Taylor Swift calls out Trump over late-night Minnesota tweet: 'You have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence?'
By Jessica Campisi
Taylor Swift lashed out at President Donald Trump on Friday for his late-night tweet threatening violence against protesters in Minnesota, tweeting that the President has been "stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism (his) entire presidency."
"After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? When the looting starts the shooting starts'???" the pop icon tweeted.
She tagged Trump in her tweet, adding: "We will vote you out in November."
Trump's tweet came as protests erupted in Minneapolis in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, a black man who was heard on video saying he couldn't breathe as a white police officer pinned him down with his knee.
"These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won't let that happen," the President tweeted early Friday morning. "Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts."
Twitter said Trump and the White House's official Twitter account, which posted the same message, violated the platform's rules against glorifying violence. A warning label has been added to both tweets -- the first time such a measure has been taken against the accounts.
Swift hasn't always gone public with her political opinions. In her Netflix documentary, "Miss Americana," the award-winning artist talked about her regrets over not openly opposing Trump during the 2016 presidential election.
It wasn't until the 2018 midterms that Swift spoke out with her endorsement of Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn's Senate rival, as well as another Democrat running in Tennessee.
Trump later hit back at the singer, saying, "I like Taylor's music about 25% less now."
Since then, Swift has become more vocal in criticizing the President. She told The Guardian in August that Trump is "gaslighting the American public."
"I really think that he thinks this is an autocracy," she said.
May 29, 2020
Important appointees has exaggerated his credentials.
The DHS Inspector General Claimed to Have a Philosophy PhD. He Doesn’t.
As Trump fires agency watchdogs, one of his most important appointees has exaggerated his credentials.
NOAH LANARD
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general wants you to know he has the credentials to hold accountable a 240,000-person department responsible for keeping the country safe. Until Thursday, Joseph Cuffari’s official government bio stated, “Dr. Cuffari earned a Ph.D. in philosophy.”
That isn’t true.
Cuffari’s PhD from California Coast University is in management, and it was conferred by a school that was unaccredited at the time. In 2004, two years after Cuffari received the degree, the Government Accountability Office prominently featured California Coast University in a report on unaccredited “diploma mills” that required no classroom instruction and issued degrees for low flat fees.
Despite all this, Cuffari has regularly signed letters to Congress and the head of DHS as “Joseph V. Cuffari, Ph.D.”
In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has fired independent inspectors general investigating wrongdoing by his administration and replaced them with political appointees beholden to him. In the past two months, Trump has gotten rid of or pushed aside five inspectors general, complaining that they were treating him “very unfairly.”
Cuffari, whom Trump nominated in November 2018, is the kind of laissez-faire watchdog Trump is looking for. A senior staffer in Cuffari’s office told the Washington Post in March that the office was often empty, well before the pandemic hit. House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) noted in a March letter to Cuffari that his office had completed only 20 reports this fiscal year, compared to 58 during the same period in 2018, before Cuffari’s tenure.“You have released reports at a slower pace than your predecessors for every year since 2003—the first year your office began issuing reports,” Maloney wrote.
DHS, which Cuffari is supposed to be holding accountable, has a nearly $70 billion budget. It includes the Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as the three immigration agencies at the center of Trump’s most controversial policy moves. Since the Senate confirmed Cuffari in July, his office has published only one critical report on the president’s anti-immigrant agenda, documenting DHS’s disastrous implementation of Trump’s family separation policy. Cuffari reportedly tried to suppress it. When it did come out, he distanced himself from the findings by stating that he hadn’t participated in the investigation. (Last week, “Joseph V. Cuffari, Ph.D.” informed Congress in a letter that he will be investigating ICE’s reckless response to COVID-19 at its detention centers.)
House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) sent a letter to Cuffari in March to express his “deep concerns” about the quality of reports from Cuffari’s office on the deaths of two children in Customs and Border Protection custody. The reports were so flawed, Thompson said, that he was worried about Cuffari’s ability to investigate DHS’s response to COVID-19. In December, the top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate homeland security committees stated in a letter that “bureaucratic infighting and competing allegations of misconduct” plagued the inspector general’s office under Cuffari.
Prior to becoming DHS inspector general, Cuffari worked as a policy adviser to Arizona’s Republican governor. Earlier, he spent more than two decades working in the Justice Department. His official bio mentions that he attended the University of Arizona as an undergrad but does not say where he got his PhD.
When I asked the inspector general’s press office to comment on Cuffari’s degree from an unaccredited school, a spokesperson replied that CCU was “accredited during his matriculation” from 1998 to 2002. But the school’s registrar told me that CCU gained accreditation for the first time in its history in 2005, and as a condition for becoming accredited, the Distance Education Accrediting Commission required it to stop offering doctoral programs.
After I mentioned those details to Cuffari’s spokesperson, the inspector general’s office contacted California Coast University and then clarified that the school was “approved by the State of California to award degrees of higher education, including doctoral degrees” when Cuffari was enrolled. But that approval came from the now-defunct California Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education, which okayed everything from barbering and bartending schools to a course in “Sexological Bodywork.” Officials at the bureau readily acknowledged to reporters in 2005 that they applied minimal standards, far less rigorous than accreditation. When Cuffari graduated, CCU’s degrees could not be legally used in neighboring Oregon, which was known for closely monitoring the quality of unaccredited schools.
California Coast University was founded by Thomas Neal in 1973 as California Western University, trading off the reputation of a school that had that same name until 1968. Neal said in 1990 that students could get his PhDs in less than a year. A few years before Cuffari enrolled, a regional accreditation official said about the degrees there, “Anybody can go out and buy anything they want to…Don’t represent it to the public.”
When Cuffari attended CCU, it was based out of a small office building in Orange County that’s currently home to a 7-Eleven and a Subway. But like all students there, he took his classes remotely. Doctoral students were required to show up on campus just once, to defend their dissertations, in a process the school’s catalogue called “a time for exchanging ideas and concepts whereby both the candidate and faculty share a beneficial growth experience.”
Unlike full-on diploma mills, CCU appeared to require some coursework, and doctoral students had to write a dissertation. Alumni have defended the school to say that they valued the education they received. But it was still far from a traditional institution. Its website at the time of Cuffari’s matriculation contained no information on the professors or the courses offered. A form for requesting additional information asked potential applicants how they’d heard about CCU. There were two options: a drop-down menu titled “Airline Magazine” that allowed people to select the airline where they had encountered the school and an open-ended field for any other source.
A 24-page catalogue for the 2002-2003 academic year listed the price of the management PhD at $4,575, a flat fee for up to five years of enrollment, rather than the per-semester tuition at most schools. The catalogue lists three deans, one of whom got her doctorate from CCU. Coursework requirements could be satisfied through previous graduate credits, by reading “Study Guides” and taking final exams on them, and by completing vaguely defined “Accelerated Learning Guides” that factored in “independent reading experience.”
In 2004, the GAO came out with its “diploma mills” investigation. The agency, which helps Congress conduct oversight of the executive branch, also submitted testimony to Congress bearing the subheading “Diploma Mills Are Easily Created and Some Have Issued Bogus Degrees to Federal Employees at Government Expense.” The GAO defined diploma mills as “nontraditional, unaccredited, postsecondary schools that offer degrees for a relatively low flat fee, promote the award of academic credits based on life experience, and do not require any classroom instruction.” CCU met those criteria.
As Trump fires agency watchdogs, one of his most important appointees has exaggerated his credentials.
NOAH LANARD
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general wants you to know he has the credentials to hold accountable a 240,000-person department responsible for keeping the country safe. Until Thursday, Joseph Cuffari’s official government bio stated, “Dr. Cuffari earned a Ph.D. in philosophy.”
That isn’t true.
Cuffari’s PhD from California Coast University is in management, and it was conferred by a school that was unaccredited at the time. In 2004, two years after Cuffari received the degree, the Government Accountability Office prominently featured California Coast University in a report on unaccredited “diploma mills” that required no classroom instruction and issued degrees for low flat fees.
Despite all this, Cuffari has regularly signed letters to Congress and the head of DHS as “Joseph V. Cuffari, Ph.D.”
In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has fired independent inspectors general investigating wrongdoing by his administration and replaced them with political appointees beholden to him. In the past two months, Trump has gotten rid of or pushed aside five inspectors general, complaining that they were treating him “very unfairly.”
Cuffari, whom Trump nominated in November 2018, is the kind of laissez-faire watchdog Trump is looking for. A senior staffer in Cuffari’s office told the Washington Post in March that the office was often empty, well before the pandemic hit. House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) noted in a March letter to Cuffari that his office had completed only 20 reports this fiscal year, compared to 58 during the same period in 2018, before Cuffari’s tenure.“You have released reports at a slower pace than your predecessors for every year since 2003—the first year your office began issuing reports,” Maloney wrote.
DHS, which Cuffari is supposed to be holding accountable, has a nearly $70 billion budget. It includes the Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as the three immigration agencies at the center of Trump’s most controversial policy moves. Since the Senate confirmed Cuffari in July, his office has published only one critical report on the president’s anti-immigrant agenda, documenting DHS’s disastrous implementation of Trump’s family separation policy. Cuffari reportedly tried to suppress it. When it did come out, he distanced himself from the findings by stating that he hadn’t participated in the investigation. (Last week, “Joseph V. Cuffari, Ph.D.” informed Congress in a letter that he will be investigating ICE’s reckless response to COVID-19 at its detention centers.)
House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) sent a letter to Cuffari in March to express his “deep concerns” about the quality of reports from Cuffari’s office on the deaths of two children in Customs and Border Protection custody. The reports were so flawed, Thompson said, that he was worried about Cuffari’s ability to investigate DHS’s response to COVID-19. In December, the top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate homeland security committees stated in a letter that “bureaucratic infighting and competing allegations of misconduct” plagued the inspector general’s office under Cuffari.
Prior to becoming DHS inspector general, Cuffari worked as a policy adviser to Arizona’s Republican governor. Earlier, he spent more than two decades working in the Justice Department. His official bio mentions that he attended the University of Arizona as an undergrad but does not say where he got his PhD.
When I asked the inspector general’s press office to comment on Cuffari’s degree from an unaccredited school, a spokesperson replied that CCU was “accredited during his matriculation” from 1998 to 2002. But the school’s registrar told me that CCU gained accreditation for the first time in its history in 2005, and as a condition for becoming accredited, the Distance Education Accrediting Commission required it to stop offering doctoral programs.
After I mentioned those details to Cuffari’s spokesperson, the inspector general’s office contacted California Coast University and then clarified that the school was “approved by the State of California to award degrees of higher education, including doctoral degrees” when Cuffari was enrolled. But that approval came from the now-defunct California Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education, which okayed everything from barbering and bartending schools to a course in “Sexological Bodywork.” Officials at the bureau readily acknowledged to reporters in 2005 that they applied minimal standards, far less rigorous than accreditation. When Cuffari graduated, CCU’s degrees could not be legally used in neighboring Oregon, which was known for closely monitoring the quality of unaccredited schools.
California Coast University was founded by Thomas Neal in 1973 as California Western University, trading off the reputation of a school that had that same name until 1968. Neal said in 1990 that students could get his PhDs in less than a year. A few years before Cuffari enrolled, a regional accreditation official said about the degrees there, “Anybody can go out and buy anything they want to…Don’t represent it to the public.”
When Cuffari attended CCU, it was based out of a small office building in Orange County that’s currently home to a 7-Eleven and a Subway. But like all students there, he took his classes remotely. Doctoral students were required to show up on campus just once, to defend their dissertations, in a process the school’s catalogue called “a time for exchanging ideas and concepts whereby both the candidate and faculty share a beneficial growth experience.”
Unlike full-on diploma mills, CCU appeared to require some coursework, and doctoral students had to write a dissertation. Alumni have defended the school to say that they valued the education they received. But it was still far from a traditional institution. Its website at the time of Cuffari’s matriculation contained no information on the professors or the courses offered. A form for requesting additional information asked potential applicants how they’d heard about CCU. There were two options: a drop-down menu titled “Airline Magazine” that allowed people to select the airline where they had encountered the school and an open-ended field for any other source.
A 24-page catalogue for the 2002-2003 academic year listed the price of the management PhD at $4,575, a flat fee for up to five years of enrollment, rather than the per-semester tuition at most schools. The catalogue lists three deans, one of whom got her doctorate from CCU. Coursework requirements could be satisfied through previous graduate credits, by reading “Study Guides” and taking final exams on them, and by completing vaguely defined “Accelerated Learning Guides” that factored in “independent reading experience.”
In 2004, the GAO came out with its “diploma mills” investigation. The agency, which helps Congress conduct oversight of the executive branch, also submitted testimony to Congress bearing the subheading “Diploma Mills Are Easily Created and Some Have Issued Bogus Degrees to Federal Employees at Government Expense.” The GAO defined diploma mills as “nontraditional, unaccredited, postsecondary schools that offer degrees for a relatively low flat fee, promote the award of academic credits based on life experience, and do not require any classroom instruction.” CCU met those criteria.
GOP put them at risk
Pennsylvania Democrats say GOP put them at risk by hiding member's positive COVID-19 test
Allyson Chiu
Democratic state legislators in Pennsylvania accused their Republican counterparts Wednesday of keeping a GOP lawmaker's positive coronavirus diagnosis under wraps for days, arguing that the lack of transparency may have increased their risk of contracting the potentially deadly infection.
Republican State Rep. Andrew Lewis released a statement Wednesday revealing that he received his positive test result on May 20 - a jarring announcement that rattled House Democrats who said they had no idea he had been sick or that other GOP members had been told to self-quarantine due to possible exposure.
Lewis, whose last appearance at the state Capitol was on May 14, said he immediately went into isolation after testing positive and informed House officials about his condition. He stressed that "every member or staff member who met the criteria for exposure" was contacted and told to isolate. One of Lewis's GOP colleagues confirmed on social media Wednesday that he had been asked to self-quarantine, but Democrats said they are aware of at least two other Republicans who were also instructed to stay home.
On Wednesday, outraged Democratic lawmakers condemned House Republicans for not disclosing that the novel coronavirus had infiltrated Pennsylvania's state Capitol, with some demanding resignations and formal investigations into why details about Lewis's diagnosis were withheld.
"While we are pleased to learn that this House member seems to have recovered, it is simply unacceptable that some House Republicans knew about this for more than a week and sat on that knowledge," Pennsylvania House Democratic Leader Frank Dermody said in a statement. "Knowing how House members and staff work closely together at the Capitol, we should have been made aware of this much sooner."
Mike Straub, a spokesman for House Republicans, told The Washington Post in an emailed statement that GOP officials implemented guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
"Anyone who met those guidelines was notified and quarantined," Straub said.
Straub declined to specify which legislators were notified or how many, citing medical privacy laws, but he noted that tracing the people Lewis had come into contact with at the Capitol in the days before the lawmaker tested positive was "easily verified."
In a Facebook live stream Wednesday night, Lewis said he was at the Capitol for a couple hours on May 14 and only interacted with a handful of people.
"I had no idea that I may have been exposed. I had no symptoms," Lewis said. "I wore a mask. I did not shake any hands."
But that weekend, Lewis started to feel unwell, displaying symptoms that included a fever, fatigue and a slight cough. Within days, he had tested positive for the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19.
Lewis said he waited until Wednesday to go public with his diagnosis because he felt that the people he might have exposed "deserved a little window of time to get tested, do their isolation and those types of things."
One such person was GOP state Rep. Russ Diamond, who disclosed Wednesday in a lengthy Facebook post that he had been self-quarantining since May 21. Earlier that day, Diamond, a vocal opponent of wearing masks, had addressed a Pennsylvania House committee in person barefaced, Spotlight PA reported.
"Upon receiving that notice, I voluntarily cancelled every in-person meeting or other engagement I had on my schedule through today," wrote Diamond, noting that he did not know the identity of the person who tested positive. Diamond told Spotlight PA that he does not have any symptoms and did not get tested.
"I am not ill. In fact, I feel like a million bucks," he wrote on Facebook, later adding: "I'm done. My self-quarantine ends today. Tomorrow, I will be back in Harrisburg."
Similarly, Lewis said in his Wednesday statement that he had "fully recovered" and now feels "completely fine."
