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NYT editorial board calls on Garland to seek indictment of Trump if there is 'sufficient evidence’

The New York Times editorial board called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to seek an indictment of former President Trump if “sufficient evidence” exists to establish his guilt “on a serious charge.”

The board argued in a piece published Friday that, “Mr. Trump’s unprecedented assault on the integrity of American democracy requires a criminal investigation” following the Jan. 6 select committee hearings and news of the Justice Department’s search of Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., home for classified documents.

“This board is aware that in deciding how Mr. Trump should be held accountable under the law it is necessary to consider not just whether criminal prosecution would be warranted but whether it would be wise.”

The board mentioned former President Gerald Ford’s pardon of former President Nixon for any crimes he may have committed during the Watergate scandal, with Ford justifying the decision as avoiding the “rousing” of “ugly passions” and polarization. 

The board stated that prosecuting Trump could entrench support for him and “play into the conspiracy theories he has sought to stoke.” They argued it could also allow future presidents to misuse the precedent set to go after their political rivals. 

But, the paper warned that doing nothing poses a much more significant risk and not holding him accountable for his actions related to the Jan. 6 insurrection would could set an “irresistible” precedent for future presidents. 

“Why not attempt to stay in power by any means necessary or use the power of the office to enrich oneself or punish one’s enemies, knowing that the law does not apply to presidents in or out of office?” the board wrote.

The Times editorial was published the same day the FBI released a redacted affidavit to convince a Florida judge to grant a search warrant for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. The document stated authorities found 184 documents — some highly classified — in boxes that were initially returned to the National Archives from Mar-a-Lago earlier in the year.

The affidavit showed that the FBI believed there were additional classified documents related to national security housed at Trump’s Palm Beach residence.

The FBI conducted a search of the Palm Beach, Fla., property earlier this month to search for documents.

The House select committee is investigating Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. It is currently taking a pause from its public hearings, but they are expected to resume in the fall.

The Times editorial board claimed the Jan. 6 hearings make clear that Trump must have known he was at the “center” of a fraudulent effort that led to the Capitol being attacked, and he refused to call off the mob that stormed the building for hours. 

“Well-meaning intentions did not shield them from the consequences of their actions,” it states. “It would be unjust if Mr. Trump, the man who inspired them, faced no consequences.”

Source: TEST FEED1

The mother of all ‘zero-days’ — immortal flaws in semiconductor chips

The CHIPS Act of 2022 was signed into law on Aug. 9. It provides tens of billions of dollars in public support for revitalization of domestic semiconductor manufacturing, workforce training, and “leap ahead” wireless technology. Because we outsource most of our device fabrication — including the chips that go into the Navy’s submarines and ships, the Army’s jeeps and tanks, military drones and satellites — our industrial base has become weak and shallow. The first order of business for the CHIPS Act is to address a serious deficit in our domestic production capacity. 

Notoriously absent from the language of the bill is any mention of chip security. Consequently, the U.S. is about to make the same mistake with microelectronics that we made with digital networks and software applications: Unless and until the government demands in-device security, our competitors will have an easy time of manipulating how chips function and behave. Nowhere is this more dangerous than our national security infrastructure.

For the first quarter-century of ubiquitous internet access, policy makers and industry leaders did not imagine — literally could not conceive — a deliberate electronic intrusion from an ideological adversary.

Now they hit us almost at will.

Deterrence has proven to be an obviously insufficient policy alternative. Western civil societies — our power stations, waste processing facilities, and hospitals — are paying a heavy price for their porous defenses and cyber naivete.

Every chip starts life as a software program before it is fabricated, mostly in Asia, and mostly in Taiwan, into a chip. The process that transforms design code into “sand in the hand” silicon is just as vulnerable today as consumer applications were in the early 2010s, and for all the same reasons. The impact is deeper and more penetrating because once a chip is compromised, it is nearly impossible to patch. It might be in space or under an ocean. Our enemies know this too.

Undetected vulnerabilities, called “zero-days,” are endemic to and ubiquitous in all digital systems. They remain dormant until activated by someone who is trying to ransom data, steal data, or insert false instructions into a computer. They target electric grids, water supplies, financial clearinghouses, supply chains, and transportation fleets. The people who operate critical infrastructure have no time — literally zero days — to fix them. They exist because it is impossible for designers and manufacturers to test every possible combination of paths in or out of a device. Zero-days enable destructive cyberattacks on physical systems.

