The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 election was slipped out to the public with less fanfare than a new menu item at Captain D’s. And like the actual Mueller report, released weeks after Attorney General William Barr produced his whitewashed summary, Republicans are just hoping everyone will read their topline statements and ignore what the investigation really found.
Somehow, after Republicans have declared over and over that there was “no collusion,” they’ve been sitting on a report that shows that Donald Trump’s campaign manager was in constant contact with a Russian operative, that both WikiLeaks and Roger Stone knew they were part of a direct pipeline from Vladimir Putin, and that the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort was in fact a meeting with Russian spies designed to get information that could be used against Hillary Clinton. And that Ivanka Trump coordinated the daily drip of words from Moscow.
The Senate report, in fact, proves everything that had been said since before the election—Trump’s campaign directly collaborated with Russia, on multiple occasions and in various ways, to alter the outcome of a U.S. election. It also shows that multiple members of Trump’s campaign lied to investigators about these connections, and that Republican senators have been aware of these facts even as they have scorned the Mueller investigation and defended Trump and his campaign. So what are Republican senators doing about it now? Lying, of course.
The Senate report shows that Manafort was directly involved in passing along information to a Russian intelligence agent and accepting information from that agent. That’s collusion by the head of Trump’s campaign. The investigation could have stopped right there and moved on to providing information to the House for impeachment.
It didn’t stop there. It went on to explore how Ivanka Trump coordinated the use of stolen documents provided by Russia to make Trump’s attacks on Clinton more effective. How Stone helped Moscow coordinate WikiLeaks information to run cover for Trump. And how Manafort’s close coordination with Kremlin sources “represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” The report isn’t just damning, it’s damning to helling. It could not be more conclusive and more authoritative in showing that there was genuine coordination between the Trump campaign and Putin’s plans. Trump took everything Putin would give him, and begged for more.
Evidence in the report shows that Manafort’s chief contact, Konstantin Kilimnik, was connected not just with providing information to the campaign after the fact, but to the whole plot to break into DNC servers in the first place. The Trump campaign wasn’t the lucky beneficiary of a Russian plot that was already in effect. The whole thing—the break-in at the DNC, the distribution of emails through WikiLeaks, the false claims about Ukraine—was a joint Trump/Putin production from the start. They didn’t just collude, they were partners.
Why they were partners from the start is also underlined in the report, as the fifth volume contains information directly related to the leverage Putin had over Trump. That includes not just witnesses corroborating the existence of the “pee tape,” but a possible affair between Trump and a former Miss Moscow as well as a visit to a Moscow strip club. All of this, along with Manafort’s existing connections to Moscow, meant that Trump and other members of the campaign “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities,” according to the report.
Almost as an aside, the report shows that Donald Trump and his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen negotiated repeatedly to cover up evidence in exchange for a pardon—and then everyone involved lied about it to Robert Mueller. Though that part was already known.
So what are Republican senators going to do about a report—their own report—that lays bare Putin’s tawdry leverage over Trump, the openness of Trump’s campaign to foreign influence, and the lies that campaigns staffers told to investigators every step of the way? As Lawfare points out, Republicans have a very simple solution: lying. Over and over, Republican senators have issued statements repeating the idea that the report shows “no collusion,” in direct contradiction of the actual contents.
Republicans in the Senate deserve credit for allowing the investigation to run its course rather than doing a Devin Nunes and popping out a Trump-praising nonsense piece while claiming that everything is good. But they deserve zero credit for running away from their own report or for making claims that the report doesn’t show what it clearly shows.
And while Republicans are scanning Mike Pompeo’s stack of documents looking for possible avenues of attack against Joe Biden, Biden could do a lot worse than simply making advertisements out of segments of the report created by the Republican-led Senate.
Yep just a smokescreen to get people off his case while he continues to burn down the postal service for Trump and private profit
Here’s a cautionary tale from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where an investigative reporter for WOOD-TV tweets that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service continues.
“Internal sources say mail sorting machines are being dismantled at downtown GR post office,” reporter Heather Walker tweeted Wednesday. “Process started yesterday. Order came from Postmaster General DeJoy.”
Process started yesterday—the same day that Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy supposedly said he would “suspend” the changes he’s been implementing that have slowed mail delivery to a crawl across the country. DeJoy issued the statement after news of his efforts to hamstring mail delivery drew front-page headlines across the country last week, but he also said nothing about reversing the measures he’s already taken to date.
Michigan Attorney General Deborah Nessel responded to Walker’s tweet: “When people asked why we were determined to continue our lawsuit against the Postmaster General despite his "promise" to discontinue efforts to dismantle the USPS-this is why.”
DeJoy said post office hours would not change, mail processing and collection equipment would not be removed, mail processing facilities would not be closed, and overtime hours would continue to be approved “as needed." Of course, need is purely subjective, especially when DeJoy has every motivation to incapacitate the Postal Service. So maybe those overtime hours will be necessary to continue DeJoy’s urgent dismantling of USPS infrastructure.
Here Walker documents a “graveyard of mail sorting pieces” at a USPS location in West Michigan on Wednesday.
UPDATE: Adding a postscript here—the destruction of these perfectly good USPS sorting machines not isolated to one locale by any means.
NBC News Exclusive: A Waterloo, Iowa postal employee provides these photos of a dismantled mail sorting machine, which now sits in a garage. The employee says it was in good working condition and that its recent removal has caused delivery delays. More tonight on @NBCNightlyNewspic.twitter.com/xG5Ez5T9M7
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke with U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Wednesday, a conversation in which he "frankly admitted that he had no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes and other key mail infrastructure," she said in a statement. She says she spoke with him to let him know that his announcement Tuesday that he was suspending certain policy changes that have crippled mail service "is not a solution and is misleading."
"The Postmaster General's alleged pause is wholly insufficient and does not reverse damage already wreaked," Pelosi wrote. In addition to the key infrastructure he's refusing to replace, he admitted "that plans for adequate overtime, which is critical for the timely delivery of mail, are not in the works." The destruction of sorting machinery is continuing, as was discovered Wednesday in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The USPS had already confirmed that restoration of infrastructure wasn't going to happen. This makes it official, and is going to make for some intense congressional hearings Friday and Monday.
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who scheduled his hearing for Friday in an attempt to pre-empt the Democratic House, is probably regretting that decision now. His plan was to have DeJoy testify that he didn't need any additional funding, and that is going to be wholly overshadowed by DeJoy's wanton destruction of the institution. The follow-up hearing on Monday in the House is definitely going to be lit.
DeJoy is proving himself to be a real gift to Democrats—not just in giving them all this fodder, but in making Republicans look craven and stupid. Not that it's a stretch to make House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy look bad, but then he tweets that the "so-called crisis at the @USPS" is just Democrats "manipulating information in order to push a conspiracy theory." A conspiracy theory that the USPS disproved by sending a letter to 46 states warning them that their elections are in jeopardy. Also a conspiracy theory that prompted DeJoy to pretend he was going to stop doing it.
This is all going to make passing the $25 billion emergency aid bill, which also requires the Postal Service to restore service to pre-coronavirus levels, that much easier for Pelosi. Once that passes, it's going to make it that much harder for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to refuse to bring the bill to the floor. Not that he won't be craven and corrupt enough to ignore it: It's just going to be really painful for all his fellow Republicans to fall in line.
Facebook's failure to halt the spread of coronavirus misinformation makes it a "major threat" to public health, a damning new report has warned. From a news report: Research by activist group Avaaz found health misinformation relating to the pandemic was viewed 3.8bn times on the social media site in the last year. Just 16 per cent of all misinformation analysed in the study carried a warning label, with the remaining 84 per cent remaining online without a warning. Facebook has vowed to crack down on conspiracy theories and misleading content linked to Covid-19 amid concerns inaccurate information was spreading unchecked on the platform. A company spokesperson said the findings of the report did not "reflect the steps we've taken to keep it from spreading on our service." Facebook said it had applied warning labels to 98m pieces of content and removed a further 7m between April and June. The site added that it had also directed more than 2bn people to resources from official health authorities.
A man identified as former San Francisco artist, magazine editor and television show host Tim Gaskin, went on a homophobic and racist tirade at a San Jose-area Marshalls store after an employee told him to put on a mask or leave. According to TMZ, Gaskin presented the employee with a card from the fake Freedom to Breathe Agency.
Gaskin was captured on video lashing out in anger at a Marshalls employee and DJ Eddie House, who was filming him and shared the clip to social media.
Said Gaskin: “You dumb f**king faggot, what’s your problem? What’s your dumb f**king faggot problem? You don’t know the law, that’s how stupid you are. It’ll cost you $75,000. It’s a health code violation to deny service based on someone’s disability. Do you want to look up the law? Do you want to look up the law first? And this faggot right here. He doesn’t know the law, he thinks he’s smart. Read Gavin Newsom’s law. If you kick me out it’s $75,000. Call the police. I’m gonna love this. It’s a $75,000 fine. Dumb Mexican doesn’t know….”
Gaskin then unbuttons his fly when he sees he’s being filmed.
CBS San Francisco reports: “His use of homophobic language surprised those who recognized him on social media as he was once a known figure in the San Francisco LGBTQ community. Starting in 2004, he hosted a weekly talk show called OUT Spoken for Comcast public access that addressed gay issues. Gaskin also hosted a television show and corresponding radio show about San Francisco real estate in 2006 called ‘Open House.’ At the time, Gaskin described the show to SFGate as ”Antiques Roadshow’ meets ’60 Minutes.” Later he started a magazine called ‘Benefit: The Lifestyle of Giving,’ which covered philanthropy in the city. At the time when it first published in 2006, Gaskin said he was a longtime fundraiser for AIDS-related causes and he wanted to do more for charities in San Francisco. … While publishing magazines and hosting television shows, Gaskin also became a somewhat successful painter. In 2004 he painted a giant heart for the Hearts in San Francisco project, a fundraiser for San Francisco General Hospital. His heart featured then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris portrayed as Billie Holiday and then-Mayor Newsom’s wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, portrayed as Frida Kahlo.”
So stop voting for a party whose only promise is to gut government. Where's your "Real 'Murica" self reliance now? Right next to Florida's in hurricane season, quite likely.
Help has been slow to arrive for Iowans devastated by last week’s derecho storm, which brought hurricane-force winds and has left thousands without power and homeless or in badly damaged homes. But despite the devastation, it took Gov. Kim Reynolds nearly a week to ask for federal disaster relief.
Reynolds, a Republican, has said that she deployed the National Guard as soon as local officials in Cedar Rapids asked for help, while the officials say they started asking immediately. Reynolds also says some of the delay in asking for federal help was because the scope of the need wasn’t immediately clear. But according to Democratic Rep. Abby Finkenauer: “The state and federal aid we needed immediately after the storm on Monday was delayed for days by a misunderstanding of this disaster and plain ignorance about the reality on the ground in communities across eastern Iowa.”
“I live here. I saw it firsthand,” said Finkenauer, who has been out on the streets physically helping to clear downed trees. “We need FEMA, we need additional support from the National Guard, and we need to amplify the stories of what’s happening on the ground here to spark more action from our governor and the administration.”
Residents of Cedar Rapids told The Washington Post they were frustrated by the lack of help. “There’s so much destruction, but the response is moving really slow. I figured it would be a lot quicker,” said Pamela Elliott, an insurance company claims processor who went to a Red Cross shelter days after the storm ripped the roof off her apartment.
”It’s still been a week and we don’t have any help out here,” said Calvin Ross, a construction day laborer who told the Post that help had come more quickly after flooding in 2008.
This disaster comes against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, which state officials blame for slowing down the response but which also makes the response more urgent, since crowded shelters and homelessness—never great things to begin with—carry added dangers.
The Trump administration’s regulation that would have eliminated protections in Obamacare for transgender people has been blocked for now by a federal judge, just hours before it was set to go into effect. NBC News reports the judge “indicated he thought the Trump administration’s so-called transgender rule is invalid in light of the Supreme Court ruling in June on a case involving similar issues in the context of job discrimination.”
“When the Supreme Court announces a major decision, it seems a sensible thing to pause and reflect on the decision’s impact,” U.S. District Court Judge Frederic Block wrote, according to the report. “Since [Health and Human Services] has been unwilling to take that path voluntarily, the Court now imposes it.”
“The injunction comes after the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) sued the Trump-Pence administration for advancing a rule that would have eliminated explicit protections from discrimination based on sex stereotyping and gender identity, thereby sanctioning discrimination against LGBTQ people, particularly transgender people, in health care programs and activities,” the organization said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “The rule was scheduled to take effect on August 18 but will now be precluded from becoming operative.”
The anti-trans policy has been among the most recent bigoted actions taken by an administration that has had the gall to call itself any sort of champion for the LGBT community, writer and activist Michelangelo Signorile has written.
“This, even as the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to allow employers to discriminate against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in hiring and firing, and of course destroyed the careers of many transgender people by putting in place a ban on transgender service in the military,” he wrote in June. “The GOP’s touting of Trump as pro-LGBTQ—even though it’s patently false—is actually a measure of how far LGBTQ people have come, and how the GOP is on the run.”
Advocates celebrated this court victory. “This is a crucial early victory for our plaintiffs, Tanya and Cecilia, and for the entire LGBTQ community, particularly those who are multiply marginalized and suffering disproportionately from the impacts of the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racialized violence,” Alphonso David, the organization’s president, said in the statement. “We are pleased the Court recognized this irrational rule for what it is: discrimination, plain and simple. LGBTQ Americans deserve the health care that they need without fear of mistreatment, harassment, or humiliation.”
The administration is on the losing side of this fight and history, but we already know it’ll nevertheless continue this war even as it shamelessly claims to be a champion on LGBT issues. And, as we’ve seen in the administration’s defiance of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) decision, this unaccountable president is willing to ignore court orders in order to keep hurting communities.
Who knows what other kind of hateful policies and actions a second term can produce, and we don’t want to find out. This isn’t just about an election: It’s about survival.
Anderson Cooper had MyPillow CEO and Trump advocate (and Tucker Carlson’s sole advertiser, at this point) Mike Lindell on his CNN show Tuesday. Lindell was there to explain the completely unproven miracle drug Oleandrin that he and Ben Carson have been pushing to Donald Trump. Oleandrin is an extract from a very toxic plant called Nerium oleander. Lindell, a man who previously settled with the government for false advertising and general business fraud, also has a financial stake in the company. Shocking, right?
