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The Memo: Trump and Biden find common enemy in DeSantis

President Biden and former President Trump have found at least one common foe: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Biden traveled to DeSantis’s home state of Florida on Thursday, just two days after his State of the Union address.

There, the president criticized DeSantis for the governor’s failure to expand Medicaid under the terms of the Affordable Care Act.

Biden asserted that more than 1.1 million lower-income Floridians would be eligible for Medicaid if DeSantis took that step, adding, “This isn’t calculus.”

En route to Florida on Air Force One, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre poked fun at DeSantis for his bitter battle with the Walt Disney Company. The feud was first sparked by a DeSantis-backed bill restricting the teaching of sexuality in schools, but it has continued to intensify. 

“I certainly would not get into a fight with Mickey Mouse,” Jean-Pierre told reporters. “I don’t think that would be the thing that I would be doing.”

Trump, as is his habit, has been even more confrontational — and personal.

Earlier this week, Trump twice promoted social media posts implying that DeSantis had partied with underage students years ago during his brief time as a high school teacher. 

The original poster in one of those instances resurfaced an old picture and accused DeSantis of “grooming high school girls with alcohol.” 

To this, Trump appended the comment, “That’s not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing!”

Those actions drew a rare DeSantis jab back at Trump. 

“I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans,” the Florida governor said at a Wednesday news conference.

The attacks from Biden and Trump are, on one level, a testament to the Florida governor’s strength if and when he enters the 2024 presidential race.

It is widely expected that he will do so, though such an announcement may not come until after the Florida legislature ends its session in May. DeSantis’s team is reported to be hiring in advance of a White House bid.

There is no real question that DeSantis is Trump’s most serious rival for the GOP nomination at this point. The reality has been reflected in poll after poll.

An Economist/YouGov survey released Wednesday showed Trump with 42 percent support among Republicans and DeSantis with 32 percent. 

No other candidate reached double figures. Former Vice President Mike Pence was in third place with 8 percent and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, who is all but certain to announce her campaign next week, came fourth with 5 percent.

Trump has been increasingly eager to take DeSantis on directly. 

The 45th president told reporters late last month that DeSantis and his team were “trying to rewrite history” when it came to Florida’s record on COVID-19. 

DeSantis has become fiercely critical of COVID restrictions but he also approved a lockdown in Florida at the height of the pandemic, as Trump noted.

Trump also contended, as he has done in the past, that his own support was pivotal in getting DeSantis elected as Florida’s governor in the first place, in 2018. If DeSantis now runs against him, Trump said he would “consider that very disloyal.”

Trump has shown from the start of his political career that he enjoys igniting and intensifying feuds. A battle with DeSantis, if it happens, will likely be especially fierce.

“Trump does best and is most effective when he has an opponent,” said Doug Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee. “In this case, we don’t really know yet if DeSantis runs or not. So Trump has to create an opponent in DeSantis.”

Heye argued that on one hand this could be a challenge, since DeSantis is beloved by the populist-right base and is less easy to vilify with those voters than a more moderate figure would be.

That said, DeSantis faces challenges too. Getting past Trump at all will be a formidable task — and it will likely be made more difficult the more candidates get into the race.

“He still has to go out and earn it. This won’t he handed to him,” Heye said. “And those other people who are running are not about to roll over just because he is in the race.”

From the Democratic perspective, strategist Mark Longabaugh also hit a note of skepticism about DeSantis, arguing that his public persona is “brittle” and questioning whether he would live up to the hype.

Longabaugh pointed to past conservative Republicans whose candidacies were the subject of early excitement but fell flat. 

He cited then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in 2016 and then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2012.

Biden and his party also believe they have an inviting target in terms of DeSantis’s embrace of hot-button social issues.

After DeSantis and his administration came out against an Advanced Placement course in African-American history last month, Jean-Pierre told reporters at a White House briefing that the decision was “incomprehensible”— and that the “study of Black Americas” itself was something that DeSantis “wants to block.”

Longabaugh, for his part, questioned whether DeSantis’s views on such topics really had “a broad constituency” of support.

There is an easy counter-argument for DeSantis to make, of course. He won re-election in Florida — a battleground state until recently — by almost 20 points in November.

Todd Belt, the director of the political management program at George Washington University, cautioned that “Democrats are having a difficult time right now trying to figure out how they counter the culture war arguments” coming from the GOP.

Either way, both Biden and Trump have reason to fear DeSantis.

And that’s one reason why the knives are being sharpened so early.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

Source: TEST FEED1

GOP races from Medicare, Social Security third rail

The back-and-forth surrounding Social Security and Medicare this week shows that the entitlement programs remain the unquestioned third rails of American politics as Republicans back away from their decades of calls to slash the popular senior benefits. 