Non-technical people may assume that cybersecurity is just “secret stuff that is getting handled behind the scenes.” It is not, or at least not-nearly well enough. And if our experience with consumer applications and industrial control systems is any indication, we urgently need to bolster our cyber defenses on semiconductor chips. Policymakers and industry leaders in the U.S. have not yet connected digital theft and intrusion to kinetic danger and violence in a way that the general public can understand.

Leading manufacturers will soon be mass-producing devices whose internal geometric features are measured by angstroms, 20 to be exact, the orbit of an electron around a hydrogen nucleus. Our ability to build chips so compact, so small, and so potent means we could dramatically improve surveillance for deviant behavior and respond proactively when it occurs.

Chips, of course, rarely live in isolation. There are communication chips, graphics chips, sensory chips, memory chips, pacemaker chips and the iconic microprocessor. They are the workhorses of our networked health, energy, water, financial, agricultural, supply chain, retail, transportation and national security infrastructure, and they are connected to each other. An infection in one can easily spread to another, like a biological virus.

Semiconductor industry icon Joe Costello and Levin recently argued that chips are the next frontier of exploitation and will have zero-day problems that cannot be patched because they are literally baked into the hardware; this is why we need much better defense there, too.

In 2017 Russia used an NSA-created zero-day, in their hands called “NotPetya,” in what Nicole Perlroth characterized as “the most destructive and costly cyberattack in world history.” She reported that after an earlier disruption of a Ukrainian electric grid, operators “[recognized] that things could have been a lot worse,” because “the attack had stopped short of the kind of deadly calamity that could derail passenger jets and planes or ignite a deadly explosion of some kind.” They were a premonition of bad things to come.

“You know,” one of Pelroth’s sources told her, “if they switch off the lights here, we might be without power for a few hours. But if they do the same to you …”

It is difficult to read these words in the summer of 2022. They are already doing the same to us. Will we stop them with tit-for-tat cyber offense and threats of escalation, or will we build a breakwater against the surges we know are coming? Unless and until we unravel this queer policy imbalance — near defenselessness against hardware zero-days, reliance on offensive capabilities as defensive deterrence, and the incessant intrusions we already endure because we know less about our exposure than our enemies do — we could find ourselves in a hot war we could have avoided with better imagination and real alternatives for our leaders.

The CHIPS Act begins to solve the problems of geography and geometry. Unless and until we systematically address on-chip cybersecurity, as the NSA recently highlighted, we will build devices that are vulnerable by design, deploy them to the field, and be helpless if an adversary takes control. Chips are on the vanguard of our digital defenses. They need to be protected with thoughtful policy and common-sense requirements of how they are secured and what happens if they are breached.

Michael D. Lumpkin is a retired Navy SEAL and former Assistant Secretary of Defense and former Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; he is currently president of Amida Technology Solutions. Inc.

Peter L. Levin is Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Technology and National Security program at the Center for a New American Security and CEO of Amida Technology Solutions, Inc.

Source: TEST FEED1

Advancing telemedicine beyond COVID-19 is the beginning of a revolution in dementia care

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, in my practice caring for persons living with dementia, I witnessed awful sufferings. The necessity of social distancing isolated my patients from vital services and supports such as adult day activity programs and, for those in hospital or residential facilities, nurturing visits from family and friends. Their disabilities worsened. Many died. Their family caregivers were overwhelmed with the added work of care and grief.

I confess, though, I’m reluctantly grateful for one consequence of social distancing. Before March 2020, some of my patients couldn’t see me at my office. And then, abruptly, I began seeing them. The visits were at my virtual office. Video or audio telemedicine gave them access to care, made possible when, in response to the public health emergency, Medicare waived limitations on its practice.

Unfortunately, as the public health emergency fades, this waiver will expire. This shouldn’t happen. Telemedicine has the potential to revolutionize the care of the 8.8 percent of adults age 65 and older, or approximately 3.8 million Americans, living with dementia. It will also accelerate America’s goal of early diagnosis and treatment of the diseases that cause dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy Body disease, vascular disease and frontotemporal lobar disease.

