The U.S. has secured enough doses of COVID-19 vaccine to inoculate the country’s adult population by the end of May, President Joe Biden said on Tuesday.
Continue reading “Biden Announces Enough COVID Vaccine For All Adult Americans By End Of May”
Cuomo Slammed With Yet Another Sexual Misconduct Accusation As Controversies Pile Up
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) fall from grace continues after the New York Times on Monday night published a woman named Anna Ruch’s allegation that he had attempted to kiss her without consent at a wedding in 2019.
Ruch is the third woman to accuse the governor of sexual misconduct after two of his former aides, Lindsey Boylan and Charlotte Bennett, alleged that Cuomo had made unwelcome sexual advances in the workplace.
New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on Monday that her office had begun investigating the allegations.
Meanwhile, Cuomo faces more legal woes in a different area after his administration was found to have withheld data on COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents last spring, leading to a serious undercounting of the death toll in his state at the moment he was basking in praise over his handling of the pandemic.
Follow our coverage of the governor’s growing controversies below:
Wray Hints Feds Are Looking To Charge People Who Simply Trespassed On Capitol Grounds
At one point during FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, he hinted at what could become the investigation’s enormous scope, when all is said and done.
5 Points On FBI Director Wray’s First Congressional Testimony Since Capitol Attack
FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday debunked right-wing conspiracy theories about the Capitol insurrection, defended the bureau’s intelligence-sharing ahead of the attack and defined the categories of alleged rioters law enforcement is looking at.
Wray appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for nearly three hours of testimony Tuesday, his first appearance before Congress since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Here are five takeaways from Wray’s testimony:
FBI intel ahead of Jan. 6 was ‘more than just an email’
There has been lots of bickering among law enforcement since the Jan. 6 Capitol attack about whether the authorities who should have been aware of the threat against Congress were properly prepared for that day. Wray offered his own defense of the FBI’s work on Tuesday, pointing to a Jan. 5 report out of the FBI’s Norfolk, Virginia office flagging internet chatter about attacking Congress. The FBI communicated the report to relevant authorities multiple ways, Wray said at several points in the hearing. “It’s more than just an email,” he told Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). The bureau also uploaded the report to a law enforcement database and mentioned the intelligence during an in-person briefing with law enforcement partners, Wray said.
Still, questions remain about whether the FBI did enough to flag the threat, especially given the volume of online chatter ahead of Jan. 6.
“Assuming for a moment there was only a Norfolk [situational information report] within the bureau then we’re talking more about a systematic failure of identifying, creating and pushing out analysis within the bureau,” the extremism researcher Seamus Hughes observed.
Neither ‘antifa’ nor ‘fake Trump supporters’ were behind behind the insurrection
Early on in the hearing, Wray debunked a conspiracy theory that has spread like wildfire in right-wing circles, including among some members of Congress. The FBI director bluntly told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) that the agency has not seen any evidence of “fake Trump supporters” organizing the deadly Capitol insurrection.
Throughout the hearing, Wray found himself doubling down on his assertion that the FBI has not found evidence of antifa staging the Capitol attack when Republican senators, such as Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), equated extremism with antifa and left-wing activists by repeatedly citing protests last summer against police brutality.
Wray reiterated that the FBI is “equal opportunity” in examining extremism of “all stripes,” regardless of ideology.
The “antifa” false flag conspiracy got a major boost last week when Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) read from a Federalist article alleging that the insurrection was staged by “agents provocateurs.”
Law enforcement is looking at ‘three groups’ of insurrectionists
Wray outlined three groups of people the FBI found to be behind the Capitol insurrection:
- “Peaceful, maybe rowdy” protesters who didn’t violate the law.
- People who intended to partake in peaceful protests, but got carried away with “the motive or emotion.” Wray said this group engaged in low-level criminal behavior, such as trespassing Capitol grounds, but did not go so far as to breach the actual Capitol building.
- “The smallest but most serious group” of people who breached the Capitol, Wray said, and endangered law enforcement officers and lawmakers. Wray said that the violence this particular group engaged in is what the FBI would consider domestic terrorism.
There was no widespread voter fraud in 2020
The FBI is among the various law enforcement entities with the power to investigate alleged voter and election fraud, so Wray would be in a position to decisively debunk the so-called “big lie” from Donald Trump and others that Trump’s 2020 loss was the result of widespread fraud. And Wray did just that on Tuesday.
After expressing his agreement with then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement that there was no evidence of fraud on a level that would have affected the 2020 results, Wray went further in response to questions from Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ).
“We are not aware of any widespread evidence of voter fraud, much less that would have affected the outcome in the presidential election,” he said.