Democrats have used Social Security and Medicare to bludgeon the GOP all week, putting Republicans on defense, especially as the White House continues to stoke the fire with Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) over his call to sunset all federal programs after five years. To most Republicans, the political impact of the two preeminent items is clear, and they’re taking long strides to distance themselves from Scott’s proposal.

“It’s essential. I mean, I live in an elderly state that…hits more people,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), a member of Senate GOP leadership, told The Hill. “In tight times like this…that it might actually be under duress or question is a terrible, not just practical, but political [issue] as well.”

“I think they’ve made it clear, and I’ve made it clear, we’re not going to touch it,” Capito added.

Such vows mark a sharp reversal for a Republican Party that has attacked Social Security and Medicare for decades as socialist initiatives that undermine American free enterprise. The most recent examples of that formal position were the GOP budgets proposed under former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who had made steep cuts to the entitlement programs a central tenet of his years-long effort to reduce federal spending. 

A number of Republican lawmakers said this week that there’s a simple reason for the shift in position: a changing of the guard in the GOP’s ranks. 

“There’s different people involved,” said freshman Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.). “I’ve said many times, I’m not supporting cuts to those programs. I believe, in fact, they need to be fully funded. And I think that’s the overwhelming opinion of the conference.”

Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over Social Security and Medicare, echoed that message. Asked what had changed since the days when Republicans opposed the entitlements, he attributed it to a personnel change.

“Maybe the leadership, because you’ve never heard me say it,” Smith said. “You should look at my history.”

Part of that shift is attributable to former President Trump, who made clear early on in his 2016 White House bid that he had no intention of taking on the entitlement programs.

“I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid,” Trump boasted on Twitter in May of 2015.

Republicans on Capitol Hill did not immediately adopt that position, even after Trump took over the White House in 2017. But six years later, GOP leaders have embraced those programs — at least rhetorically — and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has vowed that they’ll remain “off the table” as he battles with President Biden over raising the federal debt ceiling.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went multiple steps further than McCarthy, shouting during the State of the Union that Biden was a “liar” for suggesting the GOP wanted to cut the programs. 

The political power of Social Security, in particular, has been put to the test with the White House’s elongated public spat with Scott. 

The Florida senator this week has reiterated his support on numerous occasions for the “sunset” plank of his 12-point agenda, going so far as to unearth a bill Biden introduced in 1975 that would sunset federal programs between four and six years after passage and was similar to the senator’s. Scott also challenged the president to a debate while he traveled to Florida on Thursday.

The White House, unsurprisingly, has leaned into the shouting match with Scott. While appearing in Tampa, Florida, Biden panned the senator’s proposal as “outrageous,” while the White House labeled Scott as the “national poster-child” for GOP attacks on Social Security and Medicare. If Biden’s messaging on Thursday wasn’t clear enough, the backdrop at his event read, “Protect and Strengthen Medicare.”

Scott’s proposals, however, have pushed Republicans away from the topic. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made clear last year the party writ large did not support a sunset on federal programs despite the GOP’s rhetoric on the topic at times during the 2010s, especially from Ryan. 

“Everybody knows it’s the third rail. It’ll kill you if you touch it,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Thursday. “I think part of it is that when you have divided government, unless the Biden administration’s willing to engage on this, there’s no real point. People are willing to do things that require some political courage if they think they’re going to get a result. But if you’re just going to be hanging yourself out there and twisting in the wind while your opponent is taking a lot of joy and advantage of that, then there’s no real point in doing it.”

Since the State of the Union blow-up, Republicans have been upset by Biden’s accusation from the rostrum that the party backs cuts. Leaving the House chamber on Tuesday, many were visibly frustrated by the president’s charge and argued that he was painting with far too broad of a brush. 

They also believe the episode has shattered any chance to make any perceived headway on the subject for the foreseeable future, even as Medicare is expected to experience a funding shortfall in 2028, and Social Security in 2034. 

“It’s been the third rail for a long, long, long time. Quite honestly, I think the president was wrong to say Republicans are talking about cutting Social Security. They always want to talk about the benefits, benefits, benefits. But it’s a lie to tell people that Social Security is fine if we don’t do anything,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said. “I’m a little irritated by it, but it certainly demonstrated perceived potency anyway. What it demonstrated is that Democrats will always, always, always weaponize Social Security because the elderly are a group that they can scare into voting for them on the topic.”

However, the president has received backup from his own party, which believes lumping Scott in with the GOP overall is more than fair. 

