James.galbraith

From the beginning of the novel coronavirus story, there have been legitimate concerns over whether China was accurately reporting its number of cases or its rate of deaths. In Russia, what appears to be an astonishingly low COVID-19 mortality rate is made more than a little suspect by the way that defenestration remains at the top of that nation’s charts.

But you don’t have to travel around the world to find inaccurate reporting on either cases or deaths related to COVID-19. Georgia has been repeatedly rearranging—or simply altering—reported numbers to make it seem as if things there are getting better. (They’re not.) For weeks, Florida has suspended the reporting of deaths by medical examiners, even as those examiners complain that the state tally doesn’t match their information. 

And now Florida has fired the person in charge of the state’s COVID-19 dashboard after she refused to alter data to make it appear that Florida is safe to reopen.

As The Guardian reports, Dr. Rebekah Jones was fired on the same day that Florida enacted the first stage of its reopening plan. According to Jones, that firing came after she was asked to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.”

Less than a month ago, the dashboard created by Jones was trotted out at the White House and praised as an example of “transparency.” But with the medical examiners being stifled and Jones out for refusing to alter data, the only thing that seems to be transparent is that Florida governor Ron DeSantis is not being honest with the citizens of his state.

DeSantis has been taking a victory lap around the state, claiming that the mere 46,000 cases and 2,000 deaths in Florida shows that COVID-19 isn’t as bad as predicted, and claiming those totals were inflated by New Yorkers who came there after getting sick. Meanwhile, medical examiners have called the state’s death numbers “a sham” and after Jones was fired, information was removed from the state site. That includes eliminating a number of suspected cases that had not yet been tested, and even removing cases that had already received a positive result but not been included in one of DeSantis’ sanctioned announcements.

Dr. Jones says she was given two choices: either change the numbers or resign. She refused to do either, and was fired.

Right-wing media has been continuously flogging the idea that the number of cases of COVID-19 and the number of resulting deaths is being overreported. The evidence for this claim appears to be … actually, they don’t need any evidence. Meanwhile, the truth appears to be that at least two states are purposely altering or hiding public health information in order to make their decisions to rush into reopening seem more reasonable.

There are over 21 million people in Florida. DeSantis clearly believes he can lose a few—or a few thousand—and no one will notice.

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It's increasingly looking like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had the State Department's own inspector general removed not for any one reason, but because the inspector general was probing numerous allegations of wrongdoing, rule-breaking, and potentially criminal acts by Pompeo and his subordinates.

From Slate's Fred Kaplan, we learn a little more detail about the extent of charges that Pompeo has been using his government underlings as personal domestic help. We already knew Pompeo allegedly was ordering lower-rankers to walk his dog, pick up his dry cleaning, and other tasks; Kaplan says there's even more to it than that.

From Kaplan: "A friend of the family told me that when Susan Pompeo visited her mother in Lafayette, Louisiana, security officials were ordered to pick her up at the airport. Last June, they were told to pack up the house in Lafayette and cart away boxes when her mother prepared to move to a retirement home in Overland Park, Kansas."

He was using a security detail as a moving company? This isn't a joke—he really did that?

And with that, Pompeo immediately vaults into contention as the most pettily corrupt cabinet official Trump has ever hired. Having State Department security officials move your mother-in-law to a retirement home, packing and moving boxes so that Mike Pompeo doesn't have to hire someone else to do it, beats out inappropriate office decorating by a good chunk and is just so petty, compared to doing favors for your old lobbying firm clients or other acts of more substantive crookery.

So that is one of the things that now-fired inspector general Steven Linick was probing when Pompeo went to Trump with the request that Linick be removed. Trump did so without hesitation, possibly because every last person in the White House is a grifting sleazebag and none of them can possibly imagine being anything else.

There's still more, however, to suggest that State Department rules have been treated as highly optional by Pompeo and his associated political appointees. Politico reports on a just-ending inspector general investigation, this one of top Pompeo aide Cam Henderson. Henderson leads the department's Office of Protocol, a position she inherited after the previous boss, Sean Lawler, was—

—hang on, let's just take a moment to prepare ourselves here—

—pushed out for allegedly "intimidating and harassing his staffers, and even carrying a whip on the job."

Ah yes. As one does, in government offices.

The inspector general's office determined that Henderson had violated policy by not reporting allegations of "workplace violence" by her boss toward other State Department workers. (You know, the one carrying a fking whip to work while being allegedly belligerent to his staff.) The inspector general was, says Politico, awaiting a response to the report upon learning that he had been summarily fired.

Oh, and there are also questions about lavish dinners being hosted by Pompeo and his wife using State Department headquarters and resources. And who knows, by the time this is over we might learn that Pompeo has been using his position to demand each U.S. ambassador take turns waxing his wife’s cousin’s car.

So it seems that Pompeo has quite a few reasons to have sought immediate Trump relief from the questions being put to him by the State Department's official watchdog, all of them revolving around allegations of inappropriate conduct ranging from petty grifts to threatening government workers with home-brought weaponry.

Pompeo, in the meantime, is responding with yet more absolutely nonsensical lies—a character trait now well-known to those who have watched his forays onto the Sunday news shows—by claiming that he had "no sense of what investigations were taking place inside the inspector general's office," and could therefore not have retaliated against them.

It's a stupid and Trumpian lie, because we already know that at the least Pompeo was aware he was being investigated for the most serious charges against him: That he and Trump violated the law in their "emergency" acts to evade congressionally mandated arms limitations on Saudi Arabia after that country's targeting of civilians in Yemen. We know he was aware of that inspector general investigation because Pompeo refused the inspector general’s request to provide an interview related to it.

So what we seem to have here is Mike Pompeo going for some sort of Republican corruption bingo, with acts running the gamut between "using department staff as domestic help" to "violating the law to funnel illegal arms to war criminals." Yes, it's pretty clear now why Pompeo has been sniffing that he should have fired his department's legal watchdog long ago.

At one time, there was talk of ex-House Republican Mike Pompeo leaving his post to pursue a Senate bid. That ship would seem to have sailed; he seems more focused now on just treading water.

When Donald Trump ventured to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to huddle with Senate Republicans, it seemed possible that he might spend at least a little time strategizing about the pandemic that is poised to claim 100,000 American lives in the coming week. 

Nope. That was the furthest thing from Trump's mind.

Instead, Trump perseverated over his reelection bid this November, talking up poll numbers, his rival Joe Biden, and giving his GOP congressional counterparts a kick in the pants, according to NBC News.

“He just said be tough, don’t get rolled over by them,” Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota recounted.

“He was encouraging all of us to get in the fight and not get pushed around,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.

Trump is clearly petrified, by the way. One thing Trump cannot afford is for a group of vulnerable Senate Republicans to actually realize he’s a lead weight on their reelection bids. He's also desperate for minions like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to help push his “Obamagate” rubbish, as if comparing his warren of thieves to Obama's squeaky clean administration is some sort of slam dunk.

What's perfect is that Trump has almost singlehandedly put the Senate GOP majority at risk through his unparalleled ineptitude in directing a national response to the novel coronavirus. Of course, Senate Republicans deserve every damn loss they rack up in November after building Trump into a bonafide monster and then turning him loose on America right as a global pandemic landed on U.S. shores. In fact, one might call Senate Republican a bunch of weenies, among other things. 

“I think the president thinks that on certain issues we act like a bunch of weenies, and I agree with him,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said.

Right, what he said. But then Kennedy just gets downright stupid when asked which specific issues.

“On getting serious about finding out what happened with respect to [Mike] Flynn and Carter Page. […] You guys know what I’m talking about.”

Kennedy's talking about yet another investigation into the "oranges" of the Russia investigation, as Trump once put it. Apparently, the three probes launched by Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr haven’t sated Trump. Of course, none of those investigations has turned up any legit wrongdoing either—which is clearly killing Trump. Hack job Barr still might come through on manufacturing something to soothe Dear Leader.

Anyway, Senate Republicans are truly such a bunch of weenies that someone as mentally incapacitated as Trump has reduced them down to a self-loathing bunch of lemmings. 

