Trump contradicts testimony -- and himself -- by claiming he never directed Giuliani on Ukraine
By Maegan Vazquez
President Donald Trump has now denied that he directed his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to go to Ukraine and seek out investigations on his behalf, contradicting his own words to the Ukrainian President in the White House-released transcript of the July 25 call.
Trump also contradicted sworn testimony from members of his administration and claims from his own White House acting chief of staff.
Ahead of a Tuesday night rally in Florida, Trump was asked by conservative radio host Bill O'Reilly if the President directed Giuliani's involvement in Ukraine.
"No," the President said, before launching into a tangent of flattering Giuliani's credentials, calling him "a great corruption fighter" and "the greatest mayor" of New York City.
O'Reilly asked once again: "Giuliani's your personal lawyer. So you didn't direct him to go to Ukraine to do anything or put any heat on them?"
"No, I didn't direct him, but he's a warrior, Rudy's a warrior. Rudy went, he possibly saw something. But you have to understand, Rudy (has) other people that he represents," Trump said, adding that Giuliani has "done work in Ukraine for years."
But according to the rough transcript of a phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump repeatedly pressed for Giuliani's involvement.
Trump told Zelensky: "Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great."
Trump later said: "I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I'm sure you will figure it out."
A third time, Trump referenced Giuliani: "I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call."
The denial that he directed Giuliani's diplomatic foray comes as House Democrats conduct an impeachment inquiry scrutinizing just what the President knew and did surrounding the withholding of aid to Ukraine. Democrats claim he withheld the aid in order to pressure Ukraine to investigate the son of his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden in Ukraine.
And top diplomats have testified that Giuliani's role loomed large over their own official operations regarding Ukraine.
Trump's claim that he didn't direct his personal lawyer to handle issues in Ukraine also contradicts what has been told to Congress in impeachment hearings and what Trump's own acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, has told the press.
In October, Mulvaney defended Giuliani's involvement in US-Ukraine affairs by saying "the President gets to use who he wants to use."
"You may not like the fact that Giuliani was involved. That's great. That's fine. It's not illegal. It's not impeachable. The President gets to use who he wants to use," Mulvaney said during a press briefing.
And US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told members of Congress last week that the President had directed him to reach out to Giuliani on US-Ukrainian relations.
"We ... were disappointed but the President's direction that we involve Mr. Giuliani," Sondland said, indicating that their goal of setting up a meeting with the two presidents would be abandoned if they didn't "do as President Trump directed and talk to Mr. Giuliani to address the President's concerns."
"My understanding was that the President directed Mr. Giuliani's participation, and that Mr. Giuliani was expressing the concerns of the President," Sondland added.
There is a key distinction between Trump's denials and Sondland's testimony: If Sondland was lying, he could be prosecuted, because it's a crime to give false testimony to Congress. Trump can say whatever he wants to the press, and has amassed a long record of spreading blatant lies and falsehoods throughout his presidency.
Former US special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker also testified that Giuliani's name came up in that Oval Office meeting, though Volker didn't say Trump gave an explicit direction to coordinate with Giuliani.
But Trump's claim he didn't direct Giuliani's Ukraine efforts does parallel a similar strategy the President used with his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who is currently in prison for a handful of financial crimes, including campaign finance violations that Trump directed him to commit, according to the Justice Department.
Trump initially denied he ever directed Cohen to make hush money payments to women accusing him of having affairs (which he also denied occurred). Eventually, Trump did not dispute directing Cohen, but said he did not ask Cohen to break the law while making those payments. Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws by facilitating the payments.
November 27, 2019
Black holes and neutron stars shine
A new theory for how black holes and neutron stars shine bright
by Columbia University
For decades, scientists have speculated about the origin of the electromagnetic radiation emitted from celestial regions that host black holes and neutron stars—the most mysterious objects in the universe.
Astrophysicists believe that this high-energy radiation—which makes neutron stars and black holes shine bright—is generated by electrons that move at nearly the speed of light, but the process that accelerates these particles has remained a mystery.
Now, researchers at Columbia University have presented a new explanation for the physics underlying the acceleration of these energetic particles.
In a study published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal, astrophysicists Luca Comisso and Lorenzo Sironi employed massive super-computer simulations to calculate the mechanisms that accelerate these particles. They concluded that their energization is a result of the interaction between chaotic motion and reconnection of super-strong magnetic fields.
"Turbulence and magnetic reconnection—a process in which magnetic field lines tear and rapidly reconnect—conspire together to accelerate particles, boosting them to velocities that approach the speed of light," said Luca Comisso, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia and first author on the study.
"The region that hosts black holes and neutron stars is permeated by an extremely hot gas of charged particles, and the magnetic field lines dragged by the chaotic motions of the gas, drive vigorous magnetic reconnection," he added. "It is thanks to the electric field induced by reconnection and turbulence that particles are accelerated to the most extreme energies, much higher than in the most powerful accelerators on Earth, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN."
When studying turbulent gas, scientists cannot predict chaotic motion precisely. Dealing with the mathematics of turbulence is difficult, and it constitutes one of the seven "Millennium Prize" mathematical problems. To tackle this challenge from an astrophysical point of view, Comisso and Sironi designed extensive super-computer simulations —among the world's largest ever done in this research area—to solve the equations that describe the turbulence in a gas of charged particles.
"We used the most precise technique—the particle-in-cell method—for calculating the trajectories of hundreds of billions of charged particles that self-consistently dictate the electromagnetic fields. And it is this electromagnetic field that tells them how to move," said Sironi, assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia and the study's principal investigator.
Sironi said that the crucial point of the study was to identify role magnetic reconnection plays within the turbulent environment. The simulations showed that reconnection is the key mechanism that selects the particles that will be subsequently accelerated by the turbulent magnetic fields up to the highest energies.
The simulations also revealed that particles gained most of their energy by bouncing randomly at an extremely high speed off the turbulence fluctuations. When the magnetic field is strong, this acceleration mechanism is very rapid. But the strong fields also force the particles to travel in a curved path, and by doing so, they emit electromagnetic radiation.
"This is indeed the radiation emitted around black holes and neutron stars that make them shine, a phenomenon we can observe on Earth," Sironi said.
The ultimate goal, the researchers said, is to get to know what is really going on in the extreme environment surrounding black holes and neutron stars, which could shed additional light on fundamental physics and improve our understanding of how our Universe works.
They plan to connect their work even more firmly with observations, by comparing their predictions with the electromagnetic spectrum emitted from the Crab Nebula, the most intensely studied bright remnant of a supernova (a star that violently exploded in the year 1054). This will be a stringent test for their theoretical explanation.
"We figured out an important connection between turbulence and magnetic reconnection for accelerating particles, but there is still so much work to be done," Comisso said. "Advances in this field of research are rarely the contribution of a handful of scientists, but they are the result of a large collaborative effort."
Other researchers, such as the Plasma Astrophysics group at the University of Colorado Boulder, are making important contributions in this direction, Comisso said.
by Columbia University
For decades, scientists have speculated about the origin of the electromagnetic radiation emitted from celestial regions that host black holes and neutron stars—the most mysterious objects in the universe.
Astrophysicists believe that this high-energy radiation—which makes neutron stars and black holes shine bright—is generated by electrons that move at nearly the speed of light, but the process that accelerates these particles has remained a mystery.
Now, researchers at Columbia University have presented a new explanation for the physics underlying the acceleration of these energetic particles.
In a study published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal, astrophysicists Luca Comisso and Lorenzo Sironi employed massive super-computer simulations to calculate the mechanisms that accelerate these particles. They concluded that their energization is a result of the interaction between chaotic motion and reconnection of super-strong magnetic fields.
"Turbulence and magnetic reconnection—a process in which magnetic field lines tear and rapidly reconnect—conspire together to accelerate particles, boosting them to velocities that approach the speed of light," said Luca Comisso, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia and first author on the study.
"The region that hosts black holes and neutron stars is permeated by an extremely hot gas of charged particles, and the magnetic field lines dragged by the chaotic motions of the gas, drive vigorous magnetic reconnection," he added. "It is thanks to the electric field induced by reconnection and turbulence that particles are accelerated to the most extreme energies, much higher than in the most powerful accelerators on Earth, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN."
When studying turbulent gas, scientists cannot predict chaotic motion precisely. Dealing with the mathematics of turbulence is difficult, and it constitutes one of the seven "Millennium Prize" mathematical problems. To tackle this challenge from an astrophysical point of view, Comisso and Sironi designed extensive super-computer simulations —among the world's largest ever done in this research area—to solve the equations that describe the turbulence in a gas of charged particles.
"We used the most precise technique—the particle-in-cell method—for calculating the trajectories of hundreds of billions of charged particles that self-consistently dictate the electromagnetic fields. And it is this electromagnetic field that tells them how to move," said Sironi, assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia and the study's principal investigator.
Sironi said that the crucial point of the study was to identify role magnetic reconnection plays within the turbulent environment. The simulations showed that reconnection is the key mechanism that selects the particles that will be subsequently accelerated by the turbulent magnetic fields up to the highest energies.
The simulations also revealed that particles gained most of their energy by bouncing randomly at an extremely high speed off the turbulence fluctuations. When the magnetic field is strong, this acceleration mechanism is very rapid. But the strong fields also force the particles to travel in a curved path, and by doing so, they emit electromagnetic radiation.
"This is indeed the radiation emitted around black holes and neutron stars that make them shine, a phenomenon we can observe on Earth," Sironi said.
The ultimate goal, the researchers said, is to get to know what is really going on in the extreme environment surrounding black holes and neutron stars, which could shed additional light on fundamental physics and improve our understanding of how our Universe works.
They plan to connect their work even more firmly with observations, by comparing their predictions with the electromagnetic spectrum emitted from the Crab Nebula, the most intensely studied bright remnant of a supernova (a star that violently exploded in the year 1054). This will be a stringent test for their theoretical explanation.
"We figured out an important connection between turbulence and magnetic reconnection for accelerating particles, but there is still so much work to be done," Comisso said. "Advances in this field of research are rarely the contribution of a handful of scientists, but they are the result of a large collaborative effort."
Other researchers, such as the Plasma Astrophysics group at the University of Colorado Boulder, are making important contributions in this direction, Comisso said.
It flows like diarrhea...
New revelations put Trump on shakier ground
Analysis by Maeve Reston
New transcripts of witness testimony and news reports revealing key details on the Ukraine scandal timeline show in vivid detail the way President Donald Trump and top officials maneuvered behind the scenes to block aid to Ukraine as the President sought an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden.
The new revelations, coming at a time when half of Americans support impeaching and removing the President even though impeachment proceedings have not moved the needle of public opinion, underscored the problem for Trump and his supporters in Congress: Public hearings in the impeachment inquiry may be in the rearview mirror, but new details about his pressure campaign on Ukraine continue to trickle out.
The developments on Tuesday illuminated the fact that there's still much to learn about the President's actions regarding Ukraine as the House races toward a potential vote on impeachment by Christmas.
The President's claims of innocence looked even more incredulous Tuesday night after The New York Times reported that Trump released the hold on Ukraine aid after he was briefed on the whistleblower report outlining his dealings with Ukraine.
That report and newly released transcripts of impeachment witness testimony undercut key arguments that the Republicans have been making as they have defended the President, who cast the impeachment inquiry during his Florida rally Tuesday night as a "scam," a "witchhunt" and a "hoax."
During the impeachment hearings earlier this month, Republicans spooled out various theories about why the White House might have frozen aid to Ukraine -- from the notion that Trump was concerned about corruption to the idea that he wanted to see more financial contributions to the Ukraine aid from other foreign countries.
But the timeline revealed Tuesday, in conjunction with the transcript of testimony from Office of Management and Budget Official Mark Sandy, outlines an indisputably clear set of facts about the bizarre way the Ukraine aid was handled.
The confusion that Sandy and other line-level OMB aides felt about why the Ukraine aid was being withheld, along with their inability to get answers, showed how the Trump administration's unusual enterprise was shrouded in secrecy, even from the very people who were handling the money.
Timeline undercuts Trump's defense
First the timeline: We now know that White House budget office took its first official action to withhold $250 million in aid to Ukraine on the evening of July 25, according to a House Budget Committee summary of the office's documents.
That was the very same day that Trump spoke by phone with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, prefacing his request for an investigation of the 2016 election with the now infamous phrase "I would like you to do us a favor, though." Agencies had been notified at a July 18 meeting that the aid had been frozen by the President, a week before the call.
Sandy, the Office of Management and Budget official who signed off on the initial Ukraine aid freeze before a Trump political appointee took over that task, testified that the President's interest in the aid dated back to June, but that he couldn't get an explanation of why the aid was withheld in July or August.
The request was so unusual that Sandy immediately told his boss that the freeze could violate an obscure federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act, which prohibits a sitting president from unilaterally withholding funds that were appropriated by Congress.
Sandy knew that the aid fell into the category of "one-year funds" -- meaning the money (totaling nearly $400 million) was only available until September 30. He told his boss, Trump political appointee Michael Duffey, that he wanted to talk to the lawyers at the Office of Management and Budget.
Sandy and other OMB aides were so alarmed by the inexplicable hold that they also sent a memo to Duffey recommending that hold be released because "assistance to Ukraine is consistent with the national security strategy," Sandy testified, and had the added benefit of "opposing Russian aggression."
In his closed-door deposition, Sandy also directly debunked the Republican talking point that the hold on the aid was related to Trump's concern that other nations should be contributing more in national security assistance to Ukraine.
Sandy testified that the White House didn't ask the budget office for information about how much other nations were contributing until September -- months after the hold was placed.
"I recall in early September an email that attributed the hold to the President's concern about other countries not contributing money to Ukraine," Sandy testified. By that time, lawmakers were asking questions about the freeze on aid to Ukraine and reports questioning the reasons for the withholding had already hit the press.
New testimony from State Department official Philip Reeker underscores the fact that the administration's hold on aid to Ukraine was orchestrated at the highest levels of power in the White House.
Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, testified that he believed the security assistance to Ukraine was "being held by Mr. Mulvaney, the White House Acting Chief of Staff," but that he did not have "definitive knowledge that Mulvaney was behind the holdup."
"Our operating understanding was that this was being held by Mr. Mulvaney, the White House Acting Chief of Staff," Reeker told lawmakers, according to the transcript.
Reeker also testified about the concerns of veteran diplomats like Kurt Volker about the maneuverings of Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer, who has been accused of trying to orchestrate the quid pro quo of a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation of the Bidens. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden.
"I do recall him telling me ... that, well, he was going to reach out to or was going to speak to Giuliani," Reeker said of Volker, the former US special representative to Ukraine. "And I think Ambassador Volker felt that there was this very good story to tell about President Zelensky and a new chapter in Ukraine. And that was his goal, was to hopefully take away some of that, what we sense was a negative stream coming from Mr. Giuliani to the President."
Court of public opinion
It remains unclear whether the new details of the President's Ukraine timeline will do much to move public opinion.
The inquiry moves to a new phase next week with the Judiciary Committee, holding its first hearing on December 4, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler has also extended an invitation to Trump and his lawyers to participate in the probe. So far the Trump administration's strategy has been to stonewall and not participate in the process.
For now, Trump is trying to claim victory after the two weeks of blockbuster testimony by pointing to a new CNN poll showing that 50% of Americans believe that he should be impeached and removed, because that figure was unchanged from mid-October when CNN asked the same question.
At his rally on Tuesday night, Trump described Democrats leading the inquiry as "maniacs" who are "pushing the deranged impeachment."
"The radical left Democrats are trying to rip our nation apart," Trump said Tuesday night to boos at his rally in Florida. "First it was the Russia hoax, total hoax. It was a failed overthrow attempt and the biggest fraud in the history of our country and then you look, the Mueller deal, you remember that mess? They had nothing."
"Now the same maniacs are pushing the deranged impeachment -- think of this: Impeachment. Impeachment. A witch hunt. ... They're pushing that impeachment witch hunt and a lot of bad things are happening to them. Because you see what's happening in the polls? Everybody said, that's really bulls---," Trump said to cheers and applause.
But beneath the steady topline poll numbers on impeachment, there is strong evidence that the Ukraine matter has eroded confidence in the President's motives -- and that many Americans have heard enough to disapprove of his conduct.
While the views on impeachment and removal did not change in the CNN poll released Tuesday, 53% of Americans said Trump improperly used his office to gain political advantage, up from 49% who said the same in October.
Moreover, 56% said the President's efforts to get Ukraine to launch investigations into the Biden family, a Ukrainian energy company and the 2016 election were intended to benefit him rather than root out corruption in Ukraine.
The question looming over the 2020 election is whether the stain of impeachment could irreparably damage Trump and cost him the White House.
It too early to draw conclusions, but the ground he is standing on gets shakier each day as new revelations point toward questionable conduct on his part.
Analysis by Maeve Reston
New transcripts of witness testimony and news reports revealing key details on the Ukraine scandal timeline show in vivid detail the way President Donald Trump and top officials maneuvered behind the scenes to block aid to Ukraine as the President sought an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden.
The new revelations, coming at a time when half of Americans support impeaching and removing the President even though impeachment proceedings have not moved the needle of public opinion, underscored the problem for Trump and his supporters in Congress: Public hearings in the impeachment inquiry may be in the rearview mirror, but new details about his pressure campaign on Ukraine continue to trickle out.
The developments on Tuesday illuminated the fact that there's still much to learn about the President's actions regarding Ukraine as the House races toward a potential vote on impeachment by Christmas.
The President's claims of innocence looked even more incredulous Tuesday night after The New York Times reported that Trump released the hold on Ukraine aid after he was briefed on the whistleblower report outlining his dealings with Ukraine.
That report and newly released transcripts of impeachment witness testimony undercut key arguments that the Republicans have been making as they have defended the President, who cast the impeachment inquiry during his Florida rally Tuesday night as a "scam," a "witchhunt" and a "hoax."
During the impeachment hearings earlier this month, Republicans spooled out various theories about why the White House might have frozen aid to Ukraine -- from the notion that Trump was concerned about corruption to the idea that he wanted to see more financial contributions to the Ukraine aid from other foreign countries.
But the timeline revealed Tuesday, in conjunction with the transcript of testimony from Office of Management and Budget Official Mark Sandy, outlines an indisputably clear set of facts about the bizarre way the Ukraine aid was handled.
