The Full Belmonte, 12/29/2022
Flying From China to U.S. Will Require Negative Covid Test
Federal health officials said the move reflects the coronavirus’s rapid spread in China
A departure lobby of Beijing Capital International Airport.PHOTO: KYODONEWS/ZUMA PRESS
“The U.S. will require travelers from China to submit a negative Covid-19 test beginning Jan. 5, federal officials said.
The U.S. is concerned about the rapid spread of the virus that causes Covid-19 in China, which increases the potential for new variants, health officials said Wednesday. The officials said that China has provided limited surveillance data regarding the surge and that officials have declined U.S. offers to provide additional vaccines. Countries including Japan and Malaysia have also recently imposed restrictions on travelers from China.
Starting at midnight on Jan. 5, travelers 2 years old and older flying to the U.S. from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau will be required to get tested for Covid-19 no more than two days before departure, officials said. Passengers must present negative test results from either a PCR or rapid antigen test monitored by a healthcare provider, officials said. Travelers from China who are transiting through the U.S. must also present a negative test before arrival, officials said.
Officials in China have removed most of the strict preventive protocols they maintained throughout the pandemic….” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“The US will require airline passengers coming from China to show negative Covid-19 tests as health experts fear the virus’s unchecked spread across that country could imperil the world. Since Xi Jinping abruptly droppedhis restrictive “Covid-zero” policies amid protests and economic worries, tens of millions of Chinese have been infected daily while scientists predict millions may die. The Biden administration has been especially concernedabout a lack of transparency coming from China, where Covid-19 first appeared three years ago. The high number of people affected over a very short period of time raises the chances of a new variant emerging, one that could possibly circumvent defenses in nations that have already suffered multiple infection waves and millions of deaths. The US said it will also expand its viral genomic surveillance program of travelers to keep watch for new versions of the pathogen. The new testing requirement will apply to all passengers regardless of nationality or vaccination status and will go into effect Jan. 5. But the fallout from Beijing’s decision to suddenly lift precautions is already spreading: In Milan, Italian authorities said 50% of people arriving from China tested positive.” —David E. Rovella Bloomberg
Buffalo Still Clearing Snow as Winter Storm’s Death Toll Rises to 37
Storm left more than 4 feet of snowfall on the city, officials say
“The city of Buffalo, N.Y., was still digging out from the massive snowfall Wednesday, five days after one of deadliest winter storms in decades swept through the area.
The number of deaths in the Buffalo area rose to 37, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarzsaid in a tweet.
Nearly half the victims, 17 of them, were found dead outside, Mr. Poloncarz said. Nine died due to a lack of heat in their home, four died from cardiac events while shoveling snow, four died in a vehicle and three died from delays in emergency services.
The death toll surpassed that of the Buffalo blizzard of 1977, when 29 died, according to the National Weather Service.
Some locals have questioned how so many people could die in a place so used to snow, wind and cold. ‘We never thought that it was going to be as bad as it was,’ Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said Tuesday.
The storm left more than 4 feet of snow on the city, burying abandoned cars that had to be moved with special equipment. Snow was packed so tight it had to be scooped up with plow trucks, put in dump trucks and moved elsewhere.
An abandoned car was towed to a parking lot after the storm in Buffalo. PHOTO: LINDSAY DEDARIO/REUTERS
Sheriff Garcia said planning was done in the past year, and people stranded in cars were rescued. But zero visibility and heavy snow made it hard for first responders to get to calls.
‘We have to get better. We need better equipment,’ he said Wednesday, adding that an after-incident report will be made.
The brutal winter weather was part of a powerful storm that hit the U.S. last week and through the holiday weekend, bringing power outages, canceled flights and dangerous driving conditions to much of the country. More than 50 people throughout the U.S. have died because of storm conditions….” Read more at Wall Street Journal
The National Guard checked on residents in Buffalo. PHOTO: JEFFREY T. BARNES/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Delaware Man Is Sentenced in Plot to Kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
Barry Croft, alleged spiritual leader in 2020 scheme, is sentenced to 235 months in prison
Prosecutors said Barry Croft worked to perfect an improvised explosive device in training exercises held by the group plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. PHOTO: KENT COUNTY JAIL/ZUMA PRESS
“Another of the men convicted in a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was sentenced Wednesday to 235 months, or nearly 20 years in prison.
Barry Croft, 47 years old, of Bear, Del., was described by federal prosecutors as the ideas man in the foiled 2020 plan to kidnap Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat. The scheme was stopped by the Federal Bureau of Investigation before the men could harm the governor. The group of plotters was saturated with informants, and defense attorneys claimed the men were encouraged and entrapped.
Mr. Croft’s attorney didn’t respond to a request for comment on the sentencing.
