Being a badass motherfucker

From agitator to insider: The evolution of AOC

The New York Democrat, in a wide-ranging interview, tackled her “really surreal” start in Congress and the space she’s carved out in the party fold.

By NICHOLAS WU and JORDAIN CARNEY

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Washington as the ultimate Democratic disruptor. Four years into her House career, she’s embracing a new role: team player.

The co-founder of the progressive “squad” — who rocketed to prominence with her willingness to take on party leaders when others on the left would not — is acquiring power via more traditional means now. She snagged a senior position on a plum committee, putting her in closer proximity to top House Democrats. At a recent party retreat, she coached fellow Democrats on how to up their communications game.

And after years of on-and-off sparring with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez is forging ties with new Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries — a fellow New Yorker whose centrist instincts aren’t always aligned with her own.

Her evolution is driven partly by a new political reality for her party: Democrats lost the House last year, and progressives have found a lot to like in Joe Biden’s first two years in the White House. But Ocasio-Cortez’s shift also comes as the 33-year-old lawmaker is mulling her next steps.

In a lengthy recent interview in her Capitol Hill office, Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t rule out any number of options, from challenging Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) next year (“don’t ask me that question … print that,” she said with a laugh), to remaining in the House for the long haul or, perhaps, leaving Congress entirely.

“There’s a world where I’m here for a long time in this seat, in this position. There’s a world where I’m not an elected official anymore. There’s a world where … I may be in higher office,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez’s shift suggests a potential exchange of one type of power — her penchant for internal pot-stirring and the outsize media attention that comes with it — for a more conventional kind of influence. Whether AOC 2.0 is actually more powerful than the previous one isn’t clear yet; she and Jeffries have not yet locked arms the way Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) did ahead of his push to lock down the House’s top gavel.

Not that Ocasio-Cortez accepts any comparison between herself and the right flank of the GOP.

“There are people, including moderates, who sometimes try to draw this completely unfair, false equivalence between progressives and, frankly, the fascists that we see in the Republican Party,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

And Ocasio-Cortez’s new profile also isn’t without risk. The Democratic base doesn’t typically reward an ability to work the inside levers of Congress. But the influence she can accrue by playing Congress’ inside track may prove to be as potent as the saturation-level media exposure she would forgo in the process.

Then and now

Ocasio-Cortez’s growing ease and seniority within the Democratic caucus is a far cry from when she arrived in the House in 2019 and decided to skip most party meetings.

At the time, Ocasio-Cortez said, many veteran House Democrats treated her with a mix of admiration, disrespect and fear. They would avoid speaking to her when she was standing nearby, she said, even as they lapped up news coverage about her latest utterance.

Her early sense that colleagues were forming impressions of her without bothering to talk to her was reinforced by non-stop leaks of closed-door caucus meetings, which, she said, “might as well have been broadcast on C-SPAN.”

“One of those things that I really learned during that period was that there was nothing I could do that would dampen that fervor. Whether I participated in it or not, there was just going to be all these stories and all of these things,” she said of the early media attention she received. “And so I decided to have agency.”

Ocasio-Cortez is operating in a much different place now, and nothing encapsulates that repositioning more than her ascension to a top role on the Oversight Committee. Her role as vice ranking member has helped Democratic leadership bring her closer inside their tent — and allowed her to assert herself as an institutional force, while still channeling the energy she brought as a 29-year-old newcomer in 2019.

At the same time, she made clear in the interview that she reserves the right to hold the Biden administration accountable — especially in policy areas where she sees the president’s team as occasionally “weak,” like immigration.

Bonding with Raskin

Ocasio-Cortez’s rise on the committee is in part thanks to a partnership with Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the panel who led the push to impeach former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The former constitutional law professor and former bartender’s bond began during the last Congress when they worked together on the Oversight panel.

“People don’t see the academic nerd side of her,” said Raskin, who at 60 is nearly twice Ocasio-Cortez’s age. “But I totally do, as a professor.”