In recent months Lindell has been given a platform at presidential press conferences to push his conman’s brand of Christianity and received taxpayer money to make face masks he cannot produce. His miracle drug has not been approved by the FDA for the dietary supplement list nor for an Investigational New Drug (IND) application number. This is arguably because there are no meaningful studies on the extract and its supposed benefits, and the one non-peer-reviewed study on the matter has so far been deemed inconclusive. But that didn’t stop Lindell from coming on Cooper’s show and doing what he does best: try to sell his product.
It’s hard to describe how off-the-rails this more than 20-minute interview goes, and how quickly this happens. Lindell begins by hoarsely blathering about how Jesus and praying have brought this miracle supplement to him and how he’s brought it to the president of the United States through providence. Cooper very quickly points out that there are zero scientific studies on the matter, to which Lindell replies that there are. Cooper presses and Lindell has no evidence, but says he does. [He doesn’t]
It’s bananas. Here are some of the highlights:
Anderson Cooper starts early on by asking Lindell, “How are you different than a snake oil salesman?” Then, subsequently, Cooper calls him a “snake oil salesman” about three times, with increasing severity.
Lindell continuously uses the word “misconstrued” to describe everything from “mistaken” to “misconstruing.”
Cooper points out that Ben Carson has been in trouble for taking money from a dodgy supplement company and Mike Lindell settled out of court for falsely advertising that his pillows cured all kinds of very real maladies, which his pillows do not.
When Lindell tries to lie about the nature of courtroom time, chalking it up to political witch-huntery, Cooper remarks, “That’s sad. That’s sad. For a man that professes faith, for you to lie like this is really extraordinary.”
He asks Lindell at one point how he sleeps at night.
Ouch.
Finally, Cooper gets to the brass tacks, as Lindell begins talking more about how this “amazing cure” will hopefully at least get passed by the FDA as a supplement. This is what this con is all about, Cooper explains: “This will be sold as a dietary supplement—that’s how you’ll skirt this—you won’t be able to actually say, you won’t be able to actually advertise it as for COVID-19, correct? You would just put it on as a dietary supplement and going out and doing a lot of publicity, you would just hope that people would use it off-label, believing it will have COVID benefits and you will profit financially. That seems to be the theory you are operating on.”
Lindell just shouts some more until Anderson calls him a snake oil salesman again, at which point Lindell attempts the classic right-wing snowflake move of whining about being called names and being persecuted for their boneheaded beliefs and chicanery, to which Cooper responds rather clearly that the reason he is treating Lindell this way is because “You are telling people who are desperate to take something that is unproven, potentially dangerous, and you have no evidence to back it up. It’s kinda morally bankrupt.”
I’ll edit that for you Anderson. It isn’t “kinda” anything. It is totally morally bankrupt. The true low of this conversation filled with nothing but lows is that right here. Lindell very quickly says he hasn’t told anyone to take this. He is very clear that he hasn’t told anyone to take this “amazing cure” for COVID-19. He’s just “given it to my friends and family and saved their lives.” Wow.
Here’s a picture of Lindell and what seems to be his teleprompter. Gotta sell some supplements!
One of the biggest challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic is that we simply don't know what works against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Most of the scientific studies on controlling pandemics have been focused on the influenza virus, which is distinct from the coronavirus in a lot of ways. The coronaviruses we do know something about—SARS, MERS, and two cold viruses—are quite different from each other.
We're left without hard data on what works. Do we need two meters of social distancing or three? What types of face masks are most effective? We're trying to gather data on these issues at the same time that we're implementing them. So in a small bit of good news, we now have some data indicating something that's effective: plastic face shields.
To the subcontinent!
The work was done in India and takes advantage of a public health program initiated as the pandemic spread through that country. Workers in a research network in Chennai agreed to voluntarily go into isolation, then visit with the families of those who had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in order to explain things like quarantining, mask use, social distancing, and so on.
The supposed suspension of policy changes at the U.S. Postal Service by Trump lackey and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has been greeted with skepticism from pretty much all parties. Skepticism and demands for policy reversals, not just suspensions. Because, as Hunter pointed out, the statement says nothing about undoing the damage that is already devastating the institution and keeping our mail from us.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in the middle of an interview when the news covered DeJoy's announcement, said: "They felt the heat and that's what we were trying to do, to make it too hot for them to handle." She followed up with a more complete statement to reporters, saying it "is a necessary but insufficient first step in ending the President’s election sabotage campaign." She continued: "This pause only halts a limited number of the Postmaster’s changes, does not reverse damage already done, and alone is not enough to ensure voters will not be disenfranchised by the President this fall." That was the sentiment roundly heard from Democrats on both sides of the Capitol.
Sen. Chuck Schumer tweeted: "It’s good they’ve recognized the problems they’ve caused but we need a PERMANENT rescission of ALL of DeJoy’s harmful policies—and they MUST treat all election materials as first class." Sen. Gary Peters, the ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee that will grill DeJoy on Friday, said: "there are still too many unanswered questions," like whether sorting machines will be returned and which changes DeJoy is leaving in place. Peters continued: "I will keep pressing the Postmaster General for answers through my investigation and at Friday’s Senate hearing." Sen. Elizabeth Warren responded in the same vein: "Our work is far from over. We've got to reverse the damage DeJoy has already done, investigate his conflicts of interest, and fully fund the USPS. He and Trump have shown us the lengths they'll go to in order to sabotage the Postal Service—and we can't let them off the hook."
Former Deputy Postmaster General Ronald Stroman, who stepped down in May, told reporters on a press call: “I think it raises more questions than it provides answers. And it will be important int he coming days to see if we can get clarity in regard to those questions.” For example, he said: "What does that mean when you say overtime will be granted as needed? One could determine at any time that overtime is not needed in a particular instance." No one who isn't a completely partisan Republican is satisfied with this statement from DeJoy.
That includes the Democratic attorneys general from numerous states who are suing to have the policy changes reversed. The co-chairs of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, said: “We put Trump and his hand-picked Postmaster General on notice, and it worked. It’s no coincidence that DeJoy backed down just as Democratic AGs announced lawsuits. When Dem AGs team up, the Administration pays attention.”
“But,“ they continued, “we won’t believe it until we see it. Without concrete action by DeJoy to undo the damage already done and prevent future problems, we are moving forward to hold the Trump Administration accountable.” They added: “And here’s our message to the American people: Use your vote. Vote early; whether in person or by mail. However you choose to vote, Democratic state attorneys general are standing up to make sure every single vote is counted.”
“This staffer appears to have limited experience practicing law—having graduated from law school only three years ago,” DHS General Counsel Chad Mizelle wrote in defending a fellow Chad, acting DHS Sec. Chad Wolf, and his acting deputy, anti-immigrant goofball Ken Cuccinelli. This GAO staffer, Mizelle continued, “also previously worked on a Democratic campaign and the partisan Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee.”
“This is beyond insulting, especially given the circumstances,” noted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel with the American Immigration Council. He notes that not only is Mizelle himself in an acting position like the unlawfully appointed Wolf and Cuccinelli he’s defending, he also “graduated law school in 2013.” Immigration attorney Aaron Hall pointed out one word salad of a paragraph that reads all the more ridiculously when remembering it’s part of an official response to the administration’s criminality:
When you find that you’ve typed a paragraph like this, always sit on it for a full 24 hrs. Then delete and resign. pic.twitter.com/dTpbJZ2MJR
While experts noted last week that the GAO’s finding doesn’t boot the unconfirmed Chad and Cuccinelli out of office, it could have significant implications for policies under their watch. “The administration is likely to ignore the GAO's decision, but this is a potentially HUGE blow to the legality of every single thing that done at DHS” in recent years, Reichlin-Melnick noted. Advocates are in fact already calling for a review, The Texas Tribunereported.
”United We Dream, an advocacy group pushing for immigration reform, said the GAO’s conclusion calls into question the latest guidance from the DHS on the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program that was initiated in 2012,” the report said. That memo, which bears unconfirmed Chad’s signature, cruelly and unlawfully blocks new applicants from the program and slashes protections in half for current beneficiaries.
“What’s clear today from the Government Accountability Office is that Chad Wolf did not have the authority to issue this memo in the first place,” United We Dream executive director Greisa Martínez Rosas tells The Tribune. There was also loud outcry for resignations from legislators who had called for an investigation into unconfirmed Chad and Cuccinelli’s appointments following the GAO’s report, including from members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC).
The people who wrote this letter and this press release have no shame. They have fully taken control of @DHSgov and have bludgeoned the agency into doing everything they ever wanted. This press release is how authoritarian governments speak. For shame.https://t.co/VrTCIsbtXw
“The Trump administration went around Congress to make invalid appointments of anti-immigrant white nationalists in violation of the law," CHC chair Joaquin Castro of Texas said in The Tribune. “From dismantling the immigration system to tear-gassing peaceful protestors, their authority is illegitimate. In light of this GAO decision, both Wolf and Cuccinelli must resign in disgrace or be removed from their positions immediately.”
“The people who wrote this letter and this press release have no shame,” Reichlin-Melnick tweeted. “They have fully taken control of @DHSgov and have bludgeoned the agency into doing everything they ever wanted.This press release is how authoritarian governments speak. For shame.”
Haider Warraich, a cardiologist, writing for the New York Times: An intriguing new study from Germany offers a glimpse into how SARS-CoV-2 affects the heart. Researchers studied 100 individuals, with a median age of just 49, who had recovered from Covid-19. Most were asymptomatic or had mild symptoms. An average of two months after they received the diagnosis, the researchers performed M.R.I. scans of their hearts and made some alarming discoveries: Nearly 80 percent had persistent abnormalities and 60 percent had evidence of myocarditis. The degree of myocarditis was not explained by the severity of the initial illness.
Though the study has some flaws, and the generalizability and significance of its findings not fully known, it makes clear that in young patients who had seemingly overcome SARS-CoV-2 it's fairly common for the heart to be affected. We may be seeing only the beginning of the damage. Researchers are still figuring out how SARS-CoV-2 causes myocarditis -- whether it's through the virus directly injuring the heart or whether it's from the virulent immune reaction that it stimulates. It's possible that part of the success of immunosuppressant medications such as the steroid dexamethasone in treating sick Covid-19 patients comes from their preventing inflammatory damage to the heart. Such steroids are commonly used to treat cases of myocarditis. Despite treatment, more severe forms of Covid-19-associated myocarditis can lead to permanent damage of the heart -- which, in turn, can lead to heart failure.
A new 966-page report released Tuesday by the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee reads like the bestselling spy thriller that the Special Counsel's Russia investigation failed to deliver.
The new details are a simply stunning indictment of the Trump campaign's ties to Russian government officials and intelligence operations suggesting that, at best, Trump campaign officials worked in close coordination with Russian operatives throughout much of the election. At worst, the document could be viewed as evidence that the Trump campaign ultimately became a front for a Russian influence operation.
Of the many revelatory details included in Volume 5 of the Senate Intelligence Committee's Russia report, the new information related to Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort are among the most damning of all.
Manafort's central role in the campaign and proximity to Trump "created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign," writes the committee. In fact, the panel went a step further than Special Counsel Robert Mueller did in defining Manafort's longtime associate and close ally Konstantin Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence operative.
"Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer," stated the report. "Kilimnik became an integral part of Manafort's operations in Ukraine and Russia ... Kilimnik and Manafort formed a close and lasting relationship that endured to the 2016 U.S. elections and beyond."
Overall, the committee admits that much of the communication between Manafort and Kilimnik during the election remains a mystery, as is their involvement in the Russian GRU intelligence agency's "hack-and-leak operation" targeting the 2016 elections. The report says the Senate panel obtained "some information" suggesting Kilimnik may have been involved the GRU's hack attack. It also states it found "two pieces of information" that "raise the possibility of Manafort's potential connection to the hack-and-leak operations." But most of the rest of that section is redacted.
But before joining the Trump campaign in March 2016 and throughout his time on the campaign, Manafort "directly and indirectly communicated" with Kilimnik, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine. On numerous occasions, the panel writes, "Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik," including polling data and the campaign's strategy for defeating Hillary Clinton.
"Taken as a whole, Manafort's high level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat," writes the Senate Intelligence panel.
Furthermore, the panel notes that Manafort's repeated lies to the Special Counsel's office about his interactions with Kilimnik undermined Mueller's investigation and kept most of the content of their communications under wraps.
"Manafort's obfuscation ... effectively foreclosed direct insight into a series of interactions and communications which represent the single most direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services," says the report.
For reasons unknown to the committee, Manafort also willingly accepted a longer sentence for refusing to reveal more details to Mueller about his communications with Kilimnik.
"Manafort's true motive in deciding to face more severe criminal penalties rather than provide complete answers about his interactions with Kilimnik is unknown, but the result is that many interactions between Manafort and Kilimnik remain hidden."
Uh, sounds like someone was a lot more concerned about Putin's administration of justice than that of the U.S. justice system.
Several other eye-popping sections of the report regarding Ukraine, Roger Stone, Don Jr., and Michael Cohen are included.
Roger Stone/WikiLeaks
Although WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have maintained that Russia was not the source of their many email dumps regarding Clinton, her campaign, and the Democratic officials, the Senate Intelligence Committee "found significant evidence to suggest that, in the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks was knowingly collaborating with Russian government officials.”
At one point the report states the GRU "transferred the Podesta emails to WikiLeaks," referring to the emails of John Podesta that were leaked within an hour of the release of Trump's Access Hollywood "grab her by the pussy" tape.
The committee report also clearly states that longtime Trump ally and friend Roger Stone knew Podesta would be a target in advance of the email dump and directly relayed that information to Trump and his senior campaign officials.
Stone also appears to have played a part in the timing of WikiLeaks' dump of the Podesta emails on Oct. 7, shortly after the Access Hollywood tapes surfaced.
According to radio host Jerome Corsi—who served as a liaison between Stone and a WikiLeaks source—Stone and Corsi spoke twice on Oct. 7 at length about the Access Hollywood tape coming out. "Stone '[w]anted the Podesta stuff to balance the news cycle' either 'right then or at least coincident.' According to Corsi, Stone also told him to have WikiLeaks 'drop the Podesta emails immediately,'" states the report.
