Dick-faced shit

Trump set to return to the city he loves to hate and hates to love

Analysis by Stephen Collinson

Donald Trump is coming back to the place he hated to call home.

The former president is due in the nation’s capital on Wednesday to address the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and will perhaps be collecting impressions for his next unflattering depiction of the city in a future campaign speech.

Washington – with its gun crime and carjackings – has taken a starring role in the GOP front-runner’s 2024 stump speech as he tries to create a dystopian picture of a nation and its citadel trapped in the grip of lawlessness that requires a strongman’s attention.

“You can’t walk down the streets of these cities these days without being shot or mugged or beat up or pushed into a subway train,” Trump said in a dark speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, on January 20. “We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation in Washington, DC, and clean it up, renovate it, rebuild it. It’ll be a capital like no other.”

Trump went on: “Our capital is a disgrace, I was there for one of these fake trials the other day a couple of weeks ago, and I’m driving down a major thoroughfare … and there was so much garbage that we were literally driving over cartons and boxes and cans of beer.” The former president was exaggerating the city’s current state, even though it does have its problems, especially since the pandemic.

Trump has returned several times since his disgraced departure from the District as president in January 2021, when the US Capitol still bore the scars of his supporters’ mob invasion.

He’s not been much missed in this overwhelmingly Democratic bastion. And the feeling is mutual. The ex-president has never hidden his disgust for the city where he slept – or tweeted late into the night – for parts of four years when he was the commander in chief.

No modern president has been as visceral about Washington as Trump – and his contempt offers insight into his politics and his character. The ex-president’s core political project is dedicated to metaphorically tearing down a city that exists to provide governance. It’s the foundation of what ex-Trump political guru Steve Bannon calls the administrative state. If he’s elected to a second term, Trump has pledged to gut the professional civil service. Washington, in the eyes of Trump and his supporters, is the epicenter of a corrupt Deep State that is dedicated to destroying the “Make America Great Again” movement and is a playground for political and media elites.

Washington’s marbled monuments have also been the been the backdrop for some of the most notorious moments of Trump’s political career and have highlighted his autocratic leanings. In his first hours as president, Trump’s false claims about the size of his inauguration crowd, sparsely stretched between the Capitol and the obelisk of the Washington Monument, were the first indication of how he’d use the White House to defile truth. Trump once took part in a Fox News interview inside the Lincoln Memorial, raising questions about his government’s easing of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions for the event. One of the darkest moments of his presidency came when Trump corralled members of his Cabinet and marched across Lafayette Square, shortly after it was cleared of racial injustice protesters, to St. John’s Church, where presidents-elect often worship before their inaugurations. In a bizarre photo-op, he then held up a Bible. A few days later, Washington’s Democratic leadership named a street plaza for the large yellow “Black Lives Matter” letters painted on 16th Street during the protests against the police killing of George Floyd. The installation in front of the White House is now one of the most visible, physical responses to Trump’s time in the Oval Office.

Washington is still trying to forget the most chilling moment in modern presidential history, when Trump held a massive rally on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, and told his crowd to “fight like hell” for their country before the mob ransacked the Capitol building in an attempt to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

There have sometimes been suggestive racial overtones in Trump’s critique of Washington. In 2020, he tweeted that people protesting the death of Floyd would be met by “vicious dogs” if they breached the White House fence. For some Americans, this recalled the imagery of the Civil Rights movement and the suppression of protests against segregation in the Deep South. Washington’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, who frequently clashed with Trump, tweeted in response, “There are no vicious dogs & ominous weapons. There is just a scared man. Afraid/alone…”

Washington’s status as a Democratic city with a substantial minority population also appears to have been on Trump’s mind recently, given his pending trial for election subversion in federal court there. It’s fueled his claims that it will be impossible for him to get “even close to a fair trial.” He wrote on Truth Social last year, “There are many reasons for this, but just one is that I am calling for a federal takeover of this filthy and crime ridden embarrassment to our nation.” Hundreds of January 6 rioters have been tried and convicted in Washington ahead of Trump’s trial. But acceptance of his argument – that he can’t be fairly tried in the city for political reasons – would unravel the justice system. If politicians can choose their juries and judges in politically favorable jurisdictions, corruption would run rampant. One reason why the trial is set for Washington is it’s the city where the alleged offense – a crime against democracy – took place.

Many presidents have hated Washington – but not like Trump

Many previous presidents, especially Republicans, have long used Washington as a metaphor for all that is wrong with America. The city is an easy target in many federal campaigns, from both parties. And for all their efforts to get to the city as president, many commanders in chief often seem desperate to leave whenever they can. Franklin Roosevelt spent long periods at Warm Springs in Georgia, where he’d ease lifelong physical repercussions from polio and at his home at Hyde Park, New York. Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush were always keen to swap the White House for their Texas ranches.

Trump made little effort to embrace the town, getting out to play golf at his course in Virginia or heading to his properties in Florida and New Jersey. Biden spends most weekends in his beloved Delaware. But Barack Obama bucked the trend, becoming the rare president to set up home in the capital after his tenure ended instead of returning to his previous adopted hometown, Chicago.

Some presidents have tried to treat DC like home while in office. Theodore Roosevelt went rock climbing in Rock Creek Park, and decades later, Ronald Reagan saddled up to burnish his cowboy persona and went horse riding there. Abraham Lincoln used to escape the swampy summers to a cottage in Northwest DC where he’d also visit with wounded Civil War soldiers. And of course, he went to the theater at least once, with tragic results. John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who served as naval officers, loved to take the presidential yacht, the USS Sequoia, down the Potomac River. The vessel was decommissioned by Jimmy Carter, a former submariner who was perhaps more comfortable beneath the waves.

Nixon’s most lasting impact on Washington, however, was that he made the Watergate office complex famous after a raid by Republican operatives on the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee spawned a scandal that toppled him. In recent years, some Democratic presidents have adopted the city’s call for political self-determination, adding the slogan “No Taxation without Representation” to the license tags of the presidential limousine. The slogan was not, however, in evidence on the presidential ride Biden used in Florida on Tuesday, when – in a show of aviation one-up-man-ship – Air Force One taxied past Trump’s private Boeing in West Palm Beach.

Presidents have also often ventured out of the White House for refreshment. Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt and Warren Harding are all said to have patronized Old Ebbitt Grill, which is open still just around the corner. During the Clinton and Obama administrations it was not unusual to see the presidential motorcade idling outside some of the city’s top restaurants in Georgetown and downtown. Trump, however, rarely went anywhere to socialize apart from his former hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, whose bars and restaurants became a hot spot for administration officials and Trump-world figures like Rudy Giuliani and a must-see for MAGA tourists in the capital.

What Trump does love about Washington

Trump may demonize the current conditions in Washington. But as a builder, he can’t help but admire its splendid architecture.

In December 2020, he issued an executive order praising the capital’s unique real estate, noting that “President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson consciously modeled the most important buildings in Washington, D.C., on the classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome.” The order added, with some irony given subsequent events, that the founders “sought to use classical architecture to visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity, reminding citizens not only of their rights but also their responsibilities in maintaining and perpetuating its institutions.”

The order, a draft of which was titled “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” outlawed the use of modernist architecture in “ugly” and “uninspiring buildings” in the government in the future.

A month later, when Trump left Washington as president for the last time, many of those classical buildings that he so admired, including the White House, were locked behind high iron fences to protect them from the dangerous political forces he helped to incite.

Hacking.....

FBI director warns that Chinese hackers are preparing to ‘wreak havoc’ on US critical infrastructure

By Hannah Rabinowitz and Sean Lyngaas

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday warned that Chinese hackers are preparing to “wreak havoc and cause real-world harm” to the US.

“China’s hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities, if or when China decides the time has come to strike,” Wray told the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

Though cyber officials have long sounded the alarm about China’s offensive cyber capabilities, Wray’s dramatic public warning underlines the huge level of concern at the top of the US government about the threat Chinese hackers pose to critical infrastructure nationwide. The head of the National Security Agency and other senior US officials are also testifying on Chinese cyber activity in front of the panel Wednesday.

PRC hackers, Wray said, are targeting things like water treatment plants, electrical infrastructure and oil and natural gas pipelines, Wray said. “our water treatment plants, our electrical grid, our oil and natural gas pipelines, our transportation systems.

The Chinese hackers are working “to find and prepare to destroy or degrade the civilian critical infrastructure that keeps us safe and prosperous,” Wray said. “And let’s be clear: Cyber threats to our critical infrastructure represent real world threats to our physical safety.”

The FBI and Justice Department have previously stressed their focus on preventing malign campaigns by the Chinese government and hackers.