“Whether they’re the senator from Florida or the senator from Wisconsin, [Republicans who] lay out plans to cut Social Security, obviously, they’re members of the Republican Party. They have plans that would weaken Social Security and Medicare,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).  

“The president was perfectly accurate in pointing to those examples,” Van Hollen added. 

Source: TEST FEED1

How outside groups are boosting DeSantis before a possible 2024 bid

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) may still be months away from announcing a 2024 presidential bid, but multiple outside groups are putting in the work in the meantime to make sure he can hit the ground running.

Three different super PACs have emerged in recent months backing DeSantis as a 2024 candidate. The goal, according to the people behind the efforts, is to build up volunteers and infrastructure so an eventual DeSantis campaign isn’t at a disadvantage if and when he officially launches his campaign.

That could prove especially critical for DeSantis, who as Florida governor is one of the only potential 2024 candidates whose travel and involvement in early primary states is limited by his day job.

“He’s kind of handicapped by the fact he’s got a legislative session that’s going to last a couple months here,” said Ed Rollins, chief strategist for the “Ready for Ron” super PAC and a veteran of numerous Republican campaigns.

“One of the dilemmas is he had a tremendous victory but can’t announce [for president] the day after he got elected,” Rollins added, referencing DeSantis’s reelection romp in November. “Trump’s making his efforts. Others will get in before then. We want to be helpful early on and try to reach some financial supporters that want to help and put together a mechanism that can help now and in six months.”

Rollins’s group, “Ready for Ron,” officially launched last May as a committee to encourage DeSantis to run for president. Rollins described the organization as a grassroots effort that is focused on identifying voters and organizing in states that will be pivotal in the 2024 cycle.

The group filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission last month declaring its intent to spend more than $3 million on television advertising and phone, mail and digital promotion through late June.

Another group backing DeSantis for president is “Ron to the Rescue,” which was started after the midterm elections by GOP consultant John Thomas.

Thomas’s group had staff at the New Hampshire GOP’s annual meeting late last month, where volunteers and former state officials rallied support for the Florida governor in the state where the first Republican primary of the 2024 cycle will be held.

Thomas said the group received a positive response, including from self-identified Trump supporters who indicated they were open to making a change in 2024.

Both Rollins and Thomas noted in interviews that they previously supported Trump, and that they believe DeSantis is the would-be candidate who gives Republicans the best chance of retaking the White House in the next election.

According to Fox News, however, DeSantis’s team circulated a memo last year distancing the governor from the group. A source told the news outlet that the group “doesn’t help Ron DeSantis. It’s a grift — plain and simple.”

Most recently, Puck News reported this week that a pair of longtime GOP consultants — Phil Cox and Liesl Hickey — have been recruiting staffers for a new super PAC that could eventually be the one officially associated with a DeSantis 2024 campaign.

The purpose of the super PACs is to identify possible donors, activists, volunteers and voters who would back a DeSantis bid. The idea in the case of Thomas’s group, for example, is to build up a ground game in early voting states like New Hampshire so there’s a built-in infrastructure of support if and when DeSantis declares his candidacy and he can hit the ground running.

Recent polls have shown DeSantis and former President Donald Trump as the top two choices among Republican voters in a hypothetical primary. A Monmouth University poll released Thursday showed both men at 33 percent support among GOP and GOP-leaning voters.

Florida will be in legislative session into May, and DeSantis is not expected to announce a bid before then, potentially limiting his ability to get in front of voters outside the state in the meantime in the way other declared candidates would.

Trump, the only declared candidate in the field, has also held few events, but recently spoke to party leaders in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Nikki Haley, who is expected to declare her candidacy next week, will follow up that announcement with visits to Iowa and New Hampshire, states she has visited before for party events.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, another prospective 2024 candidate, has made frequent trips to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the first three states on the GOP primary calendar.

Alex Conant, who worked on Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) 2016 presidential campaign, said there are pros and cons for someone like DeSantis having a full-time job even as he weighs a presidential bid.

“The con is that running for president is a full-time job, and if you have to take care of official business, that will take time away from campaigning,” Conant said.

“On the other hand, having an official role guarantees you a platform that somebody who’s out of office doesn’t have,” he added. “And you’re seeing that now with DeSantis and how he’s using his legislative agenda to gain a lot of really positive national conservative attention.”

Source: TEST FEED1

GOP senators sympathetic to Romney’s call for Santos to resign

Senate Republicans, who are battling to win back the majority in 2024, worry the controversy surrounding Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) has become a liability for their party as a whole, and several are expressing quiet support for Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-Utah) call for Santos to step down. 