As for her posture toward Democratic leadership, they’re still figuring each other out. She noted that her sometimes-prickly relationship with Pelosi caused consternation at times.

“I … own that I was very critical of our party’s leadership.” she said. Though Ocasio-Cortez said her relationship with the new batch of Democratic leaders is “still evolving,” she acknowledged “a significant shift” in the dynamic with party leaders. She attributed at least in part it to an influx of new liberal, younger, more diverse members who are more natural allies.

All told, whether by design or not, Ocasio-Cortez has been making fewer headlines of late as Washington’s initial fascination with the “squad” passes. She’s as likely to speak directly to constituents and supporters through her own social media as she is to seek out a gaggle of reporters. Case in point: Her recent declaration — via a post on TikTok — that Congress shouldn’t rush to ban the popular China-linked app.

Republican respect

As for her work on the Oversight panel, Ocasio-Cortez has earned her begrudging respect from Republicans.

“She maximizes her five minutes as well as anyone in Congress,” Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said of Ocasio-Cortez’s allotted time to question committee witnesses. “She’s always prepared.”

Some conservatives have even opened the door to collaborating with her on issues where progressives might align with their party, like data privacy and surveillance.

It’s no accident that Ocasio-Cortez made an institutional home on the Oversight panel: Perhaps more than any other House committee, it offers members who clearly communicate a chance to go viral and force answers from the powerful.

And while Ocasio-Cortez has demonstrated her ability to go viral since her first days on the committee, she’s also now focusing on mentoring younger colleagues. She credited the committee as “one of the few refuges” when she first arrived on the Hill to “demonstrate my capacities and earned respect based on my work” — a place where senior Democrats were “willing to give me the benefit of the doubt,” she said.

“It’s understandable when I first arrived, if someone would try to question my substance and my commitment to work, but that commitment has always been there,” she added.

Mentoring new Democrats

One of the new members Ocasio-Cortez is mentoring is Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), who at 26 is the youngest elected member of Congress — a designation she held back in 2019.

She’s “helping on the best ways to craft questions, the best ways to deal with combative people on the committee,” Frost said in an interview.

Ocasio-Cortez is now helping shape the party’s investigative strategy. She took part in a panel at Democrats’ retreat last month where she taught lawmakers how to get better at asking questions in hearings. She also helped strategize for a GOP-led trip last month to the D.C. jail, where detainees are being held in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

If Ocasio-Cortez’s growing involvement in internal party strategy is chipping away at younger liberals’ affection for her, it didn’t show in the reverence with which Frost described her mentorship. Among the lessons he’s learned from her, he said, was “being a badass motherfucker.”

Make motion

Trump’s lawyer expects to make motion to dismiss charges

But the move won’t come until after Donald Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday, Joe Tacopina said.

By KELLY GARRITY

Joe Tacopina, one of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers, said Sunday that he eventually expects to move to dismiss the charges against the former president.

“I very much anticipate a motion to dismiss coming because there’s no law that fits this,” Tacopina told Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Trump was indicted Thursday by a Manhattan grand jury in a case related to hush money his lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The exact charges against the former president have yet to be unveiled.

The move to dismiss the charges against Trump won’t come until after his arraignment Tuesday, Tacopina said.

“We’re not doing anything at the arraignment because that would be showmanship and nothing more because we haven’t even seen the indictment yet.”

“We will take the indictment. We will dissect it. The team will look at every — every — potential issue that we will be able to challenge and we will challenge,” he added.

Driving up a wall.......

Nikki Haley is driving Mike Pence’s campaign up a wall

Pence staffers are complaining privately about media coverage of Haley, another second-tier contender.

By ADAM WREN and NATALIE ALLISON

Mike Pence might harbor deep-seated resentment toward Donald Trump for his handling of Jan. 6. But it’s Nikki Haley who really gets under the Pence camp’s skin.

