Politico - 03 09 2020

Dems spend millions to hammer Perdue, Loeffler on stock trades

Republicans dismiss the effectiveness of the attacks and argue that the issue has been litigated for months. ‘It’s just not a new issue.’

PAGE 4

Senate bottlenecks

Biden races to fill lower-level jobs that don’t

require confirmation.PAGE 8

Trump to restart foreign deals, breaking a post-presidency norm

A return to overseas deal-making raises new ethical issues no ex-president

has ever confronted.PAGE 9

V O L . 1 4 • N O . 6 5 | T H U R S D AY, D E C E M B E R 3 , 2 0 2 0 | P O L I T I C O . C O M

Matt Wuerker

The cartoonist’s daily take on the world of politics.

PAGE 18

Snags complicate massive $1.4T spending deal

The renewed push for corona-virus relief and unresolved budget issues is complicating the massive $1.4 trillion spending deal, with lawmakers saying they need to reach an agreement in the coming days in order to pass the measure by next week’s deadline.

House and Senate aides close to the talks insist that appropriators are inching closer to a deal and remain optimistic that legislation will come together to keep the gov-ernment open past Dec. 11.

But the longer talks drag on, the

The longer talks drag out, the more likely extra time will be necessary to close out an agreement

Congress shoots down Trump veto threat of defense bill

Congress is moving forward on a must-pass defense policy bill without repealing a legal shield for social media companies, reject-ing a last-minute veto threat from President Donald Trump.

The fi nal version of the National Defense Authorization Act that will soon be considered by the House and Senate won’t include Trump’s long-sought repeal of the legal immunity for online companies, known as Section 230, according to lawmakers and aides.

Republicans also made clear they weren’t going to bend to Trump.

Senate Armed Services Chair Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said that while he agrees with Trump on Section 230, the provision “has nothing to do with the military.”

“You can’t do it in this bill. That’s not a part of the bill,” Inhofe said, adding that he has conveyed his thinking to Trump.

In a pair of tweets Tuesday eve-ning, Trump threatened to veto the bill if it does not include a full re-peal of Section 230, which he has criticized as an unfair protection

PHOTOS BY GETTY IMAGES AND AP

Donald Trump has the unyielding support of (clockwise from top left ) Sens. Josh Hawley, Rick Scott and Lindsey Graham, and Rep. Matt Gaetz if he were to run in 2024. “I think he would win,” said Sen. Marco Rubio.

Republicans cheer on a Trump 2024 run

Congressional Republicans were slow to embrace Donald Trump’s White House campaign in 2016. But the ousted president will have plenty of support on Capitol Hill should he run again in 2024.

Trump is even being cheered on publicly by some of the very Re-publicans who could seek higher offi ce in the future. Even in de-feat, Trump’s hold on the party

remains strong.“If he were to run in 2024, I

think he would be the nominee. And I would support him doing that,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). “He’d have a lot of support out in the country.”

“It’d be great if he ran. He’s done a good job. I think he ought to run if he wants to run. Who knows what’s going to happen in ’24?” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who said he is not focused on a presidential run at the mo-

ment. “He can sell the things he accomplished.”

I n a ser ies of i nter v iews Wednesday, House and Senate Republicans made clear that the GOP has no intention of turn-ing its back on Trumpism — or Trump himself. That’s in part because Trump remains an ex-ceedingly popular figure in his party, far more than most con-gressional Republicans. Some Republicans declined to discuss

Even in defeat, GOP lawmakers are loath to break with the president

BY CAITLIN EMMAAND HEATHER CAYGLE

BY ANDREW DESIDERIO,CONNOR O’BRIEN

AND MARIANNE LeVINE

2024 on page 10

BY BURGESS EVERETTAND MELANIE ZANONA

SPENDING on page 11

NDAA on page 13

PMI.COM/BETTER

OUR MISSION IS TO EMBRACE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO DELIVER A SMOKE-FREE FUTURE.

SCIENCE DELIVERS BETTER ALTERNATIVES.

CEO, PHILIP MORRIS INTERNATIONALANDRÉ CALANTZOPOULOS

PAID ADVERTISEMENT

TOM WILLIAMS-POOL/GETTY

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to revive and tweak his Covid relief package

2 | POLITICO | T H U R S D AY, D E C E M B E R 3 , 2 0 2 0

PMI.COM/BETTER

CAMPAIGNERS CALLED FOR US TO DEVELOP BETTER ALTERNATIVESTO CONTINUED SMOKING – AND WE HAVE.

WE’RE DELIVERING BETTER CHOICES.

Build better, do better, be better. As individualsor as a society, the path to progress is paved withcontinuous improvement. It’s the foundation upon which public health in particular is built, frombetter understanding to better science to better outcomes.

Globally, reducing the harm associated withsmoking is one the most pressing challenges forgovernments and the public health community.The health risks are well known, but less wellknown is the fact that better alternatives, backed by science, are real, and they have the potential todeliver a huge public health opportunity.

Many voices have long called on tobacco companies, including mine, to develop better. I’m proud to saythat we have done just that. For over a decade,Philip Morris International has been developing smoke-free alternatives that are a better choice than continued smoking, and they now make up almost a quarter of our net revenue.

Put simply: Better alternatives are at the heart of our commitment to a smoke-free future, and our goal is they will replace cigarettes for good.

Informed choice is critical. If adults who smoke are unable to get accurate information about or access to these products, their promise will not be realized. Yet inexplicably, many still ideologically oppose the idea that adult smokers should haveaccess to better alternatives. Their dogma dictatesthat smoke-free should stay in the shadows.

It is clear that the best choice for anyone is to quit altogether — or never start — using tobacco and nicotine products. We cannot ignore, however, that despite the ongoing efforts to discourage cigaretteuse, there are more than a billion smokers globally.

Encouragingly, U.S. law recognizes that tobacco products exist on a continuum of risk, andthat adult smokers who don’t quit should be incentivized to completely switch from cigarettes— the most harmful form of tobacco use — tobetter alternatives. Moreover, our research shows that 84% of adults want their regulators to take the latest science into account when deciding policy.

Such policies have the potential to promotebetter choices and dramatically accelerate the reduction of cigarette use. Surely this is a goalwe should all share?

To those committed to misleading adult smokers about smoke-free products, I ask: Who will takeresponsibility for denying adults their right toaccurate information about, and access to, scientifically substantiated better alternatives to cigarettes? Who benefits when those men and women who might otherwise be persuaded to switch to better alternatives continue to smokeinstead?

We were challenged to create better alternatives to cigarettes. We have delivered. Our missionnow is to embrace this opportunity to deliver a smoke-free future.

André CalantzopoulosCEO, Philip Morris Internationalp

T H U R S D AY, D E C E M B E R 3 , 2 0 2 0 | POLITICO | 3

McEnany incorrectly credits Trump with White House AIDS ribbonThe press secretary made the false assertion while defending the administration for its omission of LGBTQ people in a World AIDS Day statement.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday falsely attributed the genesis of the towering red ribbon displayed in front of the White House in honor of World AIDS Day to the Trump administration.

McEnany pointed to the two-story ribbon hung from the White House’s North Portico as part of a defense of the Trump administration’s omission of any reference to LGBTQ people in its offi cial statement commemorating World AIDS Day.

“The president honored World AIDS Day yesterday in a way that no president has before, with the red ribbon there, and I think he commemorated the day as he should have,” McEnany told reporters during a news briefi ng.

The ribbon was fi rst hung in 2007 under former President George W. Bush and has become an annual feature in the years since, including under both Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The idea was the brainchild of Steven Levine, a member of the Bush communications shop, who is gay.

The White House similarly excluded mentioning these LGBTQ groups in the previous three years under Trump. It is a stark departure from Obama, who in his 2016 proclamation noted the disproportionate impact of HIV/AIDS on “gay and bisexual men, transgender people, youth, black and Latino Americans, people living in the Southern United States, and people who inject drugs.”

The Trump administration has worked to increase religious liberties, oft en outraging LGBTQ organizations that see the moves as coming at their expense. Trump has rolled back anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ patients implemented during the Obama administration, and earlier this year issued an executive order banning the government from working with contractors that conduct “race or sex stereotyping” — including diversity training.

LGBTQ advocacy groups in November sued to invalidate those restrictions, arguing the order violates their freedom of speech and is overly vague about what conduct is prohibited.

— Nick Niedzwiadek

McEnany’s husband attends White House press briefing without maskWhite House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s husband, Sean Gilmartin, appeared without a face mask in the White House briefi ng room on Wednesday and declined to cover his face aft er being asked to do so by a reporter.

The exchange between Gilmartin and the White House press corps came aft er

McEnany, who generally does not wear a mask at the briefi ng room podium, conducted a 24-minute news conference. The episode was initiated by New York Times photographer Doug Mills, who “politely pointed out” to Gilmartin, a professional baseball pitcher, rules mandating that masks be worn in White House press areas.

White House pool reporter Chris Johnson of The Washington Blade reported that “a White House staff er who was with Gilmartin said incredulously, ‘Kayleigh’s husband?’” The staff er and Gilmartin then exited the briefi ng room together as Mills “restated the mask rules and said it doesn’t matter who [Gilmartin] is,” Johnson recounted.

Mills confi rmed to Johnson that Gilmartin was maskless for the entirety of the briefi ng, adding that he did not know Gilmartin was McEnany’s husband when he informed him about the mask rules.

McEnany did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment on why her husband declined to wear a mask at Wednesday’s briefi ng. White House Correspondents’ Association President Zeke Miller, a reporter for The Associated Press, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the exchange.

Mills, a veteran White House photojournalist, is one of President Donald Trump’s favorite members of the media. Trump has previously referred to him as a “genius” and “the No. 1 photographer in the world.”

Also present at McEnany’s briefi ng was Chad Gilmartin, a White House assistant press secretary who is a cousin of Sean Gilmartin. He, too, was not wearing a mask.

McEnany, who tested positive for Covid-19 in October, has refused to wear a mask while briefi ng reporters throughout the coronavirus pandemic, citing the distance between her and the press corps when she stands at the briefi ng room podium. She was one of numerous administration offi cials to be infected across three separate White House outbreaks in recent months.

At the outset of her briefi ng on Wednesday, McEnany showed video clips of Democratic politicians violating local coronavirus restrictions or contradicting their own public health guidance — describing the footage of “images of Democrat hypocrisy playing on loop.”

— Quint Forgey

Trump to award Medal of Freedom to Lou HoltzPresident Donald Trump will award former football coach Lou Holtz the nation’s highest civilian award this week, the White House announced Wednesday.

Holtz is best known for winning a national championship at Notre Dame in the 1988 season — the most recent in the school’s history — and his long subsequent career working as a college football analyst on TV. He was inducted to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2008.

Holtz has been a vocal Trump supporter and has long been affi liated with Republican politics, including fl irting with a congressional run in 2009.

Holtz spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention, where he denigrated the faith of now-President-elect Joe Biden and other politicians as “Catholics in name only” for their position on abortion. Holtz’s rhetoric drew an admonishment from Notre Dame’s president, Fr. John

Jenkins, who said “we must never question the sincerity of another’s faith.”

Trump will bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Thursday, according to the White House. The president has shown a fondness for awarding the honor to high-profi le backers like conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson’s wife, Miriam, as well as sports fi gures like golf legend Tiger Woods, Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach and basketball great Bob Cousy, among others. Trump has also awarded a posthumous Medal of Freedom to baseball icon Babe Ruth.

Holtz, 83, tested positive for Covid-19 in November.

— Nick Niedzwiadek

Brad Parscale opens up about final days in Trump campaignHe wants to clear the air about his fall from the Trump campaign.

During an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum that aired Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager opened up about his confl icts with other members of the reelection team, saying he was “removed” from his leadership position in a move that left him feeling hurt and excluded. It was his fi rst public interview since leaving the campaign altogether in September aft er an altercation with police related to allegations of abuse against his wife. (His wife later retracted the allegation.)

Parscale served as campaign manager until July, when he was replaced by Bill Stepien and assigned to serve as a senior campaign adviser. The campaign denied at the time that the move was a demotion for Parscale, but he had come under increasing scrutiny within the campaign

amid poor polling numbers and lackluster attendance at Trump’s comeback campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla.

During his Tuesday interview, Parscale cut off MacCallum when she said he had left the campaign, curtly saying: “I was removed.”

“I didn’t get a warning sign,” Parscale said, adding that he was “hurt” by the switch-up. “No one asked me to change my plan. I don’t know exactly why I was removed, and all of a sudden we had to challenge the plan.”