Meanwhile, state Democrats were appalled that their Republican colleagues did not promptly inform them of Lewis's positive test result or the subsequent self-quarantines of other GOP members, instead allowing them to potentially risk exposure by continuing to participate in person in voting sessions and House committee meetings. Several Democrats said Wednesday that they only became aware of Lewis's diagnosis after being approached by a reporter.
"I just spent the better part of the last 11 weeks sitting across a room from people who would eventually test positive and decided not to tell us," state Democratic Rep. Brian Sims said in a video live-streamed on Facebook. "They did do some kind of quarantine. They did do some kind of contact tracing. They, I guess, being Republican leadership."
Sims, who at times grew visibly angry and repeatedly used expletives, attacked House Republicans for being "callous liars" and accused them of recklessly endangering lives in pursuit of partisan goals.
"Every single day that our gerrymandered Republican leadership has been calling us up into this building so they could pass these ridiculous bills pretending that it was safe to be out there, they were covering up that it wasn't safe," he said, referencing efforts from GOP lawmakers pushing to reopen Pennsylvania. "You have no idea how the people around you are impacted."
State Rep. Dan Frankel, minority chairman of the House Health Committee, said in a statement that he was "horrified to learn that members of the General Assembly failed to do the right thing." Frankel said Democrats only discovered Wednesday that four Republican legislators were self-quarantining.
"The failure of these Republican members and their leadership to follow basic safety protocols makes plain their disregard for those around them, but worse: it reveals a total abdication of their responsibility to act as leaders during this confusing time," Frankel said.
"The virus doesn't care about someone's ideology," he added. "The virus doesn't care if you believe in it."
According to most recent figures, Pennsylvania now has more than 69,000 cases of coronavirus and roughly 5,200 reported deaths.
Wednesday's revelation prompted a number of Democrats to call for the resignation of Republican leaders, including Pennsylvania House Speaker Mike Turzai, a demand that was supported by U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa..
"The utter indifference to peoples' lives" shown by House Republicans "proves that they are incapable, unqualified, and unwilling to faithfully discharge the duties of their office," Democratic State Rep. Leanne Krueger said in a statement.
Others urged the state attorney general to launch an investigation into the incident.
"We should know if any criminal or ethical laws were broken," tweeted state Rep. Kevin J. Boyle, a Democrat who chairs a House committee on which both Lewis and Diamond sit.
But for Democratic Rep. Jennifer O'Mara, the decision whether to disclose details of Lewis's test results to all House lawmakers should not have had anything to do with politics.
"This isn't a Republican or Democrat issue. This is a human being issue," O'Mara said. "My colleagues decided to keep information about public health from us, putting all of us at an unnecessary risk."
Allyson Chiu
Democratic state legislators in Pennsylvania accused their Republican counterparts Wednesday of keeping a GOP lawmaker's positive coronavirus diagnosis under wraps for days, arguing that the lack of transparency may have increased their risk of contracting the potentially deadly infection.
Republican State Rep. Andrew Lewis released a statement Wednesday revealing that he received his positive test result on May 20 - a jarring announcement that rattled House Democrats who said they had no idea he had been sick or that other GOP members had been told to self-quarantine due to possible exposure.
Lewis, whose last appearance at the state Capitol was on May 14, said he immediately went into isolation after testing positive and informed House officials about his condition. He stressed that "every member or staff member who met the criteria for exposure" was contacted and told to isolate. One of Lewis's GOP colleagues confirmed on social media Wednesday that he had been asked to self-quarantine, but Democrats said they are aware of at least two other Republicans who were also instructed to stay home.
On Wednesday, outraged Democratic lawmakers condemned House Republicans for not disclosing that the novel coronavirus had infiltrated Pennsylvania's state Capitol, with some demanding resignations and formal investigations into why details about Lewis's diagnosis were withheld.
"While we are pleased to learn that this House member seems to have recovered, it is simply unacceptable that some House Republicans knew about this for more than a week and sat on that knowledge," Pennsylvania House Democratic Leader Frank Dermody said in a statement. "Knowing how House members and staff work closely together at the Capitol, we should have been made aware of this much sooner."
Mike Straub, a spokesman for House Republicans, told The Washington Post in an emailed statement that GOP officials implemented guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
"Anyone who met those guidelines was notified and quarantined," Straub said.
Straub declined to specify which legislators were notified or how many, citing medical privacy laws, but he noted that tracing the people Lewis had come into contact with at the Capitol in the days before the lawmaker tested positive was "easily verified."
In a Facebook live stream Wednesday night, Lewis said he was at the Capitol for a couple hours on May 14 and only interacted with a handful of people.
"I had no idea that I may have been exposed. I had no symptoms," Lewis said. "I wore a mask. I did not shake any hands."
But that weekend, Lewis started to feel unwell, displaying symptoms that included a fever, fatigue and a slight cough. Within days, he had tested positive for the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19.
Lewis said he waited until Wednesday to go public with his diagnosis because he felt that the people he might have exposed "deserved a little window of time to get tested, do their isolation and those types of things."
One such person was GOP state Rep. Russ Diamond, who disclosed Wednesday in a lengthy Facebook post that he had been self-quarantining since May 21. Earlier that day, Diamond, a vocal opponent of wearing masks, had addressed a Pennsylvania House committee in person barefaced, Spotlight PA reported.
"Upon receiving that notice, I voluntarily cancelled every in-person meeting or other engagement I had on my schedule through today," wrote Diamond, noting that he did not know the identity of the person who tested positive. Diamond told Spotlight PA that he does not have any symptoms and did not get tested.
"I am not ill. In fact, I feel like a million bucks," he wrote on Facebook, later adding: "I'm done. My self-quarantine ends today. Tomorrow, I will be back in Harrisburg."
Similarly, Lewis said in his Wednesday statement that he had "fully recovered" and now feels "completely fine."
Meanwhile, state Democrats were appalled that their Republican colleagues did not promptly inform them of Lewis's positive test result or the subsequent self-quarantines of other GOP members, instead allowing them to potentially risk exposure by continuing to participate in person in voting sessions and House committee meetings. Several Democrats said Wednesday that they only became aware of Lewis's diagnosis after being approached by a reporter.
"I just spent the better part of the last 11 weeks sitting across a room from people who would eventually test positive and decided not to tell us," state Democratic Rep. Brian Sims said in a video live-streamed on Facebook. "They did do some kind of quarantine. They did do some kind of contact tracing. They, I guess, being Republican leadership."
Sims, who at times grew visibly angry and repeatedly used expletives, attacked House Republicans for being "callous liars" and accused them of recklessly endangering lives in pursuit of partisan goals.
"Every single day that our gerrymandered Republican leadership has been calling us up into this building so they could pass these ridiculous bills pretending that it was safe to be out there, they were covering up that it wasn't safe," he said, referencing efforts from GOP lawmakers pushing to reopen Pennsylvania. "You have no idea how the people around you are impacted."
State Rep. Dan Frankel, minority chairman of the House Health Committee, said in a statement that he was "horrified to learn that members of the General Assembly failed to do the right thing." Frankel said Democrats only discovered Wednesday that four Republican legislators were self-quarantining.
"The failure of these Republican members and their leadership to follow basic safety protocols makes plain their disregard for those around them, but worse: it reveals a total abdication of their responsibility to act as leaders during this confusing time," Frankel said.
"The virus doesn't care about someone's ideology," he added. "The virus doesn't care if you believe in it."
According to most recent figures, Pennsylvania now has more than 69,000 cases of coronavirus and roughly 5,200 reported deaths.
Wednesday's revelation prompted a number of Democrats to call for the resignation of Republican leaders, including Pennsylvania House Speaker Mike Turzai, a demand that was supported by U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa..
"The utter indifference to peoples' lives" shown by House Republicans "proves that they are incapable, unqualified, and unwilling to faithfully discharge the duties of their office," Democratic State Rep. Leanne Krueger said in a statement.
Others urged the state attorney general to launch an investigation into the incident.
"We should know if any criminal or ethical laws were broken," tweeted state Rep. Kevin J. Boyle, a Democrat who chairs a House committee on which both Lewis and Diamond sit.
But for Democratic Rep. Jennifer O'Mara, the decision whether to disclose details of Lewis's test results to all House lawmakers should not have had anything to do with politics.
"This isn't a Republican or Democrat issue. This is a human being issue," O'Mara said. "My colleagues decided to keep information about public health from us, putting all of us at an unnecessary risk."
I am sad to say I live in a country of stupid fat fucks.....
Life at the Trump Tailgate: Spiked Slurpees, Culture Wars and the Coronavirus Hoax
Michigan is beset by disease, floods and joblessness, but it’s voter fraud conspiracies that really frighten the president’s supporters.
By TIM ALBERTA
At the intersection of Rawsonville and Textile Roads, on a slender stretch of turf that runs the length of a half-deserted strip mall, Kathryn Prater and Kelra Rise are dancing.
The longtime friends, white women in their early 40s, haven’t had much to celebrate recently. Rise lost her job as a shipping clerk two months ago and is now uninsured and struggling to get by; Prater, a school bus driver, will receive her final paycheck in two weeks with no obvious prospect of income thereafter. Their pain is representative of Michigan on the whole, a state battered by Covid-19 to the tune of 5,000 deaths; a state crushed under the weight of a 22 percent unemployment rate; and now, a state reeling from a 500-year flood in mid-Michigan that has displaced tens of thousands of people. If America has a headache, Michigan has a migraine.
But in this moment, none of it matters. For the masses gathered on the side of the road, the sight of a presidential motorcade—and the knowledge that Donald Trump himself has come to their backyard, to visit the local Ford plant and pay homage to the old “Arsenal of Democracy”—is sufficient to distract from the suffering of the day. Country music blares from the back of a parked pickup truck. Giddy customers fork over $5 bills and pull MAGA shirts over their outfits. One man hoists a Betsy Ross-era flag from his fishing pole, with a naked brunette doll—“Governor Half-Whit!” he cries, echoing a presidential putdown—dangling from a noose.
Prater and Rise—both of whom voted for Democrat Gretchen Whitmer in 2018, and both of whom are siding now with Trump in his beef with Michigan’s governor—toast their spiked Slurpee cups from the nearby 7-Eleven. With no sports to watch, politics are the only game in town—and this is Trump’s tailgate, an experience as unique as the times, the closest thing to one of the president’s signature rallies at a moment when large gatherings have been banned.
“You know, I actually did this once before, when George W. Bush came to Michigan in the early 2000s. It was just a fun thing to do—go see the president’s motorcade,” Rise says. She chuckles. “Trust me, it was nothing like this.”
That’s easy to believe. For one thing, the previous Republican president never had a base quite like this. As Rise speaks, she nods across the street; a black woman, wearing sandals and a white MAGA T-shirt, is pacing the street’s shoulder, chanting, “Blacks for Trump; Trump is not a racist! Blacks for Trump; Trump is not a racist!” A moment later, a shouting match—one of several I saw—erupts between pro-Trump demonstrators on the embankment and anti-Trump protesters throwing up middle fingers from their car windows while stopped at the red light, leading one red-cap clad man to shout, “Go back to Ann Arbor, pussies!”
Of course, there are other differences. The 43rd president, he of the compassionate conservative worldview and the noble lineage, would never have thought, particularly during times of national crisis, to turn a head-of-state visit into a campaigner-in-chief event. He would not, as Trump did Thursday, mock the people who don’t support him; he would not, as Trump did Thursday, belittle his opponent in personal ways. (“I don't know how the hell these unions aren’t endorsing Trump instead of the standard Democrat,” the president told Ford employees, after touring the facility. “A Democrat that doesn't even know where he is!”)
In fairness, Trump was comparatively tame during the swing through southeast Michigan. His continued refusal to wear a mask in public and a bizarre reference to Henry Ford’s bloodline notwithstanding, the president was on his best behavior. He mentioned his nemesis, Whitmer, without attaching ad hominem insults. He dutifully delivered prepared remarks aimed at appealing to Michigan’s civic pride. He rightly showered the Rawsonville plant laborers with praise, highlighting their mettle and their selflessness and their skill in churning out world-class ventilators from a factory that two months ago was making batteries and fuel pumps.
This is the Donald Trump we witness in fleeting glimpses, the Donald Trump so many Republican leaders are desperate to see, the Donald Trump who uses the awesome stagecraft of his presidency to unite instead of divide, to drive a message of optimism and inclusiveness, to reassure Americans of his ability to rebuild a nation rather than tear half of it down.
But there is no consistency to these efforts. Indeed, even as Trump stuck predominantly to the script on Thursday, portraying himself as the fireman who had ventured into a state smoldering with rage and anxiety, the scent of kerosene followed close behind. Just 24 hours before he arrived in Michigan, the president launched a dangerous disinformation campaign, accusing the secretary of state of going “rogue” by illegally sending absentee ballots to every Michigan voter. He threatened to block funding to Michigan—a state beleaguered by multiple converging disasters, including one that was unfolding just as the tweet was sent—“if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!”
To be clear, none of this is accurate. Voters were sent applications to vote absentee, a practice consistent with a newly adopted Michigan law (a law that exists in other states, red and blue alike). The Michigan GOP has itself sent out applications. There is nothing sordid or illegitimate going on; both parties here understand the rules of the game and are attempting to master them before November.
But Trump is playing his own game. Ever in need of a foil—be it Barack Obama’s birth certificate, John McCain, Megyn Kelly, Low Energy Jeb, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Crooked Hillary, the Deep State, Never Trumpers, Sleepy Joe, Obamagate, or combinations thereof—the president has set his sights on the institution of the ballot box. The benefit is twofold: Trump can simultaneously incite the distress of his base to juice enthusiasm come November while establishing a built-in justification should he lose.
The effects are already manifest. In conversation after conversation with voters here Thursday, Trump supporters repeatedly—and completely unsolicited—say Democrats are attempting to steal the election from the president.
“I lived in Chicago for six years. We know how Mayor Daley stuffed the ballot box for JFK against Nixon.” says Keith Brudder, a 72-year-old landscape contractor from the nearby town of Willis. “That’s what the Democrats in charge here want to do, with this mail-in voting. There’s just no way to have accountability for those ballots like you do when people come to the voting booth.”
“In Wayne County alone, more than a million people who weren’t registered to vote in 2018 got to vote anyway, and that’s how Whitmer and these Democrats got elected,” says Matthew Shepard, a retired career military man who drove his hulking, orange paramilitary-style truck 90 minutes south from Shiawassee County to cheer on the president. (He offered no documentation for those statistics.) “That’s the only way Trump loses this election—this mail voting scam.”
Deborah Fuqua-Frey, who sits on the board of the Washtenaw County GOP and helped organize the pro-Trump rally here, says the United Auto Workers union “controls the outcome of the 2020 election.” And that terrifies her. “Because nobody knows how to stuff the ballot box like the UAW,” she says. “Trust me, I was a third-generation UAW member, and I know they’re always looking for new ways to cheat. That’s what they’re going to do with the mail system.”
According to Fuqua-Frey, this would represent a sinister final attempt to remove Trump from office, after the failure of the Mueller report, the Ukraine-inspired impeachment process, and, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Isn’t it kind of convenient that as soon as impeachment failed, we’ve suddenly got this virus?” she asks, alternating between puffs on a Winston and her inhaler. “This was domestic political terrorism from the Democratic Party. They’ve got all these numbers inflated, especially the deaths. Nobody can explain why nobody’s dying from other causes anymore. Most of these people who are ‘dying from coronavirus’ aren’t actually dying from coronavirus. It’s domestic political terrorism. But Trump will be fine. His voters know better. We aren’t falling for it.”
And so it went Thursday in Ypsilanti. With the president paying special attention to Michigan at a time of unprecedented turmoil in the state, touring a region rich in symbolic value for his reelection campaign, nearly every conversation with his die-hard supporters detoured into the dark and conspiratorial. Sure, there was talk outside the Ford plant of jobs created and regulations slashed and veterans taken care of. But much of that talk was perfunctory, a sort of rhetorical appetizer before digging into the red-blood entrees the president has chosen to serve up for his base.
Having obsessively covered the Republican Party from the ground up over the past decade, from the twilight of George W. Bush through the first term of Trump, I thought I’d seen it all, heard it all. But this was new. The warp speed at which alarms about voter fraud—and specifically, voting by mail—were synchronized from the president’s Twitter feed to the lips of his voters guarantees a volatile five months ahead, and a potentially volcanic period thereafter.