Inside Pence’s orbit, staffers have begun privately complaining about a presidential contender who, like Pence, is polling in single digits — distressed that Haley is drawing what they view as more favorable media coverage than the former vice president receives. In recent weeks, they fumed about coverage that painted her as a fiscal conservative at a donor retreat in Florida and didn’t fully capture what they described as her tepid reception at CPAC, where Pence previously drew headlines for getting booed.

The animosity hasn’t quite reached the level of hostilities between Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar in the 2020 Democratic primary, and Pence staffers appear to spend more time thinking about Haley than vice versa. But the tension surfacing between them has all the makings of the first, real undercard feud of 2024.

“It’s like giving a shit about who wins the NIT tournament,” said Jeff Timmer, former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party and senior adviser to the Lincoln Project. “Everybody is watching the NCAA Tournament. To use a boxing metaphor, it’s like an undercard race that no one is even paying attention to. They’re all watching the heavyweight matchup between Trump and DeSantis.”

In any other political universe, Pence, a former governor and vice president, and Haley, a former governor and U.N. ambassador, might be part of that A-list matchup, too. But in a race that hinges on either Trump or DeSantis faltering, they are both now fully engaged in a high-stakes, low-return battle for what amounts to table scraps in the primary — jostling for third place and a position to lift off from if Trump or DeSantis fades.

In part, the resentment reflects the continuation of a long-simmering rivalry between Pence and Haley. But it also illustrates a new dynamic in the 2024 primary, in which lower-polling candidates are beginning to go after each other — not Trump or DeSantis — in an effort to gain even minimal traction in the campaign.

Inside Pence’s operation, one senior Pence adviser granted anonymity to speak frankly about the dynamics of the race said “people don’t view [Haley] as a serious candidate.” This person also accused her of “chasing polls.”

“Her campaign is floundering,” the adviser said, “and by all accounts is failing its own competency test.”

For Haley’s part, while an adviser to the former South Carolina governor suggested that Pence’s likely entry into the presidential primary is “not that concerning,” they didn’t skip the opportunity to point out that Pence’s unfavorable ratings are significantly higher than other Republicans in the field. Haley herself, in an implicit jab at Pence and other likely candidates, described in blunt terms the trepidation of Republicans who have yet to announce their campaigns.

“They need to put their big boy pants on,” she said in a recent interview, adding that “you need a decisive person to be president.”

Publicly, aides to Pence and Haley describe them as friendly longtime associates, two Trump administration lieutenants and former GOP governors who called each other to swap advice and encouragement during their respective administrations.

“Nikki Haley has always had a high regard for Mike Pence,” said Haley’s communications director, Nachama Soloveichik. “Any notions to the contrary come from people who have too much time on their hands.”

But Pence and Haley have long been on a collision course — which their rivalry in the 2024 primary has only accelerated. They are the only two former Trump administration officials and GOP governors whose administrations overlapped one another in the early 2010s. Pence picked her as a member of the Cabinet during the transition, and Trump signed off.

Both, too, have sought to project a Reaganesque vibe to voters — hawkish on national security and upbeat about America’s future. In national polls, Pence and Haley register within about 2 percentage points of each other, trading off third and fourth places. A Harvard-Harris poll released on March 24, for example, found Pence at 7 percentage points to Haley’s 5, with both trailing Trump and DeSantis by double digits.

The strife between the two camps dates back to their service in the Trump administration and simmers primarily between their staffs, which have intertwined and overlapped at times. The Georgia-based Republican operative Nick Ayers has worked for Pence and also informally advised Haley. And the Republican pollster Jon Lerner, who has been one of Haley’s top consultants since her run for governor in 2010, briefly worked with Pence during the Trump administration.

Most recently, Tim Chapman, the erstwhile executive director of Haley’s political nonprofit, jumped ship to become senior adviser to Pence’s nonprofit, Advancing American Freedom. The Pence adviser characterized the move as Chapman coming back home to a campaign-in-waiting that more closely matched his long-held movement conservatism. Two people from the Haley camp, meanwhile, acknowledged he was always closer with the Pence team and had not been an integral part of Haley’s political operation.