Parscale said he loved the Trump campaign and is still deeply loyal to the president. But he added that he disagreed with Trump’s approach to the coronavirus pandemic, saying voters — particularly the suburban families the Trump campaign ardently hoped to court — were scared and looking for “empathy” from their leader. Focusing instead on bullishly reopening the economy, Parscale said, was the biggest policy error of the campaign.

“A young family with a young child who are scared to take them back to school wanted to see an empathetic president. And an empathetic Republican Party,” Parscale said. “And I said this multiple times, and he chose a diff erent path. I don’t think he was wrong, I love him, but we had a diff erence on this. I thought we should have public empathy.”

Parscale also dished out on “D-level” people around the president, whom he didn’t name but accused of steering the campaign away from a clean victory. Responding to reports that the president yelled at him amid declining poll numbers, Parscale said he was not a “yes man” like others in the campaign who curried the president’s favor by telling him what he wanted to hear.

Parscale was still holding out hope that Trump could retake the White House this year, even though election offi cials in key states across the country have called the vote for President-elect Joe Biden. When asked for hypothetical scenarios under which Trump could have won, Parscale said: “He can still win this.”

He also said he still had confi dence that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who is leading the legal battle to overturn the election, can possibly land the election for Trump. Giuliani’s public events around his legal eff orts have frequently descended into farcical spectacles, but Parscale said they didn’t detract from his respect for the former New York mayor.

“Sometimes I watch them on TV, and I’m like, ‘Whoa,’” Parscale said. “But at the same time, I mean, the guy has done so many things in his life.”

Parscale said he and Trump haven’t had any contact recently — a silence that left Parscale emotional during Tuesday’s interview.

“It is pretty hurtful, but it’s probably just as much my fault as his,” Parscale said. “I love that family. And I gave every inch of my life to him. Every inch.”

— Matthew Choi

EVAN VUCCI/AP

Masks vs. no masksWhite House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday presides over a news briefi ng at which her husband, Sean Gilmartin, appeared without a mask and declined to cover his face aft er being asked to do so by New York Times photographer Doug Mills. At the outset of her briefi ng, McEnany showed video clips of Democratic politicians violating local coronavirus restrictions or contradicting their own public health guidance — describing the footage as “images of Democrat hypocrisy playing on loop.”

A daily diary of the Trump presidency

FORTY FIVE

PHONE (703) 647-7999 • FAX (703) 647-79981000 WILSON BLVD., 8TH FLOOR

ARLINGTON, VA 22209

POLITICO.com

S M T W T F S

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

DECEMBER PUBLISHING SCHEDULEPOLITICO serves the United States Senate and House of Representatives, the White House

and offices of the executive branch, Cabinet departments and federal agencies, the Supreme Court, lobbyists and special interest groups, the media, airline and rail passengers, paid subscribers and select nonpaid recipients. Reproduction of this publication in whole or in part is prohibited except with the written permission of the publisher. POLITICO is nonideological and nonpartisan.

POLITICO is published Tuesday through Thursday when Congress is in session, and on Wednesday when Congress is in recess for one week or less, by POLITICO LLC. Subscriptions are $200 per year or $350 for two years for domestic subscribers, and $600 per year overseas. POLITICO is printed at Evergreen Printing and Publishing Co. Inc., Bellmawr, N.J. POSTMASTER: Send change of address to POLITICO, P.O. Box 36, Congers, NY 10920-0036. © POLITICO LLC, 2018.

Robert L. AllbrittonPUBLISHER & EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN

Patrick SteelCHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Matthew KaminskiEDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Carrie Budoff BrownEDITOR

NEWSPAPER STAFFBILL KUCHMAN NEWSPAPER EDITOR

M. SCOTT MAHASKEY DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHYMATT WUERKER EDITORIAL CARTOONIST

SUSHANT SAGAR COPY DESK CHIEFANDY GOODWIN, JESSE NARANJO, FERNANDO RODAS COPY EDITORS

CONGRESSIONAL STAFFBEN WEYL CONGRESS EDITORDAVID KIHARA SENIOR EDITOR

JOHN BRESNAHAN CONGRESSIONAL BUREAU CHIEF

HEATHER CAYGLE, KYLE CHENEY, ANDREW DESIDERIO, CAITLIN EMMA, BURGESS EVERETT, SARAH FERRIS,

MARIANNE LeVINE, MELANIE ZANONA REPORTERS

For corrections or questions regarding the newspaper, email [email protected], [email protected] or [email protected].


Democrats are putting a lot of stock into Sen. David Perdue’s controversial financial transac-tions in their fight to win the Sen-ate majority.

As the Georgia Republican con-tinues to face an onslaught of news stories about the timing of his stocks trades amid a high-profile runoff, super PACs run by allies of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are flooding the airwaves in the state. The Georgia Way and Geor-gia Honor — two newly formed super PACs affiliated with Senate Majority PAC — have spent more than $10 million since Nov. 3 on ads hammering Perdue and Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) over their portfolios.

And they’re adding two new ads totaling an additional $5.5 million to their TV buys this week, the third straight week they’ve hit on the issue, according to details shared first with POLITICO.

“The dam is just beginning to break and we plan to fully expose their unethical and potentially il-legal behavior in the weeks ahead,” said J.B. Poersch, president of Sen-ate Majority PAC. “Georgians sim-ply can’t trust David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler when they’re knee-deep in the swamp and profiting at their expense.”

The ads highlight the tactics be-ing used, as well as the vast sums of money both sides are willing to spend, in the run-up to the Janu-ary 5 runoffs, which will determine control of the Senate.

The first ad features news clips about Loeffler’s stock trades, which first received scrutiny shortly after she was appointed to the Senate and

as the coronavirus was beginning to take hold in the U.S. The second ad highlights recent reporting from The New York Times about the De-partment of Justice’s investigation into Perdue’s stock trades, includ-ing that Perdue received an email from the CEO of a company, and subsequently instructed his wealth manager to sell shares of the stocks. The Times reported that investiga-tors closed DOJ’s probe into Perdue over the summer. The ad accuses Perdue of “looking out for himself, not you.”

Republicans, however, are dis-missing the effectiveness of the attacks and argue that the issue has been litigated for months. New information, they say, is un-likely to sway voters in the next five weeks.

“It’s just not a new issue,” said former Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who previously held Perdue’s seat. “People are more worried about the economy, how it’s going to get back to normal. … As far as it being the deciding factor, I just don’t think it’s going to be that.”

Perdue and Loeffler both faced negative ads about their stock portfolios consistently through-out the general election. But the issue has taken on heightened in-tensity in recent weeks because the two senators are the only Republicans still on the ballot. Democrats need to win both seats to hold a 50-50 majority, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker.

Jon Ossoff, who is ru n n i ng against Perdue, continues to use the stock issue against the senator and

even called his opponent a “crook” during a debate. In a news confer-ence Monday, Ossoff characterized Perdue’s actions as “repeated and flagrant.”

“The standard for conduct for a U.S. senator needs to be higher than that he wasn’t criminally prosecuted,” Ossoff said. “This conduct is obviously deeply un-ethical and his lies all year that he doesn’t personally direct his stock trades have been exposed as lies.”

Loeffler faced earlier scrutiny than Perdue, but pushed back on it over the summer by highlighting that the Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Com-mission and Senate Ethics Com-mittee dropped investigations into her stock trades. Raphael Warnock, Loeffler’s opponent, reiterated calls this week for Loef-fler to put her stock portfolio in a blind trust.

“The people of Georgia deserve to know that when we send some-one to the Senate, that person is not focused on their business, they’re focused on the people’s business,” Warnock said.

Stephen Lawson, a spokesper-son for Loeffler, said she was “to-tally exonerated” because she did nothing wrong and accused War-nock of “peddling a debunked lie about Senator Loeffler to distract from his own radical history” on issues Republicans have attacked him on.

Perdue f i rst a n nou nced he had been investigated in a TV ad in September in which a narra-tor said the DOJ, SEC and Senate Ethics Committee “cleared him

completely.” Perdue went on the airwaves again this week with an ad accusing Ossoff’s allegations into his stock trades of being “to-tally false.” A narrator in the ad repeats that Perdue was “totally exonerated.” Democrats, however, are publicly questioning Perdue’s claims of exoneration and calling for documentation.

John Burke, a spokesman for Perdue, highlighted t Times report, which said the investigations were dropped, and accused Ossoff of ly-ing in his attacks. Burke said in a statement that Ossoff is “twisting the truth to further deceive Georgia voters.”

Democrats’ ads have played up different aspects of the trading, and a raft of new stories from various outlets has created a cascading effect of information about the stocks. But it’s unclear so far from public polling whether it will move voters, or simply help increase turnout from either side.

“There’s no such thing as a per-suadable voter,” said one Georgia Republican, who requested ano-nymity to speak candidly on the issue. “The Dems all believe [Per-due] had inside information. The Republicans, even if they believe that, don’t give a s---. I just think it doesn’t do anything. I don’t think it moves the needle.”

Republicans, meanwhile, are betting that voters will keep a broader goal in mind: GOP control of the Senate.

“The issue is probably going to be the majority,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.). “That’s what people are voting on.”

BY MARIANNE LeVINEAND JAMES ARKIN

Ad blitz slams Perdue, Loeffler over stock tradesThe GOP says its an old issue and thatinvestigations havecleared the senators

ALYSSA POINTER/ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION VIA AP

Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue flank Vice President Mike Pence in Marietta, Ga., on Nov. 20. Democrats Raphael Warnok and Jon Ossoff have criticized Loeffler and Perdue, whom they will face in Jan. 5 runoffs, over stock trades that have drawn scrutiny from federal investigators.


F-15EX—UNRIVALED PAYLOAD

THE FORCE OF THE FUTURE

With fly-by-wire flight controls, hypersonic weapon payload capacity and advanced cockpit systems,

Boeing’s F-15EX is prepared to face future threats head on. Equipped with Open Mission Systems

for quick and convenient technology upgrades, it is ready to take on the missions of today and adapt

to meet the missions of tomorrow.

boeing.com/f-15ex


Sen. Dianne Feinstein publicly threw her weight behind Califor-nia Secretary of State Alex Padilla to fill Sen. Kamala Harris’ soon-to-be-vacant seat, signaling that Padilla remains a favorite of the Democratic establishment.

The jostling over the seat has intensified in recent weeks, as President-elect Joe Biden’s victory has ensured Gov. Gavin Newsom will appoint a replacement for Har-ris when she steps aside to take on vice presidential duties.

Padilla has long been perceived as the frontrunner, and Feinstein’s

imprimatur — first reported by HuffPost on Wednesday — lends additional momentum to his bid. The two elected officials h ave a lon g-standing rela-tionsh ip that

stretches back to a young Padilla working for Feinstein in the Senate.

“I have given him my support. I did that quite a while ago. He worked for me at one point, so I know him,” Feinstein said in an interview. “And my sense is that he’s going to represent California very well. He’s someone I would be very happy to work with, and also bring Hispanic representation to the Senate for the first time.”

Padilla sits at the top of Newsom’s short list for multiple reasons. The Democrat is a longtime Newsom ally; he would make history by becoming California’s first Latino senator, a fitting milestone for a state where Latino residents are a plurality at 40 percent of the popu-lation; and he has raised his profile both in California and nationally through his work to expand voter registration and mail balloting as California’s top elections official.

Feinstein said Newsom was “aware of” her support for Padilla to become the state’s junior senator.

The Los Angeles Democrat also has benefited from a push by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ campaign arm, BOLD PAC, which underscored the imperative for Newsom to choose a Latino can-didate in endorsing Padilla.

But Newsom is also facing pres-sure from various California elect-ed officials, donors and advocacy groups to appoint a Black woman to replace Harris, who is Black and South Asian.

While Feinstein’s endorsement lends Padilla more institutional credibility, it is unlikely to sway pro-gressive groups that have soured on the centrist Feinstein and are push-ing Newsom to elevate a represen-tative of the party’s left wing, like Reps. Barbara Lee or Ro Khanna.

California Democratic Party ac-tivist RL Miller tweeted, “what a friggin’ surprise: an out of touch centrist backs her own protege,” in response to Feinstein’s public endorsement.

BY ANDREW DESIDERIOAND JEREMY B. WHITE

Feinstein supports Padilla for Harris seat

Padilla

A Democratic candidate who fell six votes short of holding an open battleground congressional district in Iowa is planning to chal-lenge those results directly with the House, placing the chamber in the highly unusual position of poten-tially determining the outcome of the race.

After what appears to be the tightest congressional election in decades, Rita Hart, a state senator, has decided to forgo a legal battle in her home state and will instead contest the election directly with the House Administration Com-mittee. Iowa election officials certified Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks as the winner on Monday after a recount diminished her initial victory margin from 47 votes to just six.

