Putin's on edge

UK-Russia naval flap shows Putin's on edge

Opinion by David A. Andelman

Last week, Russian forces spied the British destroyer HMS Defender on routine patrol in the Black Sea. Specifically, a part of the Black Sea that's very sensitive to Russia: inside the territorial waters of Crimea. That's what Putin calls Russian territory, and much of the world still thinks belongs to the sovereign -- and pro-Western -- nation of Ukraine.

Matters got a bit sticky when the Defender crossed into Crimea's territorial waters. The Russian military says it fired warning shots across the bow, and then 11 minutes later, two Su-24M bombers dropped bombs in the path of the ship. No damage was done. But the signal was sent.

And if there was any doubt at all, the Russian state news agency TASS and Russian television proclaimed it as part of a Western plot to encircle and undermine Russia, describing the action in vivid detail -- part of the Kremlin line suggesting Russia's most aggressive actions are simply defensive maneuvers to safeguard its interests.

Vivid but wrong, according to the British navy, which claimed no shots were fired at the ship, and no bombs were dropped in its path -- although more than 20 Russian planes indeed buzzed overhead. As it happens, there were previously announced Russian gunnery exercises taking place some distance away.

If there had been shots fired in the direction of the British warship in the Black Sea, they would have been the first since the Crimean War in 1854 -- the very moment that the term "red lines" was coined by renowned British war correspondent William Howell Russell in his dispatch for The Times of London, referring to lines of red-coated British troops confronting Russian Hussar cavalry. Years later, Russia is looking to draw a new set of lines.

Britain was demonstrating that most of the world still considers Ukraine the rightful owners of Crimea, no matter the territory Russian armed forces may have seized seven years ago and continue to hold. Indeed, the British defense ministry said its warship's path was part of a "routine transit" from the Ukrainian port of Odessa to Georgia through Ukrainian waters. There even happens to be a ferry route from Odessa to Georgia, though it steers well clear of the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula.

Back in April, the United States disclosed it was even considering sending its own warships into the Black Sea, just to prove that it would in no sense consider ceding that entire waterway to Russia as its own backyard.

For years, China has been doing its best to claim its own mare nostrum ("our sea"), status for the South China Sea by taking over and fortifying scores of islands there. In fact, to prove that's not acceptable, the British sent its newest aircraft carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, and its entire carrier strike group through the South China Sea in April, just to show that its waters are open to all military as well as commercial shipping. As British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace observed, it's exercising its right to freedom of navigation.

So, why all this sturm und drang if it might easily get quite nasty? Much of it would appear due precisely to the red lines that are very much in dispute and that Putin, as well as China in its own maritime disputes, seem quite clear in setting and maintaining. Weeks before this month's G7 summit with US President Joe Biden in Switzerland, Putin was already telling the Russian Federal Assembly, "I hope that no one will think about crossing the 'red line' with regard to Russia. We ourselves will determine in each specific case where it will be drawn."

So, is Putin on edge? Or does he just want to show Biden and the West who's really in charge post-summit, and establish who is indeed the master of all red lines encircling Russian interests? Or is this all simply Putin's post-summit posturing? Most likely, all of the above.

It's certainly not a very good position for the world as we wait to see how Russia plans to react with regards to Ukraine, Syria, Turkey, Iran and the nuclear agreement now under intensive negotiation in Vienna, Austria. The West, and especially the United States, still needs Putin to behave. 

Fortunately, Biden has the NATO allies, especially the British, very much behind him. Britain, at a most opportune moment, seems to have embarked on a new, aggressive military policy. The Royal Navy says the dispatch of its Queen Elizabeth carrier strike force is the nation's most powerful naval deployment in a generation.

And none of this is being discouraged by the Biden administration. Ukraine is also flexing its muscles -- hosting a joint naval exercise with NATO forces in the Black Sea from June 28 to July 10. Of course, any senses that the country could be moving toward NATO membership, joining the three Baltic Republics of the Soviet Union and most of the old Warsaw Pact military alliance, is calculated to send shivers up Putin's spine.

And that's not necessarily such a bad message. Indeed, Putin's own spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said the day after the Biden-Putin summit that this would be a "red line" for Moscow, as well as even an action plan for first steps towards joining the alliance. Putin needs to see that the Atlantic alliance is standing together and standing firm in the face of any intimidation he can gin up. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is making the rounds of NATO allies, most recently Germany, then France, to demonstrate America's spine. Blinken observed that the United States needed its allies to support a "rules-based international order."

The problem, of course, is that Putin -- not to mention China's Xi Jinping -- are doing their best to establish their own international order based on their rules. If it's simply a test of whose side is bigger and stronger, then the United States and its allies must simply stand together with even greater determination.

Uncharted territory

The Northwest heat wave is 'unprecedented.' Here's what's pushing it into uncharted territory.

By Rachel Ramirez

As temperatures surged past 100 degrees, Bree Oswill gathered all the blankets and towels she could find and taped them to every window that didn't have a shade. She doesn't have central air conditioning and wanted to prevent every bit of sunlight and heat from entering her home.

Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Oswill has become more concerned about the extreme weather changes from wildfires to heat waves she's seeing year after year.

The 44-year-old mother of two likens it to a pandemic, but never-ending.

"It's like a lockdown, but we're not going to solve it by putting on a mask or getting a vaccine," Oswill told CNN. "It's just sort of perpetual. It's scary."

A historic heat wave is searing much of the Pacific Northwest, and it is not yet July — a month when Oswill and many Portland residents typically experience the hottest days of the year.

Portland set an all-time, record-high temperature three days in a row, topping out at 116 degrees on Monday. Seattle hit 108 degrees, besting the all-time record it set just a day earlier. Across the border, Lytton, British Columbia registered 117.5 degrees on Monday — the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada, and around 48 degrees above what's normal for this time of year.

Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the heat wave is "unprecedented."

"We saw heat records over the weekend only to be broken again the next day," Dahl told CNN, "particularly for a part of the country where this type of heat does not happen very often."

Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, put it very simply: climate change is making heat waves more frequent and more intense. "You warm up the planet, you're going to see an increased incidence of heat extremes," Mann told CNN.

Experts like Dahl and Mann say climate change is reshaping the planet's weather patterns. As humans emit more planet-warming greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, more energy is added to the climate system. The excess energy, according to Kristie Ebi, a climate and health researcher at the University of Washington, appears by way of extreme weather events.

"Heat waves have always occurred and will always occur, but we've got a very different pattern of heat waves now than we did a couple of decades ago," Ebi told CNN. "And it's not just the intensity, it's also the geographic extent."

In the opposite end of the country, over 40 million people in the Northeast US are also under heat advisories, including the New York, Philadelphia and Boston metropolitan areas. Though the heat won't be as bad as Oregon and Washington, records for the date could be set in the Northeast before temperatures cool off on Thursday.

Extreme heat is of the deadliest consequences of climate change, killing more people than any other weather related event.

Kate Weinberger, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of British Columbia, analyzed the number of deaths related to extreme heat in the US each year. A 2020 study, on which Weinberger was lead author, found an underestimated number of heat-related deaths in the country, since records typically only look at medical terms such as heat stroke, and neglects other potentially heat-related causes of death, like heart attacks.