“I think the principals are fine,” a second person close to Pence told POLITICO, a sentiment echoed by Haley allies. “There’s some staff feistiness. Can’t imagine poaching Tim Chapman helped.”

Tensions also flared in 2019 amid reports that Haley could replace Pence on the GOP ticket in 2020. During that swirl of speculation, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short said in a statement to POLITICO that Haley “was an excellent ambassador for the Trump-Pence agenda during her one year at the UN.” Haley served in the role for nearly two years.

The Pence adviser speculated, without elaborating, that Haley may have been insulted by Short’s comments, describing the former ambassador and governor as “thin-skinned.”

“There was and is a feeling that Nikki Haley did not do enough to tamp down those rumors, or to distance herself from those rumors,” a third person close to Pence who also worked for the vice president in the White House said. “And that’s rightfully left a bad taste in the Pence operation’s mouth. But rivalry is not the right term for it. Maybe that she’s viewed with some skepticism, and not just palace-intrigue skepticism, it’s policy skepticism, as well.”

Pence mentioned Haley six times in his 2022 political memoir So Help Me God. He called her an “old friend” and singled her out as one of four governors who were “quick to return a call and offer wisdom and support.”

In her own 2019 memoir, Haley also spoke favorably of Pence. “I considered him a friend,” Haley wrote. “Donald Trump and I had had our differences, but his choice of Mike was something I supported and was comforted by.”

Rob Godfrey, a former aide to Haley while she was governor, said he has no doubt that she and Pence still consider one another a friend, and will continue to do so in the future.

“But when you both end up on a potential collision course in the same campaign for the Republican nomination for president, that can make things a little bit stickier,” Godfrey said. “It can exacerbate differences in personality and in policy, and ultimately it can bring some ego from both sides to the top, because at the end of the day campaigns are about competition, and both of them are competitors.

“If they weren’t fierce competitors, they wouldn’t be where they are now.”

Takes wait-and-see approach??? Take the doughnuts off your fat eyes!

Chris Christie takes wait-and-see approach to Trump indictment news

The former New Jersey governor and former federal prosecutor wants to read the charges before making a judgment.

By KELLY GARRITY

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Sunday he is reserving judgment about the charges against former President Donald Trump until he actually sees what the charges are.

Christie, a former federal prosecutor, said he wants to read the indictment first before he decides whether the case is fair or partisan, as many of his GOP colleagues claim.

“You know, one of the things I found really amazing on both sides of this is that people are willing to comment on the efficacy of an indictment before you’ve even read it,” Christie said Sunday during a panel discussion on ABC’s “This Week.”

Christie, a Trump acolyte-turned-critic and potential 2024 presidential rival, said Sunday that while criticism of Trump’s attacks on the judicial system is fair, there are “legitimate questions,” about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s motives.

“You can be incredibly critical of the way Trump treats all of our institutions, the judiciary, being part of it. And he has called for the use of prosecutorial power against people that he’s opposed to without knowing at all what the facts are. He should be criticized for that. I’ve criticized him for it and others have,” Christie said.

“At the same time, there can be legitimate questions to be raised about Alvin Bragg’s conduct and his lack of use of prosecutorial discretion here,” said, Christie, who argued that Bragg may not be making the best use of his limited resources.

“What I hate about our conversations about this right now, George, is that you have to be in one camp or the other. It’s not true,” Christie told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

The charges, Christie noted, could contain some unexpected material. “I do think there may be surprises in there for us,” he said.

Substantial documentation

Lawyer says there is ‘substantial documentation’ to back up Cohen’s testimony

Attorney Lanny Davis mentioned Karen McDougal in addition to Stormy Daniels.

By KELLY GARRITY

There is “substantial documentation” to corroborate Michael Cohen’s testimony in the case being brought against former President Donald Trump over hush money Cohen paid, lawyer Lanny Davis said Sunday.