While one administration official framed Trump’s pep talk as a message about sticking together, a GOP aide on the Hill said it was more like: "We’re doing a great job on Corona and Pelosi is mean.” (LOL. To be fair, Pelosi did call Trump “morbidly obese” while expressing concerns about his health.)

Still, Trump only "briefly" made some mentions of testing and vaccines, according to NBC, because trying to save lives and get the country back to work safely is a truly tangential consideration to the fixation of Trump and Senate Republicans on maintaining power. 

Attorney General William Barr has been conducting a series of investigations into the origins of the Russia investigation since he arrived to bail Trump out. Republicans and their media pals have been pushing the idea that some always-unspecified crime was committed by following up on information that Putin was determined to interfere in the U.S. election, and that Trump officials were eager to welcome his assistance. After all, Obamagate was just awful—even if no one can explain why.

But maybe what’s needed is an investigation into the origins of Barr’s investigation. Because new information shows that Barr was already talking to his own hand-picked investigator, U.S. Attorney John "Bull" Durham, before he released the redacted Mueller report to the public. A whole series of meetings between Durham and Barr took place soon after the attorney general returned to Washington, D.C., all for the purposes of ripping into the Russia investigation and supporting Trump’s endless string of conspiracy theories.

As CNN reports, records show that Barr brought Durham in for a series of meetings well before announcing the official start of an investigation into how the Russia investigation got underway. Soon after being confirmed as attorney general, Barr began pulling in Durham, meeting with him much more frequently than other U.S. attorneys. 

That Barr hit the ground ready to attack the Mueller investigation isn’t surprising; after all, it was a letter complaining about that investigation that was largely responsible for netting Barr his job. But it seems that Barr went in the door already planning how he would try to attack the Russia probe, and who he would select to do it. That degree of early action opens questions into whether Barr was already moving the pieces into place to attack Mueller before he sat down in the Justice Department.

Barr’s meeting with Durham eventually became a series of round-the-world trips in which both Barr and Durham undermined U.S. intelligence agencies and attempted to get allies to confirm parts of ludicrous conspiracy theories. That includes attempting to get officials in both Rome and London to agree that Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud was a CIA plant put in place to lure George Papadopoulos into connection Trump and Putin, that Australian official Andrew Downer was an instrument of U.S. intelligence who provided false reasons for opening an investigation, and that Ukrainian hackers conspired with Hillary Clinton to make it seem as though Russia stole data from the DNC. 

Barr and Durham apparently failed to find any takers on their Q-flavored tour, but that didn’t stop Barr from announcing that Durham’s investigation had become a “criminal probe” in October and announcing an expanded scope in December that included having Durham going after former FBI Director James Comey and other former intelligence officials, including former CIA Director John Brennan. 

This week, Barr refused to answer a question about the status or focus of Durham’s investigation. He did say that he doesn’t expect that the probe will result in a criminal investigation of Joe Biden or Barack Obama. That may seem like a disappointment for Trump fans, but it doesn’t mean that Durham isn’t going to announce charges against Comey, or Brennan, or anyone else that Trump wants charged. It doesn’t even mean that there won’t be charges against Obama or Biden as Barr is perfectly capable of feigning surprise at just what Durham has “uncovered.”

What’s clear is that the Durham probe was planned in advance. And while Barr has complained repeatedly about there being insufficient evidence to charge Michael Flynn, or insufficient evidence to initiate the Russia investigation, the Durham probe was created as a total fishing expedition, with no evidence whatsoever.

SACRAMENTO — A growing number of local elected officials are writing their own reopening playbooks, defying state leaders in disputes that foretell months of new regional skirmishes as the nation moves to rekindle its smoldering economy.

Mayors and county executives in rural regions where infection rates are lower than in denser, bigger cities say they’ve been unfairly held back from returning to a more normal way of life. Meanwhile, cautious officials who represent more vulnerable communities are fighting to prolong stay-at-home orders as governors, lawmakers or judges move to do the opposite.

In Texas, the attorney general is scolding big city mayors for imposing stricter coronavirus orders in their communities than the state has instituted. In Wisconsin, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said she’s keeping the capital city’s stay-at-home measures in place even as the state Supreme Court struck down a statewide order. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf threatened punitive action against leaders across several counties that moved to reopen as the state maintained its lockdown orders.

Tension that began with governors versus the federal government has now trickled down, pitting officials within their own states against each other in ways that have direct implications for the fight against the virus and have already landed in the courts. Future disputes could complicate plans to respond to a resurgence, tie up urgent policy issues in legal wrangling and even risk lives.

With cases increasing in some places and falling in others — and with a second wave predicted in the fall — the new pandemic battlegrounds will be increasingly localized.

“Cities can't wait for the federal and state government for guidance,” said Charleston Mayor Amy Shuler Goodwin, who has continued to clash with West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, including last week over his decision to add tanning beds to the list of essential businesses. “There is not one single mayor that doesn't want all the lights back on and all the doors back open, but we need to be really careful about doing that.”

Experts say a one-size-fits-all approach for reopening is not an option — not when the number of new daily cases is changing at vastly different rates from city to city and state to state. Across many states that have started to reopen, governors have indeed prescribed economic restart plans based on regional metrics, not statewide figures. As that continues — and if the virus resurges — there could be even more openings for such disagreements.

“We have to be making decisions that are hyper local. This is not one big epidemic, it’s multiple, small epidemics,“ said Caroline Buckee, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, during a Brookings Institution discussion on reopening plans. “And the decisions we make have to reflect the inequalities in the location in question and how reopening is going to impact the relationships between different neighborhoods.”

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has faced backlash from coastal mayors over cracking down on beach use, and the Democratic governor has allowed more than 20 of the state's 58 counties to move faster than his original plan in the face of increasing pressure — and lawsuits — from those anxious to reopen.

Things escalated in Texas last week after Attorney General Ken Paxton sent letters to counties that include metropolitan hubs Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, chastising them for stricter local requirements on masks and mass gatherings that conflict with state efforts to loosen restrictions.

“Insofar as your order conflicts with the governor’s order, it is unenforceable,” Paxton’s office said in a letter to Dallas County’s top executive, Judge Clay Jenkins.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and other Texas officials have repeatedly clashed with the state’s large Democratic-controlled cities and counties since the start of the pandemic and continue to do so, even as the death toll continues to grow.

“We never dreamed that the governor was not serious about wanting people to follow his guidelines,” Jenkins said in an interview. “They didn’t give me a heads up on any concerns before this letter, but that’s the political nature of how things are running in Austin.”

In West Virginia, the dissonance between the governor and the mayor of the state’s largest city has been clear for some time, with Charleston declaring a state of emergency and activating its emergency operations center before the rest of the state did.

Shuler Goodwin, the mayor, said she has talked with mayors across the country facing the same disconnect who have felt like they’ve had to take matters into their own hands. On some issues, she said, it’s obvious where to draw the line.

“Do I think tanning beds are essential services? No. Of course I don't,” Shuler Goodwin said.

In Iowa, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds made big moves to reopen her state last week, greenlighting salons, barbershops, tattoo and massage businesses. Her latest proclamation also extends partial reopenings of restaurants, libraries and fitness centers.

Reynolds had already eased restrictions in some counties, saying she “shouldn’t punish” the majority of the state because of high infection rates in certain areas. But as she was pushing people forward last week, Sioux City Mayor Bob Scott was urging his residents to remain cautious.

“I think a lot of our citizens realize that there's still a potential to have this thing expand … at this stage, it becomes an individual choice,” Scott said. “I know personally I'm not going to run right out and go shopping or do that type of activity.”

Scott said he’s had conversations with Reynolds about his concerns, and that she’s “very open” to discussions, but “I'm not sure I'll change her mind on anything.”

“She’s still the governor,” he said.

Public officials aren’t the only ones showing discontent with state responses. A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted last week found a third of Americans rated their governor‘s handling of the virus either “just fair“ or “poor.”

As the virus slows its spread, and the public grows more antsy, partisan divisions could further shape the public health debate about the pandemic — and the debate about local politics.

“The pointy end of the stick here, the leading edge of reopening, is going to be at the county level and in the cities,” said David McCuan, an American politics professor at Sonoma State University in California who has been closely watching these disputes. “County supervisors, mayors and those local politicians are going to be the ones really deciding what reopening looks like. They’re going to be much more responsive to the sentiment of the population.”