"Heat likely contributes to many more deaths from causes other than heat stroke, because heat can exacerbate other chronic diseases, such as heart and lung conditions," Weinberger told CNN. "Given the danger posed by heat, events like the ongoing heat wave in the Pacific Northwest need to be taken very seriously."

Officials in Multnomah County, home to Portland, told CNN as of Monday morning there were at least 43 heat-related emergency department and urgent care clinic visits in the county on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The sheriff's office said Monday that "ambulances are stretched thin due to demand."

"Normally we would expect about 1 or 2 visits for heat illness in the same time period," Kate Yeiser, communications coordinator for Multnomah County, told CNN in an email. "The visits this weekend alone represent nearly half the heat illness visits we typically see during an entire summer."

One appalling aspect of heat-related deaths in the US is the number of premature mortalities brought by heat exposure, particularly among babies and children left unattended in cars.

A 2020 study published in the journal GeoHealth, which Ebi co-authored, found large increases in the number of premature deaths in the US each year due to heat exposure as the planet warms.

"Many don't understand how fast cars heat up and how babies physiology can't tolerate that," Ebi said. "Ensuring that people are really aware about protecting babies and children during these heat waves is important."

To understand how the climate crisis is changing the playing field, Mann suggests thinking of weather events on a bell curve. The highest point of the curve is where the most common weather takes place and the tails are where the extreme events lie. A warming planet shifts the bell curve to the right, pushing the already-extreme events into uncharted territory.

Mann says that climate models, which predict general global conditions well into the future, can well-capture the shift and predict increases in extreme heat. But, he said, they do not paint a full picture of the impacts of climate change during the summer.

"This is an area where current generation models are not capturing a real-world climate connection," said Mann, who was also the lead author of a study that shows climate change is causing the summer's jet stream — fast-flowing air currents in the upper atmosphere that influence day to day weather — to behave oddly.

"In that sense, climate models are actually underestimating the impact that climate change is having on events like the unprecedented heat wave we're witnessing out West right now," Mann added.

Climate change can cause the jet stream to get locked into a static wave pattern during the summer. Daniel Swain, a climate researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, says this is best illustrated by flicking a jump rope up and down until its waves seem to stand still. Similarly in the atmosphere, high and low pressure systems can get stuck, creating extreme weather events like severe heat, drought or wildfires.

That's what happened in the Pacific Northwest this weekend, where a so-called heat dome, a strong ridge of high pressure, acts as a lid on the atmosphere. The lid traps the hot air trying to escape, and warms it even more as it sinks.

"Even if the jet stream does what it historically used to do, with no specific climate change contributions, climate change is still dramatically increasing the likelihood of these extreme heat events," Swain told CNN. "If you warm the atmosphere, you'd expect those heat waves to be hotter than they otherwise would have been."

If the US fails to slash planet-warming emissions and improve climate adaptation systems, climate experts say people across the US and around the world are going to experience more severe impacts of extreme heat.

By the middle of this century — 2036 to 2065 — vast swaths of the US that don't typically experience extreme heat such as the upper Midwest region and New England are set to face severe heat on a regular basis, according to a study from the Union of Concerned Scientists which Dahl co-authored.

"When we look at where we're heading in the future, our analysis has shown that if we fail to reduce our heat-trapping emissions, we are poised to see a staggering expansion of dangerous heat across the US," Dahl told CNN.

But, she adds, if the US aggressively reduces emissions as well as limit future global warming to 2-degrees Celsius, we can "spare millions of people in the US and many more around the world from relentless summer heat."

Wanted to be a dictator....

Book bombshells reveal depths of Trump's 2020 delusions

By Marshall Cohen

Excerpts from three upcoming books revealed previously unknown efforts by then-President Donald Trump to abuse the powers of his office to overturn the 2020 election, deploy the military against racial justice protests and prosecute his political opponents.

The excerpts also shed new light on Trump's increasingly unstable mindset in his final year. They portrayed a president who was obsessed with self-serving conspiracy theories and surrounded by aides who knew he was delusional but were too afraid to tell him the truth.

Here's a breakdown of the latest bombshells from the three books.

Trump's election showdown with Barr

One set of revelations came from ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl and his book "Betrayal," which comes out in November. Early excerpts were published in The Atlantic, with details of Trump's unyielding attempts to have the Justice Department join his election subversion efforts.

Then-Attorney General William Barr was one of Trump's staunchest allies, but he broke with Trump regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Barr turned into a fact-checker of sorts, personally looking into some of Trump's pet voter fraud theories, only to quickly debunk them as baseless. (Barr did this even though he often pushed similarly dubious claims before Election Day.)

Everything came to a head on December 1, when Trump summoned Barr to the Oval Office. According to the book, one of the attendees said a red-faced Trump had "the eyes and mannerism of a madman," ranted and shouted at Barr, and even started banging on the desk.

Trump went beyond the election and started hammering Barr for not prosecuting President Joe Biden's son or former FBI Director James Comey -- two of Trump's most vilified political targets.

The book bolsters recent reports about emails sent to top Justice Department officials by Trump (through his assistant) and Trump's chief of staff, cajoling them to hunt for voter fraud. Trump responded to the excerpt by attacking Barr and doubling down on his false claims of voter fraud.

Trump's nonchalance on January 6

Weeks after Trump's meltdown with Barr, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results came crashing down when a massive mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6.

A new book from controversial journalist Michael Wolff includes details of what unfolded inside the White House while the Capitol was overrun. The book, "Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency," will be published July 27. Excerpts were published in New York magazine.

Trump's senior advisers all knew Vice President Mike Pence would never go along with Trump's unconstitutional scheme to nullify the results from states that Biden won when Congress met to formally count the electoral votes. They knew Trump was experiencing "derangement," but were too scared to tell him that his dreams of overturning the election were hopeless, Wolff reported.

Instead, Trump was stuck in an fact-free feedback loop with his longtime attorney Rudy Giuliani, who led the unsuccessful effort to overturn the results at the local, state and federal level. And Giuliani led Trump even deeper into the election conspiracy theories, according to the book.

The book says Trump's staff begged and pleaded with him to publicly disavow the violence at the Capitol. He waited for hours, and his daughter Ivanka Trump even allegedly said the attack was only "an optics issue." CNN previously reported about Trump's reluctance to call off the mob, including during a conversation that day with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Trump's ire for social justice protests

A new book from Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender describes how Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and use the military to quash social justice protests last summer, some of which descended into riots in large cities. The forthcoming book, "Frankly, We Did Win This Election," is slated to be released on July 13. Axios reported some key excerpts Monday.

Bender reports that there was an unprecedented shouting match in the White House Situation Room between Trump and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump exaggerated the level of violence, said he wanted to deploy the military into American cities and put Milley "in charge." But he was quickly rebuked by Milley, in an expletive-laced argument.

"God damn it! There's a room full of lawyers here. Will someone inform him of my legal responsibilities?" Milley said to the other officials in the Situation Room, according to the book.

Barr then told Trump that Milley was correct -- he couldn't do what Trump wanted him to do.

In response to the excerpt, Trump told Axios that the argument "never happened." Bender said the incident was corroborated by "multiple senior administration officials" that he interviewed.

Exposed on multiple fronts....

