person, “as recently as one week ago.”

Here’s the place where the Second Amendment meets madness. There will be people, mostly MAGA people, who will say this is no big deal, but just imagine if a person of color was charged with an illegal trespass at a Walmart, and after being released on bond, purchased 34 guns and was found with a loaded rifle and pipe bomb in his home. Would those Second Amendment patriots kvetch?

Is this all blown out of proportion? According to prosecutors, on June 10, 2021, Robertson posted screen shots of his federal charges in the Capitol riots case, on a forum on Gunbroker.com. Someone in the forum asked if he was proud, in response to which he wrote: “I sure as fuck am.” And while that’s a whatever, insecure masculine response to a thing, he reportedly followed that up by posting this:

President Joe Biden wants tax cheats to pay the federal government what they owe, an initiative that could bring in an estimated $100 billion in revenues to help fund the trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure deal announced last week.

But putting $40 billion into beefing up the IRS enforcement division—as outlined in the $1.2 trillion deal—has Senate Republicans who oppose the deal up in arms. They say equipping the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to crack down on cheaters is a bridge too far—thereby jeopardizing one of the few actual methods of funding the bipartisan deal that doesn't involve accounting gimmicks. Apparently, Republicans would rather the deal resort to hardcore deficit spending since they refuse to raise revenues by any other method, such as rolling back their wildly unpopular 2017 tax cuts to the rich and corporate-y. Honestly, it's getting difficult to take these bozos seriously, but here goes.

"Spending $40 billion to super-size the IRS is very concerning," Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, chair of the GOP conference, told Axios. "Law-abiding Americans deserve better from their government than an army of bureaucrats snooping through their bank statements," he added.

What Barrasso is objecting to here is training IRS investigators on people and corporations who are deliberately trying to cheat the system (not to mention the American people) and have the resources to do so. Instead, Barrasso would clearly rather just keep the IRS focused on smaller fish, who may have messed up some calculation on TurboTax, for instance. Why? Because the small fries aren't delivering enough to GOP campaign coffers, that's why.

"Throwing billions more taxpayer dollars at the IRS will only hurt Americans struggling to recover after waves of devastating lockdowns," said Sen. Ted Cruz, who voted against Biden's pandemic relief bill that was specifically designed to help Americans struggling to recover after waves of devastating lockdowns. Oh, and don't look now, but the economic recovery is exceeding expectations due to federal spending, no thanks to Cruz and every other congressional Republican who voted against the American Rescue Plan.

The backdrop to these GOP objections is the fact that Republicans have spent at least a decade trying to starve the agency into nonexistence, leaving even more avenues for tax evasion. From 2010 to 2018, funding for the IRS fell 20% in inflation-adjusted dollars, resulting in a 22% decline in IRS staff, according to the Washington Post. The enforcement division, in particular, was trimmed by 30% over that decade, with the ranks of those who specialize in complex investigations taking an even bigger hit. Ultimately, that led to a 40% reduction in the number of IRS investigations.

And while nearly all corporations with assets of $20 billion or more were audited in 2010, just half were audited in 2018, the [Congressional Budget Office] found.

So Republicans haven't just been trying to kneecap the IRS, they've successfully kneecapped the agency to the benefit of their donors.

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig estimates the agency is missing out on at least $1 trillion in taxes annually in terms of what the federal government is owed.

As Rettig told Congress in April, "We do get outgunned. There's no other way to say it."

Republicans want to keep it that way. And for many of them, if that tanks the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal, so much the better.

In another lifetime, Representative Anthony Gonzalez was the Ohio Republican Party’s dream candidate. Many of his future suburban-Cleveland constituents cheered for him at Byers Field when he was a high-school-football standout at St. Ignatius, and later again at the Shoe in Columbus during his star turn as an Ohio State University wide receiver. The son of a Cuban immigrant, he was a first-round NFL draft pick and went on to graduate from Stanford’s business school. Gonzalez ran for Congress in 2018 at age 33, drawing the support of insiders such as the former TimkenSteel CEO Tim Timken, whose wife, Jane, was then the state’s GOP chair.

But last January, the golden-boy shine was abruptly stripped off. Gonzalez voted to impeach former President Donald Trump, and two weeks later, Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection in 2022. The race to replace Portman started soon after, and attacking Gonzalez became a way for candidates to prove their Trump loyalty. One Senate candidate, former State Treasurer Josh Mandel, called him a “traitor” who should be “eradicated from the Republican Party.” Jane Timken, who’d said Gonzalez was “an effective legislator” and “a very good person” in the weeks immediately following his vote, reversed that opinion once she entered the Senate race and stuck her finger out to test the prevailing political winds, which tend to blow south, toward Mar-a-Lago. The pillorying of Gonzalez became a signal to a certain kind of primary voter that all that had thrilled them to Trump—his exuberant contrarianism, his chest-thumping invective—would live on in certain Senate candidates.

Ohio, once a toss-up on the electoral map, is now firmly Republican; Trump won the state by eight points in 2016 and in 2020. Still, it’s not accustomed to the kind of medical-grade Trumpism that, say, Governor Ron DeSantis serves up in Florida—at least not yet. Republican Governor Mike DeWine was an early, steady, science-led voice during the country’s initial COVID-19 response, and although Trump won Ohio with 53 percent of the vote in 2020, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown kept his seat with the same percentage of the vote in 2018. Whether Ohio Republican voters want the party’s new Trump ideology to be in-your-face loud or laundered through the bland language and bad suits of Styrofoam-cup coffee klatches remains to be seen. The latter might help win back suburban, college-educated women, but the former is much better fodder for Tucker Carlson’s show. As Dave Luketic, an Ohio GOP strategist, told me, “The party's conflicted.” It doesn't know what kind of Trumpism it wants to pursue.

[Read: The evangelical politician who doesn’t recognize his faith—or his party]

Which is why so many of its ambitious figures have decided (or are likely to decide) to throw their hats into the 2022 Senate race. In addition to Timken and Mandel, there’s hillbilly turned venture capitalist J. D. Vance, businessman Bernie Moreno, salt-of-the-earth investment banker Mike Gibbons, Representative Mike Turner, and state Senator Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Indians. The group has more than a year to feel out where the electorate’s heart lies—with the traditions of Ohio’s Republican past, or with a Trump-inflected future.

On the national level, pro-business Republicans have long dominated Ohio politics. Historically, the businessmen of Cleveland and Cincinnati—along with their lawyers and accountants—have voted for the GOP, while their working-class employees, the steel- and autoworkers, have voted for Democrats. The rise of Republicans such as Senator George Voinovich reflected the mid-20th-century shift of some white ethnic enclaves to the Republican Party after Richard Nixon's “southern strategy” traveled north, but in general, Ohio’s Republicans put on a moderate front. Governors Bob Taft and John Kasich didn’t offer much fire and brimstone. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the state’s top Republican figures in recent decades have tended to be raised Catholic—Voinovich, Kasich, and DeWine—reflecting cultural conservatism but also a certain restrained public rhetoric befitting people accustomed to praying silently on kneelers rather than loudly testifying.

Like many states, Ohio is a regional mishmash—part Midwestern farmland, part Appalachia, part industrial Northeast—but its top Republican officials mostly came from the polite suburban environs of its largest cities, some of which fancy themselves extensions of the East Coast; both Taft and Portman went to Cincinnati Country Day School, then onto the Ivy League.

But Ohio's old-school Republican brand doesn’t suit its new base. “I really think it’s the rural vote that’s going to define” the 2022 primary, a suburban Republican politico told me. Doug Deeken, the GOP chair of rural Wayne County, says the priorities of the people in his neck of the woods are simple: ”We like babies, we like guns, we like to be left alone.” Respectfully, Deeken told me, Dolan, a wealthy moderate from the Cleveland suburbs, couldn’t win a race to be dogcatcher in Wayne County.

The primary is a post-Trump stylistic experiment in bridging the gap between the old party and the new. Timken, who’s never run for office, seems dispositionally and biographically to have more in common with the party leaders of days gone by. A Harvard-educated lawyer who married into a wealthy family, she’s a major Republican donor. She gave enough to hang around at a Trump-attended April fundraising weekend in Florida, while Mandel gate-crashed the event and was asked to leave. Mandel could probably out-yell Timken in a room—he was temporarily suspended from Twitter for asking which types of “illegals” would commit more crimes: “Muslim Terrorists” or “Mexican Gangbangers”—but she has Trump bona fides to play up. “Kasich had transformed the party organization into a corrupt, anti-Trump mess,” Timken said earlier this year, bragging that she’d turned the Ohio GOP into “a well-oiled, pro-Trump machine.” Trump reportedly was tempted to endorse Timken this spring, though he’s held off for now.

Part of Timken’s appeal is that she belongs to that ebbing GOP demographic: white, college-educated women. “Very candidly, I like that she’s gender diverse,” the Cincinnati-area GOP chair, Alex Triantafilou, told me. In the shadow primary of endorsements, Timken has been doing well, picking them up from officials around the state. The 43-year-old Mandel, who is running for the Senate for a dizzying-for-his-age third time, has a lead in early polls. Much of that is likely name recognition, though, which might not end up being an advantage. The suburban Republican politico told me that Mandel’s incessant campaigning over the past decade has worn some donors out. In May, the Delaware County GOP ended its joint fundraising account with Mandel, and three of the campaign’s fundraisers left. In late June, reports came out that staffers had quit because of a toxic work environment created by Mandel’s finance director, who is also his girlfriend.

[Read: The Democrats are already losing the next election]

Meanwhile, Timken’s competition in the Trumpy-but-I-know-wine lane could be Vance, the author of the best-seller Hillbilly Elegy. Raised in a working-class town in southwest Ohio before moving on to Yale Law School and a career in finance, Vance has carefully transitioned his Never Trump Republicanism—“I can’t stomach Trump,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2016—into what might be called academic populism. These days, he tweets and writes a lot—about the birth rate, about tech companies, about how day care is bad for American children—and is a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s show, not Gross’s. Carlson, who declined to talk for this article, citing his friendship with a number of people in the race, has described Vance as “soft-spoken but really intense.” Carlson’s endorsement, implicit or not, could in some ways be as powerful as Trump’s. The nature of Republican politics is now such that local issues seem to matter less than what Fox News decides will drive the day.

Vance’s ability to exist in two worlds—that of the party’s new working-class base and that of its traditional gatekeepers—is potentially valuable code-switching. “Authenticity,” people kept telling me, is what will resonate most with Ohio voters. Vance has developed an ease with Fox’s language. “She was elected or whatever,” he said in a June segment about Vice President Kamala Harris, the “or whatever” doing quite a bit of heavy lifting. By dint of his hardscrabble upbringing, Vance could plausibly attract swaths of voters in places like the industrial Mahoning Valley, filled with Trump Democrats, and the river counties, the southeastern Appalachia-tinged places that abut the Ohio River.

Meanwhile, Mandel, who hails from Beachwood, a heavily Democratic, East Side suburb of Cleveland, has received a barrage of criticism from some close watchers of the race for what they see as his clumsy attempts to appeal to these same voters. Mandel appeared on Fox News earlier this year speaking in a bit of a downstate drawl. “In many ways he’s trying to culturally fit into where he views the party going,” Luketic told me, adding that he thinks the race is Mandel’s to lose. One story in the Cleveland press that attacked Mandel contained a line about “the mean streets of Beachwood, where shopping for a cashmere crewneck meant taking your life in your hands.” A longtime friend, who is not supporting his Senate run and thus wishes to remain anonymous, sees some of the attacks on Mandel as anti-Semitic: “Beachwood equals Jew, and Jew equals rich, and rich equals No way that person can understand the plight of the common person.”