McCuan predicts a wave of recall elections from voters dissatisfied with how their local officials handled the pandemic.

“The easy part for politicians is over,” he said. “The next stage of this thing is a free for all.”

Renuka Rayasam contributed to this report.

The Trump campaign has an order from the president: Find a way to get him back on the road and into megarallies to re-energize his base.

In recent meetings with top campaign officials and White House aides, Trump has questioned why he’s avoiding campaign events if it‘s safe for him to travel in his official capacity. The president visited two medical supply facilities in Arizona and Pennsylvania this month and will tour a Ford ventilator factory in Michigan on Thursday. The official White House travel replaced what would have otherwise been a much busier campaign season for the president, who held three rallies in three days at the end of February.

Before the end of this month, the Trump campaign hopes to organize a series of virtual events featuring the president, who has eschewed the digital campaign trail while others involved with his reelection court voters and train supporters during nightly live streams and online briefings.

The president’s 2020 team is also keeping a close eye on regional reopenings, where modified campaign activities could soon be permitted, according to three people involved with the discussions. Some White House allies have encouraged the campaign to prioritize its plan for restarting rallies, worried that the optics and purpose of Trump’s official travel — during which the president has sent mixed messages about his administration’s response to the pandemic while surrounded by aides in face masks — is too morbid and lacks the showmanship his core base adores.

Aides are also mindful of the president’s tendency to lash out when he’s cooped up in Washington for too long and deprived of opportunities to connect with his ultra-loyal fans.

“He enjoys talking to his supporters at these patriotic events, and so the more he’s out there doing that, the better mood he’s going to be in. That’s important in a presidential year,” said Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, who described the effort to resume campaign rallies as “a moonshot mission.”

“The goal is to get as close to a traditional Trump event as possible as we’re entering the warmer months here without having to change too much,” Miller said.

The Trump campaign’s push to get its candidate back on the trail comes as the president and senior administration officials try to raise public confidence about the direction of the crisis by returning to normal schedules themselves.

Both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday to mingle with Republican lawmakers who recently returned to Washington. Pence aides are also considering ways to get the vice president back into the campaign sphere, where smaller audiences were a staple of his campaign strategy before the coronavirus pandemic hit and present fewer logistical challenges than Trump’s marquee rallies.

Internally, aides see Trump’s eagerness to reintroduce physical campaign events as an advantage over his likely general election opponent, Joe Biden, whose own team has been reticent on when the former vice president might venture beyond his Delaware home. Biden and his team have said they will base their decision to resume physical travel on the advice of medical experts and recently endorsed the idea of an online nominating convention after the Democratic National Committee postponed the convention from July to August because of public health concerns.

Trump has adamantly opposed changing the Republican Party’s August nominating convention in Charlotte, N.C. In private conversations, he has told friends his campaign should do more to capitalize on the uncertainty Biden and other Democrats have had about their own convention, according to a senior administration official.

“The president and his team will take every opportunity to make this a forward-looking election, where they can go out and say to all of the country, ‘Here’s what we are going to do on the other side of this crisis,’” said GOP strategist Alex Schriver, who spoke at the 2012 GOP convention.

During an unannounced phone call into the live broadcast of a golf tournament on Sunday, Trump said “the country is ready to start moving forward” and promised “some tremendous things are going to be coming out very soon.”

Trump has previously said the “cure” for Covid-19 cannot be worse than the virus itself, a message that has appeared on the homemade signs of some protesters fighting stay-at-home orders in recent days.

But Trump’s desire to beat Biden to the campaign trail and lead the return to normal for a shell-shocked nation comes with significant risk. Events that will require weeks of advance planning could end up colliding with a resurgence of the virus in individual states, a potentially slow economic recovery or poor economic data that’s widely expected to continue for at least another month.

There is also a lack of consensus among voters that now is an appropriate time to resume large gatherings, particularly campaign rallies in communities that have lost thousands of residents to the lethal virus. In a Morning Consult poll released Monday, twice as many Republican voters as Democrats said they would feel comfortable attending a political rally between now and the November election given what they currently know about the novel coronavirus. Still, a majority of GOP voters (51 percent) said the virus has made them “much less likely” to participate in physical campaign events this cycle.

Trump campaign aides said the need for traditional campaign rallies has become more pronounced as the president has shifted his focus to reopening the economy with hope for a third-quarter resurgence.

Not only does the president’s team want to provide him with an appropriate venue where he can talk about his economic policies and recovery plan, they also want him to highlight his actions on immigration, foreign policy and social issues without feeling restricted by the setting. One person close to the Trump campaign suggested it would be tactless for the president to tout his administration’s efforts to curb illegal immigration while he’s touring a facility that makes personal protective equipment for front-line workers.

“This is the greatest global crisis of our times, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other problems that the president is working on and areas where he’s made progress that he and his team want to show,” said Schriver.

Aides who have monitored Trump’s most recent events have already witnessed an incumbent president who is itching to shift the conversation back to issues that feel comfortable to him.

During a roundtable discussion with Navajo leaders about the Covid-19’s disproportionate impact on Native American communities, Trump made a lengthy plug for his wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, noting his administration has already completed 172 miles of the new barrier.

The roundtable followed a presidential tour of a Honeywell mask facility where ’80s rock songs from Trump’s campaign rally playlist blared overhead as he made his way through the production site.

I’ve been reading tea leaves on presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s veep-stakes, and for the longest time, it’s been looking like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has had the inside track. While rumors claim that Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Kamala Harris of California are still top contenders, it is Warren who seems to be getting the love from Biden, his team, and former President Barack Obama. (Click on that link above if you want examples.)

But last night, we saw the clearest sign that Biden is auditioning Warren for the job—if he hasn’t decided on her already. 

Check out this Twitter thread posted by Biden. 

I mean, come on! 

Three tweets, all mentioning Warren, one of them saying “Warren and I,” the last one with the prominent headshots of both, and we’re supposed to think that he hasn’t made up his mind? 

He certainly doesn’t have anything of this sort with either Klobuchar or Harris. And if this were simply a cynical (or real!) ploy for supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, he could easily do all this with Sanders himself. (The two already did a joint event.) 

No—this is next-level, and all of it points in one direction. 

The surprise now wouldn’t be that Warren is his pick; it would be if he went in a different direction. 

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Trump is now using disaster aid money to openly extort governors.

New reasons are emerging for why it was important that the inspector general of the State Department be removed. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wasn’t just illegally using the State Department personnel to handle his personal errands—he turned taxpayer-funded dinners intended to support U.S. foreign policy objectives into a means of building his own political clout.

Instead of holding quiet dinners with foreign dignitaries and diplomats, Pompeo lined up massive—and costly—affairs with U.S. politicians, big GOP donors, and celebrities. And he didn’t do this just once. He did it dozens of times.

Last Friday, Donald Trump abruptly fired the inspector general of the State Department. It was the third time in as many weeks that Trump had waved goodbye to one of the inspectors intended to guard against government corruption, and brought the total number of empty inspector general spots to 15. Trump hates whistleblowers—all criminals do—but when he was asked about the reason that the State Department inspector general was ousted, Trump immediately denied any knowledge. Instead, he claimed that he had done it all on the advice of Mike Pompeo.

This morning, the reasons why Pompeo would have wanted the inspector general out are continuing to grow. Earlier stories had indicated the inspector general was investigating Pompeo’s misuse of state department professionals to handle such tasks as walking his dog, picking up his dry cleaning, and handling his dinner reservations. But new information reported by NBC News shows that Pompeo wasn’t just using the State Department as his own personal fiefdom. He was also using it to promote his own campaign for political office.

NBC collected information on two dozen “Madison Dinners” that Pompeo held from 2018 right up until they were curtailed by the novel coronavirus in March. Despite using State Department facilities, State Department personnel, and State Department funds—as well as resources from other agencies, such as the Secret Service—the dinners don’t seem to have been State Department business. 

Instead, the elaborate private dinners hosted by Pompeo and his wife brought in corporate billionaires, members of the right-wing media, and members of the House or Senate. Except … just Republican members of the House or Senate. Not a single Democrat was invited to any of the dinners.