Dems pushed Wray on extremist rhetoric
The line of questioning from Democrats seemed to highlight the role of extremist rhetoric in fomenting the Capitol attack, which had also been central to the House impeachment managers’ charge against former President Donald Trump’s role as inciter-in-chief last month during the Senate impeachment trial.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), in one instance, prodded Wray to address how the promotion of QAnon conspiracy theories by prominent elected officials and lawmakers had contributed to the deadly insurrection, but the FBI director would not formally condemn or acknowledge the theories as playing a central role in contributing to the riot.
“We are concerned about the QAnon phenomenon, which we view as a sort of loose sort of set of conspiracy theories,” Wray said.
Last month, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was notably stripped of her committee assignments over endorsing violence against fellow lawmakers and otherwise promoting baseless conspiracy theories.
Wray further deflected when Blumenthal pressed further on whether the endorsement of QAnon conspiracy theories by members of Congress served to worsen the threat of violence.
“Our focus is on the violence,” Wray said, adding: “Obviously the folks who engaged in this kind of violence draw inspiration from a variety of sources and we’re concerned about any source that stimulates or motivates violent extremism.”
Although repeatedly pressed on linking the role of rhetoric in the riot, Wray deflected at several points throughout the hearing — effectively refusing to weigh in or formally condemn the impact of language in inspiring both the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and a wave of reported hate crimes against Asian and Asian-American people during the pandemic. Trump took aim at Asian people by popularizing the racist term “China virus” in reference to COVID-19. The term “Kung flu” has also been used as a racist derogatory term for the coronavirus.
Wray also evaded addressing the role of language when he told Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) that he didn’t think it was appropriate for him to comment on the role that language has played in an uptick in hate crimes against people of Asian descent during the pandemic.
“I don’t know that it’s really my place as FBI director to start weighing on rhetoric,” Wray said, adding that he would not personally use the racist terms when referring to the coronavirus.
He delivered a similar answer to Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) when asked whether Trump’s use of the racist language had contributed to the hate crimes.
“I want to be careful as FBI director not to start to get in the business of kind of weighing in and characterizing rhetoric,” he said.
Diverse Group Assembles To Punch Back At ‘Character Assassination’ Of Top DOJ Pick Vanita Gupta
Unlikely bedfellows congregated on Zoom Tuesday to sing the praises of Vanita Gupta, President Joe Biden’s nominee for associate attorney general, amid a right-wing campaign to paint her as radical.
Where Things Stand: Fox News–GOP Megamerger Continues At CPAC
Long gone are the excuses of yesteryear that a Fox News personality’s seemingly partisan appearance was merely a journalist performing his or her journalistic duties.
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FBI Director Wray Provides First Testimony Since Capitol Attack
FBI Director Christopher Wray will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee at 1o a.m. ET Tuesday, the first testimony from Wray since the attack on Congress on Jan. 6.
The ongoing criminal investigation into the hundreds of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol building that day constitutes one of the largest investigations in FBI history.
Former President Donald Trump nominated Wray to lead the FBI in June 2017. Wray was confirmed by the Senate that August. FBI directors serve 10-year terms. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last month that President Joe Biden “intends to keep FBI Director Wray on in his role and he has confidence in the job he is doing.”
Hardcore GOP Position For Defanging VRA Falls Apart Under SCOTUS Questioning
It appears likely that voter advocates will suffer at least some loss in their abilities to bring Voting Rights Act cases with the Arizona lawsuit heard by the Supreme Court Tuesday.
But the oral arguments produced another seeming loser. Michael Carvin, the high-profile Republican lawyer who was representing the state GOP in the hearing. Carvin backtracked on the sweeping arguments in the GOP’s briefs, prompting skepticism from the court’s left and right wing alike.
“I want to make sure that I understand your position because it strikes me that it has some contradictions in it,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said in comments suggesting that there was little support on the bench for the GOP’s hardcore approach to defanging the VRA.
The case involves two restrictive voting practices in Arizona: the state’s 2016 ban on most third-party mail-ballot collection and its longstanding policy of discarding a voter’s entire ballot if she casts it at the wrong precinct. (Many states have a similar rule, while in other places, an out-of-precinct voter’s ballot counts for non-local races.)
Beyond the question of whether those specific policies — which the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals struck down — should be reinstated, the bigger potential consequence of the case is whether the Supreme Court uses it as a vehicle to further narrow the scope of the Voting Rights Act.
