The House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump Wednesday evening, approving two articles of impeachment: one alleging abuse of power, and the other alleging obstruction of Congress.Both articles are based on the Ukraine scandal, meaning the party decided not to introduce any articles of impeachment solely based on the Mueller report, as some had pushed for. You can read the full articles of impeachment at this link.Articles of impeachment are essentially the “charges” against the president that the House of Representatives has now approved. Their approval means the Senate will next hold a trial to determine whether to remove Trump from office.Article I, abuse of power, addresses Trump’s general underlying conduct in the Ukraine scandal. It alleges that Trump abused his power by trying to pressure Ukraine’s government into announcing an investigation into the Bidens by withholding both a White House meeting and military aid. Article II, obstruction of Congress, is about how Trump responded to Democrats’ impeachment inquiry over the Ukraine scandal. It alleges that Trump obstructed the probe by urging witnesses not to cooperate and government agencies not to comply with subpoenas.Article I, “Abuse of Power,” focuses on the underlying facts of the Ukraine scandal. It asserts that Trump: “Corruptly solicited the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations” into his political rival Joe Biden, and into “a discredited theory” that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 election Attempted to condition two “official acts” on this announcement — a White House meeting with Ukraine’s president, and the release of $391 million of blocked military aid for Ukraine The article adds that, once Trump was “faced with the public revelation of his actions,” he released the aid — but that he “persisted in openly and corruptly urging and soliciting Ukraine to undertake investigations for his personal political benefit.”This, Article I continues, is abusing the powers of the presidency “by ignoring and injuring national security and other vital national interests to obtain an improper personal political benefit.” The article also asserts that Trump “betrayed the Nation by abusing his high office to enlist a foreign power in corrupting democratic elections.”Article II, “Obstruction of Congress,” states that President Trump “has directed the unprecedented, categorical, and indiscriminate defiance of subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives pursuant to its ‘sole Power of Impeachment.’”Specifically, the article goes on, Trump: Directed the White House to defy a subpoena for documents Directed other executive branch agencies, such as the State Department and Defense Department, to defy subpoenas Directed current and former executive branch officials to refuse subpoenas for their testimony. “This abuse of office served to cover up the President’s own repeated misconduct and to seize and control the power of impeachment,” Article II reads. Therefore, both articles conclude, Trump should be removed from office and barred from holding any future office.The number of articles doesn’t matter all that much — it only takes conviction on one to remove a president — but the Democrats’ decision to go with just two puts this on the lower end of historical presidential impeachments.For President Andrew Johnson in 1868, the full House approved a whopping 11 articles of impeachment. Most were based on Johnson’s violation of a new law blocking him from firing a Cabinet secretary without Senate approval, though one actually focused on mean speeches Johnson gave disparaging Congress. (Johnson ended up being acquitted by a single vote in the Senate.)For President Richard Nixon in 1974, the Judiciary Committee approved three articles related to the Watergate scandal: one alleging obstruction of justice, one alleging abuse of power, and one alleging contempt of Congress. The committee rejected two other articles: one on usurping the powers of Congress, and one accusing Nixon of tax fraud. (Nixon then resigned before the full House could vote to impeach him.)Finally, for President Bill Clinton in 1998, the Judiciary Committee approved four articles related to the Lewinsky scandal. Two, a perjury count and an obstruction of justice count, were then approved by the full House. The two other articles, another perjury count and an abuse of office count, were voted down by the full house. (Clinton was acquitted on both counts in the Senate.) The major decision that Democrats made here was one of omission — that is, they did not introduce an article of impeachment based on special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings, as many in the party have long pushed for. Mueller collected evidence on what sure looks like a pattern of obstruction of justice, exploring matters such as Trump’s attempt to get then-FBI Director James Comey to drop an investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (which failed); Trump’s attempts to get then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his recusal from oversight over the Russia probe (which failed); Trump’s firing of Comey; Trump’s order to White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller (which failed); and Trump and his legal team’s urging key figures (like former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort) not to flip while attacking those who did flip (like former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen).The tricky part is that Mueller declined to outright say whether any of this was obstruction of justice — in part, he said, because Justice Department guidelines state he shouldn’t indict a sitting president. This, he said, was Congress’s job.But in practice, that decision — combined with Mueller’s failure to establish any conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere with an election — left the special counsel’s findings a political muddle. So while more liberal Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee argued all summer that this was clear obstruction of justice that Trump needed to be held accountable for, moderates in the party were hesitant — and Speaker Nancy Pelosi became a firm opponent of impeachment based on Mueller’s findings. Still, pressure from the base for impeachment continued to rise each month.But it was the Ukraine scandal that truly changed the political situation, by providing Democrats new material about more recent behavior by Trump. It drove Pelosi and nearly all the moderates to support an impeachment inquiry. When the process moved from the House Intelligence Committee (which probed the facts of the Ukraine scandal) to the Judiciary Committee (which is in charge of drawing up articles of impeachment), some members wanted to put the Mueller material back on the table.Yet the party appears to have concluded it was too tough a political sell, and that focusing on the Ukraine scandal alone makes for a more comprehensible case. Will you help keep Vox free for all? Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. And that kind of work takes resources. Even after the economy recovers, advertising alone will never be enough to support it. If you have already made a contribution to Vox, thank you. If you haven’t, help us keep our journalism free for everyone by making a financial contribution today, from as little as $3.