“This was the most exciting day of my life. OK, the second-most exciting day, after the birth of my grandkids,” says Paula Stone, a Ypsilanti resident, after the president’s motorcade passes. Tonight, Stone says, like every other night, she’ll watch Fox News and click around the internet and social media for information about the president. But she’s not particularly interested in the highlights of his speech inside the Ford plant.
“I want to know more about this vote-by-mail fraud,” she says. “I’ve heard some shady shit is going down.”
Michigan is beset by disease, floods and joblessness, but it’s voter fraud conspiracies that really frighten the president’s supporters.
By TIM ALBERTA
At the intersection of Rawsonville and Textile Roads, on a slender stretch of turf that runs the length of a half-deserted strip mall, Kathryn Prater and Kelra Rise are dancing.
The longtime friends, white women in their early 40s, haven’t had much to celebrate recently. Rise lost her job as a shipping clerk two months ago and is now uninsured and struggling to get by; Prater, a school bus driver, will receive her final paycheck in two weeks with no obvious prospect of income thereafter. Their pain is representative of Michigan on the whole, a state battered by Covid-19 to the tune of 5,000 deaths; a state crushed under the weight of a 22 percent unemployment rate; and now, a state reeling from a 500-year flood in mid-Michigan that has displaced tens of thousands of people. If America has a headache, Michigan has a migraine.
But in this moment, none of it matters. For the masses gathered on the side of the road, the sight of a presidential motorcade—and the knowledge that Donald Trump himself has come to their backyard, to visit the local Ford plant and pay homage to the old “Arsenal of Democracy”—is sufficient to distract from the suffering of the day. Country music blares from the back of a parked pickup truck. Giddy customers fork over $5 bills and pull MAGA shirts over their outfits. One man hoists a Betsy Ross-era flag from his fishing pole, with a naked brunette doll—“Governor Half-Whit!” he cries, echoing a presidential putdown—dangling from a noose.
Prater and Rise—both of whom voted for Democrat Gretchen Whitmer in 2018, and both of whom are siding now with Trump in his beef with Michigan’s governor—toast their spiked Slurpee cups from the nearby 7-Eleven. With no sports to watch, politics are the only game in town—and this is Trump’s tailgate, an experience as unique as the times, the closest thing to one of the president’s signature rallies at a moment when large gatherings have been banned.
“You know, I actually did this once before, when George W. Bush came to Michigan in the early 2000s. It was just a fun thing to do—go see the president’s motorcade,” Rise says. She chuckles. “Trust me, it was nothing like this.”
That’s easy to believe. For one thing, the previous Republican president never had a base quite like this. As Rise speaks, she nods across the street; a black woman, wearing sandals and a white MAGA T-shirt, is pacing the street’s shoulder, chanting, “Blacks for Trump; Trump is not a racist! Blacks for Trump; Trump is not a racist!” A moment later, a shouting match—one of several I saw—erupts between pro-Trump demonstrators on the embankment and anti-Trump protesters throwing up middle fingers from their car windows while stopped at the red light, leading one red-cap clad man to shout, “Go back to Ann Arbor, pussies!”
Of course, there are other differences. The 43rd president, he of the compassionate conservative worldview and the noble lineage, would never have thought, particularly during times of national crisis, to turn a head-of-state visit into a campaigner-in-chief event. He would not, as Trump did Thursday, mock the people who don’t support him; he would not, as Trump did Thursday, belittle his opponent in personal ways. (“I don't know how the hell these unions aren’t endorsing Trump instead of the standard Democrat,” the president told Ford employees, after touring the facility. “A Democrat that doesn't even know where he is!”)
In fairness, Trump was comparatively tame during the swing through southeast Michigan. His continued refusal to wear a mask in public and a bizarre reference to Henry Ford’s bloodline notwithstanding, the president was on his best behavior. He mentioned his nemesis, Whitmer, without attaching ad hominem insults. He dutifully delivered prepared remarks aimed at appealing to Michigan’s civic pride. He rightly showered the Rawsonville plant laborers with praise, highlighting their mettle and their selflessness and their skill in churning out world-class ventilators from a factory that two months ago was making batteries and fuel pumps.
This is the Donald Trump we witness in fleeting glimpses, the Donald Trump so many Republican leaders are desperate to see, the Donald Trump who uses the awesome stagecraft of his presidency to unite instead of divide, to drive a message of optimism and inclusiveness, to reassure Americans of his ability to rebuild a nation rather than tear half of it down.
But there is no consistency to these efforts. Indeed, even as Trump stuck predominantly to the script on Thursday, portraying himself as the fireman who had ventured into a state smoldering with rage and anxiety, the scent of kerosene followed close behind. Just 24 hours before he arrived in Michigan, the president launched a dangerous disinformation campaign, accusing the secretary of state of going “rogue” by illegally sending absentee ballots to every Michigan voter. He threatened to block funding to Michigan—a state beleaguered by multiple converging disasters, including one that was unfolding just as the tweet was sent—“if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!”
To be clear, none of this is accurate. Voters were sent applications to vote absentee, a practice consistent with a newly adopted Michigan law (a law that exists in other states, red and blue alike). The Michigan GOP has itself sent out applications. There is nothing sordid or illegitimate going on; both parties here understand the rules of the game and are attempting to master them before November.
But Trump is playing his own game. Ever in need of a foil—be it Barack Obama’s birth certificate, John McCain, Megyn Kelly, Low Energy Jeb, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Crooked Hillary, the Deep State, Never Trumpers, Sleepy Joe, Obamagate, or combinations thereof—the president has set his sights on the institution of the ballot box. The benefit is twofold: Trump can simultaneously incite the distress of his base to juice enthusiasm come November while establishing a built-in justification should he lose.
The effects are already manifest. In conversation after conversation with voters here Thursday, Trump supporters repeatedly—and completely unsolicited—say Democrats are attempting to steal the election from the president.
“I lived in Chicago for six years. We know how Mayor Daley stuffed the ballot box for JFK against Nixon.” says Keith Brudder, a 72-year-old landscape contractor from the nearby town of Willis. “That’s what the Democrats in charge here want to do, with this mail-in voting. There’s just no way to have accountability for those ballots like you do when people come to the voting booth.”
“In Wayne County alone, more than a million people who weren’t registered to vote in 2018 got to vote anyway, and that’s how Whitmer and these Democrats got elected,” says Matthew Shepard, a retired career military man who drove his hulking, orange paramilitary-style truck 90 minutes south from Shiawassee County to cheer on the president. (He offered no documentation for those statistics.) “That’s the only way Trump loses this election—this mail voting scam.”
Deborah Fuqua-Frey, who sits on the board of the Washtenaw County GOP and helped organize the pro-Trump rally here, says the United Auto Workers union “controls the outcome of the 2020 election.” And that terrifies her. “Because nobody knows how to stuff the ballot box like the UAW,” she says. “Trust me, I was a third-generation UAW member, and I know they’re always looking for new ways to cheat. That’s what they’re going to do with the mail system.”
According to Fuqua-Frey, this would represent a sinister final attempt to remove Trump from office, after the failure of the Mueller report, the Ukraine-inspired impeachment process, and, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Isn’t it kind of convenient that as soon as impeachment failed, we’ve suddenly got this virus?” she asks, alternating between puffs on a Winston and her inhaler. “This was domestic political terrorism from the Democratic Party. They’ve got all these numbers inflated, especially the deaths. Nobody can explain why nobody’s dying from other causes anymore. Most of these people who are ‘dying from coronavirus’ aren’t actually dying from coronavirus. It’s domestic political terrorism. But Trump will be fine. His voters know better. We aren’t falling for it.”
And so it went Thursday in Ypsilanti. With the president paying special attention to Michigan at a time of unprecedented turmoil in the state, touring a region rich in symbolic value for his reelection campaign, nearly every conversation with his die-hard supporters detoured into the dark and conspiratorial. Sure, there was talk outside the Ford plant of jobs created and regulations slashed and veterans taken care of. But much of that talk was perfunctory, a sort of rhetorical appetizer before digging into the red-blood entrees the president has chosen to serve up for his base.
Having obsessively covered the Republican Party from the ground up over the past decade, from the twilight of George W. Bush through the first term of Trump, I thought I’d seen it all, heard it all. But this was new. The warp speed at which alarms about voter fraud—and specifically, voting by mail—were synchronized from the president’s Twitter feed to the lips of his voters guarantees a volatile five months ahead, and a potentially volcanic period thereafter.
“This was the most exciting day of my life. OK, the second-most exciting day, after the birth of my grandkids,” says Paula Stone, a Ypsilanti resident, after the president’s motorcade passes. Tonight, Stone says, like every other night, she’ll watch Fox News and click around the internet and social media for information about the president. But she’s not particularly interested in the highlights of his speech inside the Ford plant.
“I want to know more about this vote-by-mail fraud,” she says. “I’ve heard some shady shit is going down.”
Shrank at 5% annual rate
U.S. economy shrank at 5% annual rate in Q1
It was the biggest quarterly decline in more than a decade.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
The U.S. economy shrank at an even faster pace than initially estimated in the first three months of this year with economists continuing to expect a far worse outcome in the current April-June quarter.
The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic health, fell at an annual rate of 5% in the first quarter, a bigger decline than the 4.8% drop first estimated a month ago.
It was the biggest quarterly decline in more than a decade, since an 8.4% fall in the fourth quarter of 2008 during the depths of the financial crisis.
The downward revision to first quarter GDP reflected weaker investment by businesses in their inventories which was partially offset by slightly stronger consumer spending.
Economists believe the lockdowns that shut wide swaths of the economy and triggered the layoffs of millions of workers will send the GDP sinking at an annual rate of 40% in the current quarter. That would be the biggest quarterly decline on records that go back to 1947. It would be four times the size of the previous decline set back in 1958.
Many forecasters believe growth will rebound sharply in the July-September quarter with the Congressional Budget Office predicting GDP will rise at an annual rate of 21.5%. Still, that gain would not be nearly enough to make up for the economic output that was lost during the first and second quarters.
And many economists worry that the positive GDP performance being forecast for the second half of the year may not come about if the current efforts to re-open the economy do not go well. If the relaxing of stay-at-home rules results in a second wave of the coronavirus that could be a serious setback to efforts to get consumers out shopping again in stores and eating in restaurants.
Sung Won Sohn, a business and economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said he was forecasting GDP would grow at an annual rate of around 9% in the third quarter and 15% in the fourth quarter of this year if there is no second wave of the virus.
But he said even with those gains, GDP for the whole year will be down 5.3%. Sohn said it will take years to make up the lost GDP, noting that it took over six years for the economy to climb back to where GDP output was before the start of the last years.
The Trump administration, which had been counting on a strong economy to give President Donald Trump a big boost in his re-election battle, has been talking up the coming rebound.
Calling it a “transition to greatness,” the president envisions strong growth in the second half of the year.
“You’re going to see some great numbers in the fourth quarter, and you’re going to end up doing a great year next year,” Trump said recently.
But Sohn and other economists say that the economy will likely not achieve sustained GDP gains until a vaccine has been found and it is widely available, something that could still be a year or more away.
“I think there is a pretty good chance there will be a second wave of the virus,” Sohn said. “Just because we have a vaccine doesn’t mean we will stop the virus in its tracks because of the amount of time it will take to get people vaccinated.”
The GDP report Thursday was the second of three estimates for the first quarter. The 5% decline followed a 2.1% gain at an annual rate in the fourth quarter of last year.
For the first quarter, consumer spending, which accounts for 70% of economic activity, fell at an annual rate of 6.8%. It was the biggest quarterly decline since an 8.7% fall in the second quarter of 1980 but was still a slight improvement from the government's first estimate of an even bigger 7.8% decline.
Businesses decisions to slow their inventory restocking trimmed 1.4 percentage-points from GDP in the first quarter, three times the initial estimate of a 0.5 percentage-point drag from restocking cutbacks.
Business investment in new plants and equipment fell at an annual rate of 7.9% in the first quarter, a slightly smaller decline than first reported, while residential construction increased at an 18.5% rate, slightly slower than first estimated.
It was the biggest quarterly decline in more than a decade.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
The U.S. economy shrank at an even faster pace than initially estimated in the first three months of this year with economists continuing to expect a far worse outcome in the current April-June quarter.
The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic health, fell at an annual rate of 5% in the first quarter, a bigger decline than the 4.8% drop first estimated a month ago.
It was the biggest quarterly decline in more than a decade, since an 8.4% fall in the fourth quarter of 2008 during the depths of the financial crisis.
The downward revision to first quarter GDP reflected weaker investment by businesses in their inventories which was partially offset by slightly stronger consumer spending.
Economists believe the lockdowns that shut wide swaths of the economy and triggered the layoffs of millions of workers will send the GDP sinking at an annual rate of 40% in the current quarter. That would be the biggest quarterly decline on records that go back to 1947. It would be four times the size of the previous decline set back in 1958.
Many forecasters believe growth will rebound sharply in the July-September quarter with the Congressional Budget Office predicting GDP will rise at an annual rate of 21.5%. Still, that gain would not be nearly enough to make up for the economic output that was lost during the first and second quarters.
And many economists worry that the positive GDP performance being forecast for the second half of the year may not come about if the current efforts to re-open the economy do not go well. If the relaxing of stay-at-home rules results in a second wave of the coronavirus that could be a serious setback to efforts to get consumers out shopping again in stores and eating in restaurants.
Sung Won Sohn, a business and economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said he was forecasting GDP would grow at an annual rate of around 9% in the third quarter and 15% in the fourth quarter of this year if there is no second wave of the virus.
But he said even with those gains, GDP for the whole year will be down 5.3%. Sohn said it will take years to make up the lost GDP, noting that it took over six years for the economy to climb back to where GDP output was before the start of the last years.
The Trump administration, which had been counting on a strong economy to give President Donald Trump a big boost in his re-election battle, has been talking up the coming rebound.
Calling it a “transition to greatness,” the president envisions strong growth in the second half of the year.
“You’re going to see some great numbers in the fourth quarter, and you’re going to end up doing a great year next year,” Trump said recently.
But Sohn and other economists say that the economy will likely not achieve sustained GDP gains until a vaccine has been found and it is widely available, something that could still be a year or more away.
“I think there is a pretty good chance there will be a second wave of the virus,” Sohn said. “Just because we have a vaccine doesn’t mean we will stop the virus in its tracks because of the amount of time it will take to get people vaccinated.”
The GDP report Thursday was the second of three estimates for the first quarter. The 5% decline followed a 2.1% gain at an annual rate in the fourth quarter of last year.
For the first quarter, consumer spending, which accounts for 70% of economic activity, fell at an annual rate of 6.8%. It was the biggest quarterly decline since an 8.7% fall in the second quarter of 1980 but was still a slight improvement from the government's first estimate of an even bigger 7.8% decline.
Businesses decisions to slow their inventory restocking trimmed 1.4 percentage-points from GDP in the first quarter, three times the initial estimate of a 0.5 percentage-point drag from restocking cutbacks.
Business investment in new plants and equipment fell at an annual rate of 7.9% in the first quarter, a slightly smaller decline than first reported, while residential construction increased at an 18.5% rate, slightly slower than first estimated.
It's called Sedition....
Trump’s ‘big action’ on social media rests on limited legal powers
His administration cannot rewrite the law that protects tech companies from many lawsuits. But a noisy fight with Silicon Valley could rally his base.
By CRISTIANO LIMA
President Donald Trump is finally delivering on his long-threatened campaign to launch a counterstrike against social media companies that have fact-checked, downgraded or booted some of his most vocal online supporters — and in one new high-profile instance, himself.
But his efforts also reveal how little legal recourse he may have to target Silicon Valley giants protected by the First Amendment, gridlock in Congress and reluctance from within his own party. The strategy relies mostly on a newly signed executive order that seeks to limit the scope of a 1996 law that shields tech companies from many lawsuits. Trump also pledged to pursue still-undefined legislation to pare those protections.