CNN has reported that in recent months, federal law enforcement has used a court order to allow the Justice Department to update vulnerable software used by thousands of devices in the US that are at the center of a Chinese hacking campaign targeting sensitive US critical infrastructure. Nevertheless, the hackers are believed to be deeply entrenched in US infrastructure.

The move by the Justice Department and FBI is part of a broader, government-wide attempt to blunt the impact of a persistent Chinese hacking effort that US officials fear could hinder any US military response in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, CNN has reported. The hackers are believed to be using access to some of the devices to burrow further into sensitive critical infrastructure — things like ports and transportation networks.

The Chinese government has previously denied allegations of hacking efforts.

Wray said Wednesday that the PRC’s efforts extend beyond technology, his remarks show, warning that “they target our freedoms, reaching inside our borders, across America, to silence, coerce, and threaten our citizens and residents.”

As CNN exclusively reported Tuesday, Chinese leader Xi Jinping told President Joe Biden when the two men met in November that China would not interfere in the 2024 US presidential election. That assurance was reiterated by the Chinese foreign minister to Biden’s national security adviser this past weekend, two people familiar with the conversations told CNN.

Dick-wad...

Zuckerberg seeks to place responsibility onto Apple and Google for underage social media use

From CNN's Brian Fung

Apple and Google, not social media companies, should be responsible for checking users’ ages to ensure they are not underage, Zuckerberg told lawmakers, suggesting it would be “trivial” for Congress to design legislation regulating app store owners.

“My understanding is Apple and Google, or at least Apple, already requires parental consent when a child does a payment with an app,” Zuckerberg said. “So it should be pretty trivial to pass a law that requires them to make it so that parents have control anytime a child downloads an app.”

Meta previously outlined that proposal in a framework for federal legislation released this month that the company says is an alternative to some of the bills lawmakers have drafted.

Losing their shit..........

Here’s the real reason why right-wing media figures are targeting Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce

Analysis by Oliver Darcy

Conservatives are going into self-exile.

The movement that once championed small, business-friendly government is now led by far-right media forces hoping to cash in on attention from raging culture wars, sealing off its adherents from the rest of society.

From a bird’s eye view, the state of affairs among MAGA Media diehards as it sits today is remarkable. A subset of America actually purports to boycott Disney, the world’s preeminent entertainment company; Bud Light, once America’s most popular beer; Target, the quintessential brick-and-mortar shopping destination; Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that produced life-saving Covid-19 vaccines; Major League Baseball, the nation’s favorite pastime; and now Taylor Swift, a generational icon and one of the most successful musical artists of all time.

“There’s something striking about watching the far-right tying itself in knots and attacking Swift and [her boyfriend Travis] Kelce that demonstrates how badly the far-right media has alienated itself from most of society,” Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers the intersection of politics, technology, and culture, told me Tuesday. “They’ve built out this alternate universe and reality of grievance and it feels like instead of using it to wage an effective culture war, they’re fully lost in it and can’t see that they’ve chosen as their primary enemy the person with the literal highest approval rating in American life right now.”

“This isn’t the first time it’s happened,” Warzel added. “The far-right is systematically alienating itself from many of the institutions and people that normal Americans frequent, like, and associate themselves with. And I don’t think they can see how exhausting and off-putting that is to people who don’t spend their days mainlining Fox News or on X.”

A crucial factor in this bleak reality is that the incentive structure in conservative politics has gone awry. The irresponsible and dishonest stars of the right-wing media kingdom are motivated by vastly different goals than those who are actually trying to advance conservative causes, get Republicans elected, and then ultimately govern in office.

For a right-wing online influencer, the top incentive is to amass video views and shares — all in a bid to increase one’s social media footprint and, thus, power and treasure. When viewed from that vantage point, peddling increasingly outlandish, attention-grabbing junk makes sense. The same goes for Fox News hosts and talk radio personalities, who are simultaneously quietly worried that more provocative newcomers to the scene might eat into their audiences if they aren’t hardline enough.

In effect, declaring war on popular institutions like Disney and celebrities like Swift makes business sense for these media personalities. It delivers them the attention they so desperately crave while appealing to a sliver of the population — enough to carve out a lucrative career in this arena.

“Within the conservative base, it’s great strategy, but when you are trying to win over swing voters, it isn’t going to help, as they’ll see it as weird,” Evan Siegfried, a GOP strategist who has written extensively about how Republicans can try to attract new voters to their causes, candidly told me. “Right now, the GOP does not seem to have a real interest in growing, but rather prefers to stick with grievance politics.”

The problem is that lies and conspiracy theories can cause enormous harm to the body politic. And the figures who traffic in mis-and disinformation have amassed great power in the Republican Party. In fact, right-wing media stars have far more power over the GOP’s direction than most of its actual leaders, like Mitch McConnell. Don’t believe me? Just talk to Kevin McCarthy. The people standing at the helm of the ship, actually charting its path, are the handsomely paid talk-show hosts who command legions of fans and excite them into participating in the culture war battles on a weekly basis. Not the boring Washington politicians. Donald Trump is successful because he falls into the former camp far more than the latter.

The problem for the diminishing few in the Republican Party who hunger for responsible conservative governance is that these MAGA Media celebrities are leading the GOP down a path of isolation, which could ultimately result in its irrelevance with the rest of society. These conspiracy talk hosts have little-to-no incentive to behave in a way that results in Republicans getting elected to higher office. In fact, arguably it’s just the opposite. The right-wing media kingdom thrives when Democrats are in office and there are political opponents whom they can demonize.

That’s not to say the right-wing media machine holds no power. It certainly does. Just a tiny percentage of the population falling under the trance of its stars translates into millions of people who can, for example, be convinced to head to the nation’s Capital to try to overturn a democratic election. And polling indicates that a good chunk of the country has bought some of the nonsense MAGA Media has been relentlessly selling.

But heading into the 2024 election, alienating the rest of the country — which still handily outnumbers the MAGA loyalists — with absurd conspiracy theories about Swift, Kelce, and some of its most treasured institutions makes little sense as an electoral strategy.

As Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former Trump White House communications director turned vocal critic of the former president, put it on “The View” Tuesday: “I cannot think of a dumber political fight to pick than one with the Swifties.”

Swap

Russia and Ukraine complete ‘major’ prisoner exchange after mysterious plane crash

By Anna Chernova, Yulia Kesaieva, Lauren Kent and Christian Edwards

Russia and Ukraine have exchanged hundreds of prisoners of war, in the first such swap since the deadly crash of a Russian military plane that Moscow claimed was carrying 65 captured Ukrainian soldiers.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 207 Ukrainian service members were returned on Wednesday, while the Russian Defense Ministry said 195 Russian military personnel had been received.

“Ours are at home. 207 guys,” Zelensky said, adding that almost half of those returned were “defenders of Mariupol,” the southern Ukrainian city that was brutally besieged in the early weeks of the war.

Zelensky said 50 prisoner swaps had now taken place since Russia launched its full-scale invasion nearly two years ago, through which Ukraine had brought 3035 soldiers home. “We will do everything to return each and every one of them. We have not forgotten about anyone. We are looking for every single name,” he said.

Wednesday’s exchange was the first since the mysterious crash of a Russian IL-76 plane on January 24 in Russia’s Belgorod region, which neighbors eastern Ukraine.

Moscow claimed the plane was transporting dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war, while Kyiv said it was carrying Russian missiles to be used in further strikes on Ukraine.

Both sides acknowledged a prisoner exchange had been planned for the day of the crash, but Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (DI), told CNN that Ukraine had not received notification that the prisoners would be flown into the region, rather than transported by road or rail.

Russia initially failed to produce visual evidence to back up its claims that soldiers had perished in the crash. Ukraine later said it had intelligence suggesting only five bodies were delivered from the crash site to a morgue in Belgorod, which Yusov said matched the number of crew members on the plane. A number of Ukrainian officials accused Russia of falsely suggesting that Ukraine had inadvertently killed dozens of its own soldiers.

CNN is not able to verify independently claims by either side.

The 207 released soldiers did not include any of the 65 Ukrainian POWs named in a list published by Russian media of those allegedly killed in the IL-76 plane crash, a representative of Ukraine’s Coordination Center for the Treatment of POWs, Petro Yatsenko, told CNN.

Kyiv officials said last Friday that the names of the 65 POWs in Russia’s list tallied with the list of POWs scheduled to be returned to Ukraine as part of the exchange planned on the day of the crash. But Ukraine’s intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said there was still no reliable information as to who might have been on board the downed Russian plane.

Speaking after Wednesday’s prisoner exchange, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed the IL-76 plane had been downed by a US Patriot missile system.

“The plane was shot down – this has already been established with certainty – by the American Patriot system. This has already been established through examination,” Putin said in a meeting focused on his election campaign. He called on international authorities to conduct their own investigations.