The man described as the ringleader of the scheme, Adam Fox, was sentenced Tuesday to 16 years in prison.
Prosecutors described Mr. Croft as the scheme’s spiritual leader, a man who infused religion into the plot and gave co-conspirators a sort of dispensation to kill people if necessary. Prosecutors compared his role to a sheik’s role in al Qaeda.
‘This whole thing was Mr. Croft’s idea,’ Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler said in court Wednesday in Grand Rapids, Mich. ‘What he wanted was a second Civil War or a revolution.’
According to the prosecution, Messrs. Croft and Fox were central to a scheme to kidnap Ms. Whitmer at her vacation home and use a bomb to blow up a bridge near the residence. On two occasions, they reconnoitered the house and stockpiled weapons and gear needed to carry out the plan.
At an early training exercise the men held as part of the scheme, Mr. Croft made an improvised explosive device but it was poorly constructed and the men couldn’t detonate it, according to court documents. At a later event, he had a successful detonation that he tested against human-shaped targets.
In a photo obtained by prosecutors, Mr. Croft wears a tricorn hat and carries a Boogaloo flag, a symbol of desire for civil war. He has tattoos with extremist slogans and symbols.
Judge Robert Jonker said in court Wednesday that the scheme had little chance of being carried out but only because law enforcement acted early to infiltrate the group and stop the men before they could take action.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
George Santos Faces Federal and Local Investigations, and Public Dismay
Prosecutors said on Wednesday that they would examine Mr. Santos, who has admitted lying about his work and educational history during his campaign.
By Michael Gold, Ed Shanahan, Brittany Kriegstein and Rebecca Davis O’Brien
“Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether Representative-elect George Santos committed any crimes involving his finances and lies about his background on the campaign trail.
The federal investigation, which is being run by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, is focused at least in part on his financial dealings, according to a person familiar with the matter. The investigation was said to be in its early stages.
In a separate inquiry, the Nassau County, N.Y., district attorney’s office said it was looking into the ‘numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos’ during his successful 2022 campaign to represent parts of Long Island and Queens.
It was unclear how far the Nassau County inquiry had progressed, but the district attorney, Anne Donnelly, said in a statement that Mr. Santos’s fabrications ‘are nothing short of stunning.’
She added: ‘No one is above the law, and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.’
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on Wednesday. The office’s interest in Mr. Santos was reported earlier by ABC News, and the Nassau County inquiry was first reported by Newsday.
Both investigations followed reporting in The New York Times that uncovered that Mr. Santos had made false claims about his educational and professional background, including whether he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. The Times also found that Mr. Santos had omitted key details about his business on required financial disclosures.
Questions remain about how Mr. Santos has generated enough personal wealth to be able, as campaign finance filings show, to lend his campaign $700,000. Mr. Santos has said his money comes from his company, the Devolder Organization, but he has provided little information about its operations.
The statement by Ms. Donnelly, a Republican like Mr. Santos, added to the growing pressure on Mr. Santos, who was elected in November to represent northern Nassau County and northeast Queens in Congress beginning in January.
In interviews with several other media outlets on Monday, Mr. Santos confirmed some of the inaccuracies identified by The Times. He admitted that he had lied about graduating from Baruch College — he said he does not have a college degree — and that he had made misleading claims about working for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
Mr. Santos also acknowledged not having earned substantial income as a landlord, something he claimed as a credential during the campaign. In making his admissions, he has sought to explain his dishonesty as little more than routine résumé padding.
But among more than two dozen Long Island residents interviewed on Wednesday, many, including some who said they had supported Mr. Santos, expressed disappointment at his actions and anger over his explanations….
House Republican leaders have so far been silent amid the persistent questions about Mr. Santos, but he has gotten a tougher reception close to home. Ms. Donnelly is just one of several Long Island Republicans to show a willingness to examine him closely over his statements during the campaign and on his financial disclosure forms.
On Tuesday, Representative-elect Nick LaLota, a Republican who won election in a neighboring Long Island district, said the House Ethics Committee should investigate Mr. Santos. Nassau County’s Republican Party chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., said he ‘expected more than just a blanket apology’ from Mr. Santos.
Another incoming member of New York’s Republican House delegation, Mike Lawler of Rockland County, sounded a similar refrain.
‘Attempts to blame others or minimize his actions are only making things worse and a complete distraction from the task at hand,’ Mr. Lawler said in a message posted on Twitter. He added that Mr. Santos should ‘cooperate fully’ with any investigations.
Mr. Santos and his representatives have not responded to The Times’s repeated requests for comment, including to detailed questions raised by the newspaper’s reporting and to an email seeking a response to Ms. Donnelly’s statement.