GOP senators are reluctant to tell their House Republican counterparts what to do, but they privately hope Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) won’t let the situation fester for much longer.

Senate Republicans feel like they have a good chance of winning back control of the upper chamber and don’t want Santos — or other high-profile conservative House members who made a splash at President Biden’s State of the Union address — to become emblematic of their party, which could turn off independent and swing voters. 

Romney’s frustration with Santos was on display to the nation on Tuesday when he confronted the freshman lawmaker as he walked down the House center aisle, bluntly telling his fellow Republican: “You don’t belong here.”  

After the address, Romney told reporters Santos’s presence at Biden’s speech was an “embarrassment” and said he was disappointed that McCarthy hasn’t called on him to resign.  

Other Senate Republicans aren’t willing to be so bold and outspoken, but they generally agree that Santos is a distraction and should have the good sense to step down from Congress, which would spare them the spectacle of having to watch McCarthy dodge questions about the freshman’s future.  

“I am surprised that the man has not resigned, and I think it just speaks to his own lack of self-awareness and what he has done to [the] institution,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said of Santos. 

“It’s not like we’ve got a really strong public approval rating. It doesn’t do much to elevate us in the eyes of the American public when it would appear we are kind of protecting somebody just because he’s a member of our caucus,” she said. 

“And so I’m surprised he hasn’t resigned and there hasn’t been a greater push or call for him to step out by his constituents,” she added. 

Murkowski and other GOP senators are marveling over how Santos even won in a competitive House district that was previously represented by a Democrat.  

“How does an individual who would fabricate aspects of his life story in order to gain election successfully gain election?” Murkowski asked.

She said the fact that few people bothered to examine Santos’s background closely before the election was a troubling statement about how partisanship has come to dominate today’s politics. 

“It is a telling statement about us too, that all we want is your label. All we want is your label. All we want is your label. We don’t care about your integrity, your character or whether or not you are a liar. We just want to know whether you are an R vote or a D vote,” she said.  

But while Senate Republicans worry that drama in the House may tarnish the broader party, they are loath to tell House Republicans how to run their own business.  

“I wouldn’t have done it,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) when asked about Romney’s confrontation with Santos on the House floor. “We’re always visitors in their chamber” during State of the Union addresses.  

“I don’t disagree with Mitt’s sentiment, I’ll put it that way,” Cramer said.  

Senate Republican Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) described Romney as “a principled guy who generally says what he thinks.” 

“He made a fairly strong statement there, and I think that statement stands on its own,” he said.  

A Republican senator who requested anonymity to discuss Santos said “what happens in the House certainly has a consequence to the Senate, senators or Republicans, generally.”  

But the lawmaker said senators are reluctant to publicly tell McCarthy what to do about what they acknowledge is becoming a public relations problem.  

“My policy is not to meddle in what goes on in the House. They can decide. And every time it’s an elected official or colleague, it becomes more difficult to say someone should resign because the voters made a choice,” the lawmaker explained. “In this case, they apparently made a choice based on a whole lot of wrong information.” 

The senator said it’s more important that fellow House Republicans — instead of Romney — call for Santos’s resignation.  

“I think it needs to be said by his colleagues in the House,” the source said. “There’s nothing wrong with a frank discussion about how you’re harming the brand or your behavior is not acceptable to the norms of Congress.” 

Other Senate Republicans are staying mum on the topic of Santos.  

Asked if she had any thoughts on the New York lawmaker in light of Romney’s public rebuke, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) declined to comment.  

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) shrugged when asked about Romney’s harsh rebuke of Santos. 

“Everybody’s entitled to their opinion,” he said.  

At the same time, some Democrats are seizing on Republicans’ reluctance to condemn Santos to question the broader party’s integrity.  

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said Romney did the right thing.  

“I’m glad somebody in the Republican Party has the integrity to say to Santos who has lied every step of the way … you should not be serving,” she said.  

“It says to me that the rest of them are a pretty sad bunch of people if they’re not going to step up for the truth or integrity,” she said of Republicans who don’t want to press for Santos’s resignation.  

“It’s disappointing but not unexpected,” she added, noting that many Republicans have denied the result of the 2020 presidential election. 

“To the extent that there are all these people in that party does not reflect well on them at all,” she added.  

Source: TEST FEED1

Chinese spy balloon revelations raise stakes for US response

The discovery that a Chinese spy balloon shot down off the U.S. coast had the equipment to collect communications, and not just images, as it traveled across the country last week has upped the stakes around the incident.

U.S. lawmakers are demanding new action from the Biden administration after the Thursday revelations that the balloon possessed antennas to collect communications signals and solar panels to power its sensors. 