While Vance might have the biographical resonance with the party base that Mandel has contorted himself to gain, he’s also never run for office before. The libertarian investor and Trump-backer Peter Thiel’s $10 million donation to a pro-Vance super PAC has made waves, but the fascination that Fresh Air listeners have with Vance—perverse or otherwise—doesn’t necessarily translate to electoral appeal. “Having millions of dollars in this Senate primary is just the ticket to the prom. It does not get you crowned queen or king,” Deeken told me.

[Read: Who is Trump reaching?]

The GOP base’s anger with COVID-19 regulations has only accelerated the Trumpification of Ohio’s Republican ecosystem. DeWine’s steady-Eddie pandemic stewardship irritated Trump to the point of calling for the governor to be primaried. Asked and answered: Jim Renacci, a former congressman and failed Senate and gubernatorial candidate, has announced that he will challenge DeWine, with Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale as an adviser. COVID-19 has itself become a dog whistle, a way to indicate that one is of the Trump-era Ohio Republican Party, not of the Kasich or Portman days gone by. At the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference, Mandel blamed America’s “authoritarian state” on “squishy Republican governors like my Governor DeWine”; on Fox, Vance said that “one of the things that COVID has revealed is that our public-health authorities especially are just not trustworthy.” This spring the Republican-led legislature passed a bill—and overrode DeWine’s veto—that granted it the authority to cancel the governor’s health orders.

In late June, Trump reemerged from his postelection seclusion and chose Ohio for his debut. The rally he held—specifically to stick it to Gonzalez—was Trump’s first since the January insurrection. A bevy of Senate candidates roamed the event, passing out flyers  and tailgating with supporters. During his remarks Trump took a straw poll, asking the crowd to applaud their support for Timken, Mandel, and Gibbons. According to a report from the ground, Mandel appeared to win.

Gonzalez spent the evening of the rally out to dinner with his wife. Although the past few months have been rough for him—he was officially censured by the Ohio Republican Party in May—Gonzalez has remained steadfast in his stance that Trump’s ire wouldn’t affect his chances. “The job is a legislative job,” he told Cleveland.com. “The job isn’t to go on TV and Twitter and scream and yell. The job is: How are you productive for your constituents?” At least, that’s what the job used to be.

The U.K.’s Channel 4 News aired a damning video put together by Greenpeace on Wednesday. In it Exxon lobbyists, believing they were interviewing for jobs, dished rather matter-o-factly on how they’ve pushed and supported climate denier anti-science successfully in order to water down some of the more environmentally sound infrastructure focuses in the original Biden package. Interviews with senior director of federal relations at Exxon, Keith McCoy, saying things like “Did we fight aggressively against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science?  Absolutely not.  Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing, there’s nothing illegal about that,” have led to quite a backlash.

On Wednesday, McCoy went to LinkedIn to do some damage control, writing: “I am deeply embarrassed by my comments and that I allowed myself to fall for Greenpeace’s deception. My statements clearly do not represent ExxonMobil’s positions on important public policy issues. While some of my comments were taken out of context, there is no excuse for what I said or how I said it. I apologize to all my colleagues at the company and my friends in Washington, D.C., all of whom have a right to expect better of me.” But they do represent ExxonMobil’s positions. You might have to apologize to fellow colleagues for saying it on camera to the people who don’t take the campaign checks with your boss’ moniker on it, but you told the world exactly what your job and ExxonMobil’s job is when it comes to government influence.

Admitting to lobbying against climate change isn’t shocking in itself. What is surprising is how McCoy and Dan Easley, the other Exxon lobbyist recorded by Greenpeace, openly explain with their own words coming out of their own mouths how craven and environmentally shortsighted the manipulations of our Congress by them really are. As McCoy himself explained unwittingly to Greenpeace, ExxonMobil doesn’t like having its hands publicly dirty: “We don’t want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing. It’s getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be for, the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of congress.”

They then identify and call out 11 senators considered “crucial” to securing the best interests of ExxonMobil over the people of the … entire world. Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), Jon Tester (D-MT), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), John Barrasso (R-WY), John Cornyn (R-TX), Steve Daines (R-MT), Chris Coons (D-DE), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), and Marco Rubio (R-FL) are all considered to be in the pockets of oil executives, willing to block or dilute legislation that might hurt the companies’ profit margins. Channel 4 News was able to confirm that all but Hasssan and Kelly had received money from ExxonMobil.

The way this works in real life, as the ExxonMobil lobbyist explained, is by giving Congress members ways to argue down budgets. In doing so, it makes it harder for “something on emissions reductions on climate change to oil refineries” to make it through. You argue that a highway bill shouldn’t have these reductions connected to them and a Sen. Joe Manchin can use this as part of his bullshit bipartisan platform. 

One of the more damning statements made by McCoy is that ExxonMobil’s support of a carbon tax is disingenuous by nature. According to McCoy, the chances of a real carbon tax getting legislated in the United States is so low that in supporting it, ExxonMobil is basically supporting unicorns for every child born after 2010. 

KEITH MCCOY: Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans. And the cynical side of me says yeah we kind of know that. But it gives us a talking point. We can say well what is ExxonMobil for? Well we’re for a carbon tax.

Carbon tax is not gonna happen. I have always said, and I’ve worked on climate change issues for twenty years. There’s a lot of talk around it and the bottom line is it’s going to take political courage, political will in order to get something done. And that just doesn’t exist in politics. It just doesn’t.

Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil Darren Woods released a statement that was broadcasted to Twitter on Wednesday.

Comments made by the individuals in no way represent the company’s position on a variety of issues, including climate policy and our firm commitment that carbon pricing is important to addressing climate change. The individuals interviewed were never involved in developing the company’s policy positions on the issues discussed. We condemn the statements and are deeply apologetic for them, including comments regarding interactions with elected officials. They are entirely inconsistent with the way we expect our people to conduct themselves. We were shocked by these interviews and stand by our commitments to working on finding solutions to climate change.

That’s interesting. McCoy, according to his LinkedIn profile, has been the senior director of federal relations for ExxonMobil for over seven years now. I guess ExxonMobil just let the guy act as their main lobbyist, overseeing all of their interests and voice in our Congress for the past seven years just ‘cause? An editor at Channel 4 News replied to the tweet, saying: “This was not your response to our allegations in the right to reply. More to come tonight.” Oh, goodie!

Despite the number of lives the novel coronavirus has claimed and the amount of time the world has been battling this ongoing pandemic, some Republicans just don’t get it. A new variant of COVID-19 is spreading rapidly worldwide, this one highly contagious with scientists believing it may be twice as transmissible as the original coronavirus, The New York Times reported.

But instead of acknowledging the dangers of the Delta variant, GOP representatives nationwide are continuing to downplay the severity of COVID-19, some even taking it to another level by offering unsolicited advice. In a since-deleted social media post mocking the threat of the Delta variant, Rep. Lauren Boebert said “the easiest way to make the Delta variant go away is to turn off CNN.” But the tweet doesn’t end there, she continued: “and vote Republican.”

Clearly Boebert is living in another universe, because Republicans are the ones who have both downplayed the virus and called it a hoax since the start of the pandemic. So given this trend, instead of ending the virus or making it go away, voting Republican would actually have the opposite effect.

Of course, Boebert—or someone from her team—realized how stupid the tweet really was and deleted it, but not before a screenshot could be taken and shared. Given the number of cases Colorado has of the Delta variant, especially in Mesa County, which is part of the congressional district represented by Boebert, it's no surprise Boebert received a good amount of backlash. Her comments only fuel the misinformation around the novel coronavirus and contribute to the irresponsible downplaying of it.

"Lauren Boebert proves once again that stupidity has a champion in Colorado," Colorado state lawmaker Steven Woodrow said in response.

Woodrow wasn’t the only one who called out Boebert. Others tweeted in response, noting the high rate of infections in Boebert’s own district.

The Delta variant is no joke. While those vaccinated should be protected from the variant, data shows that vaccine efficacy seems slightly lower with this variant of COVID-19, CBS News reported. Plus not everyone in the U.S. is vaccinated—specifically in the state of Colorado, the variant is spreading rapidly. Even more so in Mesa County, there has been what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers an outbreak of the Delta variant, making Boebert’s mocking of the variant even more inappropriate.

“There’s probably one big underlying reason for why we are seeing transmission in Mesa County and why other counties in Colorado might be at risk, and that is we know that the vaccination rates in Mesa County are lower than they are in certain parts of the state,” Dr. Rachel Herlihy, Colorado’s State Epidemiologist, told CBS News.

Contrary to what Boebert says, the best way to stop this variant is not to stop watching CNN or vote Republican but instead to wash your hands, practice social distancing, and wear a mask.  “That’s really going to be the best way to stop this variant like all variants of COVID-19,” Herlihy said.

Keith McCoy, a senior director of federal relations for ExxonMobil, thought he was being head-hunted for a potential major lobbying client. He ended up being an unwitting participant in a Greenpeace U.K. sting to expose how his company was targeting a core group of influential senators—many of whom are in that bipartisan gang—to weaken efforts to combat climate change in President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan.

McCoy, who's been lobbying for ExxonMobil for eight years, named 11 senators who have been "crucial" to ExxonMobil: Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Jon Tester, Maggie Hassan, Chris Coons, and Mark Kelly; and Republican Sens. John Barrasso, John Cornyn, Steve Daines, Marco Rubio, and Shelley Moore Capito. Note those Democrats, particularly. Here are the 10 Democrats who signed on to the bipartisan effort: Coons, Hassan, John Hickenlooper, Kelly, Manchin, Jeanne Shaheen, Sinema, Tester, and Mark Warner along with Independent Angus King.

How handy for ExxonMobil, huh? That their "crucial" Democrats are all in this gang intent on watering down Biden's infrastructure bill. "Joe Manchin, I talk to his office every week," McCoy boasted. "He is the kingmaker on this because he’s a Democrat from West Virginia which is [a] very conservative state, so he is, and he's not shy about sort of staking his claim early and completely changing the debate," McCoy said. "On the Democrat side we look for the moderates on these issues," he continued, pointing to Sinema, Tester, and particularly Coons.

"Senator Coons […] has a very close relationship with [President] Biden, so we’ve been working with his office—as a matter of fact our CEO is talking to him next Tuesday and having those conversations and just teeing it up, and then that way I can start working with his staff to let them know where we are on some of these issues,” McCoy said. He also targets the senators up for reelection next, posting out Kelly, Hassan, and Rubio. "I can't worry about the 2027 class because they're not focused on re-election. The 2022 [class] is focused on re-election so I know I have them […] You can have those conversations with them because they're a captive audience, they know they need you and I need them," McCoy said.

The climate change fight isn't the only reason ExxonMobil is so intent on torpedoing Biden's plan, McCoy said. They're also fighting the tax increases Biden wants to pay for it. "We're playing defense because President Biden is talking about this big infrastructure package and he's going to pay for it by increasing corporate taxes," McCoy said on the video call. If the plan could be shrunk down to just "roads and bridges," from $2 trillion to $800 billion, then the tax increases could be minimized or eliminated. "The international tax piece is for, for ExxonMobil is close to a billion dollars."

Here's who those Democrats are doing this big favor for: a company that knowingly misled the public on climate change. For decades. "Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not," McCoy said. "Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true." Did they fund those groups? Sure. "But there's nothing illegal about that," he said. "We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders."