In an interview broadcast on Fox News Tuesday night, Mr. Santos again asserted that he had merely ‘embellished’ his résumé. The interviewer, Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress who left the party in October, challenged him bluntly.
‘These are blatant lies,’ Ms. Gabbard said. ‘And it calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you’re standing on the floor of the House of Representatives.’
On Wednesday, one more possible misrepresentation emerged. During his first campaign, Mr. Santos said on his website and on the campaign trail that he attended the Horace Mann School, an elite private school in Riverdale in the Bronx, but that his family’s financial difficulties caused him to drop out and get a high school equivalency diploma.
But a spokesman told The Washington Post that it could not locate records of Mr. Santos’s attendance, using several variations of his name. The spokesman, Ed Adler, confirmed that report to The Times. Mr. Santos’s press team did not respond to a request for comment.
On Wednesday, the news site Semafor published an interview with Mr. Santos in which he said his work with his company, the Devolder Organization, involved ‘deal building’ and ‘specialty consulting’ for a network of 15,000 wealthy people, family offices, endowments and institutions.
As an example, he said, he might help one client sell a plane or a boat to someone else, and that he would receive fees or commissions. But he provided no details on his contracts or clients to Semafor and has not answered similar questions from The Times.
Mr. Santos’s exercise in damage control has also involved cleaning up his personal biography, which was removed from his campaign website for most of Tuesday. By the time an updated version appeared on Wednesday, it had been stripped of several significant details.
Gone, for instance, was the claim that he had received a degree from Baruch College. (Another profile of him, on the House Republicans’ campaign committee website, said he had studied at New York University; that information is now gone as well.)
Mr. Santos’s campaign biography also no longer mentions work on Wall Street. A reference to Mr. Santos’s mother working her ‘way up to be the first female executive at a major financial institution’ has also been expunged.
Mr. Santos also deleted a reference to past philanthropic efforts. He previously claimed he had founded and run a tax-exempt charity, Friends of Pets United. The Internal Revenue Service and the New York and New Jersey attorney general’s offices said they had no records of a registered charity with that name.
In an interview with the political publication City & State, Mr. Santos said he was not the charity’s sole owner and that he was responsible for the ‘grunt work.’ But he did not address the lack of official documents related to the organization.
The revised biography now also omits any mention of where Mr. Santos lives, another detail thrown into doubt by the The Times’s reporting.” Read more at New York Times
U.S. Scrambles to Stop Iran From Providing Drones for Russia
As the war in Ukraine grinds on, some officials have become convinced that Iran and Russia are building a new alliance of convenience.
By David E. Sanger, Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt
“WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has embarked on a broad effort to halt Iran’s ability to produce and deliver drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine, an endeavor that has echoes of its yearslong program to cut off Tehran’s access to nuclear technology.
In interviews in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, a range of intelligence, military and national security officials have described an expanding U.S. program that aims to choke off Iran’s ability to manufacture the drones, make it harder for the Russians to launch the unmanned ‘kamikaze’ aircraft and — if all else fails — to provide the Ukrainians with the defenses necessary to shoot them out of the sky.
The breadth of the effort has become clearer in recent weeks. The administration has accelerated its moves to deprive Iran of the Western-made components needed to manufacture the drones being sold to Russia after it became apparent from examining the wreckage of intercepted drones that they are stuffed with made-in-America technology.
U.S. forces are helping Ukraine’s military to target the sites where the drones are being prepared for launch — a difficult task because the Russians are moving the launch sites around, from soccer fields to parking lots. And the Americans are rushing in new technologies designed to give early warning of approaching drone swarms, to improve Ukraine’s chances of bringing them down, with everything from gunfire to missiles.
But all three approaches have run into deep challenges, and the drive to cut off critical parts for the drones is already proving as difficult as the decades-old drive to deprive Iran of the components needed to build the delicate centrifuges it uses to enrich near-bomb-grade uranium. The Iranians, American intelligence officials have said in recent weeks, are applying to the drone program their expertise about how to spread nuclear centrifuge manufacturing around the country and to find ‘dual use’ technologies on the black market to sidestep export controls.
In fact, one of the Iranian companies named by Britain, France and Germany as a key manufacturer of one of the two types of drones being bought by the Russians, Qods Aviation, has appeared for years on the United Nations’ lists of suppliers to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. The company, which is owned by Iran’s military, has expanded its line of drones despite waves of sanctions.
The administration’s scramble to deal with the Iranian-supplied drones comes at a significant moment in the war, just as Ukraine is using its own drones to strike deep into Russia, including an attack this week on a base housing some of the country’s strategic bombers. And it comes as officials in Washington and London warn that Iran may be about to provide Russia with missiles, helping alleviate Moscow’s acute shortage.