Kyiv has not claimed responsibility for the downing of the plane. While the Il-76 plane would have been within the range of a Patriot deployed close to Ukraine’s northern border, Ukraine has consistently said it will not use Western-donated missiles beyond its own internationally-recognized territory.

Putin stressed that Russia would not halt prisoner exchanges despite the plane crash.

“We need to pick up our guys,” he said. “We have thousands, they [Ukrainians] have several dozen, maybe hundreds [of POWs]. But we will still take our guys if the Ukrainian side is ready for this, and they give a signal that they are ready.”

Neither Ukraine’s nor Russia’s statements on Wednesday’s prisoner exchange mentioned the crash.

The head of Zelensky’s office, Andriy Yermak, said the swap was “the second major exchange after a long break.” Alongside the defenders of Mariupol, he said the returned prisoners included “soldiers who were at Azovstal, Zmiinyi Snake Island, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Kherson and Sumy directions.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry said the Russian soldiers released would be transported by military transport aircraft to Moscow for treatment and rehabilitation.

Russian spies

There are more Russian spies in EU Parliament, Latvian lawmakers say

“We are convinced that Ždanoka is not an isolated case,” three MEPs wrote in letter about espionage obtained by Brussels Playbook.

BY JAKOB HANKE VELA AND NICOLAS CAMUT

There’s more than one.

As the European Parliament investigates a Latvian lawmaker suspected of being a Russian spy, her co-nationals in the chamber are warning there are others like her.

“There are other MEPs … knowingly serving Russia’s interests,” wrote Sandra Kalniete, Roberts Zīle and Ivars Ijabs, from the center-right European People’s Party, right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists and liberal Renew respectively, in a letter obtained by POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook.

Parliament on Monday opened an internal probe into Latvian MEP Tatjana Ždanoka after an independent Russian investigative newspaper, the Insider, reported she had been working as an agent for the Russian secret services for years.

Ždanoka has denied those claims.

She was one of just 13 MEPs who in March 2022 voted against a resolution condemning Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which caused her to be expelled from the Greens/EFA group. Ždanoka now sits as a non-attached MEP.

“We are convinced that Ždanoka is not an isolated case,” the three Latvian MEPs wrote, citing concerns over suspicious “public interventions, voting record[s], organised events, as well as covert activities.”

“The Greens/EFA group must bear a degree of responsibility for long-term cooperation, financial support, and informational exchange with Ždanoka from July 2004 till March 2022,” the group added.

The Latvian Socialists did not sign the MEPs’ letter — and there are no Latvian Greens in Parliament after Ždanoka’s expulsion from the group.

The Greens/EFA group released a statement Tuesday saying it was “deeply concerned” about the allegations and asked for Ždanoka to be banned from Parliament for the duration of the probe.

105,000 signatures

Putin challenger submits 105,000 signatures backing his election campaign

Presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin should, in theory, be permitted on the ballot in March.

BY SERGEY GORYASHKO

The elephant in the room can no longer be ignored by the Kremlin, says 60-year-old Russian presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin, referring to himself.

On Wednesday morning, he and his team delivered two dozen boxes labeled “Nadezhdin 2024” to the Central Election Commission (CEC) in Moscow. Inside were 105,000 signatures — the required quota to ensure his place on the ballot for the Russian presidential election in March. That’s when he hopes to challenge Vladimir Putin, the incumbent and almost-certain winner.

“Here is my team, all completely pale, people who — to put it mildly — had little sleep lately. But we managed to do it,” Nadezhdin told journalists.  

In a post on his Telegram channel, the anti-war candidate said, “It will be very difficult for the CEC and the current authorities to say, ‘I didn’t even notice the elephant!’” Nadezhdin wrote.  

His long-shot presidential bid comes at a time when most Russian opposition figures are jailed or exiled. Nadezhdin’s anti-war stance has, however, nudged many Russians into backing his campaign as the Kremlin continues to wage full-scale war on Ukraine.

Long lines of people willing to support the Putin critic have formed at his campaign offices across Russia. Speaking to POLITICO, Nadezhdin attributed his success to a “number of miracles” — including his volunteers’ activities and support from influential Russian opposition figures in exile. 

The CEC will review the signatures submitted by hopeful candidates within 10 days. Alexander Kynev, a Moscow-based independent political analyst, told POLITICO he thought it was unlikely that Nadezhdin would be allowed to stand for election, as that’s too big a risk for the Kremlin. 

Presidential campaigns in Russia are known for the participation of so-called spoiler candidates whom Putin can easily knock down. This time, however, appears different as the spoilers drop out of the race one by one even before it starts.

Andrei Bogdanov, a veteran spin doctor, submitted his papers on Wednesday — but then immediately announced he wouldn’t run. Bogdanov, who previously ran for president in 2008 and gained 1.3 percent of the vote, cited an undisclosed foreign bank account as the reason for his withdrawal. Formally, this mistake bars him from the being on the ballot.

Sergei Baburin of the Russian conservative All-People’s Union withdrew on Tuesday soon after submitting his signatures, urging unity with Putin in a challenging time for Russia. He as well ran in the last campaign, gaining 1 percent of the vote. The conservative Democratic Party of Russia announced its candidate, Irina Sviridova, but said the party would support Putin too.

The Russian election is scheduled for March 15 to 17.

Election officials

‘A recipe for violence’: Election officials on edge for ruling from Georgia judge

Atlanta District judge Amy Totenberg is weighing an order from the bench to mandate additional protections to Georgia’s 2024 vote — as many election officials urge her not to do so.

By JOHN SAKELLARIADIS

Five years ago, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg won plaudits from U.S. election officials for forcing Georgia to ditch its electronic voting machines because they were too susceptible to hacks.

Now Totenberg is weighing a similar order against the state’s new machines — only this time, a slew of election officials are begging her not to do so.

Current and former officials from both parties at the local, state and federal level argue that Georgia’s current voting machines are far less prone to sabotage than their predecessors — which didn’t produce any sort of paper record. But most of all, more than a dozen officials stressed their dread that ordering changes just months ahead of the 2024 presidential vote could undermine trust in the election, overwhelming local election officials and emboldening election deniers all in one breath.

Forcing changes so close to the November ballot “is a recipe for unrest and potentially violence,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on Georgia’s State Election Board, which is a defendant in the case.

The civil trial kicked off on Jan. 9 in an Atlanta district court and arguments are expected to wrap Wednesday. Totenberg — who will decide the case without a jury — is expected to issue a ruling in the coming weeks.

That means public confidence in the 2024 election in a key swing state rests to an unusual degree on this one judge — who must make shrewd judgments about the increasingly thin line between real Election Day risks and hyped-up harms.

And while fears of Russian election interference were high at the time of Totenberg’s earlier ruling, the stakes this time are much more concrete. The people and technology at the heart of the court battle are now at the center of former President Donald Trump’s continued allegations that the 2020 election was stolen.

Totenberg — an Obama appointee — is known among those close to the case for her intensity and work ethic, and as a quick study on the finer points of election technology. A Harvard Law graduate, she joined the federal judiciary in 2011 after stints in private practice and as in-house counsel to Atlanta’s school system. Totenberg’s name already resonates in Beltway judicial circles, but mostly due to her elder sister, Nina, an NPR legal affairs correspondent.

The arguments she has heard in the last few weeks are the latest twist in the same case she first ruled on in 2019, but it now centers on the replacement voting machines Georgia purchased from Dominion Voting Systems for roughly $100 million that year.

“There are thousands of Georgians who take Mike Lindell seriously,” Tindall Ghazal said, referencing the millionaire My Pillow CEO who has helped Trump spread those debunked claims.

Dominion has defamation lawsuits pending against four Trump allies who accused it of flipping votes to Joe Biden, and it reached a $787 million settlement for a similar case against Fox News last April. And it was Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — a defendant in the long-running case, known as Curling v. Raffensperger — who famously refused Trump’s pressure to “find” enough votes to throw the state to him in January 2021.

The plaintiffs in the trial, which include a nonprofit called the Coalition for Good Governance that advocates for the use of hand-marked paper ballots, are trying to persuade Totenberg that the Dominion devices used across the state are so liable to sabotage, it threatens Georgians’ constitutional right to vote.

They have drawn support from some of the country’s leading voting machine security experts, and they argue Totenberg must step in from the bench because state officials like Raffensperger aren’t taking those risks seriously enough.

“There is probably no good time to do this,” said Gregory Miller, the co-founder and chief operating officer at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, which is not a party to the case. But Totenberg deserves credit because “somebody is at last bringing to light the need to take more seriously the casting, counting and auditing of ballots.”

Totenberg declined to be interviewed for this story. Still, she has signaled she understands the choice facing her today is fraught in a way her 2019 decision wasn’t — and perhaps shouldn’t even be in her hands.