Trump's false reality is being exposed on multiple fronts

Analysis by Stephen Collinson

Former President Donald Trump is facing a wall of accountability and truth as new revelations and investigations expose his abuses of power, delusional lies about the election and business conduct to ever greater scrutiny.

Just consider what has taken place over the last several days:

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday announced a House Select Committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection Trump incited.
• Details in new books about Trump's misconduct in office underscore the depth of his autocratic threat.
• A stunning report revealed that former Attorney General William Barr thought his voter fraud claims were "bull---," shattering Trump's voter fraud lies.
• A GOP-led report into Trump's delusional claims of a stolen election in Michigan turned up nothing.
• Trump's chief propagandist of voter fraud, Rudy Giuliani, already suffered the consequences for his campaign of falsehoods by seeing his law license suspended.
• And, perhaps most seriously for Trump, the ex-President's lawyers met prosecutors on Monday in a last-ditch effort to stave off criminal charges possibly targeting the Trump Organization and its namesake's longtime financial guru, Allen Weisselberg.

The confluence of dangers facing Trump would usually be sufficient to doom any presidential legacy and rupture any hopes of a political comeback in 2024. Yet the question is now what it always has been: Will a twice-impeached former President who has always kept one step ahead of the law and political gravity by disdaining truth and ignoring shame pay a price for any of it?

Wild behavior

This issue is all the more acute in the wake of the former President's wild rally in Ohio on Saturday night, when his unhinged rhetoric and dark demagoguery highlighted the peril he still poses to democratic values.

He took the stage facing legal, political and personal challenges that have grave implications for his hopes of a political rebound and the fate of his business, which forms the foundation of his legend of deal-making greatness. But as his rapturous reception showed, the former President's impervious support among the Republican base and devoted millions of followers means there is probably nothing that emerges from any kind of investigation that will dent his personality cult.

And while in Ohio, Trump spelled out that he knows exactly what power he has over his base.

"I represent what they want," Trump said, speaking of a police officer he supposedly met while in office. "They want law, and they want order. And that's what you want. That's what this country wants."

Still, Trump's uncontrolled behavior and extremism helped devastate the Republican vote in suburbs in swing states like Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania. So while he might still be seen as the favorite for the 2024 GOP nomination, his chances of winning a national election may be further eroding.

While there has been a series of blows in recent days to Trump's false narrative that he was deprived of a second term by a massive Democratic Party conspiracy, facts are again unlikely to tip the balance among supporters fed a stream of lies about the election by a compliant conservative media machine.

The former President is doing what he always does, portraying scrutiny and accountability as evidence of an establishment conspiracy biased against him, and painting a narrative of grievance that his supporters always buy in to. Such a conceit has always been at the center of his political appeal for voters who gravitated toward his assaults on a political system from which they felt alienated. To further his strategy, any legal cases against the Trump Organization are sure to be turned into a pageant of personal persecution by the former President.

Will the truth matter?

New evidence that November's election was free and fair is also no more likely to convince his followers that their hero lost than the multiple cases thrown out of court.

A sham audit of votes in Arizona by Republican state senators is, in fact, likely to further fuel the former President's volcanic behavior if it feeds the conservative narrative of irregularities that were rejected by multiple judges.

For example, after details emerged from an excerpt of a new book -- "Betrayal," by ABC's Jon Karl -- that depicts Barr as savaging Trump's claim he was cheated out of power last November, the former President issued an extraordinary statement.

The more than 500-word rant not only blasted Barr, despite his repeated impression of tilting the scales of justice to benefit the ex-President. It also suggested that Trump has traveled even further from reality in his five months out of power as he pointed to "incredible facts" about cheating that were largely recycled and already disproven conspiracies born of conservative media.

It was unhinged rhetoric that gave a strong impression that the former President now exists in a bunker-like mentality, deeply convinced of his own invented version of reality.

Yet this is the same powerful political force that is still effectively the leader of the Republican Party -- one who has left party leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky afraid to take him on and is making support for his election lies the dominant issue in Republican Party primary races.

Trump's fantastical claims of voter fraud are also the driving force behind multiple efforts by GOP state lawmakers across the country to make it harder for many Democrats, including minorities, to vote.

Some bills equip partisan officials to interfere in local certification processes and institutionalize the kind of pressure that Trump placed on local GOP officials in Georgia to steal victory in November.

Former President Barack Obama warned on Monday that such measures could effectively make it easier for malcontents like Trump to cheat in future elections.

"If we don't stop these kinds of efforts now ... we are going to see a further delegitimizing of our democracy," Obama said.

It's also unlikely that Pelosi's select committee will fracture the fallacies Trump supporters believe about January 6. In fact, Trump acolytes like Georgia's Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene are trying to get appointed to the panel in order to turn its meetings into a circus.

A grave legal threat

There was fresh evidence of Trump's incandescent state of mind as his lawyers met with prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney's office in an effort to persuade them not to pursue charges for alleged financial crimes by the company.

Trump claimed the team was "rude, nasty, and totally biased" against him, claimed they were trying to destroy him and the "Make America Great Again" movement and were radical leftists who were a disgrace to the nation.

The former President no longer has his social media accounts and cannot propagate his fury without the help of retweets and conservative media appearances. But his statement was a taste of the vitriol sure to flow from his camp if charges are brought against his organization.

A flurry of exposés from Trump's desperate last days in office is emerging, meanwhile, from a series of forthcoming books. According to Karl, the then-President had "the eyes and mannerism of a madman," in the words of one attendee at a meeting between Trump and Barr after the attorney general said there was no evidence of widespread election fraud.

In another account, by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, Trump is depicted as getting into a shouting match with Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after saying he wanted to send the US military into cities that he claimed were in flames amid violence.

Critics often accuse the Washington media of addiction to insider accounts of the crazed behavior inside Trump's West Wing. Yet while these books, and the contributions of officials like Barr, who spoke to Karl on the record, do come across as an attempt at reputation repair, they also perform a valuable service.

The accounts are building a record of malfeasance on the behalf of the former President. They show just how close American democracy came to the brink, thanks to a former commander in chief who tried to use tactics familiar to the autocrats, like China's Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin, who he so admired.

Trump's certain attempts to make his enemies pay a price for a tightening vice of accountability mean that the process of healing from the trauma of his aberrant presidency is only just beginning, and is likely to further disrupt the country's fragile political equilibrium.

Bipartisan until it’s not...

Biden’s infrastructure plan is bipartisan until it’s not

The deal proves that bipartisanship can’t fully deliver in Congress.

By German Lopez

For a moment last week, President Joe Biden’s vision of a dealmaking, bipartisan Senate that gets big things done for the American people looked like it could soon become reality. With Biden’s announcement that Democrats and Republicans “have a deal” on infrastructure, it seemed both sides in Washington, DC, were on the verge of coming together to pass a large bill — one that would not only help rebuild America’s roads and bridges but also, potentially, move to tackle climate change, expand access to broadband internet, and remove lead from drinking water.

Then things got complicated. Biden said he wouldn’t sign the deal if congressional Democrats didn’t also pass a separate reconciliation bill enacting the rest of his agenda. That invited a Republican revolt, as previous backers like Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Jerry Moran (R-KS) threatened to pull support. Though Biden has walked back his remarks, it’s still not clear if the infrastructure deal can now get the 10 Republican votes it needs to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.