Among my patients who benefitted from telemedicine were those whose caregivers, typically adult children, lived far from my Philadelphia office. Others were persons living with advanced stages of dementia, requiring caregivers to provide life’s basic needs, such as dressing, eating and moving about. Some, despite the best efforts to stimulate and calm their mind, develop anger and aggressiveness, making even short-distance travel intensely traumatic.

Before telemedicine, these patients simply stopped coming to see me, or their caregivers would resort to telephoning me. I managed, but I did so with notable limitations. Medicare didn’t recognize a call with a patient as a “physician visit.” True, I prescribed care and wrote a chart note, but this work was unbillable. For most clinicians, this structure was an understandably frustrating exercise in delivering care with limited, if any, compensation.

The pandemic abruptly changed this. The COVID-19 public health emergency allowed Medicare to recognize a telemedicine visit as a billable office visit. The health care system where I practice installed a user-friendly digital “dashboard.” It organizes visits, addresses concern of privacy and security, and allows me to text the patient and family if I’m running late. Multiple family members in different locations can participate. On one screen, I see them, and on another, I have the chart opened. I’m able to screen share images and other information.

As the pandemic wanes, however, my colleagues and I fear we’ll return to the old system. Fortunately, Congress is considering the “Advancing Telehealth Beyond COVID–19 Act of 2022.” This bill would authorize Medicare to continue telemedicine until Dec. 31, 2024. The bill passed the House by a lopsided 416-to-12 vote. It now awaits a vote in the Senate. It ought to become law.

The bill has several valuable provisions. It allows for audio-only (telephone) visits. This is of tremendous advantage for persons who lack access to internet services and other technologies necessary for video and also for visits that really don’t need video, particularly for behavioral health.

Another benefit of the bill’s provisions is increased access to care. Telemedicine has been shown to be a notable benefit to persons living in rural areas and other regions with limited access to medical care. In dementia diagnosis and care, access is an enormous problem. There simply aren’t enough of the essential professionals, such as physicians, speech-language pathologists, psychologists and social workers, to meet the need. The bill begins to address this. It covers the services of several of these specialists.

As the COVID-19 public health emergency winds down, America still faces another public health emergency: the slow burning problem of dementia. A system of telemedicine – coverage for visits with health care professionals – is just a start. America needs to integrate this practice into an internet of care. Or, in short, a system of telehealth care.

One of the most common and important question my patients and families ask me is what to expect in the future. Implicit is really several questions: What’s wrong now, how will it change, and what should I do moving forward? Unfortunately, most persons don’t have access to the multi-disciplinary team needed to answer these questions. Telehealth care promises access to this team and to enhance the data it needs to deliver early and accurate diagnosis and quality care.

One promising opportunity is monitoring a person’s day-to-day function. Taking longer to complete or making errors in activities such as preparing a meal or paying bills often reveals emerging cognitive problems caused by diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Ordinary household appliances can monitor daily function, which is key to early diagnosis, and then tracking and managing function.

A “smart refrigerator” can track the comings and goings of food and, therefore, declines or other changes in shopping and eating. Among the earliest predictors of worsening cognitive abilities is a decrease in “life space,” the frequency and distance a person travels outside the home. A smartphone that counts steps or a device in a car can easily track these data. Computers, smart phones and watches and tablets can of course directly assess cognition, but even more intriguing is interrogating these devices’ day-to-day use to predict decline.

These are just examples. Truly, the list is growing. Combining these real-world data into a person’s medical record with telemedicine access to experts will revolutionize care.

Telehealth care faces numerous structural challenges related to data integration, privacy, scope of practice and reimbursement. An immediate one is reforming state licensure laws. During the pandemic, these were waived. I could care for patients wherever they resided. Now, as a physician licensed in Pennsylvania, I can no longer practice telemedicine with a patient who lives just across the Delaware River in New Jersey. This makes no sense. A national problem like dementia needs a national solution.

This vision of telehealth is a great experiment whose costs, quality and equity must be evaluated. But if it succeeds, it will launch a revolution in health care that could benefit all Americans.

Jason Karlawish is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perlman School of Medicine and author of “The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It.” Follow him on Twitter @jasonkarlawish.

Source: TEST FEED1

Maher on college affordability: 'It's a giant scam'

Comedian and HBO host Bill Maher discussed the subject of college affordability on his show, “Real Time With Bill Maher,” arguing that attending a higher education institution was “a giant scam.” 

The comments came as part of a larger discussion with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and filmmaker Rob Reiner about President Biden’s plan to forgive some student loan debt, which was announced this week.