Even if Trump’s moves won’t change much overnight on Twitter, Facebook or other platforms, they will satisfy his political desires to threaten big tech companies and rally conservatives who think social media has inherent bias against them. And he may be setting the stage for a protracted effort to use executive agencies and his allies in Congress to pressure tech companies to change their ways.
What is Trump doing exactly?
The president signed an executive order Thursday afternoon that calls on various agencies to take a hard look at the long-standing legal protections that safeguard online companies from libel suits and other litigation. These protections, under a statute known as Section 230, are a crucial tool that companies like Twitter and Facebook rely on to amass their fortunes — offering Trump a target in his crusade against what he calls pervasive censorship of conservatives.
But it’s an open question whether regulators will follow through on his plans, which would be sure to draw swift legal opposition. His order depends a lot on decisions by agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission, which are not subject to his direct control, as well as state attorneys general working with his Justice Department.
Why is he doing this?
Trump for weeks has teased action to address Republican allegations that social media platforms stifle conservative viewpoints, tweeing earlier this month that “the Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google." He added: "The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation."
No conclusive evidence exists of an anti-GOP bias on platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter, and the companies have consistently denied intentionally suppressing any political viewpoints as they enforce policies against hateful or dangerous conduct. But the president and his allies escalated their attacks on Silicon Valley this week after Twitter added fact-checking labels to a pair of Trump’s tweets for the first time.
Trump had tweeted without evidence that mail-in ballots in this year's elections are likely to be “substantially fraudulent,” a claim Twitter said misled users about the electoral process. One member of the Federal Election Commission, Democrat Ellen Weintraub, has called the allegations a baseless “conspiracy theory.” Independent fact-checkers have also found the claims to be unsubstantiated.
Trump vowed on Wednesday to take a “big action” against Twitter and other social media companies after the controversy erupted.
At a signing ceremony for the executive order Thursday, Trump cited Twitter's fact-checking labels as an "egregious example" of what he called the company sliding into "political activism."
"The choices that Twitter makes when it chooses to suppress, edit, blacklist, shadow ban are editorial decisions, pure and simple, they're editorial decisions," he said. "In these moments Twitter ceases to be a neutral public platform and they become an editor with a viewpoint."
What exactly would Trump’s order do?
It would take various tracks. For one thing, Trump’s order would direct the Commerce Department to ask the FCC to review when websites qualify for Section 230’s legal protections. It would prohibit federal agencies from advertising through social networks that “violate free speech principles,” and gives agencies 30 days to report their spending and the “viewpoint-based speech restrictions” on the platforms where they’ve spent money.
Finally, it tasks the FTC and state attorneys general, in partnership with the Justice Department, to review whether internet companies have deceived or been unfair to users by censoring political speech beyond what they have publicly disclosed.
Wait, Section 230? What’s that?
Section 230, part of a 1996 law called the Communications Decency Act, broadly shields websites from being sued for content their users post — or for taking down material that they “in good faith” believe to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” That once-obscure section has been crucial to the fortunes of companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google that make money from all the tweets, likes, photos and videos put up by their users, as well as smaller firms that set up shop online.
Now Section 230 has become a political target for leaders of both parties, who think Silicon Valley giants are botching their handling of political and other forms of speech online. Those include Republicans, like Trump, who accuse the tech giants of censoring conservatives — but also Democratic lawmakers who say the companies don’t do enough to curb politicians’ lies, targeted harassment and hate speech.
"My executive order calls for new regulations under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to make it that social media companies that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield," Trump said Thursday.
The agencies can’t rewrite a law that Congress has passed, can they?
No, but Trump is asking them to review when the law can be applied. It’s an open legal question whether agencies like the FCC can or should make the kinds of legal determinations that Trump is asking for, and any decisions they make would probably become a matter for a judge to decide.
Has Trump tried asking Congress to rewrite the law?
The president on Thursday for the first time publicly called for lawmakers to take up legislation to roll back the those protections, a push that has been gaining steam for months among his Capitol Hill allies.
Attorney General William Barr, who stood alongside Trump at the ceremony, said the administration is "preparing federal legislation" that they plan to send over "shortly" for review at the Office of Management and Budget. Barr wouldn't offer details, but Trump chimed in that it could contain sweeping changes to the legal shield. “One of the things we may do, Bill, is just remove or totally change 230," Trump said, without elaborating.
The remarks are likely to embolden GOP tech critics such Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Trump ally who said Wednesday that he’s drafting a bill to roll back the protections if companies engage in “editorializing” or “opine as to the truth or falsity” of statements online. Gaetz told POLITICO last year that he raised his issues with the law with top White House officials.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), another top Trump ally and a leading GOP tech critic on Capitol Hill, similarly introduced a bill that would remove the legal shield from companies if they cannot prove to regulators that they are not stifling certain viewpoints. Trump broadly praised Hawley’s legislative efforts on big tech at the White House social media summit last year, which the lawmaker attended and spoke at.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has jumped on the bandwagon, too, tweeting Sunday that the law “protects social media companies like @Twitter because they are considered forums not publishers. But if they have now decided to exercise an editorial role like a publisher then they should no longer be shielded from liability & treated as publishers under the law.”
So will Congress act on the bias charges?
Any GOP-led effort to address bias allegations by amending Section 230 would be dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled House. It has also failed so far to pick up any significant backing even in the Republican-led Senate. That campaign has even faced opposition from conservative officials and advocacy groups that largely want Washington to keep its hands off the internal decisions of private companies.
“I want to be very clear: I’m not for gutting Section 230. It’s essential for consumers and entities in the internet ecosystem,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said at a hearing on the legal shield last year. “Misguided and hasty attempts to amend or even repeal Section 230 for bias or other reasons could have unintended consequences for free speech and the ability for small businesses to provide new and innovative services.”
Haven’t some Democrats called for rolling back the legal shield, too?
Yes, but allegations of bias are where bipartisan agreement on Section 230 ends.
The issue has gained attention in the 2020 presidential race, with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden calling for the legal shield to be entirely “revoked.” But Biden said the action was needed because platforms like Facebook are “propagating falsehoods they know to be false” — pretty much the opposite of Trump’s complaints that they’re too quick to label or take down conservatives’ messages.
A bipartisan group of senators, led by Trump ally Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), is pushing for a different update to Section 230 that would require websites to prove to regulators they are taking sufficient steps to combat child exploitation to keep those protections. That bill wouldn’t address the bias allegations, however.
Still, Barr contended Thursday the administration's new legislative effort could pick up Democratic support.
"One of the things that I found has the broadest bipartisan support these days is the feeling that this provision Section 230 has been stretched way beyond its original intention," he said. "And people feel that on both sides of the aisle."
But Democratic lawmakers weren't rushing to embrance Trump's newest proposal.
“Whatever the criticisms I may have of current law, Trump’s demagogic meat-ax Executive Order is exactly wrong," Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said in a statement Thursday. He called Trump's order "a blatant attempt to use the full power of the United States government to force private companies to lie for him.”
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) accused Trump of trying to divert attention from the pandemic and economic calamity weighing down his reelection prospects. "He wants you to talk about twitter and not the mass preventable deaths and the 40 million unemployed," Schatz tweeted.
What else has the White House tried on social media bias?
It’s ramped up a lot of public pressure — in keeping with a longstanding Republican tactic of using critiques of the mainstream media, and now Silicon Valley, to rile up supporters.
Last spring, for example, the White House launched a website to solicit people’s accusations that social media companies had censored them, but it never disclosed what it did with the information it collected — which included personal details like users’ citizenship status.
Later that year, the White House held a gathering of conservative lawmakers and right-wing social media personalities that the administration billed as an exploration of “all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech and the free speech rights of all Americans.” Trump said at the time he planned to haul in executives from the big tech companies for follow-up discussions, but the only such meeting to come to light was a private dinner last fall with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Discussions of alleged anti-GOP bias on social media also came up at a Justice Department summit with state attorneys general in 2018, under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as POLITICO reported at the time. The talks triggered fears among industry executives that the Trump administration was politicizing unrelated reviews into the conduct of Silicon Valley giants.
What have the courts said?
Federal judges have said repeatedly — as recently as Wednesday — that online companies are private businesses with a legal right to police content on their sites. They have rejected claims that platforms like Twitter are trampling on people’s First Amendment rights by deleting their posts or even banning them altogether.
In Wednesday’s ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a suit that right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer had filed against Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple. Loomer, a Trump supporter, has been banned from multiple platforms for making anti-Muslim statements.
“In general, the First Amendment ‘prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech,'” the court said. And Silicon Valley, for all its power, is not the government.
Is there any harm in what Trump is proposing?
His critics among tech industry and civil liberties groups call it an alarming attempt to intimidate companies’ exercise of free speech. But some tech experts say it could also take attention away from a debate that Congress and the executive branch need to have — has this legal immunity handed Silicon Valley too much power over what billions of people see and read, even on issues as vital as this year’s elections or the coronavirus?
“The draft is 95% political theater — rhetoric without legal foundation, and without legal impact,” said Daphne Keller of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University, reacting to a draft version that matched the final order. But she added, “the real takeaway should be that this EO is a distraction. We have only ourselves to blame if it makes us avert our gaze from the crises that are right in front of us, and that urgently need attention: 100,000 Americans dead in a profoundly mismanaged pandemic, for example, or the potential failure of democratic process in the 2020 elections.”
His administration cannot rewrite the law that protects tech companies from many lawsuits. But a noisy fight with Silicon Valley could rally his base.
By CRISTIANO LIMA
President Donald Trump is finally delivering on his long-threatened campaign to launch a counterstrike against social media companies that have fact-checked, downgraded or booted some of his most vocal online supporters — and in one new high-profile instance, himself.
But his efforts also reveal how little legal recourse he may have to target Silicon Valley giants protected by the First Amendment, gridlock in Congress and reluctance from within his own party. The strategy relies mostly on a newly signed executive order that seeks to limit the scope of a 1996 law that shields tech companies from many lawsuits. Trump also pledged to pursue still-undefined legislation to pare those protections.
Even if Trump’s moves won’t change much overnight on Twitter, Facebook or other platforms, they will satisfy his political desires to threaten big tech companies and rally conservatives who think social media has inherent bias against them. And he may be setting the stage for a protracted effort to use executive agencies and his allies in Congress to pressure tech companies to change their ways.
What is Trump doing exactly?
The president signed an executive order Thursday afternoon that calls on various agencies to take a hard look at the long-standing legal protections that safeguard online companies from libel suits and other litigation. These protections, under a statute known as Section 230, are a crucial tool that companies like Twitter and Facebook rely on to amass their fortunes — offering Trump a target in his crusade against what he calls pervasive censorship of conservatives.
But it’s an open question whether regulators will follow through on his plans, which would be sure to draw swift legal opposition. His order depends a lot on decisions by agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission, which are not subject to his direct control, as well as state attorneys general working with his Justice Department.
Why is he doing this?
Trump for weeks has teased action to address Republican allegations that social media platforms stifle conservative viewpoints, tweeing earlier this month that “the Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google." He added: "The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation."
No conclusive evidence exists of an anti-GOP bias on platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter, and the companies have consistently denied intentionally suppressing any political viewpoints as they enforce policies against hateful or dangerous conduct. But the president and his allies escalated their attacks on Silicon Valley this week after Twitter added fact-checking labels to a pair of Trump’s tweets for the first time.
Trump had tweeted without evidence that mail-in ballots in this year's elections are likely to be “substantially fraudulent,” a claim Twitter said misled users about the electoral process. One member of the Federal Election Commission, Democrat Ellen Weintraub, has called the allegations a baseless “conspiracy theory.” Independent fact-checkers have also found the claims to be unsubstantiated.
Trump vowed on Wednesday to take a “big action” against Twitter and other social media companies after the controversy erupted.
At a signing ceremony for the executive order Thursday, Trump cited Twitter's fact-checking labels as an "egregious example" of what he called the company sliding into "political activism."
"The choices that Twitter makes when it chooses to suppress, edit, blacklist, shadow ban are editorial decisions, pure and simple, they're editorial decisions," he said. "In these moments Twitter ceases to be a neutral public platform and they become an editor with a viewpoint."
What exactly would Trump’s order do?
It would take various tracks. For one thing, Trump’s order would direct the Commerce Department to ask the FCC to review when websites qualify for Section 230’s legal protections. It would prohibit federal agencies from advertising through social networks that “violate free speech principles,” and gives agencies 30 days to report their spending and the “viewpoint-based speech restrictions” on the platforms where they’ve spent money.
Finally, it tasks the FTC and state attorneys general, in partnership with the Justice Department, to review whether internet companies have deceived or been unfair to users by censoring political speech beyond what they have publicly disclosed.
Wait, Section 230? What’s that?
Section 230, part of a 1996 law called the Communications Decency Act, broadly shields websites from being sued for content their users post — or for taking down material that they “in good faith” believe to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” That once-obscure section has been crucial to the fortunes of companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google that make money from all the tweets, likes, photos and videos put up by their users, as well as smaller firms that set up shop online.
Now Section 230 has become a political target for leaders of both parties, who think Silicon Valley giants are botching their handling of political and other forms of speech online. Those include Republicans, like Trump, who accuse the tech giants of censoring conservatives — but also Democratic lawmakers who say the companies don’t do enough to curb politicians’ lies, targeted harassment and hate speech.
"My executive order calls for new regulations under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to make it that social media companies that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield," Trump said Thursday.
The agencies can’t rewrite a law that Congress has passed, can they?
No, but Trump is asking them to review when the law can be applied. It’s an open legal question whether agencies like the FCC can or should make the kinds of legal determinations that Trump is asking for, and any decisions they make would probably become a matter for a judge to decide.
Has Trump tried asking Congress to rewrite the law?
The president on Thursday for the first time publicly called for lawmakers to take up legislation to roll back the those protections, a push that has been gaining steam for months among his Capitol Hill allies.
Attorney General William Barr, who stood alongside Trump at the ceremony, said the administration is "preparing federal legislation" that they plan to send over "shortly" for review at the Office of Management and Budget. Barr wouldn't offer details, but Trump chimed in that it could contain sweeping changes to the legal shield. “One of the things we may do, Bill, is just remove or totally change 230," Trump said, without elaborating.
The remarks are likely to embolden GOP tech critics such Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Trump ally who said Wednesday that he’s drafting a bill to roll back the protections if companies engage in “editorializing” or “opine as to the truth or falsity” of statements online. Gaetz told POLITICO last year that he raised his issues with the law with top White House officials.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), another top Trump ally and a leading GOP tech critic on Capitol Hill, similarly introduced a bill that would remove the legal shield from companies if they cannot prove to regulators that they are not stifling certain viewpoints. Trump broadly praised Hawley’s legislative efforts on big tech at the White House social media summit last year, which the lawmaker attended and spoke at.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has jumped on the bandwagon, too, tweeting Sunday that the law “protects social media companies like @Twitter because they are considered forums not publishers. But if they have now decided to exercise an editorial role like a publisher then they should no longer be shielded from liability & treated as publishers under the law.”
So will Congress act on the bias charges?
Any GOP-led effort to address bias allegations by amending Section 230 would be dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled House. It has also failed so far to pick up any significant backing even in the Republican-led Senate. That campaign has even faced opposition from conservative officials and advocacy groups that largely want Washington to keep its hands off the internal decisions of private companies.
“I want to be very clear: I’m not for gutting Section 230. It’s essential for consumers and entities in the internet ecosystem,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said at a hearing on the legal shield last year. “Misguided and hasty attempts to amend or even repeal Section 230 for bias or other reasons could have unintended consequences for free speech and the ability for small businesses to provide new and innovative services.”
Haven’t some Democrats called for rolling back the legal shield, too?
Yes, but allegations of bias are where bipartisan agreement on Section 230 ends.
The issue has gained attention in the 2020 presidential race, with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden calling for the legal shield to be entirely “revoked.” But Biden said the action was needed because platforms like Facebook are “propagating falsehoods they know to be false” — pretty much the opposite of Trump’s complaints that they’re too quick to label or take down conservatives’ messages.
A bipartisan group of senators, led by Trump ally Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), is pushing for a different update to Section 230 that would require websites to prove to regulators they are taking sufficient steps to combat child exploitation to keep those protections. That bill wouldn’t address the bias allegations, however.
Still, Barr contended Thursday the administration's new legislative effort could pick up Democratic support.