So, Mike Pompeo was throwing himself an entire series of high-power dinners bringing together GOP billionaires, Fox News talking heads, conservative lobbyists, and Republican politicians … on the public’s dime. There were some foreign leaders and diplomats invited, but they were less than 20% of the names on Pompeo’s list.

Despite the name, these “Madison Dinners” don’t follow in a tradition started by Madison. (Or anyone else.) At least two State Department officials have protested that Pompeo’s dinners were not related to foreign policy.

Pompeo’s spokesperson has defended the dinners as valuable opportunities for the Secretary of State to hear from a variety of “thought leaders.” But oddly, the only thoughts Pompeo seems to be interested in are Republican donors, Republican politicians, Republican media flacks, and diplomats from countries like Saudi Arabia. 

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A pickup truck belonging to an anti-COVID-19-lockdown protester who was identified by an anti-fascist group as Michael Drewer of Loveland, Colorado, bore a message thought to be aimed at Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who is openly gay: “OPEN OUR GYMS FAGGOT.”

Michael Dean Drewer is a 61 year old man from Loveland, Colorado was seen driving with “OPEN OUR GYMS F**GOT” written on the back of his truck to support a Reopen Colorado protest directed at Colorado’s (gay) governor Jared Polis on Sunday. pic.twitter.com/fJMQeZ5kKJ

— Colorado Springs Anti-Fascists (@COSAntiFascists) May 19, 2020

The truck was photographed at a Reopen Colorado protest on Sunday.

Drewer was identified by a Colorado Springs Antifa group, which noted that Drewer is also fond of Confederate flag clothing.

Wrote the group: “Not much else to say about Michael. He’s a boring and bigoted man living a sad life, whose only joy seems to come from skipping leg day, calling gay people slurs, and spreading viruses.”

Polis said on May 11 that “businesses such as gyms and nightclubs are highly social and a timeline on those has not been determined yet. Some gyms are open to appointment-only personal training for now.”

Maybe he forgot the dash, like he was signing it

— Tal Kopan (@TalKopan) May 19, 2020

True. The drivers are probably gay guys who know this trick will work with the locals to open the gym faster.

— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) May 20, 2020

The post Anti-Lockdown Protester to Colorado Governor Jared Polis: ‘Open Our Gyms Faggot’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday endorsed the confirmation of Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) to be the nation’s top intelligence official.

The panel approved Ratcliffe as President Donald Trump’s next director of national intelligence in a straight party-line vote, 8 to 7, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the committee's top Democrat, told reporters after a closed-door meeting. Ratcliffe would be the first permanent spy chief since Dan Coats stepped down last August.

The vote tally was much different from when the committee approved Coats in 2017, 14 to 2.

"I think there were many of the same concerns that were raised when he first came up in August," Warner told POLITICO.

While the nomination must still be confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate, Tuesday’s vote marks a remarkable turnaround for Ratcliffe, whom Trump floated almost a year ago to oversee the country’s 17 intelligence agencies. The Texas Republican withdrew his name from consideration just days later in the face of tepid support from the Senate GOP, along with concerns about his thin resume and partisan attitude about government investigators.

Ratcliffe's withdrawal set off a monthslong merry-go-round at the leadership of the clandestine community, as the president selected counterterrorism chief Joseph Maguire to temporarily assume the DNI post. Maguire ruined his chances of becoming the permanent chief earlier this year after Trump heard he had authorized congressional briefings on Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2020 campaign.

Trump then replaced Maguire as acting DNI with U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, who possessed limited intelligence experience but began making a series of organizational changes to the country’s spy agencies. Those included last week's announcement that the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which is part of ODNI, would take over election security briefings for political candidates and organizations.

Ratcliffe, who was elected to Congress in 2015, sits on the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees and was a member of Trump’s impeachment defense team. He drew national attention in a hearing last year where he accused former special counsel Robert Mueller of treating Trump unfairly during his probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

"Donald Trump is not above the law. He's not. But he damn sure shouldn't be below the law, which is where volume 2 of this report puts him," Ratcliffe said at the time. He was referring to the volume of the Mueller report that declines to reach a conclusion about whether the president had obstructed the Russia investigation.

Ratcliffe worked hard at shedding the image of a partisan Trump acolyte during his confirmation hearing earlier this month.

“Let me be very clear: Regardless of what anyone wants our intelligence to reflect, the intelligence I provide, if confirmed, will not be impacted or altered as a result of outside influence,” Ratcliffe said. He added that he would give intelligence briefings to the president even if he knew Trump would disagree with the conclusions, or if he believed it risked his job.

Tuesday’s vote came the day after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tapped Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to temporarily serve as the Intelligence committee’s chairman, after Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) decided to step aside while he faces an FBI investigation into his stock trades.

If confirmed by the full Senate, Warner said he hopes Ratcliffe "will execute the job in the way he described during the hearing." Warner added that it's "never more important than right now" to maintain the integrity and independence of the intelligence community.

Ratcliffe is expected to be confirmed by the full Senate in a vote likely to be held after Memorial Day, according to Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.)

The Trump administration’s effort to rapidly launch a U.S. manufacturer for drugs to treat coronavirus patients hinges on a new company whose chief executive is best known for a failed anti-allergy injector and for raising the prices of a powerful opioid antidote.

The administration on Tuesday announced a four-year, $354 million contract with Phlow, which aims to produce both drug ingredients and generic medicines in the United States. The Richmond, Virginia, company will make drugs such as sedatives for coronavirus patients on ventilators.

The ambitious effort, designed to shore up the national stockpile, brings together some well-known players in the health care world. It was hailed by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a sharp critic of China and a champion of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. More than 70 percent of the world’s drug ingredients are made overseas — many in India and China.

“You've got patriotic scientists and engineers producing essential medicines at very low margins in defense of the American people,” Navarro said of Phlow.

But the new company has no track record in drug manufacturing, and it’s not clear when its assembly lines will begin churning out products.

Its CEO Eric Edwards previously helped create the drug company Kaleo to market Auvi-Q, which was supposed to compete with the EpiPen anti-allergy injection pen — but it was pulled from the market in 2015 over safety concerns. Kaleo brought it back to market in 2017.

As the opioid crisis worsened, Kaleo was also heavily criticized over its pricing of an overdose treatment. The list price of its auto-injector of naloxone soared from $575 in 2014 to more than $4,000 in 2017 — as deadly overdoses mounted and demand from hospitals, police departments and governments rose.

Edwards says that he originally planned to focus Phlow on making pediatric medicines before the coronavirus emerged. “When Covid-19 hit, we decided as a company that we needed to immediately pivot and start focusing on the critical medicines that were going to be used for hospitalized patients,” he said. The company is registered as public-benefit corporation, or B-corp.

Skeptics swiftly questioned bestowing a massive BARDA grant on a startup run by Edwards.

“They’re gearing up to give the largest award in history to a corporate executive who quintupled the price of naloxone in the middle of the opioid epidemic,” said Margarida Jorge, campaign director for Lower Drug Prices Now. “Yet again, the administration is handing over taxpayer dollars away to a drug corporation with no strings attached and no guarantee that we'll get affordable access to the medicines developed with our money.”

Edwards rejected such criticisms. "I was the co-founder and co-inventor of the Kaleo products that have saved thousands of lives," he told POLITICO. "I left Kaleo over 18 months ago and was never involved in any pricing decisions."

Phlow has brought in established industry partners, including ingredient manufacturer AMPAC, nonprofit generic firm Civica Rx, and the Medicines for All Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University's College of Engineering. It will produce essential drugs and drug ingredients for the government — its only client — at an AMPAC facility near Richmond.

Navarro told POLITICO that Phlow has delivered more than a million doses of coronavirus-related medicines to the government under a $6 million contract it signed with HHS in April.

But a Phlow spokesperson said those drugs were produced at U.S. facilities owned by its partner Civica, a non-profit corporation founded by leading hospital systems that wanted to produce affordable generics and reduce chronic shortages.

Although there is no cure for the coronavirus, the sickest patients often require a variety of drugs to treat the symptoms caused by the virus. Frank Gupton, the founder and chief executive of Medicines for All, who sits on Phlow’s board, said the new entity will make a variety of medicines. “It’s pain management drugs, inhalation drugs, pulmonary drugs” — and perhaps eventually antibiotics, he said.