Republicans loyal to Donald Trump must stop pushing the “fictional narrative” that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election because it plays into Vladimir Putin’s hands, the White House’s former top expert on Russia has told the impeachment inquiry in dramatic testimony.British-born Fiona Hill, appearing in Washington on Thursday, attacked a debunked conspiracy theory used by Republicans to defend the US president against allegations that he sought to bribe Ukraine for his own political gain.It was another striking moment in the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee’s inquiry: a respected official on the biggest possible stage accusing elected Republican officials of boosting Russian propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy.“Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country – and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” said Hill, who until July was the national security council’s director for European and Russian affairs.“This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”Some Republicans on the intelligence committee have pushed a discredited conspiracy theory, embraced by Trump and amplified by conservative media, that Ukraine, rather than Russia, meddled in the last election.They contend that Ukraine was complicit in the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and that computer records were fabricated to cast blame on Russia. A key talking point is CrowdStrike, a security firm hired by the DNC that detected the hack.According to a rough transcript of his July phone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump said: “I would like to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike. I guess you have one of your wealthy people. The server, they say Ukraine has it.”It was this investigation, along with one into a gas company with ties to former Democratic vice-president Joe Biden’s son Hunter, that Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, pressed for, allegedly in exchange for the release of nearly $400m in military aid – a quid pro quo.During the impeachment hearings, Republicans have made frequent references to alleged election meddling by Ukraine, without offering evidence. On the opening day, Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the committee, said “indications of Ukrainian election meddling” had troubled Trump.But Hill, the co-author of the book Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, warned in forensic and measured terms that such rumour-mongering only empowers the Russian president who, as intelligence agencies and Congress concluded, systematically attacked America’s democratic institutions in 2016 and is already plotting do so again next year.“The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today,” she said, wearing black and speaking in an accent from north-east England (a feature she highlighted elsewhere in her testimony, in speaking of her roots). “Our nation is being torn apart. Truth is questioned. Our highly professional and expert career foreign service is being undermined. US support for Ukraine – which continues to face armed Russian aggression – has been politicised.”She added: “Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”Doubts over the legitimacy of a US election result, she said, are “exactly what the Russian government was hoping for. They would pit one side of our electorate against the others.”The remarks echoed a public warning by the former special counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation demonstrated concerted efforts by Russia in the 2016 election to hurt Democrat Hillary Clinton and help Trump. It also came one day after Putin himself told an event in Moscow: “Thank God, no one is accusing us of interfering in the US elections any more. Now they’re accusing Ukraine.”When the text of Hill’s opening statement was released, it was rebuked by Nunes, who circulated a copy of a 2018 congressional report on Russian meddling. But he acknowledged that Democrats had dissented from the report’s findings. Democrat Adam Schiff, the committee chairman, welcomed Hill’s intervention and said he shared her concerns.Daniel Goldman, the Democratic counsel, asked if Trump had ignored the advice of his experts on the Ukraine conspiracy theory and instead taken the word of Giuliani. Hill replied: “That appears to be the case, yes.”Giuliani was put front and centre of the Ukraine scandal on Wednesday by Gordon Sondland, US ambassador to the EU. That remained the case on Thursday. Hill reiterated earlier evidence, given behind closed doors, that John Bolton, then national security adviser, had described Giuliani as a “hand grenade that was going to blow everyone up”.Hill also repeated her claim that Bolton had said he did not want to be part of “a drug deal” that Sondland and the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, were cooking up with regard to Ukraine. She was asked what he meant by “drug deal”. She said: “I took it to mean investigations for a meeting.”Asked if she then spoke