Don Jr./Trump Tower
Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort appear to have effectively met with a Russian spy in their infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. The key leader of that delegation, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had "significant and concerning connections to Russian government and intelligence officials, and has not been forthcoming about those relationships," the report states.
Also, Don Jr. indeed intended to get dirt on Clinton from that Russian operative at the meeting. "The Committee found evidence suggesting that it was the intent of the Campaign participants in the June 9, 2016 meeting, particularly Donald Trump Jr., to receive derogatory information that would be of benefit to the Campaign from a source known, at least by Trump Jr., to have connections to the Russian government," says the report. But the committee found no evidence any material was actually relayed at the meeting.
Ukraine
Ukrainian interference in the 2016 was a total fabrication. "The Committee identified no reliable evidence that the Ukrainian government interfered in the 2016 election," states the report. The report further reveals that Russian intelligence operative Kilimnik "almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that Ukraine had interfered in the U.S. election."
So Trump was impeached for trying to strong arm Ukraine into conducting an investigation into Ukrainian election interference that was the sole creation of a Russian Intelligence operation.
Hello Ivanka
"Using Trump to promote WikiLeaks was a deliberate strategy employed by the Campaign, not only in his remarks, but also on social media. In mid-October, Ivanka Trump tasked the Campaign's senior officials (including Bannon, Scavino, Stephen Miller and Jason Miller) with preparing two Trump tweets every day linking to WikiLeaks content, which, she said, would help 'refocus the narrative,'" states the report.
Michael Cohen
Michael Cohen said that after he was indicted by the Southern District of New York, "he discussed a potential pardon for himself with [Trump lawyer] Jay Sekulow ‘more than half a dozen times.’ Cohen further stated that he understood the pardon discussions had come from Trump through Sekulow," according to the report.
Looks like a pause, not a retreat. There's already been a lot of equipment and boxes removed. It's a freeze, not a reversal.
U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy released a statement saying he’s “suspending operational initiatives” causing concerns about slowing mail service until after the 2020 election. DeJoy is set to appear before House and Senate committees within a week.
“The United States Postal Service will play a critical role this year in delivering election mail for millions of voters across the country. There has been a lot of discussion recently about whether the Postal Service is ready, willing and able to meet this challenge.
I want to make a few things clear:
The Postal Service is ready today to handle whatever volume of election mail it receives this fall. Even with the challenges of keeping our employees and customers safe and healthy as they operate amid a pandemic, we will deliver the nation’s election mail on time and within our well-established service standards. The American public should know that this is our number one priority between now and election day. The 630,000 dedicated women and men of the Postal Service are committed, ready and proud to meet this sacred duty.
I am announcing today the expansion of our current leadership taskforce on election mail to enhance our ongoing work and partnership with state and local election officials in jurisdictions throughout the country. Leaders of our postal unions and management associations have committed to joining this taskforce to ensure strong coordination throughout our organization. Because of the unprecedented demands of the 2020 election, this taskforce will help ensure that election officials and voters are well informed and fully supported by the Postal Service.
I came to the Postal Service to make changes to secure the success of this organization and its long-term sustainability. I believe significant reforms are essential to that objective, and work toward those reforms will commence after the election. In the meantime, there are some longstanding operational initiatives — efforts that predate my arrival at the Postal Service — that have been raised as areas of concern as the nation prepares to hold an election in the midst of a devastating pandemic. To avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail, I am suspending these initiatives until after the election is concluded.
I want to assure all Americans of the following:
Retail hours at Post Offices will not change.
Mail processing equipment and blue collection boxes will remain where they are.
No mail processing facilities will be closed.
And we reassert that overtime has, and will continue to be, approved as needed.
In addition, effective Oct. 1, we will engage standby resources in all areas of our operations, including transportation, to satisfy any unforeseen demand.
I am grateful for the commitment and dedication of all the men and women of the Postal Service, and the trust they earn from the American public every day, especially as we continue to contend with the impacts of COVID-19. As we move forward, they will have the full support of our organization throughout the election.”
A Trump speech in 2017. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
A “war game” that tried to simulate the 2020 transition ended in violence. One of its organizers explains how to prevent that.
Imagine that, after a narrow Joe Biden victory in November’s election, Donald Trump refuses to concede defeat — citing, among other things, alleged voter fraud in mail-in ballots. Imagine that this goes on for months, right up until Inauguration Day in January. Imagine huge protests in the streets on both sides, massive unrest that the police are unable or unwilling to contain. Imagine that some armed pro-Trump supporters, furious with what they see as a coup attempt, take matters into their own hands.
This may sound far-fetched. But in June, an organization called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) convened a group of more than 100 bipartisan experts to simulate what might happen the day after Election Day — running a kind of political “war game” where veteran Democrats role-played as the Biden campaign and veteran Republicans acted as the Trump team.
They simulated four scenarios: a big Biden victory, a narrow Biden win, an indeterminate result à la the 2000 election, and a narrow Trump victory. In every scenario but a massive Biden blowout, things went south.
“We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides,” TIP writes in a post-exercise report summarizing their findings. “The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”
Nils Gilman, the vice president of programs at the Berggruen Institute think tank, is one of the project’s co-founders. In his view, the exercise highlighted key flaws in our electoral system, ranging from the rickety 18th-century design of the presidential election system to our modern plague of hyperpartisanship. These problems, Gilman says, make the electoral system particularly vulnerable to a catastrophic collapse in 2020 — and some of them could still be addressed before it’s too late.
Legislators in key electoral states can need to “affirm the process they’re going to use” to count votes and challenge results in advance, so everyone can agree on how to proceed after Election Day. The media needs to make sure people understand that everything may not be decided on election night, and to call false claims of fraud for what they are.
And ordinary citizens, Gilman says, “need to be prepared to take to the street in nonviolent protest” if the results appear to be corrupted — one of the last lines of defense when a political system breaks down.
What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Zack Beauchamp
When you started putting together the Transition Integrity Project’s simulation, what post-election scenarios concerned you the most?
Nils Gilman
I think there were two broad categories of concern.
We have this peculiarity in the American presidential system where the election happens on the first Tuesday in November, but the president doesn’t actually take power and get sworn in until January 20. So there’s this 10- to 11-week period where there’s one administration coming into power and the other one leaving. The administration that’s in power during that interregnum could potentially get up to a lot of mischief — if they’re not inhibited by either norms or their own party.
There’s this famous anecdote that when the Clinton people were leaving the White House in 2001 and the Bush people came in, they found all the W’s had been taken off the keyboards. Obviously, that’s sort of trivial, right? The fact is that there’s lots of other things that are obviously many orders of magnitude more serious that the outgoing administration could potentially do: looting, engaging in sabotage of various sorts, engaged in starting a foreign adventure, weighing poison pills for their success, particularly if they were embittered by the way in which the loss went down.
So we were concerned about those kinds of administrative transition risks. We’re also concerned, frankly, that the incumbent administration could attempt to do things using the executive power, the power of the executive branch, to basically stop the full resolution of a close election.
Imagine the 2000 election scenario, but you have an unbounded president using federal authority that he still controls to shut down the counting of votes in states where he’s got a lead on election night and he doesn’t want to see the recounts happening.
In 2000, the Democrats were in control, yet the Clinton administration didn’t try to interfere in that process, and ultimately it was resolved by the Supreme Court. But that’s not the scenario we have now. Trump himself has lots of incentives to use executive power to hold on to power for a second term.
Zack Beauchamp
Underpinning this analysis is a banal but vital point: Trump is different from past presidents.
Nils Gilman
I don’t think this would have been necessary in 2016, in 2012, in 2008, in 2004, in 2000, in 1996, in 1992. The reason I bring up all these different dates is that there were different potential parties that would lose, but one thing that Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama had is respect for the actual counting of the votes and the process. I don’t think Trump has respect for anything. I think the only thing he’s interested in is power.
Zack Beauchamp
So when you had people playing the different 2020 campaigns, reacting to different scenarios like a Biden blowout or an indeterminate result à la 2000, did the exercise play out in a way that you would have expected?
Nils Gilman
I would say that it ended up pretty close to the worst-case scenarios I had worried about. In three of the four scenarios, all but the one where Biden won big, we ended up with massive contestation in the streets where both sides called out their followers into the streets, clashing protesters. Violence, political violence. And actual contestation of the results, running down to literally Inauguration Day.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Trump supporters in Miami protesting on June 14, 2020.
Zack Beauchamp
Oof.
Nils Gilman
One of the things that I learned, that I was only dimly aware of before I did this, was how many technical ways there are to contest an election. This is an artifact of the very archaic 18th-century nature of the way in which we elect presidents.
If I vote for Trump, I’m not actually directly voting for Trump. I’m voting to advocate that my secretary of state tell my state legislature that they should certify a slate of electors to support the Republican candidate, i.e., Donald Trump. Then my state legislature sends it to the governor, the governor approves that and sends it to the Electoral College, which meets in mid-December. The Electoral College then sends all their votes on to the Congress that meets on January 6 — which is, by the way, the new Congress, not the old Congress.
Each chamber of Congress, both the Senate and the House, have to certify the results from each state. The state delegation from Texas, for example, has to certify both the House of Representatives and the two senators certify the results of that state’s electors. Then it gets sent on to the sitting vice president of the United States, who gets to choose whose electors they prefer if there’s a dispute between those two parties.
So things that can happen include states putting forward multiple slates of electors. So, for example, if you look at states like North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan, you have an extremely polarized situation where you have a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature and they can perhaps send separate slates of electors.
This is not just a hypothetical. This actually happened in the election of 1876, between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden. There were three states — Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana — that sent in competing slates of electors. The parties were said to have planned competing inaugurations.
It was contested until literally the last day before inauguration, when Tilden gave up his claims for the presidency and told his electors to stand down — in exchange for ending Reconstruction. The integrity of the electoral process for presidents was maintained, but it came at the cost of effectively imposing Jim Crow on African Americans.
These mechanical instruments for contesting the result still exist within the constitutional process.
Zack Beauchamp
So what makes you think that, in the real world, the two major parties would be willing to exploit some of these procedural mechanisms to create 1876-style chaos?
Nils Gilman
I think there is a very sizable faction of both Democrats and Republicans who believe that the only way they lose this election is because of some sort of fraud. On the left, they’ll say it’s voter disenfranchisement. On the right, it’s ballot fraud. We can debate about how much credibility either of those narratives have, but in a sense, it doesn’t matter. The point is the narrative is there. And that narrative provides a kind of rationale for contesting a result.
Both sides also believe that if they lose and the other side is allowed to take power in 2021, or keep power in the case of the Republicans, that whoever takes office in 2021 is going to fundamentally change the rules so that they’ll never have a chance to compete effectively again. You see the president narrating this line already, saying if more people voted, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images
A Black Lives Matter protest in Manhattan on June 2.
And there are smaller factions on both sides who believe it’s literally a matter of life and death for them and theirs. There’s a faction on the far right, the kind of people who marched in Charlottesville, saying, “You will not replace us.” They believe that if the Democrats win, they will impose an order that will get them replaced.
When the stakes are that high, people will do really dramatic things. Actually contesting the electoral results is not even the thing I worry about most.
I have a background studying state failure and coups and revolutions. Every single person I know in the community of people who studies those things, people who look at indicators that those kinds of things can happen in other countries — they look at this country and they are terrified.
Zack Beauchamp
So if the flaws in our electoral system create such gigantic risks, what can be done to head off the worst-case scenarios?
The normal answer to this question is something like this: Expect participants in the electoral game to accept the rules, accept the outcomes, and avoid inflammatory rhetoric. This is the kind of statement the US State Department would issue about an election in a developing country that was likely to be contested. But we can’t expect the president to maintain his cool and accept the outcome of the election. The whole reason we’re talking about this is that we’re in abnormal times.
So what is to be done? Or, more precisely, what can be done by different actors who have roles to play that could lessen the chances of things getting really bad?
Nils Gilman
That’s a great question.
Let’s start with what ordinary people can do. I think the first thing everybody can do is you can call your senator, your member of Congress, your state legislator, your governor, and insist on a couple of basic democratic principles, which really ought to be totally noncontroversial and nonpartisan: Everybody who wants to vote should be able to, and everybody who’s voting should have their vote counted properly.
The second thing we need is for people to be prepared to take to the streets in nonviolent protest if that doesn’t happen. I want to emphasize nonviolent.
We’ve learned over the last couple of months, since the Movement for Black Lives protest really took off again in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, that taking to the streets and showing commitment to a democratic process beyond just the ballot box is a really important part of driving change. We’ve also learned that there are violent elements, both on the left and agent provocateurs on the right. Both of those things, in fact, manifested themselves in the protests that we’ve seen over the last few months.
I think if people are going to take to the streets, which they may need to do in order to insist that our democracy be maintained, then they need to be prepared to be very disciplined about insisting that it be nonviolent.
That’s what ordinary citizens can do. In terms of what people in positions of power can do, I think there’s all sorts of things.
In states like the ones I mentioned earlier — Michigan and Wisconsin and North Carolina — it would be good if there were conversations that were had and then made public by both the Republican leaders in those states and the Democratic leaders in those states that affirm the process they’re going to use, to adjudicate the outcomes in advance. In the event of a contestation, they’ve then worked out the details about how they’re going to do this, and they’re pre-committed to a process that will have legitimacy and transparency.
Second thing they want to do is be really transparent about what’s going on. One of the things you can be sure of is there’s going to be 100-plus million people who are going to vote across the country. There’s thousands of different voting jurisdictions. Will every single one of those places execute perfectly?
Will there be zero people in the whole country who are, in fact, trying to commit fraud? No, there will be a few. When you have a huge country like ours, it’s inevitable that some of that will go on, but these things, in all likelihood, will be a tiny rounding error. It should not be allowed to color the integrity of the entire process.
One of the ways we can ensure that people have confidence in that is that all of the different precincts be very transparent about the way they’re going to count the votes. That’s an important part of the process for making it happen.