As for Biden's efforts to slow the destruction of the planet by cutting greenhouse gas emissions? That's "insane," McCoy said on the call. It's not going to work anyway, he said, because people don't really care. "Outside like, of something like Covid where there’s this existential crisis and people rally to support each other. On something like climate change there's the forest fires, there's an increase [of] .001 Celsius, that doesn't affect people's everyday lives," he said. This call, it should be noted, happened in May. Before the northwest quadrant of North America was put under a broiler.

This is who the Democrats in that bipartisan "gang" are working for. Not you. Not your children and grandchildren. ExxonMobil. That's who.  

The burden on 50 Senate Democrats and President Joe Biden to save democracy became much heavier Thursday, and even more urgent. In a 6-3 majority opinion, the Supreme Court gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act. This was not a shocking outcome. After all, the Supreme Court had already severely damaged the landmark civil rights law back in 2013, when it gave Republican states the green light to start enacting whatever outrageous racist voter suppression laws they wished. Arizona took them up on that offer, giving the court—with three new illegitimate justices appointed by the former insurrectionist in chief—the excuse to destroy the whole of the law.

Which means the burden on the Senate goes beyond abolishing the filibuster and overruling the Supreme Court with new laws. A federal judiciary jam-packed with Donald Trump's illegitimate judges—including this Supreme Court—will make sure those laws don’t stand.

It means that Biden and Senate Democrats have to do what Republicans have shown themselves willing and capable of doing—whatever it takes—to save the nation.

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Let's talk about those three illegitimate justices Trump and Mitch McConnell installed. Neil Gorsuch is sitting in a pilfered seat. Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans shrugged off their constitutional obligation to advise and consent on judicial nominations and blockaded Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama's nominee for the highest court. They left a vacancy on that court for nearly a year in order to deny the nation's first Black president that seat. They also abolished the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees—unanimously. (Thanks, Joe Manchin, for helping them out on that vote, by the way.)

Then there was Brett Kavanaugh, who faced numerous and credible sexual assault allegations as well as an extremely shady financial situation on top of multiple perjury issues, none of which were adequately investigated during his rushed confirmation process. His experience, his temperament, his willingness to play fast and loose with the truth—all of that should have disqualified him from even being nominated. But there is no bottom to what Republicans are willing to say and do in order to win.

And finally, Amy Coney Barrett with her extremely short and extremely extreme judicial career, who was rushed onto the court in record time literally days before the presidential election and while ballots were already being cast. (Which proved again that McConnell's "principle" behind the Garland blockade was total bullshit.) She was Trump's choice because he was so certain she was going to give him the final vote he needed on the court to hand him the election. "I'm counting on them to look at the ballots, definitely," Trump said about the Supreme Court.

Now, that's court packing. That's elected Republicans being willing to do anything and everything in their power to rig the system in their favor. In return, they secured a compliant Supreme Court majority, one willing to fully embrace the Court's ingnominious Jim Crow past. This is a court majority that wants the minority of the electorate and elected officials to rule.

Republicans have proved to be absolutely ruthless and diabolically creative when it comes to eroding democracy for their own power and profit. Democrats, on the other hand, have held onto a moral superiority that is disastrously naive and self-harming. "We won't stoop to their level" might be a comforting thing to tell each other in the Democratic cloakroom in the Senate, but while they're patting themselves on the back, they're dooming themselves to irrelevancy and American democracy to the trash heap.

It's gone beyond the need to abolish the filibuster in order to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Restoration Act to overrule the Supreme Court. As essential as that is, it's not enough.

Schumer said it himself: "Failure is not an option, voting is too sacred." Well, it's time to do something about it. Don't just keep promising to fight. Actually fight. And win. 

The Supreme Court has to be reformed and it has to be expanded, period. Biden and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have to do everything in their power to make that happen. What's the point of having control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, along with the biggest bully pulpit in the world, if you won't use it to secure the future of democracy?

The conservative supermajority gives another thumbs-up to GOP voter suppression. And they're not done yet.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is attempting to enforce unity in his caucus and not for the side of law and order and democracy. Punchbowl News is reporting that at a private meeting with freshman House Republicans, he promised to blackball any of them who took a seat on the new select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. They would not receive any committee assignments from Republican leadership, McCarthy told them.

Whether that would extend to stripping any committee assignments from Republicans who accept seats on that committee—the two most likely are Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming or Adam Kinzinger of Illinois—isn't clear, but that certainly is an implied threat. To which Kinzinger had a salty response:

“I do think the threat of removing committees is ironic, because you won't go after the space lasers and white supremacist people but those who tell the truth,” he added. That would be references to Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene with her Jewish space lasers causing wildfires and, well, any number of white supremacists serving in the House, from Steve Scalise to Paul Gosar.

Meanwhile, a group of nearly 40 Democratic members are demanding that McCarthy finally take "immediate action" to deal with Greene whose behavior, they say, is directly threatening them. "Rep. Greene's conduct does not comport with what we expect from a member of the House of Representatives," the letter reads. "Moreover, we are extremely concerned that her conduct is creating an unsafe work environment for members, and that her actions could lead to violence against members of Congress."

Arizona Rep. Gosar isn't directly going after Democratic colleagues like Greene, but he's out there recruiting white nationalists and Holocaust deniers into the party. He's going to be the featured speaker at a convention of the California College Republicans, a chartered organization of the California Republican Party. "Congressman Gosar is a leader of President Trump's original movement to put Americans and our country first—before other concerns. We fully support President Trump's America first message," Dylan Martin, communications director of the California College Republicans, told the LA Times. "Hosting a sitting Member of Congress is great. Happy that a sitting Member of Congress is willing to speak to our students."

McCarthy clearly isn't going to do a damned thing on any of this. Instead of reprimanding Gosar for having it out with segregationist and Holocaust-denying Nicholas Fuentes—for serving as the keynote speaker at a Fuentes event and being featured on a fundraiser invitation with him—McCarthy excused him. He met with Gosar Tuesday evening. Gosar told him that it was fake news and McCarthy blew the whole thing off. Gosar "says he doesn't have—that it's not real. That he doesn't have anything on his schedule," McCarthy told reporters. So that's that.

He's not going to do anything to protect his Democratic colleagues. But he has already exacted retribution on Liz Cheney, who he helped oust from her leadership post for criticizing Trump, for voting to impeach him.

Because this is the Republican Party now. It's Trump's party. It's QAnon. It's the KKK without the hoods.  

America’s gun background check system, designed to keep weapons out of the hands of people who might use them in crimes, has struggled to keep up with record firearms sales over the past year — even as violent crime has risen dramatically in many U.S. cities.

In recent years, the FBI — which manages the system that vets gun buyers — processed an average of 8.6 million gun background checks annually, according to historical data analyzed by FiveThirtyEight.¹⁸ But last year, the bureau processed 12,761,328 background checks, according to FBI data obtained by FiveThirtyEight through a public records request.

Perhaps most alarming, the FBI never finished over 316,000 background checks in the first nine months of 2020 alone — far more than in any other year on record. And that number doesn’t include October, November and December — usually the busiest months for gun sales, when 3.4 million background checks were opened last year.

In other words, it’s impossible to know how many guns were sold to people in 2020 who couldn’t legally own them because those background checks were never completed.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/support-gun-control-led-legislation-77033996

Asked why it didn’t finish so many background checks in 2020, the FBI said in a statement that it “depends on the availability of relevant information and records provided by federal, state, local, and tribal agencies.” The bureau also said that it has “reallocated resources to help ensure that it can continue processing background checks efficiently.”

Gun sales have surged since April 2020, thanks, at least in part, to the pandemic, protests last summer for racial justice and the election of President Biden in November. The FBI data shows how the background check system has struggled to keep up. And, at this point, it’s unclear when the problem is going to get better.

A growing problem

The share of background checks the FBI never completes has ticked up slowly since 2014, the first year on record, when it processed 8,256,688 checks and didn’t complete 172,879, or just under 2.1 percent. 

But by 2019, the bureau was failing to complete about 2.5 percent of the background checks it processed, and it didn’t finish almost 3.4 percent in the first nine months of 2020.

Those numbers only include gun background checks run by the FBI, so they don’t count the 20 states that process some or all background checks themselves. It’s also important to remember that the number of background checks isn’t the same as the number of guns sold — many are also run when people apply for gun permits, for example, or when states check on the status of gun permit holders. A single background check can also represent multiple gun sales.

Still, the background check numbers for 2020 are staggering. 

The consulting firm Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting uses the total number of federal and state background checks to estimate how many represent actual gun sales, rather than concealed-carry permits or other processes that go through the background check system.

There were a total of more than 39.3 million federal and state background checks in 2020, according to the FBI. From that, the firm estimates that almost 23 million guns were sold last year, compared to just 13.9 million in 2019.

The firm’s chief economist, Jurgen Brauer, said he hasn’t seen anything like it in his 15 years working with the background check data.

“Nobody has,” Brauer said. “Everyone you talk with in the industry is perplexed.”

In fact, before the pandemic, gun sales were so low observers called it the “Trump slump.” But they then spiked dramatically in March 2020, and have remained high over the last year, overwhelming the background check system.

From bad to worse

Three numbers highlight the size of the problem we’re dealing with: (1) how many background checks take longer than three business days; (2) how many checks the FBI never completes; and (3) how many people who can’t legally own a gun are able to buy one anyway because of those delays.

The FBI responds to most gun background checks with an immediate “yes” or “no.” But sometimes, it has to delay the check to do more research because its records are incomplete. After three business days, the dealer can sell the gun anyway. Many, including large chains like Walmart, choose not to. But ones that do don’t have to tell the FBI about it.

In an average year, almost 275,000 background checks take longer than three business days. In 2020, there were 535,786 such checks, according to FBI data. That number doesn’t include background checks for things like concealed-carry permits or explosives licenses, which aren’t subject to the three-business-day rule.

Meanwhile, the FBI keeps researching. But after 90 days, the bureau’s regulations require it to stop work and delete the background check from its computers. To make sure it doesn’t violate that policy, the bureau actually deletes unfinished background checks on day 88 just to be safe.

In the first nine months of 2020, the FBI deleted 316,912 unfinished background checks — 3.4 percent of all the checks it processed. In an average year, it deletes about 202,000. Again, this only includes background checks that are subject to the three-business-day rule.

If the FBI discovers that the potential buyer can’t own a gun in between day three and day 88, it contacts the dealer to see if the sale went through anyway. If it did, the FBI asks the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (the ATF) to retrieve the weapon.

Between 2014 and 2019, there were on average at least 3,800 of these so-called “delayed denial” sales annually, according to ATF data obtained by the gun-control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. But there were at least 5,807 in all of 2020, according to the ATF data — the most since 2006, the first complete year on record.

There’s no evidence that delayed denial sales are a major driver of crime, and some point to the relatively small number that ATF records each year as proof that the law doesn’t need to change.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/remembering-george-floyd-year-protest-77890592

But the ATF data is just the part of the iceberg that’s above the water. The FBI does not finish most gun background checks that take longer than three business days. Because it deletes those unfinished background checks, it’s impossible to know how many would have been denied — and how many of those people were able to buy a gun anyway.

And even if the numbers are relatively small, they can have tragic consequences. In April 2015, Dylann Roof bought a .45-caliber Glock handgun a few days after the FBI delayed his background check because of incomplete records about his prior drug arrest. Two months later, Roof used the gun to kill nine people during a Bible study at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The three-business-day deadline is written into federal law. But deleting unfinished background checks after 88 days is a matter of FBI regulations and policy, according to Rob Wilcox, federal legal director for Everytown.