Davis also said that material pertains not only to payments made to porn actress Stormy Daniels but a second woman as well, Karen McDougal. She is a former Playboy model who also claims to have had an affair with Trump, who denies affairs with both women.

“Michael Cohen submitted a lot of documentation not only to this group of prosecutors but to the earlier group. And there are other documents from other people and other testimony from other people, some of it direct, involving conversations with Mr. Trump concerning the Karen McDougal crime,” Davis said when asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if there were documents backing up Cohen’s testimony in the case for which Trump has been indicted.

“And so the answer is substantial documentation,” Davis said on “State of the Union.”

The indictment of Trump has been announced but not unsealed, so it is not known if the case against him goes beyond the Daniels accusations to ones involving McDougal — or anyone else for that matter.

Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, has claimed he made the payments to Daniels at Trump’s behest ahead of the 2016 election. But for those hoping for Trump’s conviction, there’s concern over Cohen’s credibility as a witness. The former president’s former lawyer pled guilty to lying to Congress during hearings in 2017, as well as tax evasion charges and campaign-finance violations.

Cohen’s lawyer said Sunday that Cohen’s testimony in this case is backed by documentation from both Cohen and others involved in the case.

Though Davis acknowledged that Cohen had previously lied publicly, “the credibility between him and the jury in that courtroom is going to be based on corroborating evidence,” he said.

Blast kills Russian military blogger

Blast in St. Petersburg kills Russian military blogger: Reports

Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in explosion at Street Bar Cafe, according to media reports.

BY JONES HAYDEN

An explosion in St. Petersburg killed Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky on Sunday, according to media reports.

The Russian Interior Ministry confirmed the incident, the BBC reported. It is not clear who was responsible for the blast.

At least 16 people were injured in the attack at the Street Bar Cafe, according to the reports.

Videos posted on social media show an explosion and injured people on the street.

Reuters reported that a St. Petersburg website said that the cafe where the explosion occurred had at one time belonged to Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary operation that is fighting for Russia in Ukraine.

If Tatarsky was deliberately targeted, it would be the second assassination on Russian soil of a figure associated with the war in Ukraine. Russia blamed Ukraine for the killing of Darya Dugina — daughter of Alexander Dugin, a Russian ideologue and ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — in an attack near Moscow last summer. Kyiv denied involvement.

Indictment comments

Schiff criticizes DeSantis over indictment comments

“This is kind of a cowardly action by Ron DeSantis to try to compete with Donald Trump on Trump’s own turf,” Schiff said.

By KELLY GARRITY

Rep. Adam Schiff slammed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Sunday for comments the likely GOP primary candidate made about former President Donald Trump’s indictment.

DeSantis is willing to “say anything, do anything in hopes of becoming president,” Schiff, a California Democrat, told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki during an interview on the former Biden press secretary’s new show, “Inside with Jen Psaki.”

DeSantis, who is expected to enter the 2024 presidential race, criticized the indictment delivered by a New York grand jury on Thursday, calling it “un-American.”

“Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda,” DeSantis said, a reference to George Soros, a prominent Democratic donor who helped fund the Color of Change PAC, which supported Bragg’s campaign for district attorney. The former president is a Florida resident.

On Sunday, Schiff, who led Trump’s first impeachment in the House and sat on the high-profile committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, called DeSantis’ comments “cowardly.”

“He certainly knows better about the law. He knows what his obligation is to extradite someone who is accused of crime in another state,” Schiff said. “This is kind of a cowardly action by Ron DeSantis to try to compete with Donald Trump on Trump’s own turf.”

Tornadoes torment

32 dead as tornadoes torment from Arkansas to Delaware

Confirmed or suspected tornadoes in 11 states destroyed homes and businesses, splintered trees and laid waste to neighborhoods.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Residents across a wide swath of the U.S. raced Sunday to assess the destruction from fierce storms that spawned possibly dozens of tornadoes from the South and the Midwest into the Northeast, killing at least 32 people.