"One of the things that I found has the broadest bipartisan support these days is the feeling that this provision Section 230 has been stretched way beyond its original intention," he said. "And people feel that on both sides of the aisle."
But Democratic lawmakers weren't rushing to embrance Trump's newest proposal.
“Whatever the criticisms I may have of current law, Trump’s demagogic meat-ax Executive Order is exactly wrong," Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said in a statement Thursday. He called Trump's order "a blatant attempt to use the full power of the United States government to force private companies to lie for him.”
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) accused Trump of trying to divert attention from the pandemic and economic calamity weighing down his reelection prospects. "He wants you to talk about twitter and not the mass preventable deaths and the 40 million unemployed," Schatz tweeted.
What else has the White House tried on social media bias?
It’s ramped up a lot of public pressure — in keeping with a longstanding Republican tactic of using critiques of the mainstream media, and now Silicon Valley, to rile up supporters.
Last spring, for example, the White House launched a website to solicit people’s accusations that social media companies had censored them, but it never disclosed what it did with the information it collected — which included personal details like users’ citizenship status.
Later that year, the White House held a gathering of conservative lawmakers and right-wing social media personalities that the administration billed as an exploration of “all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech and the free speech rights of all Americans.” Trump said at the time he planned to haul in executives from the big tech companies for follow-up discussions, but the only such meeting to come to light was a private dinner last fall with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Discussions of alleged anti-GOP bias on social media also came up at a Justice Department summit with state attorneys general in 2018, under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as POLITICO reported at the time. The talks triggered fears among industry executives that the Trump administration was politicizing unrelated reviews into the conduct of Silicon Valley giants.
What have the courts said?
Federal judges have said repeatedly — as recently as Wednesday — that online companies are private businesses with a legal right to police content on their sites. They have rejected claims that platforms like Twitter are trampling on people’s First Amendment rights by deleting their posts or even banning them altogether.
In Wednesday’s ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a suit that right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer had filed against Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple. Loomer, a Trump supporter, has been banned from multiple platforms for making anti-Muslim statements.
“In general, the First Amendment ‘prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech,'” the court said. And Silicon Valley, for all its power, is not the government.
Is there any harm in what Trump is proposing?
His critics among tech industry and civil liberties groups call it an alarming attempt to intimidate companies’ exercise of free speech. But some tech experts say it could also take attention away from a debate that Congress and the executive branch need to have — has this legal immunity handed Silicon Valley too much power over what billions of people see and read, even on issues as vital as this year’s elections or the coronavirus?
“The draft is 95% political theater — rhetoric without legal foundation, and without legal impact,” said Daphne Keller of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University, reacting to a draft version that matched the final order. But she added, “the real takeaway should be that this EO is a distraction. We have only ourselves to blame if it makes us avert our gaze from the crises that are right in front of us, and that urgently need attention: 100,000 Americans dead in a profoundly mismanaged pandemic, for example, or the potential failure of democratic process in the 2020 elections.”
Big red flag
Rising ICU bed use 'a big red flag'
States proceed with reopening plans despite warnings local hospitals may struggle to handle a new coronavirus outbreak.
By NOLAN D. MCCASKILL
Intensive care units in Montgomery, Ala., are overflowing with Covid-19 patients, pushing them into emergency departments that are not primed to care for them. And Alabama’s capital city could be a harbinger for other parts of the country.
ICU beds are also starting to fill up in places like Minnesota’s Twin Cities; Omaha, Neb.; and the entire state of Rhode Island, according to local health officials and epidemiologists tracking such data, a warning sign of possible health care problems down the road. The availability of ICU beds is one measure of a hospital’s ability to care for its most vulnerable patients — people with severe illness who require more staff to treat them and may need life-support equipment such as a ventilator to breathe. And it's served as a metric for whether the local health care system is able to handle a coronavirus outbreak, albeit a constantly shifting one.
Some state leaders deny there are problems, saying they are prepared to convert regular hospital beds to ICU beds, if necessary. In the meantime, they are pressing ahead with reopening plans.
But Paul Biddinger, director of Harvard's School of Public Health Emergency Preparedness Research, Evaluation and Practice Program, says it's “a big red flag that when you see increasing numbers of ICU patients with Covid.”
“Our greatest fear about not being able to blunt the peak of illness, not being able to flatten the curve, is that ... people will be exposed to the virus, become ill and potentially die because too many people became sick too quickly and it overwhelmed the health care system," Biddinger tells POLITICO.
Minnesota’s most populous counties, Hennepin and Ramsey — where Minneapolis and St. Paul are located — are each projected to have a shortage of dozens of ICU beds in the next three weeks, according to the health care intelligence firm Leavitt Partners, which is led by President George W. Bush’s former Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. Ramsey County is also at risk of exceeding its hospital bed capacity, meaning hospitals there would have no additional space to convert for ICU patients.
Nevertheless, Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) signed an executive order Wednesday allowing outdoor dining at bars and restaurants and salons and barbershops to open, beginning on Monday.
Jan Malcolm, Minnesota’s health commissioner, told reporters the same day that despite mixed data indicators, the state is seeing “relative stability in the growth pattern” and expects to hit its peak in late June or July.
“We do see some more accelerating and concerning signs like the rate of increase in ICU capacity,” Malcolm acknowledged. “Even though we have planned for this and have surge capacity available in the state, the fact that a couple of our hospitals have already gone into that surge space at this point in the curve is important to note and gives us reason to be really, really watching these data.”
Leavitt Partners’ Torch Insight Covid-19 Burden Index tool projects hospital and ICU bed capacity across states, metro areas, counties and individual hospitals, based off the assumption that people continue behaving the same way.
The tool can inform public officials and health care leaders that, “If things don’t change, this is what I need to be ready for at the extreme in three weeks,” said David Muhlestein, chief strategy and chief research officer of Leavitt Partners, the group behind the burden index tool.
“The concern is that somebody will say, ‘Oh, we think it’s going to go down so we’re not going to prepare for the worst-case scenario,’ and then the worst-case scenario happens,” Muhlestein said in an interview.
The projections are an additional warning sign as local leaders nationwide seek to avoid what occurred in Montgomery, where the Democratic mayor is still sounding the alarm after gaining national attention last week for warning that “you’re in trouble” if you need an ICU bed in the city.
Mayor Steven Reed told NPR this week that hospital leaders are telling him to “sound the alarm and to let people know we’re still in the middle of a pandemic and that we are in a health crisis.”
Minnesota saw its largest single-day spike in Covid-19-related ICU bed use earlier this week, jumping from 207 people hospitalized in the ICU on Sunday to 248 by Monday. There were 260 ICU hospitalizations on Wednesday, the highest since the pandemic began.
And more than 90 percent of beds are in use in hospitals in the metro and southeast regions of the state. The percentage of ICU beds in use are 1 to 3 percentage points shy of 90 percent in the metro, northeast and southeast regions.
Kristen Ehresmann, the Minnesota Department of Health director of infectious disease, epidemiology, prevention and control, told reporters Tuesday that the state was also hearing that hospitals were at or near ICU capacity at the end of last week and having isolated staffing concerns. But she downplayed the rapid increase in hospitalizations.
“This level of ICU use has not been unexpected,” she said, noting that the state tracks Covid-19 admissions and the availability of ICU beds and ventilators. “This past weekend, the overall picture for ICU bed availability on May 25 showed 87 percent of the ICU beds in the metro were in use. Other regions of the state had more availability. For comparison, it isn’t unusual for ICU beds to be 95 percent full during flu season.”
But as Biddinger pointed out, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is much less predictable than flu season.
“Across the country, it is common for intensive care unit beds to be full, especially during flu season, but that’s with relatively predictable patterns of illness,” said Biddinger, who also serves as medical director of emergency preparedness at Massachusetts General Hospital. “With Covid, it’s not nearly as predictable, and the potential of a Covid outbreak is much more severe than the peak of a traditional flu season.”
Biddinger said the lower the peak of hospitalizations, the more likely it is that people who need ICU care will be able to access it.
Monday’s death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer pushed his knee into Floyd’s neck and ignored pleas that he couldn’t breathe, has sparked protests and could also lead to additional spread of the virus. Demonstrators have been photographed and recorded in large crowds, many not wearing masks. Peaceful protests Wednesday ended with looted stores and burned buildings.
Malcolm said there’s a “very, very real risk that the pandemic poses to” protesters and anyone they interact with, given “the importance of the degree of community spread that we have today.”
She made a “plea for people to be careful and to be mindful of those health guidelines and the importance of distancing and masking” while protesting.
In Nebraska, where driving tests resumed at DMVs on Wednesday, a state legislator clashed with the state’s chief medical officer after he told reporters that a slight uptick in Covid-19 patients over the past week wasn’t affecting hospital bed or ICU availability.
Chief Medical Officer Gary Anthone downplayed the hospital situation in the Omaha and Douglas County area this week, despite warnings from an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center that bed availability is meaningless without proper personnel, and that the health care system could be overwhelmed.
Anthone acknowledged an increase in Covid-19 patients over the last week but insisted the situation has “been very stable.”
“We have seen an increase in the number of patients hospitalized, but it hasn’t really affected the bed availability generally or the actual ICU bed availability. We are at a 29 percent bed availability,” he told reporters Tuesday.
He said he has been in close contact with chief medical officers of major hospitals in the area, adding that “everybody feels like they’re being able to handle the situation” without issue.
“Right now, it appears to be more of an ICU availability issue than a general bed or a ventilator issue,” he said. “So we’re working very closely with them to come to that right balance as far as how we manage the Covid situation.”
State Sen. Megan Hunt tweeted that ICU availability “is a big deal, because it’s not just COVID patients who need ICU care.”
“We need to try to keep people from getting infected and hospitalized, not say ‘We still have beds available for you to pay for,’” she said.
According to data tracked by a group of public health and crisis experts at covidexitstrategy.com, Rhode Island's health care system has the lowest percentage of ICU availability in the country, at 19 percent. Nineteen states have more than 40 percent of ICU beds available, and 29 states have between 21 percent and 40 percent of their ICU beds open.
Leavitt Partners project that hospitals across Rhode Island will have no more than 10 available ICU beds in three weeks. Still, the state is poised to enter its next phase of reopening on Monday.
Rhode Island’s health department questioned covidexitstrategy.com's data, which rates the state’s hospital bed and ICU capacity as “extremely low,” with less than 20 percent availability in each metric.
“We have adequate hospital capacity in Rhode Island,” said Joseph Wendelken, the health department’s public information officer. “A third of our non-ICU beds are open, two-thirds of our ICU beds are open, and 87 percent of our ventilators are not currently being used. Additionally, we have developed surge hospital sites that could open up, if needed.”
At a briefing Tuesday, Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo indicated a willingness to shut the state down again if there’s another virus outbreak.
“The reality is every other country who’s gotten into trouble, there was an outbreak in one community, which led to a shutdown of the whole state,” she said. “If I have to shut down our economy again, it’s our whole economy.”
States proceed with reopening plans despite warnings local hospitals may struggle to handle a new coronavirus outbreak.
By NOLAN D. MCCASKILL
Intensive care units in Montgomery, Ala., are overflowing with Covid-19 patients, pushing them into emergency departments that are not primed to care for them. And Alabama’s capital city could be a harbinger for other parts of the country.
ICU beds are also starting to fill up in places like Minnesota’s Twin Cities; Omaha, Neb.; and the entire state of Rhode Island, according to local health officials and epidemiologists tracking such data, a warning sign of possible health care problems down the road. The availability of ICU beds is one measure of a hospital’s ability to care for its most vulnerable patients — people with severe illness who require more staff to treat them and may need life-support equipment such as a ventilator to breathe. And it's served as a metric for whether the local health care system is able to handle a coronavirus outbreak, albeit a constantly shifting one.
Some state leaders deny there are problems, saying they are prepared to convert regular hospital beds to ICU beds, if necessary. In the meantime, they are pressing ahead with reopening plans.
But Paul Biddinger, director of Harvard's School of Public Health Emergency Preparedness Research, Evaluation and Practice Program, says it's “a big red flag that when you see increasing numbers of ICU patients with Covid.”
“Our greatest fear about not being able to blunt the peak of illness, not being able to flatten the curve, is that ... people will be exposed to the virus, become ill and potentially die because too many people became sick too quickly and it overwhelmed the health care system," Biddinger tells POLITICO.
Minnesota’s most populous counties, Hennepin and Ramsey — where Minneapolis and St. Paul are located — are each projected to have a shortage of dozens of ICU beds in the next three weeks, according to the health care intelligence firm Leavitt Partners, which is led by President George W. Bush’s former Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. Ramsey County is also at risk of exceeding its hospital bed capacity, meaning hospitals there would have no additional space to convert for ICU patients.
Nevertheless, Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) signed an executive order Wednesday allowing outdoor dining at bars and restaurants and salons and barbershops to open, beginning on Monday.
Jan Malcolm, Minnesota’s health commissioner, told reporters the same day that despite mixed data indicators, the state is seeing “relative stability in the growth pattern” and expects to hit its peak in late June or July.
“We do see some more accelerating and concerning signs like the rate of increase in ICU capacity,” Malcolm acknowledged. “Even though we have planned for this and have surge capacity available in the state, the fact that a couple of our hospitals have already gone into that surge space at this point in the curve is important to note and gives us reason to be really, really watching these data.”
Leavitt Partners’ Torch Insight Covid-19 Burden Index tool projects hospital and ICU bed capacity across states, metro areas, counties and individual hospitals, based off the assumption that people continue behaving the same way.
The tool can inform public officials and health care leaders that, “If things don’t change, this is what I need to be ready for at the extreme in three weeks,” said David Muhlestein, chief strategy and chief research officer of Leavitt Partners, the group behind the burden index tool.
“The concern is that somebody will say, ‘Oh, we think it’s going to go down so we’re not going to prepare for the worst-case scenario,’ and then the worst-case scenario happens,” Muhlestein said in an interview.
The projections are an additional warning sign as local leaders nationwide seek to avoid what occurred in Montgomery, where the Democratic mayor is still sounding the alarm after gaining national attention last week for warning that “you’re in trouble” if you need an ICU bed in the city.
Mayor Steven Reed told NPR this week that hospital leaders are telling him to “sound the alarm and to let people know we’re still in the middle of a pandemic and that we are in a health crisis.”
Minnesota saw its largest single-day spike in Covid-19-related ICU bed use earlier this week, jumping from 207 people hospitalized in the ICU on Sunday to 248 by Monday. There were 260 ICU hospitalizations on Wednesday, the highest since the pandemic began.
And more than 90 percent of beds are in use in hospitals in the metro and southeast regions of the state. The percentage of ICU beds in use are 1 to 3 percentage points shy of 90 percent in the metro, northeast and southeast regions.
Kristen Ehresmann, the Minnesota Department of Health director of infectious disease, epidemiology, prevention and control, told reporters Tuesday that the state was also hearing that hospitals were at or near ICU capacity at the end of last week and having isolated staffing concerns. But she downplayed the rapid increase in hospitalizations.
“This level of ICU use has not been unexpected,” she said, noting that the state tracks Covid-19 admissions and the availability of ICU beds and ventilators. “This past weekend, the overall picture for ICU bed availability on May 25 showed 87 percent of the ICU beds in the metro were in use. Other regions of the state had more availability. For comparison, it isn’t unusual for ICU beds to be 95 percent full during flu season.”
But as Biddinger pointed out, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is much less predictable than flu season.
“Across the country, it is common for intensive care unit beds to be full, especially during flu season, but that’s with relatively predictable patterns of illness,” said Biddinger, who also serves as medical director of emergency preparedness at Massachusetts General Hospital. “With Covid, it’s not nearly as predictable, and the potential of a Covid outbreak is much more severe than the peak of a traditional flu season.”
Biddinger said the lower the peak of hospitalizations, the more likely it is that people who need ICU care will be able to access it.
Monday’s death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer pushed his knee into Floyd’s neck and ignored pleas that he couldn’t breathe, has sparked protests and could also lead to additional spread of the virus. Demonstrators have been photographed and recorded in large crowds, many not wearing masks. Peaceful protests Wednesday ended with looted stores and burned buildings.
Malcolm said there’s a “very, very real risk that the pandemic poses to” protesters and anyone they interact with, given “the importance of the degree of community spread that we have today.”