In a November ruling ordering the trial, she reminded the parties that she had consistently urged them to compromise outside court because it would better suit the public interest.

After opening arguments on the first day of the trial, she flicked at her struggles weighing the controversial case. “It is an abundance of intellectual riches from all of you designed to try to confuse me at the same time as illuminate all the issues,” she said.

In the courtroom, she often leans the side of her head deep into her palm, her eyes barely peeking out at witnesses and trial lawyers from behind long hair. She patiently studies any documents that get passed to her, projecting a determination to weigh the sensitive case with care.

Totenberg has not indicated she would bar the state’s current voting machines — known as ballot marking devices — like she did in 2019. But she has said the machines put the state at real risk of a hack, and has floated ordering “reasonable fixes” to the way Georgia uses them.

A likely reason for that lighter touch is that those ballot marking devices do something their fully electronic predecessors didn’t: They print voters’ choices onto a piece of paper, which can be used to audit the vote.

The Coalition argues that the design of Dominion’s systems remains ripe for abuse since votes are recorded on the print-out as a barcode, which humans can’t verify. To count the vote, that barcode is then scanned by a separate machine.

Raising the stakes, an independent audit produced for the court in July 2021 and unsealed last summer concluded that Dominion’s machines were rife with software flaws.

And through the trial, the Coalition also uncovered evidence that alleged pro-Trump activists improperly accessed Dominion equipment in a rural Georgia county just one day after the Jan. 6th capital riot, theoretically providing a roadmap for hackers to craft malware for their machines in the future.

“As long as you have 100,000 pieces of equipment floating around in the hands of bad actors, you have no way of controlling the system,” said Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech computer science professor who previously served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs.

Election officials counter that the paper print-out from Dominion machines — which also record votes as readable text — can help spot tampering after the fact.

They also assert the risk of an election-changing hack is overblown since hackers would need physical access to a Dominion device to sabotage it. The machines are largely isolated from each other, and not connected to the internet.

The arguments against Georgia’s voting machines are “off-kilter” and not “a valid legal way” to assess the security of elections, argued Cathy Cox, Georgia’s former Secretary of State.

Cox, a Democrat who served from 1999 to 2007, said the plaintiffs were ignoring the many layers of security that go into protecting the vote, such as pre-election technical tests, physical security, post-election audits and intense public scrutiny.

Milton Kidd, the director of elections and voter registration in Douglas County, Georgia, agreed that forcing fixes on Georgia now would be a costly overreaction.

Mandating changes from the bench “is a foolish thing to do before a major election season,” Kidd said.

Totenberg could opt to let Georgia implement any changes she orders after November. Or, the state could send her ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has already batted down some of her prior rulings in the case.

Still, election officials fear the optics of such a step could reverberate in other states using voting machines.

A ruling against the state could “open the door to potentially a great number of frivolous legal challenges ahead of 2024,” said Kim Wyman, a Republican who served as Washington’s top election official for eight years and later headed the election security portfolio at DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

There’s a basis for those concerns.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly weaponized Totenberg’s opinions on Dominion’s machines in their legal and rhetorical challenges to the 2020 election, twisting her language on potential risks to buttress their debunked allegations of fraud.

And inside the courtroom, her trials this month have been attended by roughly a half-dozen members of a local voting rights group, VoterGA, which has been tied to multiple failed efforts to uncover fraud in the 2020 election.

The group’s supporters hang on each word of the trial, shaking their head or guffawing each time the state’s witnesses make claims they deem improbable.

Earlier this month, they showed up in court with custom T-shirts, which made a fundraising plea on the back. How to donate?

Scan the barcode printed on the back of the shirt.

Progressive rebellion

Democrats risk a new progressive rebellion as Biden embraces border deal

The left isn’t fuming as loudly about the bipartisan immigration talks as it is about the Israel-Hamas war — yet. But the discontent is brewing.

By URSULA PERANO and NICHOLAS WU

Progressives are frustrated with President Joe Biden for embracing the bipartisan border security deal that’s emerging in the Senate. And they’re starting to rage against it more loudly.

It’s not the only area where the left is fuming at the Biden administration — its handling of the the Israel-Hamas war has sparked public protests by progressive activists for months. Once the border deal sees the light of day, however, liberal anger is likely to boil over.

That’s partly because Senate negotiators have ruled out serious immigration concessions to the left, such as permanent status for Dreamers, a decision that effectively shifts the negotiations toward the GOP. Progressives are also watching Biden tack to the right by swearing he’ll shut down the southern border, using authority that the still unreleased bill is set to give him, if Republicans help pass it.

“The president would just do very well to remember it has never worked for Democrats to just take up Republican talking points and think that somehow Republicans are going to turn around and thank us for it,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Progressive Caucus. “That’s just not going to happen.”

It has the makings of a potential Democratic crackup, if the border proposal that’s now on the rocks in the Senate manages to stay alive. Speaker Mike Johnson is signaling the border deal is “dead on arrival” with his House Republicans, but liberal opposition could prove just as problematic even if Johnson is persuaded to act on it.

Democratic leaders have avoided any criticism that could further endanger the monthslong border talks; House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Monday that his caucus would evaluate it once they could review bill text, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has welcomed the negotiations. But progressives are openly predicting that the entire effort could backfire by further alienating a party base that’s already disillusioned by the war in Gaza.

“It’s bad immigration policy. It’s bad for our economy. It’s not humane. It’s bad for Americans, and then I think it’s bad politics as well. I don’t think that we should be accepting a hostage-taking situation and Trump-light policies as Democrats,” said Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas).

The calculus is quite different for Democratic incumbents in battleground states and districts. They have increasingly signaled their willingness to cut a deal that could alleviate a huge electoral vulnerability by showing that the Biden administration can tackle spiking migration.

While the text of Senate negotiators’ proposed policy changes isn’t available yet, people close to the talks have signaled that the final product is likely to expand details’ expulsion authorities, restrict claims for parole and asylum, and set triggers that would close the border altogether if crossings surpass a certain daily threshold.

“You have got to make decisions based on what’s the right thing to do. And we need stronger border security,” said Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.).

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), one of the caucus’ two endangered red-state incumbents, said that “we need to give [the president] the tools so he can do what we need to do to keep this country safe.”

In the House, where Democratic leaders are waiting for details of the border deal to firm up further before weighing in, the party’s purple-district incumbents sound much like Tester.

“I hope we get a bipartisan border security bill out of the Senate that gets put on the House floor that I can support,” said Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), who said she could “absolutely” support a bipartisan deal.

Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) praised the emerging package as “a good deal” that would give Biden “the tools he needs to solve the problems that most of the American people are complaining about on our southern border.” If Republicans don’t put it on the House floor, he added, “this will be on them.”

Senate border negotiators still hope to present a deal to members of both parties this week. It would be tacked on to the White House’s national security emergency spending request, which includes aid for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the southern border. With both chambers and the White House on the line this fall, though, the party is painfully aware that an intraparty squabble with the left could materialize.

Even beyond the Progressive Caucus, key House Democratic voting blocs are riled up about the talks and airing anxiety about what the White House might concede to Republicans. The “Tri-Caucus” of groups representing minority voters is also leery of the Senate’s deal, with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus particularly outraged at its exclusion so far from the talks — though some members in Tri-Caucus groups have cracked open the door to supporting it.

“Republicans are just getting what they want on the border, but then we aren’t getting reforms on immigration. And so it doesn’t feel like there’s a give and take here,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Some progressives see a potential border deal between Biden and Republicans as a betrayal of his promises to reverse former President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies.

Others outright argue the border security provisions Republicans have proposed, such as tightening asylum standards, would actually increase migration problems by increasing the number of illegal migrants. That would give further political fodder to the GOP, those Democrats say.

The deal risks resulting in “a lot more people either camped out on the Mexico side of the border or having to rely more on criminal organizations to migrate because we’re trying some ineffective, Republican-like policies,” Casar said.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told POLITICO in a statement that “the American people overwhelmingly agree with what President Biden underlined in his Day One reform plan: that our immigration system is broken and we have an imperative to secure the border and treat migrants with dignity.”

The intraparty tension helps explain why many Democrats are careful to put the onus on Republicans to support the mostly opaque Senate border talks, particularly as Johnson comes close to squashing the entire effort outright. Yet the tight margins in the House mean that while conservative resistance to the border deal may be louder than progressive opposition, both could prove just as perilous to a border deal.

Top Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are offering their own subtle advice to the left: Be prepared to give ground.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), his party’s lead negotiator on the border deal, predicted that “there are certainly going to be some Republicans who vote against this, and there are going to be some Democrats [who] vote against this.”

“I hope to be able to make the case that there are a lot of really important reforms to Democrats … but yes, I think this this was always going to be a true compromise,” he added.