The confusion that Sandy and other line-level OMB aides felt about why the Ukraine aid was being withheld, along with their inability to get answers, showed how the Trump administration's unusual enterprise was shrouded in secrecy, even from the very people who were handling the money.
Timeline undercuts Trump's defense
First the timeline: We now know that White House budget office took its first official action to withhold $250 million in aid to Ukraine on the evening of July 25, according to a House Budget Committee summary of the office's documents.
That was the very same day that Trump spoke by phone with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, prefacing his request for an investigation of the 2016 election with the now infamous phrase "I would like you to do us a favor, though." Agencies had been notified at a July 18 meeting that the aid had been frozen by the President, a week before the call.
Sandy, the Office of Management and Budget official who signed off on the initial Ukraine aid freeze before a Trump political appointee took over that task, testified that the President's interest in the aid dated back to June, but that he couldn't get an explanation of why the aid was withheld in July or August.
The request was so unusual that Sandy immediately told his boss that the freeze could violate an obscure federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act, which prohibits a sitting president from unilaterally withholding funds that were appropriated by Congress.
Sandy knew that the aid fell into the category of "one-year funds" -- meaning the money (totaling nearly $400 million) was only available until September 30. He told his boss, Trump political appointee Michael Duffey, that he wanted to talk to the lawyers at the Office of Management and Budget.
Sandy and other OMB aides were so alarmed by the inexplicable hold that they also sent a memo to Duffey recommending that hold be released because "assistance to Ukraine is consistent with the national security strategy," Sandy testified, and had the added benefit of "opposing Russian aggression."
In his closed-door deposition, Sandy also directly debunked the Republican talking point that the hold on the aid was related to Trump's concern that other nations should be contributing more in national security assistance to Ukraine.
Sandy testified that the White House didn't ask the budget office for information about how much other nations were contributing until September -- months after the hold was placed.
"I recall in early September an email that attributed the hold to the President's concern about other countries not contributing money to Ukraine," Sandy testified. By that time, lawmakers were asking questions about the freeze on aid to Ukraine and reports questioning the reasons for the withholding had already hit the press.
New testimony from State Department official Philip Reeker underscores the fact that the administration's hold on aid to Ukraine was orchestrated at the highest levels of power in the White House.
Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, testified that he believed the security assistance to Ukraine was "being held by Mr. Mulvaney, the White House Acting Chief of Staff," but that he did not have "definitive knowledge that Mulvaney was behind the holdup."
"Our operating understanding was that this was being held by Mr. Mulvaney, the White House Acting Chief of Staff," Reeker told lawmakers, according to the transcript.
Reeker also testified about the concerns of veteran diplomats like Kurt Volker about the maneuverings of Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer, who has been accused of trying to orchestrate the quid pro quo of a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation of the Bidens. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden.
"I do recall him telling me ... that, well, he was going to reach out to or was going to speak to Giuliani," Reeker said of Volker, the former US special representative to Ukraine. "And I think Ambassador Volker felt that there was this very good story to tell about President Zelensky and a new chapter in Ukraine. And that was his goal, was to hopefully take away some of that, what we sense was a negative stream coming from Mr. Giuliani to the President."
Court of public opinion
It remains unclear whether the new details of the President's Ukraine timeline will do much to move public opinion.
The inquiry moves to a new phase next week with the Judiciary Committee, holding its first hearing on December 4, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler has also extended an invitation to Trump and his lawyers to participate in the probe. So far the Trump administration's strategy has been to stonewall and not participate in the process.
For now, Trump is trying to claim victory after the two weeks of blockbuster testimony by pointing to a new CNN poll showing that 50% of Americans believe that he should be impeached and removed, because that figure was unchanged from mid-October when CNN asked the same question.
At his rally on Tuesday night, Trump described Democrats leading the inquiry as "maniacs" who are "pushing the deranged impeachment."
"The radical left Democrats are trying to rip our nation apart," Trump said Tuesday night to boos at his rally in Florida. "First it was the Russia hoax, total hoax. It was a failed overthrow attempt and the biggest fraud in the history of our country and then you look, the Mueller deal, you remember that mess? They had nothing."
"Now the same maniacs are pushing the deranged impeachment -- think of this: Impeachment. Impeachment. A witch hunt. ... They're pushing that impeachment witch hunt and a lot of bad things are happening to them. Because you see what's happening in the polls? Everybody said, that's really bulls---," Trump said to cheers and applause.
But beneath the steady topline poll numbers on impeachment, there is strong evidence that the Ukraine matter has eroded confidence in the President's motives -- and that many Americans have heard enough to disapprove of his conduct.
While the views on impeachment and removal did not change in the CNN poll released Tuesday, 53% of Americans said Trump improperly used his office to gain political advantage, up from 49% who said the same in October.
Moreover, 56% said the President's efforts to get Ukraine to launch investigations into the Biden family, a Ukrainian energy company and the 2016 election were intended to benefit him rather than root out corruption in Ukraine.
The question looming over the 2020 election is whether the stain of impeachment could irreparably damage Trump and cost him the White House.
It too early to draw conclusions, but the ground he is standing on gets shakier each day as new revelations point toward questionable conduct on his part.
Sydney-Hobart race...
Sydney-Hobart race is coming...
From Sailing Anarchy
With just 30 days to go before the start of the Sydney-Hobart race the pro crews are blowing the dust of their 100-foot supermaxis and getting ready for the last major offshore event in the world that takes these ageing behemoths seriously.
Wild Oats XI is still in the shed undergoing deck and rig repairs after her shock mast failure in the Cabbage Tree Island race three weeks ago. Scallywag (previously Ragamuffin 100) has been shipped back from Asia but is yet to step her mast. InfoTrack (the former Speedboat) is alongside and set to go. Black Jack has been in race trim for some time, testing out her new nose-and-tail job and front canard. Comanche – the fastest time record-holder – is apparently unmodified, ready to race (and reputedly for sale).
Those are the ‘Fabulous Five’. As usual, they will dominate media coverage and therefore public attention. To their credit the organizing authority, the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, tries to share that attention around the whole fleet, but the 628nm sprint for line honours is what grabs everyone’s eyeballs.
There were nine video crews and 20 yachting writers at today’s launch event in Sydney – but no surprises. Much of the questioning was about the damage to Wild Oats XI. Iain Murray, the boat’s long-serving tactician, confirmed that the mast failure below deck happened after WOXI had “ploughed into a wave” at 32 knots. The new lower mast section arrives in Australia tomorrow while half the rigging is being repaired in Spain and the other half is manufactured in Asia. They are hoping to have the yacht back together in time for the Big Boat Challenge on December 10.
While the supermaxis make headlines, the real competition for the overall prize is likely to be among the 12-strong ‘fleet within a fleet’ of TP52s. These rocket-ships have become so optimized – and quick – that they are likely to dominate the handicap podiums in all but the most extreme conditions. The ones to watch include Celestial, Ichi Ban and Gweilo.
“TP52s are the best all-round performers for this race”, said Naval Group skipper Sean Langman. His response to their challenge has been to ‘re-mode’ his 70-footer by adding water ballast, a longer bowsprit and moving the keel bulb. “My competitive instincts have taken over somewhat”, said the 29-Sydney Hobart veteran.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Sydney-Hobart and that landmark has attracted more than 160 entries – double the fleet size of the previous few years.
There will be a unique, two-day lead-up regatta for pre-1975-built race veterans on the weekend of December 7 and 8. Among the more than 30 starters listed are five previous handicap winners – Nerida, Struen Marie, Solveig, Anitra V and Love & War – plus classic line-honours champs Fidelis and Kialoa II.
But the sentimental favourite will be Wayfarer, which competed in the first race to Hobart back in 1945 and still holds the record for the slowest elapsed time – 11 days and 6 hours. That’s just a tiny bit longer than Comanche’s current record of 1 day, 19 hours. (Mind you, the Wayfarer boys had to stop a few times to sew up their ripped sails, and went ashore at one island for a spot of rabbit shooting.)
– Anarchist David
From Sailing Anarchy
With just 30 days to go before the start of the Sydney-Hobart race the pro crews are blowing the dust of their 100-foot supermaxis and getting ready for the last major offshore event in the world that takes these ageing behemoths seriously.Wild Oats XI is still in the shed undergoing deck and rig repairs after her shock mast failure in the Cabbage Tree Island race three weeks ago. Scallywag (previously Ragamuffin 100) has been shipped back from Asia but is yet to step her mast. InfoTrack (the former Speedboat) is alongside and set to go. Black Jack has been in race trim for some time, testing out her new nose-and-tail job and front canard. Comanche – the fastest time record-holder – is apparently unmodified, ready to race (and reputedly for sale).
Those are the ‘Fabulous Five’. As usual, they will dominate media coverage and therefore public attention. To their credit the organizing authority, the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, tries to share that attention around the whole fleet, but the 628nm sprint for line honours is what grabs everyone’s eyeballs.
There were nine video crews and 20 yachting writers at today’s launch event in Sydney – but no surprises. Much of the questioning was about the damage to Wild Oats XI. Iain Murray, the boat’s long-serving tactician, confirmed that the mast failure below deck happened after WOXI had “ploughed into a wave” at 32 knots. The new lower mast section arrives in Australia tomorrow while half the rigging is being repaired in Spain and the other half is manufactured in Asia. They are hoping to have the yacht back together in time for the Big Boat Challenge on December 10.
While the supermaxis make headlines, the real competition for the overall prize is likely to be among the 12-strong ‘fleet within a fleet’ of TP52s. These rocket-ships have become so optimized – and quick – that they are likely to dominate the handicap podiums in all but the most extreme conditions. The ones to watch include Celestial, Ichi Ban and Gweilo.
“TP52s are the best all-round performers for this race”, said Naval Group skipper Sean Langman. His response to their challenge has been to ‘re-mode’ his 70-footer by adding water ballast, a longer bowsprit and moving the keel bulb. “My competitive instincts have taken over somewhat”, said the 29-Sydney Hobart veteran.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Sydney-Hobart and that landmark has attracted more than 160 entries – double the fleet size of the previous few years.
There will be a unique, two-day lead-up regatta for pre-1975-built race veterans on the weekend of December 7 and 8. Among the more than 30 starters listed are five previous handicap winners – Nerida, Struen Marie, Solveig, Anitra V and Love & War – plus classic line-honours champs Fidelis and Kialoa II.
But the sentimental favourite will be Wayfarer, which competed in the first race to Hobart back in 1945 and still holds the record for the slowest elapsed time – 11 days and 6 hours. That’s just a tiny bit longer than Comanche’s current record of 1 day, 19 hours. (Mind you, the Wayfarer boys had to stop a few times to sew up their ripped sails, and went ashore at one island for a spot of rabbit shooting.)
– Anarchist David
Charities where your money will do the most good....
These are the charities where your money will do the most good
You can save lives with your giving. Here’s how.
By Dylan Matthews
Giving to charity is great, not just for the recipients but for the givers, too.
But it can be intimidating to know how to pick the best charity, especially when there are thousands of worthy causes to choose from. Here are a few simple tips that can help.
1) Check in with charity recommenders
It's of course possible to research charity options yourself, but it's probably better to outsource that labor to a careful, methodologically rigorous charity recommender like GiveWell. (Charity Navigator and Guidestar can be useful resources too, but they don’t try to rank charities or assess which do the most good for the lowest cost.)
GiveWell currently lists eight top charities, listed in order of their funding needs. If you can only support one, they advise that you support the Malaria Consortium, which “can use funding most effectively in the near term.”
GiveWell chose those charities based on how much good additional donations would do, not necessarily how good the groups are overall; in other words, these are organizations that can put new funding to use, rather than sitting on it.
GiveWell takes that factor seriously. In 2013, it revoked its recommendation of Against Malaria on the grounds that the charity had not spent enough of the money it already raised. In 2014, GiveWell judged that Against Malaria once again had room for more funding, and restored it on the recommendation list. So you can expect Against Malaria, and the other recommended charities, to spend anything you donate effectively and reasonably promptly.
The group also takes disconfirming research seriously. In 2017, it recommended Evidence Action’s No Lean Season, which offers no-interest loans to farmers in Bangladesh during the “lean season” between planting rice and harvesting it; the loans are conditional on a family member temporarily moving to a city or other area for short-term work. But a subsequent randomized evaluation found that the program didn’t actually spur people to migrate or increase their incomes, and GiveWell and Evidence Action then agreed that it should no longer be a top charity; Evidence Action stopped soliciting funds for it and later shut it down.
GiveWell recommends that, if you want to maximize your giving, you give through GiveWell to dispense the money at its discretion; GiveWell gets regular information on which highly effective charities need more money and which ones don't, and can direct donations more efficiently than an individual donor. But if you’re not comfortable giving through GiveWell, giving directly to any of the eight is fantastic.
2) Pick charities with research-based strategies
GiveWell's recommendations rely heavily on both evaluations done by charitable organizations and existing research literature on the kind of intervention the charities are trying to conduct.
For example, its recommendations of SCI, Sightsavers, the END Fund, and Deworm the World are based on research suggesting that providing children with deworming treatments could improve educational, economic, and other outcomes.
Research from the Poverty Action Lab at MIT suggests that giving away insecticidal bed nets for free — as the Against Malaria Foundation does — is vastly more effective than charging even small amounts for them.
And while cash certainly has its limits, hundreds of studies have found largely positive effects for the kind cash transfers that GiveDirectly distributes.
3) Give abroad
It's really hard to adequately express how much richer developed nations like the US are than developing ones like Kenya, Uganda, and other countries targeted by GiveWell's most effective charities. We still have extreme poverty, in the living-on-$2-a-day sense, but it's comparatively pretty rare and hard to target effectively. The poorest Americans also have access to health care and education systems that are far superior to those of developing countries. Giving to charities domestically is admirable, of course, but if you want to get the most bang for your buck in terms of saving lives, reducing illness, or improving overall well-being, you're going to want to give abroad.
Years ago, GiveWell actually looked into a number of US charities, like the Nurse-Family Partnership program for infants, the KIPP chain of charter schools, and the HOPE job-training program. It found that all were highly effective but were far more cost-intensive than the best foreign charities. KIPP and the Nurse-Family Partnership cost more than $10,000 per child served, while deworming programs like SCI's and Deworm the World's generally cost between $0.25 and $1 per child treated.
Alternatively, you could consider giving to non-humans. Animal charities, particularly those engaged in corporate pressure campaigns to better the treatment of farm animals, chickens in particular, can be effective in improving animal welfare. The charity evaluations in this area are much younger and less methodologically rigorous than GiveWell's, but Animal Charity Evaluators has named four animal groups that may be effective causes for donations:
4) If you do give locally, you can still consider impact
For years I would advocate to friends that they donate abroad, or to animal-specific charities, since their donation was likelier to have a concrete near-term impact there than in a human-based US charity, given how much money it costs to meaningfully help a resident of a rich country.
But I usually got a lot of pushback. People want to give to their specific communities, or particular causes they’re passionate about for personal reasons (like curing a disease that killed a loved one, say). And they often want to use charity as a way to connect with broader trends in the news — by, say, donating to help provide representation for immigrant children on the US-Mexico border.
For years I didn’t have much to say to that, other than to add that it’s of course fine to give to your community and personal causes; this guide is mostly meant to offer alternate suggestions if you don’t have existing philanthropic interests and are curious for ways to help.
But a new nonprofit has given some new, useful tools to people in this camp. Impact Matters, co-founded by social entrepreneur Elijah Goldberg and economist Dean Karlan, attempts to quantify the bang-for-the-buck provided by charities in several different sectors. But whereas GiveWell is pretty opinionated about cause areas — it pushes hard toward charities that save lives or dramatically improve financial well-being — Impact Matters isn’t.
So you can specify that your goal is, say, to provide a night of shelter for a person experiencing homelessness, and Impact Matters will provide you with a menu of nonprofits and their cost-per-night-of-housing. Fellowship Deliverance Ministries in Georgia, for instance, is estimated to provide a night of shelter for $2 per person. You can also narrow down by where you want to give: here’s a list of San Francisco-specific charities, for instance.
Impact Matters just launched for the 2019 giving season. And it has already sparked a bit of concern in some corners of the philanthropy world. Julia Coffman, director of the Center for Evaluation Innovation, had a thoughtful critique on Twitter, arguing that trying to quantify impact like this is “too reductionist” and that “Since many direct service orgs also do systems change, I worry cost-effectiveness in relation to impact penalizes orgs that expend $ addressing systemic and structural factors that affect both their clients’ needs and their ability to deliver services in a cost-effective way.”
That’s fair — giving for societal change is really hard to do and even harder to evaluate. The causal inference behind Impact Matters’ estimates is also necessarily limited; they can’t run whole experiments to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of every single charity, so instead they build detailed models to try to approximate an estimate of each charity’s impact (here’s their methodology for emergency shelters for people experiencing homelessness, for instance).
But for a certain set of donors, Impact Matters is a useful tool that might point them in the direction of nonprofits they hadn’t known about previously, and which are doing good in their specific areas.
5) Consider meta-charities
Another option is giving to groups like GiveWell, Innovations for Poverty Action, the Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours that evaluate development approaches/charities and encourage effective giving. Suppose that every dollar given to Giving What We Can — which encourages people to pledge to donate at least 10 percent of their income until retirement — results in $1.20 in donations to the Against Malaria Foundation. If that's the case, then you should give to Giving What We Can until the marginal effect on donations to Against Malaria hits $1 or lower.
"If they can turn a dollar of donations into substantially more than a dollar of increased donations to effective charities, isn't that the best use of my money?" asks Jeff Kaufman, a software developer who with his wife, the fantastic effective altruism activist and organizer Julia Wise, gives about half his income to effective charities and meta-charities.
6) Saving lives isn't everything
If you only care about reducing early mortality and giving people more years to live, then you should give all your donations to the the Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller International or the Against Malaria Foundation. Malaria is a frequently fatal disease, and cost-effective interventions to reduce malaria infection are a great way to save lives. Similarly, Vitamin A supplementation, like HKI does, is an effective way of reducing child mortality.
But the rest of the charities GiveWell recommends don't mainly focus on reducing mortality. Quality of life matters, too. Parasitic infections hamper children's development and education, which can have negative consequences lasting decades. Having increased access to cash may not extend the life of a GiveDirectly recipient, but it does make life considerably more pleasant.