Officials across the Western alliance say they are convinced that Iran and Russia, both isolated by American-led sanctions, are building a new alliance of convenience. One senior military official said that partnership had deepened quickly, after Iran’s agreement to supply drones to the Russians last summer ‘bailed Putin out.’
The Biden administration, having abandoned hopes of reviving the 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran, has been adding new sanctions every few weeks.
In the effort to stop the drone attacks, Mr. Biden’s aides are also engaging an ally with a long history of undermining Iran’s nuclear program: Israel.
In a secure video meeting last Thursday with Israel’s top national security, military and intelligence officials, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, ‘discussed Iran’s growing military relationship with Russia, including the transfer of weapons the Kremlin is deploying against Ukraine, targeting its civilian infrastructure and Russia’s provision of military technology to Iran in return,’ the White House said in a statement outlining the meeting. The statement did not offer details about how the two countries decided to address the issue.
But the fact that the administration chose to highlight the discussion, in a quarterly meeting normally focused on disrupting Iran’s nuclear capabilities, was notable. Israel and the United States have a long history of operating together in dealing with technological threats emanating from Tehran. Together they developed one of the world’s most famous and sophisticated cyberattacks, using computer code that was later called ‘Stuxnet,’ to attack Iran’s nuclear centrifuge facilities.
Since then, Israel has made little secret of its attempts to sabotage nuclear enrichment centers…..” Read more at New York Times
Republicans Step Up Attacks on F.B.I. as It Investigates Trump
Historically, the F.B.I.’s critics have come from the left. But the bureau’s array of inquiries into former President Donald J. Trump has turned the tables.
By Adam Goldman and Alan Feuer
“WASHINGTON — When George Piro learned that some of his former colleagues were spreading unfounded rumors about him, he was stunned.
Mr. Piro, 55, was a highly decorated agent in the F.B.I. During his 23-year career, he earned a national intelligence medal for the months he spent interrogating Saddam Hussein, supervised several high-profile shooting investigations and consistently earned reviews that were among the highest for agents who ran field offices.
Now, he stood accused of misconduct by a group of former agents who had been placed on leave and called themselves ‘the Suspendables.’ In a letter sent this month to Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, the group surfaced persistent accusations against the bureau, saying it had discriminated against conservative-leaning agents. The group’s letter also falsely suggested that Mr. Piro, who once ran the F.B.I.’s office in Miami, had played a suspicious role in the bureau’s search this summer of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald J. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
‘These claims are absolutely false,’ Mr. Piro said in an interview. ‘I dedicated my life to the country and the F.B.I. I am disappointed that former agents would spread lies about me.’
The attacks on Mr. Piro, and his angry rebuttal of them, are emblematic of a toxic dynamic that is increasingly central to Republican Party politics. Mr. Trump’s supporters — among them, Republicans poised to take over the House next month — have seized on the letter’s accusations and stepped up their assaults on the F.B.I., seeking to undermine the bureau just as it has assumed the lead in an array of investigations of Mr. Trump.
Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who will be the Judiciary Committee’s chairman next month, has pledged to investigate what he describes as the politicization of the F.B.I. as well as that of the Justice Department. In a taste of what is to come, the committee’s Republican staff released a 1,000-page report last month that asserted that the F.B.I. hierarchy ‘spied on President Trump’s campaign and ridiculed conservative Americans’ and that the ‘rot within the F.B.I. festers in and proceeds from Washington.’
Historically, the F.B.I.’s most vocal critics have come from figures on the left, who have accused it of using heavy-handed tactics in investigating groups like trade unionists or civil rights activists. Conservatives and Republicans have, at least by tradition, supported the F.B.I. and other law-enforcement agencies.
A majority of the attacks laid out in the Suspendables’ letter to Mr. Wray, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, echoed those by the Judiciary Committee. The panel’s report also condemned the bureau for using counterterrorism tactics to investigate conservative parents at school board meetings — an allegation that seemed to have come from a mischaracterization of the F.B.I.’s plan to track threats of violence against school board officials.
The report further accused the agency of ‘helping Big Tech to censor Americans’ political speech’ — a claim that misrepresented the way the F.B.I. has sought for years to curb online disinformation, especially when it comes from foreign actors. Long before the House report or the letter to Mr. Wray was released, Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress and the news media were already targeting federal law enforcement officers and demonizing those who scrutinized the former president.
The attacks began in 2018, after federal agents searched the office of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, for evidence of campaign finance violations. After the search, Rudolph W. Giuliani, another lawyer close to Mr. Trump, went on the warpath. He declared that the F.B.I.’s office in New York — with which he had worked closely as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan — had behaved like ‘storm troopers’ in conducting the raid.