The third group of people that could really help is law enforcement organizations. Obviously they’ve had a lot to contend with in the last few months, but what we’ve seen in the last few months will be child’s play compared to what could happen if you had literally millions of both Biden supporters and Trump supporters showing up in the streets in order to try to contest or support whatever result they want.
So law enforcement organizations better be planning for that kind of thing because it’s going to require a totally different kind of response than the kind they’ve been engaged in in the last months. If they don’t get it right, that will be more than an excuse — it might even be a legitimate reason for federal forces to be brought in. We’ve already seen Trump’s willingness to do that in Portland. He’s now said he’s going to deploy these [forces] in conspicuously blue cities like Detroit. So anything he could use an excuse would be something that we would want to avoid.
Zack Beauchamp
What do you think about the role of one, the national Republican Party elite, and two, the media? It seems like both of these institutions will play vital roles in the event that Trump loses.
Nils Gilman
For sure.
In some sense, Trump doesn’t need to win: He just needs to create a narrative that he didn’t legitimately lose and then has to make that narrative take [hold] in the right-wing media and with Republican elites.
There’s some indication that Republicans are willing to push back on some of his more outrageous things. When he suggested that the elections should be postponed, lots of Republicans said no. What was striking about that was that they didn’t say boo when he deployed federal forces in Lafayette Square and in Portland. They didn’t say boo when he said he might not accept the election results when [Fox’s] Chris Wallace asked him.
So they do have some limits. But the limits may not be ones that would prevent the outcome from going to the worst-case scenarios. It’s not clear to me who could play the part of Barry Goldwater in 1974, going to Nixon and telling him the game’s up, you’ve got to go. I absolutely obviously hope that senior Republican officials in states and in Washington will respect their oaths of office and try to respect the process, even if it works out against their guy. I’m not so sure I’d want to put a lot of confidence [that] when push comes to shove, they’d be willing to do that.
Zack Beauchamp
And news organizations?
Nils Gilman
I think the media in some ways has the most important role of all. If there’s a contested result, the only way that either Trump or Biden, for that matter, can effectively contest a result that goes against them is if they create a plausible narrative that is backed up by their media factions that they actually were the legitimate winners of the election. That the seeming results that went against them in fact, in some ways, are not legitimate.
You could imagine that Trump says, “Oh, guess what? Rumors of voting irregularities in Broward County. We had to throw out those votes because who knows what was going on down there? We need to throw those out until we can figure out what the hell is going on.” He just does that in Maricopa County, he does that in Milwaukee County, etc., across all these different places, and then the question is ... we know his strategy: He throws stuff against the wall and sees what sticks.
There’s going to be a crazy social media firestorm going on on this, but my suspicion is that the decisive question will be, in the event of a Trump loss, how people like the evening lineup on Fox react. Do [Sean] Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham accept that he lost, or do they go with the crazy conspiracies as they’re bubbling out of the fever swamps?
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Trump greeting Sean Hannity at a rally in 2018.
Ultimately, it’s actually not them who’s going to decide. It’s actually, ultimately Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch who are going to decide. Those guys on the evening lineup check in with the boss. So the question really is, what will those senior leaders be willing to countenance?
Likewise, what is Mark Zuckerberg going to be willing to countenance in terms of the propagation of nonsense on Facebook? Right now, there hasn’t been a lot of indication from either the Murdochs or Zuckerberg that they’re willing to put any limits on what’s going to be said. So that’s a deep concern.
These people will hold the state of the republic in their hands, potentially. The question is how do they want to be remembered?
Zack Beauchamp
So this has all been pretty apocalyptic.
I want to ask one moderating question. The polls suggest a very high likelihood of a Biden win, and quite possibly a Biden blowout. Does that make you less worried? If it’s a really clear-cut scenario where Biden wins, maybe even one that’s declared on election night, do you think Trump is not likely to fight in the way you’re describing here?
Put differently, how much of what you’re worrying about is contingent on the election being really close — and how much of it is a deeper fear about the nature of our political system and the rise of hyperpartisanship, when even a clear-cut result wouldn’t be enough to get a loser to accept the results?
Nils Gilman
The one scenario that we modeled which didn’t end up in a really terrible situation was, in fact, the scenario where Biden won by a very decisive margin and it was called on election night. Trump still tried a bunch of shenanigans in order to try to negotiate a better exit package for himself in that scenario, but there was no actual contestation of the results in that particular case.
It’s just a simulation; it’s not a prediction. But if Biden wins 350 electoral votes or 375 electoral votes, Trump has lost Florida, he’s lost Arizona, he’s lost North Carolina, he’s lost maybe Georgia, maybe Ohio. Remember, the man’s not very competent; he’s not going to actually be able to probably mount the contestation of 12 states at once. So he probably goes.
But then we’re still left with a situation where people on the right think that outcome is a death sentence. And I mean that not as a metaphor.
Zack Beauchamp
Yeah. In literal terms.
Nils Gilman
I don’t know, right? It would be good in terms of maintaining the integrity of the institutions, but I’m not sure it solves the underlying social and political risks that have led us to this impasse in the first place.
Zack Beauchamp
In other words, you’re saying it’s not just Trump. Trump uniquely exacerbates a certain category of election-contestation-related risks, but the reasons the risks exist at all run deeper than him.
Nils Gilman
Trump is more of a symptom than anything else. The man, as far as I can tell, has neither ideas nor ideology — only instincts and interests. He may fade away quite quickly.
Or he may go start Trump TV. Even if he loses and even if he goes, he will still be here. Even if he’s perhaps broadcasting Trump TV from his dacha in Sochi, Russia, he still will be able to influence the political process. Then Republicans will immediately have instincts to not cooperate with Joe Biden and try to set up their electoral fortunes for 2022 and 2024.
I think one of the things that’s going to be really interesting is what happens to other Republican elites if he loses in a close election and goes. Let’s say Biden wins, the process gets resolved relatively normally, but Biden only wins 300 electoral votes. At that point, Trump goes, perhaps, but who’s going to be the successor in the party? And what is going to be their conclusion about the kind of politics they should be running in the Republican Party?
I think that what ends up happening is Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson and Tom Cotton look at the situation and say, “Well, it’s true that Trump lost, but he was dealt a really bad hand. The Covid thing came along and he got unlucky with that and he was incontinent with his tweeting. And all we need to do is basically double down on the same formula and execute it a little bit more competently and a little bit more ruthlessly and a little bit more effectively.”
In the event of a close Trump loss, I think that’s where the Republican Party goes. In the event of a real Biden blowout, and particularly if there are deep losses in the Senate, that would be a pretty catastrophic blow and they’d be in the minority across the board. At that point, there might be a reckoning within the Republican Party, but I’m skeptical.
Obama had this theory all along that eventually the fever would break, and that’s not proven out over the last, I would say, 26 years. This process began with Newt Gingrich, and it’s just gotten more and more intense ever since. So I don’t know that necessarily even with a Biden blowout, the Republicans are going to fundamentally change their approach to politics.
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As Democrats step up their scrutiny of Donald Trump's sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service, a former board member who resigned in protest of Trump's handling of the agency is set to privately brief House Democrats Thursday, according to NBC News.
David Williams, a former Postal Service inspector general, left the Postal Service board in April due to Trump's personal involvement with the independent board of governors and the selection of a new postmaster general.
Williams officially resigned just days before Trump tapped Louis DeJoy to become the new postmaster general. He is expected to provide insight into the process that led to the selection of DeJoy, a major GOP fundraiser and Trump campaign donor who has also earned millions from his stake in a company with ties to the Postal Service. Imagine that: Trump appointed someone with a direct financial conflict of interest.
DeJoy has implemented a series of new measures that have resulted in long mail delays and serious concerns about the agency's ability to handle a spike in mail balloting this election cycle as many voters seek the safest way to vote amid the pandemic. In particular, DeJoy has presided over policies like removing mailboxes and bulk sorting machines, policies that have kneecapped the agency's ability to process mail, particularly in high-volume areas such as urban centers. But the delivery slowdowns appear to have caused problems in both urban and rural areas of the country alike, with the Postal Service warning 46 states last month that it can't guarantee timely delivery of their mailed-in ballots.
“When David Williams resigned, I knew we were in serious trouble," Stephen Crawford, a former Postal Service board member under Barack Obama, told NBC News. Crawford said Williams "knew postal service in and out.”
Williams will be briefing Democrats in advance of DeJoy's appearance before the House Oversight Committee next week. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called lawmakers back to Washington Saturday for an emergency session to vote on new legislation that will provide the agency with $25 billion in funding and reverse the changes DeJoy has implemented until next year.
Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked closely with a Russian intelligence officer who may have been involved in the hack and release of Democratic emails during the election, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report released Tuesday.
It’s the furthest U.S. officials have gone in describing Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime Manafort business associate, as an agent of the Russian government. The disclosure was part of the committee’s fifth and final installment of its investigation of the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In particular, the committee’s investigation found that Manafort “represented a grave counterintelligence threat” due to his relationship with Kilimnik and other Russians connected to the country’s intelligence services — a bombshell conclusion that underscores how Russia developed a direct pipeline to the upper echelons of a U.S. presidential campaign.
“Kilimnik quickly became an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia,” the report states, adding that the pair “formed a close and lasting relationship that would endure to the 2016 U.S. elections and beyond.”
Tuesday’s report, the product of a three-year bipartisan probe by the committee, focuses on counterintelligence aspects of the U.S. government’s Russia investigation, including allegations that Trump campaign officials coordinated with Russian operatives. It outlines in exhaustive detail the extent of Trump campaign officials’ contacts with Russians, though it stops short of alleging a direct coordination effort.
The committee, which conducted the only bipartisan investigation on Capitol Hill centering on Russia’s 2016 meddling, also raised the possibility that Manafort was personally connected to the “hack-and-leak operations” that targeted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The committee states that “some evidence suggests Kilimnik may be connected” to the effort, which was helmed by Russia’s GRU, its main military-intelligence directorate. WikiLeaks eventually released the documents obtained in the GRU cyberattack, which included Democratic National Committee emails.
The committee cautioned that Manafort’s personal involvement with the operation is “largely unknown” because investigators were unable to learn the full extent of many of the conversations between Manafort and Kilimnik, which included several in-person meetings, about which “no objective record of their content exists.”
“Kilimnik was in sustained contact with Manafort before, during, and after the GRU cyber and influence operations, but the committee did not obtain reliable, direct evidence that Kilimnik and Manafort discussed the GRU hack-and-leak operation,” the report states.
Kilimnik’s role as a Russian intelligence officer is one of several findings in the 966-page report showing that Trump campaign contacts with Russian intelligence-connected operatives were more extensive than previously known. The report also showed that at least two participants in a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Manafort, senior adviser Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. were more deeply tied to Russian intelligence than other reports have indicated.
“The committee assesses that at least two participants in the June 9, 2016 meeting, [Natalia] Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, have significant connections to the Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services,” the panel concluded. “The connections the committee uncovered, particularly regarding Veselnitskaya, were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.”
Kilimnik is described as not only aiding the Russian interference effort but working with Manafort and allies in Ukraine to help cover up evidence of Russia’s involvement — and spread false allegations that it was Ukrainians who interfered instead.
Manafort was convicted of a raft of financial crimes in August 2018 and pleaded guilty to additional crimes in August 2019, briefly pledging to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's team before prosecutors accused him of telling additional lies and breaking off the deal. Manafort was sentenced to 7 and ½ years in prison but was released to home confinement amid the coronavirus pandemic after serving 23 months.
Although Mueller’s report described Kilimnik as simply having “ties” to Russian intelligence, the Senate panel said a more probing analysis revealed him to be a Russian intelligence officer carrying out Kremlin-backed influence operations abroad. In a heavily redacted section of the report, the committee delves into its own assessment of Kilimnik, describing an extensive body of evidence, including communications that reveal Kilimnik misleading even close associates about his connections to Russia.
The Senate report mentions Kilimnik more than 800 times, but a year-long House GOP investigation — which Democrats have assailed as a partisan effort to protect Trump that made minimal effort to procure testimony from resistant witnesses — did not mention him at all.
The report also implicates Trump directly. While the president told Mueller that he did not “recall” discussing WikiLeaks with campaign adviser Roger Stone, the committee “assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”
Although the report stops short of suggesting that Trump or his campaign “colluded” with Russia, it echoes Mueller’s findings that the campaign sought and welcomed Russian interference in the 2016 election, amplifying the results of its hacking operation despite the knowledge of its likely foreign provenance and seeking advance knowledge of the hacked materials.
The committee’s leaders had differing views on that subject of collusion. Acting Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said the report presents “absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.”
Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.), meanwhile, highlighted “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections.”
Like Mueller’s two-year investigation, the Senate panel said the evidence was insufficient to prove that Trump or any advisers coordinated or conspired with the massive Russian election interference effort. But the panel also found that multiple witnesses were untruthful and hid or destroyed evidence that might have shed more light on the allegations.
The report also described a slew of lingering mysteries and unanswered questions In particular, the panel raised sharp concerns about potentially “obstructive” conduct by witnesses who claimed to be part of “an undocumented and unproven ‘joint defense agreement.’”
In particular, the panel sought details about whether Trump’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, floated the possibility of a “pre-pardon” or pardon for Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, in exchange for false testimony about Trump’s effort to build a tower in Moscow. The panel found that at least two witnesses, Trump Jr. and Felix Sater, “could have known that Cohen's statement falsely represented material facts about negotiations over a deal for a Trump Tower Moscow.”
“Normally, these communications would not be protected by the attorney-client privilege because they were shared with third parties, and hence no longer confidential,” the committee concluded. “Nonetheless, the committee was informed that the materials it requested could not be provided because they were subject to a joint defense agreement (JDA).”
After further probing, the committee determined that the defense agreement appeared to cover Trump, Trump Jr., Kushner, Ivanka Trump, the Trump campaign and organization, Hope Hicks, Michael Flynn and others.
“Due to time and resource considerations, the committee opted not to further pursue its inquiry into potentially obstructive conduct under this alleged JDA umbrella,” the panel wrote. “Doing so would have likely required initiating litigation over subpoena compliance, a process that may not have resolved in time to be of investigative value.”
The committee noted that several witnesses, including Flynn, Manafort, George Papadopoulos and Rick Gates asserted their Fifth Amendment rights to avoid self-incrimination during the probe.