7) Don't give to a big charity
You'll notice that all of the charities GiveWell recommends are reasonably small, and some big names are absent. That's not an accident. In general, charity effectiveness evaluators are skeptical of large relief organizations, for a number of reasons.
Large organizations tend to be less transparent about where their money goes and also likelier to direct money to disaster relief efforts, which are usually less cost-effective, in general, than public health programs. "Overall, our impression is that your donation to these organizations is very hard to trace, but will likely supplement an agenda of extremely diverse programming, driven largely by governments and other very large funders," writes GiveWell cofounder Holden Karnofsky.
8) Maybe just give money directly to poor people
For years one of my primary charities was GiveDirectly, which is the only cause outside public health to get GiveWell's top rating, and, to my knowledge, the only charity devoted to unconditional cash transfers. I gave to them partly because there's a large body of research on the benefits of cash transfers, which I find quite compelling.
(I have ceased donating to them since Future Perfect started and instead give to GiveWell’s top charities bucket, as a way to avoid conflicts of interest as I write more about charity. I view the GiveWell option as equivalent to investing in index funds to avoid any bias as a business reporter.)
But I donated to GiveDirectly mostly because I didn’t trust myself to know what the world's poorest people need most. I've been profoundly lucky to never experience the kind of extreme poverty that billions of people worldwide have to endure. I have no idea what I would spend a cash transfer from GiveDirectly on if I were living on less than $2 a day in Uganda. Would I buy a bed net? Maybe! Or maybe I'd buy an iron roof. Or school tuition for loved ones. Or cattle.
But you know who does have a good sense of the needs of poor people in Uganda? Poor people in Uganda. They have a very good idea of what they need. Do they sometimes misjudge their spending priorities? Certainly; so do we all. And bed nets and deworming treatments appear to be underpurchased relative to the actual need for them. But generally, you should only give something other than cash if you are confident you know the recipients' needs better than they do. With the exception of bed nets — which really do seem underprovided when they're just put up for sale rather than given away for free — I'm not confident of that. So I gave cash.
As the World Bank's Jishnu Das once put it, "'Does giving cash work well' is a well-defined question only if you are willing to say that 'well' is something that WE, the donors, want to define for families whom we have never met and whose living circumstances we have probably never spent a day, let alone a lifetime, in." If you're not willing to say that, then you should strongly consider giving cash.
9) Give what you can (though if you can spare it, pledging to give 10 percent of your income would be fantastic)
One of the hardest problems in philanthropy is deciding how much to donate.
There are some people who argue the correct answer, unless you’re near the end of your life, is nothing: you should, on this view, not give to charity during your career, and instead save as much of your money as possible and donate it when you die (my colleague Kelsey Piper explains why this is probably not a good approach).
Another approach is to “earn to give”: take a high-paying job, typically in finance or tech, and give a huge share, like 40 to 50 percent, of your earnings away.
I wrote about people who do this back in 2013, and I know that many of the people I profiled still earn-to-give; for them, at least, this is a sustainable option. It’s a really good career option if you like working in finance and tech, but frankly it’s not the best option for most people, and there are a lot of amazing jobs — in scientific research, in the private sector, in direct charity or nonprofit or government work — where the typical person can do more good than they could by using their career as a mechanism through which to generate donation money.
So I suggest a more moderate course. I’ve signed the Giving What We Can pledge, which commits members to donating 10 percent of their annual income to highly effective charities. That is a totally reasonable number, comparable to alms in many religions, that requires relatively minimal sacrifice relative to what earn-to-give people do.
Even if 10 percent is too much for you, though, don’t despair. Giving $1 is better than giving $0. Perhaps the most important thing is to just get into the groove of donating, to make it a habit. I use direct deposit on my paychecks to make most of my charitable contributions, just so it’s extremely automatic and hard for me to avoid doing. Going from not giving to giving a little, regularly, is a huge positive step.
You can save lives with your giving. Here’s how.
By Dylan Matthews
Giving to charity is great, not just for the recipients but for the givers, too.
But it can be intimidating to know how to pick the best charity, especially when there are thousands of worthy causes to choose from. Here are a few simple tips that can help.
1) Check in with charity recommenders
It's of course possible to research charity options yourself, but it's probably better to outsource that labor to a careful, methodologically rigorous charity recommender like GiveWell. (Charity Navigator and Guidestar can be useful resources too, but they don’t try to rank charities or assess which do the most good for the lowest cost.)
GiveWell currently lists eight top charities, listed in order of their funding needs. If you can only support one, they advise that you support the Malaria Consortium, which “can use funding most effectively in the near term.”
- Malaria Consortium, which helps distribute preventative antimalarial medication to children (a program known as “seasonal malaria chemoprevention”).
- Against Malaria Foundation, which buys and distributes insecticidal bed nets, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa but also in Papua New Guinea.
- Helen Keller International, which provides technical assistance to, advocates for, and funds vitamin A supplementation programs in sub-Saharan Africa, which reduce child mortality.
- Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative, END Fund, and Sightsavers, which all work on deworming programs to prevent parasitic infections.
- GiveDirectly, which directly distributes donations to poor people in Kenya and Uganda, to spend as they see fit.
- Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), which also does deworming work, but which GiveWell recommends refraining from donating to until they give more information on their near-term funding needs.
GiveWell chose those charities based on how much good additional donations would do, not necessarily how good the groups are overall; in other words, these are organizations that can put new funding to use, rather than sitting on it.
GiveWell takes that factor seriously. In 2013, it revoked its recommendation of Against Malaria on the grounds that the charity had not spent enough of the money it already raised. In 2014, GiveWell judged that Against Malaria once again had room for more funding, and restored it on the recommendation list. So you can expect Against Malaria, and the other recommended charities, to spend anything you donate effectively and reasonably promptly.
The group also takes disconfirming research seriously. In 2017, it recommended Evidence Action’s No Lean Season, which offers no-interest loans to farmers in Bangladesh during the “lean season” between planting rice and harvesting it; the loans are conditional on a family member temporarily moving to a city or other area for short-term work. But a subsequent randomized evaluation found that the program didn’t actually spur people to migrate or increase their incomes, and GiveWell and Evidence Action then agreed that it should no longer be a top charity; Evidence Action stopped soliciting funds for it and later shut it down.
GiveWell recommends that, if you want to maximize your giving, you give through GiveWell to dispense the money at its discretion; GiveWell gets regular information on which highly effective charities need more money and which ones don't, and can direct donations more efficiently than an individual donor. But if you’re not comfortable giving through GiveWell, giving directly to any of the eight is fantastic.
2) Pick charities with research-based strategies
GiveWell's recommendations rely heavily on both evaluations done by charitable organizations and existing research literature on the kind of intervention the charities are trying to conduct.
For example, its recommendations of SCI, Sightsavers, the END Fund, and Deworm the World are based on research suggesting that providing children with deworming treatments could improve educational, economic, and other outcomes.
Research from the Poverty Action Lab at MIT suggests that giving away insecticidal bed nets for free — as the Against Malaria Foundation does — is vastly more effective than charging even small amounts for them.
And while cash certainly has its limits, hundreds of studies have found largely positive effects for the kind cash transfers that GiveDirectly distributes.
3) Give abroad
It's really hard to adequately express how much richer developed nations like the US are than developing ones like Kenya, Uganda, and other countries targeted by GiveWell's most effective charities. We still have extreme poverty, in the living-on-$2-a-day sense, but it's comparatively pretty rare and hard to target effectively. The poorest Americans also have access to health care and education systems that are far superior to those of developing countries. Giving to charities domestically is admirable, of course, but if you want to get the most bang for your buck in terms of saving lives, reducing illness, or improving overall well-being, you're going to want to give abroad.
Years ago, GiveWell actually looked into a number of US charities, like the Nurse-Family Partnership program for infants, the KIPP chain of charter schools, and the HOPE job-training program. It found that all were highly effective but were far more cost-intensive than the best foreign charities. KIPP and the Nurse-Family Partnership cost more than $10,000 per child served, while deworming programs like SCI's and Deworm the World's generally cost between $0.25 and $1 per child treated.
Alternatively, you could consider giving to non-humans. Animal charities, particularly those engaged in corporate pressure campaigns to better the treatment of farm animals, chickens in particular, can be effective in improving animal welfare. The charity evaluations in this area are much younger and less methodologically rigorous than GiveWell's, but Animal Charity Evaluators has named four animal groups that may be effective causes for donations:
- Animal Equality, which conducts undercover investigations against factory farms, corporate campaigns to change food industry practices, and lobbying efforts to pass animal protection laws.
- The Humane League, which specializes in corporate campaigns to improve farm standards, and has achieved big victories in eliminating the culling of baby chicks and getting food service companies like Kroger and Sodexo to only use cage-free eggs, and is now pushing for better standards for chickens raised for their meat.
- The Good Food Institute, which promotes plant-based and cultured meat alternatives to animal-based foods.
- The Albert Schweitzer Foundation, conducts corporate campaigns in Germany and Poland and is unusual in advocating for farmed fish as well as chickens and mammals.
4) If you do give locally, you can still consider impact
For years I would advocate to friends that they donate abroad, or to animal-specific charities, since their donation was likelier to have a concrete near-term impact there than in a human-based US charity, given how much money it costs to meaningfully help a resident of a rich country.
But I usually got a lot of pushback. People want to give to their specific communities, or particular causes they’re passionate about for personal reasons (like curing a disease that killed a loved one, say). And they often want to use charity as a way to connect with broader trends in the news — by, say, donating to help provide representation for immigrant children on the US-Mexico border.
For years I didn’t have much to say to that, other than to add that it’s of course fine to give to your community and personal causes; this guide is mostly meant to offer alternate suggestions if you don’t have existing philanthropic interests and are curious for ways to help.
But a new nonprofit has given some new, useful tools to people in this camp. Impact Matters, co-founded by social entrepreneur Elijah Goldberg and economist Dean Karlan, attempts to quantify the bang-for-the-buck provided by charities in several different sectors. But whereas GiveWell is pretty opinionated about cause areas — it pushes hard toward charities that save lives or dramatically improve financial well-being — Impact Matters isn’t.
So you can specify that your goal is, say, to provide a night of shelter for a person experiencing homelessness, and Impact Matters will provide you with a menu of nonprofits and their cost-per-night-of-housing. Fellowship Deliverance Ministries in Georgia, for instance, is estimated to provide a night of shelter for $2 per person. You can also narrow down by where you want to give: here’s a list of San Francisco-specific charities, for instance.
Impact Matters just launched for the 2019 giving season. And it has already sparked a bit of concern in some corners of the philanthropy world. Julia Coffman, director of the Center for Evaluation Innovation, had a thoughtful critique on Twitter, arguing that trying to quantify impact like this is “too reductionist” and that “Since many direct service orgs also do systems change, I worry cost-effectiveness in relation to impact penalizes orgs that expend $ addressing systemic and structural factors that affect both their clients’ needs and their ability to deliver services in a cost-effective way.”
That’s fair — giving for societal change is really hard to do and even harder to evaluate. The causal inference behind Impact Matters’ estimates is also necessarily limited; they can’t run whole experiments to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of every single charity, so instead they build detailed models to try to approximate an estimate of each charity’s impact (here’s their methodology for emergency shelters for people experiencing homelessness, for instance).
But for a certain set of donors, Impact Matters is a useful tool that might point them in the direction of nonprofits they hadn’t known about previously, and which are doing good in their specific areas.
5) Consider meta-charities
Another option is giving to groups like GiveWell, Innovations for Poverty Action, the Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours that evaluate development approaches/charities and encourage effective giving. Suppose that every dollar given to Giving What We Can — which encourages people to pledge to donate at least 10 percent of their income until retirement — results in $1.20 in donations to the Against Malaria Foundation. If that's the case, then you should give to Giving What We Can until the marginal effect on donations to Against Malaria hits $1 or lower.
"If they can turn a dollar of donations into substantially more than a dollar of increased donations to effective charities, isn't that the best use of my money?" asks Jeff Kaufman, a software developer who with his wife, the fantastic effective altruism activist and organizer Julia Wise, gives about half his income to effective charities and meta-charities.
6) Saving lives isn't everything
If you only care about reducing early mortality and giving people more years to live, then you should give all your donations to the the Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller International or the Against Malaria Foundation. Malaria is a frequently fatal disease, and cost-effective interventions to reduce malaria infection are a great way to save lives. Similarly, Vitamin A supplementation, like HKI does, is an effective way of reducing child mortality.
But the rest of the charities GiveWell recommends don't mainly focus on reducing mortality. Quality of life matters, too. Parasitic infections hamper children's development and education, which can have negative consequences lasting decades. Having increased access to cash may not extend the life of a GiveDirectly recipient, but it does make life considerably more pleasant.
7) Don't give to a big charity
You'll notice that all of the charities GiveWell recommends are reasonably small, and some big names are absent. That's not an accident. In general, charity effectiveness evaluators are skeptical of large relief organizations, for a number of reasons.
Large organizations tend to be less transparent about where their money goes and also likelier to direct money to disaster relief efforts, which are usually less cost-effective, in general, than public health programs. "Overall, our impression is that your donation to these organizations is very hard to trace, but will likely supplement an agenda of extremely diverse programming, driven largely by governments and other very large funders," writes GiveWell cofounder Holden Karnofsky.
8) Maybe just give money directly to poor people
For years one of my primary charities was GiveDirectly, which is the only cause outside public health to get GiveWell's top rating, and, to my knowledge, the only charity devoted to unconditional cash transfers. I gave to them partly because there's a large body of research on the benefits of cash transfers, which I find quite compelling.
(I have ceased donating to them since Future Perfect started and instead give to GiveWell’s top charities bucket, as a way to avoid conflicts of interest as I write more about charity. I view the GiveWell option as equivalent to investing in index funds to avoid any bias as a business reporter.)
But I donated to GiveDirectly mostly because I didn’t trust myself to know what the world's poorest people need most. I've been profoundly lucky to never experience the kind of extreme poverty that billions of people worldwide have to endure. I have no idea what I would spend a cash transfer from GiveDirectly on if I were living on less than $2 a day in Uganda. Would I buy a bed net? Maybe! Or maybe I'd buy an iron roof. Or school tuition for loved ones. Or cattle.
But you know who does have a good sense of the needs of poor people in Uganda? Poor people in Uganda. They have a very good idea of what they need. Do they sometimes misjudge their spending priorities? Certainly; so do we all. And bed nets and deworming treatments appear to be underpurchased relative to the actual need for them. But generally, you should only give something other than cash if you are confident you know the recipients' needs better than they do. With the exception of bed nets — which really do seem underprovided when they're just put up for sale rather than given away for free — I'm not confident of that. So I gave cash.
As the World Bank's Jishnu Das once put it, "'Does giving cash work well' is a well-defined question only if you are willing to say that 'well' is something that WE, the donors, want to define for families whom we have never met and whose living circumstances we have probably never spent a day, let alone a lifetime, in." If you're not willing to say that, then you should strongly consider giving cash.
9) Give what you can (though if you can spare it, pledging to give 10 percent of your income would be fantastic)
One of the hardest problems in philanthropy is deciding how much to donate.
There are some people who argue the correct answer, unless you’re near the end of your life, is nothing: you should, on this view, not give to charity during your career, and instead save as much of your money as possible and donate it when you die (my colleague Kelsey Piper explains why this is probably not a good approach).
Another approach is to “earn to give”: take a high-paying job, typically in finance or tech, and give a huge share, like 40 to 50 percent, of your earnings away.
I wrote about people who do this back in 2013, and I know that many of the people I profiled still earn-to-give; for them, at least, this is a sustainable option. It’s a really good career option if you like working in finance and tech, but frankly it’s not the best option for most people, and there are a lot of amazing jobs — in scientific research, in the private sector, in direct charity or nonprofit or government work — where the typical person can do more good than they could by using their career as a mechanism through which to generate donation money.
So I suggest a more moderate course. I’ve signed the Giving What We Can pledge, which commits members to donating 10 percent of their annual income to highly effective charities. That is a totally reasonable number, comparable to alms in many religions, that requires relatively minimal sacrifice relative to what earn-to-give people do.
Even if 10 percent is too much for you, though, don’t despair. Giving $1 is better than giving $0. Perhaps the most important thing is to just get into the groove of donating, to make it a habit. I use direct deposit on my paychecks to make most of my charitable contributions, just so it’s extremely automatic and hard for me to avoid doing. Going from not giving to giving a little, regularly, is a huge positive step.
So this is how fucking stupid the GOPers really are....
Tucker Carlson’s defense of Russia takes “America First” to its logical conclusion
“Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”
By Aaron Rupar
On his Monday night show, Fox News host Tucker Carlson made a comment that was shocking even by his standards. He said he’s rooting for Russia to prevail in its armed conflict with Ukraine’s fledging democracy — a conflict that began when Russia illegally invaded its neighbor years ago and continues to this day.
During a segment about impeachment with former Hillary Clinton adviser Richard Goodstein, Carlson questioned why Americans should even care that President Donald Trump used hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid to leverage Ukraine into investigating his political rivals in the first place. Goodstein responded by noting that “people are dying on the front lines” there. (More than 13,000 people have died as a result of the conflict so far.)
The US government hasn’t always thought that providing military aid to Ukraine is the smartest way to maintain stability in Eastern Europe. But even Republicans who don’t think Trump should be impeached for using it as leverage for political favors generally believe that deterring Russian aggression and protecting democracy in Eastern Europe is important. Carlson, however, went on to express a view that in a previous era would have been far outside the foreign policy mainstream, but accords with the type of nihilism he’s played a leading role in promoting during the Trump era.
“Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?!” Carlson said. “And I’m serious. Why do I care? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”
Carlson saying he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine, and that he, in fact, hopes that the country is subjugated by Moscow may accord with an extreme interpretation of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, but it belies that idea that the United States stands for democracy at home and abroad. The clip of Carlson’s comments quickly went viral, and as his show drew to a close, Carlson — apparently aware of the stir he caused — tried to walk it back.
“Before we go, earlier in the show I noted I was rooting for Russia in the contest between Russia and Ukraine,” Carlson said. “Of course, I’m joking. I’m only rooting for America —mocking the obsession many on the left have. Ha!”