The move, whose aggressiveness has stunned some Democrats, will

trigger a rarely used congressional process, which was memorably de-ployed to settle an election in the mid-1980s. But the stakes are high: Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a severely diminished majority, which could be as small as five votes after sus-taining unexpected losses last month.

But some Democrats question the optics of challenging certi-fied election results, as President Donald Trump still refuses to con-cede and makes baseless claims of widespread election fraud, despite losing by much larger margins than the Iowa race.

Hart faced a deadline Wednes-day to appeal the recount results through state channels. Under Iowa law, Hart’s challenge would trigger the formation of a tribunal, which would include the chief justice of the state Supreme Court and four other district court judges. That panel would have until Dec. 8 to

rule on the matter, a timeline the Hart campaign suggested would be insufficient.

“With a margin this small, it is critical that we take this next step to ensure Iowans’ ballots that were legally cast are counted,” said Zach Meunier, Hart’s campaign manager.

Many operatives in both parties thought Hart would exhaust all state methods of challenging the election before seeking relief from the House of Representatives, in part because it will force the new, smaller Democratic majority to wade into a state election.

The process for contesting an election with the House is complex. If Hart challenges the results un-der the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969, the case would be re-ferred to the House Administration Committee, which could conduct an investigation of its own before making a recommendation to the

full House, which would decide by a simple majority vote whom to seat.

The process that played out under this act after the 1984 elec-tion was exceedingly bitter. The Democratic-controlled House un-der Speaker Tip O’Neill refused to seat Republican Richard McIntyre, even after Indiana’s secretary of state certified McIntyre as the winner over incumbent Demo-cratic Rep. Frank McCloskey . McCloskey objected to what he said were a rushed certification and inconsistent standards for counting ballots, and McIntyre was not seated in the House.

The nonpartisan General Ac-counting Office conducted a re-count and found McCloskey the winner by four votes. The House voted to seat him, triggering a walkout protest from Republicans. At the time, Democrats had a larger majority and did not need the extra seat as badly as they do now.

BY SARAH FERRISAND ALLY MUTNICK

Iowa results to be challenged directly in the House

Democrat Mark Kelly of Ari-zona was sworn in Wednesday as the newest member of the Senate, bringing the GOP majority down to 52-48.

Kelly, a former astronaut and U.S. Navy captain, beat GOP Sen. Martha McSally in a special elec-tion this November. While Kelly has never held public office before, he was widely viewed as a star re-cruit for the Democratic party this election cycle. He is married to for-

mer Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.), who is now an advocate for stricter gun laws after surviving a 2011 as-sassination attempt.

The Arizona Democrat’s arrival in the Senate during the lame duck session comes as Senate Republi-cans are aiming to confirm a series of executive and judicial branch ap-pointees who will outlast President Donald Trump’s term. Republicans’ slightly smaller majority leaves them little room for error on any potential controversial nominees

and Kelly’s arrival essentially kills Judy Shelton’s nomination to the Federal Reserve.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) welcomed Kelly to the Senate ahead of his swear-ing in.

“It may not be the role he ex-pected for himself earlier in his life,” Schumer said. “As Mark likes to say, his wife Gabby was already the member of the family in Congress. But tragedy upended both of their lives, and changed so many of their plans. Everyone continues to be inspired by Gab-by’s recovery, by Mark’s devotion, and the courage it took for their

family to reenter public life and public service.”

Kelly will serve the remainder of the late GOP Sen. John McCain’s final two years, and immediately run again for re-election in 2022. Throughout his Senate campaign against McSally, Kelly proved him-self to be a prolific fundraiser.

Kelly’s swearing in marks the first time in nearly 70 years that Arizona will have two Democratic senators, a sign of the state’s new-found status as a battleground. He will join Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who beat McSally in 2018. Both Kelly and Sinema ran as mod-erates during their campaign.

BY MARIANNE LeVINE

Arizona Dem Kelly sworn in as senatorThe former astronaut and U.S. Navy captaindefeated Martha McSally in a special election

GRAEME JENNINGS/AP

Sen. Mark Kelly and his wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords, reenact his swearing-in on Wednesday with Vice President Mike Pence in the Old Senate Chamber. Kelly will finish the final two years of the late Sen. John McCain’s term. He will be up for reelection in 2022.


The faces of the economic team President-elect Joe Biden unveiled publicly Tuesday included an Afri-can American woman, a man born in Nigeria, an Indian American woman and just one white man.

The response from Asian Ameri-can, Black and Latino Democrats: It’s not enough.

They want more representation, particularly in the Cabinet. And after Rep. Jim Clyburn, the most senior Black member of Congress and a key Biden ally, spoke out last week about the need for more di-versity in Biden’s burgeoning ad-ministration, more Black, Latino and Asian American lawmakers are joining the chorus.

“We’re very, very concerned as a community, as a Latino com-munity,” said Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who called last week for at least five Latinos to be appointed to Cabinet-level positions.

Asian American and Pacific Is-lander advocates and officials are warning the Biden administration, in writing, it will be “deeply disap-pointing if several AAPIs are not nominated” to Cabinet positions. They’re growing increasingly con-vinced the president-elect will not match President Barack Obama’s total of three Asian Americans in his first Cabinet.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Black Caucus is urging Biden to choose a Black Defense secretary and up the number of African Americans leading departments overall.

Together, the criticism high-lights the challenges the Biden transition faces in satisfying ex-pectations for a historically di-verse Cabinet. And it underscores the growing demands for equal representation after a presidential election in which Asian Americans were difference-makers in Georgia, Latinos boosted Biden in Arizona, and Black voters propelled him to the nomination and ultimate victory.

But appeasing everyone may be a nearly impossible task, especially given the zero-sum reality of Cabi-net jockeying and the limited slate of top-tier positions.

Latino lawmakers and outside groups, for example, are pushing New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham for Health and Human Services secretary — but tap-ping her over former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who is In-dian American, could anger Asian American advocacy groups.

“It’s no secret that as you look at the number of people that have been appointed … we don’t see too many Asian Americans there, do we?” said Bel Leong-Hong, chair of the Democratic National Com-mittee’s AAPI caucus.

Those lobbying the transition team say there is still time for Biden to meet his lofty diversity goals. But some Democrats are pessimistic af-ter seeing the first rounds of per-sonnel picks.

Biden’s core White House team will be mostly white, including his chief of staff, communications director, press secretary, legisla-tive affairs director and one of his top economic advisers. And two of the so-called Big Four Cabinet positions — the State, Treasury, Justice and Defense Departments — have already been filled by white candidates.

“A true way for Biden to make history would be to nominate a person of color for one or more of those ‘Big Four’ positions, and now they’re down to just two,” said Ja-net Murguía, the president of Uni-dosUS and a former adviser to Pres-ident Bill Clinton. “So there will be enormous scrutiny from both the Black and Latino community for the remaining two jobs — DOD and Justice — and rightfully so.”

A Black House lawmaker, who requested anonymity to speak more freely as Biden fills posi-tions, put it more bluntly. “He’s got to step it up,” the lawmaker said, noting that Kamala Harris’ selection as vice president doesn’t give Biden an excuse to appoint fewer African Americans to head key departments.

The Biden transition team says the president-elect will have a diverse administration when all is said and done. “His success in finding diverse voices to develop and implement his policy vision to tackle our nation’s toughest chal-lenges will be clear when our full slate of appointees and nominees is complete,” a Biden-Harris tran-sition official said in a statement.

It’s true that, as the transition official pointed out, Biden has “announced several historic and

diverse White House appointments and Cabinet nominees.” He ap-pointed an all-female senior com-munications team, for example, as well as the first woman of color to lead the Office of Management and Budget and the first female nominee for Treasury secretary.

But in 2020, the bar for diversity has been raised well beyond the seven women and 10 nonwhite of-ficials in President Barack Obama’s first Cabinet.

Senior AAPI officials highlight huge increases in voter turnout among Asian American voters in the 2020 election — including in crucial battleground states Biden won, such as Georgia and Arizona — as one reason they should be well-represented throughout the administration. Early and absen-tee voting among AAPI voters rose nearly 300 percent in battleground states this year, according to the Democratic data firm Catalist.

The Biden transition announced Monday that Neera Tanden, an Indian American woman, will be nominated to lead the Office of Management and Budget. But some AAPI officials said they still fear Biden is unlikely to meet the benchmark set by Obama, who appointed three AAPI candidates to Cabinet positions at the start of his term.

“We just want to make sure that the Biden administration — and we’ve conveyed this from day one — has a diverse representation, and that diversity includes AAPIs,” said New York Rep. Grace Meng, vice chair of the DNC. “That’s not always fully understood.”

The influential Congressional Hispanic Caucus has also mounted

an active pressure campaign.In phone calls and letters, the

lawmakers pointed out the tran-sition’s agency review teams are roughly 11 percent Latino and their COVID-19 Advisory Board is about 15 percent Latino — each less than the roughly 20 percent share of the U.S. population Latinos represent.

And though they cheered the nomination of Cuban American Alejandro Mayorkas to run Home-land Security — the first immigrant and first Latino to hold the position, if confirmed — it does not come close to representing the breadth of Latinos across the country, they say.

“When we talk about diversity, we also need to talk about diversity within the Hispanic community,” said California Democratic Rep. Raul Ruiz. “The vast majority of Hispanics in the U.S. are Mexican Americans, so it would be im-portant and helpful to have them represented in nominations. The Puerto Rican and Cuban American and Dominican American experi-ences are also important and should also be reflected.”

Gonzalez, the Texas Democrat, said he’s warned Democrats about the surge in support for Republi-cans among Mexican American communities in South Texas and other battleground states.

“When Republicans are coming into our districts saying, ‘What have the Democrats done for you?’ And we have a Democratic presi-dent with a low showing or low representation of Latinos in his Cabinet and government, it is a tough response,” Gonzalez said. “I don’t want to have to defend that.”

In addition to Lujan Grisham,

Latino lawmakers support either DNC Chair Tom Perez or California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to lead the Justice Department. Ruiz’s name has also been floated by some members of the Hispanic Caucus as a potential addition to a Biden ad-ministration, given his health care background as a physician.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been pressur-ing Biden’s transition team on an individual level, according to multiple members. Many take their cues from Clyburn, who is pushing for Ohio Democratic Rep. Marcia Fudge to be selected as the first Black female Agricul-ture secretary.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Mis-souri said he’s keeping a close eye on whom Biden names to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, pointing out that Democrats have not nominated a Black man to lead HUD since 1965, when the department was created by President Lyndon Johnson. And he echoed other CBC members who are saying former Homeland Secu-rity Secretary Jeh Johnson’s “name needs to be in the mix” for Defense Secretary.

“I’m not ready to panic,” Cleaver said of representation within the administration, adding that mem-bers see Biden as someone who un-derstands their demands and the “delicacy” of keeping a diverse party happy.

“The philosophy of those of us who’ve been in the civil rights movement is that even i f it’s friends, you know, you don’t let up in your expressions of anticipa-tion,” said Cleaver. “We’re antici-pating that he does the right thing.”

BY MEGAN CASSELLA,LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ

AND ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN

Biden is told to ‘step it up’ on Cabinet diversityLawmakers, advocatesof color put pressureon president-electfor more inclusion

GERALD HERBERT/AP

Rep. Jim Clyburn, the most senior Black member of Congress and a key ally of Joe Biden, spoke out last week about the need for more diversity in a Biden administration. The criticism highlights challenges the transition team is facing in satisfying expectations for a historically diverse Cabinet.


President-elect Joe Biden sug-gested in an interview published Wednesday that outrage from Senate Republicans over his pick for White House budget director is hypocritical and insincere, defend-ing Neera Tanden amid an outcry from the lawmakers whose votes she will need for confirmation.

The remarks from Biden came in an interview with Thomas Fried-man of The New York Times, dur-ing which the president-elect was asked whether “nasty tweets” — Tanden has been sharply critical of Republican officials on social media — should be disqualifying for potential nominees to his in-coming administration.

“That disqualifies almost every Republican senator and 90 percent of the administration,” Biden said. “But by the way, she’s smart as hell. Yeah, I think they’re going to pick a

couple of people just to fight [over] no matter what.”

Reports emerged over the week-end that Biden planned to nominate Tanden, a former senior policy ad-viser to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns, as director of the Office of Man-agement and Budget. The presi-dent-elect introduced Tanden as his OMB director-designate on Tuesday at an event in Delaware.

Since her initial announce-ment, Senate Republicans have protested Biden’s pick to lead the powerful executive branch agency, complaining about old social me-dia posts from Tanden. A prolific Twitter user, Tanden is president of the Center for American Progress, a prominent liberal think tank.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas , one of Tanden’s more outspoken Republican opponents, described her this week as “radioactive” and

said her intended nomination by Biden is “really a misstep by the administration.”