“Obviously, this will be an issue that’s going to be discussed” during the election season, said Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “That’s why it’s important for us to come to a bipartisan agreement, and certainly Democrats are willing to do that. But that means both sides gotta give.”

Bipartisan tax package

Johnson plans to bring bipartisan tax package to House floor Wednesday

The decision follows a chaotic day on Tuesday in which four New York Republicans threatened to grind the House floor to a halt over their problems with the tax package.

By BENJAMIN GUGGENHEIM

House Speaker Mike Johnson plans to bring a bipartisan tax package to the House floor on Wednesday after a long night of negotiations with a small band of New York Republicans who protested the deal over its lack of state and local tax relief.

The vote would be under a suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority to pass and would therefore need strong showings from both Democrats and Republicans to pass.

The legislation would expand the Child Tax Credit for millions of families and revive a trio of business tax breaks.

The decision puts a cap on a breathless stretch that lasted little more than 24 hours in which four New York Republicans voted “no” on House floor action to bring up unrelated legislation over their complaints that the tax deal does not include larger deductions for state and local tax relief.

After meeting with the speaker, the four GOP members then reversed their votes and let floor action proceed.

The speaker then had prolonged meetings into the night with House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) — the chief tax writer who brokered the tax deal — along with Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) — and the four New York members over how to break the impasse.

Reps. Nick LaLota, Anthony D’Esposito, Mike Lawler and Andrew Garbarino were hopeful that they could either leverage some SALT relief in the deal or else get the speaker to allow a vote on a separate bill to expand the SALT deduction that would be considered by the chamber contemporaneously.

However, the tax package to be considered this evening by the House remains unchanged from that reported out of the Ways and Means Committee 40-3 on Jan. 19. First votes begin at 4:00pm and late votes are currently scheduled for 8:00pm.

A vote of approval by a two-thirds majority in the House would send the package straight to the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said he supports the legislation. But Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has yet to voice his views on the bill and Senate Republican tax writers have insisted they want their own mark-up of the bill to potentially force amendments on the package.

Both Republican and Democratic moderates in the House have voiced their approval of the deal, but some House Freedom Caucus members have expressed concerns that the child credit under current law allows undocumented immigrants with U.S.-born children to get tax refunds.

Several members are also opposed to increasing “refundability” of the credit as written under the deal, which allows low-income families to get part of the credit in the form of a check.

But the legislation’s momentum has overcome several obstacles that have threatened to derail efforts to get it to the House floor.

For instance, a resolution circulated on Monday by Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) to block the speaker from sending the deal to the floor until Johnson stripped all provisions related to the child credit — a decision that would have killed the bipartisan deal — has been retracted by McClintock, according to the lawmaker’s office.

Expanded health benefits

‘The politics have changed’: South warms to expanded health benefits

The South opens a window on public health insurance for more low-income people.

By MEGAN MESSERLY

Southern conservatives have for years privately flirted with extending public health benefits to more low-income people. Those talks are now moving out of the shadows.

House speakers in three Republican-controlled states — Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi — have said in recent weeks that they need to consider covering more people through their state-run health insurance programs.

Their comments represent a stark departure from more than a decade of lawmakers in conservative statehouses arguing vehemently against expanding Medicaid or similar benefits — many of them because of a reflexive revulsion to Obamacare.

The shift is partly a byproduct of a historic realignment that has seen more working-class voters gravitate to the GOP, largely driven by an affinity for the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump.

The changing attitudes could reshape health care in the South by allowing nearly half a million uninsured people to obtain coverage, improving the finances of some of the nation’s most beleaguered hospitals and helping communities with high rates of chronic disease, maternal mortality and avoidable deaths.

“For the first time — really over the last few months in Mississippi — there is this conversation about, ‘Hey, we need to look at these people who don’t have any kind of coverage right now at all. We need to look at some type of an expansion program that fits for Mississippi,’” said Austin Barbour, a Republican strategist and nephew of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. “Our legislators and other officials are looking for ways to improve our health care system in Mississippi.”

In Mississippi, new House Speaker Jason White said lawmakers have never “fully vetted and looked at the Medicaid expansion population.” In Georgia, Speaker Jon Burns said he is “encouraged” that Republican lawmakers are “looking at the facts that surround expansion.”

And in Alabama, Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said the state has “got to have the conversation” about expanding coverage to more Alabamians and that a “private-public partnership” to do so “makes a lot of sense.”

Legislative leaders have met with Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s staff multiple times since December to talk about such a proposal, according to an advocate who was briefed on the conversations.

The comments demonstrate how the political liability of the policy has faded and indicate the states are the closest they have ever been to expanding health insurance to low-income people.

“Eight years ago you would have had to dance around the jargon you used because Obamacare still had this bad branding with Republicans, but these days I don’t even think you have to do that,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist in Georgia and deputy chief of staff to former Gov. Nathan Deal, who refused to expand Medicaid. “The politics have changed because the facts have changed.”

Taken together, the three states could provide health insurance to nearly 470,000 more people who don’t have affordable options, according to estimates from KFF, a think tank. And while Texas and Florida — the two largest states that have not opted to expand programs — remain firmly against the idea, opposition elsewhere is clearly softening.

Alabama state Rep. Paul Lee, chair of the House health committee, is one of a growing number of Republicans who have bought into the idea that expanding Medicaid would help people who are working but either are not offered or cannot afford health insurance through their jobs.

“Everyone knows somebody. We know a neighbor, somebody at our church, somebody in our family — or maybe it’s us — who can’t afford health insurance because they’re paying their electricity bills and clothing their children, but yet they’re working,” Lee said. “I have seen very much an open mind [among GOP lawmakers] because it’s affecting everyone.”

Beyond working-class interests, the strategists, lawmakers and health care advocates attributed the GOP’s shift to a constellation of factors: rural hospitals in conservative areas closing their doors; growing acknowledgement among Republicans that expanding coverage would mostly benefit people already working; a belief that the federal government won’t renege on its promise to foot most of the bill; states like North Carolina and South Dakota last year adopting expansion; and increasing frustration from the holdout states that they are losing out on millions in federal dollars.

They said Medicaid expansion is not the third rail it became when it was established as part of Obamacare more than a decade ago. Resistance among the GOP has crumbled, antipathy toward former President Barack Obama has faded and there are now 19 states with GOP governors that have expanded Medicaid.

In Mississippi, White replaced a stalwart opponent who once killed a proposal to extend postpartum benefits because it seemed too much like expansion. And in Georgia, House Speaker David Ralston, who died in 2022, for years kept the door shut on expansion alongside the governor and other GOP leaders.

Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s partial Medicaid expansion, called Georgia Pathways to Coverage, has struggled, enrolling only 2,344 people in its first five and a half months. But Robinson, who consults for the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals and the Georgia House GOP caucus, believes the program has created a path for a full expansion of Medicaid.

It “showed that politically the issue had lost its sting,” Robinson said. “No one was primaried on that issue. No one even talked about it on the campaign trail.”

That has created space for newer legislative leaders, like Burns in Georgia and Ledbetter in Alabama, now in their second years leading the House, and White in Mississippi, who was elected speaker in January, to push a fresh look at the issue.

White and Burns did not respond to requests for comment.

Charles Murry, a Ledbetter spokesperson, said that while the speaker “is not an advocate for expanding Medicaid, he does believe the state must evaluate all possible options.” That includes a public-private partnership, like the one that exists in Arkansas, which allows states to use Medicaid dollars to purchase private health plans.

Approving Medicaid expansion is still an uphill battle in these states, though. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves spent his 2023 reelection campaign arguing against the idea, while Kemp has called a full Medicaid expansion a “failed one-size-fit-none” policy.

Ivey, who could implement a coverage expansion without legislative approval, has been more open, saying that “Medicaid expansion in Alabama will continue to be a serious consideration.”

Spokespeople for Reeves, Kemp and Ivey did not respond to requests for comment.

Still, strategists believe the paradigm in the South has shifted and that more vocal support for Medicaid expansion among legislative leaders creates an opening for those governors to shift on the policy, too.

Outside those three states, prospects are less promising despite some support among rank-and-file Republican lawmakers in Kansas, South Carolina and Wyoming.

“We can’t just simply content ourselves as Republicans with throwing rocks at Obamacare. We’ve got to move beyond just a superficial bumper sticker condemnation of it and move into a constructive analysis,” said Republican South Carolina state Sen. Tom Davis, who sits on the Senate Medical Affairs Committee and introduced a measure this year to study, among other things, expanding Medicaid. “Maybe at the end of the day we make a reasoned decision that we don’t want to expand Medicaid, but we owe the people of South Carolina a transparent and open debate.”

But South Carolina state Rep. Sylleste Davis, a Republican who chairs the House’s health committee, said lawmakers are “focused on other things and just have not had any conversations about” expanding Medicaid.