It should be noted that Carlson’s comments about Russia weren’t the only time on Monday’s broadcast that he defended an authoritarian leader. During a segment immediately following his discussion with Goodstein, Carlson defended Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad by questioning whether he was really responsible for committing war crimes against his own people — a position at odds with a mountain of evidence indicating that Assad is in fact responsible.
As former Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Shaub noted in response to Carlson’s comments on Tuesday morning, his open rooting for Russia and defense of Assad alludes to a deep fault line below the surface of modern politics. In the Trump era, it’s not so much liberals versus conservatives, but those who believe in democracy versus those who are, at best, indifferent about Putin-style authoritarianism.
Trumpworld continues to buy what Carlson is selling
Carlson, of course, has a long history of being criticized for promoting white nationalism, Islamophobia, sexism, and lies in service of Trump. Yet last month his show was the second best-rated on all of cable news — only trailing his Fox News colleague Sean Hannity — and he continues to enjoy a remarkably cozy relationship with President Trump, with whom he’s traveled on foreign trips.
But comments like the ones he made on Monday illustrate why, despite his strong ratings, Carlson has a hard time retaining advertisers. And on Tuesday, Michael Blake, vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), used his appearance on one of Fox News’s “straight news” shows to question why Carlson still has a job with the network.
Asked to respond to comments Carlson made about Michelle Obama, Blake instead turned his fire on Carlson.
“The core question is why the hell does Tucker Carlson still have a job here in the first place? The reality is this is someone who said white supremacy is a hoax,” Blake said. “Why does Fox still allow him to be here in the first place?”
“We didn’t bring you on to talk about Tucker Carlson, I brought you on to talk about the Democratic field,” host Bill Hemmer replied, ignoring the fact that he was the one who brought up Carlson in the first place.
Meanwhile, even Republican insiders like Frank Luntz criticized Carlson’s comments about Russia.
“Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”
By Aaron Rupar
On his Monday night show, Fox News host Tucker Carlson made a comment that was shocking even by his standards. He said he’s rooting for Russia to prevail in its armed conflict with Ukraine’s fledging democracy — a conflict that began when Russia illegally invaded its neighbor years ago and continues to this day.
During a segment about impeachment with former Hillary Clinton adviser Richard Goodstein, Carlson questioned why Americans should even care that President Donald Trump used hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid to leverage Ukraine into investigating his political rivals in the first place. Goodstein responded by noting that “people are dying on the front lines” there. (More than 13,000 people have died as a result of the conflict so far.)
The US government hasn’t always thought that providing military aid to Ukraine is the smartest way to maintain stability in Eastern Europe. But even Republicans who don’t think Trump should be impeached for using it as leverage for political favors generally believe that deterring Russian aggression and protecting democracy in Eastern Europe is important. Carlson, however, went on to express a view that in a previous era would have been far outside the foreign policy mainstream, but accords with the type of nihilism he’s played a leading role in promoting during the Trump era.
“Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?!” Carlson said. “And I’m serious. Why do I care? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”
Carlson saying he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine, and that he, in fact, hopes that the country is subjugated by Moscow may accord with an extreme interpretation of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, but it belies that idea that the United States stands for democracy at home and abroad. The clip of Carlson’s comments quickly went viral, and as his show drew to a close, Carlson — apparently aware of the stir he caused — tried to walk it back.
“Before we go, earlier in the show I noted I was rooting for Russia in the contest between Russia and Ukraine,” Carlson said. “Of course, I’m joking. I’m only rooting for America —mocking the obsession many on the left have. Ha!”
It should be noted that Carlson’s comments about Russia weren’t the only time on Monday’s broadcast that he defended an authoritarian leader. During a segment immediately following his discussion with Goodstein, Carlson defended Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad by questioning whether he was really responsible for committing war crimes against his own people — a position at odds with a mountain of evidence indicating that Assad is in fact responsible.
As former Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Shaub noted in response to Carlson’s comments on Tuesday morning, his open rooting for Russia and defense of Assad alludes to a deep fault line below the surface of modern politics. In the Trump era, it’s not so much liberals versus conservatives, but those who believe in democracy versus those who are, at best, indifferent about Putin-style authoritarianism.
Trumpworld continues to buy what Carlson is selling
Carlson, of course, has a long history of being criticized for promoting white nationalism, Islamophobia, sexism, and lies in service of Trump. Yet last month his show was the second best-rated on all of cable news — only trailing his Fox News colleague Sean Hannity — and he continues to enjoy a remarkably cozy relationship with President Trump, with whom he’s traveled on foreign trips.
But comments like the ones he made on Monday illustrate why, despite his strong ratings, Carlson has a hard time retaining advertisers. And on Tuesday, Michael Blake, vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), used his appearance on one of Fox News’s “straight news” shows to question why Carlson still has a job with the network.
Asked to respond to comments Carlson made about Michelle Obama, Blake instead turned his fire on Carlson.
“The core question is why the hell does Tucker Carlson still have a job here in the first place? The reality is this is someone who said white supremacy is a hoax,” Blake said. “Why does Fox still allow him to be here in the first place?”
“We didn’t bring you on to talk about Tucker Carlson, I brought you on to talk about the Democratic field,” host Bill Hemmer replied, ignoring the fact that he was the one who brought up Carlson in the first place.
Meanwhile, even Republican insiders like Frank Luntz criticized Carlson’s comments about Russia.
Racist Family Members...
Here’s What to Say to Racist Family Members During the Holidays
A quick and dirty tip sheet.
JAMILAH KING
It’s holiday season! Which means it’s time to have some potentially awkward conversations with family, on top of the usual awkward conversations that dredge up old resentments and new disappointments. Lots has already been written about today’s polarized political climate, and if they want, people can more or less successfully avoid being in spaces that run completely counter to their core beliefs.
But the family dinner table isn’t one of those places.
This brings me to the time I recently spent at the Chicago Humanities Festival interviewing the author and scholar Dr. Ibram X. Kendi about his new book, How to be an Antiracist. Kendi has established himself as one of America’s go-to authorities on how racism operates. His first book, Stamped From the Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideas, traced the origin and purpose of racist ideas that informed public policy, from the alleged intellectual inferiority of enslaved African-Americans to the criminality of immigrant laborers from Mexico. His latest book now offers some advice on how to undo those dangerous ideas—of people who are simply racist, of people who may not realize they’re racist, and of people who enable racist ideas to go unchallenged.
So who better to ask about how to confront racist family members before the holidays? Here are some short tips, explained in Kendi’s own words, that are culled from a much longer interview. We got on this particular topic in response to a question from an audience member who wanted to know what to do about good friends who happen to also be “diehard” Trump supports. “Are we co-enablers by not discussing it?” he asked.
Keep in mind that your silence enables their racism.
“Are you co-enablers by not discussing it with them? Yes. And the reason why I would say that is because you have much more of a likelihood to transform them than I do, or Jamilah does, or any of probably the other people in this room. And why is that? For two reasons: because you’re close to them, and if the two of you are white, and the two of them are white, white racists—if part of their appeal to Trump’s racism is their racism—are much more likely to listen to and seriously consider ideas about race coming from other white people.
So then the question becomes: If you choose not to be that person, who’s going to do it? When you think about that, and exponentially add to that, you’re essentially saying that everyone across this country who has friends or family members who are Trump supporters should essentially do nothing, and not be that person who is trying to get them to see the ways in which Trump is harming them, let alone people of color. So then, what’s that going to lead to? That’s going to lead to precisely what we don’t want.”
Strategically offer them some homework.
“You could have a reading group on a book on racism, if they’d be open to that, right? They may be like, ‘No, I don’t need that book. I’m not racist. What are you talking about?’ And if you were to sort of propose that, I wouldn’t say, ‘Yeah, y’all are racist, or you support a racist president, so therefore, you need to read this book.’ Be like, ‘Hey, let’s form a reading group.’ And you choose a book that doesn’t have to do with race at all, another book that doesn’t have to do with race at all, and then the third book—you know, you could do that. You have to be strategic, right?”
Define terms.
“You begin any conversation about race with definitions. You have to get on the same page about what is a racist, or who is a racist, but I would more so say what is the racist—what is a racist idea and what is a racist policy. What’s happening in this country is we are arguing over definitions. That’s what’s happening. That’s how you can have the president calling the late Congressman [Elijah] Cummings racist. And then Cummings calling the president racist simultaneously, even though their ideas about race and what they support are dramatically different. The only way that happens is if they have completely different definitions of ‘racist’ and one of their definitions is obviously wrong.
I don’t have any conversation with somebody I know has racist ideas, and I know is in denial about those racist ideas, without first defining what a racist idea is and getting them to agree to that definition, which is the most important thing. So we’re having a common conversation about what is racism, a definition that they agree with. So then when they start saying racist ideas, I’m like, ‘Well, according to your definition of a racist idea, what you just said was racist. Should we change the definition?’ So then, you’re not essentially telling them that they’re racist, you’re saying according to you, you’re racist.”
A quick and dirty tip sheet.
JAMILAH KING
It’s holiday season! Which means it’s time to have some potentially awkward conversations with family, on top of the usual awkward conversations that dredge up old resentments and new disappointments. Lots has already been written about today’s polarized political climate, and if they want, people can more or less successfully avoid being in spaces that run completely counter to their core beliefs.
But the family dinner table isn’t one of those places.
This brings me to the time I recently spent at the Chicago Humanities Festival interviewing the author and scholar Dr. Ibram X. Kendi about his new book, How to be an Antiracist. Kendi has established himself as one of America’s go-to authorities on how racism operates. His first book, Stamped From the Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideas, traced the origin and purpose of racist ideas that informed public policy, from the alleged intellectual inferiority of enslaved African-Americans to the criminality of immigrant laborers from Mexico. His latest book now offers some advice on how to undo those dangerous ideas—of people who are simply racist, of people who may not realize they’re racist, and of people who enable racist ideas to go unchallenged.
So who better to ask about how to confront racist family members before the holidays? Here are some short tips, explained in Kendi’s own words, that are culled from a much longer interview. We got on this particular topic in response to a question from an audience member who wanted to know what to do about good friends who happen to also be “diehard” Trump supports. “Are we co-enablers by not discussing it?” he asked.
Keep in mind that your silence enables their racism.
“Are you co-enablers by not discussing it with them? Yes. And the reason why I would say that is because you have much more of a likelihood to transform them than I do, or Jamilah does, or any of probably the other people in this room. And why is that? For two reasons: because you’re close to them, and if the two of you are white, and the two of them are white, white racists—if part of their appeal to Trump’s racism is their racism—are much more likely to listen to and seriously consider ideas about race coming from other white people.
So then the question becomes: If you choose not to be that person, who’s going to do it? When you think about that, and exponentially add to that, you’re essentially saying that everyone across this country who has friends or family members who are Trump supporters should essentially do nothing, and not be that person who is trying to get them to see the ways in which Trump is harming them, let alone people of color. So then, what’s that going to lead to? That’s going to lead to precisely what we don’t want.”
Strategically offer them some homework.
“You could have a reading group on a book on racism, if they’d be open to that, right? They may be like, ‘No, I don’t need that book. I’m not racist. What are you talking about?’ And if you were to sort of propose that, I wouldn’t say, ‘Yeah, y’all are racist, or you support a racist president, so therefore, you need to read this book.’ Be like, ‘Hey, let’s form a reading group.’ And you choose a book that doesn’t have to do with race at all, another book that doesn’t have to do with race at all, and then the third book—you know, you could do that. You have to be strategic, right?”
Define terms.
“You begin any conversation about race with definitions. You have to get on the same page about what is a racist, or who is a racist, but I would more so say what is the racist—what is a racist idea and what is a racist policy. What’s happening in this country is we are arguing over definitions. That’s what’s happening. That’s how you can have the president calling the late Congressman [Elijah] Cummings racist. And then Cummings calling the president racist simultaneously, even though their ideas about race and what they support are dramatically different. The only way that happens is if they have completely different definitions of ‘racist’ and one of their definitions is obviously wrong.
I don’t have any conversation with somebody I know has racist ideas, and I know is in denial about those racist ideas, without first defining what a racist idea is and getting them to agree to that definition, which is the most important thing. So we’re having a common conversation about what is racism, a definition that they agree with. So then when they start saying racist ideas, I’m like, ‘Well, according to your definition of a racist idea, what you just said was racist. Should we change the definition?’ So then, you’re not essentially telling them that they’re racist, you’re saying according to you, you’re racist.”
His bitch...
There’s Just One Problem With Dems Fast-Tracking Impeachment
His name is Mitch McConnell.
DAVID CORN
At the start of this week, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to his colleagues in the House that provided a status report on the impeachment inquiry he has been overseeing. He noted that after weeks of investigation and public hearings, “We have uncovered a months-long effort in which President Trump again sought foreign interference in our elections for his personal and political benefit at the expense of our national interest.” And he informed his fellow House members that the committee was preparing a report that will be handed to the judiciary committee “soon after” Congress’ Thanksgiving recess—and that the judiciary committee will then proceed with the “next phase” of the impeachment inquiry. Schiff wrote, “This is an urgent matter that cannot wait if we are to protect the nation’s security and the integrity of our elections.” He added, “we will continue with our investigative work and do not foreclose the possibility of further depositions or hearings, we will not allow the President or others to drag this out for months on end in the courts.”
The message: Impeachment is on a fast track. That’s been House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s strategy—stick to a narrow case for impeachment (the Ukrainian caper), don’t get bogged down in a lengthy and complicated investigation, demonstrate that House Democrats are not overly fixated on impeachment at the expense of other work, and don’t test the voting public’s patience. This certainly makes sense. Though public opinion polls show support for Trump’s impeachment at about 50 percent, Democratic strategists are convinced that a long, drawn-out process will turn the public against the Democrats. And the next election is just around the corner. The closer an impeachment trial in the Senate gets to Election Day, the more power there will be to the Republican argument that voters across the land should decide Trump’s fate, not a bunch of senators in Washington. So the Democratic plan appears to be to draw up and vote on—and presumably approve—articles of impeachment before Congress breaks for the holidays in mid-December.
There is a possible problem with this approach: Mitch McConnell. Once the House Democrats adopt those articles and kick impeachment over to the Senate for trial, they will lose control of the narrative. And then McConnell, the wily Republican leader in the Senate, and other GOPers in that body will be in charge of the story. Though Chief Justice John Roberts would preside over an impeachment trial, McConnell has a lot of leeway in setting some ground rules for that historic event. Imagine if Trump’s defense team wants to emulate the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and call Hunter Biden, the whistleblower, and others to the stand as part of Trump’s defense—to turn the trial into a circus or advance the phony cover stories, excuses, and distractions Trump and his allies have cooked up. The proceedings could turn into a free-for-all and provide Trump and the Republicans a platform for their various conspiracy theories. (Ukraine intervened in the 2016 election! Where are the Democratic servers?) Perhaps Roberts could keep the Republicans in line, but Senate rules do allow a majority to vote on questions of evidence and other matters. The rules state that the chief justice “may rule on all questions of evidence including, but not limited to, questions of relevancy, materiality, and redundancy of evidence and incidental questions, which ruling shall stand as the judgment of the Senate, unless some Member of the Senate shall ask that a formal vote be taken thereon, in which case it shall be submitted to the Senate for decision without debate.”
In other words, the Republicans could try to use the trial for their own purposes. And even if they don’t succeed in getting these and other witnesses to the stand, just having the fight will help them and Trump. During the recent hearings, Schiff was able to prevent Republicans from circusfying the sessions because he held the gavel. He rejected their requests for these sorts of witnesses. In the Senate, Roberts and McConnell’s majority, which is hostile to the impeachment process, will be in charge.
Then there’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who behaves like Trump’s Mini-Me. He has already announced he’ll conduct an investigation and hold hearings related to the activities of Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. (There are no credible allegations they engaged in any wrongdoing.) Whether or not McConnell can turn the impeachment inquiry into a trial of the Bidens, Graham is aiming to do that on his own. Once the House passes articles of impeachment, the Senate Republicans could gain monopoly control of the Trump-Ukraine tale and use their power to morph a story of Trump wrongdoing into one of Democratic scheming and malfeasance.
Schiff has said his committee will continue to investigate the Ukrainian mess, and there’s plenty there. This episode isn’t as compact as the House Democrats first believed. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s top henchman in this act of seeming extortion, is under investigation by federal prosecutors for a variety of potential misdeeds that may be related to his effort, on behalf of Trump, to pressure the Ukrainian government to produce both dirt on Joe Biden and information to support a debunked conspiracy theory that holds Russia did not hack the 2016 election. Two of Giuliani’s associates involved in this dirt-seeking mission—Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman—have been indicted for allegedly violating campaign finance law in the United States. They are charged with dumping large illegal donations into the bank accounts of a pro-Trump super PAC and the campaign of a Congress member who they enlisted in their effort to oust US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. (Where did the money come from? That’s unknown.) Parnas, according to his lawyer, claims he helped set up a meeting between Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, and a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor who was part of multipronged scheme to boot Yovanovitch and disseminate negative information about the Bidens. (What was Nunes up to? He is now facing an ethics committee investigation.)
There appear to be ties between Giuliani’s muck-gathering in Ukraine and a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmytro Firtash, who’s fighting extradition to the United States after being indicted on bribery charges. (Were Giuliani and two Washington, DC, lawyers close to Trump who are representing Firtash for $300,000 a month—Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing—endeavoring to spread anti-Biden material in return for receiving lenient treatment for Firtash from Bill Barr’s Justice Department?) The roles of White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton in the Ukraine pressure scheme have not been fully detailed, with each of them refusing to testify before Congress.
The Trump-Ukraine scandal is deeper and wider than House Democrats first assumed. Should they ratchet back before finding answers to all these questions? Before using the courts to try to compel testimony from Bolton, Mulvaney, Pompeo, Perry, and maybe even Giuliani? (Giuliani is the president’s personal attorney, but attorney-client privilege may not cover all his actions.) Parnas says he wants to tell all to the intelligence committee—but presumably only if he is granted immunity. The bottom line: There’s still much to do to sort out all the dimensions of this scandal. The committee can continue to do so privately. But if the main show becomes the Senate trial—which will include whatever shenanigans the Republicans try to pull—the Democrats will have a tougher time conveying to the public a full account of Trump’s Ukraine scandal.