The storms tore a path through the Arkansas capital and also collapsed the roof of a packed concert venue in Illinois, stunning people throughout the region with the scope of the damage.

The number of deaths continued to grow Sunday.

“While we are still assessing the full extent of the damage, we know families across America are mourning the loss of loved ones, desperately waiting for news of others fighting for their lives, and sorting through the rubble of their homes and businesses,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.

Biden earlier declared broad areas of the country major disaster areas, making federal resources and financial aid available for recovery.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas, where at least five people were killed, already had declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard.

Confirmed or suspected tornadoes in 11 states destroyed homes and businesses, splintered trees and laid waste to neighborhoods.

The National Weather Service confirmed Sunday that a tornado was responsible for damage to several homes near Bridgeville, Delaware. One person was found dead inside a house heavily damaged by the storm Saturday night, Delaware State Police reported.

It may take days to confirm all the recent tornadoes. The dead included at least nine in one Tennessee county, five in Indiana and four in Illinois.

Other deaths from the storms that hit Friday night into Saturday were reported in Alabama and Mississippi.

Residents of Wynne, Arkansas, a community of about 8,000 people 50 miles west of Memphis, Tennessee, woke Saturday to find the high school’s roof shredded and its windows blown out. At least four people died.

Ashley Macmillan said she, her husband and their children huddled with their dogs in a bathroom as a tornado passed, “praying and saying goodbye to each other, because we thought we were dead.” A falling tree seriously damaged their home, but they escaped unhurt.

Chainsaws buzzed, as bulldozers plowed into debris. Utility crews restored power as some neighborhoods began recovery.

Tennessee recorded at least 15 deaths, including nine fatalities in McNairy County, east of Memphis, according to Patrick Sheehan, director the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee drove to the county Saturday to tour the destruction and comfort residents. He said the storm capped the “worst” week of his time as governor, coming days after a school shooting in Nashville that killed six people including a family friend whose funeral he and his wife just attended.

“It’s terrible what has happened in this community, this county, this state,” Lee said. “But it looks like your community has done what Tennessean communities do, and that is rally and respond.”

Rachel Milam lived in the basement with her 6-year-old daughter, while her mother and her mother’s boyfriend lived upstairs in their home on the outskirts of Waynesboro, Tennessee.

All squeezed into the bathroom of the cinder block basement Friday night as the tornado approached and made whooshing sounds like a washing machine.

“As it ripped the roof off, the shower curtain fell,” Milam, 26, said Sunday. “So I’m trying to dig through the shower curtain and see. I saw darkness and then rain started to fall.”

Then absolute terror.

“And the house — I watched it pick up and move … about six inches and then pick up and it was gone.”

“I was just thinking it’s gonna take the tub, like we’re going to be gone,” she said.

A piece of wood fell over them. So did a mirror. “We were fine and just thankful that we made it out alive,” Milam said.

Milam, who works as a nurse, soon joined other neighbors in digging people out from wrecked homes. One woman had a laceration to her face and other parts of her body and was flown out by a helicopter. Another man was freed from the rubble of his home by rescuers who used chainsaws to slice through the debris.

Jeffrey Day said he called his daughter after seeing on the news that their community of Adamsville was being hit. Huddled in a closet with her 2-year-old son as the storm passed over, she answered the phone screaming.

“She kept asking me, ‘What do I do, daddy?’” Day said, tearing up. “I didn’t know what to say.”

After the storm passed, his daughter crawled out of her destroyed home and drove to nearby family.

Elsewhere, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker traveled Sunday to Belvidere to visit the Apollo Theatre, which partially collapsed as about 260 people were attending a heavy metal concert.

Frederick Livingston, Jr., was pulled from the rubble but didn’t survive. He had gone to enjoy the concert with his son, Alex.

“I couldn’t save him,” his son told WLS-TV. The father and son were standing side by side when debris began raining down. “It happened so fast.”

The governor said 48 others were treated in hospitals, with five in critical condition.