“It’s pretty crazy to me to think that she can go back and … elimi-nate all the tweets that she’s sent out over the last, whatever, months, years,” Cornyn said.

In formally unveiling his eco-nomic team on Tuesday, Biden praised Tanden as “a brilliant policy mind with critical practical experience across government.” For her part, Tanden expressed her be-lief that government should “serve all the American people — Republi-cans, Democrats, and independents alike.”

Tanden has received markedly more public pushback than the oth-er intended nominees announced by Biden in recent days, who have been mostly regarded as neither too centrist by Democratic progressives nor too left-leaning by the party’s

moderates.Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sand-

ers (I-Vt.) have also been upset by Tanden’s selection, casting her as a Clinton loyalist who helped tank his presidential ambitions.

Biden’s transition team is antici-pating fierce confirmation battles over his Cabinet picks, and prepar-ing for the possibility Republicans will slow-walk his nominees by focusing on naming candidates for government roles that do not require Senate approval.

Of course, the fate of the presi-dent-elect’s Cabinet and likely that of his legislative agenda is depen-dent on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), with whom Biden has boasted about be-ing able to strike deals in the past.

“There are a number of things that when McConnell controlled the Senate that people said couldn’t get done, and I was able to get them

done with [him]. I was able to get them to, you know, raise taxes on the wealthy,” Biden told the Times.

“I think there are trade-offs, that not all compromise is walking away from principle,” he added. “He knows me. I know him. I don’t ask him to embarrass himself to make a deal.”

BY QUINT FORGEY

Biden supports Tanden as GOP attacks her tweets

Now that he’s chosen a big chunk of his Cabinet nominees, President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team is focusing increasingly on selecting candidates for government posi-tions that do not require Senate confirmation.

Concerned about Republicans slow-walking confirmation hear-ings for Cabinet appointees and hollowed-out federal agencies, Biden and his aides are eager to place mid- to lower-level officials across the federal government, par-ticularly in national security roles, to ensure his administration can begin to enact his agenda imme-diately, according to three people familiar with the situation.

By quickly selecting candidates for slots that don’t require Senate confirmation, such as deputy as-sistant secretaries, the transition team also can try to ensure that many of those hired can obtain security clearances by the time Biden takes office.

The shift in focus to filling po-sitions that do not require confir-mation reflects the urgency with which the Biden team sees its staffing conundrum — especially in the realm of national security, where there’s little room for error. It also signals Biden’s anxiousness to replace Trump appointees and fill long-empty positions as soon as possible so he can enact his agenda.

The strategy is an explicit effort to overcome a common hurdle of the early months of a new adminis-tration: The middle tier of political appointees often don’t take up their posts until well into the first year.

“You get into this weird situation where a lot of times you’ll have the top people confirmed and in place basically right away and the non-confirmed people at a whole lower level,” said Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security. Those in between “can take literally months to get through the confirmation process.”

The Biden transition team is also considering asking former gov-ernment officials, such as retired diplomats, to come in and fill key positions on an acting basis until the nominees for those jobs are confirmed by the Senate, accord-ing to a fourth person familiar with the situation. That could prove legally complicated, but it’s not impossible, some foreign service veterans said. (A person involved in the transition noted that retired officials are welcome to throw in their hats for jobs beyond those that require confirmation.)

“For months, the transition focused on identifying critical positions for the immediate and successful execution of the Biden-Harris agenda, analyzing each fed-eral agency from the ground up,” Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for the transition, said in a statement. “We are working with both parties in Congress to confirm qualified, experienced nominees while hiring senior agency leaders to be ready on Day One to overcome the pandemic and the recession while safeguard-ing American national security.”

Two runoff elections in Geor-gia will determine who controls the Senate, though those results won’t be known until on or after Jan. 5. The Biden team appears to be planning ahead as if Republicans will prevail and keep the chamber.

The heightened sense of urgen-cy follows a weekslong period in which the Trump administration refused to recognize Biden’s vic-tory, a process known as “ascer-tainment.” Foreign policy experts had expressed alarm over the delay, warning it could have dangerous consequences.

The Biden team is aiming to re-place “every political appointee of Trump immediately,” with a par-ticular emphasis on national secu-rity positions, said a former U.S. official involved in the transition. “They have people identified all the way down to the [deputy assistant secretary] level.”

Biden has promised to hire a di-

verse group of people, and that com-mitment will extend to the mid- and lower-level ranks, one of the people familiar with the situation said. The person added that Biden and his aides are keenly aware that many career civil servants — who were ac-cused by the Trump administration of being members of a disloyal “deep state” — are eager to be considered for promotions and will be weighing those desires as well.

Even within the transition team, many of the decisions on hiring are treated on a confidential basis, with only a few people involved. A “staffing unit” has been set up to vet candidates, and a person famil-iar with the situation described it as a “black box.” That’s partly by design because of the sensitivities that surround any hiring process. One person familiar with the situ-ation noted, however, that it also eases awkwardness given that so many people volunteering for or otherwise on the transition team are competing against one another for jobs.

Lisa Monaco and Suzy George, both veterans of the Obama ad-ministration’s national security teams, play key roles in overseeing personnel decisions, according to a person involved in the transition. Yohannes Abraham is also heavily involved in personnel in addition

to Gautam Raghavan and Stepha-nie Valencia, according to another person involved in the transition.

Biden has yet to select nominees for director of the CIA and secre-tary of Defense, despite rolling out other senior members of his nation-al security team. The leading can-didate for the Pentagon job, Michèle Flournoy, previously served as an undersecretary for policy there.

In an interview posted earlier this year with the Transition Lab podcast, Flournoy said hiring un-derlings was a top priority when she arrived at the Pentagon in the first months of the Obama administra-tion, and that she was fortunate to get confirmed early because she had the “pick of the litter” in building her team.

“At every free moment — and at night — I was looking at résumés and trying to make decisions,” she said. “The easiest thing was to hire the deputy assistant secretaries and below because they did not require Senate confirmation. … So you have your sort of more junior staff in place first. And then, six months, 12 months [later], as the assistant secretaries start rolling in through the confirmation process, you have to figure out how to make room for them and really leverage their tal-ents as well.”

If Republicans retain the Senate

majority after the Georgia runoff elections, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will play an outsize role in the confirmation process.

GOP leaders already have indi-cated they intend to abide by the tra-ditional protocol with presidential nominees, though certain picks such as Neera Tanden, Biden’s choice to run the Office of Management and Budget whom Republicans consider to be outside the “mainstream,” would face an uphill battle.

“I’m not disqualifying anybody, but I do think that it gets a lot harder obviously if they send folks from their progressive left that are kind of out of the mainstream,” Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said.

“I would hope that they could consult with us so that if they send somebody up here it’s some-body that we can get confirmed,” Thune added.

Some of Biden’s nominees are al-ready getting a positive reception from Republican senators.

For example, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said he has “philosophi-cal” differences with Biden’s pick for Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, but said he has “no problem” with her and could see no reason to op-pose her nomination.

“My attitude is that, absent con-flicts of interest or other — lack of temperament, and uber-partisan-ship — beyond those, that [Biden] should get the people who he wants to serve him,” Cornyn said. “Ob-viously, we’re going to have dif-ferences of opinion on policy, and that’s fine.”

While Cabinet nominees may get relatively speedy hearings, the Senate is likely to take its time with numerous other posts that require confirmation. Much of that simply comes down to logistics, such as being able to schedule hearings.

T he coronav i r us pa ndem ic might add delays to the process. So could the Georgia runoff races if the results are close and take days or weeks to certify, leaving open the question of who controls the Senate.

Lara Seligman contributed to this report.

BY NAHAL TOOSI,TYLER PAGER

AND ANDREW DESIDERIO

Sensing Senate snags move Biden to fill agency jobsHe’s lining up appointees to fill positions thatdon’t require running the confirmation gantlet

ANDREW HARNIK/AP

Filling slots that don’t require Senate confirmation will ensure those hired can obtain security clearances by the time Joe Biden is inaugurated.

ANDREW HARNIK/AP

Joe Biden suggested GOP’s outrageover Neera Tanden’s nominationis insincere and hypocritical.


After he leaves the White House, Donald Trump is expected to do something no president before him has done: cut multimillion-dollar deals with foreign governments and companies for his private business.

Trump’s namesake company plans to resume foreign real estate projects, likely luxury hotels, as it grapples with a tarnished brand in the United States and the need to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, according to three people familiar with the plans, not to mention past public statements from Trump’s children. Company officials have already vowed to look into more developments in India and will be expected to give a second look to projects they had considered in China, Turkey, Co-lombia and Brazil before Trump entered office.

The arrangement is already being criticized as one that could be used to pay back Trump for his policies as president or to influence U.S. policy through a former president — and possibly a future presidential candidate.

Other former presidents have faced allegations they were mon-etizing the presidency with their post-presidency ventures, includ-ing paid speeches abroad, seven-figure book advances and foreign donations to presidential libraries. Most recently, Bill Clinton raised millions of dollars from foreign governments and foreign donors for his family’s global charity.

But Trump’s return to overseas deal-making as a private business-man raises a new set of ethical is-sues no former president has ever confronted. The Trump Organiza-tion, is sprawling and extensive — it comprises more than 500 business-es, including hotels, resorts and golf clubs around the globe. And since it’s not a charity or publicly held, it has fewer financial disclo-sure requirements. To cap it off, few American financial firms are still willing to lend Trump money, meaning he increasingly has had to go abroad to seek financing.

“There are some boundaries that didn’t exist before, and I have no doubt that he will blow past those boundaries and not respect any of them,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a member of the House Oversight Com m ittee, wh ich launched an investigation into whether Trump is violating the Constitution by profiting from foreign governments.

Trump’s decision to maintain his grip on his real estate empire while president — he handed over day-to-day operation to his children but retained ownership — created a vast web of potential conflicts of interest that prompted accusa-tions Trump’s business interests were driving policy decisions and that the arrangement could break the law.

Yet Trump managed to skirt sig-nificant accountability for what critics called an abuse of power. Congress failed to secure Trump’s financial records and then declined

to include financial allegations of wrongdoing in articles of impeach-ment against Trump in 2019.

Now, as he prepares for his post-presidency, Trump, like every mod-ern president, will have to decide how to balance a political past with a desire to make money.

“I don’t think he’d be the first former president to do those things,” said Andy Card, former chief of staff to President George W. Bush. “He’ll be a citizen who was a former president. He’d have stature from the past. He wouldn’t have stature at that time.”

Trump lost his bid for a sec-ond term to Joe Biden but has yet to concede, falsely asserting the election was stolen through voter fraud. Still, he has told allies he is considering running for president again in 2024, which means any foreign deals could lead to poten-tial conflicts of interest for him both as a former president, trav-eling around the globe with a Secret Service entourage, and as a possible future president.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said all former presidents have faced controversy with their post-presidential activities, espe-cially after former President Ronald Reagan traveled to Japan to deliver a $1 million speech. But Trump’s ventures, Brinkley said, go far be-yond that.

“What Trump is doing is trying to make a vast fortune, which has never been tried before, parlay-ing his presidency into massive amounts of money abroad,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.

After winning the presidency in 2016, Trump ignored calls to fully separate from his company. His holdings were placed in a trust from which he can withdraw money at any time, without the public’s knowledge.

When Trump became president, he pledged his company would press pause on any new foreign deals.

But the Trump Organization has continued to promote and profit from existing foreign properties.

T r u mp h a s prop er t ies a nd branding deals in countries around the world — from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates to the Phil-ippines and South Korea to Ire-land and Scotland. He’s building properties in Indonesia and the Do-minican Republic. In some coun-tries, Trump’s company partnered with state-owned companies on the construction. In others, gov-ernments are spending their own money on roads and other infra-structure around Trump-branded properties.

“He’ll do what he does. He’ll license his name, and he will do Trump towers in different cities — Moscow, Seoul, who knows? It’s going to generate more money for him,” said Barbara Res, a longtime executive in Trump’s real estate company who recently released a book about Trump called “Tower of Lies.” “There are two things that make him run — ego and money. Looking at it from the point of the money, he’s going to have people who give him money to build Trump towers.”

Despite Trump’s frequent boasts about his exorbitant wealth, he may

need a financial boon after leaving the White House.

T he Trump Organization is presumed to have lost millions of dollars during the coronavirus outbreak, and Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth dropped $1 billion during the global pandemic.

Meanwhile, Trump has to pay back $421 million in loans that he has personally guaranteed, much of it to foreign creditors, most due in the next four years, according to a New York Times examination of Trump’s personal and business tax returns. The investigation also found Trump attempted to secure a $72 million refund from the IRS in 2010 by claiming $1.4 billion in losses in 2008 and 2009, trigger-ing a yearslong audit that could cost him millions in back taxes.