On Tuesday, during a background briefing with reporters, Mother Jones asked a Democratic staffer on the House Judiciary Committee, “Why rush?” Why not dig more into all the sinkholes that have opened up? Why not fight in the courts for the testimony of Bolton, Mulvaney, Pompeo, Perry, and others? (The House just won a first-round battle in its effort to force Don McGahn, Trump’s former White House counsel, to testify.) The staffer responded that Trump’s challenges to Congress’ oversight responsibility have been unprecedented and that the “wheels of justice turn but turn slowly.” If the House Dems slugged it out with the White House on these matters, he said, it’s not clear how long the fight might take. The other option, he indicated, was to proceed with the information they have unearthed and consider adding to the articles of impeachment the charge of obstructing Congress. Soon after the briefing, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), chair of the judiciary committee, announced that his committee will hold its first impeachment hearing on December 4 with a panel of constitutional scholars. In a letter to Trump, Nadler stated the hearing will “serve as an opportunity to discuss the historical and constitutional basis of impeachment.” He also asked if Trump and his lawyer would “attend the hearing or make a request to question the witness panel.”
In the House, it’s impeachment, full steam ahead. Perhaps there is little choice. Dwelling on impeachment could become a turnoff for some voters. Pushing an impeachment trial into the spring might provide Republicans the easy way out of declaring it’s too close to an election to consider this form of political capital punishment. But a narrowly cast impeachment case—as strong as it might be—could come across as thin, given all of Trump’s misdeeds, and as possibly premature, given all the elements of the Trump-Ukraine scandal that have not yet been probed and explained. And there’s little doubt the Republicans, once they’re in the driver’s seat, will do all they can to steer a course away from the truth and toward the bizarro world of Trumpian hogwash. Placing impeachment in the ten-items-or-less line may have certain advantages. But they don’t come without serious risks.
His name is Mitch McConnell.
DAVID CORN
 |
| Mitch McConnell |
The message: Impeachment is on a fast track. That’s been House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s strategy—stick to a narrow case for impeachment (the Ukrainian caper), don’t get bogged down in a lengthy and complicated investigation, demonstrate that House Democrats are not overly fixated on impeachment at the expense of other work, and don’t test the voting public’s patience. This certainly makes sense. Though public opinion polls show support for Trump’s impeachment at about 50 percent, Democratic strategists are convinced that a long, drawn-out process will turn the public against the Democrats. And the next election is just around the corner. The closer an impeachment trial in the Senate gets to Election Day, the more power there will be to the Republican argument that voters across the land should decide Trump’s fate, not a bunch of senators in Washington. So the Democratic plan appears to be to draw up and vote on—and presumably approve—articles of impeachment before Congress breaks for the holidays in mid-December.
There is a possible problem with this approach: Mitch McConnell. Once the House Democrats adopt those articles and kick impeachment over to the Senate for trial, they will lose control of the narrative. And then McConnell, the wily Republican leader in the Senate, and other GOPers in that body will be in charge of the story. Though Chief Justice John Roberts would preside over an impeachment trial, McConnell has a lot of leeway in setting some ground rules for that historic event. Imagine if Trump’s defense team wants to emulate the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and call Hunter Biden, the whistleblower, and others to the stand as part of Trump’s defense—to turn the trial into a circus or advance the phony cover stories, excuses, and distractions Trump and his allies have cooked up. The proceedings could turn into a free-for-all and provide Trump and the Republicans a platform for their various conspiracy theories. (Ukraine intervened in the 2016 election! Where are the Democratic servers?) Perhaps Roberts could keep the Republicans in line, but Senate rules do allow a majority to vote on questions of evidence and other matters. The rules state that the chief justice “may rule on all questions of evidence including, but not limited to, questions of relevancy, materiality, and redundancy of evidence and incidental questions, which ruling shall stand as the judgment of the Senate, unless some Member of the Senate shall ask that a formal vote be taken thereon, in which case it shall be submitted to the Senate for decision without debate.”
In other words, the Republicans could try to use the trial for their own purposes. And even if they don’t succeed in getting these and other witnesses to the stand, just having the fight will help them and Trump. During the recent hearings, Schiff was able to prevent Republicans from circusfying the sessions because he held the gavel. He rejected their requests for these sorts of witnesses. In the Senate, Roberts and McConnell’s majority, which is hostile to the impeachment process, will be in charge.
Then there’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who behaves like Trump’s Mini-Me. He has already announced he’ll conduct an investigation and hold hearings related to the activities of Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. (There are no credible allegations they engaged in any wrongdoing.) Whether or not McConnell can turn the impeachment inquiry into a trial of the Bidens, Graham is aiming to do that on his own. Once the House passes articles of impeachment, the Senate Republicans could gain monopoly control of the Trump-Ukraine tale and use their power to morph a story of Trump wrongdoing into one of Democratic scheming and malfeasance.
Schiff has said his committee will continue to investigate the Ukrainian mess, and there’s plenty there. This episode isn’t as compact as the House Democrats first believed. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s top henchman in this act of seeming extortion, is under investigation by federal prosecutors for a variety of potential misdeeds that may be related to his effort, on behalf of Trump, to pressure the Ukrainian government to produce both dirt on Joe Biden and information to support a debunked conspiracy theory that holds Russia did not hack the 2016 election. Two of Giuliani’s associates involved in this dirt-seeking mission—Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman—have been indicted for allegedly violating campaign finance law in the United States. They are charged with dumping large illegal donations into the bank accounts of a pro-Trump super PAC and the campaign of a Congress member who they enlisted in their effort to oust US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. (Where did the money come from? That’s unknown.) Parnas, according to his lawyer, claims he helped set up a meeting between Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, and a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor who was part of multipronged scheme to boot Yovanovitch and disseminate negative information about the Bidens. (What was Nunes up to? He is now facing an ethics committee investigation.)
There appear to be ties between Giuliani’s muck-gathering in Ukraine and a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmytro Firtash, who’s fighting extradition to the United States after being indicted on bribery charges. (Were Giuliani and two Washington, DC, lawyers close to Trump who are representing Firtash for $300,000 a month—Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing—endeavoring to spread anti-Biden material in return for receiving lenient treatment for Firtash from Bill Barr’s Justice Department?) The roles of White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton in the Ukraine pressure scheme have not been fully detailed, with each of them refusing to testify before Congress.
The Trump-Ukraine scandal is deeper and wider than House Democrats first assumed. Should they ratchet back before finding answers to all these questions? Before using the courts to try to compel testimony from Bolton, Mulvaney, Pompeo, Perry, and maybe even Giuliani? (Giuliani is the president’s personal attorney, but attorney-client privilege may not cover all his actions.) Parnas says he wants to tell all to the intelligence committee—but presumably only if he is granted immunity. The bottom line: There’s still much to do to sort out all the dimensions of this scandal. The committee can continue to do so privately. But if the main show becomes the Senate trial—which will include whatever shenanigans the Republicans try to pull—the Democrats will have a tougher time conveying to the public a full account of Trump’s Ukraine scandal.
On Tuesday, during a background briefing with reporters, Mother Jones asked a Democratic staffer on the House Judiciary Committee, “Why rush?” Why not dig more into all the sinkholes that have opened up? Why not fight in the courts for the testimony of Bolton, Mulvaney, Pompeo, Perry, and others? (The House just won a first-round battle in its effort to force Don McGahn, Trump’s former White House counsel, to testify.) The staffer responded that Trump’s challenges to Congress’ oversight responsibility have been unprecedented and that the “wheels of justice turn but turn slowly.” If the House Dems slugged it out with the White House on these matters, he said, it’s not clear how long the fight might take. The other option, he indicated, was to proceed with the information they have unearthed and consider adding to the articles of impeachment the charge of obstructing Congress. Soon after the briefing, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), chair of the judiciary committee, announced that his committee will hold its first impeachment hearing on December 4 with a panel of constitutional scholars. In a letter to Trump, Nadler stated the hearing will “serve as an opportunity to discuss the historical and constitutional basis of impeachment.” He also asked if Trump and his lawyer would “attend the hearing or make a request to question the witness panel.”
In the House, it’s impeachment, full steam ahead. Perhaps there is little choice. Dwelling on impeachment could become a turnoff for some voters. Pushing an impeachment trial into the spring might provide Republicans the easy way out of declaring it’s too close to an election to consider this form of political capital punishment. But a narrowly cast impeachment case—as strong as it might be—could come across as thin, given all of Trump’s misdeeds, and as possibly premature, given all the elements of the Trump-Ukraine scandal that have not yet been probed and explained. And there’s little doubt the Republicans, once they’re in the driver’s seat, will do all they can to steer a course away from the truth and toward the bizarro world of Trumpian hogwash. Placing impeachment in the ten-items-or-less line may have certain advantages. But they don’t come without serious risks.
Plant Some Damn Trees
Stop Building a Spaceship to Mars and Just Plant Some Damn Trees
Researchers found that there’s room for an extra 900 million hectares of canopy cover.
JACKIE FLYNN MOGENSEN
When it comes to climate change research, most studies bear bad news regarding the looming, very real threat of a warming planet and the resulting devastation that it will bring upon the Earth. But a new study, out Thursday in the journal Science, offers a sliver of hope for the world: A group of researchers based in Switzerland, Italy, and France found that expanding forests, which sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, could seriously make up for humans’ toxic carbon emissions.
In 2018, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s foremost authority on climate, estimated that we’d need to plant 1 billion hectares of forest by 2050 to keep the globe from warming a full 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. (One hectare is about twice the size of a football field.) Not only is that “undoubtedly achievable,” according to the study’s authors, but global tree restoration is “our most effective climate change solution to date.”
In fact, there’s space on the planet for an extra 900 million hectares of canopy cover, the researchers found, which translates to storage for a whopping 205 gigatonnes of carbon. To put that in perspective, humans emit about 10 gigatonnes of carbon from burning fossil fuels every year, according to Richard Houghton, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, who was not involved with the study. And overall, there are now about 850 gigatonnes of carbon in the atmosphere; a tree-planting effort on that scale could, in theory, cut carbon by about 25 percent, according to the authors.
In addition to that, Houghton says, trees are relatively cheap carbon consumers. As he put it, “There are technologies people are working on to take carbon dioxide out of the air. And trees do it—for nothing.”
To make this bold prediction, the researchers identified what tree cover looks like in nearly 80,000 half-hectare plots in existing forests. They then used that data to map how much canopy cover would be possible in other regions—excluding urban or agricultural land—depending on the area’s topography, climate, precipitation levels, and other environmental variables. The result revealed where trees might grow outside of existing forests.
“We know a single tree can capture a lot of carbon. What we don’t know is how many trees the planet can support,” says Jean-François Bastin, an ecologist and postdoc at ETH-Zürich, a university in Zürich, Switzerland, and the study’s lead author, adding, “This gives us an idea.”
They found that all that tree-planting potential isn’t spaced evenly across the globe. Six countries, in fact, hold more than half of the world’s area for potential tree restoration (in this order): Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and China. The United States alone has room for more than 100 million hectares of additional tree cover—greater than the size of Texas.
The study, however, has its limitations. For one, a global tree-planting effort is somewhat impractical. As the authors write, “it remains unclear what proportion of this land is public or privately owned, and so we cannot identify how much land is truly available for restoration.” Rob Jackson, who chairs the Earth System Science Department and Global Carbon Project at Stanford University and was not involved with the study, agrees that forest management plays an important role in the fight against climate change, but says the paper’s finding that humans could reduce atmospheric carbon by 25 percent by planting trees seemed “unrealistic,” and wondered what kinds of trees would be most effective or how forest restoration may disrupt agriculture.
“Forests and soils are the cheapest and fastest way to remove carbon from the atmosphere—lots of really good opportunities there,” he said. “I get uneasy when we start talking about managing billions of extra acres of land, with one goal in mind: to store carbon.” Bastin, though, says the study is “about respecting the natural ecosystem,” and not simply planting “100 percent tree cover.” He also clarified that planting trees alone cannot fix climate change. The problem is “related to the way we are living on the planet,” he says.
Caveats aside, Houghton sees the study as a useful exercise in what’s possible. “[The study] is setting the limits,” says Houghton. “It’s not telling us at all how to implement it. That’s what our leaders have to think about.”
Researchers found that there’s room for an extra 900 million hectares of canopy cover.
JACKIE FLYNN MOGENSEN
When it comes to climate change research, most studies bear bad news regarding the looming, very real threat of a warming planet and the resulting devastation that it will bring upon the Earth. But a new study, out Thursday in the journal Science, offers a sliver of hope for the world: A group of researchers based in Switzerland, Italy, and France found that expanding forests, which sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, could seriously make up for humans’ toxic carbon emissions.
In 2018, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s foremost authority on climate, estimated that we’d need to plant 1 billion hectares of forest by 2050 to keep the globe from warming a full 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. (One hectare is about twice the size of a football field.) Not only is that “undoubtedly achievable,” according to the study’s authors, but global tree restoration is “our most effective climate change solution to date.”
In fact, there’s space on the planet for an extra 900 million hectares of canopy cover, the researchers found, which translates to storage for a whopping 205 gigatonnes of carbon. To put that in perspective, humans emit about 10 gigatonnes of carbon from burning fossil fuels every year, according to Richard Houghton, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, who was not involved with the study. And overall, there are now about 850 gigatonnes of carbon in the atmosphere; a tree-planting effort on that scale could, in theory, cut carbon by about 25 percent, according to the authors.
In addition to that, Houghton says, trees are relatively cheap carbon consumers. As he put it, “There are technologies people are working on to take carbon dioxide out of the air. And trees do it—for nothing.”
To make this bold prediction, the researchers identified what tree cover looks like in nearly 80,000 half-hectare plots in existing forests. They then used that data to map how much canopy cover would be possible in other regions—excluding urban or agricultural land—depending on the area’s topography, climate, precipitation levels, and other environmental variables. The result revealed where trees might grow outside of existing forests.
“We know a single tree can capture a lot of carbon. What we don’t know is how many trees the planet can support,” says Jean-François Bastin, an ecologist and postdoc at ETH-Zürich, a university in Zürich, Switzerland, and the study’s lead author, adding, “This gives us an idea.”
They found that all that tree-planting potential isn’t spaced evenly across the globe. Six countries, in fact, hold more than half of the world’s area for potential tree restoration (in this order): Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and China. The United States alone has room for more than 100 million hectares of additional tree cover—greater than the size of Texas.
The study, however, has its limitations. For one, a global tree-planting effort is somewhat impractical. As the authors write, “it remains unclear what proportion of this land is public or privately owned, and so we cannot identify how much land is truly available for restoration.” Rob Jackson, who chairs the Earth System Science Department and Global Carbon Project at Stanford University and was not involved with the study, agrees that forest management plays an important role in the fight against climate change, but says the paper’s finding that humans could reduce atmospheric carbon by 25 percent by planting trees seemed “unrealistic,” and wondered what kinds of trees would be most effective or how forest restoration may disrupt agriculture.
“Forests and soils are the cheapest and fastest way to remove carbon from the atmosphere—lots of really good opportunities there,” he said. “I get uneasy when we start talking about managing billions of extra acres of land, with one goal in mind: to store carbon.” Bastin, though, says the study is “about respecting the natural ecosystem,” and not simply planting “100 percent tree cover.” He also clarified that planting trees alone cannot fix climate change. The problem is “related to the way we are living on the planet,” he says.
Caveats aside, Houghton sees the study as a useful exercise in what’s possible. “[The study] is setting the limits,” says Houghton. “It’s not telling us at all how to implement it. That’s what our leaders have to think about.”
Shakier ground....
New revelations put Trump on shakier ground
Analysis by Maeve Reston
New transcripts of witness testimony and news reports revealing key details on the Ukraine scandal timeline show in vivid detail the way President Donald Trump and top officials maneuvered behind the scenes to block aid to Ukraine as the President sought an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden.
The new revelations, coming at a time when half of Americans support impeaching and removing the President even though impeachment proceedings have not moved the needle of public opinion, underscored the problem for Trump and his supporters in Congress: Public hearings in the impeachment inquiry may be in the rearview mirror, but new details about his pressure campaign on Ukraine continue to trickle out.
The developments on Tuesday illuminated the fact that there's still much to learn about the President's actions regarding Ukraine as the House races toward a potential vote on impeachment by Christmas.
The President's claims of innocence looked even more incredulous Tuesday night after The New York Times reported that Trump released the hold on Ukraine aid after he was briefed on the whistleblower report outlining his dealings with Ukraine.
That report and newly released transcripts of impeachment witness testimony undercut key arguments that the Republicans have been making as they have defended the President, who cast the impeachment inquiry during his Florida rally Tuesday night as a "scam," a "witchhunt" and a "hoax."
During the impeachment hearings earlier this month, Republicans spooled out various theories about why the White House might have frozen aid to Ukraine -- from the notion that Trump was concerned about corruption to the idea that he wanted to see more financial contributions to the Ukraine aid from other foreign countries.
But the timeline revealed Tuesday, in conjunction with the transcript of testimony from Office of Management and Budget Official Mark Sandy, outlines an indisputably clear set of facts about the bizarre way the Ukraine aid was handled.
The confusion that Sandy and other line-level OMB aides felt about why the Ukraine aid was being withheld, along with their inability to get answers, showed how the Trump administration's unusual enterprise was shrouded in secrecy, even from the very people who were handling the money.
Timeline undercuts Trump's defense
First the timeline: We now know that White House budget office took its first official action to withhold $250 million in aid to Ukraine on the evening of July 25, according to a House Budget Committee summary of the office's documents.
That was the very same day that Trump spoke by phone with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, prefacing his request for an investigation of the 2016 election with the now infamous phrase "I would like you to do us a favor, though." Agencies had been notified at a July 18 meeting that the aid had been frozen by the President, a week before the call.
Sandy, the Office of Management and Budget official who signed off on the initial Ukraine aid freeze before a Trump political appointee took over that task, testified that the President's interest in the aid dated back to June, but that he couldn't get an explanation of why the aid was withheld in July or August.
The request was so unusual that Sandy immediately told his boss that the freeze could violate an obscure federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act, which prohibits a sitting president from unilaterally withholding funds that were appropriated by Congress.
Sandy knew that the aid fell into the category of "one-year funds" -- meaning the money (totaling nearly $400 million) was only available until September 30. He told his boss, Trump political appointee Michael Duffey, that he wanted to talk to the lawyers at the Office of Management and Budget.