Maher argued that college is a “consumer product that they’re selling you as a golden ticket” to reach the upper middle class, but it is unnecessary for most people. He said pushing American students to go to college for most jobs that do not require an undergraduate degree is a scam. 

He said he has spoken to nurses, administrators and teachers about their complaints that they need to attain another degree once they reach a certain point in their careers.

“They all have this complaint that at a certain point they need more ‘education’ to advance in their career, when really, they know exactly what they’re doing,” Maher said. 

Biden announced on Wednesday that the federal government will forgive up to $10,000 in federal student loans for borrowers making less than $125,000 annually. It will also forgive up to $20,000 for those making less than $125,000 and who received a Pell Grant.

Maher said Democrats believe education is the solution to “everything,” as Republicans do with tax cuts. 

Maher stated that a “vast majority of Americans” didn’t go to college, and therefore, do not have student loan debt. He mentioned to Klobuchar that some Democrats are divided on the issue of student loan debt forgiveness.

“Where are you on that one?” he asked the senator.

Klobuchar said Biden’s plan is targeted to people who are making less per year, and most of the money goes to people making less than $75,000 annually. 

She said the plan will help nurses, teachers and electricians, and many people have community college loans. But, she added, she would have tied the debt forgiveness specifically to the hard-to-fill jobs, like those in health care and assisted living. 

“If people will go into those jobs instead of being hedge fund managers, then we could actually put the loan repayment help and have it connect to people going into the jobs that we need to fill,” Klobuchar said. “I think that would be a way to do it, but I do think it’s important for people to understand, this is a targeted program that he put out.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Why is it so difficult to achieve a soft economic landing?

Larry Summers is worried that the economy faces a hard landing as the Federal Reserve attempts to bring inflation under control. The former Treasury secretary recently said, “My worst fear would be that the Fed will continue to be suggesting that it can have it all in terms of low inflation, low unemployment and a healthy economy.” Many other pundits also warn that the economy is on the edge of recession. While a recession is not inevitable, history shows that soft landings are difficult to achieve.

Let’s look at some background before getting into the specifics of our situation. During an economic recovery, the unemployment rate gradually declines. A useful definition of a soft landing would be a period of at least three years of economic growth with low inflation even after the labor market has full recovered from recession. Surprisingly, there is no evidence that the United States has ever achieved a soft landing, at least as far back as we have economic data.

In the United States, a recession almost always occurs within two years of the unemployment rate recovering from the previous recession. Instead of leveling off at “full employment,” unemployment almost always begins rising sharply soon after reaching its natural rate.

The closest that the United States has come to a soft landing was 1966-69, when unemployment leveled off in the 3.5 percent to 4 percent range for almost four years. Unfortunately, inflation took off during that period. An extended period of both low unemployment and stable prices seems as elusive as a unicorn.

Oddly, this is not the case in other countries, where soft landings are not particularly unusual. Japan has had extended periods of very low unemployment and low inflation. A notable example of a soft landing occurred in Britain during 2001-08, when unemployment stayed in the 4.7 percent to 5.5 percent range for seven years and inflation remained relatively low. Australia had no official recessions between 1991 and 2020.

In some respects, the challenge facing the Fed is even greater than during the past few business cycles, as for the first time since the 1980s it allowed nominal spending growth for the overall economy to dramatically exceed the rate consistent with its 2 percent inflation target.

Over the past two years, nominal GDP has grown at roughly 13 percent per year. During the first year of recovery from the COVID-19 shutdown, fast growth in nominal spending was justified by the need to recover from a deep slump. But in late 2021, spending began overshooting the previous trend line, causing inflation to rise dramatically.

To get inflation back to the  2 percent target, nominal spending growth must slow to less than 4 percent per year, which would account for the economy’s trend rate of real GDP growth, which has fallen below 2 percent. But if the Fed were to immediately slow spending growth to such a rate, the economy would almost certainly fall into recession. Nominal wages are still rising rapidly, and if business cannot pass along those wage increases in the form of higher prices, then businesses would sharply reduce employment.

The best way to avoid this dilemma would have been to keep the economy from overheating in the first place. That might have been done if the Fed had interpreted its “flexible average inflation target” (FAIT) of 2 percent in a symmetrical way — promising to make up for both inflation undershoots and overshoots. Unfortunately, it ended up with an asymmetric FAIT policy, only committing to make up for inflation undershoots.