Gupton says that the partnership between Phlow’s backers and the government was seeded last fall during a meeting with Trump administration officials arranged by Rosemary Gibson, a senior adviser on health care issues at the non-profit Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank. Gibson, who has co-authored a book on the risks of depending on China for medicine, now sits on Phlow’s board of directors.

In early February, as the coronavirus spread within and beyond China, “there was a call with this basic sense of urgency from Peter Navarro’s office saying, ‘We’d like to come down and talk to you about this,’” said Gupton. “They brought basically a SWAT team from HHS, the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Defense. We sat down on a Saturday afternoon.”

Those discussions about how Phlow and its partners could help bolster the U.S. supply chain quickly transformed into an official contract with BARDA, according to Edwards.

“We started targeting and recommending to the U.S. government how to prioritize” medicines that could be vulnerable to supply-chain disruption during the pandemic, he said. “The very first [drug ingredient] we told the government we needed to get on U.S. soil was manufactured in a single facility in northern Italy, right in the heart of the Covid containment zone.”

The partnership between Phlow and the government “has the potential to be a game changer that could significantly strengthen the U.S. drug supply chain,” said Tom Kraus, vice president of government relations at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, in a statement.

Former BARDA Director Rick Bright, who was ousted from the agency last month and filed a whistleblower complaint against the Trump administration, also praised the new deal.

"Congratulations to BARDA and their partners for envisioning and enabling solutions to address critical challenges to saving lives, during the pandemic and every day," he wrote on LinkedIn. "Domestic production capabilities for essential medicines reduce costs, improve quality and improve access for everyone. This, in turn, will save lives."

phalse phace shares a report from Investor's Business Daily: Amazon is reportedly in talks with JCPenney, the debt-laden retailer that filed for bankruptcy protection last week. Trading in JCPenney stock was halted while Amazon stock moved up. According to apparel industry trade publication Women's Wear Daily, Amazon has a team in Plano, Texas, where JCPenney is headquartered. The report cited an unnamed source saying there is a dialogue between the two companies. The acquisition of JCPenney could potentially bolster the online retailer's burgeoning apparel business. It's also possible Amazon could be interested in acquiring some of the stores that JCPenney plans to sell and use them as distribution outlets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s not exactly new information that Gregory McMichael, a former Georgia cop, is accused of hunting down Ahmaud Arbery on the suspicion he was trespassing and having his son Travis shoot and kill the man. But Gregory’s daughter, Lindsay McMichael, had largely been overlooked in the incident until The Sun newspaper caught on to rumors in the community that she had posted a picture of Arbery's bloody body on Snapchat. After obtaining the photo in question, Lindsay McMichael confirmed her involvement. She told the newspaper she “had no nefarious or malicious intent” when she posted the picture.

“The thing is I’m a huge fan of true crime – I listen to four or five podcasts a week – I’m constantly watching that sort of thing,” she said. “It was more of a, ‘Holy s***, I can’t believe this has happened.’”

In her interview with The Sun, Lindsay called her decision “absolutely poor judgment" but defended her father and brother as people who are not racists. She claimed they never “meant to kill anybody” and they always "loved" her boyfriends who weren’t white.

It’s unclear if she will face charges in the incident. “At this time, we’re not making any further comments about the investigation because it is very active. Any updates that we deem appropriate will be shared,” said Nelly Miles, a spokeswoman for the investigating agency, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

It is also unclear if William "Roddie" Bryan, a witness in the incident, will face charges. He filmed select moments of the deadly encounter, and the Arbery family’s legal team has been pushing officials to arrest him. Bryan’s attorney Kevin Gough told reporters Monday night Bryan took a polygraph test, and the results confirmed he was unarmed at the time of the shooting and had not had any conversation with the two men accused of murdering Arbery.

Gough said Bryan is only a witness in the case and not a "vigilante," but he still has been the target of death threats. Gough addressed Arbery’s family attorneys Lee Merritt and Benjamin Crump directly in his plea for them to “please stop doing and saying things that place the lives of Roddie and his family in danger.”  

“Whether you realize it or not, y’all have put a target on his back,” Gough said. “He is unarmed and defenseless.”

Merritt took a moment on Twitter to remind Gough who the real victim in Arbery’s case is. “On 2/23/20 William ‘Roddy’ Bryan jumped in his truck & chased #AhmaudArbery around Satilla Shores, GA— recording as Travis McMichael shot him to death,” Merritt said in the tweet. “I wish Ahmaud’s mom could have told him ‘please stop.’ Her son was ‘unarmed and defenseless.’ We will stop when he’s in jail.”

The Arbery case, now on its fourth prosecutor, dragged along for 74 days before Gregory and Travis McMichael were arrested on murder and aggravated assault charges. The delay happened even though authorities saw Bryan’s shooting footage the same day of Arbery’s death, according to the GBI.

Hundreds of protesters marched Saturday in Brunswick, Georgia, to call for the resignations of two district attorneys being investigated on prosecutorial misconduct allegations in the case.

RELATED: 2 Georgia prosecutors investigated for 'possible prosecutorial misconduct' in Ahmaud Arbery case

Brunswick District Attorney Jackie Johnson, whose office formerly employed Gregory, immediately recused herself from the case but not before eliciting the help of George Barnhill, another prosecutor with ties to Gregory, according to Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s request for a Georgia Bureau of Investigation probe. Barnhill, district attorney for Georgia’s Waycross Judicial Circuit, has a son serving as assistant district attorney in Johnson’s office, and he worked with Gregory on a prosecution involving Arbery, Carr said in his request.

The next district attorney assigned to the case, Tom Durden, opted out in favor of an office with more resources handling the prosecution, Carr said. Cobb County District Attorney Joyette Holmes, the first Black woman to serve in the role, is prosecuting the case now. "I'm thankful for the newly appointed prosecutor, Joyette Holmes, and her efforts to help us fight for #JusticeForAhmaud and his family," Crump tweeted Monday.

The public has been less trusting of other authorities in the Arbery case, and rightfully so. It was Glynn County police officer Robert Rash who practically gave Gregory McMichael permission to take the law into his own hands even though Gregory apparently didn't even have the proper credentials when he did work as an investigator for the Brunswick district attorney's office, 11 Alive reported.

RELATED: Watch what happens when Georgia cop encourages accused killer to play pretend cop with Ahmaud Arbery

Still, it was Arbery who was treated like a criminal when surveillance camera footage only captured him walking into a home under construction, and not taking anything. Additional footage Merritt tweeted Friday even revealed Arbery wasn’t the only one who went inside the home. “NEW VIDEO shows there were frequent visitors on the construction site where Ahmaud was seen leaving on the day he was killed both day & night,” Merritt tweeted. “Ahmaud Arbery seems to be the only one who was presumed to be a criminal and ultimately the only one murdered based on that presumption.”

Rep. Matt Shea—the far-right Washington legislator who has been working with secessionist “Patriot”/militia movement figures to form a Christian nationalist 51st state—quietly dropped the news over the weekend that after months of struggling with Republican leaders in the state House and insisting he be allowed to hang onto his seat, with militia organizers coming to his defense, he won’t be running for reelection after all.

Shea failed to file to run again by Friday’s deadline, according to the Spokane County Auditor’s office. However, he remained mum about his reasons for doing so—as well as about any future political plans, which are rumored to include running for Congress against incumbent Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers.

After an independent investigation of Shea’s activities with various far-right factions around the region concluded that he likely participated in domestic terrorism, Shea fought with Republican leadership—which stripped him of his seniority and committee assignments, and denied him use of state caucus staff—to keep his seat. His desk was moved to the last row on the House floor.

Shea defiantly refused calls from both Republican and Democratic leaders to resign, calling the entire matter a “coup” against him and vowing to fight on. Militiamen held rallies in Seattle and Olympia calling for “Patriots” to rise to his defense. Democrats made an attempt to remove him officially from the House this winter, but received no GOP support to do so. The state Constitution requires a two-thirds vote for expulsion, so the matter was believed to be in the hands of the voters.