She made a “plea for people to be careful and to be mindful of those health guidelines and the importance of distancing and masking” while protesting.
In Nebraska, where driving tests resumed at DMVs on Wednesday, a state legislator clashed with the state’s chief medical officer after he told reporters that a slight uptick in Covid-19 patients over the past week wasn’t affecting hospital bed or ICU availability.
Chief Medical Officer Gary Anthone downplayed the hospital situation in the Omaha and Douglas County area this week, despite warnings from an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center that bed availability is meaningless without proper personnel, and that the health care system could be overwhelmed.
Anthone acknowledged an increase in Covid-19 patients over the last week but insisted the situation has “been very stable.”
“We have seen an increase in the number of patients hospitalized, but it hasn’t really affected the bed availability generally or the actual ICU bed availability. We are at a 29 percent bed availability,” he told reporters Tuesday.
He said he has been in close contact with chief medical officers of major hospitals in the area, adding that “everybody feels like they’re being able to handle the situation” without issue.
“Right now, it appears to be more of an ICU availability issue than a general bed or a ventilator issue,” he said. “So we’re working very closely with them to come to that right balance as far as how we manage the Covid situation.”
State Sen. Megan Hunt tweeted that ICU availability “is a big deal, because it’s not just COVID patients who need ICU care.”
“We need to try to keep people from getting infected and hospitalized, not say ‘We still have beds available for you to pay for,’” she said.
According to data tracked by a group of public health and crisis experts at covidexitstrategy.com, Rhode Island's health care system has the lowest percentage of ICU availability in the country, at 19 percent. Nineteen states have more than 40 percent of ICU beds available, and 29 states have between 21 percent and 40 percent of their ICU beds open.
Leavitt Partners project that hospitals across Rhode Island will have no more than 10 available ICU beds in three weeks. Still, the state is poised to enter its next phase of reopening on Monday.
Rhode Island’s health department questioned covidexitstrategy.com's data, which rates the state’s hospital bed and ICU capacity as “extremely low,” with less than 20 percent availability in each metric.
“We have adequate hospital capacity in Rhode Island,” said Joseph Wendelken, the health department’s public information officer. “A third of our non-ICU beds are open, two-thirds of our ICU beds are open, and 87 percent of our ventilators are not currently being used. Additionally, we have developed surge hospital sites that could open up, if needed.”
At a briefing Tuesday, Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo indicated a willingness to shut the state down again if there’s another virus outbreak.
“The reality is every other country who’s gotten into trouble, there was an outbreak in one community, which led to a shutdown of the whole state,” she said. “If I have to shut down our economy again, it’s our whole economy.”
FISA crumbles
Effort to renew FISA crumbles
It was a rare legislative setback for Pelosi, and Trump rejoiced.
By JOHN BRESNAHAN, KYLE CHENEY, SARAH FERRIS and MARTIN MATISHAK
House Democrats have pulled a bill to reauthorize parts of the federal surveillance program known as FISA, a setback for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s legislative machine that followed a veto threat from President Donald Trump.
Pelosi announced Thursday that she would seek negotiations with Senate Republicans, a move that sends both parties back to the drafting table to resolve differences — which appeared to be minimal until Trump's threat sent Republicans dropping their support en masse.
House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell both supported the decision to begin formal negotiations between the chambers, with a McConnell spokesperson calling it "regular order." Democrats had initially resisted because it could slow down the process of passing a bill. The reversal, a rarity for Pelosi, leaves behind a political mess for both parties, with limited options unless Trump, again, changes course.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, the California Democrat blasted Republicans — at the urging of Trump — for “abandoning their commitment" to national security.
"This has always been bipartisan," Pelosi said at a press conference. "All of the sudden, [Republican] commitment to national security disappeared by a tweet, the twinkle of a tweet."
By Thursday afternoon, the House overwhelmingly voted to go to conference with the Senate. Lawmakers also agreed on who should represent the chamber in the negotiations: Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler (N.Y.), Adam Schiff (Calif.) and Zoe Lofgren (Calif.) and GOP Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Devin Nunes (Calif.).
Negotiations between the House and Senate on the FISA bill are expected to begin quickly, though it’s unclear how long before a final bill is ready.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) announced Thursday afternoon that the chamber would not return to Washington next week. Lawmakers would receive 72-hours notice before they will need to vote, Hoyer said.
The House had been expected to easily approve the FISA bill this week, with an unusual alliance of Republicans and Democrats who carried a similar version across the floor in March. The Senate passed the measure with than 80 votes in favor, including 45 Republicans. But that fragile coalition collapsed this week as Trump suddenly intervened, issuing a veto threat that seemed to contradict his own administration’s efforts to renew the law.
GOP support for the measure quickly crumbled, forcing Democrats to summon the votes on their own. Republicans who had once endorsed the measure railed against it Wednesday and Thursday, even though the bill had undergone modest changes — all in the direction of increasing limitations on the FBI's data collection.
“We want to make sure it’s not abused like it’s obviously been abused," said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who supported the earlier version of the bill. “You don’t have the votes because we need more work done on this to correct it.”
But the Democratic caucus was facing its own revolt from the left, with about 100 progressives refusing to back legislation they saw as undermining the privacy rights of Americans. And last-minute language from senior Democrats close to Pelosi, like Schiff, further muddied the waters for an uneasy left wing.
Trump celebrated the bill's demise in a Thursday morning tweet, calling it an "incredibly important blockage" and telling Republicans, "Fantastic job!" for uniformly opposing the measure they once backed.
The retreat by Democrats comes after hours of frenetic, but ultimately unsuccessful, maneuvering by Pelosi and her leadership team on Wednesday. But it had been clear for much of the day that Democrats would not be able to win over enough progressives to pass the bill and send it to Trump’s desk.
Trump has rooted his objections to FISA renewal in his disputed claims that the FBI abused its surveillance powers to monitor his campaign in 2016. Though an inspector general review found that a FISA warrant to monitor former Trump campaign aide Carter Page contained significant flaws and omissions, he didn’t conclude whether it would have been enough to invalidate the application altogether.
Trump has spent recent weeks accusing President Barack Obama of committing crimes against him without any evidence and which Trump linked to his sudden opposition to the FISA measure in the House.
Trump’s animus toward senior FBI leadership over the issue has motivated him and other Republican allies to call for dramatic reforms to the FISA law, even over the efforts by Attorney General William Barr to preserve it unchanged.
Justice Department officials have indicated that the failure of congressional efforts to reauthorize FISA don’t pose an immediate, urgent problem. John Demers, the head of the department’s National Security Division, said in an interview on Wednesday afternoon that the department, for the time being, can make do without Hill action.
“We’re going to have to look at where we can fill in the gaps using criminal tools,” he said. “They’re not perfect. Foreign partners are not crazy when we use their information as the basis of criminal tools, because we don’t have the same protections that we do to protect underlying information as we do on the national security side. We are going to do the best we can to fill those holes and keep those investigations going.”
The department can keep using FISA authorities for investigations that were underway when those authorities lapsed, as Julian Sanchez detailed at Just Security.
The most significant defections seemed to come from Democrats, whose objections mounted this week after key committee leaders negotiated an amendment to restrict the FBI’s ability to monitor Americans' web browsing history. A nearly identical amendment offered by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) failed in the Senate by a single vote, and seemed poised to secure bipartisan support in the House.
House leaders had agreed to consider a version in the House offered by Lofgren and Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), which closely mirrored the Wyden-Daines proposal. The language included a tweak negotiated between Lofgren and Schiff specifying that the effort was limited to protecting the browsing data of "U.S. persons," as opposed to foreign nationals. Sources involved in the negotiations indicated that Wyden supported the tweaked language — and he issued a public statement backing it early Wednesday.
But Wyden reversed himself after a comment from Schiff in The New York Times appeared to suggest that the amendment could be used by intelligence agencies to make broad web browsing data requests — sweeping up Americans' information — under the guise of pursuing foreign nationals' data. Wyden blasted Schiff's characterization in a subsequent statement and withdrew his support for the amendment.
A Democratic official involved in crafting the bill downplayed the significance of the Schiff-Wyden spat, noting that if Republicans had remained aboard, the measure would have passed easily.
"This was a bipartisan compromise bill that passed the Senate by a wide margin, but when the bipartisanship goes away so do chances for passage," the official said.
It was a rare legislative setback for Pelosi, and Trump rejoiced.
By JOHN BRESNAHAN, KYLE CHENEY, SARAH FERRIS and MARTIN MATISHAK
House Democrats have pulled a bill to reauthorize parts of the federal surveillance program known as FISA, a setback for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s legislative machine that followed a veto threat from President Donald Trump.
Pelosi announced Thursday that she would seek negotiations with Senate Republicans, a move that sends both parties back to the drafting table to resolve differences — which appeared to be minimal until Trump's threat sent Republicans dropping their support en masse.
House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell both supported the decision to begin formal negotiations between the chambers, with a McConnell spokesperson calling it "regular order." Democrats had initially resisted because it could slow down the process of passing a bill. The reversal, a rarity for Pelosi, leaves behind a political mess for both parties, with limited options unless Trump, again, changes course.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, the California Democrat blasted Republicans — at the urging of Trump — for “abandoning their commitment" to national security.
"This has always been bipartisan," Pelosi said at a press conference. "All of the sudden, [Republican] commitment to national security disappeared by a tweet, the twinkle of a tweet."
By Thursday afternoon, the House overwhelmingly voted to go to conference with the Senate. Lawmakers also agreed on who should represent the chamber in the negotiations: Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler (N.Y.), Adam Schiff (Calif.) and Zoe Lofgren (Calif.) and GOP Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Devin Nunes (Calif.).
Negotiations between the House and Senate on the FISA bill are expected to begin quickly, though it’s unclear how long before a final bill is ready.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) announced Thursday afternoon that the chamber would not return to Washington next week. Lawmakers would receive 72-hours notice before they will need to vote, Hoyer said.
The House had been expected to easily approve the FISA bill this week, with an unusual alliance of Republicans and Democrats who carried a similar version across the floor in March. The Senate passed the measure with than 80 votes in favor, including 45 Republicans. But that fragile coalition collapsed this week as Trump suddenly intervened, issuing a veto threat that seemed to contradict his own administration’s efforts to renew the law.
GOP support for the measure quickly crumbled, forcing Democrats to summon the votes on their own. Republicans who had once endorsed the measure railed against it Wednesday and Thursday, even though the bill had undergone modest changes — all in the direction of increasing limitations on the FBI's data collection.
“We want to make sure it’s not abused like it’s obviously been abused," said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who supported the earlier version of the bill. “You don’t have the votes because we need more work done on this to correct it.”
But the Democratic caucus was facing its own revolt from the left, with about 100 progressives refusing to back legislation they saw as undermining the privacy rights of Americans. And last-minute language from senior Democrats close to Pelosi, like Schiff, further muddied the waters for an uneasy left wing.
Trump celebrated the bill's demise in a Thursday morning tweet, calling it an "incredibly important blockage" and telling Republicans, "Fantastic job!" for uniformly opposing the measure they once backed.
The retreat by Democrats comes after hours of frenetic, but ultimately unsuccessful, maneuvering by Pelosi and her leadership team on Wednesday. But it had been clear for much of the day that Democrats would not be able to win over enough progressives to pass the bill and send it to Trump’s desk.
Trump has rooted his objections to FISA renewal in his disputed claims that the FBI abused its surveillance powers to monitor his campaign in 2016. Though an inspector general review found that a FISA warrant to monitor former Trump campaign aide Carter Page contained significant flaws and omissions, he didn’t conclude whether it would have been enough to invalidate the application altogether.
Trump has spent recent weeks accusing President Barack Obama of committing crimes against him without any evidence and which Trump linked to his sudden opposition to the FISA measure in the House.
Trump’s animus toward senior FBI leadership over the issue has motivated him and other Republican allies to call for dramatic reforms to the FISA law, even over the efforts by Attorney General William Barr to preserve it unchanged.
Justice Department officials have indicated that the failure of congressional efforts to reauthorize FISA don’t pose an immediate, urgent problem. John Demers, the head of the department’s National Security Division, said in an interview on Wednesday afternoon that the department, for the time being, can make do without Hill action.
“We’re going to have to look at where we can fill in the gaps using criminal tools,” he said. “They’re not perfect. Foreign partners are not crazy when we use their information as the basis of criminal tools, because we don’t have the same protections that we do to protect underlying information as we do on the national security side. We are going to do the best we can to fill those holes and keep those investigations going.”
The department can keep using FISA authorities for investigations that were underway when those authorities lapsed, as Julian Sanchez detailed at Just Security.
The most significant defections seemed to come from Democrats, whose objections mounted this week after key committee leaders negotiated an amendment to restrict the FBI’s ability to monitor Americans' web browsing history. A nearly identical amendment offered by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) failed in the Senate by a single vote, and seemed poised to secure bipartisan support in the House.
House leaders had agreed to consider a version in the House offered by Lofgren and Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), which closely mirrored the Wyden-Daines proposal. The language included a tweak negotiated between Lofgren and Schiff specifying that the effort was limited to protecting the browsing data of "U.S. persons," as opposed to foreign nationals. Sources involved in the negotiations indicated that Wyden supported the tweaked language — and he issued a public statement backing it early Wednesday.
But Wyden reversed himself after a comment from Schiff in The New York Times appeared to suggest that the amendment could be used by intelligence agencies to make broad web browsing data requests — sweeping up Americans' information — under the guise of pursuing foreign nationals' data. Wyden blasted Schiff's characterization in a subsequent statement and withdrew his support for the amendment.
A Democratic official involved in crafting the bill downplayed the significance of the Schiff-Wyden spat, noting that if Republicans had remained aboard, the measure would have passed easily.
"This was a bipartisan compromise bill that passed the Senate by a wide margin, but when the bipartisanship goes away so do chances for passage," the official said.
Punish student loan firm
Democrats urge DeVos to punish student loan firm for emergency relief blunder
POLITICO first reported last week that the Trump administration was rushing to fix errors made by Great Lakes Educational Loan Services.
By MICHAEL STRATFORD
Democrats are urging Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to take “immediate and aggressive action” against a student loan company that incorrectly dinged the credit reports of nearly 5 million borrowers whose payments were automatically suspended under the CARES Act.
POLITICO first reported last week that the Trump administration was rushing to fix errors made by Great Lakes Educational Loan Services in how the company reported information about federal student loan borrowers to credit bureaus. The errors lowered borrowers’ credit scores in some cases.
Six Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, on Thursday wrote to DeVos that the Education Department should “take immediate action to fully remedy this issue, hold Great Lakes accountable for this inexcusable blunder, and provide Congress with a detailed accounting of how this breakdown occurred.”
Great Lakes, which is owned by Nelnet Inc., is one of several companies that collects and manages federal student loans on behalf of the Education Department under contracts that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Democrats said they want DeVos to consider “any consequences or penalties allowed under the Department’s contact with Great Lakes, which may include the reduction of loan volume.”
Great Lakes incorrectly reported to credit bureaus — including Equifax, TransUnion and Experian — that borrowers whose payments were automatically suspended by the CARES Act were in a “deferment” on their federal student loans. The CARES Act, and the department’s instructions to loan companies, required those loans to be reported as though a borrower was making current and on-time payments.
The company and the Education Department have insisted that there was little or no damage to borrowers’ credit scores. But Senate Democrats said that’s not the case.
“It is difficult to know how far reaching the consequences of this error will be for millions of borrowers who might attempt to purchase a home, start a new job, or take out a loan to stay financially afloat during this economic crisis,” the senators wrote in their letter.
Besides Warren, the letter was signed by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.).
Some borrowers’ VantageScore was lowered by the error. Jeff Richardson, a spokesperson for VantageScore, one of two major providers of credit scores, said that the company “had treated a deferment code as a negative factor in calculating scores in some cases” but that the company was in the process of changing its methodology so that wouldn’t be the case.
FICO, a competing and larger credit score provider, said that it does not consider deferments in calculating its scores.
The lawmakers urged DeVos to audit all of the companies hired by the Education Department to make sure they are correctly reporting borrowers’ credit information. In addition, they requested documents and information related to the error.