In Wyoming, Eric Boley, president of the Wyoming Hospital Association, said passing Medicaid expansion “might require the second coming of the savior” as the Republican-dominated Legislature grapples with a deep divide between the conservative Wyoming Caucus and the far-right Freedom Caucus, the chair of which has said he won’t support Medicaid expansion under any circumstances.

And Republican legislative leaders in Kansas continue to vehemently oppose any Medicaid expansion proposal Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly puts before them. Her latest, released in December, tried to entice conservatives by mandating that new enrollees show proof of work to qualify for coverage, but opponents balked.

“Medicaid should be reserved for only those truly that need it, the children, the elderly, the disabled,” said House Speaker Dan Hawkins, a longtime opponent of Medicaid expansion. “It should be called government expansion or something else because Medicaid was meant for a specific purpose.”

Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins watches the chamber's electronic tally board during a vote.

“Medicaid should be reserved for only those truly that need it, the children, the elderly, the disabled,” said House Speaker Dan Hawkins, a longtime opponent of Medicaid expansion. | John Hanna/AP

Last week, Kelly’s office highlighted the expansion momentum in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi and warned that her state may soon be one of only seven that hasn’t adopted the policy.

Stephanie Sharp, a moderate former Republican state lawmaker turned strategist in Kansas, believes Republican legislative leaders don’t want to hand a win to Kelly, who has been pushing for expansion since she took office in 2019. She said it will likely take a change in legislative leadership — like happened in Georgia and Mississippi — to push the issue forward.

“Once you change out some of this more established leadership — people who have been there for a long time, since the original Medicaid battles — they aren’t as beholden to that position,” Sharp said. “We could get somebody who is a little newer, a little more fresh blood — and they could get it done.”

Immunity

As judges mull presidential immunity, Trump reaps the benefits of delay

For over three weeks, the D.C. Circuit has been sitting on a potentially decisive question.

By KYLE CHENEY and JOSH GERSTEIN

Whether Donald Trump faces a potential prison sentence in 2024 is at the mercy of a federal appeals court that’s operating on its own schedule — at a time when every day matters.

More than 50 days have elapsed since Trump’s criminal proceedings in a Washington, D.C., trial court — on charges for attempting to subvert the 2020 election — were paused indefinitely. They won’t resume until the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and, most likely, the Supreme Court resolve the question hanging over the entire case: whether Trump, as a former president, is immune from criminal prosecution.

Even if those courts ultimately reject Trump’s immunity arguments — an outcome that most legal experts expect — the protracted delays help the former president, whose strategy across his various trials has been to drag them out for as long as possible. Lengthy delays in his federal criminal cases create the possibility that, if he wins the presidency this November, Trump could avoid the charges altogether by having the Justice Department end the prosecutions or perhaps even by pardoning himself.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal election case, has tried to keep it on an expeditious track, and the trial is officially slated to begin on March 4. Chutkan, though, has strongly suggested she’ll push back that start date to account for each day of delay caused by Trump’s immunity appeal.

Even if the appeal were resolved this week against Trump, that calculation would put his earliest trial date in late April. But if the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court take additional weeks or months to deliver a final ruling, the opening days of Trump’s trial could be pushed to the summer or fall.

If, at that point, Trump retains his grip on the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he and his allies are certain to exert intense pressure to postpone the trial until after the election. Chutkan, an Obama appointee, could plow forward with a trial anyway — and she’s repeatedly indicated that the campaign calendar has no bearing on her own.

But doing so would require Trump to sit in a courtroom for weeks during the heart of the campaign. Trump has already used his crowded legal calendar as a campaign cudgel to raise funds and rally supporters by claiming to be the victim of political prosecutions and lawsuits.

For now, the timing of the case remains in the hands of a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit, which heard arguments on the immunity issue on Jan. 8. That reality has placed immense power in the hands of a few judges guided by opaque internal procedures, seniority and norms of collegiality that make reliable prediction impossible.

Many legal experts had expected the D.C. Circuit panel to rule quickly after the arguments, perhaps within a few days. But for more than three weeks, the court has been silent. There’s no required deadline for a ruling.

“The timing of a decision by the panel will indeed be a critical determinant of whether the case can go forward expeditiously,” said Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor.

Richman said Trump’s arguments for immunity were so “outlandish” that the appeals court should have little trouble rejecting them. But he said the court must take its time to issue a careful ruling because of the certainty Trump will keep pressing his immunity claim.

“Quite a few stars would have to align before the trial can proceed,” Richman said.

If those stars do align, the timing will be crucial. Special counsel Jack Smith has estimated that his case would take nearly two months to present, and Trump is almost certain to present a defense that could add additional weeks to the timeline. That raises the prospect of Trump being required to spend the duration of the Republican National Convention — or even Election Day itself — in a courtroom.

Or, if the Supreme Court agrees to hear Trump’s bid for immunity but won’t take up his appeal on an emergency basis, the trial could remain on hold until after the election. And if Trump wins, he would be virtually certain to shut down the case.

The three-judge D.C. Circuit panel initially appeared to be moving swiftly: It took up the matter on an emergency basis in December and held oral arguments a few weeks later, a lightning-quick schedule for the typically plodding court.

The judges seemed poised to reject Trump’s sweeping immunity claim at the time. But the precise contours of their ruling were less obvious, and it’s possible the judges could splinter over the details, further delaying the ruling.

The urgency of ruling to the prosecution has drawn unusual scrutiny of the internal machinations of the appeals court, such as whether a single judge — perhaps Karen Henderson, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush — could prevent the ruling from coming out quickly, even if the panel’s other two judges — Florence Pan and Michelle Childs, appointed by President Joe Biden — are ready to rule.

Henderson, the panel’s senior judge, had expressed opposition to taking up the case on an expedited basis and also had the most cryptic outlook based on her questions during oral arguments. As the most senior judge, she has the right to write the majority opinion if she’s in the majority. And even if she disagrees with her colleagues, she could potentially hold back the court’s ruling for weeks or months while she crafts a dissenting opinion.

There is no formal rule or policy at the appeals court that allows the majority on a panel to force the release of a ruling when another member of the panel hasn’t completed his or her opinion, according to Matthew Seligman, a former D.C. Circuit law clerk who is co-counsel on a friend-of-the-court brief in the case filed by former Republican officials opposing Trump’s immunity claim.

“At this point, it’s uncomfortable how long it’s taken, but I don’t think you can look at it and say it’s, on its face, absurd,” said Seligman, who said judges in the majority would likely wait much longer before trying to cajole or force the release of a ruling while a colleague is still writing. “I don’t think we’re really close to a point where the judges in the majority would consider taking whatever measures they could — and it’s not clear what those are.”

The time it takes for the appeals panel to mull over the weighty question could also influence the likely Supreme Court battle to follow. If Trump loses at the appeals court, he’s already announced his intention to seek the high court’s judgment and has begun a public campaign to persuade them to endorse a boundless definition of presidential immunity. The longer it takes for the appeals court to rule, the likelier the Supreme Court would punt the issue into the fall — effectively ruling out a trial before the election.

That’s why the timing of the D.C. Circuit’s opinion could bear heavily on whether Trump sees a criminal trial that carries the risk of jail time in 2024.

Trump is facing three other criminal cases: one brought by Smith in Florida in which Trump stands accused of hoarding national security secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office; one in Georgia brought by local prosecutors who say Trump conspired to subvert the presidential election there in 2020; and one in New York brought by the Manhattan district attorney, who says Trump falsified his company’s records to mask hush money payments he made to conceal an alleged affair with a porn star.

A trial in the New York case is officially slated to begin in late March, though Trump is still pushing to toss it altogether, and even if it moves forward, the anticipated punishment is expected to be minimal. The Georgia case has not yet been scheduled but is likely to be shunted to 2025, given its complexity and laundry list of unresolved issues. And the classified documents case in Florida, set for May 20, also appears likely to be pushed back as U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, has extended key pretrial deadlines.

The pause in the proceedings in the election-focused case in Washington began on Dec. 7, when Trump appealed Chutkan’s conclusion that neither he — nor any former president — enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution. And Chutkan has acknowledged that as long as the immunity question remains unresolved, Trump is under no obligation to continue preparing for trial.

Stuck

The Real Reason We’re Stuck with Trump v. Biden

There’s more than one thing wrong with the U.S. primary system.

By GEOFFREY COWAN

Even though the November presidential election is more than nine months away, only two states have voted and less than 1 percent of the electorate has cast a ballot, the presidential primary process in both parties is all but over. Joe Biden is virtually certain to represent the Democratic Party, and despite Nikki Haley’s persistence, Donald Trump is virtually certain to be the Republican Party’s nominee.