“There’s no law that requires the FBI to delete delayed background checks,” Wilcox said. “The regulation sets the deletion date at 90 days, and that regulation could be changed through the administrative process.”

Few answers and fewer solutions

The question of why so many background checks go unfinished, and why the numbers haven’t improved over time, doesn’t have a clear answer.

The FBI poured millions into upgrading and automating parts of the gun background check system from 2012 to 2016, and Congress passed new legislation aimed at fixing the system in 2018. But every year, the delays keep piling up.

The 2015 FBI report on Roof’s background check found that slow responses and incomplete records were the biggest cause of delays. It also singled out FBI policies that limited how inspectors from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) could do research on a background check and how the system prioritized keeping the immediate response rate at 90 percent rather than clearing the relatively small number of open cases.

The report also found that NICS had trouble handling the normal volume of background checks without resorting to an “escalation plan” that involved surging all available staff to handle background check requests.

FiveThirtyEight asked the FBI whether it has enough staff to process the current volume of background checks. In response, the bureau pointed to two-year supplemental funding it received in the fiscal year 2021 budget that it said will help pay for additional staff, IT resources and other productivity enhancements. 

“The ongoing system improvements being performed with the supplemental funding enhance the efficiency of processing gun background checks,” the bureau said in a statement.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, which represents the firearms industry, has worked to get more state and local records — especially ones related to mental health — into the background check system in order to cut down on delays. It’s also working with appropriations committees on the Hill to get more resources for NICS and the ATF, according to Lawrence Keane, the organization’s senior vice president for government and public affairs.

“They have told us they need more resources,” Keane said. “They need more bodies as well as technology, to meet the growing demands.”

“The industry wants NICS to function properly,” he added.

But others, like Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, think Congress needs to change the law so dealers can’t sell a gun without a completed background check. 

The Democratic congressman has sponsored a bill, S. 591, that would require a completed background check for a gun sale. The bill, which the National Shooting Sports Foundation opposes, is currently pending in the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Another bill, H.R. 1446, which passed the House earlier this year, would replace the three-business-day window with a 10-day window after which the potential buyer would have to certify that they’re not prohibited from owning a gun. It’s also pending in the Senate.

But as long as the filibuster stands, the hope for any new gun legislation is thin. A similar bill that passed the House during the last Congress died in the Senate. And a third bill that would have kept the FBI from deleting unfinished background checks died in the House.

Ultimately, it’s not clear what the solution is. Gun-control advocates would like to see the law changed so dealers can’t sell guns until a background check is complete. Opponents say that even with all the time in the world, the FBI can’t complete background checks if it doesn’t get the right records from state and local officials.

What is clear is that even if the current surge in gun sales wanes, as some in the industry predict, the long-term trajectory is pointing up. The question is how to build a system that can handle an ever-growing number of guns.

“One uncompleted check is a problem,” Blumenthal said in a statement, “but 316,000 uncompleted checks is a systemic failure of an already overburdened system.”

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/politics-podcast-summer-mailbag-edition-fivethirtyeight-78499147

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/republicans-starting-make-climate-agenda-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-78546775

NEW YORK — Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia are suing. Donald Trump is pushing conspiracy theories. And the final results in New York’s mayoral primary may not be known for weeks or possibly months.

The botched count of the city’s ranked-choice election results Tuesday sparked a flood of criticism and calls for reform of New York’s notorious Board of Elections — but as candidate Maya Wiley said Tuesday night, “It is impossible to be surprised.”

Like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and July 4 on Coney Island, bungled votes and the uproar that follows have become a tradition in New York where elections have long been run by a board controlled by political party machines and staffed through patronage.

The Board of Elections was forced to retract a set of mayoral primary results it published on Tuesday, admitting that staffers had accidentally included 135,000 test ballots in the numbers. The election is the first citywide contest conducted under a new system of ranked-choice voting.

“It’s broken. It’s arcane,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said of the board on Wednesday. “This is a partisan board with no accountability... They’re a relic from the past.”

The cycle of election day fumbles — followed by recriminations, hearings and investigations — has played out many times before. But New York elected officials have never taken action to overhaul the board, whose structure is dictated by state law.

In fact, de Blasio’s comments echoed those he made in October, when the elections board declined city funding to expand early voting and sites saw long lines ahead of the presidential election.

"This is the moment for change and reform. It's clearly the moment. People are angry. And they want to be involved and they're going to want to be involved next year so we gotta make it better before next year's elections,” he said at the time. “I'm going to reach out to the governor and offer a proposal for how to change things.”

He cited a bill in the state Legislature he’s backing that could “professionalize” the board’s operations, but said changing the structure of the board would require a constitutional amendment.

The board is controlled by ten commissioners, one Democrat and one Republican from each of the five boroughs’ political parties. Those commissioners in turn have authority over the board’s operations — and its hiring, with jobs at every level traditionally divvied up between the local parties.

It’s one of the last vestiges of a party machine system that dates back to Tammany Hall — with county parties having lost much of their influence over who wins local elections, but having retained control over the administration of the elections themselves.

The City Council has the authority to approve BOE commissioners, but it has not used that power to veto problematic picks — instead rubber stamping nominations by the county parties, as it did last fall with two appointees whose main qualifications were their political connections.

De Blasio is pushing two measures in the state legislature: a bill that would give the board’s executive director authority over day-to-day operations, and a state constitutional amendment that would terminate the partisan structure of the board.

Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers) vowed hearings soon.

"The situation in New York City is a national embarrassment and must be dealt with promptly and properly,” she said Wednesday in a statement. “In the coming weeks, the Senate will be holding hearings on this situation and will seek to pass reform legislation as a result at the earliest opportunity.”

The bill's sponsor, state Sen. Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan) said, "The number of screw-ups at every level of management that must have gone into the release of those incorrect numbers is mind boggling," and demanded immediate reform.

Representatives for Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) and Gov. Andrew Cuomo did not respond to questions about their positions on the legislation.

But the sense of déjà vu was palpable.

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said he hoped the “wildly, wildly incompetent error” would be enough of a humiliation to finally spur reform.

“We’ve seen some pretty bad errors before. This one seems to be a national embarrassment,” he said.

Last year, the BOE failed to send out absentee ballots in time, forcing many New Yorkers who had requested them to vote in person despite the Covid-19 pandemic or sacrifice their right to vote. The general election saw another bungle: The board mailed out some 100,000 ballots with incorrect return envelopes to voters in Brooklyn, feeding conspiracy theories by then-President Donald Trump.

Trump, who has been pushing for audits of 2020 election results based on false claims of election fraud, took the opportunity Wednesday to tee off on his hometown’s elections administrators.

“Based on what has happened, nobody will ever know who really won,” the former president said in a statement. “Watch the mess you are about to see in New York City, it will go on forever. They should close the books and do it all over again, the old-fashioned way, when we had results that were accurate and meaningful.”

The board is rife with patronage and outright nepotism: A probe by the Department of Investigation in 2013 found at least 69 BOE employees had a relative also working at the board, including two of the commissioners. That investigation came when DOI created a special unit to scrutinize the board, after finding the agency wasted millions of dollars by hiring thousands of unnecessary poll workers for an off-year election.

Ahead of the 2016 presidential primary, BOE wrongly purged over 200,000 voters from the rolls. That contest led to another round of investigations, including one by the state attorney general.

Reports of chaos at the polls — closed polling sites, broken machines, long lines and more — marred one election after another, including the 2010 state primary where new voting machines were adopted, which led to the firing of the board’s executive director; the 2012 presidential general election; and the 2018 general election for governor, where soggy ballots on a rainy day were blamed for causing jams.

De Blasio offered the board $20 million in exchange for agreeing to a series of reforms, including improving poll worker training and salaries and bringing in an outside consultant to review its operations. BOE turned the money down.

While the bungling is nothing new, the latest flub marred the city’s first attempt to choose a mayor through a new ranked-choice voting system. Critics of ranked-choice voting seized on the trouble to criticize the system, but its defenders said human error and not ranked-choice was to blame.

Ranked-choice allows voters to select up to five candidates, in order of preference. If no one gets a majority, the last-place candidate is eliminated and their votes assigned to the voter’s second choice, a process that continues until a candidate tops 50 percent.

Tuesday’s results, since retracted, were a tabulation of those elimination rounds, though they were never intended to be final because more than 124,000 absentee ballots still have to be counted. They showed front-runner Eric Adams’ lead in the Democratic primary narrowing substantially. New results released Wednesday showed roughly the same outcome.

“Our members warned the public for months that the City was ill-prepared to execute elections under the new Ranked-Choice Voting system, and the concerns they raised continue to be borne out by the facts,” the City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus said in a statement. The caucus pushed for legislation that would put ranked- choice voting, approved by public referendum in 2019, up for another referendum that could repeal it.

Adams’ campaign filed a preemptive lawsuit Wednesday in Brooklyn, asking for the opportunity to have a judge oversee the results. “Today we petitioned the court to preserve our right to a fair election process and to have a judge oversee and review ballots, if necessary,” the campaign said in a statement. “We are notifying the other campaigns of our lawsuit through personal service, as required by law, because they are interested parties. We invite the other campaigns to join us and petition the court as we all seek a clear and trusted conclusion to this election.”

Garcia's campaign filed a similar suit on Wednesday as well.

Susan Lerner, head of the good government group Common Cause, which backs ranked-choice voting, said the system’s opponents “are misguided, and they are misleading the public.”

“Many of them are in positions of power to actually effect change at the Board of Elections and reform the structure,” she said. “Instead they deflect, by pounding away at RCV rather than addressing the problems they’ve been ignoring and benefiting from.”

De Blasio did manage to find a silver lining: The city's primary was moved up to June this year instead of the fall, which leaves a lot more lead time ahead of the general election to settle on a Democratic nominee.

"If this were a September primary, we'd all be screwed right now," he said.

Joe Anuta and Sally Goldenberg contributed to this report.

Kristi Noem is sending the South Dakota National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border. Florida’s Ron DeSantis is providing law enforcement officers. Greg Abbott is vowing that Texas will build its own wall.

With Donald Trump and a dozen House Republicans joining Abbott on the border on Wednesday, the GOP is loudly signaling its conviction that immigration will be a potent political weapon ahead of the midterm elections and presidential primary in 2024.

“As an issue, I can’t think of one that’s better,” said Jeff Roe, a Republican strategist and top adviser to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2016. “One day they’re erecting a wall to keep illegal immigrants out, and the next day it’s 180,000 people coming across the border. It’s incredible. It’s just enigmatic of Biden’s failure … I mean, what the f--- is going on?”

Five years after Trump rallied Republican primary voters with his chants of “Build that wall!” the election of a Democratic president coupled with the recent increase of migrants from Latin America has afforded Republicans a new opening on border security. It’s gaining traction in advertising in Republican campaigns across the country, and it has turned the southern border into a destination for candidates seeking to burnish their conservative bona fides at home.

“It’s off the Richter scale in terms of importance for the Republican electorate,” said John Thomas, a Republican strategist who works on House campaigns across the country. “It transcends jurisdictions. So, it goes from the suburbs of Orange County to statewide in Nevada … It’s even going to be included in a judicial race I’m doing in Fort Worth.”