Thus, it is now too late to avoid the need to attempt a highly difficult soft landing. If the economy were an airplane, it is coming in much too fast, leaving little margin for error.

The Fed’s best hope is to gradually slow nominal GDP growth, perhaps to a 5 percent rate over the next 12 months, and a 4 percent rate over the subsequent year. If we were to escape with a mini-recession (roughly 5 percent unemployment) and 2 percent inflation by 2024, it might not count as a soft landing, but by historical standards we will have escaped high inflation with relatively little damage.

Unfortunately, not only has the United States never had a true soft landing; we’ve never had a mini-recession. When unemployment begins rising during an economic slowdown, it always increases by at least 2 full percentage points. In contrast, mini-recessions often occur in foreign countries. The Fed needs to do a better job of steering a course between too much stimulus and too little.

Scott Sumner is the Ralph G. Hawtrey Chair of Monetary Policy with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a professor emeritus at Bentley University.

Source: TEST FEED1

Five takeaways from a bruising primary season

The primaries in Florida and New York this week marked the final major nominating contests of 2022, and the country’s attention is now poised to shift to the general elections that will determine control of Congress for the next two years.

Primaries for both parties stretching from March through this week offered up some key hints about the two main parties and their voters, as well as what the coming fall campaign season could look like.

Here are five takeaways from the 2022 primaries:

The GOP is still Trump’s party — and 2020 is still top of mind

Former President Trump may have left the White House more than a year and a half ago, but this year’s GOP primaries proved that he remains the most influential Republican in the country.

The impact of Trump’s endorsements was clear: he shaped Republican messaging, scrambled primary contests and elevated to victory candidates that even some top GOP officials had concerns about.

Perhaps no issue was more important in obtaining Trump’s endorsement than the 2020 presidential election and his false claim that it was rigged against him. Republican candidates frequently echoed that talking point on the campaign trail — with some centering their races around it — hoping to win the former president’s favor.

The end result: In most of the nation’s high-profile Republican primaries, voters sided with Trump. 

All of the GOP nominees in the most competitive Senate races were backed by the former president ahead of their primaries. Of the six House Republicans who ran for reelection after voting last year to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, only two won renomination. 

And candidates who have questioned or flat-out denied the results of the 2020 election will be on ballots across the country in November, having secured nominations for governor, Senate, House and secretary of state.

Of course, there are a few exceptions. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, for instance, won in a landslide against his Trump-backed primary opponent, former Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.). And in South Carolina, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) made it through her primary against Trump-endorsed Katie Arrington. 

Still, if the 2022 Republican primaries made one thing clear, it’s that GOP voters are still overwhelmingly aligned with Trump. 

Democrats largely played it safe, but progressives scored some key wins

Despite ongoing debates over the direction of the Democratic Party, voters across the country largely sided with more moderate or establishment-backed candidates in their primaries, apparently seeing them as their best bets for winning in an otherwise punishing political environment for Democrats.

In Ohio, for example, former state Sen. Nina Turner, a progressive former co-chair of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) presidential campaign, lost for a second time to Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), who had the support of the party establishment.  

Likewise, Rep. Henry Cuellar (Texas), a conservative South Texas Democrat, narrowly defeated progressive Jessica Cisneros in a race that drew intense national attention.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t all bad for the party’s left flank.

Progressives won Senate nominations in two key swing states. In Pennsylvania, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman beat out Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.), a moderate who cast himself as the candidate better able to court suburban and rural voters, while Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes won the chance to challenge Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). And just this week, Central Florida Democrats tapped Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a Sanders-backed gun control activist, to succeed Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) in the House.

Still, this year’s primaries were far from the ideological turning point that progressives were hoping for.

It was a tough season for a lot of House incumbents

There are still a few primaries left, but 2022 is already on track to see the most U.S. House incumbents lose renomination in more than two decades.

So far this year, 15 House members — nine Republicans and six Democrats — have lost their bids to return to Capitol Hill, according to Ballotpedia, which has been tracking the losses.

In some cases, the circumstances were simply out of members’ control, mostly because of the decennial redistricting process. 

This week, for example, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), a 30-year veteran of the House, lost her primary to fellow longtime incumbent Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) after redistricting combined their Manhattan congressional districts. From the get-go, one of them was bound to lose.