Education Department spokesperson Angela Marabito said in a statement, “How is this news? There is nothing new said in the letter, and the problem is already being resolved.”
Morabito last week said that providing incorrect information to credit bureaus was “totally unacceptable” but that Great Lakes had “quickly corrected the coding issue” and sent corrected information to the credit bureaus.
A department official told POLITICO last week that the department’s Office of Federal Student Aid, led by Mark Brown, had not yet made a “formal determination” whether Great Lakes ran afoul of the department’s instructions on how to report student loans covered by the CARES Act to credit bureaus.
Democrats said in their letter that they were unsatisfied with Brown’s response so far. The letter accuses him of having “doubled down on past efforts to deflect responsibility, blaming ‘third-party credit service companies' and failing to even identify Great Lakes by name in an alert that purports to be ‘information for borrowers.’”
The Senate Democrats’ letter follows similar criticism of the credit-reporting error earlier this week from House Democrats. The letter, led by Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), called the error “unacceptable” and said the Education Department “should have ensured that it did not happen.”
POLITICO first reported last week that the Trump administration was rushing to fix errors made by Great Lakes Educational Loan Services.
By MICHAEL STRATFORD
Democrats are urging Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to take “immediate and aggressive action” against a student loan company that incorrectly dinged the credit reports of nearly 5 million borrowers whose payments were automatically suspended under the CARES Act.
POLITICO first reported last week that the Trump administration was rushing to fix errors made by Great Lakes Educational Loan Services in how the company reported information about federal student loan borrowers to credit bureaus. The errors lowered borrowers’ credit scores in some cases.
Six Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, on Thursday wrote to DeVos that the Education Department should “take immediate action to fully remedy this issue, hold Great Lakes accountable for this inexcusable blunder, and provide Congress with a detailed accounting of how this breakdown occurred.”
Great Lakes, which is owned by Nelnet Inc., is one of several companies that collects and manages federal student loans on behalf of the Education Department under contracts that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Democrats said they want DeVos to consider “any consequences or penalties allowed under the Department’s contact with Great Lakes, which may include the reduction of loan volume.”
Great Lakes incorrectly reported to credit bureaus — including Equifax, TransUnion and Experian — that borrowers whose payments were automatically suspended by the CARES Act were in a “deferment” on their federal student loans. The CARES Act, and the department’s instructions to loan companies, required those loans to be reported as though a borrower was making current and on-time payments.
The company and the Education Department have insisted that there was little or no damage to borrowers’ credit scores. But Senate Democrats said that’s not the case.
“It is difficult to know how far reaching the consequences of this error will be for millions of borrowers who might attempt to purchase a home, start a new job, or take out a loan to stay financially afloat during this economic crisis,” the senators wrote in their letter.
Besides Warren, the letter was signed by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.).
Some borrowers’ VantageScore was lowered by the error. Jeff Richardson, a spokesperson for VantageScore, one of two major providers of credit scores, said that the company “had treated a deferment code as a negative factor in calculating scores in some cases” but that the company was in the process of changing its methodology so that wouldn’t be the case.
FICO, a competing and larger credit score provider, said that it does not consider deferments in calculating its scores.
The lawmakers urged DeVos to audit all of the companies hired by the Education Department to make sure they are correctly reporting borrowers’ credit information. In addition, they requested documents and information related to the error.
Education Department spokesperson Angela Marabito said in a statement, “How is this news? There is nothing new said in the letter, and the problem is already being resolved.”
Morabito last week said that providing incorrect information to credit bureaus was “totally unacceptable” but that Great Lakes had “quickly corrected the coding issue” and sent corrected information to the credit bureaus.
A department official told POLITICO last week that the department’s Office of Federal Student Aid, led by Mark Brown, had not yet made a “formal determination” whether Great Lakes ran afoul of the department’s instructions on how to report student loans covered by the CARES Act to credit bureaus.
Democrats said in their letter that they were unsatisfied with Brown’s response so far. The letter accuses him of having “doubled down on past efforts to deflect responsibility, blaming ‘third-party credit service companies' and failing to even identify Great Lakes by name in an alert that purports to be ‘information for borrowers.’”
The Senate Democrats’ letter follows similar criticism of the credit-reporting error earlier this week from House Democrats. The letter, led by Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), called the error “unacceptable” and said the Education Department “should have ensured that it did not happen.”
Glorifying violence
Twitter labels Trump tweet as ‘glorifying violence’
The president had said ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ regarding protests in Minnesota.
By MARK SCOTT
The battle between Donald Trump and Twitter reignited Friday after the social media giant ran a warning label on a tweet by the president.
The social media giant said that the president's tweet — which addressed protests in Minneapolis and said that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" — violated the company's policies on "glorifying violence."
The company also barred individuals from retweeting Trump's post but only after it had been shared more than 23,000 times.
“We’ve taken action in the interest of preventing others from being inspired to commit violent acts, but have kept the tweets on Twitter because it is important that the public still be able to see the tweet given its relevance to ongoing matters of public importance,” the company said in a post.
Trump's tweet came after protesters took to the streets in Minnesota to voice their anger against the recent killing of a man by local law enforcement. In a tweet, Twitter said it violated the company's policies "based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today."
The company's move comes a day after the U.S. president signed an executive order aimed at punishing Twitter, Facebook and Google for what he perceives as these companies' attack on free speech. Tech executives and free speech campaigners, however, have defended Twitter's practice of fact-checking Trump's comments as a necessary step to protect vulnerable groups.
The president had said ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ regarding protests in Minnesota.
By MARK SCOTT
The battle between Donald Trump and Twitter reignited Friday after the social media giant ran a warning label on a tweet by the president.
The social media giant said that the president's tweet — which addressed protests in Minneapolis and said that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" — violated the company's policies on "glorifying violence."
The company also barred individuals from retweeting Trump's post but only after it had been shared more than 23,000 times.
“We’ve taken action in the interest of preventing others from being inspired to commit violent acts, but have kept the tweets on Twitter because it is important that the public still be able to see the tweet given its relevance to ongoing matters of public importance,” the company said in a post.
Trump's tweet came after protesters took to the streets in Minnesota to voice their anger against the recent killing of a man by local law enforcement. In a tweet, Twitter said it violated the company's policies "based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today."
The company's move comes a day after the U.S. president signed an executive order aimed at punishing Twitter, Facebook and Google for what he perceives as these companies' attack on free speech. Tech executives and free speech campaigners, however, have defended Twitter's practice of fact-checking Trump's comments as a necessary step to protect vulnerable groups.
Arrested live on-air
CNN reporters covering Minnesota riots arrested live on-air
Reporter Omar Jimenez was quickly released and was back on CNN’s air less than 90 minutes later.
By LOUIS NELSON
Police in Minnesota arrested a CNN news crew Friday morning as it was live on the air, handcuffing reporter Omar Jimenez and leading him away even after he produced his media credentials.
Jimenez was quickly released and was back on CNN’s air less than 90 minutes later.
The CNN crew’s cameras were rolling just after 6 a.m. on Friday as Jimenez, holding his microphone, interacted with Minnesota State Patrol officers in riot gear. The reporter, holding his press badge in one hand as an officer held the other behind his back, could be heard negotiating with the officers and asking where they would like him to move.
Jimenez turned his attention to the camera, telling the network’s “New Day” audience that “this is part of the advance police presence that we saw come over the course of, really, minutes.” Seconds later, an officer informed Jimenez that he was being placed under arrest.
Officers refused to answer Jimenez’s question as to why he was being arrested as he was led away in handcuffs. The remaining three members of the CNN crew were arrested soon after.
Jimenez, who is black, was in Minnesota to report on protests and riots in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died after being detained by a Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on Floyd’s neck for several minutes. Floyd was left motionless by the officer’s actions, was carried away on a gurney and later died.
The officers involved in Floyd’s death have been fired but no announcement has yet been made as to whether they will face charges. Floyd’s death has sparked days of protests in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, where rioters and looters set fire to multiple buildings, including a Minneapolis police precinct.
The reporters’ arrests were widely reported on multiple media networks and drew swift condemnation across social media. In a statement released via Twitter, CNN called the arrest “a clear violation of [the crew’s] First Amendment rights” and demanded that “the authorities in Minnesota, incl. the Governor, must release the 3 CNN employees immediately.”
Multiple CNN journalists reported that the network’s chief, Jeff Zucker, personally called Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) to demand the reporters’ release. CNN journalist Donnie O’Sullivan wrote on Twitter that “Walz said he ‘deeply apologizes’ and described the arrests as ‘unacceptable.’”
The Minnesota State Patrol, in a post to its Twitter account, offered an explanation of the arrests.
“In the course of clearing the streets and restoring order at Lake Street and Snelling Avenue, four people were arrested by State Patrol troopers, including three members of a CNN crew,” the state patrol wrote online. “The three were released once they were confirmed to be members of the media.”
But that account does not match with the arrest that aired live on CNN, where the reporters could clearly be seen and heard identifying themselves as working members of the press.
Reporter Omar Jimenez was quickly released and was back on CNN’s air less than 90 minutes later.
By LOUIS NELSON
Police in Minnesota arrested a CNN news crew Friday morning as it was live on the air, handcuffing reporter Omar Jimenez and leading him away even after he produced his media credentials.
Jimenez was quickly released and was back on CNN’s air less than 90 minutes later.
The CNN crew’s cameras were rolling just after 6 a.m. on Friday as Jimenez, holding his microphone, interacted with Minnesota State Patrol officers in riot gear. The reporter, holding his press badge in one hand as an officer held the other behind his back, could be heard negotiating with the officers and asking where they would like him to move.
Jimenez turned his attention to the camera, telling the network’s “New Day” audience that “this is part of the advance police presence that we saw come over the course of, really, minutes.” Seconds later, an officer informed Jimenez that he was being placed under arrest.
Officers refused to answer Jimenez’s question as to why he was being arrested as he was led away in handcuffs. The remaining three members of the CNN crew were arrested soon after.
Jimenez, who is black, was in Minnesota to report on protests and riots in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died after being detained by a Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on Floyd’s neck for several minutes. Floyd was left motionless by the officer’s actions, was carried away on a gurney and later died.
The officers involved in Floyd’s death have been fired but no announcement has yet been made as to whether they will face charges. Floyd’s death has sparked days of protests in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, where rioters and looters set fire to multiple buildings, including a Minneapolis police precinct.
The reporters’ arrests were widely reported on multiple media networks and drew swift condemnation across social media. In a statement released via Twitter, CNN called the arrest “a clear violation of [the crew’s] First Amendment rights” and demanded that “the authorities in Minnesota, incl. the Governor, must release the 3 CNN employees immediately.”
Multiple CNN journalists reported that the network’s chief, Jeff Zucker, personally called Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) to demand the reporters’ release. CNN journalist Donnie O’Sullivan wrote on Twitter that “Walz said he ‘deeply apologizes’ and described the arrests as ‘unacceptable.’”
The Minnesota State Patrol, in a post to its Twitter account, offered an explanation of the arrests.
“In the course of clearing the streets and restoring order at Lake Street and Snelling Avenue, four people were arrested by State Patrol troopers, including three members of a CNN crew,” the state patrol wrote online. “The three were released once they were confirmed to be members of the media.”
But that account does not match with the arrest that aired live on CNN, where the reporters could clearly be seen and heard identifying themselves as working members of the press.
Inmate No. 19579-104
Trump ally Stone must surrender to prison by June 30, won’t need to go to quarantine site
Just last week, the agency said it would “process all newly-sentenced Bureau inmates through one of three quarantine sites.”
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
By the end of June, he’ll be Inmate No. 19579-104.
But Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of President Donald Trump, will start his prison sentence without needing to comply with a Bureau of Prisons directive that newly sentenced inmates be sent to a federal quarantine site.
Just last week, the agency said it would “process all newly-sentenced Bureau inmates through one of three quarantine sites” or at a federal detention facility. But that won’t be the case for Stone.
Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Sue Allison told The Associated Press that Stone is supposed to surrender to the Bureau of Prisons by June 30 and will not be required to go to a quarantine facility. That’s because he’s voluntarily surrendering, she said. The agency has an exemption for those who are voluntarily surrendering, absolving them of the requirement to be sent to a quarantine site, a policy designed to stop the spread of coronavirus that has exploded in the federal prison system. The exception was not laid out in the policy the agency made public last week.
Advocates have raised alarms for years about racial disparities of so-called “voluntary surrenders” which typically happen in cases with special circumstances or involve affluent or high-profile defendants.
Stone will need to quarantine for 14 days at the prison where he surrenders, Allison said. The agency will not say where he’ll serve his prison sentence.
As of Thursday, 4,979 inmates had tested positive for Covid-19 since late March; the Bureau of Prisons has said 3,232 had recovered. At least 60 inmates have died.
The response from the federal Bureau of Prisons coronavirus has raised alarm among advocates and lawmakers about whether the agency is doing enough to ensure the safety of the about 137,000 inmates serving time in federal facilities.
And even though officials have stressed infection and death rates inside prisons are lower compared with outside, a high number of inmates tested come back positive — signs that Covid-19 cases are left uncovered.
Stone’s ability to skirt the quarantine-site rule is likely to ignite inquiries from Democratic lawmakers and prison advocates who have raised concerns about the appearance that the Bureau of Prisons has been loosening its rules to help allies of the president and high-profile inmates.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was released from prison on home confinement earlier this month to serve the rest of his prison sentence at home, despite not meeting the bureau’s criteria to be considered a priority for home confinement. And Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen was also released from a federal prison last week on furlough and is expected to transition to home confinement for the rest of his sentence on charges of campaign finance fraud and lying to Congress.
The Bureau of Prisons has disputed that it is giving any preferential treatment to high-profile inmates and has said more than 2,400 inmates have been moved to home confinement since March 26, when Attorney General William Barr first issued a memo ordering an increase in the use of home confinement. More than 1,200 others have been approved and are in the pipeline to be released, the agency said.
Stone was convicted in November on all seven counts of an indictment that accused him of lying to Congress, tampering with a witness and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election.
He was the sixth Trump aide or adviser to be convicted on charges brought as part of Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Before his Feb. 20 sentencing, the Justice Department leadership backed away from its initial recommendation just hours after Trump tweeted his displeasure at the recommendation of up to nine years in prison, saying it had been too harsh. The move led to a brief flare-up between Attorney General Willam Barr and Trump.
Stone was sentenced to serve more than three years in prison plus two years’ probation and a $20,000 fine.
Just last week, the agency said it would “process all newly-sentenced Bureau inmates through one of three quarantine sites.”
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
By the end of June, he’ll be Inmate No. 19579-104.
But Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of President Donald Trump, will start his prison sentence without needing to comply with a Bureau of Prisons directive that newly sentenced inmates be sent to a federal quarantine site.
Just last week, the agency said it would “process all newly-sentenced Bureau inmates through one of three quarantine sites” or at a federal detention facility. But that won’t be the case for Stone.
Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Sue Allison told The Associated Press that Stone is supposed to surrender to the Bureau of Prisons by June 30 and will not be required to go to a quarantine facility. That’s because he’s voluntarily surrendering, she said. The agency has an exemption for those who are voluntarily surrendering, absolving them of the requirement to be sent to a quarantine site, a policy designed to stop the spread of coronavirus that has exploded in the federal prison system. The exception was not laid out in the policy the agency made public last week.
Advocates have raised alarms for years about racial disparities of so-called “voluntary surrenders” which typically happen in cases with special circumstances or involve affluent or high-profile defendants.
Stone will need to quarantine for 14 days at the prison where he surrenders, Allison said. The agency will not say where he’ll serve his prison sentence.
As of Thursday, 4,979 inmates had tested positive for Covid-19 since late March; the Bureau of Prisons has said 3,232 had recovered. At least 60 inmates have died.
The response from the federal Bureau of Prisons coronavirus has raised alarm among advocates and lawmakers about whether the agency is doing enough to ensure the safety of the about 137,000 inmates serving time in federal facilities.
And even though officials have stressed infection and death rates inside prisons are lower compared with outside, a high number of inmates tested come back positive — signs that Covid-19 cases are left uncovered.