Sandy and other OMB aides were so alarmed by the inexplicable hold that they also sent a memo to Duffey recommending that hold be released because "assistance to Ukraine is consistent with the national security strategy," Sandy testified, and had the added benefit of "opposing Russian aggression."
In his closed-door deposition, Sandy also directly debunked the Republican talking point that the hold on the aid was related to Trump's concern that other nations should be contributing more in national security assistance to Ukraine.
Sandy testified that the White House didn't ask the budget office for information about how much other nations were contributing until September -- months after the hold was placed.
"I recall in early September an email that attributed the hold to the President's concern about other countries not contributing money to Ukraine," Sandy testified. By that time, lawmakers were asking questions about the freeze on aid to Ukraine and reports questioning the reasons for the withholding had already hit the press.
New testimony from State Department official Philip Reeker underscores the fact that the administration's hold on aid to Ukraine was orchestrated at the highest levels of power in the White House.
Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, testified that he believed the security assistance to Ukraine was "being held by Mr. Mulvaney, the White House Acting Chief of Staff," but that he did not have "definitive knowledge that Mulvaney was behind the holdup."
"Our operating understanding was that this was being held by Mr. Mulvaney, the White House Acting Chief of Staff," Reeker told lawmakers, according to the transcript.
Reeker also testified about the concerns of veteran diplomats like Kurt Volker about the maneuverings of Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer, who has been accused of trying to orchestrate the quid pro quo of a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation of the Bidens. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden.
"I do recall him telling me ... that, well, he was going to reach out to or was going to speak to Giuliani," Reeker said of Volker, the former US special representative to Ukraine. "And I think Ambassador Volker felt that there was this very good story to tell about President Zelensky and a new chapter in Ukraine. And that was his goal, was to hopefully take away some of that, what we sense was a negative stream coming from Mr. Giuliani to the President."
Court of public opinion
It remains unclear whether the new details of the President's Ukraine timeline will do much to move public opinion.
The inquiry moves to a new phase next week with the Judiciary Committee, holding its first hearing on December 4, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler has also extended an invitation to Trump and his lawyers to participate in the probe. So far the Trump administration's strategy has been to stonewall and not participate in the process.
For now, Trump is trying to claim victory after the two weeks of blockbuster testimony by pointing to a new CNN poll showing that 50% of Americans believe that he should be impeached and removed, because that figure was unchanged from mid-October when CNN asked the same question.
At his rally on Tuesday night, Trump described Democrats leading the inquiry as "maniacs" who are "pushing the deranged impeachment."
"The radical left Democrats are trying to rip our nation apart," Trump said Tuesday night to boos at his rally in Florida. "First it was the Russia hoax, total hoax. It was a failed overthrow attempt and the biggest fraud in the history of our country and then you look, the Mueller deal, you remember that mess? They had nothing."
"Now the same maniacs are pushing the deranged impeachment -- think of this: Impeachment. Impeachment. A witch hunt. ... They're pushing that impeachment witch hunt and a lot of bad things are happening to them. Because you see what's happening in the polls? Everybody said, that's really bulls---," Trump said to cheers and applause.
But beneath the steady topline poll numbers on impeachment, there is strong evidence that the Ukraine matter has eroded confidence in the President's motives -- and that many Americans have heard enough to disapprove of his conduct.
While the views on impeachment and removal did not change in the CNN poll released Tuesday, 53% of Americans said Trump improperly used his office to gain political advantage, up from 49% who said the same in October.
Moreover, 56% said the President's efforts to get Ukraine to launch investigations into the Biden family, a Ukrainian energy company and the 2016 election were intended to benefit him rather than root out corruption in Ukraine.
The question looming over the 2020 election is whether the stain of impeachment could irreparably damage Trump and cost him the White House.
It too early to draw conclusions, but the ground he is standing on gets shakier each day as new revelations point toward questionable conduct on his part.
Analysis by Maeve Reston
New transcripts of witness testimony and news reports revealing key details on the Ukraine scandal timeline show in vivid detail the way President Donald Trump and top officials maneuvered behind the scenes to block aid to Ukraine as the President sought an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden.
The new revelations, coming at a time when half of Americans support impeaching and removing the President even though impeachment proceedings have not moved the needle of public opinion, underscored the problem for Trump and his supporters in Congress: Public hearings in the impeachment inquiry may be in the rearview mirror, but new details about his pressure campaign on Ukraine continue to trickle out.
The developments on Tuesday illuminated the fact that there's still much to learn about the President's actions regarding Ukraine as the House races toward a potential vote on impeachment by Christmas.
The President's claims of innocence looked even more incredulous Tuesday night after The New York Times reported that Trump released the hold on Ukraine aid after he was briefed on the whistleblower report outlining his dealings with Ukraine.
That report and newly released transcripts of impeachment witness testimony undercut key arguments that the Republicans have been making as they have defended the President, who cast the impeachment inquiry during his Florida rally Tuesday night as a "scam," a "witchhunt" and a "hoax."
During the impeachment hearings earlier this month, Republicans spooled out various theories about why the White House might have frozen aid to Ukraine -- from the notion that Trump was concerned about corruption to the idea that he wanted to see more financial contributions to the Ukraine aid from other foreign countries.
But the timeline revealed Tuesday, in conjunction with the transcript of testimony from Office of Management and Budget Official Mark Sandy, outlines an indisputably clear set of facts about the bizarre way the Ukraine aid was handled.
The confusion that Sandy and other line-level OMB aides felt about why the Ukraine aid was being withheld, along with their inability to get answers, showed how the Trump administration's unusual enterprise was shrouded in secrecy, even from the very people who were handling the money.
Timeline undercuts Trump's defense
First the timeline: We now know that White House budget office took its first official action to withhold $250 million in aid to Ukraine on the evening of July 25, according to a House Budget Committee summary of the office's documents.
That was the very same day that Trump spoke by phone with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, prefacing his request for an investigation of the 2016 election with the now infamous phrase "I would like you to do us a favor, though." Agencies had been notified at a July 18 meeting that the aid had been frozen by the President, a week before the call.
Sandy, the Office of Management and Budget official who signed off on the initial Ukraine aid freeze before a Trump political appointee took over that task, testified that the President's interest in the aid dated back to June, but that he couldn't get an explanation of why the aid was withheld in July or August.
The request was so unusual that Sandy immediately told his boss that the freeze could violate an obscure federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act, which prohibits a sitting president from unilaterally withholding funds that were appropriated by Congress.
Sandy knew that the aid fell into the category of "one-year funds" -- meaning the money (totaling nearly $400 million) was only available until September 30. He told his boss, Trump political appointee Michael Duffey, that he wanted to talk to the lawyers at the Office of Management and Budget.
Sandy and other OMB aides were so alarmed by the inexplicable hold that they also sent a memo to Duffey recommending that hold be released because "assistance to Ukraine is consistent with the national security strategy," Sandy testified, and had the added benefit of "opposing Russian aggression."
In his closed-door deposition, Sandy also directly debunked the Republican talking point that the hold on the aid was related to Trump's concern that other nations should be contributing more in national security assistance to Ukraine.
Sandy testified that the White House didn't ask the budget office for information about how much other nations were contributing until September -- months after the hold was placed.
"I recall in early September an email that attributed the hold to the President's concern about other countries not contributing money to Ukraine," Sandy testified. By that time, lawmakers were asking questions about the freeze on aid to Ukraine and reports questioning the reasons for the withholding had already hit the press.
New testimony from State Department official Philip Reeker underscores the fact that the administration's hold on aid to Ukraine was orchestrated at the highest levels of power in the White House.
Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, testified that he believed the security assistance to Ukraine was "being held by Mr. Mulvaney, the White House Acting Chief of Staff," but that he did not have "definitive knowledge that Mulvaney was behind the holdup."
"Our operating understanding was that this was being held by Mr. Mulvaney, the White House Acting Chief of Staff," Reeker told lawmakers, according to the transcript.
Reeker also testified about the concerns of veteran diplomats like Kurt Volker about the maneuverings of Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer, who has been accused of trying to orchestrate the quid pro quo of a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation of the Bidens. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden.
"I do recall him telling me ... that, well, he was going to reach out to or was going to speak to Giuliani," Reeker said of Volker, the former US special representative to Ukraine. "And I think Ambassador Volker felt that there was this very good story to tell about President Zelensky and a new chapter in Ukraine. And that was his goal, was to hopefully take away some of that, what we sense was a negative stream coming from Mr. Giuliani to the President."
Court of public opinion
It remains unclear whether the new details of the President's Ukraine timeline will do much to move public opinion.
The inquiry moves to a new phase next week with the Judiciary Committee, holding its first hearing on December 4, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler has also extended an invitation to Trump and his lawyers to participate in the probe. So far the Trump administration's strategy has been to stonewall and not participate in the process.
For now, Trump is trying to claim victory after the two weeks of blockbuster testimony by pointing to a new CNN poll showing that 50% of Americans believe that he should be impeached and removed, because that figure was unchanged from mid-October when CNN asked the same question.
At his rally on Tuesday night, Trump described Democrats leading the inquiry as "maniacs" who are "pushing the deranged impeachment."
"The radical left Democrats are trying to rip our nation apart," Trump said Tuesday night to boos at his rally in Florida. "First it was the Russia hoax, total hoax. It was a failed overthrow attempt and the biggest fraud in the history of our country and then you look, the Mueller deal, you remember that mess? They had nothing."
"Now the same maniacs are pushing the deranged impeachment -- think of this: Impeachment. Impeachment. A witch hunt. ... They're pushing that impeachment witch hunt and a lot of bad things are happening to them. Because you see what's happening in the polls? Everybody said, that's really bulls---," Trump said to cheers and applause.
But beneath the steady topline poll numbers on impeachment, there is strong evidence that the Ukraine matter has eroded confidence in the President's motives -- and that many Americans have heard enough to disapprove of his conduct.
While the views on impeachment and removal did not change in the CNN poll released Tuesday, 53% of Americans said Trump improperly used his office to gain political advantage, up from 49% who said the same in October.
Moreover, 56% said the President's efforts to get Ukraine to launch investigations into the Biden family, a Ukrainian energy company and the 2016 election were intended to benefit him rather than root out corruption in Ukraine.
The question looming over the 2020 election is whether the stain of impeachment could irreparably damage Trump and cost him the White House.
It too early to draw conclusions, but the ground he is standing on gets shakier each day as new revelations point toward questionable conduct on his part.
Hoag's Object: A Nearly Perfect Ring Galaxy
Brest Atlantiques race
Brest Atlantiques
From Sailing Anarchy
After three weeks racing on the Brest Atlantiques, the two leading trimarans, Maxi Edmond de Rothschild and Actual Leader, are now following a similar route and heading towards the equator at a moderate pace. Meanwhile MACIF, who headed west on Sunday, is preparing to build up speed and no doubt regain some ground. The question, however, is how much…
Following a turbulent crossing from Rio to Cape Town, and an ascent up the Namibian coast – offering unforgettable scenes to those who came close to the shoreline – a certain monotony has now set in on the race. In particular for the two leading trimarans, who, due to light winds averaging 8-10 knots, are now sailing at unusually slow speeds.
Actual Leader’s media man, Ronan Gladu today made no secret of how quickly he’d like this stretch to be over: “We’re currently bypassing the St Helena High from the north, it’s pretty laborious. Despite low winds of 2-3 knots, the waves are unpredictable. We still have at least another 48 hours in these conditions”.
“It’s pretty monotonous”, admits Franck Cammas in a video shot by media man Yann Riou, “but sometimes it’s nice to have days like this without having to make manoeuvres, where you can check over the boat and go at a steady pace before attacking the Northern Hemisphere. We’ve still got a way to go before we reach the equator, but at the same time, we have already made great progress.”
That said, Maxi Edmond de Rothschild gybed this morning in order to best position herself in relation to the south-easterly trade wind, and finally complete her ascent towards the equator. Unless there’s a sudden turn of events, they should cross in front of MACIF, who should be heading northwards in the coming hours.
François Gabart and Gwénolé Gahinet hope this will mean they can gain some ground on Maxi Edmond de Rothschild, or at least Actual Leader. “When you look at Actual’s progress, you can see that they’re moving a little slower than we had thought, which is a good thing for us,” Gwénolé said on board to media man Jérémie Eloy, who himself added: “We’re moving faster than expected, it’s pretty cool.” The next few days promise to be very exciting…
From Sailing Anarchy
Following a turbulent crossing from Rio to Cape Town, and an ascent up the Namibian coast – offering unforgettable scenes to those who came close to the shoreline – a certain monotony has now set in on the race. In particular for the two leading trimarans, who, due to light winds averaging 8-10 knots, are now sailing at unusually slow speeds.
Actual Leader’s media man, Ronan Gladu today made no secret of how quickly he’d like this stretch to be over: “We’re currently bypassing the St Helena High from the north, it’s pretty laborious. Despite low winds of 2-3 knots, the waves are unpredictable. We still have at least another 48 hours in these conditions”.
“It’s pretty monotonous”, admits Franck Cammas in a video shot by media man Yann Riou, “but sometimes it’s nice to have days like this without having to make manoeuvres, where you can check over the boat and go at a steady pace before attacking the Northern Hemisphere. We’ve still got a way to go before we reach the equator, but at the same time, we have already made great progress.”
That said, Maxi Edmond de Rothschild gybed this morning in order to best position herself in relation to the south-easterly trade wind, and finally complete her ascent towards the equator. Unless there’s a sudden turn of events, they should cross in front of MACIF, who should be heading northwards in the coming hours.
François Gabart and Gwénolé Gahinet hope this will mean they can gain some ground on Maxi Edmond de Rothschild, or at least Actual Leader. “When you look at Actual’s progress, you can see that they’re moving a little slower than we had thought, which is a good thing for us,” Gwénolé said on board to media man Jérémie Eloy, who himself added: “We’re moving faster than expected, it’s pretty cool.” The next few days promise to be very exciting…
Officials undermine
Clashes among top HHS officials undermine Trump agenda
Alex Azar and Seema Verma spar over Obamacare replacement plan, staffing and who gets credit for major initiatives.
By RACHANA PRADHAN, ADAM CANCRYN and DAN DIAMOND
President Donald Trump’s health secretary, Alex Azar, and his Medicare chief, Seema Verma, are increasingly at odds, and their feuding has delayed the president’s long-promised replacement proposal for Obamacare and disrupted other health care initiatives central to Trump's reelection campaign, according to administration officials.
Verma spent about six months developing a Trump administration alternative to the Affordable Care Act, only to have Azar nix the proposal before it could be presented to Trump this summer, sending the administration back to the drawing board, senior officials told POLITICO. Azar believed Verma’s plan would actually strengthen Obamacare, not kill it.
Behind the policy differences over Obamacare, drug pricing and other initiatives, however, is a personal rivalry that has become increasingly bitter. This fall, Azar blocked Verma from traveling with Trump on Air Force One from Washington to Florida in early October for the unveiling of a high-profile Medicare executive order — an initiative largely drawn up by Verma's agency — said six officials with knowledge of the episode, which played out over days. Only after Verma complained to White House staff was she allowed on Trump’s plane, according to seven people familiar with the situation. HHS disputed the account, saying that the White House had identified space limitations on the plane.
Azar is a Cabinet secretary who oversees the 80,000-person Health and Human Services department, while Verma runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare and accounts for the lion's share of the overall HHS budget. That often affords the CMS administrator outsize autonomy and public visibility.
Before joining the administration, Azar and Verma were both based in Indianapolis, where the state's political and policy circle is so tight-knit that their children even attended the same school. While Vice President Mike Pence was governor of Indiana, Azar was a senior executive at the drug company Eli Lilly and developed ties with Pence. Verma was Pence's health care consultant, drafting his conservative overhaul of Medicaid. But despite their overlapping connections, the two are not personally close, officials said.
The rift that has emerged between Azar and Verma over the last several months is deep, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials at HHS, CMS and the White House, who requested anonymity to describe sensitive inner workings of the administration. Privately, Azar's and Verma's camps are pointing the finger at one another. Disclosures about Verma’s extensive use of highly paid outside consultants to raise her personal profile have exacerbated the tensions.
Time that could and should be spent on policy issues and advancing Trump's health agenda is instead being consumed by disputes, officials said.
"The amount of time spent dealing with things like this, and having to have these fights and have these issues, are time that could've been spent thinking of better drug pricing proposals or other ways to advance parts of the agenda,” said one health care official close to the situation.
An Azar spokesperson said any suggestion about tensions between him and Verma was "absurd."
"As the head of the Department, which includes CMS as an agency, Secretary Azar is working positively and productively with all operating and staff divisions to advance the President’s agenda and deliver real results for the American people," said HHS spokesperson Caitlin Oakley.
A spokesperson for CMS did not directly respond to questions about the pair's working relationship.
“Under the president’s bold leadership to put patients first, CMS has a record number of initiatives aimed at transforming the health care system to deliver access to low cost, high quality care and improved health outcomes for all Americans," the CMS spokesperson said. "Advancing the president’s health care agenda is the Administrator’s number one priority and focus.”
An HHS spokesperson denied that the secretary tried to block Verma from joining Trump's flight last month. The spokesperson said Azar's chief of staff had in fact approved Verma to go on Air Force One for Trump's Medicare announcement, but the White House said there was no longer room for her because Trump would be taking a smaller plane to Florida than planned.
The White House declined to comment.
Given the organizational relationship between HHS and CMS, some friction between the two offices isn’t unusual. However, officials familiar with the workings of previous administrations described an atmosphere of discord among the top two health appointees unlike anything seen in recent years.
Several said Azar and his top aides have worked to shut out Verma from the department's decision-making in an effort to minimize her influence. At the same time, Verma has frustrated senior HHS officials who believe she is overly concerned with building up her public profile. Those suspicions were heightened earlier this year after POLITICO first reported Verma directed a multi-million-dollar federal contract to outside communications consultants, circumventing her agency’s own extensive communication staff, in part to boost her personal brand.
Azar’s and Verma’s aides have dueled over who takes high-profile speaking engagements, how to announce agency priorities and who gets to decide personnel matters such as promotions and the hiring of top aides. In one particularly intense episode last month, the health department scrambled for days to arrange an announcement on a major rollback of regulations for health care providers after infighting over who would get the spotlight, said three people who were familiar with the planning for the event.