But in other races, incumbents suffered from their political choices, most notably, their votes to impeach Trump. That decision spelled the end for Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Tom Rice (R-S.C.), Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) and Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.), all of whom were defeated by Trump-backed primary challengers who hammered them for their impeachment votes.

Others, like Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), found themselves on the losing end of their primaries after becoming the subject of various controversies.

Democrats found their footing

For the first half of the year, Democrats were staring down some daunting problems. Their legislative agenda in Congress had largely stalled out, inflation was reaching its highest levels in decades and their main political foil was no longer in the Oval Office.

To make matters worse for Democrats, they were also contending with the reality that the party in power almost always loses ground in Congress in midterm elections. 

That fact may still hold true. But things have notably shifted for Democrats in the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That decision gave the party a powerful message with which to rally voters fearing an erosion of protections for reproductive rights and helped reenergize Democrats amid concerns over complacency.

Perhaps the biggest turning point for Democrats came in Kansas, when voters rejected by a wide margin a proposed amendment that would have stripped abortion rights from the state constitution. 

Since then, Democrats have homed in on a clearer messaging strategy: they’ve warned what GOP congressional majorities would mean for reproductive rights, touted the passage of a massive tax and climate bill and sought to cast themselves as a steady hand in government.

Of course, while Democrats’ midterm prospects appear to have brightened somewhat, they’re still facing a brutal political landscape and strong historical headwinds that could give an edge to Republicans.

But Republican voters are still energized

The outlook may be brightening for Democrats. But this year’s primaries have still given credence to what Republican leaders have been claiming for over a year: GOP voters are motivated. 

In top-of-the-ticket races across key battleground states, Republican primary turnout repeatedly outpaced Democratic turnout, a sign that GOP voters are eager to cast their ballots this year.

In Georgia, nearly a half million more Republicans voted in the Senate primary than Democrats. In Arizona, more than 200,000 more voters cast ballots in the top Republican primaries. The turnout advantage also holds true in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada and Florida.

To be sure, the higher Republican turnout may not have been due to voter enthusiasm alone. In Georgia, for example, Republicans saw a hotly contested gubernatorial primary, while the Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams, went unchallenged for the nomination.

The same is true is North Carolina, where Republicans were faced with a choice between Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and former Gov. Pat McCrory in the primary to succeed retiring Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.). Democrats, meanwhile, had already largely coalesced behind Cheri Beasley as their nominee.

But Florida’s most competitive race was on the Democratic side, and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had hotly contested contests on both sides of the aisle.

And for much of the year, public polling has shown that Republicans are more enthusiastic to vote in November than Democrats are. But as Democrats’ prospects have improved, they’ve also begun to close that enthusiasm gap. 

A Morning Consult poll released last week showed that 65 percent of Republican voters are either “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic to cast their ballots in the midterm elections. Meanwhile, 62 percent of Democrats said the same.

Source: TEST FEED1

The Memo: Trump’s narrative takes big hit with affidavit’s release

One of former President Trump’s main claims about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago is being undermined by Friday’s release of a key affidavit.

Trump has pushed the narrative that he and his lawyers were cooperating with the Department of Justice’s inquiries about documents from his time in the White House. This, he claims, means that the Aug. 8 raid on his Florida estate was gratuitous.

But the affidavit that persuaded a judge to grant the search warrant tells a different story.

Even in heavily redacted form, the affidavit points out that there was a prolonged process lasting around seven months in 2021 before Trump’s team coughed up any documents at all.

It gives a far less friendly account than Team Trump has done of events in June of this year. 

The former president and his allies have, for instance, described an affable visit to Mar-a-Lago by a senior DOJ official, Jay Bratt, and three FBI agents on June 3. According to a Trump legal filing earlier this week, one of the FBI agents, having been shown the storage room in which some documents were held, purportedly said, “Now it all makes sense.”

The same Trump filing refers to a June 8 letter in which the DOJ “requested, in pertinent part, that the storage room be secured” — a request that is implied to have been met when Trump told staff to put a second lock on the door.

By contrast, the DOJ’s affidavit quotes a letter on the same date — presumably the same letter — reiterating to a Trump lawyer that there was no “secure location authorized for the storage of classified information” anywhere at the resort. 