Since then, Mr. Trump and his supporters have gone after the bureau for its role in investigating his campaign’s ties to Russia; for purportedly failing to investigate issues surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop; and for using informants to infiltrate a group of militiamen charged in a plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
Some critics, including former agents, have attacked the F.B.I. for pursuing those in the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, describing the criminal prosecution of the rioters as political persecution.
This drumbeat of vitriol has created a reflexive reaction against the F.B.I. as nefarious and partisan among large swaths of the right, even as Mr. Trump has lost a measure of political support.
“The FBI is the largest criminal gang in the country,” the right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza recently wrote on Twitter, adding, “It’s America’s version of the KGB or the Chinese state police.”
To be sure, the F.B.I. has made several grievous errors in recent years. It failed to follow up on a tip that might have prevented a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in 2018. It bungled an investigation in 2015 into claims that a doctor for U.S.A. Gymnastics had sexually abused young women.
In 2020, an F.B.I. lawyer pleaded guilty to doctoring an email that was used in preparation to ask a court to renew an order to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser. Questions have also been raised about whether the bureau, which is in charge of preventing terrorism, could have done more to stop the Capitol attack with the use of secret informants it had within two of the far-right groups involved in the riot.
Some recent attacks on the F.B.I. by right-wing officials and figures in the news media seem intended to make money. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia sells “Defund the F.B.I.” baseball hats; Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump adviser, peddles T-shirts reading, “F.B.I.: Fascist Bureau of Intimidation.”
The barrage of messaging comes as the bureau itself has faced violence.
In August, an Ohio man, enraged by the search of Mar-a-Lago, tried to break into the F.B.I.’s field office near Cincinnati and was ultimately killed in a shootout with the local police. Investigators later discovered social media posts he had written encouraging others to kill federal agents.
On Dec. 16, a Tennessee man who was facing charges of assaulting the police during the Capitol attack was charged again with plotting to assassinate several of the federal agents who had investigated him. He was also accused of planning an attack on the F.B.I.’s field office in Knoxville, Tenn.
The Suspendables’ letter and the House Republicans’ report were both apparently drawn from statements by former F.B.I. agents who left the bureau under a cloud and then came forward as self-described whistle-blowers. Among them is Steven Friend, a former agent from Florida, who refused to take part in a SWAT raid this summer of a Jan. 6 suspect facing arrest on misdemeanor charges.
‘I have an oath to uphold the Constitution,’ Mr. Friend, a 12-year veteran of the bureau, told his supervisors when he declined to join the raid on Aug. 24 in Jacksonville, Fla., which he deemed an excessive use of force. ‘I have a moral objection and want to be considered a conscientious objector.’
According to Justice Department records, there was only one Jan. 6-related arrest in the Jacksonville area on Aug. 24: that of Tyler Bensch, who was accused of being a member of a right-wing militia group connected to the Three Percenter movement.
What Mr. Friend omitted from his account — which was published in The New York Post and widely shared online — was that while Mr. Bensch was charged with only misdemeanors, documents in his case say that on Jan. 6, 2021, he posted a video of himself outside the Capitol wearing body armor and a gas mask and carrying an AR-15-style rifle. The documents also say that witnesses told the F.B.I. they had seen photographs of Mr. Bensch carrying a similar rifle at other times.
Former F.B.I. agents who have served on SWAT teams said the use of tactical agents during arrests has nothing to do with the charges someone is facing but is based instead on a risk assessment of the suspect.
‘When in doubt, you use SWAT,’ said Robert D’Amico, who served on the Miami tactical team for four years and the hostage team for almost two decades. ‘You never let the charges dictate the tactics.’
Last year, two F.B.I. agents were killed and three more were wounded while serving a search warrant in a case involving child pornography in Florida. The suspect did not have a violent history and had been deemed low risk. The deadly episode illustrated the dangers of serving warrants or arresting suspects considered not threatening. The agents worked for Mr. Piro.
Mr. Friend’s lawyer said his client objected to the SWAT team arrest because he wanted to ‘de-escalate’ the situation and avoid what he described as another Ruby Ridge — a reference to a botched F.B.I. raid on a white supremacist compound in Idaho in 1992 that has becoming a rallying cry for far-right extremists.
The F.B.I. declined to comment on the attacks against Mr. Piro, but three former and current law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said he was not under investigation when he retired from the bureau.
Mr. Piro said he was depressed by how some former agents had turned on the bureau.