to lawyers, Hill said: “I certainly did.”Hill, widely praised by observers for her composure and expertise, gave a pithy summary of Sondland’s role. “He was being involved in a domestic political errand,” she said. “And we were being involved in national security foreign policy and those two things had just diverged … I did say to him … I do think this is all going to blow up. And here we are.”The day’s exchanges underlined how Bolton, who was fired by Trump in September, was a pivotal figure in the Ukraine affair, intensifying calls for him to come forward and give his version of events.Hill went on to express alarm about the abrupt removal of Marie Yovanovitch, the US ambassador to Ukraine, who addressed the hearing last week, and the operation of a shadow diplomatic channel involving “three amigos” including Sondland.“I was concerned about two things in particular – one was, again, the removal of our ambassador … On the second front, it was very clear at this point there was a different channel in operation: one that was domestic and political in nature.”Hill was the third immigrant to testify at the impeachment hearings. In her opening statement, she described her childhood in Britain and how she was inspired by American values.“I am an American by choice, having become a citizen in 2002,” she said. “I was born in the north-east of England, in the same region George Washington’s ancestors came from. Both the region and my family have deep ties to the United States.”Her father, a coalminer, wanted to emigrate to the US but his dream was thwarted. “Years later, I can say with confidence that this country has offered for me opportunities I never would have had in England. I grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent. In England in the 1980s and 1990s, this would have impeded my professional advancement.”The committee also heard from David Holmes, a staffer from the US embassy in Ukraine, who again expressed concerns about the role played by Giuliani in pressing for the investigations that Trump wanted.“My clear impression was that the security assistance hold was likely intended by the president either as an expression of dissatisfaction that the Ukrainians had not yet agreed to the Burisma/Biden investigation or as an effort to increase the pressure on them to do so.”Holmes testified that he overheard Sondland speak by phone to Trump about an investigation and assure him Zelenskiy would do anything he asked. “I sat directly across from Ambassador Sondland,” he said. “The president’s voice was loud and recognisable.”Not for the first time during the inquiry, Trump responded in real time on Twitter: “I have been watching people making phone calls my entire life. My hearing is, and has been, great. Never have I been watching a person making a call, which was not on speakerphone, and been able to hear or understand a conversation. I’ve even tried, but to no avail. Try it live!”The White House again sought to play down the significance of the hearings. Stephanie Grisham, the press secretary, said: “As has been the case throughout the Democrats’ impeachment sham, today’s witnesses rely heavily on their own presumptions, assumptions and opinions.”Thursday’s hearing marks the last scheduled day of hearings by the intelligence committee focused on whether Trump pressured Zelenskiy to investigate Biden, his potential challenger in next year’s election. Should Trump be impeached by the Democratic-controlled House, he will go on trial in the Republican-controlled Senate, with acquittal seeming the most likely outcome.The hearings ended with little sign of political movement. Even Will Hurd, a Republican on the verge of retirement who has spoken out against Trump in the past, said he did not favour impeachment. Nunes condemned the process as a “show trial” and sought to take a page from Democrats’ playbook by invoking one of the founding fathers, James Madison, who warned against “the tyranny of the majority”.Then Schiff delivered an impassioned final statement. “There is nothing more dangerous than an unethical president who believes they are above the law,” he said, wielding the gavel. “And I would just say to people watching at home and around the world … we are better than that.” Topics Trump impeachment inquiry Donald Trump Trump administration US politics House of Representatives Ukraine news