Washington was also rattled by news earlier this week that the airship was part of a much larger operation run by the Chinese military to spy on more than 40 countries across five continents. 

The incursion, which until last week was largely unknown to much of the American public, seems to mark a new era of espionage and counter-espionage activities between the U.S. and China, according to John Ciorciari, the director of the Weiser Diplomacy Center at the University of Michigan. 

“This incident makes it likely the U.S. accelerates different kinds of counterintelligence initiatives and expands to areas like, who do we grant visas to? Who is allowed to study at universities?” Ciorciari told The Hill. “An acceleration of those kinds of policies, the Chinese government will probably mirror.”

The U.S. government isn’t wasting time in punching back at the breach. A State Department official on Thursday said the U.S. is exploring options to take action against the Chinese military and entities supporting the balloon spying operation. Washington will also seek to further expose the Chinese global surveillance campaign, the official said.

Congressional lawmakers also denounced Beijing, with the House later in the day unanimously passing a resolution condemning China’s use of the surveillance balloon over the United States, calling it a “brazen violation” of U.S. sovereignty.

The resolution also calls on the Biden administration to keep Congress abreast of any new information gleaned from the incident.

But lawmakers remain unsatisfied by the information to come out of the White House and Pentagon so far, as well as the reasoning for why the U.S. military didn’t move quicker to down the balloon before it drifted slowly across U.S. territory for days before being shot off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4.

Tensions were particularly high at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing with defense officials.

Alaskan Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), whose state’s airspace was the first to be breached by the Chinese balloon on Jan. 28, was visibly angry as she questioned the witnesses.

“As an Alaskan, I am so angry. I want to use other words but I’m not going to,” she said. “The fact of the matter is, Alaska is the first line of defense for America, right? If you’re going to have Russia coming at you, if you’re going to have China coming at you, we know exactly how they come. They come up and they go over Alaska.”

She later added: “Seems to me the clear message to China is ‘we’ve got free range in Alaska, because they’re going to let us cruise over that.’”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), meanwhile, said “it defies belief that there was not a single opportunity to safely shoot down this spy balloon prior to the coast of South Carolina.”

And the subcommittee chairman, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), whose state also was in the balloon’s flight path, demanded answers as to how the administration has responded to past instances of Chinese aerial spying, what the balloons were collecting, and if there are any plans to respond if such a thing happens again.

“Do we have a plan for when this happens again and what we’re going to do and when we’re going to do it?” Tester asked the witnesses, which included Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs Melissa Dalton and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Jedidiah Royal.

“I don’t want a damn balloon going across the United States when we could potentially have taken it down over the Aleutian Islands,” he added. “I got a problem with a Chinese balloon flying over my state, much less the rest of the country.”

Royal assured Tester that the Defense Department has “some very good guesses” about what intel China was attempting to gather with the balloon, promising more details in the classified version of the hearing.

But Tester responded that while U.S. intelligence agencies may “think we know what they were going to collect, we don’t know. That scares the hell out of me.”

Asked repeatedly why the government didn’t immediately shoot down the balloon when it was detected over Alaska, the defense officials repeated past assertions that the debris field caused by such an operation, even in a remote area such as Alaska, was still too much of a risk to citizens on the ground.

Taking down the balloon over Alaska would have also made it significantly more difficult and dangerous to “salvage, understand and exploit the capabilities” of the devices on board given the cold, volatile and deep waters around the state, Dalton said. 

Also concerning for intelligence officials and lawmakers is that four previous spy balloons flew over the U.S. initially undetected, according to the Pentagon — three during the Trump administration and another months ago during the Biden administration.

Tim Heath, a senior International defense researcher with Rand Corporation, said the incident should prompt the U.S. to develop better technology to detect future balloons.

“It’s possible that the U.S. military really didn’t think the Chinese would have the gall to float one right over our own country,” he said. “I can understand why they didn’t detect them in the past.”

Heath said current radar systems focus on missiles and aircraft coming into U.S. airspace.

“In order to detect [balloons] with radar, you need to have some kind of new technology that can pick up very low observable things in the sky like balloons,” Heath continued.

In a heightened era of U.S.-China tensions, it’s possible that other technologies and Chinese tactics will fall under more scrutiny. 

Areas of concern include social media app TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company and is already being banned on government devices in Republican-led states, along with Chinese companies buying up land near U.S. military bases and Beijing’s deployment of covert agents at American universities .

Ciorciari, of the University of Michigan, said espionage is common among nations — but the Chinese spy balloon placed the image of such spying “in the minds of average American citizens.”