The way the filings fell into place Friday indicated that Republican officials had been aware of this outcome and arranged for a shuffle that would likely keep the seat—from an extremely conservative district in Spokane Valley—in GOP hands. Shea’s ultra-conservative Republican seatmate in the district, Robert McCaslin, filed to run for Shea’s former No. 1 position in the district, meaning the Democrat who had filed to run against Shea would instead be facing a different incumbent Republican. Meanwhile, other conservative Republicans filed for McCaslin’s former No. 2 spot.

Shea’s future plans are unclear. While he did file to run as a Republican precinct committee officer, he was also rumored to be considering a primary run for McMorris Rodgers’ seat, according to the Spokesman-Review.

However, it also looks likely that Shea will turn his attention to his long-running efforts to create a 51st state called “Liberty,” formed from the eastern half of Washington state, with the support of the same “Patriot” faction that had come to his defense during the fight over his House seat. He’d earlier helped organize a county-by-county campaign to gain support for secession.

Despite the quiet end of his reelection plans, Shea has been very publicly vocal this week. On Friday in Spokane, he participated in a protest of Gov. Jay Inslee’s shelter-in-place order at which he ranted:

Tyranny is a disease—a virus, if you will. And I submit to you that we should tell Governor Inslee today that it is our aim to quarantine tyrants in America! The idea that cowardice and coddling and capitulation is the right way to go is hateful to Americans, to real Americans. Because the Marines didn’t wade through the mud and the blood at Tarawa so that we could grovel for our rights from the king’s table! Come on!

He also participated in a March 6 protest of the stay-in-place orders during which he apparently poured a bottle of olive oil on the granite steps of the state Capitol in a symbolic response to the presence of a group from the Satanic Church of Washington as counter-protesters. This week, he was billed more than $4,700 for damage to the stairs and walkway around the domed Legislative Building.

This was hardly the first time Shea has engaged in antics involving the state Capitol. In 2015, he helped pioneer the “Patriot” movement tactic of bringing guns into state capitol buildings when he led a faction of armed protesters into the Legislative Building while protesting new state rules prohibiting weapons in the House and Senate chambers. That tactic has been very popular among pandemic denialists who are protesting stay-at-home measures at various capitols around the country, most notably in Michigan.

Back in March, Sen. Susan Collins was concerned about Rep. John Ratcliffe, impeached president Trump's pick to serve as director of national intelligence. That was when the nomination was fairly new, after Ratcliffe had already been considered and rejected as a "chicken-plucking liar" in Mark Sumner's perfect words. Since that time, Ratcliffe proved his fealty to Trump in a completely over-the-top impeachment hearing process/Republican shouting competition.

So of course Trump nominated him officially, no doubt appreciating a fellow fabulist, which gave Collins heartburn. As she loves to remind anyone who will listen, she sponsored the legislation which created the DNI position. Back in March, she fretted "I don’t know Congressman Ratcliffe. As the author of the 2004 law that created the director of national intelligence position, I obviously am very concerned about who the nominee is, the qualifications and the commitment to overseeing the intelligence community in order to provide the best-quality intelligence." So much for that.

Collins voted for him in committee Tuesday, in a closed hearing. Which means Collins didn't have to comment on it again. Go figure.

Let's make sure her time is up. Please give $1 to help Democrats in each of these crucial Senate races, but especially the one in Maine!

Trump at the Capitol on Tuesday. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Trump is now suggesting his own government is part of a conspiracy to demean his favorite unproven drug. Really.

President Donald Trump is now dismissing medical information promulgated by his own government as a “Trump enemy statement.”

Trump made that remark on Tuesday afternoon, when he was asked following a lunch with Republican senators to explain his rationale for promoting unproven and potentially dangerous hydroxychloroquine treatments for coronavirus. The president’s ensuing effort to defend the stunning announcement he made on Monday that he’s taking the anti-malarial drug didn’t end up making much sense. But it did reveal a reflexive contempt for scientific reasoning that undercuts his talking points.

“Why is it okay for you to promote the use of this drug when you’re not a doctor?” a reporter asked. Trump responded by making a case that he knows better than medical professionals do.

“I worked with doctors,” he began. “If you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, they were giving it to people that were in very bad shape, they were very old, almost dead. It was a Trump enemy statement.”

The “Trump enemy statement” in question is a study of coronavirus patients in Veterans Affairs hospitals that became the basis for a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warning about hydroxychloroquine treatments for coronavirus.

The study, which the National Institutes of Health posted to its website last month and is the largest of its kind, was not peer-reviewed, but it found more deaths among those treated with hydroxychloroquine than those treated with standard care. Researchers also reported finding no benefit to its use.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) subsequently posted a warning on its website that “cautions against use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for COVID-19 outside of the hospital setting or a clinical trial due to risk of heart rhythm problems.”

To hear Trump tell it, however, the FDA has been infiltrated by his deep state enemies.

“That was a false study done. Where they gave it to very sick people. Extremely sick people. People that were ready to die. It was given by obviously not friends of the administration,” Trump said later Tuesday, during a roundtable event at the White House.

It should go without saying at this point that it’s a bad idea to take medical advice from Trump — recall that his daily coronavirus press briefings basically came to an end last month after he was widely mocked for musing aloud about the possibility of treating the coronavirus with disinfectant and bizarre sunlight treatments.

Still, it’s instructive to note how quick the president is to attribute any conclusion that contradicts him as the product of an anti-Trump conspiracy, even when the conclusion in question comes from his own government.

Trump simply dismisses experts who don’t agree with him

It’s not like the study of VA patients was the first to raise concerns about hydroxychloroquine. The drug is an effective treatment for malaria, but doctors have long warned that taking it can result in drug-induced cardiac arrest for a small subset of the population.

Those risks might be worth taking if it turned out that hydroxychloroquine was effective in helping people recover from coronavirus infections. But health officials have consistently said preliminary research shows the opposite — and that more rigorous research into the drug still needs to be conducted.

To cite one notable example, a day after Trump called the drug a “game changer” on March 20, his top health official on the coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told the press it was too soon to say whether the drug was safe or effective.

“The information that you’re referring to specifically is anecdotal,” Fauci said, alluding to non-randomized, non-peer-reviewed studies conducted abroad that Trump has repeatedly invoked as evidence of hydroxychloroquine’s efficaciousness, including on Tuesday. “It was not done in a controlled clinical trial. So you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.”

Clashes between Trump and government public heaths experts over unproven drugs led to the abrupt exit of Dr. Rick Bright as director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the federal agency tasked with developing a coronavirus vaccine. Last month, Bright, who has since become a whistleblower, released a statement indicating he was pressured to give the green light to hydroxychloroquine treatments.

“While I am prepared to look at all options and to think ‘outside the box’ for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public,” Bright said. “I insisted that these drugs be provided only to hospitalized patients with confirmed Covid-19 while under the supervision of a physician.”

Trump’s infatuation with hydroxychloroquine can be traced back to a controversial French study released in March on a small number of Covid-19 patients that found hydroxychloroquine could lessen the duration of infection. As Media Matters for America has detailed, the French study and similar anecdotal evidence from China was covered by Fox News and amplified by Trump, with Trump’s amplification in turn being covered by Fox — in other words, it was the perfect illustration of the Fox-to-Trump feedback loop.

As it became clear that the United States was going to be especially hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic, Trump became insistent that the drug could be a savior, despite Fauci’s position.

The study of VA patients seemed to cool Fox News’s enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine, at least among certain anchors. Anchor Neil Cavuto even went as far as to warn his viewers immediately after Trump’s announcement on Monday that taking the drug without a doctor’s supervision can result in death for populations at risk.

Cavuto reiterated his concerns on Tuesday, following a roundtable event in which Trump falsely claimed about hydroxychloroquine that “what has been determined is it doesn’t harm you.”

Instead of engaging with Cavuto’s measured criticisms, Trump on Monday evening posted a string of retweets demeaning him. Around the same time, Trump’s White House doctor released a statement saying of hydroxychloroquine that “we concluded the potential benefits from treatments outweighed the relative risks” — but notably, it stopped short of confirming that Trump is in fact taking the drug.