In the Trump administration’s early days, Verma clashed with Azar’s predecessor, Tom Price, who resigned in 2017 after a scandal over his use of private planes for official business, multiple officials recalled. A spokesperson for CMS said Verma and Price had a "fine working relationship" that helped advance Trump's agenda.
The tensions between Azar and Verma blew up this summer after Verma — in an Oval Office meeting with senior administration officials, including Azar and Trump — criticized a major drug pricing proposal Azar had been pushing for months, said three officials with knowledge.
In doing so, Verma sided with White House officials, including domestic policy chief Joe Grogan, who have challenged Azar on several major policy debates, including the administration's position on a high-profile lawsuit that could strike down the entire Affordable Care Act. The White House ultimately shelved the drug plan, aimed at lowering out-of-pocket costs for some seniors, over fears it would drive up both Medicare premiums in 2020 and government spending.
Around the same time, Verma was finalizing an Obamacare replacement proposal that would have created new subsidies for coverage options that the administration has long opposed. Azar and other senior officials worried that Verma's plan would drive people away from the cheaper but less robust health insurance options the White House had crafted over the previous two years. The proposal's $1 trillion price tag was also a nonstarter.
"That was simply not acceptable to HHS and the White House team," said one senior administration official, calling the proposal a "disastrous plan" that was killed before Trump could be formally briefed. The official also said Verma had failed to collaborate with Azar. "She was absolutely freelancing."
A White House official rejected that characterization. “The CMS administrator is following the president’s directive in full coordination with HHS and the White House and is not freelancing,” the official said. A spokesperson for CMS said that Verma "has been working closely and diligently with senior officials from the White House and [HHS] to deliver a health care plan that keeps what works and fixes what doesn’t." HHS declined to comment.
Yet multiple administration officials said the conflict between Azar and Verma had been building before then.
Verma was often mentioned as a potential successor as HHS secretary following Price's fall 2017 resignation. But Trump nominated Azar for the role that November, and he was confirmed in January 2018. Since then, the two have competed over which would get credit from Trump for advancing his health policies.
Verma has worked to put her stamp on policies seen as undermining Obamacare — a program she directly oversees — and spearheaded the Medicaid program’s first-ever work requirements, which so far have been struck down in the courts. She’s become the administration’s most visible critic of Democratic health care plans like “Medicare for All."
Before joining Eli Lilly, Azar was the top HHS lawyer and then the deputy secretary in the George W. Bush administration. He was brought into Trump's HHS because of his reputation as an able administrator who could establish order to the department after Price stepped down.
In working to maintain Trump’s favor, both Azar and Verma have faced ongoing challenges. The mercurial president is eager to tout major accomplishments on health care — and undercut a traditional political strength for Democrats — but has little patience for the glacial pace of making federal policy.
Azar has taken a hard line on some culture war issues important to Trump’s evangelical base, like the ban on federal Title X family planning dollars to abortion providers, but has largely avoided tangling with Democratic critics to the extent Verma has. He's also played a prominent role in some of the administration’s bipartisan health initiatives, such as trying to eradicate HIV transmission and overhauling care for kidney disease.
Azar has been particularly focused on forging a close relationship with Trump — privately vowing to have “no daylight” with the president. That’s even meant reversing his opposition to importing cheaper drugs from Canada, a policy priority for Trump that Republicans have traditionally viewed skeptically and Azar just last year dismissed as a “gimmick."
Verma, though nominally Azar’s deputy, has cultivated her own line to the White House and become a favorite of senior officials as a prominent woman in the administration who readily attacks Democratic health policies, aiding Trump’s efforts to cast their ideas as extreme.
Several officials say Azar and his top aides have made changes within the department meant to marginalize Verma, exercising greater control over her public appearances and staffing decisions.
Azar in recent months has required that senior CMS officials report directly to him or his aides. In some instances, Verma has been excluded from internal policy meetings her subordinates have attended, four officials said.
"A lot of this is sort of, 'Just remember, we are in charge,'" said one official. "It's not so subtly making that point over and over."
Last month, the two officials sparred over the announcement of a plan to help health care providers better coordinate patient care. When Azar heard that Verma was set to lead the announcement, he insisted on being included, said three individuals with knowledge of the discussions. The White House then pushed to be included in the rollout as well, prolonging an agency turf war by days.
Health officials eventually agreed to make the announcement in stages. Azar and Verma would brief reporters on a phone call, and Verma — accompanied by HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan and Grogan — the next day would make an in-person announcement at a health industry association in Minnesota.
But that second part of the plan was scuttled after HHS aides realized the industry-hosted event could expose the health department to ethical risks. That forced a scramble to find a new location — a Mayo Clinic satellite facility — just hours ahead of the major announcement and after invitations had already gone out.
An HHS spokesperson said the secretary had been involved in the rollout from the start.
Azar aides have also intervened in CMS personnel decisions to a degree that three current administration officials described as highly unusual.
In one case that illustrates the tensions, top HHS officials over a year ago encouraged Verma to hire Paul Mango, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, to run CMS’ daily operations as her chief of staff and principal deputy administrator. Then, in July, Azar plucked Mango from CMS and gave him a top role at HHS — without consulting Verma. She didn’t find out until Mango told her less than an hour before the move was announced publicly, two officials said.
Verma spent the following months without an official chief of staff, largely because HHS officials hadn’t signed off on giving that role to Brady Brookes, a former aide to Pence who had been Verma’s right hand for months. She was formally approved for the job last week.
CMS has encountered similar roadblocks trying to make acting Medicaid director Calder Lynch the program’s permanent leader, officials said. He enjoys wide support in the agency.
In other instances, Azar has established a direct line with Verma’s top aides to advise him on major policy efforts. Shortly after Verma hired Adam Boehler to run CMS' innovation center last year, Azar tapped him to serve simultaneously as a senior HHS adviser on value-based care.
Azar also asserted his authority over John Brooks, a senior CMS official overseeing Medicare, who simultaneously became a senior adviser to Azar on drug pricing.
In another case earlier this month, Azar’s top aides told Alec Aramanda, the top CMS liaison to Capitol Hill, that he would report directly to Azar's staff instead of Verma, although CMS has its own legislative division, three officials said.
Officials said the confusion over who reports to whom undermines the administration’s work. Without a clear chain of command, the policy making process can be easily scrambled and break down.
"It just makes it so much harder, and our jobs are hard enough already," one official said. "I don't see what the net positive outcome is."
An HHS spokesperson defended Azar, saying, "The secretary believes firmly in one goal and one team and put these reporting structures into place to better communicate and operationalize subject-matter experts to work on implementing the president's agenda at HHS."
Alex Azar and Seema Verma spar over Obamacare replacement plan, staffing and who gets credit for major initiatives.
By RACHANA PRADHAN, ADAM CANCRYN and DAN DIAMOND
President Donald Trump’s health secretary, Alex Azar, and his Medicare chief, Seema Verma, are increasingly at odds, and their feuding has delayed the president’s long-promised replacement proposal for Obamacare and disrupted other health care initiatives central to Trump's reelection campaign, according to administration officials.
Verma spent about six months developing a Trump administration alternative to the Affordable Care Act, only to have Azar nix the proposal before it could be presented to Trump this summer, sending the administration back to the drawing board, senior officials told POLITICO. Azar believed Verma’s plan would actually strengthen Obamacare, not kill it.
Behind the policy differences over Obamacare, drug pricing and other initiatives, however, is a personal rivalry that has become increasingly bitter. This fall, Azar blocked Verma from traveling with Trump on Air Force One from Washington to Florida in early October for the unveiling of a high-profile Medicare executive order — an initiative largely drawn up by Verma's agency — said six officials with knowledge of the episode, which played out over days. Only after Verma complained to White House staff was she allowed on Trump’s plane, according to seven people familiar with the situation. HHS disputed the account, saying that the White House had identified space limitations on the plane.
Azar is a Cabinet secretary who oversees the 80,000-person Health and Human Services department, while Verma runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare and accounts for the lion's share of the overall HHS budget. That often affords the CMS administrator outsize autonomy and public visibility.
Before joining the administration, Azar and Verma were both based in Indianapolis, where the state's political and policy circle is so tight-knit that their children even attended the same school. While Vice President Mike Pence was governor of Indiana, Azar was a senior executive at the drug company Eli Lilly and developed ties with Pence. Verma was Pence's health care consultant, drafting his conservative overhaul of Medicaid. But despite their overlapping connections, the two are not personally close, officials said.
The rift that has emerged between Azar and Verma over the last several months is deep, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials at HHS, CMS and the White House, who requested anonymity to describe sensitive inner workings of the administration. Privately, Azar's and Verma's camps are pointing the finger at one another. Disclosures about Verma’s extensive use of highly paid outside consultants to raise her personal profile have exacerbated the tensions.
Time that could and should be spent on policy issues and advancing Trump's health agenda is instead being consumed by disputes, officials said.
"The amount of time spent dealing with things like this, and having to have these fights and have these issues, are time that could've been spent thinking of better drug pricing proposals or other ways to advance parts of the agenda,” said one health care official close to the situation.
An Azar spokesperson said any suggestion about tensions between him and Verma was "absurd."
"As the head of the Department, which includes CMS as an agency, Secretary Azar is working positively and productively with all operating and staff divisions to advance the President’s agenda and deliver real results for the American people," said HHS spokesperson Caitlin Oakley.
A spokesperson for CMS did not directly respond to questions about the pair's working relationship.
“Under the president’s bold leadership to put patients first, CMS has a record number of initiatives aimed at transforming the health care system to deliver access to low cost, high quality care and improved health outcomes for all Americans," the CMS spokesperson said. "Advancing the president’s health care agenda is the Administrator’s number one priority and focus.”
An HHS spokesperson denied that the secretary tried to block Verma from joining Trump's flight last month. The spokesperson said Azar's chief of staff had in fact approved Verma to go on Air Force One for Trump's Medicare announcement, but the White House said there was no longer room for her because Trump would be taking a smaller plane to Florida than planned.
The White House declined to comment.
Given the organizational relationship between HHS and CMS, some friction between the two offices isn’t unusual. However, officials familiar with the workings of previous administrations described an atmosphere of discord among the top two health appointees unlike anything seen in recent years.
Several said Azar and his top aides have worked to shut out Verma from the department's decision-making in an effort to minimize her influence. At the same time, Verma has frustrated senior HHS officials who believe she is overly concerned with building up her public profile. Those suspicions were heightened earlier this year after POLITICO first reported Verma directed a multi-million-dollar federal contract to outside communications consultants, circumventing her agency’s own extensive communication staff, in part to boost her personal brand.
Azar’s and Verma’s aides have dueled over who takes high-profile speaking engagements, how to announce agency priorities and who gets to decide personnel matters such as promotions and the hiring of top aides. In one particularly intense episode last month, the health department scrambled for days to arrange an announcement on a major rollback of regulations for health care providers after infighting over who would get the spotlight, said three people who were familiar with the planning for the event.
In the Trump administration’s early days, Verma clashed with Azar’s predecessor, Tom Price, who resigned in 2017 after a scandal over his use of private planes for official business, multiple officials recalled. A spokesperson for CMS said Verma and Price had a "fine working relationship" that helped advance Trump's agenda.
The tensions between Azar and Verma blew up this summer after Verma — in an Oval Office meeting with senior administration officials, including Azar and Trump — criticized a major drug pricing proposal Azar had been pushing for months, said three officials with knowledge.
In doing so, Verma sided with White House officials, including domestic policy chief Joe Grogan, who have challenged Azar on several major policy debates, including the administration's position on a high-profile lawsuit that could strike down the entire Affordable Care Act. The White House ultimately shelved the drug plan, aimed at lowering out-of-pocket costs for some seniors, over fears it would drive up both Medicare premiums in 2020 and government spending.
Around the same time, Verma was finalizing an Obamacare replacement proposal that would have created new subsidies for coverage options that the administration has long opposed. Azar and other senior officials worried that Verma's plan would drive people away from the cheaper but less robust health insurance options the White House had crafted over the previous two years. The proposal's $1 trillion price tag was also a nonstarter.
"That was simply not acceptable to HHS and the White House team," said one senior administration official, calling the proposal a "disastrous plan" that was killed before Trump could be formally briefed. The official also said Verma had failed to collaborate with Azar. "She was absolutely freelancing."
A White House official rejected that characterization. “The CMS administrator is following the president’s directive in full coordination with HHS and the White House and is not freelancing,” the official said. A spokesperson for CMS said that Verma "has been working closely and diligently with senior officials from the White House and [HHS] to deliver a health care plan that keeps what works and fixes what doesn’t." HHS declined to comment.
Yet multiple administration officials said the conflict between Azar and Verma had been building before then.
Verma was often mentioned as a potential successor as HHS secretary following Price's fall 2017 resignation. But Trump nominated Azar for the role that November, and he was confirmed in January 2018. Since then, the two have competed over which would get credit from Trump for advancing his health policies.
Verma has worked to put her stamp on policies seen as undermining Obamacare — a program she directly oversees — and spearheaded the Medicaid program’s first-ever work requirements, which so far have been struck down in the courts. She’s become the administration’s most visible critic of Democratic health care plans like “Medicare for All."
Before joining Eli Lilly, Azar was the top HHS lawyer and then the deputy secretary in the George W. Bush administration. He was brought into Trump's HHS because of his reputation as an able administrator who could establish order to the department after Price stepped down.
In working to maintain Trump’s favor, both Azar and Verma have faced ongoing challenges. The mercurial president is eager to tout major accomplishments on health care — and undercut a traditional political strength for Democrats — but has little patience for the glacial pace of making federal policy.
Azar has taken a hard line on some culture war issues important to Trump’s evangelical base, like the ban on federal Title X family planning dollars to abortion providers, but has largely avoided tangling with Democratic critics to the extent Verma has. He's also played a prominent role in some of the administration’s bipartisan health initiatives, such as trying to eradicate HIV transmission and overhauling care for kidney disease.
Azar has been particularly focused on forging a close relationship with Trump — privately vowing to have “no daylight” with the president. That’s even meant reversing his opposition to importing cheaper drugs from Canada, a policy priority for Trump that Republicans have traditionally viewed skeptically and Azar just last year dismissed as a “gimmick."
Verma, though nominally Azar’s deputy, has cultivated her own line to the White House and become a favorite of senior officials as a prominent woman in the administration who readily attacks Democratic health policies, aiding Trump’s efforts to cast their ideas as extreme.
Several officials say Azar and his top aides have made changes within the department meant to marginalize Verma, exercising greater control over her public appearances and staffing decisions.
Azar in recent months has required that senior CMS officials report directly to him or his aides. In some instances, Verma has been excluded from internal policy meetings her subordinates have attended, four officials said.
"A lot of this is sort of, 'Just remember, we are in charge,'" said one official. "It's not so subtly making that point over and over."
Last month, the two officials sparred over the announcement of a plan to help health care providers better coordinate patient care. When Azar heard that Verma was set to lead the announcement, he insisted on being included, said three individuals with knowledge of the discussions. The White House then pushed to be included in the rollout as well, prolonging an agency turf war by days.
Health officials eventually agreed to make the announcement in stages. Azar and Verma would brief reporters on a phone call, and Verma — accompanied by HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan and Grogan — the next day would make an in-person announcement at a health industry association in Minnesota.
But that second part of the plan was scuttled after HHS aides realized the industry-hosted event could expose the health department to ethical risks. That forced a scramble to find a new location — a Mayo Clinic satellite facility — just hours ahead of the major announcement and after invitations had already gone out.
An HHS spokesperson said the secretary had been involved in the rollout from the start.
Azar aides have also intervened in CMS personnel decisions to a degree that three current administration officials described as highly unusual.
In one case that illustrates the tensions, top HHS officials over a year ago encouraged Verma to hire Paul Mango, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, to run CMS’ daily operations as her chief of staff and principal deputy administrator. Then, in July, Azar plucked Mango from CMS and gave him a top role at HHS — without consulting Verma. She didn’t find out until Mango told her less than an hour before the move was announced publicly, two officials said.
Verma spent the following months without an official chief of staff, largely because HHS officials hadn’t signed off on giving that role to Brady Brookes, a former aide to Pence who had been Verma’s right hand for months. She was formally approved for the job last week.
CMS has encountered similar roadblocks trying to make acting Medicaid director Calder Lynch the program’s permanent leader, officials said. He enjoys wide support in the agency.
In other instances, Azar has established a direct line with Verma’s top aides to advise him on major policy efforts. Shortly after Verma hired Adam Boehler to run CMS' innovation center last year, Azar tapped him to serve simultaneously as a senior HHS adviser on value-based care.
Azar also asserted his authority over John Brooks, a senior CMS official overseeing Medicare, who simultaneously became a senior adviser to Azar on drug pricing.
In another case earlier this month, Azar’s top aides told Alec Aramanda, the top CMS liaison to Capitol Hill, that he would report directly to Azar's staff instead of Verma, although CMS has its own legislative division, three officials said.
Officials said the confusion over who reports to whom undermines the administration’s work. Without a clear chain of command, the policy making process can be easily scrambled and break down.
"It just makes it so much harder, and our jobs are hard enough already," one official said. "I don't see what the net positive outcome is."
An HHS spokesperson defended Azar, saying, "The secretary believes firmly in one goal and one team and put these reporting structures into place to better communicate and operationalize subject-matter experts to work on implementing the president's agenda at HHS."
Fucking Crazy...
Here's why Bloomberg insists he's not crazy
None of his assumptions is wildly implausible. It would just take all of them coming true for this to work.
By JOHN F. HARRIS, SALLY GOLDENBERG and MARC CAPUTO
Yes, say the political strategists around former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, the notion of him becoming the Democratic presidential nominee requires many unprecedented and highly speculative factors falling into place just so.
No, these strategists insist, the billionaire media titan and philanthropist is not crazy, and neither are they.
The evidence for the alleged non-craziness is based on polling, an emphatically low regard for the current field of Democratic candidates, and an emphatically high regard for Bloomberg’s purported assets. These include a compelling life story, a record of accomplishment as mayor, credibility with activists on gun control and climate change, and an ability to nationalize the race this coming winter and early spring with a historic torrent of money and messaging.
What Bloomberg contemplates is not so much an exercise in threading the political needle as pulverizing that needle as it has existed for decades.
“We’re just going to rewrite a new system,” said Kevin Sheekey, a senior Bloomberg strategist.