The report also outlined several attempts by the White House Counsel to issue “novel and unprecedented potential executive privilege claims” on behalf of Trump’s presidential transition team. The committee stated that the claims “were made inconsistently” and had “no basis in law.”
Of course Johnson is providing the Trump campaign line
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy will testify Friday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, amid heightened scrutiny of the U.S. Postal Service.
DeJoy’s appearance before the Republican-led committee comes as President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked vote-by-mail efforts and Democrats have raised serious concerns about delays in receiving postal deliveries.
“I wanted to give the [postmaster general] an opportunity to tell his side of the story before he appeared before a hostile House committee,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee. Johnson added that "the Postal Service has had significant financial problems for years, and it is important for everyone to fully understand its current fiscal challenges."
DeJoy is also scheduled to testify before the Democrat-led House Oversight and Reform Committee Aug. 24.
The hearing, titled “Examining Finances and Operations of the United States Postal Service During COVID-19 and Upcoming Elections,” will take place at 9 a.m. Friday by video conference, according to a notice.
The Washington Post first reported on the Friday hearing.
In a statement, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the committee, said he will “continue pressing for answers on Mr. DeJoy’s recent directives and their impacts on all Americans, who rely on the Postal Service for prescriptions, running their small businesses, voting and other crucial purposes.”
In addition to the House’s oversight hearing next week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is planning to interrupt the August recess for a rare Saturday vote on legislation that would provide $25 billion to USPS and would seek to blockorganizational changes to the U.S. Postal Service.
Ahead of the hearings, DeJoy announced Tuesday that any changes to operational procedures would take place after the election.
"To avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail, I am suspending these initiatives until after the election is concluded," he said.
In a meeting with Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Aug. 5, DeJoy offered to suspend the operational changes he’s doing to the Postal Service and would allow late and extra trips for postal workers to get ballots delivered on time and to election officials, according to two people familiar with the conversation. He also would allow postal workers to not have to leave on time in the morning but instead would allow them wait until all the mail for the day was ready to be delivered.
One of the people said DeJoy had offered to suspend it for the 10 days before the election, but Pelosi and Schumer said he should suspend the changes now and that none of them are acceptable in the middle of a pandemic and right before an election.
Pelosi said Tuesday after DeJoy's announcement that the House's bill to infuse $25 billion into the Postal Service was still necessary.
"We want to roll them back. You know, he calls them reforms. Reforms! Reforms for what," Pelosi said at a POLITICO Playbook event. "They felt the heat. And that's what we were trying to do, make it too hot for them to handle."
Schumer, who spoke with DeJoy Tuesday, said he asked him for a "specific, written document from him outlining exactly what changes he is rescinding, which reforms will remain, and an explicit confirmation that all election mail will continue to be treated as First Class priority." DeJoy responded that he would provide a written response soon, according to the New York Democrat. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told the Courier Journal Tuesday that he did not think the Senate would pass a bill that only focuses on the Postal Service.
Senate Republicans meanwhile are planning to soon unveil a more narrow coronavirus relief proposal that would provide $10 billion to the U.S. Postal Service, the same amount of money that Democrats and White House negotiators agreed to before coronavirus negotiations broke down.
Some Senate Republicans have expressed concern about funding for USPS. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced legislation in July that would provide up to $25 billion in funding for USPS. The bill has support from Republican Sens. Steve Daines of Montana and Roy Blunt of Missouri.
And in a letter sent Monday, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kans.) reiterated his request for DeJoy to meet with him and work with Congress to reform the Postal Service.
"The urgent threats facing the institution should be spurring you into discussions with Congress and the White House," Moran wrote. "Given that President Trump’s chief-of-staff, former Congressman Mark Meadows, was a leader in postal reform during his time in the House of Representatives, I believe this moment in time provides a unique opportunity for this administration to work with a willing audience in Congress eager to achieve long-term reforms for the Postal Service."
NORFOLK, Va. — A Virginia state senator has been charged with damaging a Confederate monument in Portsmouth during protests that also led to a demonstrator being critically injured when a statue was torn down, authorities said Monday.
Sen. Louise Lucas faces charges of conspiracy to commit a felony and injury to a monument in excess of $1,000, Portsmouth Police Chief Angela Greene said during a news conference. The protest occurred in June.
Lucas is a longtime Democratic legislator and a key power broker in the state Senate, joining the chamber in 1992. The charges were filed the same week Virginia lawmakers are taking up dozens of criminal justice reforms during a special legislative session.
The reaction from some of her fellow Democrats was swift.
“It’s deeply troubling that on the verge of Virginia passing long-overdue police reform, the first Black woman to serve as our Senate Pro Tempore is suddenly facing highly unusual charges,” Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, tweeted on Monday evening.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia called for the charges against Lucas and several others to be dropped. The ACLU said the charges constitute a stark overreach by police because they were not approved by the local prosecutor's office.
Lucas did not respond to an email and phone call seeking comment. Her attorney, Don Scott, told WAVY-TV that Lucas will “vigorously” fight the case and be vindicated.
Lucas is being charged at a time when many memorials to the Confederacy are being taken down, whether by demonstrators opposed to racial injustice or by authorities seeking to dismantle them through official channels. The monuments have long been viewed by many as symbols of white supremacy. But they've drawn increasing attention following the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in Minneapolis police custody.
The monument in Portsmouth consists of a large obelisk and statues of four Confederate military personnel. During protests that drew hundreds of people in June, heads were ripped off some of the statues while one was pulled down, critically injuring a demonstrator.
Greene, the Portsmouth police chief, said that “several individuals conspired and organized to destroy the monument as well as summon hundreds of people to join in felonious acts.”
Greene said those acts “not only resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the monument, but also permanent injury to an individual.”
Greene did not detail exactly what Lucas or several other people are accused of doing did to merit the charges that have been filed against them.
Other people facing charges include members of the local NAACP chapter, a local school board member and members of the public defenders office, the police chief said.
Greene said requests were made to state and federal authorities to conduct an independent investigation. And she said that a discussion with the Portsmouth Commonwealth's Attorney "did not yield any action.”
“It was the duty of the Portsmouth Police Department to begin a thorough and comprehensive investigation,” Greene said.
Stephanie Morales, the Portsmouth Commonwealth's Attorney, told The Associated Press in an email that her office did not sign off on the police department's charges.
Claire G. Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, said Virginia is one of the few states in which a felony warrant can be filed without a prosecutor's approval.
“These charges are political, and I think they're discriminatory,” she said.
“The police department is making decisions about who should be charged in a circumstance in which the elected (prosecutor) is being bypassed,” Gastañaga added. “The police want a different result” and that is alarming.
Meanwhile, Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Rich Anderson said the senator should turn herself in.
“Felony charges leveled against a sitting state senator are to be taken seriously, and should not be sought out for political gain,” he said in a statement. "It is for that reason that the Republican Party of Virginia calls for Senator Lucas to turn herself in. Immediately.”
The Trump administration said on Monday it has officially approved a plan to open a pristine Arctic wildlife refuge in Alaska for oil drilling, an effort that has enraged environmental groups who say the work will threaten polar bears and herds of caribou in the region.
The plan has been in the works since Congress mandated in its 2017 tax bill that the Interior Department must auction off drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It would open up the so-called 1002 area, a patch of 1.5 million acres along the coast of the Beaufort Sea.
"I do believe that there certainly could be a lease sale by the end of the year,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told reporters on a conference call.
Oil companies have sought access to ANWR for decades, but the official decision to open it comes at a time when few in the industry are expected to take a risk on unexplored properties with little data on the oil resources beneath the surface. But Bernhardt said despite the absence of seismic data that companies use to map out oil reservoirs before drilling, he expected interest to be strong.
"I think a lot of people will bid without seismic data,” he told reporters.
But David Hayes, a former Obama administration Interior official and now the head of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at New York University School of Law, said the lack of geological data and Interior's failure to assess how seismic testing itself could impact the area were two major shortfalls that could doom Interior’s efforts to open the area to drilling.
Environmental groups could exploit Interior’s contention that oil production would affect only 2,000 acres of land, even though the agency's own review shows drilling wells would be widely dispersed and have to be connected with many miles pipelines, Hayes added.
“They tried to use creative accounting to suggest this will only impact 2,000 acres,” Hayes said in an interview. “But they don’t fully analyze the impact of a full 1.5 million acres crisscrossed by pipelines out the wazoo. ... There are tripwires they have right out of the box.”
President Donald Trump, who has previously boasted about opening ANWR, indicated in an interview early Monday that no final decision had been made on opening the area.
"We may or may not do it," he said. "Well no, we are looking at it."
Bernhardt declined to comment on Trump’s comments, saying, “I’m not aware of what the President specifically said.”
Oil companies have been leaving Alaska because of the high cost of drilling and shipping oil from such a remote area compared to the relatively quick and cheap oil wells they can drill in Texas, North Dakota and other states already equipped with pipelines. British oil giant BP last month completed a sale of its extensive Alaska operations to the smaller Hilcorp, and ConocoPhillips remains one of the only major oil companies still drilling in Alaska. Shell dropped its offshore Alaska interest in 2015 after failing to find oil in an expensive exploration effort.
Oil trade association American Petroleum Institute cheered Bernhardt‘s announcement, saying in a press release the industry has "a well-established record of safe and environmentally responsible development of Alaska’s energy resources and has been recognized for its success in being respectful of Alaska’s wildlife and surrounding communities.“
But others in the industry were less confident that opening up ANWR this year would trigger a rush to the area, and the possibility that Alaskan voters would back a November ballot referendum that would raise taxes on oil production was adding to the uncertainty.
“There may be a few players looking at this but it will be far from a Gold Rush,” said one industry official who requested anonymity to speak frankly. “In the current and near term energy market, the costs of development is significantly higher than for the Permian Shale [in Texas] and in some cases Gulf of Mexico development.“
Even industry officials who supported the move in principal said there may be limited interest in the area for now.
“We may not need those resources today but we will eventually,” said Dan Eberhart, chief executive of oil services company Canary LLC and a major Republican donor.
Environmental groups also said tapping the resources from the area will exacerbate climate change in a region that is already seeing a loss of permafrost and, in some cases, villages on the coastline in danger of sliding into the sea.
“This plan will not only harm caribou, polar bears, and other wildlife, it is foolish in the face of rapidly advancing climate change,” said Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Jennifer Rokala. “Oil companies will have to harden their infrastructure to withstand melting permafrost and rising seas, leading to an even greater impact.”
Center for Biological Diversity attorney Kristen Monsell said her group would challenge Interior’s decision in court, noting that the department’s environmental review was “fundamentally flawed” in its downplaying or dismissal of climate science.
“The administration’s narrow focus ignores both the science and the agency’s legal obligations,” Monsell said. “This move is both reckless and unlawful and we’ll continue to fight it using all the tools we have, including litigation.“
Democrats, native tribes in the area and environmental groups have long opposed Interior’s efforts to open ANWR. They said drilling in the area would negatively impact caribou herds in the area that are an important food source for tribes, and point to Interior’s own environmental impact review that says drilling in the area would harm polar bears.
A number of major global banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, have said they won’t provide financing for drilling in ANWR. Environmental activists have suggested the reputational risks to companies operating in ANWR would be severe.
Those announcements from the banks have prompted the Trump administration to explore whether they were discriminating against the project, which was first reported by POLITICO.
Former Vice President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the Trump administration’s actions in Iraq on January 7, 2020, in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
“He’s looking at an across-the-board restoration project,” said a former Obama administration official.
If Joe Biden wins in November, he will face a slew of global crises on the first day of his presidency — many of them caused or at least exacerbated by the presidency of Donald Trump.
Climate change has only become more dire. The coronavirus has upended lives and economies around the world. America’s allies trust it less and less. China has taken advantage of the chaos to gain more power. Countries like Iran and North Koreahave moved closer to obtaining nuclear weapons or strengthened their arsenals. And, lest we forget, the nation remains at war.
It’s a daunting set of challenges for any new president to face. “He’s looking at an across-the-board restoration project,” said Derek Chollet, a former top Pentagon official in the Obama administration. “Biden would be facing the most chaotic international environment since 1945” — the year World War II ended and the Cold War started to ramp up.
The good news is that Biden is a creature of the American foreign policy machine. From his years serving as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his time in Congress and later as point person on key aspects of Barack Obama’s handling of the world as vice president, Biden knows what it’s like to have his hands on the controls.
In 2012, Foreign Policy’s James Taub wrote, “It is safe to say that on foreign policy, Biden is the most powerful US vice president in history save for his immediate predecessor, Dick Cheney.”
That’s the kind of background and knowhow few commanders in chief have. “He will come into office with a résumé that’s unmatched on foreign policy experience,” with the possible exception of George H.W. Bush, said former Biden congressional adviser James Rubin.
The bad news is that Biden hasn’t always been — and, according to some, never was — successful on the world stage. His critics, including those on the left, contend he made America’s postwar Iraq efforts worse, got too close to authoritarian leaders, and never had a signature foreign policy achievement in Congress or as Obama’s No. 2. And their hopes for Biden’s ability to get the US out of the global hole Trump dug for it are low.
“Biden is not going to be the leader of our times or for our times,” Daniel Bessner, a University of Washington professor and adviser to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, told me. Having Biden in charge, instead of someone with more progressive foreign policy ideas like the Vermont senator, “is pretty grim from my perspective. It’s a world historical loss for this nation.”
But if Biden finds himself back in the Oval Office on January 20, he’ll be the one in charge. It’d be too much to expect him to solve the world’s ills on day one — no president could — but he’ll have to start making significant moves right away to stitch a frayed world back together.
How Biden will aim to do so is still not fully clear. His campaign declined multiple requests for an on-the-record interview with the candidate or staff to get a better understanding of his foreign policy plans. But Biden and his aides have made many statements on foreign policy during the 2020 campaign so far, and the former VP has a long record from which to glean insights. Interviews with those who worked with him and other experts help fill in the details.
What follows, then, is how Biden would likely handle the top foreign policy challenges facing the country right now.
Global health: Climate change and coronavirus
Biden’s team has made no secret of what the newly elected president would do in his first hours on the job.