The letter makes clear that the DOJ’s request was not some generalized security check-up but a demand for the “preservation” of the storage room in its “current condition until further notice” — phrasing that is far more redolent of an investigation of a possible crime scene than a friendly chat about padlocks.

The filing also includes, as an exhibit, a May 2022 letter from Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to Bratt, the head of the counterintelligence section of the DOJ’s national security division.

In the letter, Corcoran argues that presidents have “absolute authority to declassify documents” and that, in any event, no president can be prosecuted for “actions involving classified documents.”

Those claims are contentious and, again, strike a different tone than the one Trump and his allies have sought to portray.

Put it all together and the effect on Trump’s preferred narrative of the investigation seems stark.

“It blows it to smithereens,” Harry Litman told this column. 

Litman, a former U.S. attorney and deputy assistant attorney general, focused on the various delays by the Trump side as the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and then the DOJ sought missing documents.

The affidavit seeking the search warrant, Litman said, “is at the end of an exasperating, very prolonged dallying by them that would never be put up with from any other citizen.”

The argument that Trump may simply have declassified all the relevant documents also drew the sharpest comment yet from President Biden, who had previously sought to keep his distance from the investigation.

“I’ve declassified everything in the world. I’m president, I can do it all!” Biden sarcastically told reporters at the White House Friday soon after the affidavit became public. “C’mon!”

Meanwhile a footnote in the affidavit made clear that the classification status of the documents in question would not have a make-or-break bearing on at least one of the possible crimes being investigated.

Trump, characteristically, is pressing on full-bore with his allegations that he is being mistreated for political reasons over the raid.

He argued in a Truth Social post Friday that the judge in the case, Bruce Reinhart, “should NEVER have allowed the Break-In of my home.” 

He further alleged that Reinhart bore “animosity and hatred” toward him.

Yet even while deploying his usual combative rhetoric, Trump still insisted that his side had enjoyed “a close working relationship regarding document turnover.”

It’s impossible to square that claim with the FBI’s assertion in the affidavit that investigators had “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found” in a Mar-a-Lago search.

The bureau’s reasons for this assertion remain mysterious, however, given the extensive redactions to the 32-page affidavit. 

In a related document also released on Friday, the DOJ contended that the redactions were necessary because of the imperative to “protect the safety of multiple civilian witnesses” in the burgeoning case.

The department further argued that “the government has well-founded concerns that steps may be taken to frustrate or otherwise interfere with this investigation if facts in the affidavit were prematurely disclosed.”

Still, information that was disclosed brought a new level of granular detail into the public domain.

In particular, it revealed that of the 15 boxes that had been retrieved from Mar-a-Lago roughly one year after Trump left office, 14 contained information that had classified markings.

In total, the affidavit said, there were 184 such documents, 67 of which were marked as confidential, 92 of which were marked as secret and 25 of which were marked as top secret.

Those details alone disconcert experts in the field.

“While we don’t know what that information pertains to, by its very definition it could conceivably threaten individuals’ lives,” said Mark Zaid, an attorney who specializes in national security matters.

Zaid emphasized that it is not yet clear that Trump himself is the target of the criminal investigation, only that investigators believe evidence of a crime could be found at Mar-a-Lago.

Even so, he warned, “I do think, based on the affidavit, that the jeopardy faced by one or more people continues to rise. 

“I don’t know who the one or more people are,” he added. “It could be Mar-a-Lago staff, it could be the president, it could be his lawyers.”

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage. 

Source: TEST FEED1

Federal appeals court upholds Jim Crow-era Mississippi law restricting voting rights for felons

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld a Mississippi law restricting voting rights for certain convicted felons that was first crafted during the Jim Crow era.

In a 10-7 decision, the court ruled that though Section 241 of the Mississippi state constitution was originally written for racist reasons in 1890, it is no longer racist in effect.

“It is uncontroverted that the state constitutional convention was steeped in racism and that ‘the state was motivated by a desire to discriminate against blacks’ when the 1890 constitution was adopted,” reads the majority opinion.

However, it says, the “plaintiffs failed to meet their burden of showing that the current version of Section 241 was motivated by discriminatory intent. In addition, Mississippi has conclusively shown that any taint associated with Section 241 has been cured.”

The provision in question in Mississippi’s state constitution prevents people convicted of certain felonies, including forgery, rape and murder, among others, from voting. It has been amended multiple times since the constitution was first adopted in 1890.