“Our theory of the case is that we’re going to skip the first four early states and we’re going to run as intensive a campaign” in other Democratic states as rivals do in Iowa and New Hampshire. That plan kicks in with the March 3 run of Super Tuesday states, but won’t stop there.
“We’re going to do it all across the country,” Sheekey said.
In background briefings, Bloomberg operatives defend this strategy in ways that makes logical sense as an abstraction but requires suspension of disbelief about numerous practical factors that are largely outside his control:
— That the contest will remain muddled and fluid until the March 3 Super Tuesday primaries (the first time Bloomberg’s name will be on the ballot), even though historically the early states have clarified the race and created frontrunners in ways that offered no path to late entrants.
— That Bloomberg’s argument that he’s best-positioned to beat President Donald Trump will be compelling eventually to African-Americans and women, even though he starts the race with gaping challenges with these groups.
— That the narrative advanced by liberal pundits, that Democrats in 2020 urgently want a more progressive agenda and a more demographically diverse nominee, is wrong — even though this is precisely what has powered Elizabeth Warren’s campaign so far.
Here is a breakdown of four key strategic assumptions of Bloomberg’s nascent campaign, along with some “yes but” analysis about why those assumptions might be wobbly. Probably there is no individual Bloomberg assumption that is wildly implausible. But it is the number of assumptions that must come together at once that make this for now a low-probability endeavor.
Assumption: Bloomberg’s rivals are losers
There’s no nice way to put it. Bloomberg operatives say he made a decision months ago not to run for president in 2020, and in recent weeks reversed course because of public and private polls that he believes shows the people currently atop the Democratic field are suffering from potentially fatal political defects.
Under the current trajectory of the race, Bloomberg’s team believes Warren is the likely nominee. By this reckoning, former Vice President Joe Biden simply has not been commanding enough in debates and other venues to inspire confidence among Democratic voters. Bloomberg aides believe even his support from African-Americans may turn to mush in the event — entirely possible under current polling — that he barely registers in the Iowa caucuses and performs limply in the New Hampshire primary.
At the same time, the assumption is that South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is riding high in Iowa largely because he has devoted so much personal time there. It's an investment that may pay off with a victory there, the thinking goes, but won’t translate into national gains as Democratic voters conclude at age 37 he is too young and inexperienced to actually win.
Bloomberg aides say the former mayor likes and respects Warren personally, and is not bothered by the effect of her wealth tax proposals on his own fortune. The problem, they believe, is that she made a critical strategic error by deciding no rival would get to her left, and in the course embraced a “Medicare for All” plan in which private insurance would be banned. The plan is losing popularity among Democrats, and many party officials share Bloomberg’s belief that the plan could be her undoing in a general election.
“We did a poll, it was the exact same poll that the New York Times did — it overlapped by a few days — and it had Elizabeth Warren losing not one swing state but six swing states,” one of Bloomberg’s advisers said, listing the states as Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona. "If the election was held today, with her [running] against Trump, he wins all six" states, the person added.
Bloomberg aides say they are helped by Democratic voters’ eagerness to put head before heart in 2020. His recent polling has shown that 85 percent of Democrats rank perceived ability to beat Trump as a top concern, a number that has spiked 40 points or so since the impeachment drama got underway in September
These aides don’t disguise their hope that Warren will do well enough to serve as a foil but not so well that she is the prohibitive favorite by March 3. They want Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders to each keep enough support that the battle for the Democratic left remains a stalemate.
Yes, but: There are a lot of questionable assertions in the Bloomberg team’s appraisal of the race. Is it really so clear that Biden is spiraling downward? A new national Quinnipiac poll showed he just retook the lead while Warren lost half her support, dropping to third place. Journalists have been quoting Democratic chattering-class types for months about his alleged defects, but he continues to perform well in national polls and his support among African-Americans especially has proven durable. The primary is littered with candidates mired in single digits in the polls because they anticipated a Biden collapse that never came.
What’s more, primary candidates often look weak as general election contenders at this stage in the calendar. Historically, early victories have transformed how they are perceived by the electorate. The assertion that 2020 will be different is a wish by Bloomberg’s team but so far it is only that. In addition, women voters especially will remember that “too liberal, hurting our chances of victory” was also the rap against Nancy Pelosi, who led Democrats to take back the House in 2018.
Assumption: Bloomberg has a wide open country to portray himself as a winner
While the alleged losers are strapped down doing their thing in Iowa ( Feb. 3), New Hampshire ( Feb. 11), Nevada ( Feb. 22) and South Carolina ( Feb. 29), the man who ducked those contests is ready to spend hundreds of millions on ads and campaign turnout apparatus in Super Tuesday’s 15 states, plus more than a dozen other states and territories later in March.
It can’t be emphasized enough how unusual this strategy is. Successful nominating strategies have always started with early small-state victories, and then gone national. If one was going to try a different national-first strategy, it would help to have a self-funded campaign backed by a fortune (estimated $54 billion) that is several dozen times larger than Trump’s.
Yes, but: There may be good reason, beyond just limited financial resources, this has never been tried before. It is unproven whether a candidate can simply buy credibility with national voters through advertising if he has skipped the first states. It also might overestimate the effect of paid media and undervalue the impact of earned media from early-state victories. If Bloomberg has got thick enough skin to withstand the caustic dismissals of other candidates, and media mockery that will come if the strategy doesn’t work, he has nothing to lose in the experiment except a small fraction of his fortune.
The assumption: Biography can beat ideology
Bloomberg is not going to run principally as “a centrist” who thinks Warren and Sanders are “too liberal,” even though both things happen to be true. A message of someone who likes his porridge neither too hot nor to cold has already flopped for several candidates (Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper) and hardly fits with the disruptive mood driving politics in both parties.
At least initially, advisers say, Bloomberg hopes he doesn’t even have to launch direct criticism of Warren or other candidates.
Instead, he’s counting on two things. The first is that his personal life story as someone who started “as a middle-class kid” — as his first, newly released ad puts it — and then built the Bloomberg media empire before becoming mayor of New York shortly after 9/11, is compelling to a national audience that otherwise would not much identify with a rich New Yorker.
“We have a really compelling candidate with a really compelling message and life story and a lot of resources to share that message with a lot of people,"said adviser Howard Wolfson, "and that’s not about running against any other one person.”
The second is that his national leadership on gun control and climate change position him as sufficiently bold on the most important issues to appeal to progressives. In addition, not many candidates boast about their record of raising taxes, but that is what Bloomberg is doing now as the former Republican shores up his liberal bona fides.
Some Bloomberg advisers say they would, as a matter of personal interest, welcome a genuinely searching philosophical debate between Bloomberg and Warren on the role of capitalism and wealth creation, which Bloomberg believes in and Warren thinks too often hurtles into pure greed. It would feature two informed and articulate advocates for different points of view.
For now, however, they are trying the rather complicated feat of saying Warren may be unelectable while not offending her supporters and not looking like they are being condescending toward a strong woman.
Yes, but: Bloomberg’s biography is impressive, and his new ad making the case is polished. But this may be a case of telling rather than showing. In person, Bloomberg is hardly a commanding presence or electrifying speaker. As for their notions about how to run against a woman, if you are worried about being condescending there is a good chance you may indeed sound condescending.
The assumption: His people are smarter than the average bears
They may be crazy, they may be brilliant, but in any event the people around Bloomberg’s campaign have been around the block. It includes long-term advisors like Sheekey, a Washington native who started on Capitol Hill in his 20s and eventually became chief of staff to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and also Wolfson, who ran the Democrats' House campaign arm in the early 2000s and then ran communications for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first presidential campaign.
It also has old Bill Clinton advisers with centrist streaks like pollster Doug Schoen and ad maker Bill Knapp. The team is also quickly expanding to include respected regional operatives like Ryan Berni, a former deputy mayor of New Orleans who’s in talks with the Bloomberg campaign to help carry Louisiana and hire operatives in states that are often overlooked in primaries.
The Bloomberg team believes his efforts on behalf of House Democrats in 2018 helped him build technological capacity and expertise in identifying and mobilizing voters that is superior to his rivals. More broadly, Democrats in recent cycles have fallen behind in the data wars against Trump, with his ability to efficiently enlist supporters for fundraising and turnout without spending (as weaker candidates must) vast amounts of money simply to identify potential backers. Bloomberg’s team is boasting that he will close the gap.
Yes, but: Lincoln said that the hen is the wisest of all animals, “because she never cackles until the egg is laid.” Of course, Bloomberg’s team needs to do some boasting now just to be taken seriously by Democratic activists, who in these hyper-political times are following campaign coverage closely. The next four months will show how well Bloomberg’s team can match their ability to articulate a winning strategy with an ability to execute a winning strategy. Even Bloomberg’s team acknowledges they’re not completely sure that this strategy will be more of a golden egg or a goose egg.
None of his assumptions is wildly implausible. It would just take all of them coming true for this to work.
By JOHN F. HARRIS, SALLY GOLDENBERG and MARC CAPUTO
Yes, say the political strategists around former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, the notion of him becoming the Democratic presidential nominee requires many unprecedented and highly speculative factors falling into place just so.
No, these strategists insist, the billionaire media titan and philanthropist is not crazy, and neither are they.
The evidence for the alleged non-craziness is based on polling, an emphatically low regard for the current field of Democratic candidates, and an emphatically high regard for Bloomberg’s purported assets. These include a compelling life story, a record of accomplishment as mayor, credibility with activists on gun control and climate change, and an ability to nationalize the race this coming winter and early spring with a historic torrent of money and messaging.
What Bloomberg contemplates is not so much an exercise in threading the political needle as pulverizing that needle as it has existed for decades.
“We’re just going to rewrite a new system,” said Kevin Sheekey, a senior Bloomberg strategist.
“Our theory of the case is that we’re going to skip the first four early states and we’re going to run as intensive a campaign” in other Democratic states as rivals do in Iowa and New Hampshire. That plan kicks in with the March 3 run of Super Tuesday states, but won’t stop there.
“We’re going to do it all across the country,” Sheekey said.
In background briefings, Bloomberg operatives defend this strategy in ways that makes logical sense as an abstraction but requires suspension of disbelief about numerous practical factors that are largely outside his control:
— That the contest will remain muddled and fluid until the March 3 Super Tuesday primaries (the first time Bloomberg’s name will be on the ballot), even though historically the early states have clarified the race and created frontrunners in ways that offered no path to late entrants.
— That Bloomberg’s argument that he’s best-positioned to beat President Donald Trump will be compelling eventually to African-Americans and women, even though he starts the race with gaping challenges with these groups.
— That the narrative advanced by liberal pundits, that Democrats in 2020 urgently want a more progressive agenda and a more demographically diverse nominee, is wrong — even though this is precisely what has powered Elizabeth Warren’s campaign so far.
Here is a breakdown of four key strategic assumptions of Bloomberg’s nascent campaign, along with some “yes but” analysis about why those assumptions might be wobbly. Probably there is no individual Bloomberg assumption that is wildly implausible. But it is the number of assumptions that must come together at once that make this for now a low-probability endeavor.
Assumption: Bloomberg’s rivals are losers
There’s no nice way to put it. Bloomberg operatives say he made a decision months ago not to run for president in 2020, and in recent weeks reversed course because of public and private polls that he believes shows the people currently atop the Democratic field are suffering from potentially fatal political defects.
Under the current trajectory of the race, Bloomberg’s team believes Warren is the likely nominee. By this reckoning, former Vice President Joe Biden simply has not been commanding enough in debates and other venues to inspire confidence among Democratic voters. Bloomberg aides believe even his support from African-Americans may turn to mush in the event — entirely possible under current polling — that he barely registers in the Iowa caucuses and performs limply in the New Hampshire primary.
At the same time, the assumption is that South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is riding high in Iowa largely because he has devoted so much personal time there. It's an investment that may pay off with a victory there, the thinking goes, but won’t translate into national gains as Democratic voters conclude at age 37 he is too young and inexperienced to actually win.
Bloomberg aides say the former mayor likes and respects Warren personally, and is not bothered by the effect of her wealth tax proposals on his own fortune. The problem, they believe, is that she made a critical strategic error by deciding no rival would get to her left, and in the course embraced a “Medicare for All” plan in which private insurance would be banned. The plan is losing popularity among Democrats, and many party officials share Bloomberg’s belief that the plan could be her undoing in a general election.
“We did a poll, it was the exact same poll that the New York Times did — it overlapped by a few days — and it had Elizabeth Warren losing not one swing state but six swing states,” one of Bloomberg’s advisers said, listing the states as Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona. "If the election was held today, with her [running] against Trump, he wins all six" states, the person added.
Bloomberg aides say they are helped by Democratic voters’ eagerness to put head before heart in 2020. His recent polling has shown that 85 percent of Democrats rank perceived ability to beat Trump as a top concern, a number that has spiked 40 points or so since the impeachment drama got underway in September
These aides don’t disguise their hope that Warren will do well enough to serve as a foil but not so well that she is the prohibitive favorite by March 3. They want Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders to each keep enough support that the battle for the Democratic left remains a stalemate.
Yes, but: There are a lot of questionable assertions in the Bloomberg team’s appraisal of the race. Is it really so clear that Biden is spiraling downward? A new national Quinnipiac poll showed he just retook the lead while Warren lost half her support, dropping to third place. Journalists have been quoting Democratic chattering-class types for months about his alleged defects, but he continues to perform well in national polls and his support among African-Americans especially has proven durable. The primary is littered with candidates mired in single digits in the polls because they anticipated a Biden collapse that never came.
What’s more, primary candidates often look weak as general election contenders at this stage in the calendar. Historically, early victories have transformed how they are perceived by the electorate. The assertion that 2020 will be different is a wish by Bloomberg’s team but so far it is only that. In addition, women voters especially will remember that “too liberal, hurting our chances of victory” was also the rap against Nancy Pelosi, who led Democrats to take back the House in 2018.
Assumption: Bloomberg has a wide open country to portray himself as a winner
While the alleged losers are strapped down doing their thing in Iowa ( Feb. 3), New Hampshire ( Feb. 11), Nevada ( Feb. 22) and South Carolina ( Feb. 29), the man who ducked those contests is ready to spend hundreds of millions on ads and campaign turnout apparatus in Super Tuesday’s 15 states, plus more than a dozen other states and territories later in March.
It can’t be emphasized enough how unusual this strategy is. Successful nominating strategies have always started with early small-state victories, and then gone national. If one was going to try a different national-first strategy, it would help to have a self-funded campaign backed by a fortune (estimated $54 billion) that is several dozen times larger than Trump’s.
Yes, but: There may be good reason, beyond just limited financial resources, this has never been tried before. It is unproven whether a candidate can simply buy credibility with national voters through advertising if he has skipped the first states. It also might overestimate the effect of paid media and undervalue the impact of earned media from early-state victories. If Bloomberg has got thick enough skin to withstand the caustic dismissals of other candidates, and media mockery that will come if the strategy doesn’t work, he has nothing to lose in the experiment except a small fraction of his fortune.
The assumption: Biography can beat ideology
Bloomberg is not going to run principally as “a centrist” who thinks Warren and Sanders are “too liberal,” even though both things happen to be true. A message of someone who likes his porridge neither too hot nor to cold has already flopped for several candidates (Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper) and hardly fits with the disruptive mood driving politics in both parties.
At least initially, advisers say, Bloomberg hopes he doesn’t even have to launch direct criticism of Warren or other candidates.
Instead, he’s counting on two things. The first is that his personal life story as someone who started “as a middle-class kid” — as his first, newly released ad puts it — and then built the Bloomberg media empire before becoming mayor of New York shortly after 9/11, is compelling to a national audience that otherwise would not much identify with a rich New Yorker.
“We have a really compelling candidate with a really compelling message and life story and a lot of resources to share that message with a lot of people,"said adviser Howard Wolfson, "and that’s not about running against any other one person.”
The second is that his national leadership on gun control and climate change position him as sufficiently bold on the most important issues to appeal to progressives. In addition, not many candidates boast about their record of raising taxes, but that is what Bloomberg is doing now as the former Republican shores up his liberal bona fides.
Some Bloomberg advisers say they would, as a matter of personal interest, welcome a genuinely searching philosophical debate between Bloomberg and Warren on the role of capitalism and wealth creation, which Bloomberg believes in and Warren thinks too often hurtles into pure greed. It would feature two informed and articulate advocates for different points of view.
For now, however, they are trying the rather complicated feat of saying Warren may be unelectable while not offending her supporters and not looking like they are being condescending toward a strong woman.
Yes, but: Bloomberg’s biography is impressive, and his new ad making the case is polished. But this may be a case of telling rather than showing. In person, Bloomberg is hardly a commanding presence or electrifying speaker. As for their notions about how to run against a woman, if you are worried about being condescending there is a good chance you may indeed sound condescending.
The assumption: His people are smarter than the average bears
They may be crazy, they may be brilliant, but in any event the people around Bloomberg’s campaign have been around the block. It includes long-term advisors like Sheekey, a Washington native who started on Capitol Hill in his 20s and eventually became chief of staff to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and also Wolfson, who ran the Democrats' House campaign arm in the early 2000s and then ran communications for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first presidential campaign.
It also has old Bill Clinton advisers with centrist streaks like pollster Doug Schoen and ad maker Bill Knapp. The team is also quickly expanding to include respected regional operatives like Ryan Berni, a former deputy mayor of New Orleans who’s in talks with the Bloomberg campaign to help carry Louisiana and hire operatives in states that are often overlooked in primaries.
The Bloomberg team believes his efforts on behalf of House Democrats in 2018 helped him build technological capacity and expertise in identifying and mobilizing voters that is superior to his rivals. More broadly, Democrats in recent cycles have fallen behind in the data wars against Trump, with his ability to efficiently enlist supporters for fundraising and turnout without spending (as weaker candidates must) vast amounts of money simply to identify potential backers. Bloomberg’s team is boasting that he will close the gap.
Yes, but: Lincoln said that the hen is the wisest of all animals, “because she never cackles until the egg is laid.” Of course, Bloomberg’s team needs to do some boasting now just to be taken seriously by Democratic activists, who in these hyper-political times are following campaign coverage closely. The next four months will show how well Bloomberg’s team can match their ability to articulate a winning strategy with an ability to execute a winning strategy. Even Bloomberg’s team acknowledges they’re not completely sure that this strategy will be more of a golden egg or a goose egg.
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