Republicans have reason to be optimistic about the potential of immigration as a voting issue — and a potential point of weakness for the Democratic Party. In a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll this month, voters rated immigration just behind the economy and jobs on issues of importance, a finding in line with Republicans’ internal polling. Biden’s approval rating on immigration is still above water at 52 percent, according to the poll. But that’s a weaker endorsement of Biden than on any other subject measured, from the economy to crime and response to the coronavirus.

A Morning Consult survey last month suggested Democrats may be on even shakier ground, with disapproval of Biden’s handling of immigration outpacing approval 48 percent to 42 percent.

Whit Ayres, the longtime Republican pollster, called immigration “one of the top three vulnerabilities of the administration.” Dave Carney, the Republican strategist who advises Abbott, described the Biden administration’s management of the border as a political “gift,” while Shawn Steel, a Republican National Committee member from California, predicted immigration and crime will be the “twin drivers” of Republicans’ midterm campaigns.

“Democrats couldn’t have asked for worse timing,” Steel said. “It’s the volume, it’s the lack of control … You’re seeing a border that wasn’t even an issue in 2020 coming to the forefront.”

Nowhere is the issue more resonant than Texas, the border state where Trump appeared Wednesday beside Abbott, with the former president accusing Democrats of either being “incompetent” on border security or favoring “open borders.” Customs and Border Protection reported more than 180,000 migrant encounters at the border in May, up from about 23,000 in the same month in 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, and about 144,000 in May 2019.

Before Trump’s visit, the RNC bracketed Vice President Kamala Harris’ visit to the border at El Paso last week with mobile billboards criticizing the “Biden-Harris Border Crisis,” and a newspaper ad in McAllen, a border city of more than 140,000 people, painted Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) as complicit in what it called Biden’s “open borders agenda.” In a state whose electorate ranks immigration and border security above even the economy and the coronavirus as the most important problem facing the state, Republicans believe Democrats are especially vulnerable on the issue.

But GOP spending patterns suggest immigration resonates far beyond Texas or other border states. In Ohio, former Rep. Steve Stivers aired ads this month endorsing state Rep. Jeff LaRe to succeed him, pairing video of border wall construction with a promise that LaRe, among other reasons to elect him, would work to “strengthen our borders.” In Pennsylvania, Republican Jeff Bartos, a real estate developer running for the state’s open Senate seat, is putting out list-building digital ads asserting the state’s taxpayers “shouldn’t foot the bill for Biden’s Border Crisis.”

“There’s a reason why Trump got elected,” said Carl Fogliani, a Republican strategist based in Pittsburgh. “It’s the dominant issue. It’s obvious.”

In Arizona, Republican Jim Lamon, a businessperson running in the 2022 campaign to challenge Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, aired TV ads this month featuring footage of immigrants jumping border barriers — a throwback to the controversial, grainy footage of immigrants streaming across the U.S.-Mexico border that then-California Gov. Pete Wilson employed in his 1994 re-election campaign.

A similar digital ad campaign by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors reducing overall immigration, is even more explicit, employing the same opening line as Wilson used in his infamous ad: “They keep coming.” The ad is running in 20 markets, according to the group, targeting Democratic lawmakers for “encouraging illegal immigration,” a claim Democrats deny. Republicans believe the issue works in their favor not just in districts near the border, but in competitive races everywhere, lumping it in with broader law and order concerns.

There is a risk that Republicans might go too far. Wilson’s messaging around immigration in 1994 — including with his championing of Prop. 187, the initiative to restrict services to undocumented immigrants — was widely seen as contributing to the Republican Party’s decline with Latino voters in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2018, Republicans pleaded unsuccessfully with Trump ahead of the party’s midterm shellacking to focus less on the border and more on the economy. And two years later, it was not immigration, but Trump’s working-class economic message, that helped him to make marginal gains with Latino voters.

“Trump had literally created a roadmap of incremental gains with Hispanic voters by not being racially aggressive and by leading with economic populism, and now you have the Republican Party backtracking on it,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project before stepping down in December.

In the party’s current push on immigration, he said, “They risk losing whatever incremental gains they made with Latino voters that will be necessary to hold the House ... Instead of talking about economic populist messages, which Trump did to marginal success in 2020, they’re choosing a 2018 model instead of a 2020 model. It doesn’t make sense.”

The Biden administration has said Trump’s immigration policies were both ineffective and inhumane. Harris said at the border last week that the administration is focused on “root causes” of migration, including violence and lack of economic opportunity in other countries, and during a trip to Guatemala this month told migrants directly “do not come” to the border. And many Republicans acknowledge that Trump’s harsh rhetoric about “rapists” and “criminals” crossing the border was unhelpful in the midterm elections.

For that reason, having Trump at the border this week might not ultimately benefit the party. But there is widespread agreement among Republican strategists that the issue of immigration itself will.

In 2018, Thomas said, Republicans paid a price for Trump’s rhetoric with voters who “were concerned about the way he framed the issue and vilified immigrants.”

Without Trump in office, Thomas said, “There’s not a figurehead at the top who is using inflammatory language that might turn off those voters that actually do want border enforcement but don’t want the vilification of human beings.”

Yay is "helping"

In what's been dubbed the "Great Resignation," a whopping 95% of workers are now considering changing jobs, and 92% are even willing to switch industries to find the right position, according to a recent report by jobs site Monster.com. CNBC reports: Most say burnout and lack of growth opportunities are what is driving the shift, Monster found. "When we were in the throes of the pandemic, so many people buckled down, now what we're seeing is a sign of confidence," said Scott Blumsack, senior vice president of research and insights at Monster. Already, a record 4 million people quit their jobs in April alone, according to the Labor Department. At the same time, there are more opportunities for job seekers -- with the Labor Department reporting a record 9.3 million job openings as of the latest tally. "The number of open jobs is higher than ever before, that's absolutely contributing to why candidates are putting their toe in the water to see what's out there," Blumsack said. As Covid vaccinations gain steam, so are plans to return to the office, which is driving more workers to consider their options. In a survey of more than 350 CEOs and human resources and finance leaders, 70% said they plan to have employees back in the office by the fall of this year -- if not sooner -- according to a report by staffing firm LaSalle Network. Of the companies that are planning for office reentry, managing employees who want to continue working remotely is a top concern, LaSalle Network found. "If we see a wave of employees leaving, companies are going to have to figure it out," Reitan said. The report goes on to cite a separate survey from McKinsey that says 9 out of 10 organizations will now be combining remote and on-site working.

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The court decision freeing Bill Cosby is a train wreck. It’s also probably correct.

Bill Cosby, the disgraced comedian who was convicted of sexual assault in 2018, is no longer in prison, due to a state supreme court decision in Commonwealth v. Cosby.

The circumstances that freed him involve a stunning display of prosecutorial incompetence, a divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court that split three ways on what should become of Cosby, and a long, rambling judicial opinion that is often difficult to parse.

The thrust of that opinion is that, even though then-Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor never reached a formal agreement with Cosby that granted him immunity from prosecution, a press release that Castor sent out in 2005 — combined with Cosby’s later, incriminating testimony in a civil lawsuit — had the same effect as a formal immunity deal.

That decision — which, again, attaches a simply astonishing amount of legal weight to a 16-year-old press release — is less ridiculous than it sounds. It does not exonerate Cosby; it merely strikes down his conviction on constitutional grounds. Justice David Wecht’s majority opinion is poorly organized and, at times, quite difficult to follow. But it is rooted in basic principles of contract law that will be familiar to most first-year law students.

The court owed the public, and especially victims of sexual assault, a clearer explanation of why it decided to free Cosby. Though accusations against the former entertainer came to light before the Me Too movement began, he was, as Vox’s Anna North explained, “one of the first high-profile men to face criminal consequences for sexual misconduct” since the movement gained steam. The court’s often-confounding opinion muddies this case’s place in history and may contribute to sexual assault victims’ sense that reporting the crimes against them won’t lead to justice.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean the court’s decision was wrong as a matter of law. Six members of the seven-justice Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed that Cosby’s conviction must be tossed out, although only Wecht and three other justices agreed that the state should not be allowed to retry Cosby.

Mark Makela/Getty Images

Sixty women accused Cosby of sexual assault, but he was ultimately convicted of assaulting just one of those women, Andrea Constand.

It’s possible that some other prosecutor will pursue a case involving one of Cosby’s 59 other accusers. But, barring an unlikely intervention by the US Supreme Court, Wecht is likely to have the final word on Cosby’s conviction for assaulting Constand.

That conviction is now dead, and likely to remain so.

Cosby was convicted of sexually assaulting Constand after drugging her

Andrea Constand is a former professional basketball player who formed a personal relationship with Cosby while she was directing Temple University’s women’s basketball program. Cosby invited her to his home, invited her family to his standup performances, and offered to help Constand launch a career in sports broadcasting. As P.R. Lockhart reported for Vox in 2018, “In 2004, Constand alleged that Cosby drugged and molested her during an incident at his home. The accusations were the subject of a civil lawsuit in 2005 and a criminal trial in 2017.”

Per the suits, during a visit to Cosby’s home in 2004, Cosby convinced Constand to take three pills containing some sort of sedative (Cosby claims that the pills were Benadryl). Shortly thereafter, Constand became weak and unable to move or speak. She also started slipping in and out of consciousness.

Then, while Constand was unable to tell Cosby “no” or physically attempt to stop him, he touched her breasts and inserted his fingers into her vagina. Cosby also used Constand’s hand to masturbate himself.

This incident also fit a pattern. At the criminal trial where Cosby was convicted of assaulting Constand, five other women testified that Cosby had also sexually assaulted them. Several of them testified that Cosby offered to mentor them or otherwise indicated that he could help their careers. And all of them testified that he gave them drugs, alcohol, or both to prevent them from resisting when he attacked them.

Prosecutors did not bring charges against Cosby until 2015, however, more than a decade after he assaulted Constand. Part of the reason is that Constand did not come forward with her allegations against Cosby until 2005, about a year after she was assaulted.

But an even more significant reason is that Castor, the district attorney, did not believe he could secure a conviction if he’d brought charges against Cosby in 2005.

Castor’s ill-conceived press release, and its aftermath

After a month-long investigation into Constand’s allegations against Cosby, Castor decided not to bring charges. Yet, according to Wecht’s majority opinion, Castor still “contemplated an alternative course of action that could place Constand on a path to some form of justice.”

That path: civil court.

Under the Fifth Amendment, no one may be “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” But if a potential criminal defendant is given immunity from prosecution, they may be compelled to testify against themselves in a civil trial. So, as Castor later explained, he decided “that Mr. Cosby would not be prosecuted no matter what,” thinking Constand would have a better shot at justice in civil court. With the threat of prosecution removed, “that then made it so that [Cosby] could not take the Fifth Amendment ever as a matter of law.”

But Castor never reached a formal immunity agreement with Cosby, and Pennsylvania law typically requires a district attorney to “request an immunity order from any judge of a designated court” before such an agreement is finalized.

David Maialetti/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Instead, Castor sent a press release in February 2005 announcing that “the District Attorney finds insufficient credible and admissible evidence exists upon which any charge against Mr. Cosby could be sustained beyond a reasonable doubt.” The press release claimed that “a conviction under the circumstances of this case would be unattainable.”

Less than a month later, Constand filed a civil suit against Cosby, which she eventually settled for $3.38 million. But Cosby and Castor didn’t reach a formal immunity agreement during the year and a half while this case was being litigated either. During that suit, Cosby sat for four depositions and testified about his interactions with Constand. He also admitted that, in the past, he’d given Quaaludes, a sedative drug, to women with whom he wanted to have sex.