Trump’s family has made no se-cret about its desire to pursue new overseas business ventures.

The president’s sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, have repeatedly said the company has lost significant amounts of money because of their father’s presidency and vowed they would be back developing proper-ties once their dad leaves office.

Eric Trump told an Argentine news site in January 2019 that they will start looking at foreign business ventures when his father leaves office.

“We will consider the options,” he said. “Every day we have many offers.” In June, he told The Wall Street Journal the company wants to focus on overseas luxury hotels after Trump’s presidency.

In 2018, Donald Trump Jr. spent several days in India promoting the family’s existing developments,

bringing in millions of dollars in new sales.

“After politics, we would cer-tainly look at India and other markets,” Trump Jr. told the In-dian newspaper Mint in 2019. But India, he said, “would be a big focus of mine. Frankly, it would be easier for me to get going in India because of the relationships we have built up in the last decade.”

Despite Trump’s pledge not to engage in foreign deals while he was president, Trump received more than $200 million in income from his interests in foreign coun-tries since 2016, according to an analysis by OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics. And, the group found, Trump held up to $150 million in foreign assets at the end of 2019.

Trump’s finances are also tied up in potential court cases.

The New York Attorney Gener-al’s Office is investigating whether Trump and his company misre-ported assets on financial state-ments used to seek loans, tax breaks and economic benefits. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is looking into whether Trump paid off two women to keep them quiet about extramarital affairs as well as possible tax crimes and bank and insurance fraud, according to court filings.

“The president does not feel bound by actual legal prohibitions much less merely ethical or moral ones,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House Over-sight Committee. “We can expect that he will continue to operate his business in conjunction with for-eign businesses and governments.”

BY ANITA KUMAR

Post-White House, Trump to restart foreign dealsOverseas deal-makingraises ethical issues noformer president has ever confronted

EVAN VUCCI/AP

“What Trump is doing,” historian Douglas Brinkley said, “is trying to make a vast fortune, which has never been tried before, parlaying his presidency into massive amounts of money abroad. I’ve never seen anything like it.” If Donald Trump runs in 2024, he will likely have dizzying conflicts of interest.


the 2024 race, however, deeming it too speculative.

The political calculus is also clear. While he will soon lose the Oval Office, he’ll still have his Twitter handle and will still be in firm control of his base. Repub-licans are loath to get cross with Trump, who could play a central role in Senate and House prima-ries in 2022 and create trouble for incumbents who break with him. Future GOP presidential candidates will also be eager to court his sup-porters if he ultimately passes on another campaign.

Still, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of Trump’s fiercest allies on Capitol Hill, said Trump “should run and would have the support of the party.”

“The president is very popular in the Republican Party, and he would be very tough to beat,” added Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, the incoming chair of the conservative Republi-can Study Committee.

As it slowly sinks in for Trump that he’s being replaced by Joe Biden, the president is starting to publicly toy with a comeback bid four years from now. And Repub-licans show little interest in defy-ing the president who has rapidly transformed their party. Many have refused to recognize Biden as the president-elect, and few have con-demned Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.

The president may freeze the field as long as he weighs another presidential run, despite more than a dozen Republicans posi-tioning themselves as potential candidates in 2024. Trump told Republican National Committee members on Tuesday that if his bid to challenge the 2020 election re-sults ultimately fails: “I’ll see you in four years.”

“I would encourage him to keep that option open. I would person-ally support him if he did,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who ripped Trump while running in the 2016 GOP primary and then became a close ally. “Most Repub-licans believe he’s done a very good job and that his presidency from a conservative’s point of view has been very consequential.”

“If President Trump runs in ’24, I support it. That will be his decision;

he’s come off a tough election,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who added that most congressional Re-publicans would be likely to back Trump.

Republicans also said they have few reservations about putting their faith in a freshly defeated candidate to win back the White House, arguing Trump has defied the odds — and the polls — once before.

“Here you have a gentleman that

won in 2016 and then in 2020, he not only outperforms, but overper-forms by 15 million votes? That’s unheard of,” said conservative Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who noted Trump won a larger share of Black voters than he did in 2016. Trump, of course, also bled support in the suburbs — including in Arizona and Georgia, states Democrats hadn’t won in decades.

Still, not every Republican in Congress felt like chatting about

the matter after five years of Trump’s dominance over the party. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said he doesn’t talk about those kinds of hypotheticals. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a potential presidential candidate, declined to comment. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said she hasn’t “thought at all about 2024,” and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said it was “too specula-tive” a topic.

“I am going to try not to answer

hypotheticals,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). “It’s going to be a crowded field, I assume, unless he clears the field. I don’t know.”

“We’re so far away from that. I will tell you this. If he runs, I think he would clearly be the favorite. I think he would win,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who ran against Trump in 2016 and has mulled another run in the future. “I know it’s an interesting story, but I have no idea.”

While Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) predicted Trump would have many GOP supporters, Hawley guessed that some Republican senators would be dismayed if Trump ran again: “I personally suspect that Republican senators would gnash their teeth and wail and hate it.”

Some Republicans have tired of being asked about Trump’s various tweets and controversies, including this week’s threat to veto a popu-lar defense bill and reports that he may pardon members of his inner circle. But many of the newer GOP senators, particularly those from red states, are openly supportive of Trump’s potential third run for president.

“The country benefited tremen-dously from the first four years of President Trump and it would benefit tremendously by a second four-year term from President Trump,” said Sen. Marsha Black-burn of Tennessee, who said she hopes Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election is successful. “People in Tennessee are very enthusiastic about a sec-ond Trump term.”

If Trump does launch another bid, it could force other Repub-licans who have been waiting in the wings to put their presidential ambitions on hold for yet another four years. The idea of Trump as the GOP nominee for three cycles straight could stymie the ambi-tions of an entire generation of Republicans.

“I’m from Indiana, and I want to see my guy, Mike Pence, in the White House one day,” Banks said. “And hopefully, [in] 2024, we’ll have Mike Pence on the ballot one way or another.”

Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

If he runs again, Trump will be ‘very tough to beat’2024 from page 1

The Centers for Disease Con-trol and Prevention on Wednes-day urged A mericans to post-pone holiday travel after a busy Thanksgiving weekend that likely led to a further surge in corona-virus cases.

“Cases are rising, hospitaliza-tions are increasing and deaths are increasing,” said Henry Walke, the CDC’s Covid-19 incident manager during a press briefing. “We’re ask-ing Americans to help prevent these increases and avoid travel.”

People who do travel should be tested one to three days before and three to five days after their trips, while avoiding public activities for

seven days, the agency said.T he agency relea sed si m i-

lar guidance against travel over Thanksgiving, but officials said travel volume remained high.

“Even if only a small percentage of those travelers were asymptom-atically infected, this can translate into hundreds of thousands of ad-ditional infections moving from one community to another,” said Cindy Friedman, chief of the CDC’s Travelers’ Health Branch.

The Thanksgiving guidance was at odds with messaging from the White House but tracked with state restrictions that are being imple-mented in response to the worsen-ing pandemic.

T he CDC, as previously re-ported, also said it was shorten-ing the recommended quarantine times for people who have been exposed to the virus from 14 days to 10 days if the individual is not exhibiting any symptoms. If some-one has tested negative, the CDC recommends quarantining for seven days, though officials say 14 days is still the best way to reduce transmission.

The U.S. has reported 13.7 mil-lion cases and more than 270,000 deaths so far. CDC officials said they expect an uptick in cases from the Thanksgiving holiday to show up in case counts in the next week or two.

BY BRIANNA EHLEY

CDC recommends postponing holiday travel as Covid surges in the U.S.

NAM Y. HUH/AP

“Cases are rising, hospitalizations are increasing and deaths are increasing,” said Henry Walke, the CDC’s Covid-19 incident manager.

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

Sen. Josh Hawley said he would support a 2024 run by Donald Trump, but that some Republican senators would be dismayed: “I personally suspect that Republican senators would gnash their teeth and wail and hate it.”


more likely it becomes that con-gressional leaders will need extra time to close out an agreement on fiscal 2021 funding. Further ham-pering matters is the last-minute push by top lawmakers to address the surging coronavirus pandemic alongside annual spending.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have been in a standoff for months over coronavirus funding — but there were glimmers of hope late Wednesday that the chances for a deal may be improving.

Pelosi a nd Senate M i nority Leader Chuck Schumer offered a secret proposal to McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin Mc-Carthy on Monday that sources said totaled around $1.3 trillion, but it went nowhere. In an effort to push things forward on Wednesday, the duo publicly urged McConnell to use instead a bipartisan Senate pro-posal released earlier this week as the basis for negotiations.

“While we made a new offer to Leader McConnell and Leader Mc-Carthy on Monday, in the spirit of compromise we believe the biparti-san framework introduced by sena-tors yesterday should be used as the basis for immediate bipartisan, bi-cameral negotiations,” Pelosi and Schumer wrote.

“Of course, we and others will offer improvements, but the need to act is immediate and we believe that with good-faith negotiations we could come to an agreement.”

McConnell’s office did not im-mediately comment on the plan, but his top deputy, Senate Majority Whip John Thune of South Dakota, told reporters the Democratic of-fer was a positive first step toward breaking the long running logjam. Democratic and Republican leaders have been at odds for months over the price tag of the next relief bill, with McConnell pushing a $500 billion proposal and Democrats de-manding something in the ballpark of $2 trillion.

“They had this huge request, which was unreasonable. They’ve gotten reasonable, and I think that could help us get to a solution,” Thune told reporters Wednesday.

Lawmakers, who haven’t ap-proved any substantially new aid since April, are under pressure to deliver relief as coronavirus cases spike across the nation and the economy continues to falter. The bipartisan Senate plan released Tuesday totals $908 billion in funding, including $160 billion in state and local aid and $180 bil-lion in additional unemployment insurance. But McConnell, so far, remains on his own path, with plans to revive and tweak his tar-geted package for a vote.

Thune suggested that congres-sional negotiators could “merge” the McConnell plan with the bi-partisan Senate proposal to reach a deal in the coming days. But with just days before Congress is set to depart for the holidays, any coro-navirus relief deal “is probably gonna ride on the spending bill,” he conceded.

Democrats have dismissed the McConnell proposal as a partisan nonstarter, and even senior Repub-licans such as Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) and Susan Collins of Maine pushed back, describing it as

a messaging bill with little chance of becoming law.

“In light of the Covid crisis that confronts us, I am hopeful that members will come to grips with decision-making — that will be a compelling reason for them to do so and reach compromise,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters Wednesday.

Hoyer talked with McConnell on Monday — with plans to chat again Wednesday — and said the two agree on the need to provide stimulus relief and clinch a deal

this week, despite the long odds of doing so.

“[McConnell] and I both agree that it would be optimal, if in fact we get to an agreement by the end of this weekend, get that agreement put on paper and memorialized so that we can consider it as early as Wednesday or Thursday of next week,” Hoyer said. “I know that sounds very optimistic.”

Congress is known for pulling together major deals in the wan-ing hours before a deadline — and this lame duck session likely won’t be different. But senior lawmakers have already started to discuss the

possibility of staying in session for another week to wrap up spending talks, at the very least.

Senate Appropriations Chair Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) met with McConnell on Wednesday after-noon about government funding, stressing that “we’re close to clos-ing a deal on the omnibus. We’re not there yet, but we’re close.”

“The question is, can we do it before the deadline? Hopefully, but probably not,” he said.

Earlier in the day, Shelby said, “I think it’s where we’re headed at

the moment,” when asked about the need for a brief stopgap spend-ing bill that would buy more time to close out omnibus talks before the holiday.

But appropriators see pandemic aid as an issue for leadership that isn’t slowing down progress on an omnibus, aides said Wednesday. House Appropriations Chair Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Shelby have already agreed on topline funding levels for all 12 bills that will consti-tute an omnibus package — a major step toward clinching a final deal that would boost agency budgets through the end of the fiscal year.

Lawmakers likely need to reach an agreement in the coming days, with text of the omnibus spend-ing package finalized by early next week in order to give the House and Senate enough time to set the pro-cedural gears in motion for passage in both chambers.

Still, snags have popped up in re-cent days. For example, Lowey and Shelby have so far agreed to clas-sify billions of dollars in veterans’ health spending through the VA Mission Act — legislation President Donald Trump has championed —

as emergency spending not subject to overall funding limits.

Appropriators hope to preserve what small increases are allowed in fiscal 2021 nondefense spending and spread that money elsewhere, avoiding cuts to popular programs that would follow if they had to ac-commodate about $12.5 billion in veterans’ health cost increases as nonemergency spending.