‘I am saddened by their behavior and their total disregard for those who are working for the F.B.I.,’ he said, ‘and those who came before them to make the F.B.I. the premier law enforcement agency in the world.’” Read more at New York Times
Race for G.O.P. Chair Obscures the Party’s Bigger Problems
Ronna McDaniel’s quest for a fourth term atop the Republican National Committee has triggered an ugly intraparty fight between the right and the farther right. Figuring out how to win back swing voters is not a top priority.
By Jonathan Weisman and Ken Bensinger
“Since former President Donald J. Trump’s narrow victory in 2016, the Republican Party has suffered at the ballot box every two years, from the loss of the House in 2018 to the loss of the White House and Senate in 2020 to this year’s history-defying midterm disappointments.
Many in the party have now found a scapegoat for the G.O.P.’s struggles who is not named Trump: the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel.
But as Ms. McDaniel struggles for a fourth term at the party’s helm, her re-election fight before the clubby 168 members of the Republican National Committee next month may be diverting G.O.P. leaders from any serious consideration of the thornier problems facing the party heading into the 2024 presidential campaign.
Ms. McDaniel, who was handpicked by Mr. Trump in late 2016 to run the party and whom he enlisted in a scheme to draft fake electors to perpetuate his presidency, could be considered a Trump proxy by Republicans eager to begin to eradicate what many consider to be the party’s pre-eminent problem: the former president’s influence over the G.O.P.
Those Republicans, whose voices have grown louder in the wake of the party’s weak November showing, see any hopes of wooing swing voters and moderates back to the G.O.P. as imperiled by Mr. Trump’s endless harping on his own grievances, the taint surrounding his efforts to remain in power after his 2020 defeat, and the continuing dramas around purloined classified documents, his company’s tax fraud conviction and his insistence on trying to make a political comeback.
But Ms. McDaniel is not facing moderation-minded challengers. Her rivals are from the Trumpist right. They include the pillow salesman Mike Lindell, who continues to spin out fanciful election conspiracies, and — more worrying for Ms. McDaniel — a Trump loyalist from California, Harmeet Dhillon, who is backed by some of Mr. Trump’s fiercest defenders, including the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a youthful group of pro-Trump rightists.
Ms. McDaniel has accused Ms. Dhillon, who was co-chair of the election denying group Lawyers for Trump in 2020, of conducting “a scorched-earth campaign” against her by rallying outside activists “to put maximum pressure on the R.N.C. members” who will choose the party leader for the next two years in late January in Dana Point, Calif.
“It’s been a very vitriolic campaign,” Ms. McDaniel said in an interview, adding: “I’m all for scorched earth against Democrats. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do against other Republicans.”
The candidacy of Mr. Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who exemplifies the conspiracy-driven fringe, has put still more right-wing pressure on Ms. McDaniel, who refuses to say Joseph R. Biden Jr. was fairly elected in 2020. (Mr. Lindell’s latest conspiracy theory is that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s biggest rival so far for the 2024 presidential nomination, unfairly won re-election in November.)
The circus brewing ahead of the R.N.C.’s Jan. 25 gathering does not bode well for members who believe the party’s troubles stem from Mr. Trump.
“The former president has done so much damage to this country and to this party,” said Bill Palatucci, a committee member from New Jersey, who described the R.N.C. chair election as shaping up to be “a Hobson’s choice.”
“We have to acknowledge that 2022 was a disaster, and we need to do things differently,” he said, adding, “I would prefer and still hope there would be a different option.”
The R.N.C. has undertaken what it says is a serious analysis of the 2022 results, led by Henry Barbour of Mississippi, the nephew of the state’s former governor, Haley Barbour, and a co-author of the so-called autopsy that the party ordered up after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. That report counseled a more inclusive attitude toward voters of color and moderate swing voters, and a more open stand on overhauling immigration laws — the opposite tack taken by the party during the Trump era.
The 2022 review committee includes Jane Brady, a former attorney general of Delaware, and Kim Borchers, a committee member from Kansas, but it is also being co-chaired by Ms. Dhillon, who, at least for now, has spent the past weeks rallying the hard right, not courting the center.
Ms. Dhillon, in an interview, suggested replacing Ms. McDaniel was a prerequisite for change.
‘There may be many reasons for the various losses over the last several years, but what they all have in common is that they occurred under the current leadership, which has promised to change exactly nothing in the next two years,’ she said. ‘The most unifying thing that Ronna could do would be to move on to new challenges, and allow us to unite around a vision that includes much-needed reforms, improvements, and investments in a winning future.’
And the forces gathering against Ms. McDaniel are multiplying. The Republican Party of Florida scheduled a no-confidence vote on Ms. McDaniel in the second half of January. The chairman of the Nebraska Republican Party withdrew his support of Ms. McDaniel, citing an ‘ever growing divide’ among both R.N.C. members and ‘now, even more so, Republicans across the nation.’ The executive committee of the Texas Republican Party unanimously passed a nonbinding vote of no-confidence in Ms. McDaniel, and the Arizona G.O.P. publicly called on her to resign.