The court made its decision in response to a lawsuit filed by the Mississippi Center for Justice on behalf of two Black men in Mississippi who lost their right to vote after they were convicted of felonies included in Section 241.

The lawsuit argued that the law violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause and that because it was originally crafted with racist intent, restricting people’s voting rights under the provision based on convictions for the eight felonies included in the 1890 version should be ruled to be unconstitutional.

Rape and murder, the other two felonies included in the current version of the law, were added to Section 241 in a 1968 amendment.

“This provision was a part of the 1890 plan to take the vote away from Black people who had attained it in the wake of the civil war,” said Rob McDuff, Impact Litigation Project director at the Mississippi Center for Justice, in a statement responding to the ruling.

“Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals is allowing it to remain in place despite its racist origins.”

McDuff claimed that the organization will challenge the decision at the level of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Source: TEST FEED1

DeSantis suspends four school board members after grand jury investigation into Parkland shooting

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) suspended four members of the Broward County School Board on Friday after reviewing a grand jury investigation into the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

DeSantis filed an executive order suspending Patricia Good, Donna Korn, Ann Murray and Laurie Rich Levinson from office based on recommendations by the Twentieth Statewide Grand Jury.

The jury recommended that the board be suspended due to incompetence, neglect of duty and misuse of authority related to the shooting.

The governor referenced findings by the grand jury that a safety alarm that would have saved lives during the mass shooting at the high school was not installed and still remains uninstalled at many schools in the area.

“Students continue to be educated in unsafe, aging, decrepit, moldy buildings that were supposed to have been renovated years ago,” the grand jury found.

In February of 2018, an expelled student opened fire at the Parkland school killing a total of 17 students and staff. The shooting prompted some of the survivors to found the March for Our Lives movement, a prominent group that works to prevent gun violence.

DeSantis’s press release described the alleged neglect of duty on the part of Good, Korn, Murray and Rich Levinson as “inexcusable,” saying that the four school board members “have shown a pattern of emboldening unacceptable behavior, including fraud and mismanagement, across the district.”

“It is my duty to suspend people from office when there is clear evidence of incompetence, neglect of duty, misfeasance or malfeasance,” DeSantis said.

He continued: “We hope this suspension brings the Parkland community another step towards justice.”

DeSantis appointed Torey Alston, Manual “Nandy” Serrano, Ryan Reiter and Kevin Tynan to the Broward County School Board in place of the four who were suspended.

The governor, who is rumored to be planning a run for president in 2024, also suspended a state attorney this month for “neglect of duty” after he refused to enforce laws prohibiting abortion and gender-affirming surgery for transgender minors.

The prosecutor, Andrew Warren, later sued the governor, calling the firing a violation of his First Amendment rights.

Source: TEST FEED1

Jan. 6 defendant who beat officer with Trump flag sentenced to 46 months in prison

A man who beat a Washington, D.C., police officer with a Trump flag during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack was sentenced to 46 months in prison on Friday.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that Howard Richardson received the sentence after pleading guilty earlier in the year to assaulting, resisting or impeding officers.

Richardson waved his flagpole after entering a restricted area of Capitol grounds, according to the Department of Justice, before later hitting a police officer multiple times with the pole.

“He raised it and forcefully swung it downward to strike an officer with the Metropolitan Police Department who was standing behind a metal barricade,” the DOJ wrote of Richardson and the flagpole.

“Richardson then struck the officer two more times, using enough force to break the flagpole.”

Richardson then pushed a “large metal sign into a line of law enforcement officers” along with other rioters, according to the department.

The Pennsylvania native, 72, was arrested in November 2021 before pleading guilty in April.

Richardson will be subject to three years of supervised release after completing his almost four-year in prison sentence, and is required to pay $2,000 in restitution.

More than 860 people have been arrested since Jan. 6 in connection with the attack on the Capitol, according to the DOJ.

More than 260 of them have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.

Richardson’s sentencing follows the DOJ’s announcement earlier Friday that it would seek an over 17-year sentence for an ex-police officer who was found guilty in May of five felonies and a misdemeanor for his participation in the Jan. 6 attack, including assaulting, resisting or impeding an officer using a deadly or dangerous weapon and engaging in an act of physical violence on Capitol grounds.

That sentence is by far the longest yet received by a Jan. 6 defendant.

Source: TEST FEED1