First, he would recommit the US to the Paris climate agreement. America’s participation in the accord ends on November 4, 2020 — the day after the election. The move to end US participation, initiated on November 4, 2019, fulfilled Trump’s campaign promise to withdraw from the pact even as US greenhouse gas emissions were rising, reversing years of decline.
Reentering the agreement would be a significant development: The 2015 Paris agreement set a target for limiting warming this century to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, with an aspirational target of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Under the accord, signed by the Obama administration, the United States set a target of cutting its emissions 13 to 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
(For a fuller explanation of Biden’s climate plan, read my colleague David Roberts’s story.)
Biden would also start combating the coronavirus right away. “Job one will be to get Covid under control,” Tony Blinken, Biden’s foreign policy adviser who’s expected to get a top job in the administration, told Axios last month.
People close to Biden, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity because the campaign didn’t give them permission to talk, said Biden’s coronavirus plan would put an equal emphasis on handling the health crisis and the simultaneous economic crisis caused by the pandemic.
It’s no surprise that Biden would push on these two issues from the start. Climate change is the greatest medium- to long-term threat facing the world, and Covid-19 is the top short- to medium-term threat. Promising to tackle those issues, then, is not only out of necessity, but also to display he intrinsically understands these problems more than Trump.
“Biden knows that we’re in a super-deep hole,” an aide to Biden while he was vice president told me, “while the president keeps digging it.”
Biden has spent much of the past few months of his campaign outlining a coronavirus plan that focuses heavily on domestic efforts like increasing the supplies of available tests and personal protective equipment, as well as reversing the nation’s economic slide. He’s spent less time detailing the international aspects of his pandemic solutions, though he’s offered some policies.
A major component includes reversing Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization (WHO), the globe’s premier health body. “We have to immediately restore our relationship with the World Health Organization, for all its shortcomings and missteps around Covid-19,” Biden said during a June 30 speech in Wilmington, Delaware, noting the WHO was slow to call the outbreak a pandemic and challenge China’s obfuscation.
Keeping the US in the WHO would be a major boon for it. The health body will lose nearly $900 million in US contributions every two years — by far the most it receives from any nation — if the US leaves in July 2021, when Trump’s withdrawal is slated to go into effect. Trump had already frozen about $400 million of that money in April when he first halted funding during a review of US-WHO relations, subsequently harming the agency in the middle of the pandemic.
Biden also wants the US to head a global coalition to find a vaccine and other remedies for the disease. “It is essential to coordinating the global response during a pandemic, and the United States should be leading that response as we had in the past,” he said in the same Delaware speech. “We should be leading a coordinated global approach on the science, not disregarding experts while pushing dangerous and disproved drugs as if they’re treatments.”
Most experts I spoke to applaud this concept, namely because a coordinated global effort might minimize the consequences of “vaccine nationalism.” As Vox’s Jen Kirby explains, “the race to discover and distribute a coronavirus vaccine pits countries against each other” as “each nation prioritizes its own interests, inside its own borders, rather than cooperating and fighting against a pandemic that respects neither.”
The hope, those close to Biden argue, is that having the US coordinate a global response instead of allowing every nation to fend for itself — or having countries like China or Russia lead the global response — would benefit everyone.
It’s possible Biden has other ideas he’s not fully articulating at the moment. Experts, though, would like to hear more on his global health plans and are offering their own thoughts in the meantime.
Chollet, who is now at the German Marshall Fund think tank, said he expects more money will be allocated for global health in Biden’s federal budget. If that’s the case, it’s likely some of those funds will be taken out of defense spending and moved into combating the coronavirus at home and abroad (more on that in the last section).
Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen would like to see that. “The first thing Biden needs to do for global health is to invest in pandemic preparedness across the board,” she told me. That means, among other things, more cash for lab fieldwork and research in coordination with other countries, including China.
Such a commitment must be sustained, she continued, “as the ‘boom and bust’ cycles of funding on emerging viruses have greatly hindered our ability to effectively respond to them and one reason why we are scrambling to counter this pandemic.”
Noam Galai/Getty Images
A person wears a protective face mask outside Trump International Hotel and Tower New York on August 16, 2020.
While Biden may adopt these and other ideas down the line, those close to him tell me he’s thinking about the broader message that having the US at the forefront of handling the pandemic really sends. In the former vice president’s mind, quickly changing course from Trump’s “America First” approach would signal the US has returned as a world leader capable of solving global problems and its own issues at home.
“Biden’s foreign policy, in the first instance, is about fixing us here,” the former aide told me. “You can’t be a city upon a hill if your city is tarnished.”
It’s a concept Biden has championed often. “In over 45 years of working in global affairs, I’ve observed a simple truth: America’s ability to lead the world depends not just on the example of our power, but on the power of our example,” he wrote in a 2017 New York Times op-ed.
Taking on such tasks is monumental, experts say, and would require the US to coordinate more closely with allies. The US, after all, couldn’t possibly do all of what he wants to address alone.
Biden sees it the same way.
Alliances: “Build from the free world out”
Since the end of World War II, Democrats and Republicans have pursued largely similar approaches to US foreign policy. Presidents from both parties have used US power to underwrite and maintain what’s called the “liberal international order,” which basically means the set of economic and political rules and values that help the world function.
The US never did this out of the goodness of its heart. Promoting free trade and liberal democracy was meant to provide America with markets to sell goods to and countries with which to build alliances against adversaries. It was never a perfect system, and the US made many, many errors along the way. But overall, that grand strategy helped the US maintain its position as the world’s preeminent power.
That, in a nutshell, is the world Biden wants to restore and protect.
“For the past seven decades, the choices we have made — particularly the United States and our allies in Europe — have steered our world down a clear path,” Biden said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in January 2017, just three days before leaving office as vice president. “In recent years it has become evident that the consensus upholding this system is facing increasing pressures, from within and from without,” he continued. “It’s imperative that we act urgently to defend the liberal international order.”
The best way to do that, Biden contends, is to maintain and bolster America’s system of alliances that form the heart of that order.
He hit that theme in a July 2019 foreign policy address at the City University of New York. “America’s security, prosperity, and way of life require the strongest possible network of partners and allies working alongside us,” he said. “The Biden foreign policy agenda will place America back at the head of the table, working with our allies and partners — to mobilize global action on global threats, especially those unique to our century.”
This stance, the centrality of America’s alliances to US foreign policy, is key to understanding how Biden thinks about almost every global issue, experts and those close to him told me. “Expect Biden’s approach to be much more multilateral” than Trump’s, Mira Rapp-Hooper, author of a well-regarded book on America’s alliances, told me. “There is no major approach that could be taken unilaterally.”
A former aide explained Biden’s view on this to me in terms of “concentric circles.” Those circles, which variously could be labeled “coronavirus” or “China” or “climate change” (take your pick) all have one common core: allies. For Biden, then, no problem can be solved unless America’s friends in Europe, East Asia, and beyond are fully engaged.
“He would build from the free world out,” the aide said.
It’s why Biden takes almost any chance he gets to reiterate that message while blasting Trump for pushing allies away out of a belief they mainly free ride off America’s favor.
“Working cooperatively with other nations that share our values and goals does not make the United States a chump,” Biden wrote in a January Foreign Affairs article. “It makes us more secure and more successful. We amplify our own strength, extend our presence around the globe, and magnify our impact while sharing global responsibilities with willing partners.”
But reestablishing America’s relations with allies is easier said than done.
Biden would have to rebuild trust lost during the Trump years. In 2018, for example, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her country could no longer lean on the United States to help maintain order in the world. “We can’t rely on the superpower of the United States,” she said during a news conference.
Last month, after years of frosty Washington-Berlin relations during the current administration, Trump ordered the removal of nearly 12,000 US troops from Germany because he claimed the key European ally wasn’t pulling its weight on defense.
Such instances of ally abuse will be hard for America’s friends to forget. “There has been damage that can’t be undone so simply,” said James Mann, author of a book on the Obama administration’s foreign policy and now at Johns Hopkins University.
Indeed, experts say Biden may initially feel like he can just proclaim that “Uncle Joe is back, and America is back,” but he’d be better served going on a listening tour first.
“It would be wise not to assert any specific agenda at the outset,” but instead coordinate conferences with allies in Europe and Asia — perhaps both together — “and start listening to what they see as the top global threats to their countries,” said Rapp-Hooper, who is at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank and informally advises the Biden campaign.
In his July 2019 speech, Biden committed to hosting a summit of the world’s democracies in his first year “to put strengthening democracy back on the global stage.” Reclaiming that alliance system, then, will be a major lift for Biden.
Reshaping alliances for the future will be even harder.
Rapp-Hooper told me the way America set up its post-World War II alliance structure — mainly to deter a conventional war with powers like Russia and China — “isn’t as effective as it once was.” The reason is straightforward: That system was actually very successful, so Moscow, Beijing, and others adapted their strategies. Russia started showing it could chew off parts of Europe bite by bite, and China gained more control of waters near its territory also claimed by US allies.
Sprinkle in government-backed disinformation campaigns and it becomes clear America’s adversaries are running a long-term alliance erosion play. The problem, Rapp-Hooper told me, is “America’s alliances haven’t moved” to meet the new challenge.
Critics say Biden is too steeped in Cold War thinking — after all, he spent decades of his career during that time — and is too captured by the traditional alliance model to catalyze a needed reformation. His supporters, meanwhile, note the line in the January Foreign Affairs article in which Biden wrote, “I will do more than just restore our historic partnerships; I will lead the effort to reimagine them for the world we face today.”
Biden may also need to reimagine who, exactly, counts as a US ally. Two traditional American friends in particular have come under increased scrutiny.
Democrats are very critical of Israel under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his coziness with Trump and his desire to further infringe on the rights of Palestinians. Biden has often stated America’s commitment to Israel would be “ironclad” during his administration, but those close to him say he would push the prime minister harder than previous presidents.
“As long as Israel’s government is as far to the right as it is, there will be disagreements,” the former Biden aide said, “but that doesn’t undermine America’s support for Israel’s security.”
Baz Ratner/Getty Images
Then-Vice President Joe Biden sits with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before a dinner at the prime minister’s residence, March 9, 2010, in Jerusalem, Israel.
The former staffer also said Biden would look to manage the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict crisis instead of seeking a two-state solution. The conditions just aren’t there for it.
“The time is not right for a two-state outcome,” the former staffer told me. “The goal right now is to stop the bleeding” and “minimize the unilateral steps that make a two-state outcome less and less viable by the day,” such as pushing for Israeli annexation of the West Bank. “We need to put a bandage on a gaping wound. We’re not going to cure the patient.”
The other ally under a microscope is Saudi Arabia. Under Trump, Saudi Arabia has grown closer to the US than it has been in decades — in large part due to the close personal relationship between the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Trump son-in-law and presidential adviser Jared Kushner.
But many Democrats, and especially progressives, question the wisdom and morality of such staunch US support for Saudi Arabia given the regime’s myriad human rights abuses — such as the 2018 murder of dissident journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence believes was directly ordered by top Saudi leaders, and the Saudi war in Yemen.
“Our interests are going down and our values are getting further apart,” another former Biden aide said. “Democrats feel there’s no going back to a previous era of US-Saudi policy,” Rapp-Hooper noted, referencing years of an understood trade of cheap Saudi oil and support against Iran in return for US weapons and funding.
All this means Biden will have the immense task of stopping America’s alliance structure from crumbling, finding a way to make alliances stronger, and changing the way the US engages with troublesome friends all at the same time. To do that at any point would be difficult, but to do it with a major global challenger testing those relationships at once will be even harder.
Countering China requires “a democratic alliance to save the world”
Despite Biden’s increasingly tough rhetoric on China, it doesn’t rank quite as high on his list as the aforementioned policy issues.
It’s not that the US-China relationship doesn’t matter to Biden — it does, and I’ve been repeatedly told he’ll make it a top priority. But he firmly believes the US will only get the upper hand on China by proving it is strong at home and has a coalition of friends willing to thwart Beijing’s most troublesome policies in unison.
Think of it like a geopolitical gang-up: the US and its crew versus a mostly lonely China. “We need to rally the democratic world together more than ever,” said the first former Biden staffer. “It’ll be a democratic alliance to save the world.”
For years now, Democrats have signaled the party would take a more confrontational stance toward China. An influential 2018 Foreign Affairs piece by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, the latter of whom is advising Biden, made that explicit. Here’s the key part:
Neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted. Diplomatic and commercial engagement have not brought political and economic openness. Neither U.S. military power nor regional balancing has stopped Beijing from seeking to displace core components of the U.S.-led system. And the liberal international order has failed to lure or bind China as powerfully as expected. China has instead pursued its own course, belying a range of American expectations in the process. ...
[B]uilding a stronger and more sustainable approach to, and relationship with, Beijing requires honesty about how many fundamental assumptions have turned out wrong.
That tone is a marked shift from, say, the first term of the Obama administration.
To hear Biden tell it, he’s ready for a showdown. “We do need to get tough with China,” he said in his July 2019 speech. “If China has its way, it will keep robbing the US of our technology and intellectual property, or forcing American companies to give it away in order to do business in China.”
Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images
Vice President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping toast during a luncheon on September 25, 2015, at the Department of State in Washington, DC.
How to confront Beijing? You guessed it: with allies. “The most effective way to meet that challenge is to build a united front of friends and partners to challenge China’s abusive behavior — even as we seek to deepen cooperation on issues where our interests converge, like climate change and preventing nuclear proliferation,” Biden continued.
That all sounds well and good, but one of the main critiques of Biden’s handling of foreign policy is that he did next to nothing to blunt China’s military and economic rise over two terms as vice president.
On the military front, despite declaring a strategic “pivot to Asia” to counter Beijing, Obama’s team put few resources behind making it actually happen. In 2015, Xi promised at the White House that China wouldn’t militarize artificial islands in the South China Sea, an area the country claims mostly for itself but that is disputed by a number of other countries.
But over the following months, it became clear that Xi had broken his vow, leading to rising tensions in those waters and between the US, its allies, and China writ large. That militarization persists and would be an issue for Biden to contend with.
On economics and trade, too, some experts feel Biden will have trouble responding. “The Obama administration was asleep at the wheel on this issue,” Edward Alden, a global trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me in June.