Because of this, he predicted, there will be “more pressure to limit espionage” by the U.S. government.

“The threat that I see is not so much the intelligence collection capabilities of the balloons,” he said, but “where this set of episodes fit in the broader relationship.”

And there’s still much to learn about the balloon shot down over the weekend. 

The Navy, helped by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is still attempting to collect balloon debris from the Atlantic Ocean to glean information on the Chinese technology. 

So far, dive teams have only pulled the canopy, some wiring and a small amount of electronics from the water, FBI officials said in a briefing Thursday. The rest is at the “ocean bottom,” including the majority of the balloon’s payload, with recovery efforts expected to take a while due to weather.

Source: TEST FEED1

Hispanic Caucus chair fires executive director; group's staff down to zero

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) has no political staffers on the active payroll after Chair Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.) fired Executive Director Jacky Usyk Thursday.

The news of the firing was first reported by Dear White Staffers, an Instagram account run by anonymous Congressional staff that keeps tabs on alleged workplace abuses in the Capitol.

A half dozen sources confirmed the news to The Hill; no CHC members returned requests for comment on the firing.

A spokesperson for Barragán did not return a request for comment.

“This debacle unfolding at the CHC doesn’t bode well for the Caucus and for Congresswoman Barragán, who fired a well-liked staffer a month into the start of the new Congress,” a Democratic strategist with knowledge of the situation said.

Usyk’s firing came just a day after the last of four political CHC staffers left the organization, and a month to the day after the CHC officially announced her hiring.

The other three political staff who worked at the CHC prior to Barragán’s appointment as chair left between December and January.

The staff exodus comes as Barragán settles into her position at the head of the 42-member organization, a group with significant sway over policy choices in the broader Democratic Caucus.

It’s a worst-case scenario for Barragán, whose tenure in Congress has been marred with irregularly high staff turnover in her personal office.

While Barragán is well respected and well liked among her peers, she has gained a reputation among staffers that she is hard to work for.

According to Legistorm, a website that tracks Congressional staff, Barragán’s personal office had the third highest turnover rate of any House office from 2001 to 2021.

Still, in 2022, Barragán did not make the top 10 turnover Legistorm turnover list.

Usyk’s firing after less than a month on the job also comes as the CHC is searching for a new leader for its campaign arm, Bold PAC.

Bold PAC Chair Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) last month announced he will step down from leading the organization at the end of the quarter to focus on his Arizona Senate campaign to take over Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s seat.

In 2022, Bold PAC had a record year, adding nine new CHC members and successfully defending all its incumbents, as well as spreading donations to friendly Democrats around the country.

“This will be a major detriment to her lagging fundraising apparatus and will likely even impact BOLD PAC’s capability to provide resources for its record membership,” the strategist said.

Source: TEST FEED1

Special counsel subpoenas Pence in Trump investigation: reports

The special counsel leading the Justice Department’s investigations into former President Trump has subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence, multiple outlets reported on Thursday.

Special counsel Jack Smith — who was appointed in November to oversee the investigation into the former president’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his handling of classified materials — is reportedly seeking documents and testimony from Pence, according to CNN.

The subpoena, which was first reported by ABC News, is seeking testimony from the former vice president about his interactions with Trump in the run up to the 2020 election, as well as on Jan. 6, 2021, itself, per CNN.

The New York Times previously reported in November that the Justice Department was in talks with Pence’s representatives in an effort to obtain his testimony.

The former vice president played a central role in the events of Jan. 6 when he defied Trump’s requests to block the certification of the 2020 election.

As rioters broke into the Capitol, Trump fanned the flames, tweeting that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

Several rioters could be heard chanting “Hang Mike Pence” amid the chaos that ensued.

The Hill has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

Source: TEST FEED1

Biden says China spy balloon ‘not a major breach’

President Biden on Thursday said that the suspected Chinese spy balloon that flew over much of the U.S. last week was “not a major breach,” comparing it to intelligence gathering conducted by countries around the world.

“It’s not a major breach. Look, the total amount of intelligence gathering that’s going on by every country around the world is overwhelming,” Biden said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo that airs this evening.

Biden, however does acknowledge that in the case of last week’s incident, China sending the balloon was “a violation of international law.”

“It’s our airspace. And once it comes into our space, we can do what we want with it,” the president said.

Biden ordered a U.S. military take down of the suspected spy balloon off the South Carolina coast on Saturday after it was first reported flying over Montana last Wednesday with the ordeal intensifying tensions between Washington and Beijing. The balloon had antennas to collect communications and solar panels to power its sensors as it traversed the U.S., a State Department official said earlier on Thursday.