Earlier this year, Shelby sug-gested that Trump had signed off on that arrangement, which has tem-porarily ensnared appropriations talks in the past. But now there are questions as to whether the White

House will support emergency spending for veterans’ health.

The White House and the Of-fice of Management and Budget didn’t respond to a request for com-ment on Tuesday. Pelosi spoke to Mnuchin about government fund-ing on Tuesday, saying she “laid out the bipartisan progress that Chairman Shelby and Chairwoman Lowey have made.”

“I relayed my hope that the Ad-ministration would support this bipartisan path,” Pelosi said in a statement after the call, although it’s unclear if the two discussed veterans’ health spending.

A GOP aide close to the talks said Senate appropriators aren’t inter-ested in holding “veterans’ health care hostage” when it comes to an omnibus deal.

A number of other issues remain open, including federal funding for police departments and the usual sticking points like border wall funding and detention beds.

Senate Republicans have pro-posed $2 billion in border wall funding, while House Democrats haven’t offered any more cash. Such issues are usually some of the last to get resolved, and appropriators are still hopeful about finding a middle ground, which might just mean maintaining the status quo.

“I think things are on track,” one House Democratic aide told POLITICO. “Everyone remains op-timistic that this can be finished.”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

Hope reigns as clock ticks down on spending billSPENDING from page 1

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to use a bipartisan Senate deal released earlier this week as the basis for a second coronavirus relief deal. Pelosi and McConnell have been in a standoff for months.

“We’re close to closing a deal on the omnibus. We’re not there yet, but we’re close. The question is, can we do it before the deadline? Hopefully, but probably not.”

— Richard Shelby Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee


Transition Playbook

Tracking the appointments, the

people, and the power centers of

the next administration.

Polit ico.com/Transit ionPlaybook


for social media companies who, the president believes, are biased against him.

“At this last minute, this sudden threat on an item that’s not even part of a defense bill. … I don’t think we could do it in a thoughtful, logical way at all,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told POLITICO.

“It seems to be more out of spite than anything else,” Reed said of the president’s threat, warning that Trump’s posture jeopardizes several important policy moves, in-cluding a pay raise for U.S. troops.

The House is also set to move forward with a compromise defense bill that doesn’t alter Section 230, according to two House Democratic aides.

The president’s Twitter broad-side puts Republicans in a bind as they look to maintain the support of Trump and his base heading into the Georgia runoffs next month that will determine control of the Senate. If GOP lawmakers back Trump, they risk tanking the popular military policy bill that’s become law each year for nearly six decades; if they buck him by ignoring his complaints or over-riding a veto, they risk stoking Trump’s ire.

Still, Republicans on Wednesday showed some signs of exasperation with the president’s latest effort. As one GOP lawmaker put it: “Repub-licans are sick of this sh--.”

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who sits on Armed Services, put it more delicately. While he said he under-stood the president’s frustrations with Section 230, it was not worth imperiling the broader defense bill.

“The NDAA is so important to the men and women that wear the

uniform that this should not be an item to veto the act over,” he said. “So I would hope he would recon-sider his position on it.”

And Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said his “prefer-ence” would be to pass the NDAA and then address Section 230 separately.

Some lawmakers are already working with the White House to try to address the president’s demands. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who chairs the Senate Com-merce Committee, said he submit-ted possible legislative language to the White House on Section 230.

“This was not an idea I had ad-vocated. I’m simply trying to be of assistance to the committee … and to the administration,” Wicker said, adding that he doesn’t believe the president will ultimately veto the NDAA.

The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, retir-ing Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, urged lawmakers to close ranks and pass the bill.

“The purpose of the bill has al-ways been to support our troops and to protect American national security,” Thornberry said in a statement. “Disagreements on all other issues have been put aside. This year should be no different.”

Not all of Trump’s allies on Capi-tol Hill want him to back off from a fight on the defense bill.

“I hope we can do it,” said Sen-ate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “If I were him, I’d use all the leverage I could.”

Some Senate Republicans have been pushing to include changes to the online shield short of repeal in the defense bill. Separately, Gra-ham’s panel was slated to vote on a bill Wednesday to alter Section 230.

Trump’s top economic adviser,

Larry Kudlow, indicated Trump may be open to curbing the law.

“Right now, they’re getting a free ride to be editors and publishers to censor certain conservative mes-sages,” Kudlow said in an interview on Fox Business. “We don’t like that one bit, and the president believes the NDAA is one way to amend that and make it better.

“He’s not dictating the language yet, but he wants an amendment that would essentially curb in one way shape or form the unbridled li-ability protection shield that these firms have,” Kudlow added.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a co-sponsor of the only bipartisan bill targeting Section 230 to advance out of commit-tee this Congress, called the veto threat “deeply dangerous and just plain stupid.”

He added: “Reforming Section 230 deserves its own debate — one that I’ve helped lead in Con-gress, and which I look forward to continuing with a more seri-ous, thoughtful administration in January.”

Blumenthal’s bill, the EARN IT Act, would puncture a hole in the Section 230 immunity by opening up online companies to federal and state civil lawsuits for hosting child porn.

The Section 230 push is the sec-ond time Trump has threatened to nix the defense bill this year. Over the summer, Trump promised to veto any defense legislation that would remove the names of Con-federate leaders from 10 Army bases, even though provisions that would rename bases were included in both House and Senate bills with bipartisan support.

The final defense bill does in-clude a provision that would spur the Pentagon to remove the names

over a three-year period, according to an aide for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who authored the pro-posal. The provision was included in the Senate-passed bill.

Renaming bases has been one of the thornier issues for negotiators, with Democrats digging in against Trump. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) reiterated that the provision is a deal-breaker for Democrats.

“If that language is not included in the defense bill … I would be re-luctant to put that bill on the floor,” Hoyer told reporters.

T he Sen ate f i n a l ly a g re e d Wednesday to name its slate of members to formal talks with the House on a compromise defense bill. Even though negotiations have been ongoing for months between the leaders of the Senate and House Armed Services committees and their staffs, the procedural move is needed to formally bring a final defense bill up for a vote.

The NDAA is expected to be one of the last major pieces of legisla-tion that passes this year, and dur-ing Trump’s presidency. Lawmak-ers are aiming to leave the nation’s capital in the coming days ahead of the holidays, but must still work out a funding deal to stave off a gov-ernment shutdown by the end of next week. Congressional leaders are also eyeing another round of coronavirus economic relief that has been stalled for months.

“Name a time that it’s not this way,” Graham said. “Name a time where we’re done Dec. 1, go home and enjoy Christmas. I mean, it’s always this way.”

Burgess Everett, Sarah Ferris, Heather Caygle, Melanie Zanona and Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.

NDAA from page 1

Congress: No social-media shield in NDAA

Welcome to PI. Reach out: [email protected]. And follow me on Twitter: @caitlinoprysko.

Reading between the (redacted) linesA court ruling unsealed Tuesday disclosed that federal prosecutors are investigating an alleged “bribe-for-pardon” scheme relating to the Trump White House — a probe that included whether lobbying efforts for the pardon violated the Lobbying Disclosure Act because those involved didn’t register under the law, making it only the second known investigation into a breach of lobbying laws in the statute’s 25-year history. Both known LDA probes have come within a matter of months, which some experts see as an indication that the Justice Department is leaning into enforcing advocacy laws.

The August opinion issued by Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, was released in a heavily redacted form Tuesday, and shows “Howell granted prosecutors permission to examine emails involving lawyers and an effort to seek a pardon for someone whose name was deleted from the public version of the opinion,” our Josh Gerstein reports. She expressed doubt in the ruling that there’s enough evidence to prove that those involved violated the LDA, noting the statute has some rather large loopholes.

But the disclosure of any investigation at all is notable and, taken together with charges brought against disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff earlier this summer, could signal that DOJ is “actively now looking into potential LDA violations,” said Josh Rosenstein, a lawyer with Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock who advises clients on lobbying laws. That, along with prosecutions in recent years targeting high-profile figures’ failure to register as foreign agents, “very well may reveal a trend in DOJ’s renewed focus broadly on enforcing laws concerning advocacy.”

“That’s a significant development for the lobbying community, because it shows that 25 years after the LDA was enacted, the Department of Justice is suddenly treating it as worthy of criminal prosecution,” echoed Robert Kelner, an attorney for Covington’s election and political law practice.

Jobs report Sloan Savage has joined the

D.C. office of Avisa Partners as an associate director focused on the Paris-based firm’s international clients. She was previously at Signal Group.

Mercedes LeGrand is now managing director at Raines International, co-leading its aerospace, defense and government services practice, Playbook reports. She most recently headed Russell Reynolds’ aviation, aerospace and defense practice.

— Caitlin Oprysko

POLITICO INFLUENCE

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

“You can’t do it in this bill. That’s not a part of the bill,” Senate Armed Services Chair Jim Inhofe said of the president’s advocacy of attaching a repeal of Section 230, a social media legal shield, to the National Defense Authorization Act. The provision “has nothing to do with the military,” Inhofe said.


Nobody involved in Donald Trump’s reelection thought the president would win the youth vote in 2020. But they didn’t think it would be this bad.

Now the finger-pointing has begun.

When the data came pouring in after Election Day, campaign aides and Trump allies alike were struck by the president’s poor perfor-mance with the 18-to-29-year-old crowd — especially in a cycle with surging youth turnout.

In nearly every Midwestern battleground state that mattered to Trump’s reelection, the president performed worse among young voters than in 2016, according to a POLITICO review of state exit polls. Trump ceded ground in Pennsyl-vania and Wisconsin, two states he lost. He also regressed in Arizona, another critical state that slipped away.

In several of these states, the erosion was considerable. I n Pennsylvania, President-elect Joe Biden won young voters by a 20-point margin, compared with Hillary Clinton’s 9-point advan-tage in 2016. In Wisconsin, Biden won the state’s youngest voters by a 16-point margin, a dramatic rise from Clinton’s razor-thin edge in 2016 — and a significant swing in a state Trump lost by only 20,000 votes. Michigan saw a 4-point shift from 2016 to 2020.

“It’s not that Joe Biden electri-fied young people, it’s that there was a failure to connect with as many young people as we had the potential to,” said a Trump ally who is heavily involved in outreach to conservative youth.

To Trump’s critics, Biden gained ground with young voters because of who his opponent was: a divisive politician with a culture wars play-book that failed to energize audi-ences outside his base. But among the president’s campaign aides and allies, the consensus is far less clear. Interviews with more than a dozen people involved in Trump’s 2020 operation revealed rifts, acri-mony and a system in which no one would take the blame but everyone had a scapegoat — from the presi-dent himself to the campaign to outside groups like Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s conservative campus organizing group.

The fallout has left the GOP with a dearth of insight into what went wrong with millennial and Gen Z voters — particularly in a cycle in which Trump saw gains with oth-er demographics — and no clear strategy to prevent another surge of youth support for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections. And the Republican Party is desperately in need of a strategy to reverse the trend, having struggled for decades to connect with younger voters.

“The Republican Party has no fu-ture if it doesn’t improve its perfor-mance among younger voters,” said Michael Steel, a GOP strategist and former top aide to House Speaker John Boehner.

“I’m not a fan of top-down au-

topsy processes,” Steel added, “but I do hope the end of the Trump presidency is a natural inflection point and a time to reboot to some extent.”

Some Republican operatives involved in the 2020 cycle said the way young voters, who skew heavily Democratic, currently per-ceive the GOP will automatically improve once Trump is no longer in office.

They said the president’s inflam-matory approach to issues like race relations, which became a major cultural flashpoint this summer, likely cost the party the support of young conservatives who may have been on the fence about support-ing Trump and are less ideologically rigid than their older counterparts on such topics.

For instance, a postelection study by the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University showed that 60 percent of Trump voters ages 18 to 29 believe racism is a “somewhat or very serious issue,” compared with 52 percent of Trump voters older than 45. Similar gaps emerged when young Trump voters were asked about the importance of climate change (52 percent said they were “concerned” versus 40 percent of older Trump voters) and their self-proclaimed identity (61 percent identify as conservative versus 74 percent of older Trump voters).

These same party operatives also blamed Trump for failing to tweak his message in the few in-stances when he appeared before younger audiences during the gen-eral election.

At a June campaign event in Phoenix, where the president spoke to several hundred Students for

Trump activists, he talked about 401(k) retirement funds, school choice and stock market gains — is-sues that resonate more with older investors, those planning for retire-ment and parents.

“Your 401(k)s, I don’t think you want to have somebody else play-ing with them because you’re just about at a record high, and you put the wrong person in, they will be obliterated,” Trump said to a group that had probably never dealt with a 401(k).