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While Donald Trump is insisting that a vaccine could be around in time for the kids to go back to school this fall, a leaked Defense Department memo contains much less sunny predictions. Like many health officials, the memo warns that the 92,000 Americans who have died so far in the coronavirus pandemic could be just the first wave, with an even stronger second wave coming in the fall.

And when it comes to a vaccine, the memo warns that rather than looking for an answer this autumn, Americans might be waiting until summer—of 2021.

The memo, reported by noted military site Task & Purpose, is focused not on when the COVID-19 pandemic will end, but on how the military can continue to serve in the face of potentially worsening conditions. A portion of the memo states that, “All indications suggest we will be operating in a globally-persistent COVID-19 environment in the months ahead.” That’s a reality that the Pentagon appears to be facing, even as Trump denies it.

The author of the memo is assistant secretary of defense Kenneth Rapuano. While it has not been released to the public, it has apparently been circulated widely in military circles. 

The purpose of the memo doesn’t appear to be to dispute Trump’s statements, or to make any kind of prediction about the course of the pandemic. Instead, it’s just what might be expected, and even hoped for, from the Defense Department: an attempt to take a realistic look at how the pandemic affects the military’s operations. 

The letter is intended as guidance to military commanders in the field and to military planners in Washington. It replaces an earlier version from April that described procedures that should be employed in situations as diverse as ships on active service, and troops being trained in barracks. 

That earlier letter raised the level of action within the military to “HPCON D”—the highest level of health threat alert—based on widespread community transmission and ongoing transmission “across a majority of regions.” That memo called for the canceling of military exercises, limiting access to military bases, restrictions on the movement of military personnel, and maximizing remote operations.

The date that the memo states for a potential vaccine in the summer of 2021 places the military in line with the original statement from experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who in early January 2020 called for a period of at least 12 to 18 months for the development of a vaccine.

Task & Purpose has swiftly become one of the most read and most respected military websites, with a close attention on issues affecting both active military and veterans. In 2018, the then-editor of the site resigned after the publisher bowed to conservative pressure over headlines that called Trump out on errors, but the site has continued to publish articles that point out Trump’s mistakes and misuse of military issues. That includes an article on Monday debunking claims that a defense analyst had demonstrated that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab.

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Today's News:

As expected, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to approve the nomination of devoted Donald Trump toady Rep. John Ratcliffe as Trump's new Director of National Intelligence. An AP source says the closed-hearing vote was along party lines, 8-7; the nomination will now go to the full Senate.

Notably, the vote was chaired by new committee head Marco Rubio, the man of voluminous Bible quotes and no identifiable principles, after former chairman Sen. Richard Burr temporarily stepped down during the investigation into his early pandemic stock trades. Yes, it's quite the cesspool. No, nobody in the party seems to have had their fill of it yet.

The Republican-held Senate seems likely to confirm Ratcliffe, which is a big departure from the congressman's fortunes only last year. When originally nominated for the role, Ratcliffe faced significant opposition in the Republican Senate due to his lack of apparent intelligence expertise, his role as hyper-partisan Trump fluffer (including, specifically, his willingness to politicize intelligence in misleading ways), and most glaringly the discovery that Ratcliffe appears to have been lying, egregiously, about his own resume.

Ratcliffe remains unqualified, hyper-political and a liar. The difference now appears to be a Republican loathing of current "acting" "part-time" DNI Richard Grenell that runs so deep that, in the eyes of Ratcliffe's former detractors, even putting a chewed shoe in the post would be preferable to letting Grenell pretend to run things. Grenell is widely seen by critics as a devoted Trump yes-man installed in the role to bury or tweak intelligence findings displeasing to Trump; Ratcliffe's behavior can be expected to be worse.

How far down the rabbit hole is Ratcliffe? The new would-be director of national intelligence follows "Q"-themed conspiracy theorists on Twitter. The man is willing to go down some deep holes to find people praising Dear Leader, which is precisely why Trump has confidence he's the right man for the current job.

That's the short version. As the pandemic unfolds and Congress is distracted with 100,000 deaths, then possibly 200,000 deaths, Trump continues to purge government of any official seen as potentially disloyal, instead installing numerous Rudy Giuliani clones into those roles to act as protection (in the mob sense) and oversight saboteurs. We can expect Ratcliffe to continue to push the administration effort to invent sketchily premised intelligence charges claiming Trump's problems are due to the machinations of China, Democrats, or both. We can expect to come out of this with Ratcliffe committing at least one known crime, when all is said and done, because when you have a conspiracy-minded yes man with broad powers to manipulate government (see: Mike Pompeo, William Barr, etc., etc.) laws tend to be seen as optional.

After the defeat of Senator Bernie Sanders, leading progressive activists faced a difficult choice: Support Joe Biden’s “unity task forces,” announced last month, and compromise in the hopes of winning concessions, or continue a likely doomed rearguard action.

Some have chosen to fight on. “You’re either for Medicare for All or you’re not. You’re for free college or you’re not,” Kyle Kulinski, the host of a popular progressive YouTube show, wrote on Twitter. “You don’t need a fucking task force. It’s a show to placate the left.”

But many of Sanders’s most fervent advocates have decided to give peace a chance. Eighteen top Sanders supporters and progressive activists, including more than a few harsh critics of Biden, accepted appointments to the task forces. That’s a departure from the uncompromising caricature of Sanders’s supporters painted during the primary. It’s also a tough position to be in. How do activists win concessions from a candidate they were railing against just a few weeks ago? And how do they bring their fellow Berners on board with the nominee while maintaining their progressive bona fides?

I asked nine of the Sanders-supporting appointees to Biden’s task forces about the kind of influence they hope to have over his presidential platform. They see some opportunity to move the presumptive nominee left. But they know they won’t get the high-reaching progressive agenda they’ve been fighting for.

[Read: How it feels to lose Bernie Sanders]

The Sunrise Movement, which gave Biden an F grade for his climate agenda, has so far refused to endorse the former vice president. Still, Varshini Prakash, the group’s leader, said she is eager to serve on the climate panel. “When people have asked me, ‘How do you know that this won’t be lip service?’ my answer is, ‘I don’t,’” Prakash told me last week.

Her organization is dedicated to making the Green New Deal a reality, regardless of the Democratic Party’s nominee, she said, referencing the legislative proposal that would involve sweeping reforms to address climate change and economic inequality. When I asked Prakash what, specifically, she plans to bring up in her task-force meetings, she said she’ll urge Biden’s campaign to do three things: shorten its timelines to enact urgent climate policy, add an environmental-justice component to his platform, and hold fossil-fuel companies accountable for their harm to the environment and for disseminating misinformation. “I don’t expect to get everything that I want, but I’d expect to be listened to and engaged in principled debate about these things,” she said.

Several of the appointees I spoke with have real concerns about the efficacy of the project. The whole thing could still be a ruse meant to create the appearance of open-mindedness on the part of the Biden campaign, some said. At the same time, they told me, the panels present an opportunity—maybe the only one—for progressives to weigh in on the policy agenda for the next four years. Even more crucial, they said, is presenting a united Democratic front to take down Donald Trump.

“I would feel like a personal hypocrite if I didn't seize the chance to make a difference,” said Darrick Hamilton, the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University and a key adviser to Sanders on issues of racial inequality. “I would be derelict in my responsibility.”

Sanders, who popularized the idea of Medicare for All in his 2016 presidential bid, has appointed three fervent Medicare for All advocates to Biden’s health-care task force: Representative Pramila Jayapal, the physician and former Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and Donald Berwick, a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration. Biden opposes Medicare for All and instead has argued for a public option and endorsed lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60.

El-Sayed, the former executive director of the Detroit Health Department, has been critical of the former vice president’s health-care position. Still, El-Sayed agreed to join the panel. “We probably won’t be getting the full Medicare for All package. But I do know that what we will put together is so much better than what we have right now,” said El-Sayed, who told me that he hopes the task force can reach a consensus on how to expand health-insurance coverage and address the high price of prescription drugs. Biden is a better option than Trump, El-Sayed said, even if progressives don’t get the policy outcomes they’ve fought so hard for. “Even if you can’t score a touchdown, you can get three points in a field goal.”