The state Republican party, at least in its briefs, argued that it should. It wanted to severely limit the use of Voting Rights Act Section 2 “results test,” which prohibits policies that have the effect of discriminating against minority voters (as opposed to those that are proven to be intentionally discriminatory). The test should only be applied in a redistricting context or for voter qualification measures, the GOP said in its brief. Election regulations — i.e. the measures that dictate the “time, place and manner” in which the ballots are cast — should be off the table for “results test” cases, the GOP was arguing.
Or, at least, that was the state party’s position until Carvin was thrown a series of hypotheticals by Justice Elena Kagan. She asked him if each example would be compliant under the interpretation of the Voting Rights Act he was putting forward.
Carvin said that permissible under the VRA were examples of policies that ended Sunday in-person early voting or that limited polling places hours to 9-5. But faced with her hypothetical about counties of vastly different sizes being restricted to one polling place each, as well as an example of a policy that put polling places only in country clubs, Carvin waffled. He said the former would likely be illegal under the relevant VRA provision, because it has to take “into account demographic realities.” The latter scenario would provide minorities “with less opportunity” to vote than non-minorities, Carvin said.
With those answers, Carvin cut against his own brief’s argument about election regulations not being covered under the relevant part of Section 2. That flip-flop attracted scrutiny from two conservative justices. Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Carvin to elaborate on how the results test, under his interpretation, is supposed to take into account demographic realities. Justice Coney Barrett said his answers to Kagan’s examples suggested some “contradictions” in his position.
“I don’t understand why you conceded, in your examples to Justice Kagan, that some of those time, place and manner restrictions — like time-place-and-manner ‘you can only vote at a country club,’ or time-place-and-manner ‘this is the placement of the polls and they’re going to be placed in areas that are burdensome to minorities’ — aren’t those time, place and manner restrictions?” Coney Barrett asked, later adding that the distinctions made in the brief were not relevant to what Carvin was now arguing Tuesday.
In questions posed to other lawyers arguing the case, both Kagan and Kavanaugh made snide remarks about the theory laid out in the GOP’s brief being different than what Carvin had argued in court on Tuesday.
“The longer this argument goes on, the less clear I am as to how the parties’ standards differ,” Kagan said at one point, addressing Jessica Ring Amunson, a lawyer for Arizona’s Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D).
“So if I understood what Mr. Carvin said at argument, as opposed to what he said in his brief, he said, of course, you should look at demographic realities,” she continued.
Coney Barrett’s harsh exchange with Carvin suggested that there were not five votes on the court for the state GOP’s original position that put election regulations out of reach for the results test of the VRA. The potential that the Court would take the state GOP’s suggestion and say that the “results test” did not cover election regulations was the absolute doomsday scenario for federal voting rights enforcement. There were plenty other ways, however, that the conservatives flirted with limiting the scope of that provision.
Several Republican appointees appeared focused on a standard (since withdrawn) laid out by the Trump administration. That standard would raise the bar on the kind of evidence challengers would have to bring in alleging an election measure had a discriminatory effect.
How Carvin wavered on his even more hostile take on the VRA was not the only surprising moment from the hearing. He was surprisingly candid when he was asked by Justice Coney Barrett why the GOP should be allowed to be in the case in the first place. (Its opponents have argued that striking down the measures does not inflict the kind of harm to the GOP that would allow it to defend the measures in court.)
Carvin justified the GOP presence in the case by saying that blocking the policies put Republicans at a “disadvantage” because it would help more people to vote, and those people would lean Democratic.
“Politics is a zero-sum game, and every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretations of Section 2 hurts us,” he said.
This post has been updated.
Your COVID Moments #7
From TPM Reader PI …
I’m retired, and before Covid, I visited and cared for my mother every day in a nearby memory care facility. She’s in late-stage Alzheimer’s. I took her to nearby parks, manicurists, restaurants and of course doctor visits and hospital stays when she had seizures. I helped her shower and trimmed her hair, joined her in group activities, sat with her in her facility’s garden, or in her room, watching television. I also spent many a time helping her through the fears, delusions or violence that dementia can trigger, then working with her doctor, psychiatrist and neurologist to find the right meds balance to keep her seizure-free and calm.
Your COVID Moments #6
From TPM Reader BA …
Last year I worked at a law firm, the type started by three guys in the later 80s who decided to never change how they did business. In February I was starting to get concerned about COVID and asked one of the partners what plans the firm had to adjust. The answer was more or less “nothing”. My wife’s company, like many others, instituted a company-wide work from home policy in early March, while the direction at my office was just “Everything’s fine, try to avoid in-person contact while in the office.” Keep in mind that this was an office which previous denied people the ability to work from home unless there was some family emergency.