Others faulted the Trump cam-paign, accusing the president’s top aides of “outsourcing” his youth outreach program to Turning Point Action, the political action arm of the conservative campus group Turning Point USA.

Led by its 26-year-old founder, Charlie Kirk, the group oversaw myriad door-knocking and grass-roots get-out-the-vote efforts this cycle, in addition to working with top White House aides like se-nior adviser Jared Kushner to plan events that put the president and his surrogates in front of young audiences. People involved with Kirk’s operation claimed his “Her-culean” efforts to boost Trump’s reelection were done without input or resources from the Trump cam-paign — much to their chagrin in the months leading up to the Nov. 3 election.

But two Trump campaign aides who have worked closely with Kirk said the campaign had its own youth outreach efforts that went beyond voters who are still in college. These aides described Turning Point’s messaging as too sycophantic to bring in young vot-ers who might align more closely

with conservatism but remain ap-prehensive about Trump himself. Kirk was afforded a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in August and has a close relationship with the president and some of his adult children.

“It’s a mistake to think that groups operating on college cam-puses alone are going to reach young voters outside of college,” said one of the aides.

Another Trump ally described T u r n i ng Poi nt Act ion as i l l-equipped to handle youth outreach for a major party presidential cam-paign “because it’s a relatively new organization without deeper com-munity ties.”

People close to Kirk rejected these claims, suggesting the young activist and his group did what they could to help the president, and accused the Trump campaign and the Republican National Com-mittee of lacking the organizational skills and resources needed to reach broad swaths of young voters in the critical 2020 battlegrounds.

“Instead of trying to scapegoat Turning Point Action, a completely outside, separate and independent entity that’s still fighting for elec-tion integrity, maybe that’s what the campaign should be doing,” said a person close to Kirk.

“He gave the president a platform when it was exceedingly hard and nobody could get it done on the campaign,” said a second person close to Kirk.

Part of the issue for both cam-paigns this cycle was the inabil-ity to reach college-age students on ca mpuses, where they a re most likely to register to vote and

hear from candidates and their surrogates.

Because of campus closures re-lated to the Covid-19 pandemic, voter registration drives and ini-tiatives like the RNC’s “Make Cam-pus Great Again” were stunted. Meanwhile, crowd-size and travel restrictions in many swing states made it difficult for the Trump campaign to get the candidate in front of millennial audiences out-side of his signature rallies.

“Republicans are fighting from a deficit when it comes to young vot-ers, so when you lose the ability to do a lot of things that drive turn-out with those age groups, it’s even more challenging,” said a senior adviser to the Trump campaign.

RNC spokesperson Mike Reed said the party’s student and young professional volunteers still man-aged to knock on over 4.1 million doors in key battleground states during the final few months of the 2020 cycle, in addition to mak-ing nearly 7 million calls to voter households. However, these figures did not apply to millennial-specific outreach.

In the end, Trump saw a decline in his youth support from four years ago in Arizona, Florida, Wiscon-sin, Pennsylvania and several other states. Only Georgia and Michigan saw a slight increase in Trump vot-ers under the age of 29 — from 33 percent in 2016 to 39 percent this cycle in Georgia, and 34 percent to 35 percent in Michigan, according to exit poll data. But the gains were not enough to put either state in the president’s column.

“We lost ground in a year where we should have gained ground,” the Trump ally said, matter of factly.

BY GABBY ORR

Blame game erupts over Trump’s declining youth voteScapegoats abound, from the president to the campaign toTurning Point USA

SAUL MARTINEZ/GETTY IMAGES

After Election Day, campaign aides and allies of Donald Trump were struck by the president’s poor performance among 18-to-29-year-olds. In nearly every Midwestern battleground state that mattered to Trump’s reelection, the president performed worse among young voters than in 2016.


President-elect Joe Biden’s plan to crack down on the energy in-dustry’s greenhouse gas pollution could offer a boon for U.S. natural gas producers who want to keep ex-porting to an increasingly climate-minded Europe.

U.S. gas shipments to Europe have soared since 2016, driven by the American fracking boom and efforts to help the Continent lessen its reliance on Russia. But pressure on European countries to reduce their impact on the climate is threatening to close off oppor-tunities for the U.S. because of the heavy amounts of planet-warming methane released when the gas is produced.

Now, Biden’s promise to reduce those methane emissions could make U.S. gas shipments more palatable to Europe.

Such an outcome would con-tradict one of President Donald Trump’s closing campaign themes: that electing the former vice presi-dent would spell doom for U.S. fossil fuel producers. But it could rankle progressive climate activ-ists who are pushing for Biden to end fracking and stop all U.S. fossil fuel exports.

The Trump administration rolled back Obama-era methane regula-tions for new oil and gas wells in August, and last month, a federal judge in Wyoming struck down a 2016 rule designed to rein in meth-ane emissions from oil and gas production on public lands. While natural gas emits half as much car-bon dioxide as coal when burned, methane also leaks from wells and the equipment used to transport it, offsetting the fuel’s climate advan-tages over coal.

European Union countries took delivery of 36 percent of overall U.S. liquefied natural gas cargoes in 2019, but buyers there are taking a closer look at how the industry ad-dresses those leaks. France and Ire-land have both taken recent steps to limit imports of U.S. natural gas.

European governments are sour-ing on the business-as-usual ap-proach of many gas producers in West Texas and New Mexico, said Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Colum-bia University and a former climate adviser in the Obama White House.

“There’s growing pressure in the European Union that if they’re go-ing to go with gas, they have to hold it to a higher standard and not go with the lowest common denomi-nator,” Bordoff said.

Biden has pledged to take action as soon as he takes office to combat climate change, including setting aggressive methane pollution limits for new and existing oil and gas op-erations. He’s likely to rely initially on executive actions to send clear signals to governments around the globe that the U.S. is serious about tackling methane emissions even if Congress takes longer to move, Bordoff and other energy experts said.

Biden could sign an executive or-der instructing the Environmental

Protection Agency to reinstate the emissions standards the Trump administration removed for new sources of pollution and apply them to existing ones. Biden’s Justice Department is also likely to stop defending the lawsuits that envi-ronmental groups brought against the Trump administration’s meth-ane rules.

Some Eastern European coun-tries such as Poland continue to welcome imports of U.S. gas as a way to displace coal. And sales to Asia continue, although countries there are also becoming more sen-sitive to methane emissions.

But a wider European pushback against U.S. natural gas is real, multiple people at the gas compa-nies have said. To the energy indus-try people, the best way for Biden to tackle the problem is to negoti-ate a shared standard for countries to measure the carbon content of natural gas, while making methane regulations a top policy priority at home.

“There’s a real sensitivity in the EU about fracked gas,” said one U.S. industry executive who asked for anonymity to discuss business discussions. The incoming admin-istration “would be well advised to prioritize that. If [customers] can’t use U.S. gas, then they’re using Russian gas and Mideast gas.”

That wariness around buying U.S. natural gas is relatively new. After the Obama administration started approving export permits in 2015, countries across Europe generally welcomed the U.S. ship-ments as an alternative to their tra-ditional suppliers in Russia or the Middle East.

But the controversy surround-ing Texas oil companies’ practice of venting — simply releasing un-wanted methane into the air — or burning it off through flaring has become a major issue for some Eu-

ropean countries intent on fighting climate change. Texas companies have flared 1 trillion cubic feet of methane into the atmosphere since 2013, according to an estimate by the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental group that has worked with oil companies to try to reduce emissions. A recent report from the group showed EPA was probably undercounting methane emissions by 60 percent.

Engie SA, a major French trading house, walked away from a proposed $7 billion, 20-year deal to import natural gas from NextDecade, a Texas liquefied natural gas compa-ny. A copy of Engie’s analysis of the proposed deal, obtained by French environmental group Les Amis de la Terre and shared with POLITICO, shows that the company feared financial repercussions if it con-tracted to buy the Texas shale gas that NextDecade had been offering.

The analysis warned that En-gie, which is partly owned by the French government, could see its reputation suffer among the Eu-ropean public and investors con-cerned with environmental, social and governance issues.

“Gas flaring has become a major source of negative attention for gas production globally and for Perm-ian oil producers in particular,” En-gie wrote in the document.

“As the Project will result in a long-term commitment to secure LNG supply associated to shale ex-ploitation, and to import all or part of it into Europe, they may question the compatibility with ENGIE’S Raison d’Etre, causing reputational damage, which should be factored in the final decision,” the analysis continued. “We cannot exclude that two topics might impact our ESG rating: negative environmental impact and controversies (if any) linked to the project.”

An Engie spokesperson con-

firmed the document’s authenticity.In Ireland, the coalition govern-

ment recently came out against im-porting natural gas from the United States. A joint policy statement re-leased by the country’s three largest political parties in June withdrew support for a planned expansion of the Shannon LNG import terminal that was backed by U.S. company New Fortress Energy.

“As Ireland moves towards car-bon neutrality, we do not believe that it makes sense to develop LNG gas import terminals importing fracked gas, accordingly we shall withdraw the Shannon LNG ter-minal from the EU Projects of Common Interest list in 2021,” the coalition government wrote in its Programme for Government.

Germany is also showing signs of reconsidering increased gas imports from the U.S., amid an-ger over the Trump administra-tion’s pressure for the country to halt the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia. German trading firm Uniper earlier this month backed away from plans to build a new gas import terminal, blaming lack of interest from potential buyers.

But while the Biden administra-tion could use executive actions to crack down on methane pollution on federal land, reducing emissions from the private land in West Texas where most production occurs will be more difficult.

The three members of the Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulates the oil and gas industry there, include Wayne Christian, who has questioned the scientific consensus that human activity causes climate change. I ncom i ng Com m issioner Ji m Wright has said methane doesn’t contribute to climate change, even though scientists have long known that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide

despite staying in the atmosphere for a shorter period.

Christian said the commis-sion “takes flaring seriously” and has already taken steps to reduce emissions with new regulations it is adopting. Moves by investors to back away from buying U.S. natural gas would not help reduce flaring, Christian added in a statement to POLITICO.

“As a financial adviser and en-ergy regulator, I am extraordinarily concerned by the [environmental, social and governance] movement,” Christian said. “Investing capital should be about creating the great-est possible profit to the investor or pension fund, not about virtue signaling.”

But the commissions’ actions aren’t going to convince buyers worried about Texas gas pollution problems, said Luke Metzger, ex-ecutive director of Environment Texas.

“I can’t imagine the election of an outspoken climate denier, join-ing fellow climate denier Wayne Christian, is going to at all allevi-ate concerns of investors and Euro-pean countries demanding a more responsible product,” Metzger said. “All of this just reinforces in the world’s mind that Texas can’t be trusted to produce fracked gas in a way that’s any less polluting than coal.”

Some of the European stances may just be warning shots to get Americans to take methane emis-sions more seriously, Leslie Palti-Guzman, head of the consulting firm Gas Vista, wrote in an email. But the Europeans won’t be con-vinced unless the Biden adminis-tration tackles the issue early, she added.

“I believe there is a negotiable pathway to avoid a trans-Atlantic green gas war,” Palti-Guzman wrote.

BY BEN LEFEBVRE

How Biden could save U.S. gas exports to EuropeCleaning up pollutionat home could helpthe industry avoid atrans-Atlantic gas war

AP FILE PHOTO 2014

European Union countries took delivery of 36 percent of overall U.S. liquefied natural gas cargoes in 2019, but buyers there are taking a closer look at how the industry addresses leaks of dangerous methane. France and Ireland have both taken recent steps to limit imports of U.S. natural gas.


As U.S. policymakers grapple with China’s dominance in pro-ducing the materials needed for so-called clean energy and other cutting-edge technology, the case of cobalt serves as a warning.

China’s state-directed indus-trial policy has outmaneuvered America’s laissez-faire approach to securing access around the world to a metal that’s taking on grow-ing economic and strategic im-portance. Its success is sparking a debate over whether Washington needs to intervene to encourage more mining at home.

Used for millennia to make rich blue pigment for ceramics, cobalt now plays an important role in lithium-ion batteries — conducting heat to prevent them from catch-ing fire in smartphones and electric vehicles. Cobalt’s other commer-cial, industrial and military appli-cations, from jet engines to mag-nets, spurred the U.S. government in 2018 to deem it a commodity of “strategic and critical” importance to U.S. security.

But today’s global cobalt supply chains are dominated by China — the result of two decades of Bei-jing’s relentless efforts to dominate what it assesses as likely to be key industries of the future, according to interviews for a new episode of POLITICO’s Global Translations podcast.

“This is a strategic thinking on their part — that ‘these are materi-als that are strategic for our needs and we’re going to make sure that we have access to them,’” Nedal Nassar, chief of the Materials Flow Analysis Section at the National Minerals Information Center at the U.S. Geological Survey, told the podcast.