[Read: The dissonance between Sanders and his supporters on Medicare for All]

Perhaps the reason so many Sanders backers were willing to join the task-force effort is that Sanders asked them to. Before the appointees were announced, the Vermont senator gathered them all on a conference call to assure them of the unity project’s authenticity. This experience would be a genuine attempt to learn from one another, he promised; progressives would be listened to, and their ideas would help shape the nominee’s platform. It’s a huge opportunity, in other words. If task-force members can push the former vice president left on a handful of policy issues, they have a better shot of enticing progressives to support him in November. But if, after several weeks, their input hasn’t had any influence over Biden’s agenda, it’s hard to overstate how incensed the left will be.

The pressure is on. “It’s daunting,” Stacey Walker, a co-chair of Sanders’s campaign in Iowa and member of the criminal-justice task force, told me. “If at the end of six weeks there has been no substantive movement in the material policies that the vice president is advocating for, we will have our answer then.”

Progressives don’t have a lot of other options. “We can either throw our hands up and refuse to try to shape the debate,” Walker said, “or we can do our very best to influence these policies right now and gear up and continue to organize for the next battle.”

I’ve been saying that there are seven presidential battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Six of the seven are obvious and long-standing battlegrounds. But … Georgia? Yes. Georgia. 

The latest numbers are courtesy of Civiqs for Daily Kos:  

Can you believe that impeached president Donald Trump won Georgia suburbs in 2016? The reason presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is winning in 2020 and Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 is the suburbs.

According to the 2016 exit polls, Trump won rural Georgia 67-29, which is virtually identical to what this poll found. Clinton won urban Georgia 68-29, again within rough range of Civiqs’ findings. But those suburban numbers! That’s the new ball game, going from Trump 51-46 in 2016 to 52-43 Biden in this poll—a 14-point swing. 

It was massive shifts in the suburbs that delivered the House to Nancy Pelosi in 2018. It was that shift that delivered the Virginia legislature, and governors in red Louisiana and Kentucky in 2019. And it’s those suburbs that have made Georgia so competitive in 2020.   

Look at that 26-point gender gap! 

As for ages, we don’t have an exact age match (the 2016 exit polls are 18-29, 30-44, 45-64, and 65+), but we know that Biden appears to be underperforming among young voters, something we’ve seen in plenty of polling already. That means that if and when Biden brings those votes home, his margin could be padded a little. 

Among voters 65+, we’ve gone from 67-31 Trump in 2016 to 62-36 in this poll—from +36 Trump to +26. That’s a 10-point net drop. Perhaps these older voters don’t care to be cannon fodder in Trump’s war for Wall Street?   

Like most of the South, being a Democrat is being Black. Black Democrats are 25% of the state. White Democrats are about 5% of Georgians. Meanwhile, 95% of all Republicans are white.

Education, like in 2016, is a key factor in partisan affiliation. The more educated, the more Democratic. Post graduates are 71%-25% Biden. Too bad there aren’t more of them!

One last key factor: the double-haters. We've seen them already—voters who have unfavorable opinions of both Biden and Trump. In 2016, the double-haters swung 50-39 for Trump. The last Civiqs national poll had Biden winning the double-haters 40-7. NBC has it even more lopsided, with Biden winning double-haters 60-10.

In this Georgia poll? Biden is winning double-haters by a gaudy 60-2. Sure, many Democrats wish someone else had won the nomination, but people don’t really care because Donald Trump is president, period, the end.

This poll does bolster the case for my two top vice presidential possibilities—Georgia’s 2018 Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Stacey Abrams—for obvious reasons—and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who displayed strength among the white educated suburban women who have driven many of the Democratic gains in the last three years. 

Now, some of you may be thinking: “This can’t be real! This is wishful thinking!” Well, we aren't the first pollsters to find Biden in the lead. That honor goes to a Republican pollster. "Currently, 46 percent of Georgia voters are backing President Donald Trump, while 47 percent are supporting Joe Biden," read the leaked poll from GOP outfit Public Opinion Strategies.

In fact, the Georgia Republican Party hasn’t been shy about broadcasting this state of affairs, likely in order to scare their donors into taking their state seriously. 

Georgia GOP isn’t wrong, and neither is this poll. Georgia is very much a top-tier battleground. 

The poll was conducted May 16-18, with a margin of error of 3.1% (a whopping 1,339 respondents).

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham is preparing to ask his colleagues on the panel for blanket permission to subpoena dozens of Obama and Trump administration officials connected to the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election — and contacts between President Donald Trump's team and Russians.

His proposal would permit the South Carolina Republican to demand testimony and documents from figures involved in the intelligence associated with the launch of the Russia investigation, including Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former national intelligence director James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey.

But it also stretches into the Trump era, with authorization to subpoena current and former figures involved in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller — including former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and current FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Graham intends to seek a Judiciary Committee vote on the matter on June 4. The proposal would allow Graham to obtain documents or testimony from any figures referenced in a report by the Justice Department Inspector General's review of the FBI's handling of a surveillance warrant connected to that investigation. That probe found corner-cutting, missteps and abuses by officials in the process used to surveil Carter Page, a former adviser to the Trump campaign.

The subpoena is unusually broad — committee subpoenas are usually specific to a smaller number of targets. But its approval, which will likely fall along party lines, would give Graham enormous, unilateral authority to conduct the probe.

Trump allies have been forcefully demanding for months that Graham take a more aggressive posture toward investigating the origins of the Russia probe, which Trump has assailed as a "hoax" against him for years.

Graham's proposal would allow him to subpoena some of Trump's most frequent Twitter targets, including former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.

The list also includes officials involved in the decision-making surrounding the January 2017 interview of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI later that year but previously moved to withdraw the plea and accuse the FBI of "egregious misconduct." The DOJ recently asked a judge to drop the criminal case against Flynn.

Trump in recent days has leaned on allies in the Senate, including Graham and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), to ramp up their probes of Obama administration officials, as Trump has sought to level unsupported allegations of criminality by his predecessor against his incoming administration. Graham recently shot down a suggestion by Trump to call Barack Obama himself, an action that Trump's Justice Department has argued is unconstitutional, despite the current president's call.

A powerful Senate committee chairman has asked the Trump administration to fully declassify an unusual email a top Obama aide sent herself regarding Michael Flynn on the eve of her departure. In a letter reviewed by POLITICO, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) made the request of Attorney General Bill Barr.

Through a spokesperson, the aide said she welcomes the release of the email.

At issue is a meeting then-President Barack Obama had with senior officials in the Oval Office on Jan. 5, 2017. President Trump and his allies say the meeting may have involved problematic discussions of Flynn, a retired lieutenant general who was set to become Trump’s national security adviser. Democrats vehemently defend the president and his aides, saying all discussions involving Flynn were appropriate.

“I understand your office is currently reviewing a January 20, 2017, email from former national security advisor Susan Rice,” Johnson wrote in the letter. “In that email, Ambassador Rice summarized an Oval Office meeting with President Obama and other administration officials that occurred on January 5, 2017. A majority of Ambassador Rice’s email was declassified but a portion of the email remains classified.

“The significance of that meeting is becoming increasingly apparent as more and more information is declassified,” Johnson wrote. “For these reasons, it is essential that Congress and the American people understand what occurred during that January 5, 2017, meeting and how it was later characterized by administration officials. The declassification of Ambassador Rice’s email, in whole, will assist these efforts.”

“On January 5, following a briefing by IC leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election, President Obama had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office. Vice President Biden and I were also present,” Rice wrote in a portion of the email that was declassified.

“President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book,’” Rice continued. “The president stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.”

“From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia,” Rice added.

Another unredacted portion of the email reads: “The president asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.“

A spokesperson for Rice said supports the effort to release her email. “Ambassador Rice would welcome the release of the entirety of her January 20, 2017 email, as well as all of the intelligence reports related to Michael Flynn," the spokesperson said.

When the redacted email surfaced in early 2018, Rice’s then-attorney, Kathy Ruemmler, told reporters there was “nothing unusual” in Rice “memorializing an important discussion for the record.”

Last week, Johnson asked the intelligence community to reveal the names of officials who made so-called unmasking requests that revealed Flynn’s name.

The next day, acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell sent the names to Johnson and other senators; the list was first reported by POLITICO.