Pritzker also planned to visit Crawford County, about 230 miles south of Chicago, where three people were killed and eight injured when a tornado hit around New Hebron.

“We’ve had emergency crews digging people out of their basements because the house is collapsed on top of them, but luckily they had that safe space to go to,” Sheriff Bill Rutan said at a news conference.

That tornado was not far from where three people died in Indiana’s Sullivan County, about 95 miles southwest of Indianapolis. Several people were rescued overnight, with reports of as many as 12 people injured.

Surprise production cuts

Saudis, other oil giants announce surprise production cuts

Higher oil prices would help fill Russian President Vladimir Putin’s coffers.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers on Sunday announced surprise cuts totaling up to 1.15 million barrels per day from May until the end of the year, a move that could raise prices worldwide.

Higher oil prices would help fill Russian President Vladimir Putin’s coffers as his country wages war on Ukraine and force Americans and others to pay even more at the pump amid worldwide inflation.

It was also likely to further strain ties with the United States, which has called on Saudi Arabia and other allies to increase production as it tries to bring prices down and squeeze Russia’s finances.

The production cuts alone could push U.S. gasoline prices up by roughly 26 cents per gallon, in addition to the usual increase that comes when refineries change the gasoline blend during the summer driving season, said Kevin Book, managing director of Clearview Energy Partners LLC. The Energy Department calculates the seasonal increase at an average of 32 cents per gallon, Book said.

So with an average U.S. price now at roughly $3.50 per gallon of regular, according to AAA, that could mean gasoline over $4 per gallon during the summer.

However, Book said there are a number of complex variables in oil and gas prices. The size of each country’s production cut depends on the baseline production number it is using, so the cut might not be 1.15 million. It also could take much of the year for the cuts to take effect. Demand could fall if the U.S. enters a recession caused by the banking crisis. But it also could increase during the summer as more people travel.

Even though the production cut is only about 1% of the roughly 100 million barrels of oil the world uses per day, the impact on prices could be big, Book said.

“It’s a big deal because of the way oil prices work,” he said. “You are in a market that is relatively balanced. You take a small amount away, depending on what demand does, you could have a very significant price response.”

Saudi Arabia announced the biggest cut among OPEC members at 500,000 barrels per day. The cuts are in addition to a reduction announced last October that infuriated the Biden administration.

The Saudi Energy Ministry described the move as a “precautionary measure” aimed at stabilizing the oil market. The cuts represent less than 5% of Saudi Arabia’s average production of 11.5 million barrels per day in 2022.

Iraq said it would reduce production by 211,000 barrels per day, the United Arab Emirates by 144,000, Kuwait by 128,000, Kazakhstan by 78,000, Algeria by 48,000 and Oman by 40,000. The announcements were carried by each country’s state media.

Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak meanwhile said Moscow would extend a voluntary cut of 500,000 until the end of the year, according to remarks carried by the state news agency Tass. Russia had announced the unilateral reduction in February after Western countries imposed price caps.

All are members of the so-called OPEC+ group of oil exporting countries, which includes the original Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries as well as Russia and other major producers. There was no immediate statement from OPEC itself.

The cuts announced in October — of some 2 million barrels a day — had come on the eve of U.S. midterm elections in which soaring prices were a major issue. President Joe Biden vowed at the time that there would be “consequences” and Democratic lawmakers called for freezing cooperation with the Saudis.

Both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia denied any political motives in the dispute.

Since those cuts, oil prices have trended down. Brent crude, a global benchmark, was trading around $80 a barrel at the end of last week, down from around $95 in early October, when the earlier cuts were agreed.

Competition bill

Big Tech lobbyists get stuck in to UK’s landmark competition bill

Ministers are preparing new competition rules — and US tech giants are already pushing back.

BY TOM BRISTOW

As the U.K. prepares to overhaul its competition regime, a fierce lobbying battle has broken out between the world’s largest tech companies and their challengers.

Ministers are gearing up to publish new competition legislation in late-April, giving regulators more power to stop a handful of companies dominating digital markets.