Also on Thursday, the House unanimously approved a resolution condemning the Chinese Communist Party’s use of a spy balloon over the continental U.S., labeling the situation “a brazen violation of United States sovereignty.”

The president faced a rash of criticism over the weekend, mostly from Republicans, who said he acted too slowly to shoot down the balloon. Biden has since defended his position, saying he was advised to wait to shoot it down until it went over water to avoid any potential deaths on the ground.

The Biden administration has worked to recover the balloon in order to “exploit” what they can from it, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Monday. The U.S. reportedly took action to limit the capabilities of the balloon while it was in the air before shooting it down off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, stopping it from collecting U.S. communications.

Also in the Noticias Telemundo interview on Thursday, Biden addressed potentially running for president against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) or former President Trump, saying he doesn’t see a difference between the two should either become the Republican nominee in 2024.

“No, I don’t think so, because I think that they have a similar modus operandi, a similar way in which they work,” the president said when asked if there’s a difference.

The president was interviewed by Noticias Telemundo Thursday during a trip Florida, DeSantis and Trump’s home state, for a speech on protecting Social Security and Medicare at the University of Tampa.

Updated 6:45 p.m.

Source: TEST FEED1

Five outstanding questions about the Chinese spy balloon

Navy sailors are still pulling up debris from the Chinese spy balloon an F-22 fighter jet shot down on Saturday, and more details about the surveillance device are likely to be revealed in the coming days.

But for now, there are more questions than answers.

Here are the questions we have about the Chinese spy balloon.

What equipment was attached to the balloon, and what was it being used for?

A State Department official revealed on Thursday the balloon hosted antennas with the capability of collecting communications intelligence.

It also came “equipped with solar panels large enough to produce the requisite power to operate multiple active intelligence collection sensors,” the official said.

There is little else known about the equipment attached to the spy balloon, which weighs about 200 pounds and is the size of three coach buses.

While satellites are commonly used by nations for surveillance, balloons are cheaper to deploy and can linger over certain areas for longer than a satellite, potentially snapping clearer pictures and picking up on more communications.

Tim Heath, a senior international defense researcher at Rand Corporation, said China is using these balloons to “augment satellite collections.”

“Satellites are highly capable but they’re in high demand so they can’t be everywhere,” Heath said. “Balloons are cheap and pretty cost effective. … You can deploy them all over the place.”

Why didn’t the Pentagon tell the public about the balloon for five days?

The Pentagon first detected the balloon on Jan. 28 over the Aleutian Islands in Alaska but chose not to inform the public about it until Feb. 2, when it was spotted over Montana.

Military officials briefed President Biden on the balloon last Tuesday. The next day, Biden ordered it to be shot down when it was safe to do so. That was determined to be when it was over water in the Atlantic Ocean.

Last Thursday, the Biden administration was forced to publicly acknowledge the balloon as the massive white ball floated through the skies of Montana and attracted attention.

What, if any, sensitive information did the balloon collect?

A major point of contention is how long it took the Pentagon to shoot down the balloon, which traveled from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina.

Republican lawmakers have slammed the Biden administration for waiting to take it down, arguing they could have shot it out of the sky over the waters of the Aleutian Islands or over sparsely populated areas of America’s heartland.

A concern from the GOP is that the balloon traveled over much of the continental U.S. and potentially collected sensitive information.

We do know the balloon traveled over Montana, home to one of the nation’s three nuclear missile fields.

Defense officials have said they took steps to ensure the balloon was not collecting sensitive information.

Heath, from Rand Corporation, said the Pentagon could have jammed the technology by beaming static at the balloon’s frequency, which would then block it from electronically communicating any message to a satellite for collection by China.

Why didn’t the Pentagon know about previous balloon sightings?

One of the most pressing questions for investigators and intelligence officials is why at least four previous Chinese balloon flyovers were not detected by the Pentagon.

Three of those balloon sightings occurred during the Trump administration, and in addition to the one downed last week, there was one more during the Biden administration.

Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said there was a “domain awareness gap” in the Defense Department’s ability to detect these four balloons, which were discovered retroactively.

Retired Navy Adm. Harry Harris Jr., a former commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told a House congressional panel on Tuesday this detection gap is worrying.

“That ought to concern all of us,” he said, calling it a “disconnect in our ability to understand these balloons.”

Improved technology developed during the Biden administration helped detect the balloon last week, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Monday.

How often has China deployed these balloons and to which countries?

China is deploying the spy balloons in a massive global surveillance campaign, according to the State Department.

A State Department official on Thursday said that China has deployed them in at least 40 countries across five continents.