The episode exposed the fine line that Biden has walked not just on infrastructure but through his brief time as president so far. Biden ran as a moderate and defeated challenges from more transformative candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — vowing that, as an institutionalist who had been in Congress for decades, he could get Congress to work together, across the aisle, again.

But as president, Biden’s legislative ambitions have been expansive. And while he has tried to get bipartisan support for his ideas, the biggest bill passed under his leadership — a $1.9 trillion economic relief package — relied on Democrats passing it through razor-thin, party-line margins.

The infrastructure deal exemplifies the contradictions. Last week’s news was about a $1 trillion deal that some Senate Democrats and Republicans are working to get through the 60-vote threshold required overcome the filibuster. But, as Biden has said, Democrats are also working on another measure, ranging anywhere from $2 trillion to $5 trillion, that could pass Congress with only Democratic support by using the reconciliation process. Biden is promising and working toward bipartisanship but already planning to sign a partisan bill to fill the void the bipartisan measure leaves in place.

It’s still not clear if this will all pan out. The infrastructure agreement so far is only on the thinnest of frameworks. As people like Graham and Moran question their support, it’s less likely that the final measure could get the 10 Republican votes it needs to pass the Senate. It’s also not clear if Democrats can get the votes they need to pass the bigger infrastructure measure, with moderates like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) voicing support for a reconciliation bill but also skepticism toward a partisan bill that’s too large.

Meanwhile, the rest of Biden’s agenda, from voting rights to gun control, now looks very unlikely to get anywhere in Congress. If lawmakers can barely achieve a bipartisan moment with infrastructure spending — which once was, as Biden noted last week, a common source of bipartisan consensus — it’s unlikely more contentious legislation stands a chance.

To put it another way: Biden has framed his legislative agenda with the goal of proving to the American people that the government can work for them — as he put it, that “we can deliver for our people.” Even if Biden delivers on infrastructure, with a reconciliation bill in tow, it’s already clear Congress can’t fully live up to that ideal.

The infrastructure deal is very thin so far

Right now, the best hope for Biden’s agenda is that Congress passes a limited infrastructure deal on a bipartisan basis and then Democrats enact the rest of Biden’s infrastructure plans in a separate bill along party lines.

So far, Democrats and Republicans have made some headway on the bipartisan deal. They have agreed to a very vague framework that includes funding for roads and bridges, public transit, passenger and freight rail, electric vehicle infrastructure, clean drinking water, and broadband internet, among a few other areas. The agreement goes into almost no detail beyond those broad categories — with lawmakers now working to get more specific as they transform that framework into actual legislation.

Where both sides haven’t reached any agreement yet is how all of this will be paid for. Democrats want to pay for it largely by undoing parts of former President Donald Trump’s tax law, while Republicans suggested raising the gas tax and electric vehicle charging fees. With both sides rejecting each other’s ideas, they instead put out a list of potential revenue sources, ranging from stronger enforcement of current tax laws to spending caps to public-private partnerships. But the sides haven’t reached any concrete agreements here, and all of these ideas may not even be enough to fund the full bill.

Democrats have also promised to pass an additional infrastructure bill through reconciliation (to bypass the filibuster on a party-line vote). This bill would aim to fill in the other parts of Biden’s agenda left out of the bipartisan deal, including broader action on climate change and “human infrastructure” measures like an expanded child tax credit and eldercare.

But the party hasn’t come to an agreement on this measure. Manchin suggested the bill could be as little as $2 trillion while Sanders has worked on a $5 trillion proposal. There is, suffice to say, a very wide space in between.

In short: A lot is up in the air. The specific details are still being worked out. It’s not clear if any of this will happen.

The uncertainty works against the overall goal of Biden’s agenda. In a rejection of times when Democratic presidents declared that “the era of big government is over,” Biden has strived to show the American people that the government can help solve big problems. As the administration claimed when it announced the bipartisan infrastructure framework, “At this moment in our history, President Biden believes we must demonstrate to the world that American democracy can deliver for the American people. Today, the President is showing that democracy can deliver results.”

But if Congress ultimately falls short on a bipartisan deal, a reconciliation measure, or both, the whole process would show the opposite: that the American government can’t deliver after all.

The deal’s troubles show how hard it will be to do much more

Even if Congress does manage to pass the bipartisan deal and reconciliation bill, it’s not exactly a glowing endorsement of bipartisanship or Biden’s old way of doing things.

To the contrary, the negotiations have shown the clear limits of bipartisanship. After all, the plan for Democrats right now is to work with Republicans on a $1 trillion infrastructure bill and then go around them and pass another bill multiple times that size to finish the work. That second step would simply not be required if bipartisanship worked as hoped.

In other words, Congress might ultimately deliver for the American people, but it won’t be due to the “epiphany” Biden hoped Republican lawmakers would have in a post-Trump era. It will be because Democrats found a loophole to overcome the filibuster while continuing to disagree even within their own party on whether they should repeal the filibuster and let the Senate function through a simple majority.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the Democratic agenda seems dead on arrival. A big voting rights bill collapsed due to Republican opposition and Democratic skepticism. Larger health care reform, efforts to address policing and systemic racism, and gun control measures also have struggled to gain not just bipartisan support but even a consensus among Democrats. That the infrastructure deal has hit so many bumps on the road invites little confidence any of those other measures will get bipartisan support, and limits on the reconciliation process prevent Democrats from pursuing these other efforts without Republican support for now.

In fact, if the infrastructure bill gets done, it may be the last big initiative by the federal government until at least the 2022 midterm elections and maybe through all of Biden’s first term. This could be it for Biden’s presidency.

Congress has managed to pass or make serious progress on some minor bills, including science funding legislation and a water infrastructure bill. But these are more the basics of government than the kind of transformative change that progressives hoped a Democratic trifecta holding the House, Senate, and White House could achieve.

Rather than showing that the federal government can deliver, then, Congress is reinforcing the limits of the American political system.

There is still time for all of this to change. Biden has only been in office for around 160 days. Maybe some sort of bipartisan breakthrough could arrive.

But the wrangling around the infrastructure deal, at least, gives little confidence a bigger breakthrough will happen — and if it does, it will likely be much more limited than anyone would like. The government might deliver for the American people, but not on everything that was once promised.

Knew all along...

New Details Suggest Senior Trump Aides Knew January 6 Rally Could Get Chaotic

White House officials worked to both contain and appease Stop the Steal leaders.

JOSHUA KAPLAN and JOAQUIN SAPIEN

On Dec. 19, President Donald Trump blasted out a tweet to his 88 million followers, inviting supporters to Washington for a “wild” protest.

Earlier that week, one of his senior advisers had released a 36-page report alleging significant evidence of election fraud that could reverse Joe Biden’s victory. “A great report,” Trump wrote. “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

The tweet worked like a starter’s pistol, with two pro-Trump factions competing to take control of the “big protest.”

On one side stood Women for America First, led by Amy Kremer, a Republican operative who helped found the tea party movement. The group initially wanted to hold a kind of extended oral argument, with multiple speakers making their case for how the election had been stolen.

On the other was Stop the Steal, a new, more radical group that had recruited avowed racists to swell its ranks and wanted the President to share the podium with Alex Jones, the radio host banned from the world’s major social media platforms for hate speech, misinformation and glorifying violence. Stop the Steal organizers say their plan was to march on the Capitol and demand that lawmakers give Trump a second term.