In 2010, major credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard, and American Express pleaded with Obama’s trade representative to take action against China for shutting them out of the country’s market, especially since Beijing had promised them access by 2006. But Obama’s team didn’t succeed, making it an issue for Trump to deal with during trade negotiations.
The Obama White House also didn’t push back much on China’s gaming of the World Trade Organization during the first term, essentially allowing China to continue to cheat on trade at America’s expense. It was only in Obama’s second term that the White House took the issue more seriously.
So the question remains: Would a President Biden hew more closely to his vice presidential days, or will he opt for a more aggressive stance?
Some say Biden will follow his relatively hawkish China advisers, perhaps prodding Beijing more than necessary. Others close to Biden say he has strong views on the issue: He’d like to compel China to change its ways on trade, cybertheft, technology, and human rights, but he also recognizes that Washington and Beijing need to cooperate on major issues like the coronavirus and climate change.
“The relationship can’t be a complete race to the bottom like a new cold war,” said a former Biden foreign policy aide.
One of the trickiest issues Biden must deal with early on is the ongoing persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, a province in western China. The Chinese regime has interned at least a million Uighurs against their will in vast prison camps, where officials use torture and brainwashing to “reeducate them” to more closely align with the Communist Party’s beliefs.
Biden hasn’t minced words on this issue, or on President Xi. “This is a guy who is — doesn’t have a democratic, with a small D, bone in his body,” Biden said during a February Democratic debate. “This is a guy who is a thug, who in fact has a million Uighurs in ‘reconstruction camps,’ meaning concentration camps.”
His campaign also has said a Biden administration would crack down on China for its encroachment on the democratic rights of Hong Kong.
Blinken, the top Biden foreign policy aide, told Reuters in May that Biden would “fully enforce” a law which requires the State Department to certify the democratic nature of the city, “including sanctions on officials, financial institutions, companies, and individuals.”
In a July statement to Reuters, Biden said China’s recently imposed national security law would equate to “dealing a death blow to the freedoms and autonomy that set Hong Kong apart from the rest of China.” Should Beijing cite those laws to stamp out the city’s pro-democracy movement — which it looks like it’s doing — then Biden said he’d further sanction China.
The Biden campaign is also keeping an eye on potential Chinese moves to destabilize or even attack Taiwan, the breakaway democratic island Beijing considers part of the country. The US supports Taiwan’s democracy with weaponry and funding as a way to deter China from trying to bring the island back into the government’s fold.
“If China is getting signals of impunity, then one’s concern is it may think it can do the same with regard to Taiwan,” Blinken told Bloomberg last month. As president, Blinken said, Biden would “step up defenses of Taiwan’s democracy by exposing Beijing’s efforts to interfere.” It’s unclear, though, if that means sending more fighter jets to Taiwan, as some Democrats have advocated for.
Neither of these stances gives Biden much wiggle room. He’s quite committed now to confronting China on these issues, preferably with US allies working alongside him to urge Beijing to change these practices. Most say the chances for success are minimal, but even some Republicans say Biden might have the chops to pull it off.
“The Biden administration would be much better positioned to marshal a coalition of countries” to counter the most troublesome Chinese policies than Trump, former Louisiana Republican Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., who spent years in the House working on Washington-Beijing relations, told me.
Biden may need such multilateral assistance for another major challenge: stopping the growing proliferation risk around the world.
Nuclear proliferation: Russian, North Korean, and Iranian efforts “a major problem”
Just over a week before leaving office as vice president, Biden gave a major speech on the Obama administration’s nuclear security legacy. Among the successes he touted, he said the US had struck nuclear deals with Iran, Russia, China, and others. He pressed the next administration — the Trump administration — to follow a similar course.
“Arms control is integral to our national defense and — when it comes to nuclear weapons — to our self-preservation,” Biden told the crowd at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Chris Kleponis/AFP via Getty Images
Vice President Joe Biden speaks about the Obama administration’s nuclear policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, on January 11, 2017.
Yet the threat of nuclear proliferation — that is, countries with the bomb strengthening their arsenals and those without one moving closer to it — is higher now than when Biden left office. Trump has either broken or eschewed nuclear agreements with other countries, leading some to worry the guardrails around nuclear proliferation have all but come down.
A quick look around the world makes that clear. The US and Russia are months away from not having any nuclear agreements between them just as Moscow builds a nuclear-powered cruise missile. North Korea is closer to hitting the US with a miniaturized nuclear weapon atop a long-range missile. And Iran is inching toward getting its first bomb, should it actually seek one.
Experts say nuclear issues may feature more prominently during the Biden era, then, than in past administrations. “Nuclear proliferation is going to be a major problem for sure,” said Peter Rough, a US foreign policy expert at the Hudson Institute.
Here’s a quick look at each of those four top proliferation risks, and how Biden might handle them.
Russia
The US and Russia are just months away from losing the last major arms control agreement between them: New START, short for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. That agreement limits the size of the two countries’ nuclear arsenals, which together account for 93 percent of all nuclear warheads on earth. The deal expires on February 5, 2021, and those sitting around the table feared its demise.
And if that’s the case, there will be no formal treaties limiting the size and strength of each other’s nuclear arsenals — which understandably has some experts quite worried. “We’re creating the greater threat of a conflict that could literally destroy each country and perhaps even our planet,” Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and defense secretary under President Obama, told me earlier this month.
The concern is justified, as both the US and Russia have moved further away from limiting their nuclear abilities.
The Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, released in February 2018, lowered the threshold for dropping a bomb on an enemy. Basically, the US said it would launch low-yield nuclear weapons — smaller, less deadly bombs — in response to non-nuclear strikes, such as a major cyberattack. That was in contrast with previous US administrations, which said they would respond with a nuke only in the event of the most egregious threats against the US, like the possible use of a biological weapon.
In February, the US military placed its first low-yield nuclear weapon on a submarine, which means Washington now has a stealthy and hard-to-defend-against way to deliver a nuke to almost any point on earth.
And in March 2018, Putin gave a dramatic speech to his nation in which he boasted about creating an unstoppable, nuclear-powered cruise missile that could hit any point on the planet. (That’s big: Conventional cruise missiles rarely travel farther than 600 miles.) This kind of weapon moves so quickly and flies so low to the ground that it could evade US and European missile defense systems and hit intended targets with a nuclear weapon.
Putin said the new technology would render American missile defense “useless,” but US officials say it needs further testing and is not yet operational. In fact, a radioactive explosion in 2019 in Russia may have been caused by a failed test of this very weapon.
Alexey Druzhinin/AFP via Getty Images
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Vice President Joe Biden meet on March 10, 2011, with their delegations in Moscow.
Biden would come into office before New START officially expires, and he has already committed to extending it. “I’ll pursue an extension of New START Treaty, an anchor of strategic stability between the United States and Russia, and use that as a foundation for new arms control agreements,” he said during his foreign policy speech in New York.
Since the presidents of the US and Russia simply need to agree to its extension, Biden and Putin — who already said he wants to keep New START — could add another five years to the deal.
Per a former aide, Biden hopes the extension “could be used as a follow-on for more arms control negotiations with Russia.” It’s unclear that it would lead both countries to ramp down other nuclear moves, but it would certainly be a start.
North Korea
Trump made history by holding three summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. But while the meetings were high on pageantry, they were low on substance. As a result, Pyongyang hasn’t halted its nuclear advancements — it has accelerated them.
Earlier this month, a UN report stated North Korea had “probably” figured out how to place miniaturized nuclear weapons on a ballistic missile, moving Kim closer to hitting US territory with a bomb. That tracks with other projections showing North Korea has only augmented its arsenal in the Trump era, which it has vowed to continue to do.
“Even a slim ray of optimism for peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula has faded away into a dark nightmare,” North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Son Gwon said in a June statement.
It’s clear, then, that Trump’s attempt at personal diplomacy has failed. A former Biden aide familiar with the former vice president’s views told me that “Biden wouldn’t repeat [Trump’s] mistakes” in an effort to rid North Korea of its nuclear weapons.
Namely, Biden would go back to the traditional model of handling the North Korea portfolio: refusing to hold a nonconditional meeting with Kim while giving space for working-level staff to hammer out critical details of any potential nuclear deal. In the meantime, he’d keep and toughen sanctions on North Korea until it took serious steps to dismantle its nuclear arsenal.
He’d also coordinate actions closely with South Korea and Japan to ensure any move on Pyongyang was done “in lockstep” with them, as well as fold in China due to its immense economic influence on Kim’s country.
He made this clear during his July 2019 speech: “I will empower our negotiators and jumpstart a sustained, coordinated campaign with our allies and others — including China — to advance our shared objective of a denuclearized North Korea.”
Of course, that approach hasn’t yet worked either, as previous presidents tried similar routes only to see North Korea expand its nuclear arsenal. For that and other reasons, the former Biden staffer acknowledged that “there’s no silver bullet on North Korea.”
A top South Korean official, who wasn’t authorized to speak with me on the record, said they were upset to hear Biden’s stated North Korea plan. The official suggested that Biden not completely throw out the Trump playbook and urged the former VP to “send a clear signal to Pyongyang that he is willing to meet Kim Jong Un without any precondition.”
Such a divergence in stances means there may already be a major split between how a Biden administration would want to handle Pyongyang and how Seoul would prefer things be done. However, Biden left the door open to meeting with Kim in an answer to a New York Times questionnaire: “I would be willing to meet with Kim ... as part of an actual strategy that moves the ball forward on denuclearization.”
A lot of what happens, though, depends on North Korea. If Kim won’t engage in talks of any kind and/or resumes testing nuclear bombs or missiles that could reach the US, it would be hard for Biden to adopt a Trump-like approach, the South Korean official said.
What’s clear, then, is that Biden may have the hardest job of any president yet engaging with North Korea. “North Korea will be the same problem as it was, if not worse,” said Hudson’s Rough.
Iran
The 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran, the US, European powers, Russia, and China put tight restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. The Obama administration’s goal was to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon diplomatically instead of by force. But Trump withdrew America from the deal in 2018, reimposed financial penalties on Iran, and asked European countries to cease their business with the country.
That led Iranian President Hassan Rouhani last year to announce a series of escalations to move Iran further from compliance with the deal as a way to put pressure on the US and its allies. Rouhani said his nation would start stockpiling low-enriched uranium, which can be used for nuclear reactors but not for atomic bombs. And in January, he announced his country was enriching uranium at a higher level than before the nuclear deal restricted that activity.
The Iranian regime has made no secret as to why it’s taking such provocative steps. “In response to the US’s withdrawal from its obligations, we decided to reduce our commitments step by step,” Rouhani said in his address at a meeting with the Islamic Republic’s Central Bank in January.
Iran denies it has ever aimed to get a nuclear weapon, and these and other moves brought it closer — but not close — to that point. Still, it’s fair to say Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 pact made a nuclear Iran more likely in the years ahead.
That leaves a tough test for Biden, who must decide how to handle an increasingly aggressive Iran. A former Biden foreign policy staffer told me dealing with Tehran “will be an early priority” for a Biden administration.
Here’s how the aide described Biden’s Iran plan: First, the US “would be open to mutual reentry” into the Iran nuclear deal as long as Iran moved back into compliance with it. That would mean reducing the enrichment level and stockpile of uranium, among other actions.
After that, the US would work with European allies in the deal to “push for further talks on regional questions.” This might satisfy one of the main critiques of the agreement, which is that the Obama administration didn’t press Tehran hard enough to end its support for proxies in the Middle East or missile program. “There’s a lot of appetite to have those broader conversations,” the aide said.
Should he need to compel Iran to change its behavior on those broader issues, Biden outlined a suite of responses in the New York Times:
This would include: targeted sanctions against Iranian support for terrorism and Iran’s ballistic missile program; ironclad support for Israel; robust intelligence and security cooperation with regional partners; support for strengthening the capacity of countries like Iraq to resist Iranian influence; and a renewed commitment to diplomacy aimed at ending wars in Yemen and Syria that provide Iran with opportunities to expand.
But there’s a complication: Iran has a presidential election next year. Rouhani was president when the nuclear deal was signed, and he certainly views not overseeing its complete deathas a legacy issue. Another president might not, which is why experts say Biden would have to move quickly to restore the deal before the Iranian election season really kicks off.
Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, makes that argument. She told me Biden would have to make advances with Tehran early in his presidency. The regime would need to agree to stop further expanding its nuclear efforts by early February, she said, paving a pathway for it to come back into compliance by March or April. The US would by then have to provide financial relief to Iran for doing so.
Having the Iran deal back in place would set the stage for the Biden administration to have those further talks on regional issues with the next Iranian leader’s team, Geranmayeh claimed, but not direct president-to-president negotiations. “There’s still a big political stink” to having those, she told me.
Biden, however, may not even get the chance to have such talks. The Trump administration may further impose sanctions on Iran later in the year, which may cause Tehran to sprint even faster toward a bomb or launch further attacks on Americans. At that point, the deal would all but collapse and the former VP wouldn’t have the political space for diplomacy.
“We may be in a situation where Iran is expanding activities,” and “it could land us anywhere,” said Geranmayeh — including war.
That’s troubling. In a New York Times questionnaire, Biden said he would consider military action to preempt Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. “Force must be used judiciously to protect a vital interest of the United States, only when the objective is clear and achievable, with the informed consent of the American people and, where required, the approval of Congress,” he said. “[T]he nuclear ambitions of Iran pose such a vital interest.”
Biden, however, seems committed to a diplomacy-first course. “The only way out of this crisis is through diplomacy — clear-eyed, hard-nosed diplomacy grounded in strategy, that’s not about one-off decisions or one-upmanship,” he said during a January foreign policy speech.
Would Biden’s preference for diplomacy over war also extend to America’s continuing conflicts around the world? Maybe.
America’s wars: “It’s past time to end the forever wars”
It’s always worth repeating that the US has been at war since 2001. Thousands of American and non-American lives have been lost. Trillions of dollars have been spent. And, for all that’s happened, it looks like the US made much of the world worse.
The Taliban is surging in Afghanistan. Iraq remains in shambles; the government in Baghdad has moved closer to Iran, and the Iraqi people openly call for the US to stop meddling in its affairs.
Xinhua/Saifurahman Safi via Getty Images
An Afghan border forces soldier stands guard at a US forces base, which has been handed over to Afghan border forces in Dih Bala district of Nangarhar province, eastern Afghanistan, July 20, 2020.