Still, the Republican National Committee chair’s race is the ultimate inside game; only members get a vote. And Michael Kuckelman, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party and an R.N.C. member, said he still thinks Ms. McDaniel will easily win another term.
Ms. Dhillon’s pressure campaign is likely bolstering Ms. McDaniel’s support among committee members she has befriended over the past six years, he said, and potentially damaging Ms. Dhillon’s chances of leading the party in the future. Around two-thirds of the committee’s members have already said they will back Ms. McDaniel’s re-election.
Mr. Kuckelman also said Ms. McDaniel was being unfairly blamed for losses in key Senate and House contests. ‘Everybody needs to bring the temperature down a little bit,’ he said. ‘Ronna McDaniel does not pick candidates. Republicans do that in the primaries. Her job is to get the vote out, and she does get the vote out.’
Moreover, Ms. Dhillon’s tactics have antagonized some committee members.
At Turning Point USA’s conference last week in Phoenix — where recriminations and sniping at fellow Republicans seemed to be a theme — Ms. Dhillon appeared on Stephen K. Bannon’s ‘War Room’ show and took her own shots at the committee she seeks to lead.
‘Consultants are running the building at the R.N.C.,’ she told Mr. Bannon before a cheering crowd. ‘Those consultants get paid whether we win or lose.’
Her accusations are rankling her colleagues. On an internal committee listserv, Jeff Kent, a committee member from Washington, wrote that Ms. Dhillon ‘does not have the right to go on national television and defame the character of the R.N.C. members who have chosen not to support her.’
The Turning Point conference concluded with a straw poll in which only 2 percent of the 1,150 conference attendees chose Ms. McDaniel as their preferred party chairwoman going forward. Mr. Kirk then emailed all 168 voting members of the committee to tell them the group would challenge any member who did not heed the call of the party’s activists.
Given the circumstances, Mr. Palatucci said Ms. McDaniel remains favored for re-election, but anything could happen over the next month.
‘A lot of her support is soft, and some could be convinced to vote for somebody else,’ he said. ‘R.N.C. members are very experienced politicians. They’re experts at looking you in the eye and saying, ‘I love you,’ and in a secret ballot slitting your throat.’
All of this fighting is over a position whose salary topped $358,000 in 2022 but whose responsibilities are tangential to midterm elections at best.
In the interview, Ms. McDaniel boasted of investments the party has made — in community centers to engage voters of color, especially Latinos; in voter registration drives; and in get-out-the-vote efforts. She cited a New York Times analysis that showed that Republican voter turnout in November was robust.
The problem: Many of those Republicans appeared to vote for Democrats.
‘We don’t pick the candidate,’ she said. ‘We do not do the messaging for the candidates, right? They pick consultants, and their own pollsters. So what does the R.N.C. do? We build the infrastructure. We do the voter registration.’
The committee’s role becomes more pivotal during the presidential campaign, raising money for the party’s nominee and staging the convention, which is set for mid-July 2024 in Milwaukee. It will also try to unify the party during what may be an exceptionally contentious primary season.
Party chairs usually take a back seat to the president, who commonly calls the shots from the White House. And Ms. McDaniel said she had really only begun to put her imprimatur on the R.N.C. since Mr. Trump left the White House. ‘These last few years, in my mind, have been the first few years I’ve been able to really innovate,’ she said.
She cited efforts like those on Republican community centers, voter registration and legal actions around voting as important to continue. ‘We have to keep that going heading into a presidential year,’ she said. ‘After that, I will happily step aside.’
But Ms. McDaniel’s keep-it-going attitude may be her biggest liability. Some committee members who do not like Ms. Dhillon’s tactics or solutions nevertheless worry about the current chairwoman’s insistence that all is well.
‘We need a leadership change; the bottom line is the status quo is unacceptable,’ Mr. Palatucci said. ‘This election is a month and a half away. A lot can happen. I’m expecting some movement. And certainly the storm that Harmeet is instigating is causing a very good debate within the committee, and that’s worth having.’” Read more at New York Times
“Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) announced today he has a ‘serious but curable form of cancer.’ Raskin's statement.” Read more at Axios
Tariffs on imported baby formula are coming back next year.