ProPublica has obtained new details about the Trump White House’s knowledge of the gathering storm, after interviewing more than 50 people involved in the events of Jan. 6 and reviewing months of private correspondence. Taken together, these accounts suggest that senior Trump aides had been warned the Jan. 6 events could turn chaotic, with tens of thousands of people potentially overwhelming ill-prepared law enforcement officials.

Rather than trying to halt the march, Trump and his allies accommodated its leaders, according to text messages and interviews with Republican operatives and officials.

Katrina Pierson, a former Trump campaign official assigned by the White House to take charge of the rally planning, helped arrange a deal where those organizers deemed too extreme to speak at the Ellipse could do so on the night of Jan. 5. That event ended up including incendiary speeches from Jones and Ali Alexander, the leader of Stop the Steal, who fired up his followers with a chant of “Victory or death!”

The record of what White House officials knew about Jan. 6 and when they knew it remains incomplete. Key officials, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, declined to be interviewed for this story.

The second impeachment of President Trump focused mostly on his public statements, including his Jan. 6 exhortation that the crowd march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Trump was acquitted by the Senate, and his lawyers insisted that the attack on the Capitol was both regrettable and unforeseeable.

Rally organizers interviewed by ProPublica said they did not expect Jan. 6 to culminate with the violent sacking of the Capitol. But they acknowledged they were worried about plans by the Stop the Steal movement to organize an unpermitted march that would reach the steps of the building as Congress gathered to certify the election results.

One of the Women for America First organizers told ProPublica he and his group felt they needed to urgently warn the White House of the possible danger.

“A last-minute march, without a permit, without all the metro police that’d usually be there to fortify the perimeter, felt unsafe,” Dustin Stockton said in a recent interview.

“And these people aren’t there for a fucking flower contest,” added Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, Stockton’s fiancee and co-organizer. “They’re there because they’re angry.”

Stockton said he and Kremer initially took their concerns to Pierson. Feeling that they weren’t gaining enough traction, Stockton said, he and Kremer agreed to call Meadows directly.

Kremer, who has a personal relationship with Meadows dating back to his early days in Congress, said she would handle the matter herself. Soon after, Kremer told Stockton “the White House would take care of it,” which he interpreted to mean she had contacted top officials about the march.

Kremer denied that she ever spoke with Meadows or any other White House official about her Jan. 6 concerns. “Also, no one on my team was talking to them that I was aware of,” she said in an email to ProPublica. Meadows declined to comment on whether he’d been contacted.

A Dec. 27 text from Kremer obtained by ProPublica casts doubt on her assertion. Written at a time when her group was pressing to control the upcoming Jan. 6 rally, it refers to Alexander and Cindy Chafian, an activist who worked closely with Alex Jones. “The WH and team Trump are aware of the situation with Ali and Cindy,” Kremer wrote. “I need to be the one to handle both.” Kremer did not answer questions from ProPublica about the text.

So far, congressional and law enforcement reconstructions of Jan. 6 have established failures of preparedness and intelligence sharing by the U.S. Capitol Police, the FBI and the Pentagon, which is responsible for deploying the D.C. National Guard.

But those reports have not addressed the role of White House officials in the unfolding events and whether officials took appropriate action before or during the rally. Legislation that would have authorized an independent commission to investigate further was quashed by Senate Republicans.

Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she would create a select committee to investigate Jan. 6 that would not require Republican support. It’s not certain whether Meadows and other aides would be willing to testify. Internal White House dealings have historically been subject to claims of “executive privilege” by both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Our reporting raises new questions that will not be answered unless Trump insiders tell the story of that day. It remains unclear, for example, precisely what Meadows and other White House officials learned of safety concerns about the march and whether they took those reports seriously.

The former president has a well-established pattern of bolstering far-right groups while he and his aides attempt to maintain some distance. Following the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump at first appeared to tacitly support torch-bearing white supremacists, later backing off. And in one presidential debate, he appeared to offer encouragement to the Proud Boys, a group of street brawlers who claim to protect Trump supporters, his statement triggering a dramatic spike in their recruitment. Trump later disavowed his support.

ProPublica has learned that White House officials worked behind the scenes to prevent the leaders of the march from appearing on stage and embarrassing the president. But Trump then undid those efforts with his speech, urging the crowd to join the march on the Capitol organized by the very people who had been blocked from speaking.

“And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said.

One Nation Under God

On Nov. 5, as Joe Biden began to emerge as the likely winner of the 2020 presidential election, a far-right provocateur named Ali Alexander assembled a loose collection of right-wing activists to help Trump maintain the presidency.

Alexander approached the cause of overturning the election with an almost messianic fervor. In private text messages, he obsessed over gaining attention from Trump and strategized about how to draw large, angry crowds in support of him.

On Nov. 7, the group held simultaneous protests in all 50 states.

Seven days later, its members traveled to Washington for the Million MAGA March, which drew tens of thousands. The event is now considered by many to be a precursor of Jan. 6.

Alexander united them under the battle cry “Stop the Steal,” a phrase originally coined by former Trump adviser Roger Stone, whom Alexander has called a friend. (Stone launched a short-lived organization of the same name in 2016.) To draw such crowds, Alexander made clear Stop the Steal would collaborate with anyone who supported its cause, no matter how extreme their views.

“We’re willing to work with racists,” he said on one livestream in December. Alexander did not return requests for comment made by email, by voicemail, to his recent attorney or to Stop the Steal PAC’s designated agent.

As he worked to expand his influence, Alexander found a valuable ally in Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist at the helm of the popular far-right website InfoWars. Jones, who first gained notoriety for spreading a lie that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, had once counted more than 2 million YouTube subscribers and 800,000 Twitter followers before being banned from both platforms.

Alexander also collaborated with Nick Fuentes, the 22-year-old leader of the white nationalist “Groyper” movement.

“Thirty percent of that crowd was Alex Jones’ crowd,” Alexander said on another livestream, referring to the Million MAGA March on Nov. 14. “And there were thousands and thousands of Groypers — America First young white men. … Even if you thought these were bad people, why can’t bad people do good tasks? Why can’t bad people fight for their country?”

Alexander’s willingness to work with such people sparked conflict even within his inner circle.

“Is Nick Fuentes now a prominent figure in Stop the Steal?” asked Brandon Straka, an openly gay conservative activist, in a November text message, obtained exclusively by ProPublica. “I find him disgusting,” Straka said, pointing to Fuentes’ vehemently anti-LGBT views.

Alexander saw more people and more power. He wrote that Fuentes was “very valuable” at “putting bodies in places,” and that both Jones and Fuentes were “willing to push bodies … where we point.”

Straka, Fuentes and Jones did not respond to requests for comment.

Right-wing leaders who had once known each other only peripherally were now feeling a deeper sense of camaraderie. In an interview, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio described how he felt as he walked alongside Jones through the crowds assembled in Washington on Nov. 14, after Jones had asked the Proud Boys to act as his informal bodyguards.

“That was the moment we really united everybody under one banner,” he said. “That everyone thought, ‘Fuck you, this is what we can do.’” According to Tarrio, the Proud Boys nearly tripled in numbers around this time, bringing in over 20,000 new members. “November was the seed that sparked that flower on Jan. 6,” he said.