In a USGS review of 50 com-modities, Nassar identified cobalt as one of the of materials at highest risk of supply disruptions. Most of the world’s cobalt is produced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nedal estimates that between 40 percent and 50 percent of the DRC’s cobalt production is owned by Chi-nese companies. “A lot of it leaves the DRC and gets shipped to China for further processing,” said Nas-sar, adding that about two-thirds of the world’s cobalt refining takes place in China.

China’s drive to secure its own access to cobalt has been driven by an approach that put long-term goals over short-term profits. For the past two decades, China has invested heavily in cobalt mining operations in Africa. Beginning in 2000, Beijing encouraged overseas foreign investment in developing countries, especially in natural re-sources such as minerals. Beijing’s “Belt and Road” initiative in 2013 then started pumping an estimated trillion dollars into building trade

corridors between China and Africa and Europe. As part of a $6 billion deal in 2007 dubbed “minerals for infrastructure,” China secured mining rights in a major cobalt mine in the DRC in exchange for building projects such as roads, highways and hospitals.

Analysts contrast China’s gov-ernment-led approach to securing direct control over the supply chain with America’s reliance on outside producers in the marketplace, ac-cepting greater risk of disruption or shortages in exchange for lower short-term costs.

“The Chinese deserve a great deal of credit for being farsighted,” Sharon Burke, a former Pentagon official now leading the resource security group at the New America think tank, told a recent episode of the podcast. “They wanted to have a vertical production. They wanted to own the raw resource, but also be fabricating the batter-ies and all of that. And so they had a very strategic approach to this, whereas ours was dominated by a private sector that was operating on different principles.”

Demand for cobalt is expected to grow as the world moves to a greater reliance on renewable en-ergy and electric vehicles.

“The constraining factor on electric vehicle adoption is ulti-mately going to be raw materi-als,” said Bryce Crocker, CEO of Jervois Mining, an Australian mining firm. “There’s simply not enough raw materials for all the vehicle-makers to roll out their

development plans over the next 10 to 15 years based on the avail-ability of cobalt, given the supply constraints we see today.”

Crocker is developing the only mine in the United States set up to primarily produce cobalt, in Idaho’s Lemhi County. The mine is permitted and under construc-tion, projected to open in mid-2022.

“Those of us in the industry have been talking to regulators and politicians for a long time, but the level of traction now, it’s different. I mean, Washington is genuinely paying attention,” Bryce said.

Last year, in response to an exec-utive order from President Donald Trump, the USGS published Amer-ica’s first formal critical minerals strategy. The policy called for faster permitting of mining on federal lands and launched a new mapping initiative to locate deposits of cer-tain minerals and metals, including cobalt, in the U.S.

“The Trump administration is dedicated to ensuring that we are never held hostage to foreign powers for the natural resources critical to our national security and economic growth,” said Inte-rior Secretary David Bernhardt in announcing the strategy.

Domestic mining is not the only way to secure supply chains, how-ever. Other policy approaches in-clude mining collaboration with mineral-rich allies such as Aus-tralia and Canada, and recycling of scarce materials. The scientific race is on to eventually develop bat-

teries that use less cobalt or, one day, none at all.

The Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance works with governments, mining companies and environmentally conscious organizations to create guidelines for mining to be environmentally and socially sustainable, as well as profitable.

“We know that this extraction leaves harm behind that lasts not just decades, but often hundreds of years,” Aimee Boulanger, executive director of the initiative, told the podcast. She cited mining waste and water pollution as problems that the increased hunting for raw materials like cobalt are likely worsen.

“We should make things that are more efficient and use our materials more efficiently. We should do more recycling — retrieving our materi-als and putting them back to use so we don’t have to do new mining,” Boulanger said.

But with demand for batteries set to soar, recycling alone won’t be enough, many experts say. Crocker, the mining executive, argues that ready access to cobalt and other minerals will shape the global competitive landscape in coming decades.

“China is not processing that re-fined cobalt to export to the Unit-ed States to support your electric vehicle revolution,” Crocker said. “They’re going to make cheap cars themselves and the best you can hope for is that they’ll export cheap cars to you.”

BY LUIZA CH. SAVAGE

The U.S. got outmaneuvered in a critical mining raceChina’s decadeslong strategy to secure vitalmaterials has forced the U.S. to play catch-up

AP FILE PHOTO 2007

Today’s supply chains for cobalt, which is used in smartphones and electric vehicles, are dominated by China. “The Chinese deserve a great deal of credit for being farsighted,” said Sharon Burke of the New America think tank, referring to China’s decadeslong relationships with countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (above), where it has built mines.

ALTITUDE

JOHN F. HARRIS


R ahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed are two longtime friends who both had

high-level experience in the Clinton and Obama White House and now share another bond: Prominent voices on the left are urging President-elect Joe Biden not to bring them on for yet another tour of government service.

As it happens, Emanuel and Reed in 2005 also co-authored a book, “The Plan: Big Ideas for America,” in which these two Democratic moderates offered their prescriptions for the Democratic Party and the country in the generation ahead.

There must be a copy on the shelf around here somewhere. Surely it will be entertaining to read the cringeworthy things these centrists advocated 15 years ago, back when their timid, Clintonesque brand of politics was still in vogue. Probably there will be chapters urging Democrats to take it easy on Wall Street and tone down their class-warfare rhetoric. Perhaps sermons on bipartisanship and some tough-on-crime ideas to reassure anxious suburbanites.

Actually, turns out none of that is in “The Plan.” What is there are proposals — well before the idea of Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders running for president was widely contemplated — for robust expansion of government to allow universal access to free college; universal health care for children; increases in the minimum wage and on taxes paid by the wealthy and corporations; and investments in clean energy with the aim of cutting national gasoline consumption in half by 2015.

Now the people who advocated these ideas are viewed as apostates by the Democratic left.

As a journalist, count me in for a good old-fashioned ideological bloodletting. Intraparty conflict on matters of genuine principle is an important story; in the fashion of a forest fire, it can sometimes be an agent of party renewal.

In the case of the scowling warnings about who does and does not have the left’s seal of approval for duty in the incoming Biden administration, however, the conflict rests heavily on optical illusion.

These are matters of personal preference — and, in some cases, genuine differences over political strategy — masquerading as vital ideological questions. It’s possible many people making the arguments for and against potential Biden appointees don’t know how flimsy the factual predicates for their strong opinions really are.

Among the most absurd examples was the swirl of speculation over who would be Biden’s chief of staff. Many on the left were worried Biden would pick Steve Ricchetti; they were

pleased that he went, instead, with Ron Klain.

It was news to many who know both men that either man has an ideological profile different from the moderate progressivism embraced by most Democratic professional operatives, much less that there are important distinctions between them. Some activists don’t like how Ricchetti represented corporate interests in his public affairs work when he wasn’t in government. Apparently working in venture capital with billionaire Steve Case, as Klain did when not in government, is better background for the kind of populist disruption the left is seeking. One Democrat who worked with both men in the Clinton and Obama White Houses joked that Klain’s success in positioning himself to the left of Ricchetti (who will serve in the West Wing as counselor) may be the best evidence that he has the necessary political cunning to be an effective chief of staff.

The differences are scarcely more real in other battles that have drawn notice in the Democrats’ intramural struggles. The Washington Post said some on the left were troubled that Biden chose Antony Blinken as secretary of State over Susan Rice. While it is deplorable how Republicans have demonized Rice, an African American woman, there are scant differences on a center-left spectrum between the two; both are foreign policy establishment

stalwarts.Meanwhile, Biden’s choice

as budget director, Neera Tanden, is drawing the kind of fire Rice would have taken from Republicans — quite the coincidence that she also is an outspoken women of color. But Tanden is also drawing grumbles from some on the left, even though she is president of the Center for American Progress, one of the leading generators of progressive policy ideas. That’s because she was vocal in arguing that Bernie Sanders would be a poor choice as nominee on electability grounds.

That argument, carried over from the 2020 Democratic nominating contest — which was itself an echo of a generation-long intraparty debate — is actually the real crux of the matter.

There is no serious argument that Tanden, like Emanuel and Reed, is not a committed lifelong progressive. But it is true that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has publicly urged that Emanuel and Reed be kept out of the administration, is not laboring under a big misunderstanding about her targets. She knows why she doesn’t like them.

The most important debate in the Democratic Party right now isn’t between centrists and the left on fundamental policy aims but on how to present those aims to the public and then achieve them. Both the centrists who want a robust expansion of government and those on the left who want to

go even further have the same problem: insufficient legislative power to do more than modestly advance the goals of either wing. One side, that of AOC and her allies on the left, believes the answer to this problem is a more creative politics of mobilization — putting forth a bolder agenda and defiantly drawing lines in a way that excites people who should naturally vote Democratic but often don’t vote at all because the stakes have not been framed sharply enough. The other side believes the answer is a more creative politics of persuasion — simultaneously engaging and reassuring voters who are skeptical of undiluted progressivism but can be coaxed into backing Democrats through more pragmatic appeals.

Here is where, as often seems to happen in Democratic intraparty battles, the road leads back to Rahm Emanuel. For more than a quarter-century, as White House senior adviser under Clinton, as a member of Congress from 2003 to 2009, as Obama’s chief of staff in the first term, and in two terms as the mayor of Chicago, he has stood consistently—and loudly—for the politics of persuasion. Now he is hoping to be picked by Biden as secretary of Transportation. Unlike the mild-mannered and cerebral Reed — who served as domestic policy chief under Clinton and was a chief of staff to Vice President Biden — Emanuel has relished picking fights with the left. (Reed once joked that he taught Emanuel how to do policy,

and Emanuel taught him how to be an a--hole.) Emanuel believes he is right that progressive politics rests on political support that is acutely perishable, and that those on the left are wrong in underestimating the danger of overreach, or for reaching the wrong goal altogether.

As Obama’s chief of staff, Emanuel lost two big internal debates. One was his argument for a more incremental approach to health care reform. That sounds like something you’d expect from a centrist. Obama said he wasn’t elected to pursue incrementalism. The other argument was for a more vigorous and punitive campaign denouncing Wall Street malfeasance after the 2008 financial crash. That doesn’t necessarily sound like what a centrist would say. Obama sided with financial advisers who urged that scoring political points against bankers might shake confidence and slow economic recovery. Whatever the substantive merits of Emanuel’s positions, it is clear he was right in warning that Democrats were flying into a storm in 2010—the midterm elections in which control of the House flipped to Republicans, limiting Obama’s options for the balance of his term.

If the Democratic left doesn’t want a president who would be tempted to appoint the likes of Ricchetti, Emanuel or Reed, the best option would have been to win the nomination and general election for someone like Sanders or Elizabeth Warren — who wouldn’t want that crowd working for them and for whom that crowd wouldn’t want to work. Sanders and Warren backers tried that in 2020 and didn’t succeed.

This reality of power makes the left’s hectoring of Biden about who is worthy to serve in a Biden administration these activists never wanted in the first place such a foolish exercise.

The alternative to stupid second-guessing isn’t simply to shut up. It is smart second-guessing. AOC and others on the left are surely right that an administration headed by a president who came to Washington in the 1970s, and who is surrounded by advisers who began their government service in the 1980s and 1990s, isn’t necessarily going to be fully attuned to the challenges of the 2020s. They will benefit from being pushed.

But the left should push Biden on policy ideas—and help give him the broad political support needed to implement those polices. There is little benefit to trying to exert influence with likely unsuccessful bids to pick off potential appointees on the basis of spurious ideological arguments about who really counts as a progressive.

Altitude is a column by POLITICO founding editor John Harris, offering perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption.

Why the left’s second-guessing of Biden is stupid

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

Progressive Democrats’ efforts to pressure President-elect Joe Biden on personnel choices are actually matters of personal preference masquerading as vital ideological questions, John Harris writes.


DAVE GRANLUND POLITICALCARTOONS.COMRJ MATSON CQ ROLLCALL

MATT WUERKER

CARTOON CAROUSEL



Paid Advertisement

Paid for by Facebook - about.fb.com

Facebook supports updated internet regulationsWe continue to take critical steps to better secure and improve our platforms, including more than tripling our security and safety teams to 35,000 people, building tools like Privacy Checkup to help people manage their privacy, and working with tech peers to make it easier for people to move their data securely between services.

What’s next? We support updated regulations that will address today’s challenges, set clear rules and hold companies, including Facebook, accountable for:

• Combating foreign election interference

• Protecting people’s privacy and data

• Enabling safe and easy data portability between platforms

Read more at: about.fb.com/regulations

Documents

Politico - 03 09 2020