“Congress waived them to help families amid a nationwide shortagestemming from supply-chain problems and the closure of a crucial factory. In November, the National Milk Producers Federation said the supply had improved enough to allow for a return of the tariffs, which can be as high as 17.5%. Some parents and manufacturers are still reporting problems.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
U.S. Virgin Islands Sues JPMorgan Over Epstein Sex-Trafficking Scheme
A lawsuit says the bank helped conceal the exploitation of women and girls by the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“The attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands is accusing JPMorgan Chase of helping Jeffrey Epstein illegally exploit women and girls, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan. The suit says JPMorgan provided banking services to Mr. Epstein after he had been convicted of sex charges and failed to report his suspicious activities.
The lawsuit said the bank should have known about Mr. Epstein’s illegal activities at a villa on Little St. James Island, an island he owned in the territory, and should have reported them to the authorities as part of its adherence to anti-money-laundering laws.
‘JPMorgan knowingly, negligently and unlawfully provided and pulled the levers through which recruiters and victims were paid and was indispensable to the operation and concealment of the Epstein trafficking enterprise,’ the lawsuit said.
A JPMorgan spokeswoman declined to comment.
Mr. Epstein, a secretive financier, maintained close associations with a long list of wealthy men, politicians and celebrities even after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to two counts of soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl and faced allegations in 2016 that he had helped smother a larger investigation into his activities. He died in an apparent suicide in August 2019 while in federal custody on a new set of sex exploitation charges.
Mr. Epstein was a client of JPMorgan’s high-end banking services for 15 years, a relationship that continued well after his 2008 conviction even though the bank’s employees raised alarms about the legal and reputational risks. The bank ejected him as a client in 2013.
Tuesday’s lawsuit, parts of which were redacted from public view, said the bank’s failure to cut ties with Mr. Epstein after his 2008 conviction, as well as its failure to scrutinize his activities when new sexual abuse allegations against him became public, amounted to helping Mr. Epstein carry out his schemes.
The lawsuit cited civil racketeering claims that the territory’s attorney general, Denise N. George, filed in 2020 against Mr. Epstein’s estate. The 2020 case described a complex operation focused on bringing women and girls to Little St. James Island, where they were abused and then paid to stay silent.
On Nov. 30, Ms. George and the estate announced an agreement to settle the case for around $105 million, including $80 million in repayments to the government for tax benefits that Mr. Epstein inappropriately obtained, and about half the proceeds from the sale of Mr. Epstein’s island, which could total $55 million. Neither the estate nor its executors admitted wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
This week’s lawsuit against JPMorgan seeks to force the bank to turn over profits from its business with Mr. Epstein and his companies and to pay unspecified amounts in penalties and damages to the government.
‘JPMorgan facilitated and concealed wire and cash transactions that raised suspicion of — and were in fact part of — a criminal enterprise whose currency was the sexual servitude of dozens of women and girls in and beyond the Virgin Islands,’ the lawsuit said.” Read more at New York Times
60-21-10: Luka Doncic Enters Uncharted Territory
The Dallas Mavericks rallied to beat the Knicks in overtime as Doncic rewrote the N.B.A. record books with a 60-point triple-double.
“No player since the 1960s had tallied 50 points, 20 rebounds and 10 assists in an N.B.A. game. On Tuesday night, Luka Doncic reached that total and kept right on going to 60 points.
Doncic’s 60-21-10 line in the Mavericks’ 126-121 overtime victory against the Knicks in Dallas was the first in N.B.A. history. The other highest point totals with 20 rebounds and 10 assists all came more than 50 years ago: Wilt Chamberlain’s 53-32-14 in 1968, Elgin Baylor’s 52-25-10 in 1961 and Chamberlain’s 51-29-11 in 1963.
In the 21st century, only DeMarcus Cousins (44-23-10) in 2018 and Nikola Jokic (40-27-10) this month had as many as 40 points along with 20 rebounds and 10 assists.
Cut the rebound requirement to 10 from 20 and Doncic’s game is still tied for the highest scoring ever, alongside James Harden’s 60-10-11 game in 2018.
Doncic shot 21-for-31 on Tuesday night. It was the first 60-point game in Mavericks history, surpassing a 53-point game by Dirk Nowitzki in 2004. Basketball Reference gave the performance a ‘game score’ of 56.3, the best in the league since Harden’s game and the fifth best of the 3-point era.
Many of Doncic’s buckets came in classic Luka style: The 6-foot-7 player repeatedly handled the ball near the 3-point arc, then drove in for a layup or an assist. His teammates made 23 baskets in total, and Doncic assisted on 10 of them.
The Knicks led the game by 9 points with 42 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, but Doncic helped lead a Mavericks comeback that forced overtime. With one second to go and the Mavericks trailing by 2, he intentionally missed a free throw, got the rebound after several players from both teams touched the ball and made the shot as time expired.
He punctuated the move with a spontaneous goofy dance that involved him bouncing his arms up and down herky-jerky….” Read more at New York Times