The crowds impressed people like Tom Van Flein, chief of staff for Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. Van Flein told ProPublica he kept in regular contact with Alexander while Gosar led the effort in Congress to shoot down the election certification. “Ali was very talented and put on some very good rallies on short notice,” Van Flein said. “Great turnout.”

But as Jan. 6 drew nearer, the Capitol Police became increasingly concerned by the disparate elements that formed the rank and file of the organization.

“Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence, may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike,” the Capitol Police wrote in a Jan. 3 intelligence assessment.

Yet the police force, for all its concern, wound up effectively blindsided by what happened on Jan. 6.

An intelligence report from that day obtained by ProPublica shows that the Capitol Police expected a handful of rallies on Capitol grounds, the largest of which would be hosted by a group called One Nation Under God.

Law enforcement anticipated between 50 and 500 people at the gathering, assigning it the lowest possible threat score and predicting a 1% to 5% chance of arrests. The police gave much higher threat scores to two small anti-Trump demonstrations planned elsewhere in the city.

However, One Nation Under God was a fake name used to trick the Capitol Police into giving Stop the Steal a permit, according to Stop the Steal organizer Kimberly Fletcher. Fletcher is president of Moms for America, a grassroots organization founded to combat “radical feminism.”

“Everybody was using different names because they didn’t want us to be there,” Fletcher said, adding that Alexander and his allies experimented with a variety of aliases to secure permits for the east front of the Capitol. Laughing, Fletcher recalled how the police repeatedly called her “trying to find out who was who.”

A Senate report on security failures during the Capitol riot released earlier this month suggests that at least one Capitol Police intelligence officer had suspicions about this deceptive strategy, but that leadership failed to appreciate it — yet another example of an intelligence breakdown.

On Dec. 31, the officer sent an email expressing her concerns that the permit requests were “being used as proxies for Stop the Steal” and that those requesting permits “may also be involved with organizations that may be planning trouble” on Jan. 6.

A Capitol Police spokesperson told ProPublica on April 2, “Our intelligence suggested one or more groups were affiliated with Stop the Steal,” after we asked for a copy of the One Nation Under God permit, which they declined to provide.

Yet 18 days later, Capitol Police Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman told congressional investigators that she believed the permit requests had been properly vetted and that they were not granted to anyone affiliated with Stop the Steal. Pittman did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.

Last week, a Capitol Police spokesperson told ProPublica, “The Department knew that Stop the Steal and One Nation Under God organizers were likely associated,” but added that the police believed denying a permit based on “assumed associations” would be a First Amendment violation. “The Department did, however, take the likely association into account when making decisions to enhance its security posture.”

Kenneth Harrelson, an Oath Keeper who allegedly ran the far-right group’s “ground team” in D.C. on Jan. 6, went to Washington to provide security for Alexander, according to Harrelson’s wife. Harrelson has pleaded not guilty to felony charges in connection with the riot and is one of the Oath Keepers at the center of a major Department of Justice conspiracy case.

Harrelson’s wife, Angel Harrelson, said in an interview with ProPublica that her husband was excited to visit Washington for the first time, especially to provide security for an important person, but that he lost Alexander in the chaos that consumed the Capitol and decided to join the crowd inside.

“Historic Day!”

As the movement hurtled toward Jan. 6, what started as a loosely united coalition quickly splintered, dividing into two competing groups that vied for power and credit.

On one side, Alexander and Jones had emerged as a new, more extreme element within the Republican grassroots ecosystem.

Their chief opposition was the organization Women for America First, helmed by Kremer and other veterans of the tea party movement, itself once viewed as the Republican fringe. Kremer was an early backer of Trump, and her tea party work helped get Mark Meadows elected to the House of Representatives in 2012.

The schism was rooted in an ideological dispute. Kremer felt Alexander’s agenda and tactics were too extreme; Alexander wanted to distinguish Stop the Steal by being more directly confrontational than Kremer’s group and the tea party. “Our movement is masculine in nature,” he said in a livestream.

Trump promoted both groups’ events online at various times.

Stop the Steal, through its alias One Nation Under God, obtained a Capitol Police permit to rally on Capitol grounds, while Kremer and Women for America First controlled the National Park Service permit for a large gathering on the White House Ellipse.

Alexander and Jones wanted to speak at the Ellipse rally, but Kremer was opposed. The provocateurs found a powerful ally in Caroline Wren, an elite Republican fundraiser with connections to the Trump family, particularly Donald Trump Jr. and his partner, Kimberly Guilfoyle. Wren had raised money for the Ellipse rally and pushed to get Alexander and Jones on stage, according to six people involved in the Jan. 6 rally and emails reviewed by ProPublica.

Pierson, the Trump campaign official, had initially been asked by Wren to help mediate the conflict. But Pierson shared Kremer’s concern that Jones and Alexander were too unpredictable. Pierson and Wren declined to comment.

On Jan. 2, the fighting became so intense that Pierson asked senior White House officials how she should handle the situation, according to a person familiar with White House communications. The officials agreed that Alexander and Jones should not be on the stage and told Pierson to take charge of the event.

The next morning, Trump announced to the world that he would attend the rally at the Ellipse. “I will be there. Historic day!” he tweeted. This came as a surprise to both rally organizers and White House staff, each of whom told ProPublica they hadn’t been informed he intended to speak at the rally.

That same day, a website went live promoting a march on Jan. 6. It instructed demonstrators to meet at the Ellipse, then march to the Capitol at 1 p.m. to “let the establishment know we will fight back against this fraudulent election. … The fate of our nation depends on it.”

Alexander and his allies fired off these instructions across social media.

While Kremer and her group had held legally permitted marches at previous D.C. rallies and promoted all their events with the hashtag #marchfortrump, this time their permit specifically barred them from holding an “organized march.” Rally organizers were concerned that violating their permit could create a legal liability for themselves and pose significant danger to the public, said Stockton, a political consultant with tea party roots who spent weeks with Kremer as they held rallies across the country in support of the president.

Lawrence and Stockton’s fellow organizers contacted Pierson to inform her that the march was unpermitted, according to Stockton and three other people familiar with the situation.

While ProPublica has independently confirmed that senior White House officials, including Meadows, were involved in the broader effort to limit Alexander’s role on Jan. 6, it remains unclear just how far the rally organizers went to warn officials of their specific fears about the march.

Another source present for communications between Amy Kremer and her daughter and fellow organizer, Kylie Kremer, told ProPublica that on Jan. 3, Kylie Kremer called her mother in desperation about the march.

Kylie Kremer asked her mom to escalate the situation to higher levels of the White House, and her mother said she would work on it, according to the source, who could hear the conversation on speakerphone. “You need to call right now,” the source remembered the younger Kremer saying.

The source said that Kylie Kremer suggested Meadows as a person to contact around that time.

The source said that in a subsequent conversation, Amy Kremer told her daughter she would take the matter to Eric Trump’s wife, Lara Trump. The source said that Kremer was in frequent contact with Lara Trump at the time.

Stockton said that he was not aware of Kremer talking to the family about Jan. 6, but added that Kremer regularly communicates with the Trump family, including Lara Trump. He also said that Kremer gave him the distinct impression that she had contacted Meadows about the march.