This may seem to make little sense in many ways. The Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary have chosen just 61 of the roughly 2,400 delegates who will officially vote for the GOP nominee at the party’s convention six months from now. None of the more than 4,000 delegates have so far been chosen for the Democratic Party’s convention.

What’s more, these candidates do not reflect the preferences of a majority of Americans. An Associated Press-NORC Research Center poll published last month found that 56 percent of U.S. adults would be “very” or “somewhat” dissatisfied with Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee and about 58 percent would be unhappy with Trump as the GOP nominee. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 67 percent of respondents were “tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections and want someone new.”

“ Trump vs. Biden: No Thanks,” read a recent USA Today headline.

But the problem isn’t just that a small number of states can have an outsized influence over our politics or that the primary system locks in unpopular candidate choices so far in advance of the election.

It is also that the system locks out alternatives: Thanks to changes in party rules over the years, it has become almost impossible for people to launch a campaign after the start of the calendar year of the election. This problem has been growing for some time, but it has become particularly obvious this year.

Moreover, an aspect of the delegate selection process known as “frontloading” also makes the process less democratic than the public expects. Thanks to the effort to have maximum impact on the process, states now hold their primaries as early in the election year as possible. In addition, most states have now adopted rules requiring candidates who want to run in a party’s primary to register by the first week of the year of the presidential election.

That’s not how the people who wrote the delegate selection rules expected the process to work.

More than five decades ago, I had a role in drafting important aspects of the process that, with some adjustments, still governs how both parties choose their presidential nominees. The goal of the reform commission led the Democratic Party to eliminate the “smoke-filled rooms” that had enabled party leaders (or “bosses”) to pick the presidential nominee without input from voters. The new rules, adopted in a close vote by the delegates at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, said that nominees should be chosen by convention delegates and that “all delegates ... must be selected through a process open to full public participation in the calendar year of the convention.” The rule had two aims: to create an open process such as a primary or caucus, and also make sure that the selection took place in the calendar year of the election.

That second part of the rule — choosing candidates in the same calendar year of the election — was equally important in our view at the time. The goal was to make sure that current events could be taken into account by the voters. We did not want the parties to lock in their choices too early.

The events of 1968 help to explain why. In late 1967, President Lyndon Johnson seemed headed to a decisive victory. On December 31, the New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Johnson Popularity on Upswing” quoting from a Gallup poll showing him with a 46 percent end-of-year approval rating, an increase of 5 percent from November and 8 percent from October. Part of his growing popularity was based on Johnson’s promise that there would be an early end to the war in Vietnam.

But Johnson’s support melted in early February 1968, due to the so-called “Tet Offensive,” a massive military operation launched by the Vietcong on January 30, 1968. The Tet Offensive made people feel that America was far less likely to win what was already an unpopular war. In January, before the Tet Offensive, the Gallup poll showed Johnson leading former President Richard Nixon, his likely Republican opponent, by 12 points — by 51 percent to 39 percent. But by late February they were tied at 42 percent. Tet also helped Johnson’s Democratic challenger, former Sen. Eugene McCarthy, win 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, which was held on March 12.

Although McCarthy had decided to challenge Johnson by January, it was the impact of the Tet Offensive that led Sen. Robert Kennedy to jump in. He did not announce his campaign until March 16. Two weeks later, recognizing that his campaign was in deep jeopardy, Johnson announced that he would not run for president. Even with a mid-March entry, Kennedy was able to enter primaries in six states including California, where he won the primary on June 6. Had he not been assassinated that same night, Kennedy might well have been the party’s nominee.

The events of that spring were very much on the minds of those of us who reformed the party rules in the summer of 1968. We wanted to be sure that candidates could enter the race in the spring of a presidential election year as Kennedy had done, and that voters could take account of changing circumstances in voting for candidates.

For many years, such a late entry was possible. Exactly eight years after Kennedy announced that he would run for president, California Gov. Jerry Brown announced that he would run for the Democratic Party’s nomination. Starting on March 16, 1976, Brown was able to enter primaries in several states, beginning with Maryland on May 18.

But what would happen at the same point in 2024 if there were dramatic events on the world or domestic stage, if there were major legal developments, if a candidate decided to withdraw or, lord forbid, if the leading candidate encountered a major health problem in the spring? Could a new candidate still enter the race?

Probably not.

Since the 1980s, primaries have become “frontloaded” into the first few months of the year. The New Hampshire primary, which used to be in March, is now in January. Delegate-rich California now votes on Super Tuesday in early March instead of in early June. As the primary election dates have crept earlier and earlier, the filing deadlines have become earlier as well. Most states now require candidates to file in the year prior to the election, or by the first week of the election year — in contravention of what we intended at the time.

For that reason, should Trump’s fortunes change — due to health concerns, court decisions, or an unforeseen circumstance — Republican voters’ only alternative would be Haley. Indeed, one reason for Haley to stay in the race is that while candidates like DeSantis who have suspended their campaigns (rather than dropping out completely) could technically re-enter, party rules now make it almost impossible for a new candidate to enter the delegate selection process in any state.

If Trump were to drop out altogether, Haley would have certain special advantages at the Republican National Convention. For example, some state party rules — including those of South Carolina — award the delegate votes to the second-place finisher in a state if the first-place finisher drops out. As the only remaining candidate, Haley would get all the votes from those states. But she would still need to get a majority of delegates on the first ballot; if she doesn’t, the nomination would go to an open convention.

If Biden, on the other hand, were to falter, there is no clear challenger on the ballot in most states this spring thanks in part to exceedingly early filing deadlines. There is some chance that states that have yet to hold primaries might be able to extend their filing deadlines or even move their primaries until later in the year with the approval of state legislatures. If Biden officially withdraws from the race, the DNC, unlike the RNC, allows pledged delegates to vote for any other candidate, meaning it could be open season for the Democratic nominee at the convention.

If either candidate were to withdraw after their party’s convention, members of the national committees would almost certainly be given responsibility for finding the replacement.

Hopefully no such event will occur this year since our system is ill-equipped to handle it. If it does, we may come perilously close to chaos at this summer’s conventions.

At the very least, the parties should take this year as a warning. This would be a good time for both parties to develop new guidelines for the selection of presidential candidates that allow the public to play a role in the nominating process — but keep it open well into the calendar year of the election.

Fundraising plummets

Sinema’s fundraising plummets as reelection decision deadline nears

The Arizona independent is raising less and less each quarter.

By ALLY MUTNICK and JESSICA PIPER

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (I-Ariz.) fundraising cratered to her lowest quarterly total yet this cycle as she stares down an April deadline to file for reelection.

The independent Arizona senator raised just $595,000 in the final three months of 2023, according to a report filed by her campaign with the Federal Election Commission late Tuesday. That is less than one-fifth of the total that her main Democratic challenger, Rep. Ruben Gallego, said his campaign raised during the same period. Her likely Republican challenger, Kari Lake, reported raising $2 million.

And Sinema spent $749,000 during that same time period, which means her cash-on-hand total dropped slightly, though still resembling an impressive sum. (Contribution refunds alone took out more than 10% of her fundraising haul.)

Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December 2022, has not decided if she will seek reelection this year. With nearly $11 million in her campaign account, she remains the biggest unknown on the Senate map. If she does enter the race, it would create an unpredictable three-way matchup.

“Kyrsten remains laser focused on continuing her work making a meaningful impact in the lives of Arizonans across the state - not on campaign politics,” a spokesperson for her campaign said in a statement. “She has the resources to keep delivering lasting results for Arizona.”

The first-term senator has been focused on negotiating a border deal during recent months, keeping her focus and time in Washington. But Sinema’s fundraising steadily declined all year.

Her high-water mark came in the first three months of 2023 when she posted $2.1 million. That fell 22 percent in the second quarter. Then her third-quarter number was only 50 percent of her second-quarter haul. And the new filing shows a 30 percent drop from her third-quarter to fourth-quarter totals.

Sinema’s struggle to fundraise wasn’t for lack of trying, her expenditures suggest. The campaign spent more than $124,000 on fundraising consulting and event and travel costs associated with fundraising, the filing showed. She also spent more than $141,000 on digital advertising, which is typically used to attract donors. A spokesperson declined to provide details on the digital spending but said it was not focused directly on fundraising.

Security-related expenses were her other major spending category in the fourth quarter, including a $100,000 retainer with Kinsaker Security Group, LLC, and $77,000 spent on a security vehicle.

But the Arizona senator’s campaign notably spent very little on payroll, with just over $7,700 paid in total to four staffers. That suggests Sinema has not started to staff up like a major Senate campaign would likely need to in an election year.

The filing deadline in Arizona is April 8, and Sinema would face an onerous requirement of some 40,000 signatures to secure a place on the ballot. Sinema did not appear to spend money toward gathering signatures or other ballot-access measures.