Stone’s ability to skirt the quarantine-site rule is likely to ignite inquiries from Democratic lawmakers and prison advocates who have raised concerns about the appearance that the Bureau of Prisons has been loosening its rules to help allies of the president and high-profile inmates.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was released from prison on home confinement earlier this month to serve the rest of his prison sentence at home, despite not meeting the bureau’s criteria to be considered a priority for home confinement. And Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen was also released from a federal prison last week on furlough and is expected to transition to home confinement for the rest of his sentence on charges of campaign finance fraud and lying to Congress.
The Bureau of Prisons has disputed that it is giving any preferential treatment to high-profile inmates and has said more than 2,400 inmates have been moved to home confinement since March 26, when Attorney General William Barr first issued a memo ordering an increase in the use of home confinement. More than 1,200 others have been approved and are in the pipeline to be released, the agency said.
Stone was convicted in November on all seven counts of an indictment that accused him of lying to Congress, tampering with a witness and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election.
He was the sixth Trump aide or adviser to be convicted on charges brought as part of Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Before his Feb. 20 sentencing, the Justice Department leadership backed away from its initial recommendation just hours after Trump tweeted his displeasure at the recommendation of up to nine years in prison, saying it had been too harsh. The move led to a brief flare-up between Attorney General Willam Barr and Trump.
Stone was sentenced to serve more than three years in prison plus two years’ probation and a $20,000 fine.
It's Friday and the shit show is starting early...
Trump threatens to unleash gunfire on Minnesota protesters
The president’s tweet earned a warning label from Twitter for violating its policies on “glorifying violence.”
By QUINT FORGEY
President Donald Trump on Friday appeared to urge the shooting of looters in Minnesota, bursting into a volatile national debate over the death of an African-American man in police custody and issuing an online provocation against U.S. citizens so extraordinary it was partially obscured by Twitter.
“I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right,” Trump tweeted minutes before 1 a.m.
In the second part of his message, Trump wrote: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
The president’s early morning post, which came at the beginning of the fourth day of raging protests in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, earned a warning label from Twitter for violating its policies on “glorifying violence.”
But the social media platform “determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible,” and allowed users to view Trump’s tweet if they chose. Twitter’s communications team also tweeted it had “placed a public interest notice” on the post in part due to the “risk it could inspire similar actions today.”
Protests have cropped up across the country since the arrest Monday and death hours later of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, in Minneapolis. A bystander’s video of his encounter with police, which sparked national outrage, showed an officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck as he repeatedly pleads for air, eventually becomes motionless and is put onto a gurney by paramedics.
Dozens of businesses across the Twin Cities have boarded up their storefronts to prevent looting, while Minneapolis-based Target announced it was temporarily closing two dozen area stores and the city shut down nearly its entire light-rail system and all bus service through Sunday.
By nightfall Thursday, protesters had set fire to the 3rd Precinct Minneapolis police station — which covers the portion of south Minneapolis where Floyd was arrested — forcing the department to abandon the building.
Frey, the Minneapolis mayor, announced Tuesday the firings of the four officers involved in the arrest, and called Wednesday for criminal charges to be brought against Derek Chauvin, the officer who immobilized Floyd.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said Friday he had “every expectation” charges will be filed by the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and defended the caution with which he said prosecutors were approaching the case.
“They want to make sure they have a case that sticks, and unfortunately that is taking more time than anyone of us want,” he told CNN, adding: “We are pushing to get those charges filed as soon as we can.”
Walz, the Minnesota governor, activated the National Guard at Frey’s request Thursday, but no Guard members could be seen during protests in the Twin Cities.
It is unclear whether Trump knew of Walz’s decision to call in the Guard at the time he posted his tweet Friday morning, but the president nevertheless is empowered to bring the military reserve force under federal command at any time by formally placing its members on active duty.
The president’s latest tweets regarding the events in Minneapolis represent a stark reversal from his previous tone on the matter.
On Wednesday, Trump lamented the “very sad and tragic death in Minnesota of George Floyd,” tweeting that he had requested an FBI and Justice Department investigation “to be expedited” and vowing: “Justice will be served!”
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters Thursday that the president was being briefed on the situation by Attorney General William Barr and the deputy director of the FBI, and went on to characterize Trump’s reaction to the viral video of Floyd’s arrest.
“He was very upset by it. It was egregious, appalling, tragic,” she said.
Floyd’s death came just weeks after a video of the fatal February shooting of a black man in Georgia, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, began circulating widely on social media.
That footage provoked a similar uproar among Americans, and the president described it earlier this month as “very, very disturbing” to watch. He also said that “law enforcement is going to look at” the incident and predicted Gov. Brian Kemp was “going to do what’s right.”
Despite his recent comments and public calls for further investigation of the two high-profile cases, Trump’s incendiary tweets Friday could chip away at whatever gains his reelection campaign has sought to make with the African-American voters ahead of November.
The president has often promoted his administration’s backing of a criminal justice bill he signed in 2018 as evidence of his commitment to the black community, and argued that Democrats take the votes of African Americans for granted.
“What the hell do you have to lose?” he controversially asked in 2016, imploring African Americans to abandon the Democratic Party and support his first White House bid.
However, Trump’s warning Friday that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” echoed a more infamous historical predicate: Miami Police Chief Walter Headley reportedly uttered the same phrase at a December 1967 news conference.
A federal task force later concluded Headley’s words had contributed to the escalated local tensions that resulted in a deadly, three-day riot the following summer coinciding with the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach — where former Vice President Richard Nixon was nominated as the party’s candidate for president.
Twitter has now altered in some form three of Trump’s tweets in recent days, flagging with fact-check warnings two posts Tuesday that falsely claimed mail-in ballots are likely to be “substantially fraudulent.”
The company’s first-of-its-kind intervention on the president’s preferred social media feed elicited significant fury from the White House, culminating in an executive order Thursday seeking to limit the scope of a 1996 law that shields tech companies from many lawsuits.
On Friday morning, Trump again attacked Twitter after it labeled his tweet about the Minnesota protests, writing that the platform has “targeted Republicans, Conservatives & the President of the United States. Section 230 should be revoked by Congress. Until then, it will be regulated!”
The federal statute Trump referenced provides legal protections that safeguard online companies from libel suits and other litigation.
Dan Scavino, one of Trump’s longest-serving aides and the White House’s deputy chief of staff for communications, also lashed out at Twitter in coarse terms online.
“Twitter is targeting the President of the United States 24/7, while turning their heads to protest organizers who are planning, plotting, and communicating their next moves daily on this very platform,” he tweeted. “Twitter is full of shit - more and more people are beginning to get it.”
After the White House Twitter feed, which is operated by Scavino, reposted the original Trump tweet that was concealed from users, Twitter slapped a warning label on that account’s message, as well.
Twitter told POLITICO in a statement that Friday was not the first time it had used a “public interest notice,” and emphasized that Trump’s tweet “will remain on the service” and not be removed.
The White House was quick to retort via its official account that the president “did not glorify violence. He clearly condemned it.” It went on to allege that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey “and Twitter’s biased, bad-faith ‘fact-checkers’ have made it clear: Twitter is a publisher, not a platform.”
The president’s tweet earned a warning label from Twitter for violating its policies on “glorifying violence.”
By QUINT FORGEY
President Donald Trump on Friday appeared to urge the shooting of looters in Minnesota, bursting into a volatile national debate over the death of an African-American man in police custody and issuing an online provocation against U.S. citizens so extraordinary it was partially obscured by Twitter.
“I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right,” Trump tweeted minutes before 1 a.m.
In the second part of his message, Trump wrote: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
The president’s early morning post, which came at the beginning of the fourth day of raging protests in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, earned a warning label from Twitter for violating its policies on “glorifying violence.”
But the social media platform “determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible,” and allowed users to view Trump’s tweet if they chose. Twitter’s communications team also tweeted it had “placed a public interest notice” on the post in part due to the “risk it could inspire similar actions today.”
Protests have cropped up across the country since the arrest Monday and death hours later of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, in Minneapolis. A bystander’s video of his encounter with police, which sparked national outrage, showed an officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck as he repeatedly pleads for air, eventually becomes motionless and is put onto a gurney by paramedics.
Dozens of businesses across the Twin Cities have boarded up their storefronts to prevent looting, while Minneapolis-based Target announced it was temporarily closing two dozen area stores and the city shut down nearly its entire light-rail system and all bus service through Sunday.
By nightfall Thursday, protesters had set fire to the 3rd Precinct Minneapolis police station — which covers the portion of south Minneapolis where Floyd was arrested — forcing the department to abandon the building.
Frey, the Minneapolis mayor, announced Tuesday the firings of the four officers involved in the arrest, and called Wednesday for criminal charges to be brought against Derek Chauvin, the officer who immobilized Floyd.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said Friday he had “every expectation” charges will be filed by the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and defended the caution with which he said prosecutors were approaching the case.
“They want to make sure they have a case that sticks, and unfortunately that is taking more time than anyone of us want,” he told CNN, adding: “We are pushing to get those charges filed as soon as we can.”
Walz, the Minnesota governor, activated the National Guard at Frey’s request Thursday, but no Guard members could be seen during protests in the Twin Cities.
It is unclear whether Trump knew of Walz’s decision to call in the Guard at the time he posted his tweet Friday morning, but the president nevertheless is empowered to bring the military reserve force under federal command at any time by formally placing its members on active duty.
The president’s latest tweets regarding the events in Minneapolis represent a stark reversal from his previous tone on the matter.
On Wednesday, Trump lamented the “very sad and tragic death in Minnesota of George Floyd,” tweeting that he had requested an FBI and Justice Department investigation “to be expedited” and vowing: “Justice will be served!”
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters Thursday that the president was being briefed on the situation by Attorney General William Barr and the deputy director of the FBI, and went on to characterize Trump’s reaction to the viral video of Floyd’s arrest.
“He was very upset by it. It was egregious, appalling, tragic,” she said.
Floyd’s death came just weeks after a video of the fatal February shooting of a black man in Georgia, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, began circulating widely on social media.
That footage provoked a similar uproar among Americans, and the president described it earlier this month as “very, very disturbing” to watch. He also said that “law enforcement is going to look at” the incident and predicted Gov. Brian Kemp was “going to do what’s right.”
Despite his recent comments and public calls for further investigation of the two high-profile cases, Trump’s incendiary tweets Friday could chip away at whatever gains his reelection campaign has sought to make with the African-American voters ahead of November.
The president has often promoted his administration’s backing of a criminal justice bill he signed in 2018 as evidence of his commitment to the black community, and argued that Democrats take the votes of African Americans for granted.
“What the hell do you have to lose?” he controversially asked in 2016, imploring African Americans to abandon the Democratic Party and support his first White House bid.
However, Trump’s warning Friday that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” echoed a more infamous historical predicate: Miami Police Chief Walter Headley reportedly uttered the same phrase at a December 1967 news conference.
A federal task force later concluded Headley’s words had contributed to the escalated local tensions that resulted in a deadly, three-day riot the following summer coinciding with the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach — where former Vice President Richard Nixon was nominated as the party’s candidate for president.
Twitter has now altered in some form three of Trump’s tweets in recent days, flagging with fact-check warnings two posts Tuesday that falsely claimed mail-in ballots are likely to be “substantially fraudulent.”
The company’s first-of-its-kind intervention on the president’s preferred social media feed elicited significant fury from the White House, culminating in an executive order Thursday seeking to limit the scope of a 1996 law that shields tech companies from many lawsuits.
On Friday morning, Trump again attacked Twitter after it labeled his tweet about the Minnesota protests, writing that the platform has “targeted Republicans, Conservatives & the President of the United States. Section 230 should be revoked by Congress. Until then, it will be regulated!”
The federal statute Trump referenced provides legal protections that safeguard online companies from libel suits and other litigation.
Dan Scavino, one of Trump’s longest-serving aides and the White House’s deputy chief of staff for communications, also lashed out at Twitter in coarse terms online.
“Twitter is targeting the President of the United States 24/7, while turning their heads to protest organizers who are planning, plotting, and communicating their next moves daily on this very platform,” he tweeted. “Twitter is full of shit - more and more people are beginning to get it.”
After the White House Twitter feed, which is operated by Scavino, reposted the original Trump tweet that was concealed from users, Twitter slapped a warning label on that account’s message, as well.
Twitter told POLITICO in a statement that Friday was not the first time it had used a “public interest notice,” and emphasized that Trump’s tweet “will remain on the service” and not be removed.
The White House was quick to retort via its official account that the president “did not glorify violence. He clearly condemned it.” It went on to allege that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey “and Twitter’s biased, bad-faith ‘fact-checkers’ have made it clear: Twitter is a publisher, not a platform.”
May 28, 2020
Suddenly Silent
Trump and Fox News Are Suddenly Silent on Their “Miracle” Drug Hydroxychloroquine
Their reckless promotion flew in the face of expert warnings.
INAE OH
After aggressively promoting an anti-malaria drug as a “miracle” in the fight against COVID-19—a push that flew in the face of repeated warnings from experts—President Donald Trump and Fox News personalities suddenly appear to be cooling on hydroxychloroquine just as a new study reports the drug could lead to a higher death rate.
“The fact of the matter is we don’t know,” Dr. Mehmet Oz told the hosts of Fox & Friends on Wednesday. “Thankfully these medications are prescriptions only… We are better off waiting for the randomized trials Dr. Fauci has been asking for.”
The segment was a head-spinning reversal for Oz, who less than a week ago encouraged Americans to participate in an at-home hydroxychloroquine clinical trial. “They mail you the pills, you start the protocol, tell them what happened… Be part of the solution,” he told Fox News viewers in a segment on April 16, the latest in Oz’s ongoing promotion of hydroxychloroquine on the conservative news network.
The attempt to strike a more cautious approach this week comes on the heels of new studies that showed hydroxychloroquine yielded no benefit in helping patients infected with the virus; one study on US veterans reported more deaths among those treated with the drug than those who received normal care.
When asked about the veterans’ study on Tuesday, Trump, perhaps the biggest hydroxychloroquine cheerleader of all, dodged.
“I don’t know of the report,” he said at his daily coronavirus briefing. “Obviously there have been some very good reports and perhaps this one’s not a good report. But we’ll be looking at it.”
The claim of ignorance appeared to track with what could be a retreat in Trump’s relentless hydroxychloroquine promotion. Politico reports that the president has significantly reduced his mentions of the drug in recent days, both in his coronavirus pressers and social media, as he shifts his focus to promoting open rebellion of Democratic governors over lockdown restrictions. Still, his repeated claims that hydroxychloroquine could be a “miracle” are unlikely to be forgotten.
Their reckless promotion flew in the face of expert warnings.
INAE OH
After aggressively promoting an anti-malaria drug as a “miracle” in the fight against COVID-19—a push that flew in the face of repeated warnings from experts—President Donald Trump and Fox News personalities suddenly appear to be cooling on hydroxychloroquine just as a new study reports the drug could lead to a higher death rate.
“The fact of the matter is we don’t know,” Dr. Mehmet Oz told the hosts of Fox & Friends on Wednesday. “Thankfully these medications are prescriptions only… We are better off waiting for the randomized trials Dr. Fauci has been asking for.”
The segment was a head-spinning reversal for Oz, who less than a week ago encouraged Americans to participate in an at-home hydroxychloroquine clinical trial. “They mail you the pills, you start the protocol, tell them what happened… Be part of the solution,” he told Fox News viewers in a segment on April 16, the latest in Oz’s ongoing promotion of hydroxychloroquine on the conservative news network.
The attempt to strike a more cautious approach this week comes on the heels of new studies that showed hydroxychloroquine yielded no benefit in helping patients infected with the virus; one study on US veterans reported more deaths among those treated with the drug than those who received normal care.
When asked about the veterans’ study on Tuesday, Trump, perhaps the biggest hydroxychloroquine cheerleader of all, dodged.
“I don’t know of the report,” he said at his daily coronavirus briefing. “Obviously there have been some very good reports and perhaps this one’s not a good report. But we’ll be looking at it.”
The claim of ignorance appeared to track with what could be a retreat in Trump’s relentless hydroxychloroquine promotion. Politico reports that the president has significantly reduced his mentions of the drug in recent days, both in his coronavirus pressers and social media, as he shifts his focus to promoting open rebellion of Democratic governors over lockdown restrictions. Still, his repeated claims that hydroxychloroquine could be a “miracle” are unlikely to be forgotten.
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