According to Wecht, “From the perspective of Cosby’s attorneys, the district attorney’s decision legally deprived Cosby of any right or ability to invoke the Fifth Amendment,” and “not once during the four depositions did Cosby invoke the Fifth Amendment or even mention it.”

Castor stepped down as district attorney in 2008 following his election to another office (Castor is a prominent Pennsylvania Republican, who briefly served as the state’s acting attorney general in 2016 and eventually represented then-President Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial), and his successor, Risa Vetri Ferman, decided to reopen the Cosby investigation in 2015.

Significantly, Ferman made the decision to reopen the investigation after a federal judge unsealed Cosby’s depositions, suggesting she may have based that decision on information Cosby revealed while testifying during the civil trial. Moreover, as Justice Kevin Dougherty notes in a partial dissent, Ferman’s office used “the evidence obtained in the civil case concerning Cosby’s ‘use of drugs to facilitate his sexual exploits’” against Cosby at his criminal trial.

And that brings us to the legal reason the state supreme court eventually tossed out Cosby’s conviction.

Wecht’s opinion is rooted in the idea that prosecutors must be bound by their own promises

In order to understand Wecht’s opinion, it’s helpful to understand a few basic contract law principles.

Ordinarily, in order for two parties to be bound by a contract, certain elements must be present. One party has to make the other an offer, and the other party needs to accept that offer. There also must be “consideration,” meaning each party has to agree to give something up to the other one. Under a doctrine known as “promissory estoppel,” however, a court will sometimes dispense with these requirements if one party makes a promise to the other, and the second party relies on that promise to their detriment.

Here’s a fairly basic example of how promissory estoppel works: When I started law school, a school official told the incoming class that the university would not enforce parking restrictions during the first week of classes. I relied on this promise, parked in a lot that I was ordinarily not allowed to park in, and received a ticket. After I complained to the university, they rescinded the ticket, because I’d relied on the university’s promise and suffered as a result.

According to Wecht, Castor’s 2005 press release functions much like my law school’s promise not to ticket me if I parked in the wrong lot. Cosby, moreover, relied on Castor’s alleged promise not to prosecute him by declining to assert his Fifth Amendment rights during his civil trial. And Cosby relied on that alleged promise very much to his own detriment. Not only did he reveal incriminating information during his civil depositions — testimony that was used against him in a criminal trial — but he also later settled the case for millions of dollars.

There are a number of weaknesses in Wecht’s arguments. For one thing, as Wecht acknowledges in his opinion, Pennsylvania law typically requires prosecutors to seek a formal order from a judge if they want to grant immunity from prosecution to a particular individual. And the 2005 press release doesn’t exactly contain explicit language to the effect of “I promise that this office will never bring a prosecution against Bill Cosby.”

As Justice Thomas Saylor writes in a dissenting opinion:

I read the operative language [of the press release] — “District Attorney Castor declines to authorize the filing of criminal charges in connection with this matter” — as a conventional public announcement of a present exercise of prosecutorial discretion by the temporary occupant of the elected office of district attorney that would in no way be binding upon his own future decision-making processes, let alone those of his successor.

Wecht, meanwhile, replies that prosecutors must be held to a higher standard. “As prosecutors are vested with such ‘tremendous’ discretion and authority,” he writes in the court’s majority opinion, “our law has long recognized the special weight that must be accorded to their assurances.”

In any event, Saylor was the sole dissenter on this point. All six other justices agreed that Castor’s press release should be read as a promise. As Dougherty writes in his partial dissent:

By publicly announcing that appellant William Cosby would not be charged with any crimes related to Andrea Constand — a decision apparently made, in part, to force Cosby to testify in Constand’s future anticipated civil suit — former Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor intended to, and in fact did, force Cosby to give up his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Then, years later, Castor’s successor used the damaging evidence Cosby turned over in the civil case to convict him of the same criminal offenses he had previously been induced to believe were off the table. I am constrained to agree with the majority that due process does not permit the government to engage in this type of coercive bait-and-switch.

It should be noted that neither Wecht’s nor Dougherty’s opinion suggests that any statement by a prosecutor who declines to bring a certain prosecution prevents them, or their successor, from changing their mind later. Rather, Cosby prevailed because he relied on Castor’s previous statement and abandoned his Fifth Amendment rights during the civil lawsuit.

So what’s the remedy?

One of the weakest parts of Wecht’s majority opinion is the final part of his reasoning, where he concludes that the state is permanently barred from retrying Cosby for assaulting Constand.

The thrust of this section of Wecht’s opinion is that the state’s treatment of Cosby was so egregious that it demands an extreme remedy. “It bears repeating that D.A. Castor intended his charging decision to induce the waiver of Cosby’s fundamental constitutional right,” Wecht writes. He adds that “under these circumstances, neither our principles of justice, nor society’s expectations, nor our sense of fair play and decency, can tolerate anything short of compelling the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office to stand by the decision of its former elected head.”

That decision, of course, was the decision to never bring charges against Cosby.

Dougherty, meanwhile, sketches out a more moderate approach in his partial dissent. “It is not the mere fact that another district attorney sought to prosecute Cosby after Castor made an unauthorized (and invalid) declaration there would be no such prosecution that resulted in the due process violation,” Dougherty writes. Rather, it was the prosecution’s use of information obtained at the civil trial to convict Cosby.

Accordingly, the appropriate remedy, according to Dougherty, should be to allow the state to retry Cosby but to also bar the prosecution from using any evidence gleaned from his civil trial. (The court’s decision might also prevent the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office from using Cosby’s civil testimony to charge him for the alleged assault of his other accusers, although it’s far from clear that the decision would impact other prosecutors.)

Lucas Jackson-Pool/Getty Images

Given the unusual facts of this case, it’s hard to say who is correct in this dispute. No member of the court doubts that Cosby committed a serious crime, and his release is likely to retraumatize many of his victims. At the same time, it’s not at all clear that Ferman, Castor’s successor, would have agreed to reopen the investigation into Cosby had she not learned what was in his civil depositions.

If she would not have acted but for Cosby’s belief that his civil testimony could not be used against him, it is much more reasonable to argue that the entire criminal trial was the fruit of a poisoned tree.

The court owed everyone a better explanation

Having done my best to explain why Bill Cosby is now a free man, I want to conclude with a few observations about Wecht’s majority opinion. I’ve probably read hundreds, if not thousands, of judicial opinions in my career, and purely as a matter of judicial craftmanship, Wecht’s is one of the worst.

Wecht’s opinion rambles for 79 pages. It includes long and unnecessary block quotes that take up several pages. It is duplicative, sometimes repeating unimportant facts three or four times, while it simultaneously places little emphasis on essential parts of the case.

Having now read all the opinions in the Cosby case, I’ve concluded that the majority is likely correct that Cosby’s conviction should be tossed out. The single most important fact in this case, in my opinion, is that prosecutors used Cosby’s civil testimony against him in a criminal proceeding, even after they induced him to testify as if he were immune to prosecution.

But that fact receives frightfully little attention in Wecht’s opinion. I will confess that I was not even aware of it until I read Dougherty’s partial dissent, which, unlike the majority opinion, emphasizes this crucial fact in its first paragraph.

The price of living under the rule of law is that the law must apply equally to everyone. If a conviction violates the Constitution, it must be tossed out. The fact that the law protects everyone, even loathsome men like Bill Cosby, is what guarantees each of us that the law will protect us should we ever need it.

But the rule of law also depends on individual citizens believing that judges are applying the law fairly. When a court issues an unpopular decision, especially in a case as fraught as this one, it needs to explain its reasoning clearly.

Wecht’s opinion, frankly, does not clear that low bar. He owed us a better opinion.

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Donald Rumsfeld, the controversial and hard-charging secretary of defense who planned and oversaw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and pushed to rapidly modernize the military, has died. He was 88.

Rumsfeld passed away surrounded by relatives in Taos, N.M., his family said in a statement on Wednesday. The cause was multiple myeloma, a family spokesperson confirmed.

“History may remember him for his extraordinary accomplishments over six decades of public service, but for those who knew him best and whose lives were forever changed as a result, we will remember his unwavering love for his wife Joyce, his family and friends, and the integrity he brought to a life dedicated to country,” the family said in the statement.

Rumsfeld held the distinction of serving two nonconsecutive terms as head of the Defense Department, first under President Gerald Ford and then, a quarter-century later, under President George W. Bush.

After entering the Pentagon in 2001 with ambitious plans to change how the military does business and develop new weapons systems incorporating emerging commercial technologies, Rumsfeld was instead forced to pivot to managing the grinding insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. That often uncoordinated effort led to a string of disasters — including U.S. forces torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and mounting casualties to underequipped U.S. troops — that resulted in his firing in 2006.

Rumsfeld graduated from Princeton University in 1954 with a degree in political science and went on to serve in the Navy for three years. The Illinois native launched a campaign for Congress in Illinois’ 13th Congressional District, winning in 1962 at the age of 30 and getting reelected three times. He was a leading co-sponsor of the Freedom of Information Act.

He served under several presidents, starting with Richard Nixon. He was appointed to the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969, then served as counselor to the president. He also headed Nixon’s Economic Stabilization Program before being appointed as ambassador to NATO.

In 1974, after Nixon’s resignation, Rumsfeld returned to Washington to serve as Ford’s chief of staff. When Ford later appointed him secretary of defense, Rumsfeld recruited Dick Cheney, his young former staffer and a staunch ally, to take over the White House role.

As the secretary of defense who, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, oversaw the push into Afghanistan and Iraq, Rumsfeld didn’t live to see the end of either war. The last U.S. troops aren’t expected to leave Afghanistan until later this summer, and several thousand remain in Iraq with no end in sight.

Those wars are only now winding down for U.S. forces two decades later, with the last American troops expected to leave Afghanistan by early July — just days after his passing. In total, 4,400 U.S. forces were killed in Iraq and another 32,000 wounded, with 2,200 dead and 21,000 wounded in Afghanistan.

The irony is that Rumsfeld sought to limit the size of both wars by looking for ways to conduct them cheaply and quickly, a push that had long-term disastrous effects as U.S. forces struggled to understand the enemy and develop effective plans to counter the clearly growing insurgencies.

From the early days of planning for the invasion of Iraq and continuing years into the fight, Rumsfeld rejected suggestions that the country could turn into a long, grinding counterinsurgency fight. During regular combative Pentagon news conferences, he famously quipped that “stuff happens” when Baghdad descended into chaos after the dictator Saddam Hussein fell, and years later he still refused to call local fighters “insurgents.”

Rumsfeld even dismissed the rise of roadside bombs that were tearing through poorly armed American Humvees and killing scores of Americans.

“As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” he said in 2004. “You can have all the armor in the world on a tank, and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee, and it can be blown up.”

A consummate Washington insider, Rumsfeld was adept at playing the bureaucracy, and at the Pentagon he became infamous for issuing hundreds of “snowflakes,” short directives and memos across the department that contained everything from direct orders to musings on press conference etiquette and complaints that career officials were slowing him down.

He walked in the front door of the Pentagon with his eyes firmly fixed on what he envisioned would be a historical modernization of the department, and a sweeping upgrade of the weapons the military takes into combat. But the Sept. 11 attacks and the beginning of two wars — only now ending for U.S. troops — frustrated his ambitions.

As defense secretary from 2001 until his firing in 2006 in the wake of a disastrous midterm election for the Republicans, Rumsfeld also pushed billions of dollars into military modernization projects — many of which ended up flaming out after investing in unproven ideas.

The abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba were among some of the most consequential controversies of his tenure.

New York City mayoral contender Kathryn Garcia said Wednesday she is “concerned” that the recent ballot counting snafu by the city’s Board of Elections could undermine confidence in the electoral system.

“I am concerned that it undermines people's confidence. There is no one on my team or where we've been doing observations of opening of ballots that gives us concern that there is something fraudulent happening at all. But we need to make sure that the vote is protected and that we get the result that New Yorkers went to the polls or mailed in at the end of the day,” Garcia told CNN's "New Day" on Wednesday. "I am really hopeful it won't [produce conspiracy theories]. It seems like this was a straightforward mistake, but we will definitely be watching and monitoring as we go forward.”

After ranked-choice votes were tabulated on Tuesday, Garcia, the former commissioner of the city’s Department of Sanitation, trailed the leading candidate, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, by just 2 points. Hours later, the Board of Elections, long plagued by understaffing and underfinancing, admitted it had failed to remove 135,000 test ballots from its tabulation and withdrew those results from its website. There are also more than 120,000 absentee ballots that need to be counted.

Voting experts warned the Board of releasing preliminary results piecemeal and ranked-choice voting supporters are concerned the vote discrepancy opens a window for criticism of the system. The mayoral primary is New York City’s first election featuring ranked-choice voting.

Former President Donald Trump took a swipe at the Board of Elections’ mistake, suggesting a return to “old-fashioned” elections and using the snafu to float his disproved conspiracy theories that last year's presidential election was stolen from him.

“They should close the books and do it all over again, the old-fashioned way, when we had results that were accurate and meaningful,” he said in a statement.

Suppliers that want to land Amazon as a client for their goods and services can find that its business comes with a catch: the right for Amazon to buy big stakes in their companies at potentially steep discounts to market value. The Wall Street Journal: The technology-and-retail giant has struck at least a dozen deals with publicly traded companies in which it gets rights, called warrants, to buy the vendors' stock in the future at what could be below-market prices, according to corporate filings and interviews with people involved with the deals. Amazon over the past decade also has done more than 75 such deals with privately held companies, according to a person familiar with the matter. In all, the tech titan's stakes and potential stakes amount to billions of dollars across companies that provide everything from call-center services to natural gas, and in some cases position Amazon among the top shareholders in those businesses. The unusual arrangements offer another window into how Amazon uses its market heft to increase its wealth and clout. The company has been under growing scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers over its competitive practices, including with companies it partners with. While the deals can benefit the suppliers by locking in big contracts, which can also boost their share prices, executives at several of the companies said they felt they couldn't refuse Amazon's push for the right to buy the stock without risking a major contract. The deals in some cases also give Amazon rights such as board representation and the ability to top any acquisition offers from other companies. For Amazon, the arrangements give it a piece of the potential upside the vendors can get from doing business with one of the world's biggest companies.

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A justice who tries to be apolitical only exacerbates the political stakes. It's time for the system to change.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned Bill Cosby's sexual assault conviction on Wednesday and barred further prosecution in the matter, meaning Cosby is now being freed after serving just two years of a three- to 10-year sentence. The court based its decision on a supposed nonprosecution deal with former Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor, ruling that the incriminating evidence on which Cosby was convicted—a deposition in a civil suit by Andrea Constand, the woman Cosby raped in this particular case, though far from his only victim—would not have happened if Castor hadn’t promised Cosby he was free from the threat of prosecution and therefore could not invoke the Fifth Amendment.

If the name Bruce Castor sounds familiar, it’s because he was previously seen embarrassing himself on the national stage in 2021 as Donald Trump's least competent impeachment defense attorney.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to overturn this conviction based on Castor’s promise of nonprosecution drew the support of six out of seven justices, with one dissenting in full. Two of the justices, however, concurred with that decision while dissenting from the ruling that Cosby can never be prosecuted for this crime—something that could have been done while suppressing the evidence that emerged because of Cosby’s reliance on the nonprosecution pledge.

The concurring and dissenting opinion clearly lays out one of the key issues: “Significantly, none of this authority or our case law interpreting it remotely purports to grant to district attorneys the power to impose on their successors—in perpetuity, no less—the kind of general non-prosecution agreement that Castor sought to convey to Cosby. It’s not difficult to imagine why: If district attorneys had the power to dole out irrevocable get-out-of-jail-free cards at will and without any judicial oversight, it would invite a host of abuses. And it would ‘effectively assign pardon power to District Attorneys, something this Court has already rejected as unconstitutional.’”

Cosby’s argument that Castor had given him an eternal get-out-of-jail-free card was already brought up in Cosby's trial and rejected by the judge there, based in part on the fact that no such agreement existed in writing.

“There’s no other witness to the promise,” the judge in that case said to Castor’s effort to convince him that the agreement was a real thing. “The rabbit is in the hat and you want me at this point to assume: ‘Hey, the promise was made, judge. Accept that.’”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court disagreed, and disagreed to the extent that Cosby is now in no danger of facing justice beyond the time he has already served.

State Rep. Jim Walsh of Aberdeen, Washington, decided to make a spectacle of himself this past weekend. First reported on by the Seattle Times, Walsh showed up at a Lacey church basketball gym to give a speech to “conservative activists” while wearing a yellow star affixed to his shirt. The yellow Star of David was a symbol that Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis in order to identify them. Many of the Jews forced to wear this yellow symbol were exterminated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Walsh, who is not Jewish, gave a speech about “Constitutional rights” to a group of about 100 conservatives and told them you have the “right to live as you choose to live it.” It turns out that the anchor for Walsh’s speech is that anti-vaxxer activism is the result of the American dream and proves the integrity of the conservative movement.* In the comments on the Facebook page where the video was posted, Walsh responded to someone asking about the “yellow star on Jim’s shirt,” explaining: “It’s an echo from history ... In the current context, we’re all Jews.” Walsh also wrote in the comments to “see my note below.” 

*Like the Jan. 6 insurgency, when conservatives tried to overthrow the results of our country’s elections.

Walsh’s “note below” was another response he made to a similar comment, writing: “During WWII, when the Nazis told the Danes that Danish Jews had to wear yellow stars, the Danes ALL wore yellow stars. So the Nazis couldn't ID the Danish Jews. It worked. The Nazis focused their evil efforts elsewhere.” Trying to analogize public health officials’ pushes for Americans to get free vaccinations—proven to literally save the lives of anybody of any race, creed, or religion—against the global pandemic that has been raging for more than a year and a half with Nazis creating identification symbols for Jewish citizens in areas the Nazis had invaded for the purpose of later “deporting” them to concentration camps where they would be exterminated ... is offensive. 

It’s offensive to the millions of Jews murdered during the Holocaust, and the millions more Jews whose families were destroyed by the Holocaust. It is offensive to history. It isn’t even a real thing. Just like the myth of self-determination that racists and antisemitic slanderers like Walsh believe, the myth that the Danes all wore yellow stars in solidarity—or that King Christian X of Denmark wore a yellow star in solidarity with his countrymen—is just that: a myth. The myth has some truth to it in that when the Nazis occupied Denmark, the Danish did not turn their backs on their Jewish brothers and sisters. But this easy-to-digest oversimplification of how people struggle against history and form solidarity in the face of real fascism is bogus.

Dee Simon, executive director of Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity, told the Seattle Times: “Our government is making an effort to protect their own citizens, not kill them.” This is the seemingly simple-to-understand reason why Walsh’s theatrics are deeply offensive to so many people. On Tuesday, Walsh said that he had been given the star by someone at the conservative-organized event and that “most attendees were wearing one.” Funny how all of those Germans, Hungarians, Polish, Slovakians, Romanians, Croatians, Bulgarians, French, Italians, and Norwegians wearing swastikas during the 1930s and the 1940s said pretty much the same thing in my recollection.

While the state of Washington has not mandated vaccinations against COVID-19, it has created a requirement that businesses that want to lift their mask requirements must also verify that their employees are vaccinated.

“I won’t say publicly whether I am vaccinated or not,” Walsh said, likening his stance to the film “Spartacus,” in which former slaves, under threat of crucifixion, refuse to identify the title character to a Roman general.

Walsh also likened any disparate treatment of unvaccinated people to the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld “separate but equal” racial segregation laws targeting African Americans.

Walsh’s rhetoric isn’t rooted in anything more than a whitewashing of history, placing himself and mostly white people on the receiving end of the foot of oppression. The irony of course is that at every point in the history Walsh is coopting for his political gain, a person almost identical to Walsh was the oppressing force. When it was mentioned to Walsh that the appropriation of such a serious symbol of hatred and oppression and unimaginable violence might just be considered offensive to lots of people, Walsh gave this third-grader’s response: “Some people are offended by having to provide vaccine documentation at their work.”

This analogy only works if in providing vaccine documentation to your workplace you were subjected to being arrested, having all of your possessions taken from you, your family split up, and then were forced to work on a labor camp until you were murdered by the state—violently. That’s what the yellow Star of David meant to Jews during the Holocaust. That was in fact the purpose of those yellow stars in the first place: to mark people for extermination.

There will be no placating Trump's anger, no matter how hard Republicans try.

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American, Delta, and United spent a year laying off workers. Now the airlines need them back.

The airlines are no longer desperate. Gone are the pandemic-era flight deals, flexible booking policies, and open middle seats. Millions of Americans are traveling again, as the weather warms (in some parts of the US) and vaccination rates rise. This is cause for optimism. The joys of normal life — summer vacations and guilt-free social gatherings — are on the horizon. But first, the airport.

Travel is back, and so are its all-too-many inconveniences: long security lines, pissed-off passengers, boarding mishaps, and random airline fees. It’s not good news for summer travelers, especially those with trips booked around Independence Day, so plan accordingly for all of the above. And it isn’t just that rowdy travelers might be acting up. From a logistical standpoint, things have actually gotten worse.

The number of flyers daily in the US is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels, even though business and international travel have been slow to resume. Airlines and airports have struggled to accommodate this influx, which has resulted in longer customer service wait times, significant flight delays, and sudden cancellations. In some cities, airport concession stands and restaurants aren’t fully staffed or open, leaving stranded travelers with fewer options for food and beverages.

Industry executives have attributed such inconveniences to bad weather and, perhaps more vaguely, “labor shortages.” A May memo from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to its employees warned that over 100 of America’s largest airports will struggle with staffing shortages and asked office workers to assist with airport security on a volunteer basis. Delta’s CEO was concerned about staffing enough contracted workers for the summer. American Airlines recently announced plans to cancel hundreds of flights in July, citing “unprecedented weather,” a spike in travel demand, and a dearth of workers. Skift, a news site on the travel industry, predicted a summer full of subpar domestic travel experiences — from elbow-to-elbow seating on flights to sold-out destinations — as a result of the labor shortage.

Republican lawmakers and business leaders have used similar language to describe America’s slow job recovery. They’ve blamed the worker shortage on generous unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, claiming that people would rather stay at home and receive government aid than apply for jobs, a theory rejected by economists. According to the Washington Post’s Heather Long, America is undergoing a “great reassessment of work,” as people consider changing their industry or seek out higher-paying, stable jobs that are less public-facing. Regardless of the reason, America’s labor market is still far from normal, and certain sectors are recovering at different rates.