Legal expenses

Haley goes after Trump’s legal expenses yet again

The former U.N. Ambassador slammed her one-time boss over reports he has had to spend tens of millions of campaign funds on legal fees.

By KELLY GARRITY

Nikki Haley wants Donald Trump to pay a political price for his legal problems — before the start of the general election.

Haley took a swing at Trump over his legal woes Tuesday evening, after the New York Times reported that political committees aligned with the former president spent roughly $50 million to cover his legal bills last year.

“Another reason Donald Trump won’t debate me… His PAC spent [$]50 MILLION in campaign dollars on his legal fees,” Haley posted on X (formerly Twitter). “He can’t beat Joe Biden if he’s spending all his time and money on court cases and chaos.”

The $50 million, according to the Times, is around the same amount that Haley – Trump’s only remaining high-profile opponent in the Republican primary – raised across her committees last year. POLITICO has not independently verified the figure.

It’s the second time in recent days that Haley has used Trump’s mounting legal fees as a line of attack — a notable escalation as the campaign moves to her home state of South Carolina. Last week, she went after the former president after a jury ordered him to pay $83.3 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll over defamatory remarks he made about her while he was president in response to her rape accusation against him.

“Donald Trump wants to be the presumptive Republican nominee and we’re talking about $83 million in damages,” Haley wrote on X in the wake of the verdict. “We’re not talking about fixing the border. We’re not talking about tackling inflation. America can do better than Donald Trump and Joe Biden.”

Appearing on Meet the Press this Sunday she said she “absolutely” trusted the jury’s verdict in that case.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Haley has steadily ramped up her attacks against Trump as the field has narrowed. With just the two of them remaining, she’s begun more aggressively focusing on Trump’s legal baggage. It’s a topic many former primary opponents declined to touch, fearful that the former president would use it to rally Republican voters behind him.

The former South Carolina governor has done it largely in a way that has side-stepped the specifics of Trump’s dozens of indictments while focusing on the distractions they pose.

“Chaos follows him,” she often says, when asked whether the charges or the allegations that Trump incited a riot at the U.S. Capitol should disqualify him from returning to the White House.

Longer-range bomb

New US-made longer-range bomb expected to arrive as soon as Wednesday in Ukraine

The Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb doesn’t even exist in the U.S. inventory.

By LEE HUDSON, LARA SELIGMAN and PAUL MCLEARY

The Pentagon has successfully tested a new long-range precision bomb for Ukraine that is expected to arrive on the battlefield as soon as Wednesday, according to two U.S. officials and two other people with knowledge of the talks.

Ukraine will receive its first batch of Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bombs, a brand new long-range weapon made by Boeing that even the U.S. doesn’t have in its inventory, according to the four people, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss matters ahead of an announcement.

The new bomb, which can travel about 90 miles, is expected to be “a significant capability for Ukraine,” said one of the U.S. officials.

“It gives them a deeper strike capability they haven’t had, it complements their long-range fire arsenal,” the U.S. official said. “It’s just an extra arrow in the quiver that’s gonna allow them to do more.”

An Army spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder declined to comment on timing “due to operational security.”

“I will refer to Ukraine to talk about any delivery,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “But we do, as I mentioned, continue to work closely with Ukraine and with our industry partners to ensure that Ukraine receives and is ready to use the capabilities that we’re delivering to them, and as quickly as possible.”

The weapon, co-developed by Boeing and Saab, is made up of a precision-guided 250-pound bomb strapped to a rocket motor and fired from various ground launchers. The U.S. military has a similar version of the bomb that is air-launched, but a ground-launched version does not yet exist in U.S. inventory.

The extended range will put a new capability in Kyiv’s arsenal at a time when fighting along the front is in a stalemate, and as Ukraine looks for new ways to hit Russian forces and infrastructure behind the front lines.

The bomb will join other long-range weapons given to Ukraine over the past year that have allowed its troops to hit Russian logistics and naval sites in Crimea. While the new bombs don’t have the range of the British Storm Shadow or the U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System, it is arriving as Ukraine’s stockpiles of artillery and munitions are running low.

New funding for Ukraine is part of the $111 billion emergency supplemental that’s been stalled on Capitol Hill. Despite the fact that the U.S. has no new money to authorize weapons transfers from existing stocks, the U.S. signed a contract with Boeing last year to provide the weapon to Kyiv.

Ukraine will be the first country to use the bomb in combat, making it a critical test case for other countries that have been snapping up long-range munitions since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The Pentagon announced last February that the Biden administration was providing the new bomb to Ukraine. But before sending the new version, the U.S. military needed to test the weapon — and that took many months.

The Army oversaw the testing of the new precision-guided bomb before providing its stamp of approval to send the weapon to Ukraine, according to an industry source.

The air-launched version was created in 2019, but despite successful tests, Boeing and Saab did not make a sale until the U.S. decided to donate it to Ukraine as part of an aid package.

Florida fundraiser

Biden mocks Trump during Florida fundraiser

He lamented that Florida had faced a “real dose of Trumpism.”

By KIMBERLY LEONARD

President Joe Biden came to South Florida to cash in and dump all over Donald Trump.

During a fundraiser in Jupiter, Florida, on Tuesday, Biden rallied donors to help him make Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, a “loser again” and made the sign of the cross after bemoaning that Florida faced a “real dose of Trumpism.”

The president accused Trump of leaving the U.S. a “mess” when he came into office during the height of the Covid pandemic and when the economy was “reeling.” Biden swiped his opponent on mass shootings, the economy, abortion rights and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“He got us to imagine what life was like under Trump and what it would be like again if Trump were to be reelected,” said Betsy Sheerr, a retiree who attended the event and was a Democratic Party activist and communications specialist. “He drew a sharp contrast between the two views.”

Biden ended his speech with the lofty prediction that he could win Florida, though he lost the state to Trump by more than three percentage points in 2020 and polling shows him trailing by double digits. The president’s speech was right in Trump’s backyard: Jupiter is located in Palm Beach County, where Trump is a resident and where he’s been charged with hoarding classified documents at his Mar-A-Lago estate after leaving the White House.

According to a pool report of Biden’s comments, the president did not address the Middle East crisis during the fundraiser, even in the wake of a drone strike launched by Iranian proxies in Jordan that killed three American soldiers. He did address the matter briefly to reporters outside the White House on Tuesday morning, saying, without details, that the U.S. planned to respond.

Biden also only briefly mentioned Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in passing and didn’t mention Trump’s indictments, said Biden donor Bonnie Lautenberg, an artist and wife of the late Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey who attended Tuesday’s event in Jupiter that had roughly 100 guests.

The president boasted about the current state of the economy, taking a moment to bash comments Trump made during a TV interview this month, when he said he hoped the economy would nose-dive before the election. Trump said at the time that he didn’t want to wind up like former President Herbert Hoover, who saw the stock market crash during his first year in office.

Biden told donors at the Jupiter fundraiser, held at the waterfront Pelican Club, that he thought Trump said that because he knew the economy was strong and that it was “bad for him politically.”

“I think it’s close to un-American,” he said. “How can anyone, especially a former president of the United States, wish for an economic crash that would devastate the United States?” He then mockingly called Trump “Donald Herbert Hoover Trump,” a nickname he’s used before, and was met with laughter in the room, per the pool report.

Biden also joked that Trump was already like Hoover because the U.S. had “fewer jobs when he left office than when he came into office.”

“I was glad to see him make a joke about Trump, because Trump puts down everybody,” Lautenberg said. “He always has nicknames.”

Becoming more serious, Biden also criticized Trump’s comments “to get over,” a mass shooting at Perry High School in Iowa. Sheerr said the president “appeared very somber, shocked and angry” during that part of the speech.

Asked about the fundraiser, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called Biden “delusional” for thinking he could win Florida.

“Americans know that they were better off with President Trump,” he said. “After almost four years of Crooked Joe’s disastrous presidency, we need a return to America First policies that successfully kept our country safe and supercharged the economy for all Americans.”

Both Sheerr and Lautenberg said Biden received the biggest applause of the Jupiter event when he raised the issue of abortion rights. Sheerr said Biden had specifically referenced Democrats’ chances in Florida in light of the ballot measure that’s expected to go before voters in November, which would legalize abortion for up to 24 weeks in a pregnancy, doing away with the state’s current 15-week ban that doesn’t have exceptions for rape or incest.

The president also addressed another group of donors later in the day at a fundraiser at the Coral Gables home of Biden Victory Fund finance chair Chris Korge, repeating some of the same lines of attack against Trump. The chair previously said he hoped the event would be among the largest fundraisers for a presidential candidate ever hosted in Florida.

Biden, the Democratic National Committee and their joint-fundraising committees raised more than $97 million in the final three months of 2023, the campaign announced this month.