Since the U.S. detection of the balloon last week, both Japan and Taiwan have come forward with information and pictures about what they now understand to be balloon sightings.

Previous balloons have been spotted in the Pacific, including one near Hawaii, according to the Pentagon. Last week, one was spotted in Latin America.

The State Department also said the manufacturer of these balloons has a direct relationship with China’s military.

The U.S. is exploring options to take action against the Chinese military and entities supporting the balloon incursions, along with efforts to expose and address the surveillance campaign.

Source: TEST FEED1

House briefing on China spy balloon turns tense with Greene comments: 'I chewed them out'

A classified briefing for House lawmakers on the Chinese spy balloon turned tense on Thursday when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went after administration officials for waiting days before shooting down the surveillance device.

“I had to wait in line the whole time, I was I think the second to last person, and I chewed them out just like the American people would’ve,” Greene told The Hill. “I tore ‘em to pieces.”

Biden administration officials briefed House members behind closed doors in the Capitol Thursday morning on this weekend’s downing of a Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast, which capped off a days-long saga of following the balloon as it floated over the U.S.

One lawmaker who attended the briefing said the exchange between Greene and the officials included profanities.

“When she got to ask questions,” the lawmaker recalled, “she was yelling out saying ‘bullshit,’ and, you know, ‘I don’t believe you.’”

“Just screaming and yelling, irrational in my estimation,” the lawmaker added.

Republicans have criticized the administration’s decision to wait to shoot down the balloon until it was over water — which allowed the device to travel through several states across the country. President Biden said he ordered the U.S. military to shoot down the balloon “as soon as possible,” and his national security officials determined that “the best time to do that was when it got over water.”

Greene said she expressed that GOP sentiment during Thursday’s briefing.

“I said the president may be a Democrat but he’s still the president of the United States and they made him look like a fool and made him look weak the week before the State of the Union, I’ve said that publicly too, by not shooting it down,” Greene recalled. “And I said there was nothing I heard there today that gave me any confidence in what they did.”

“They tried to give me some more excuses and I said, I don’t want to hear more of your excuses,” Greene said when asked about how others in the room reacted to her time at the microphone. “He said, ‘well it’s a matter of opinion.’ I said ‘no, you’re nothing but of excuses and it’s wrong and I’m just telling you, this is how the American people see it and it’s a serious problem.’”

Rep. Gregory Meeks (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said there was “tension in the room” during the briefing.

“There’s some members who just don’t want to believe what they said. They says oh, I don’t believe you, you know, that kind of thing, I don’t trust you,” he said. “So that’s the kind of tension, just the fight back.”

Another lawmaker said “there were people muttering on the side,” described as making quiet comments so people around them would hear that were not made to the panel directly.

And a third said the meeting featured “remarks out loud” over “the course” of the briefing from “more than one” GOP lawmaker.

The Pentagon announced on Feb. 2 that the government had detected and was tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon over continental U.S. that belonged to the People’s Republic of China. It was first detected on Jan. 28.

Days later, on Feb. 4, the U.S. Air Force shot down the balloon off the Carolina coast, and an operation began to recover the debris.

Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said officials at Thursday’s briefing explained their decision-making process.

“They shared what happened and the decision process that they took in deciding what to do when they did it and believe that by taking it down over the water, they’ll have a chance to recover and learn lessons,” he said.

Meeks called the briefing “very helpful” and “very transparent,” 

“Any question that was asked of them they answered,” he said. “I think it confirms… some of what’s already out in the public domain that at no time was American sovereignty — and everybody’s upset about that — was violated, but America was safe.”

“There’s a determination that… it did not present a threat to the United States. And by tracking it across, knowing that it wasn’t a threat, we learned much more than we would have had we destroyed it earlier,” he added.

Some Republicans, however, were less impressed with the briefing, noting that little new information was presented.

“I’m [an] Intel guy by trade. And I read all the paper articles about it, I would just say I didn’t learn a whole lot,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said. “I didn’t come away a whole lot wiser.”

“It was good they had it. I learned a couple things that I didn’t read in public sources,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) recalled. “Everything else pretty much, if you read other public sources you kind of got it.”

Greene, whose office said her outfit at the State of the Union was meant to echo the Chinese spy balloon, summed up the briefing in two categories.

“One doesn’t sound so nice, but it sounded like bullshit. The other one, is it was a bunch of excuses,” she said.

“They allowed it to go across the country and there was nothing they told us in there that gave us a good reason to think they made the right move,” she said. “As a matter of fact, they made the wrong move.”

Emily Brooks contributed.

Source: TEST FEED1