Through his adviser Ben Williamson, Meadows declined to comment on whether the organizers contacted him regarding the march.

Lara Trump, who spoke at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, did not immediately respond to a voicemail and text message asking for comment or to an inquiry left on her website. Eric Trump did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Kremer did not answer questions from ProPublica about communications with Lara Trump. Donald Trump’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The White House, at the time, was scrambling from one crisis to the next. On Jan. 2, Trump and Meadows called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump pressed Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” that would swing the state tally his way. On Jan. 3, the president met with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and urged him to do what he could to protect Trump’s supporters on the 6th.

Meanwhile, Wren, the Republican fundraiser, was continuing to advocate for Jones and Alexander to play a prominent role at the Ellipse rally, according to emails and multiple sources.

A senior White House official suggested to Pierson that she resolve the dispute by going to the president himself, according to a source familiar with the matter.

On Jan. 4, Pierson met with Trump in the Oval Office. Trump expressed surprise that other people wanted to speak at the Ellipse at all. His request for the day was simple: He wanted lots of music and to limit the speakers to himself, some family members and a few others, according to the source and emails reviewed by ProPublica. The president asked if there was another venue where people like Alexander and Roger Stone could speak.

Pierson assured him there was. She informed the president that there was another rally scheduled the night before the election certification where those who lost their opportunity to speak at the Ellipse could still do so. It was meant as an olive branch extended between the competing factions, according to Stockton and two other sources.

Chafian, a reiki practitioner who’d been working closely with Alex Jones, was put in charge of the evening portion of the Jan. 5 event.

The speakers included Jones, Alexander, Stone, Michael Flynn and Three Percenter militia member Jeremy Liggett, who wore a flak jacket and led a “Fuck antifa!” chant. (Liggett is now running for Congress.) Chafian had invited Proud Boy leader Tarrio to speak as well, but Tarrio was arrested the day before on charges that he had brought prohibited gun magazines to Washington and burned a Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a church.

Tarrio told ProPublica that he did not know the flag was taken from a church and that the gun magazines were a custom-engraved gift for a friend. He has pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor charge of property destruction; the gun magazine charge is still pending indictment before a grand jury.

“Thank you, Proud Boys!” Chafian shouted at the end of her speech. “The Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters — all of those guys keep you safe.”

Wren, however, would not back down. On the morning of Jan. 6, she arrived at the Ellipse before dawn and began arranging the seats. Jones and Alexander moved toward the front. Organizers were so worried that Jones and Alexander might try to rush the stage that Pierson contacted a senior White House official to see how aggressive she could get in her effort to contain Wren.

After discussing several options, the official suggested she call the United States Park Police and have Wren escorted off the premises.

Pierson relayed this to Kylie Kremer, who contacted the police. Officers arrived, but ultimately took no action.

By 9 a.m.,Trump supporters had arrived in droves: nuns and bikers, men in American flag suits, a line of Oath Keepers. Signs welcomed the crowd with the words “Save America March.”

Kylie Kremer greeted them gleefully. “What’s up, deplorables!” she said from the stage.

Wren escorted Jones and Alexander out of the event early, as they prepared to lead their march on the Capitol.

At 11:57 a.m, Trump got on stage and, after a rambling speech, gave his now infamous directive. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he said. “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Lawrence, Dustin Stockton’s fiancee and co-organizer, remembers her shock.

“What the fuck is this motherfucker talking about?” Lawrence, an ardent Trump supporter, said of the former president.

In the coming hours, an angry mob would force its way into the building. Protesters smashed windows with riot shields stolen from cops, ransacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s chambers, and inflicted an estimated $1.5 million of damage. Roughly 140 police officers were injured. One was stabbed with a metal fence stake and another had spinal discs smashed, according to union officials.

The Stop the Steal group chat shows a reckoning with these events in real time.

“They stormed the capital,” wrote Stop the Steal national coordinator Michael Coudrey in a text message at 2:33 p.m. “Our event is on delay.”

“I’m at the Capitol and just joined the breach!!!” texted Straka, who months earlier had raised concerns about allying with white nationalists. “I just got gassed! Never felt so fucking alive in my life!!!”

Alexander and Coudrey advised the group to leave.

“Everyone get out of there,” Alexander wrote. “The FBI is coming hunting.”

In the months since, the Department of Justice has charged more than 400 people for their actions at the Capitol, including more than 20 alleged Proud Boys, over a dozen alleged Oath Keepers, and Straka. It’s unclear from court records whether Straka has yet entered a plea.

In emails to ProPublica, Coudrey declined to answer questions about Stop the Steal. “I just really don’t care about politics anymore,” he said. “It’s boring.”

Meadows, now a senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a think tank in Washington, appeared on Fox News on Jan. 27, delivering one of the first public remarks on the riot from a former Trump White House official. He encouraged the GOP to “get on” from Jan. 6 and focus on “what’s important to the American people.” Neither Meadows nor anyone else who worked in the Trump White House at the time has had to answer questions as part of the various inquiries currently proceeding in Congress.

Alexander has kept a low profile since Jan. 6. But in private, texts show, he has encouraged his allies to prepare for “civil war.”

“Don’t denounce anything,” he messaged his inner circle in January regarding the Capitol riot. “You don’t want to be on the opposite side of freedom fighters in the coming conflict. Veterans will be looking for civilian political leaders.”

Kirsten Berg and Lynn Dombek contributed additional reporting.

Bans state travel.

California bans state travel to Florida, 4 other states

OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ

California added five more states, including Florida, to the list of places where state-funded travel is banned because of laws that discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community, the state attorney general announced Monday.

Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta added Florida, Arkansas, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia to the list that now has 17 states where state employee travel is forbidden except under limited circumstances.

“Make no mistake: We’re in the midst of an unprecedented wave of bigotry and discrimination in this country — and the State of California is not going to support it,” Bonta said.

Lawmakers in 2016 banned non-essential travel to states with laws that discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The 12 other states on the list are: Texas, Alabama, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Kentucky, North Carolina, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee.

The five states newly added to the list have introduced bills in their legislatures this year that prevent transgender women and girls from participating in school sports consistent with their gender identity, block access to health care and allow the discrimination of the LGBTQ community, Bonta said.

Florida, Montana, Arkansas, and West Virginia passed laws that prevent transgender women and girls from participating in school sports consistent with their gender identity.

North Dakota signed into law a bill allowing certain publicly-funded student organizations to restrict LGBTQ students from joining without losing funding.

Arkansas passed the first law in the nation to prohibit physicians from providing gender-affirming healthcare to transgender minors — regardless of the wishes of parents or whether a physician deems such care to be medically necessary.

These lawmakers “would rather demonize trans youth than focus on solving real issues like tackling gun violence beating back this pandemic and rebuilding our economy,” Bonta said.

The state law has exemptions for some trips, such as travel needed to enforce California law and to honor contracts signed before the states were added to the list. Travel to conferences or out-of-state training are examples of trips that can be blocked.

It’s unclear what effect California’s travel ban will have. Bonta did not have information about how many state agencies have stopped sending state employees to the states on the list or the financial impact of California's travel ban on those states.

Roads are buckling...