It’s no wonder, then, that a bipartisan movement in the US pushes for an end to the “forever wars.” If Biden is president, he’ll face pressure to deliver that. “Now is the time to roll back America’s military misadventures,” said Bessner, the former Sanders adviser at the University of Washington.
Biden has clearly heard these concerns. “It’s past time to end the forever wars, which have cost us untold blood and treasure,” he said in July 2019.
“We should bring the vast majority of our troops home — from the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East — and narrowly focus our mission on al-Qaeda and ISIS. And we should end our support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen,” he continued. “Staying entrenched in unwinnable conflicts drains our capacity to lead on other issues that require our attention, and it prevents us from rebuilding the other instruments of American power.”
How he’ll do that, though, is unclear.
Biden told the New York Times he’d “bring American combat troops in Afghanistan home during my first term. Any residual US military presence in Afghanistan would be focused only on counterterrorism operations.” But he’ll only have the political space to do that if he’s able to strengthen the Afghan government and weaken the Taliban so they reach some kind of permanent ceasefire and deal.
Husain Haqqani, formerly Pakistan’s ambassador to the US who interacted with Biden in an official capacity, thinks he knows how the former VP might try to do that. Biden once called Pakistan “potentially the most dangerous country in the world,” namely because it has nuclear weapons and supports the Taliban in Afghanistan. “He was right from an American point of view,” Haqqani told me.
That’s why Haqqani, now at the Hudson Institute, says Biden will likely place sanctions or other harsh measures on Islamabad to compel it to sever ties with Taliban fighters. “He will push on Pakistan far more than his predecessors,” the former ambassador said.
Whether or not that works, those close to Biden told me that as much as he’d want to bring US service members home from Afghanistan, he wouldn’t do it until he was sure a few thousand troops would suffice to handle the counterterrorism mission there. “It’s really going to depend on where Afghanistan is,” said GMF’s Chollet.
Trump told Axios earlier this month that he plans to have fewer than 5,000 troops in Afghanistan by Election Day — down from a current total of about 8,500 — which wouldn’t give Biden much wiggle room.
As for Yemen, a war in which the US got involved during the Obama administration, Biden has stated unequivocally that America will no longer play any role. “I would end US support for the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations in a questionnaire. But he’d do more than that: He’d punish Saudi Arabia for it, too.
“I would make it very clear we were not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them, we were going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are,” Biden said in November 2019 during the fifth Democratic debate. “I would end subsidies that we have, end the sale of material to the Saudis where they’re going in and murdering children and they’re murdering innocent people. And so they have to be held accountable.”
So Biden would look to end the wars the US is already in. But would he get the US involved in another one? Perhaps, but only under a strict set of conditions.
“We will use force to defend our vital interests, but it should be a last resort,” the former Biden aide said. “We need to make sure that there’s a clear mission, that it’s achievable, and have informed consent of the American people — and where possible bring the people with us.”
The former staffer noted Biden “is very proud” of the US-led coalition to defeat ISIS, which began under the Obama administration and was effectively continued by Trump. Biden believes that was the right kind of mission for the threat, and no longer wants to get bogged down in another major war unless absolutely necessary.
Indeed, the staffer said, “Biden is not a believer in the transformative, nation-building role of our military” and is “skeptical of intervention in the Middle East and Central Asia.” However, bringing forces around the world down to zero makes no sense because there are threats, Biden believes, mainly terrorist threats that a few thousand troops could handle (just like in Afghanistan).
Between winding down America’s wars, revamping diplomacy, and focusing on global health and economic issues at the start, some experts expect Biden to lower defense spending. “I think the defense budget will go down,” said GMF’s Chollet. “There should be cuts to the defense budget, and there will be cuts.”
Even so, Biden is unlikely to end the forever wars — despite his claims — but is surely looking to downsize them quite a bit.
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I can't for the life of me think why Oracle would want it, but... ok?
Enlarge / Oracle’s approach comes after President Donald Trump last week ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok’s US operations within 90 days. (credit: Chris Delmas | Getty Images)
Oracle has entered the race to acquire TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned short video app that President Donald Trump has vowed to shut down unless it is taken over by a US company by mid-November, people briefed about the matter have said.
The tech company co-founded by Larry Ellison had held preliminary talks with TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, and was seriously considering purchasing the app's operations in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the people said.
Oracle was working with a group of US investors that already own a stake in ByteDance, including General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital, the people added.
Enlarge / Eyes painted on cattle rumps trick lions into thinking they have lost the element of surprise, a new study suggests. (credit: Ben Yexley)
Cattle herds in the Okavango delta region in Botswana are plagued by attacks by lions and other predators, prompting farmers to retaliate by killing the predators. An alternative nonlethal technique involves painting eyes on the butts of cattle to trick ambush predators like lions into thinking they've been spotted by their intended prey. It's called the "Eye-Cow Project," and a recent paper published in the journal Communications Biology provides some solid empirical evidence for the practice. There are now practical guides for using the "eye-cow" technique available in both English and Setswana, so farmers can try it out for themselves.
Neil Jordan, a conservation biologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, came up with the idea several years ago while he was doing field work in Botswana. Local farmers killed a pair of lionesses in retaliation for preying on their herds of cattle, and Jordan wanted to come up with a non-lethal alternative. The African lion population has dropped significantly from more than 100,000 in the 1990s to somewhere between 23,000 and 39,000 in 2016—much of it due to retaliation killings.
Jordan knew that butterfly wings sporting eye-like patterns are known to ward off preying birds and are also found in certain fish, mollusks, amphibians and birds, although such patterns had not been observed in mammals. He also discovered that woodcutters in Indian forests have been known to wear masks on the backs of their heads to discourage any tigers hunting for prey. He had observed a lion stalking an impala and noticed the predator gave up the chase when the prey spotted it. Lions are ambush hunters, Jordan reasoned, and he decided to test his "detection hypothesis" that painting eyes on the butts of cows would discourage predatory behavior from the local lion population.
A plant-based Beyond Burger at a restaurant in Chicago. | Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
To save the world, plant-based meat needs to be cheaper.
The last couple of years have been consequential ones for meatless meat, as we at Future Perfect have documented. For all meatless meat’s success, however, advocates shouldn’t feel complacent. After all, meatless meat still makes up less than 1 percent of the annual meat consumption in the US — hardly a dent in how we eat.
Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to mass meatless meat consumption becomes apparent when you get to the checkout line at your local grocery store.
One pound of factory-farmed beef burgers at theWalmart near me? $2.80/pound.
One pound of, say, Beyond Meat’s Beyond Beef burgers? $6.25/pound.
That price disparity may well be a big factor keeping meatless meat from breaking through in a big way.
The pandemic has only underscored the importance of making meatless meat be a mainstream alternative to factory-farmed meat. Slaughterhouses, long notorious for their terrible working conditions, have been overwhelmed with coronavirus cases, in some cases because they responded to the coronavirus crisis by telling employees not to take any sick leave for any reason. With slaughterhouses shuttered, agriculture companies have engaged in mass cullings of animals they couldn’t sell, and the price of animal meat has gone up and remains higher than typical.
And then there are the larger-scale problems that the pandemic reminded the world of: It is a public health hazard to raise animals in crowded conditions that can incubate and rapidly spread disease.
All those problems have buoyed the plant-based meat industry, which was already coming off a record-setting year when the coronavirus crisis started. The simple idea of plant-based meat is that we can make food that tastes like meat, has the same nutrient profile as meat, and doesn’t come from animals — solving the environmental, public health, and ethical problems with factory farms in one swoop.
Consumers areinterested. More and more companies have launched plant-based meat brands, more and more fast food and casual dining restaurants have added menu options, and major players in the field have raised a lot of money — including a new $200 million in fundraising at Impossible Foods, announced Thursday.
Having won the first battle — getting consumers interested enough to try plant-based foods, and investors interested enough to fund them — plant-based meat companies are setting their sights on a bigger challenge: getting plant-based meat products as cheap as animal meat products are. The plant-based meat industry has to be bigger to compete with animal products on price — and competing on price is a key component of getting bigger as an industry.
There’s a lot at stake. Billions of animals are raised on factory farms and killed for food in the United States every year. The way we raise them contributes to climate change, antibiotic resistance, swine and bird flus, workers’ rights abuses, and animal cruelty on an appalling scale. But all the corners we’ve cut in animal farming mean that meat is cheap. To give every person access to plant-based alternatives and to meaningfully transition away from factory farming, plant-based alternatives have to get just as cheap — without cutting any of the same corners.
Why is meat so cheap anyway?
One big challenge for meatless meat is to become competitive on price with regular meat. It’s a steep challenge because meat in America is shockingly, unprecedentedly cheap.
The average price for a meat alternative sold in a grocers’ meat department in the US last year was $9.87/pound. The average price for beef? $4.82/pound. Chicken is even cheaper, at $2.33/pound.
That’s a big difference, and might go a long way toward explaining why even as consumer interest increases and the flavor profile of plant-based meats gets closer and closer to the flavor profile of animal meats, plant-based meats still make up only about 0.5 percent of meat sales in the U.S.
“The most processed cheap forms of chicken are just insanely cheap, relative to historical standards and relative to other food products on the market,” Lewis Bollard, who researches animals at the Open Philanthropy Project, told me. “The chicken industry has managed to cut all their corners, they don’t pay their environmental bills, they don’t pay for a lot of the public health hazards they cause. They have managed to produce a product that is just artificially cheap and hard to compete with.”
Animal agriculture is also heavily subsidized by the federal government. That said, neither Bollard nor Zak Weston, a researcher at the Good Food Institute, thought direct monetary subsidieswere the main reason meat was so cheap. More important are invisible forms of subsidization like not enforcing worker’s rights, exempting factory farms from animal cruelty laws, not requiring companies to engage in environmental cleanup, and not restricting practices — like antibiotic overuse — that impose costs on the whole world.
“It’s not the case that plant-based meat is weirdly expensive or labor intensive or something,” Weston told me. “The animal protein industry has spent decades wringing incredible efficiencies out of every part of the program. Animal meat gets to externalize a lot of its negatives — externalities like health care, ecological, worker welfare, animal welfare.”
In other words, if the animal meat industry were held accountable for the costs their products and their workings inflict on society, meat would be much more expensive.
Plant-based meat is getting cheaper, but it still doesn’t beat animal meat
“The three priorities we set ourselves are to develop products that from a sensory perspective closely resemble animal meat, the second is nutrition, and then the third is about cost,” Chuck Muth, chief growth officer at Beyond Meat, told me. “We know that to democratize our brand, we’ve got to bring the price down.”
“We were thinking about cost reductions and getting to the cost structure of commodity ground beef from the very beginning,” David Lee, chief financial officer of Impossible Foods, told me. “We knew that if we had the best product at the same cost then consumers would vote with their stomachs.”
In the last few years, they’ve already made progress. Companies were wary of sharing with me specific figures on their costs, but based onSecurities andExchange Commission filings, Bollard estimates that Beyond’s cost of production has fallen from $4.50/pound last year to $3.50/pound now.
Impossible declined to share similar numbers but noted that they’d cut their prices 15 percent earlier this year because of savings from scaling up their operations. At a few outlets, such as Dunkin’, the Beyond Sausage Sandwich sells for the exact same price as the meat sausage sandwich — and Muth confirmed that Beyond’s products do much better when they’re listed at the same price as meat.
“The thing we like to say here,” Muth said, “is we’re changing the way consumers and shoppers think about what they eat. We don’t want pricing to be a barrier when they’re considering that. We’d like to take pricing out of that conversation as best as we can.”
How to make plant-based meat cheap
There’s no single brilliant secret to making a mass-manufactured product cheaper. Instead, experts told me, it’s a matter of relentlessly making every element of the supply chain, the manufacturing process, and the distribution process work slightly better.
“A lot of issues today are really around scale,” Muth told me. When a company is big enough, it can make purchases at scale, get expensive equipment that’s only worthwhile if it’ll be used to make an enormous number of products, have distribution centers in lots of different parts of the world to minimize transportation costs, and negotiate better deals for its supplies. “As we scale up, our costs naturally go down,” Lee told me. That means there’s the potential for a virtuous cycle where lower costs recruit more consumers, who make further cost savings possible.
Plant-based meat started out small and is still only a fraction of the market shareof animal meat, but as it gets bigger, more of these options open up. Beyond Meat has opened factories in more countries and inked deals with wholesaler clubs such as Costco to make its products available more cheaply. The company has a commitment to, by 2024, sell at least one product that’s at the same price — or cheaper — than animal meat.
Weston expected plant-based meat prices to keep falling. “It really just boils down to scale and optimization. Developing operational efficiency is something that takes years, and the animal ag industry has a multi-decade head start on this. As the quantity produced goes up, we’ll be able to drive up operational efficiencies,” he told me.
Another key problem to solve is sourcing cheap protein. Animal agriculture mostly feeds animals corn, wheat, and soy — some of the cheapest crops out there — and plant-based foods that are made from corn, wheat, and soy are among the plant-based foods that are closest to the price of meat.
But the plant-based meat companies that have made the most headlines for their uncanny verisimilitude to meat — Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods — use novel proteins like mung beans and peas. Those are considerably more expensive, and getting them cheaper would be a critical step in getting plant-based products cheaper. (Another option would be abandoning these fancier proteins; plant-based foods in Europe and China largely use wheat and soy protein, and they’ve still gone over well with consumers.)
There is reason for optimism. After only a few years of research and development, plant-based meat products are already within striking distance of animal ones. There is likely lots of low-hanging fruit in optimizing the supply chain and production process for these products because they’re so new. “The single most impactful intervention is R&D which is going to make these products better and cheaper,” Weston told me.
Investors seem interested in making sure that research happens. Beyond Meat’s stock price has swung wildly over the last year but is currently almost double what it was at its IPO last year. Impossible Foods, privately held, announced on Thursday that it had secured $200 million in new funding. And many existing meat companies are expanding their range of plant-based offerings.
Those investors and companies are betting that as plant-based meat gets better at competing with animal-based meat — on price, flavor, and availability — it will claim a bigger and bigger share of the global market for meat. If they’re right, it’d be a rare piece of good news in a dismal 2020.
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