After a year spent slashing jobs, airlines and aviation subcontractors are now back on the hiring train. It’s not enough to hire back workers; those workers need to undergo training and security clearances. “For airlines, you just don’t go out and hire somebody,” Mike Boyd, an aviation consultant, told Yahoo Finance. “If you’re going to have them work at a ticket counter, they have to have training in hazardous materials and security. You just don’t bring people on real quick. The real issue is [the airlines] had to let somebody go.”

United’s CEO recently warned of a pending pilot shortage as older crew members retire, but it’s not just pilots that are in demand. Airlines and airports are looking to staff a variety of positions, from flight crew and food service workers to customer call staff and gate agents.

The airlines’ response has been akin to a corporate shoulder shrug that sidesteps the industry’s role in fragmenting its workforce, argued Laura Moran, a spokesperson for the Service Employees International Union. “There was a time when most folks — the customer service and wheelchair agents, security officers, cabin cleaners, and baggage handlers — were directly employed by the airlines,” Moran said. “Now, we have a real patchwork of subcontracted workers who perform crucial labor for the airlines.”

Some of these positions were first on the chopping block when travel halted. Thousands of jobs were nixed to stem immediate revenue loss — by airlines, airports, or the vendors they contracted out work. The travel and leisure industry accounted for a staggering 39 percent of all US job losses from Covid-19. Airlines cut about 90,000 full-time, in-house positions by the end of 2020, including the 30,000 workers they’ve placed on furlough.

Workers employed directly by the airlines were promised some job security; domestic carriers received billions of dollars in federal aid — $25 billion in April 2020 and $15 billion in December 2020 — predicated on the condition that they would bring back employees or keep them on payroll for a set period of time. But thousands of others in contracted positions, like cabin cleaners and wheelchair attendants, weren’t offered the same protections. A House investigation revealed that aviation contractors axed tens of thousands of jobs — roughly 15 percent of their workforce — even after receiving CARES Act funding for payroll assistance.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Thus, it’s inaccurate to chalk up a diminished passenger experience to a “labor shortage” without contextualizing the airline industry’s working conditions and standards — and why it’s seemingly unable to summon back tens of thousands of crucial workers. A shortage does little to acknowledge the fluctuations in work consistency and lack of financial security that many have contended with. The industry has long relied on an understaffed and underpaid workforce, with many clocking in on the front lines (which, again, are unusually stressful these days). Yet, airlines have consistently deflected blame toward the vendors and contractors that employ some of these missing workers. It’s a tactic used by major corporations (and the airlines themselves) to shirk responsibility for low wages and the lack of worker benefits and protections.

Airlines work with different vendors to outsource different types of labor, from cleaning to food services to baggage handling. These vendors independently negotiate subcontracting agreements with the airline, Moran explained, which determines workers’ wages and benefits: “The result is a disconnected system of work with no standard wages, and it’s a situation the airlines have created to keep costs down and profits up. It’s unreasonable that low-wage Black and brown workers on the front lines are expected to bear the brunt of these problems when airlines are trying to reach profitability.”

Now, across the country, it seems there are fewer workers willing to return to an underpaid, unstable job, whether in retail, food service, or travel. The work of airport unions and organized labor in recent years have helped secure better wages for subcontracted employees, but inequities still persist in many cities.

“There isn’t a shortage of workers. There is a shortage of workers wanting to come back to work for poverty wages,” said Elsa Caballero, president of SEIU Texas, whose union represents janitorial, security, and building staff in airports. “Airlines, which are a major employer in Houston, are still paying way below $12 an hour.”

United, for example, has previously downplayed its relationship to subcontracted airport workers, dismissing its influence over vendors’ pay. In response to a “Fight for $15” protest in 2017, a spokesperson emphasized how United does “not have a direct employer-employee relationship with [its] vendors’ employees,” as if that alone absolves the airline of any responsibility.

However, airlines do have leverage to raise wages, if they choose to intervene and place pressure on contractors. Workers at Philadelphia International Airport, for example, qualified for a $12 minimum wage after the city passed a “living wage” ordinance in 2014, but subcontracting companies refused to increase their pay rate until American Airlines upped its contract to pay for the discrepancy. American interjected again in 2017, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, when contractors refused to bargain with the workers’ union.

“In Houston, we’ve had to work with the mayor and city officials to create an executive order to ensure that an airline like United will pay workers a living wage,” Caballero said. “We know airlines can pay more, but they are lowballing the contracts they offer vendors.”

Substantial federal aid has done little to assuage workers’ and union leaders’ fears of further layoffs. Airlines are still searching for ways to keep costs low. United Airlines, for example, told its in-house catering workers earlier this year that it was “exploring the option” of working with a third-party contractor for its kitchen services, igniting a series of worker protests in April.

Running an airline is a high-cost operation. Slate’s Henry Grabar previously described the industry as “low-margin, capital-intensive businesses,” which means a company’s cash savings won’t be very helpful during an extensive crisis. ”Capital-intensive means it’s hard to tighten your belt,” Grabar wrote. “You can save some money on fuel and food, but not on labor or rent. You still have to pay banks or leasing companies for your planes. You can’t save those seats for later, or fly twice as many flights when business picks up again. There is no factory to shut down. Even if you ground flights, many costs are fixed.” Customers have been expected to pay additional fees on top of ticket costs for additional luggage, seat selection, and priority boarding. (Fees are also another stream of revenue for airlines, one that is exempt from the 7 percent excise tax on domestic airfare.)

Yet the aviation industry has a long history of generously padding the wallets of its executives, investors, and other shareholders through stock buybacks and hefty compensation packages. All this, despite being a fundamentally expensive business. So far, they’ve squared that tricky circle by passing on costs to the consumer and neglecting the needs of workers who are central to airline operations.

While customer service and labor issues can seem at odds with one another, Caballero argues that improved working conditions can directly affect the passenger experience. Travelers and workers could find solidarity in the fact that they both expect more from airlines. If travelers are being nickel-and-dimed for every expense, where does the additional money go? Research shows that higher pay boosts employee performance and retention; in a place like the airport, in which so many workers are public-facing employees (sometimes dealing with unruly passengers), fair compensation and benefits should be prerequisites.

“This is a consumer issue,” said Caballero. “It affects passengers when airport workers are paid poorly and don’t want to show up, when there’s no one to push a wheelchair or answer questions at the gate. Their work is undervalued, yet it’s incredibly important to passengers.”

When Democrats have power — like they do now — they can't wait for Republicans to wake up to reality.

Barr wants you to forget he spent much of 2020 spreading Trump’s lies about the election.

William Barr began his tenure as Donald Trump’s attorney general with extremely evasive testimony during his confirmation hearing. He may be best remembered for giving a highly misleading summary of the Mueller report, and he spent much of 2020 trying to substantiate Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election being rigged against him.

But now, more than six months following his departure from government, Barr is trying to do some image damage control.

In interviews with journalist Jonathan Karl for a book excerpted in the Atlantic, Barr details how his final break with Trump finally came after he went public with claims undermining Trump’s last-ditch effort to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden.

“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told an Associated Press reporter on December 1.

Barr told Karl that comment prompted an angry Trump to summon him into a meeting in which the president unloaded on him, saying things like “how the fuck could you do this to me?” and “you must hate Trump.”

Barr indicates that not only was he not intimidated by Trump’s outburst, but he fired back, comparing the Rudy Giuliani-led effort to overturn the results to a circus.

“You know, you only have five weeks, Mr. President, after an election to make legal challenges,” Barr told Trump, according to Karl. “This would have taken a crackerjack team with a really coherent and disciplined strategy. Instead, you have a clown show. No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are.”

Barr ended up leaving the Department of Justice days before the January 6 insurrection. The new account of the weeks leading up to his resignation has led some to describe him as a “patriot.” But that’s going way too far even when Barr’s account is read in the most charitable light.

Barr was eager to spread Trump’s election conspiracy theories right until the bitter end

While Karl’s portrayal of Barr isn’t flattering, the book excerpt doesn’t get into how Barr spent the run-up to the 2020 election serving more as an arm of Trump’s campaign than he did as an independent arbiter of the rule of law. Barr was happy to amplify Trump’s lies about mail voting and voting fraud up to the point where it was clear to all but the most fanatical Trump supporters that he had lost the election.

Consider, for instance, the disastrous interview Barr did with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on September 2, when he couldn’t produce any evidence of mail voting fraud and resorted to saying its general existence is a “matter of logic.” Or his DOJ’s decision a few weeks later to issue a factually incorrect press release announcing an investigation into alleged mail voting irregularities in Pennsylvania — an announcement that violated DOJ’s policies. Or Barr’s move three days after the election to authorize investigations into “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities,” even though there was no evidence of such irregularities.

In his interviews with Karl, Barr portrayed his decision to authorize fraud investigations despite a lack of evidence as a strategy he used to make sure he would be able to tell Trump that his conspiracy theories were baseless when the time came.

“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr said to Karl. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

That might sound reasonable enough on its face. But as Greg Sargent highlighted for the Washington Post, it’s not normal for the DOJ, which is ostensibly supposed to operate with a modicum of independence from the executive branch, to pursue investigations based on “bullshit” conspiracy theories favored by the president. But Barr spent years turning the DOJ into something akin to the president’s personal law firm.

Barr’s comments about authorizing election fraud investigations aren’t the only thing he tries to whitewash during his interviews with Karl. He also explains away his fawning resignation statement as a gambit to calm down political tensions. (Barr wrote of Trump: “Your record is all the more historic because you accomplished it in the face of relentless, implacable resistance,” adding that the president “had been met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds.”)

“To defuse the tension, Barr had written an effusive resignation letter, which he handed to the president when he got to the Oval Office,” Karl wrote.

But, as Jonathan Chait notes for New York magazine, “if Barr had decided Trump was dangerous and undemocratic” — and his comments to Karl suggest he had already reached that conclusion weeks earlier — then “why would he continue to claim publicly that the true danger was Trump’s opponents?”

Barr and Mitch McConnell come across as cynical political operators

It’s not even clear to what extent — if at all — Barr’s break with Trump was motivated by a desire to protect American democracy. Instead, Karl’s piece makes it seem as though Barr and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were primarily interested in helping Republicans win special elections in January for two US Senate seats.

Karl writes that McConnell had been urging Barr throughout November to speak out against Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories, because those theories were complicating the argument Republicans wanted to make about how maintaining the Senate majority was important as a check on Biden’s power. But McConnell was reluctant to speak out himself for fear that if he did so, an embittered Trump would sabotage the Republican candidates.

From Karl’s story:

“Look, we need the president in Georgia,” McConnell told Barr, “and so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.”

“I understand that,” Barr said. “And I’m going to do it at the appropriate time.”

On another call, McConnell again pleaded with Barr to come out and shoot down the talk of widespread fraud.

“Bill, I look around, and you are the only person who can do it,” McConnell told him.

So while it’s good that Barr ultimately stood up to Trump, it’s worth keeping in mind how abnormal it is for the US attorney general to be scheming with the Senate leader on ways to ensure their political party retains power.

Of course, by the end of the Trump administration, that sort of norm-shattering behavior had become par for the course, and Barr worked as hard as anyone to pervert the DOJ into an arm of the president’s reelection campaign. Only when it became clear that Trump lost did he think twice. Even then, he appears to have been motivated more by cynical political concerns than he was by doing right by American democracy.

Despite Barr’s devotion to him and the key work he did fending off the Mueller investigation, Trump predictably responded to the Atlantic story with a statement attacking Barr as a “RINO” and a “disappointment in every sense of the word.” As always, anything short of complete and unflinching loyalty isn’t enough for Trump.