It's so hot in the Pacific Northwest that roads are buckling

Amy Graff

It's so hot in the Pacific Northwest that roads are buckling.

Asphalt and concrete roadways are expanding and cracking and even Interstate 5 has been impacted amid a heat wave that has sent temperatures soaring to dangerous levels.

"There have been several instances of road impacts across Western Washington today, including along I-5 at times," the National Weather Service's Seattle office wrote on Twitter. "Additional impacts likely tomorrow with another day of extreme heat. Remain vigilant on your commutes!"

A state trooper shared images on social media of a damaged highway near Everson, Washington, about 10 miles south of the Canada border. 

"State Route 544 milepost 7 near Everson, Wa is currently closed," read the message from the Washington State Patrol District 7. "The asphalt roadway is buckling and unsafe for travel. WSDOT is advised and detours are currently being set up." 

A concrete panel popped up on a northbound section of Interstate 5 near Interstate 405 in Tukwila, 12 miles south of Seattle, according to the Washington State Department of Transportation.

The agency wrote on Twitter that heat equals expansion. 

"Crews are removing the damaged panel and filling it back in," WSDOT shared. "No estimated time for getting these lanes and ramp back open. Fortunately, not much of a backup at the moment."

A historic heat wave is gripping the Pacific Northwest, pushing daytime temperatures into the triple digits, disrupting Olympic qualifying events and breaking all-time high temperature records in places unaccustomed to such extreme heat.

Portland, Oregon, reached 112 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday, breaking the all-time temperature record of 108 Fahrenheit, which was set just a day earlier.

In Eugene, Oregon, the U.S. track and field trials were halted Sunday afternoon and fans were asked to evacuate the stadium due to extreme heat. The National Weather Service said it hit 110 in Eugene, breaking the all-time record of 108.

Oregon's capital city, Salem, also recorded the highest temperature in its history on Sunday: 112, breaking the old mark by 4 degrees.

The temperature hit 104 in Seattle. The NWS said that was an all-time record for the city better known for rain than heat and was the first time the area recorded two consecutive triple digit days since records began being kept in 1894.

Records were being broken across the region, and the sizzling temperatures were expected to get even hotter Monday before beginning to cool Tuesday.

Climate experts say the "heat dome" over the Northwest is yet another example of how human-caused climate change is leading to more extreme weather events and more severe drought.

Orion Nebula: The Hubble View

Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula. Also known as M42, the nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1,500 light-years away. The Orion Nebula offers one of the best opportunities to study how stars are born partly because it is the nearest large star-forming region, but also because the nebula's energetic stars have blown away obscuring gas and dust clouds that would otherwise block our view - providing an intimate look at a range of ongoing stages of starbirth and evolution. The featured image of the Orion Nebula is among the sharpest ever, constructed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope. The entire Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.

Supermassive Black Holes May Generate ‘Tsunamis’ in Escaping Gas

Here on Earth, earthquakes and underwater volcanic eruptions may displace enough ocean water to create a tsunami, a drumbeat of waves reaching huge heights as they approach land.

Now, astrophysicists have used computer simulations to show that in deep in space, tsunami-like structures may form on much bigger scales, from gas escaping the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole. In fact, the mysterious environment of supermassive black holes may host the largest tsunami-like structures in the universe, researchers say. The NASA-funded study is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“What governs phenomena here on Earth are the laws of physics that can explain things in outer space and even very far outside the black hole,” said Daniel Proga, astrophysicist at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada.

Black holes are mysterious by themselves. But for theoretical astrophysicists like Proga, a greater puzzle is solving the mathematical equations that describe how black holes distort their environments even dozens of light-years away.

When a black hole with a mass larger than a million Suns feeds off material from a surrounding disk at the center of a galaxy, the system is called an “active galactic nucleus.” Active galactic nuclei may additionally have relativistic jets at their poles and a thick shroud of material blocking our view of the central activity. But circulating plasma above the disk, just far enough that it won’t fall into the black hole, shines incredibly bright in X-rays — so bright that astronomers have been able to catalog over a million of these objects.

Strong winds, at least in part driven by this radiation, storm out of this central region in what’s called an “outflow.” Researchers want to understand the complicated interactions of gas with X-rays, and not just near the event horizon, where those X-rays are produced. The effects of these central X-rays can be important all the way out to tens of light-years from the black hole. In addition to launching outflows, X-ray irradiation may explain the presence of various populations of denser regions called clouds. Last year Proga and colleagues published simulations showing that more distant clouds can be produced within an outflow.

“These clouds are ten times hotter than the surface of the Sun and moving at the speed of the solar wind, so they are rather exotic objects that you would not want an airplane to fly through,” said lead author Tim Waters, a postdoctoral researcher at UNLV who is also a guest scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

Now, the group has demonstrated for the first time just how complicated the clouds within these outflows from the central black hole engine really are. Their simulations show that just within the distance where the supermassive black hole loses its grip on the surrounding matter, the relatively cool atmosphere of the spinning disk can form waves, similar to the surface of the ocean.  When interacting with hot winds, these waves can steepen into spiraling vortex structures that can reach a height of 10 light-years above the disk.  That’s more than twice the distance from the Sun to its closest star, which is a little over 4 light-years.  By the time tsunami-shaped clouds form, they are no longer influenced by the black hole’s gravity.

The simulations show how X-ray light coming from the plasma near the black hole first inflates pockets of heated gas within the atmosphere of the accretion disk beyond a certain distance from the active galactic nucleus. Heated plasma rises like a balloon, expanding into and disrupting the surrounding cooler gas.  It can be scorching — hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of degrees, no matter which unit of measurement one might use.  

Instead of a subsea volcanic eruption causing tsunamis, these hot pockets of gas in the outskirts of the accretion disk initiate the outward propagating disturbance. As the gas particles form a gigantic tsunami-like structure, it blocks the accretion disk wind, spawning a separate pattern of spiral structures known as a Kármán vortex street, with each vortex spanning a light-year in size. The phenomenon is named for physicist Theodore von Kármán, one of the founders of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This all may sound exotic and far-flung, but Kármán vortex streets are common weather patterns on Earth that structural engineers must worry about, especially with regards to bridges.

The new results contradict a longstanding theory that the clouds in the vicinity of an active galactic nucleus form spontaneously out of hot gas through the action of a fluid instability. They also go against the idea that magnetic fields are needed to propel cooler gas from a disk into the wind.

“While it all makes sense in hindsight, it was initially quite confusing to observe that thermal instability cannot produce cold gas directly, yet it can take the place of magnetic fields by lifting cold gas into the wind,” said Waters.

Armed with these simulations, researchers hope to work with observational astronomers to use telescopes to look for signs of these dynamics.

No satellite currently in orbit can hands down confirm the new findings. But NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton have detected plasma near active galactic nuclei with temperatures and velocities consistent with the simulations.

Stronger evidence may come from future missions. NASA’s forthcoming IXPE mission, launching in November, may contribute to scientists’ understanding of these phenomena. The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), a collaboration between NASA and the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), could study these phenomena when it launches later this decade. The European Space Agency is also planning a mission called ATHENA, the Advanced Telescope for High-ENergy Astrophysics, which has this capability, too.

Until then, the researchers will continue improving their models and comparing them with available data, caught in the whirlwind of this mystery.