But concern over the U.S. tech giants’ influence in Westminster has prompted ministers close to the bill to warn that the new legislation could be watered down.

Two ministers have expressed concerns that Big Tech firms are seeking to weaken the process for appealing decisions made by the country's beefed-up competition regulator, according to multiple people who were either present at those discussions or whose organizations were represented there. They requested anonymity to discuss private meetings.

One MP said a minister had also approached them to raise concerns, while at an industry roundtable, two ministers spoke of worry about Big Tech firms trying to influence the appeal mechanism. 

An industry representative said: “There has been a sh*t load of lobbying from Big Tech, but I don’t know if they’ll succeed.” 

Appealing to who? 

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill will give new powers to a branch of the Competition and Markets Authority called the Digital Markets Unit (DMU). Under the plan, the DMU will be able fine a company 10 percent of their annual turnover for breaching a code of conduct.

The code, which has not yet been published, would be designed to ensure that a company with ‘strategic market status’ cannot “unfairly use its market power and strategic position to distort or undermine competition between users of the ... firm’s services,” the government has said.

Jonathan Jones, senior consultant in public law at Linklaters and formerly the head of the U.K. government's legal department, wrote that the plan would have “very significant consequences” for Big Tech firms and could force them to “significantly alter” their business models.

One of Big Tech’s concerns is that the bill will only allow companies to appeal decisions made by the DMU on whether or not the right process was followed, known as the judicial review standard, rather than the content or merit of the decision. That puts it in line with other regulators and should mean the process is faster, but it also makes it harder to appeal decisions.

Big Tech firms want to be able to appeal on the “merit”, arguing it is unfair that they can’t challenge whether a DMU decision was correct or not. They also argue it won’t necessarily be slower than the judicial review standard.

Tech Minister Paul Scully, who has responsibility for the bill, told POLITICO: “We want to make sure that the legislation is flexible, proportionate and fair to both big and challenger companies. Any remediation needs to be in place quickly as digital markets move quickly.” 

One representative of a mid-sized tech firm said: “This is the fundamental point of contention and it will influence whether the bill works for SMEs and challengers against Big Tech. 

“The fear is that big companies with big lawyers understand how to eke things out (during the appeals process) so that they’ll keep their market advantage for years. We’ve heard ministers express these concerns too.”

Consumer group Which? is also urging the government to stay with its proposed appeal system. “For the DMU to work effectively, the government must stick to its guns and ensure that the decisions it reaches are not tied up in an elongated appeals process,” said director of policy, Rocio Concha.

‘Investigator and executioner’

But Jones argued that the bill will make the DMU too powerful.

“The DMU will have power to decide who it is going to regulate, set the rules that apply to them, and then enforce those rules,” he wrote. “This makes the DMU effectively legislator, investigator and executioner.”

On the appeal method, Jones argued that it is an “oversimplification” to think that the government’s proposed standard of appeal would be quicker than one based on merits.

Ben Greenstone, managing director of tech policy consultancy Taso Advisory, said: “I can understand the argument from both sides. The largest tech companies are incentivized to push back against this, but my guess is the government will keep the appeals process as it is, because it keeps it in line with the wider competition regime.”

However, he added the bill would work better if some sort of compromise can be found with the biggest tech companies.

The international playbook

One of the biggest fears from medium-sized firms is that the biggest tech companies will use strategies already tried and tested abroad to lengthen the appeals process or even get the entire bill delayed.

In the U.S., the Open App Markets Act has failed to pass following huge spends on lobbying.

Rick VanMeter, executive director of the Coalition for App Fairness, which is based in the U.S. but has U.K. members, said: “In the U.S. we've learned that these mobile app gatekeepers' will stop at nothing to preserve the status quo and squash their competition.

“To be successful, policymakers around the world must see through these gatekeepers' efforts for what they are: self-serving attempts to retain their market power.”

Google and Microsoft declined to comment. Apple did not respond.