The U.S. Department of Justice announced today that it has obtained a Temporary Restraining Order in federal court to combat fraud related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The enforcement action, filed in Tampa, Florida, is part of the Justice Department’s ongoing efforts prioritizing the detection, investigation, and prosecution of illegal conduct related to the pandemic. The action was brought based on an investigation conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), in coordination with the Vietnam Ministry of Public Security.“The Department of Justice is committed to preventing fraudsters from exploiting this pandemic for personal gain,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Ethan P. Davis of the Department of Justice’s Civil Division. “We will use every resource at the government’s disposal to pursue scammers who are stealing money from citizens amidst the ongoing public health crisis.”“This action affirms our commitment to Attorney General Barr’s directive to prioritize fraud schemes arising out of the coronavirus pandemic,” said U.S. Attorney Maria Chapa Lopez of the Middle District of Florida. “We will continue to aggressively investigate and shut down these scams that attempt to take advantage of our fellow American citizens, who are trying to keep their families safe and healthy during these very trying times.”“Unfortunately the Global Pandemic has given criminals and criminal organizations a new opportunity to take advantage of our communities by targeting vulnerable populations through financial fraud schemes, the importation of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, and illicit websites defrauding consumers which continue to compromise legitimate trade and financial systems,” said HSI Tampa Acting Special Agent in Charge Kevin Sibley. “Through our investigations under Operation Stolen Promise, HSI will continue to disrupt and dismantle these criminal networks as well as those who are exploiting the pandemic for their own financial gain.”As detailed in the civil complaint and accompanying court papers filed on Monday, Aug. 3, 2020, Defendants Thu Phan Dinh, Tran Khanh, and Nguyen Duy Toan, all residents of Vietnam, are alleged to have engaged in a wire fraud scheme seeking to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the complaint, defendants operated more than 300 websites that fraudulently purported to sell products that became scarce during the pandemic, including hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes. Thousands of victims in all 50 states attempted to purchase these items from defendants’ websites. Victims paid for items supposedly sold through the websites but never received the purchased products. The complaint alleges that defendants set up hundreds of email accounts and accounts with a U.S.-based payment processor to effectuate the scheme and keep it hidden from law enforcement. Defendants are also alleged to have listed fraudulent contact addresses and phone numbers on the websites, causing unaffiliated individuals and businesses in the United States to receive numerous complaint calls from victims who had been defrauded by the scheme. In response to the Department’s request for injunctive relief, U.S. District Judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell issued an emergency ex parte temporary restraining order requiring that the registrar and registries of defendants’ fraudulent websites take immediate action to disable them.The United States obtained the restraining order to shutter defendants’ websites immediately while an investigation of defendants’ scheme continues. In so doing, the government is employing a federal statute that permits federal courts to issue injunctions to prevent harm to potential victims of fraudulent schemes. In response to information provided by HSI, Vietnamese authorities have also conducted their own investigation and arrested the Defendants.The Department of Justice recommends that Americans take the following precautionary measures to protect themselves from known and emerging scams related to COVID-19:Independently verify the identity of any company, charity, or individual that contacts you regarding COVID-19. Check the websites and email addresses offering information, products, or services related to COVID-19. Be aware that scammers often employ addresses that differ only slightly from those belonging to the entities they are impersonating. For example, they might use “cdc.com” or “cdc.org” instead of “cdc.gov.” Be wary of unsolicited emails offering information, supplies, or treatment for COVID-19 or requesting your personal information for medical purposes. Legitimate health authorities will not contact the general public this way. Do not click on links or open email attachments from unknown or unverified sources. Doing so could download a virus onto your computer or device. Make sure the anti-malware and anti-virus software on your computer is operating and up to date. Ignore offers from suspicious sources for a COVID-19 vaccine, cure, or treatment. Remember, if a vaccine becomes available, you won’t hear about it for the first time through an email, online ad, or unsolicited sales pitch. Check online reviews of any company offering COVID-19 products or supplies. Avoid companies whose customers have complained about not receiving items. Research any charities or crowdfunding sites soliciting donations in connection with COVID-19 before giving any donation. Remember, an organization may not be legitimate even if it uses words like “CDC” or “government” in its name or has reputable looking seals or logos on its materials. For online resources on donating wisely, visit the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) website. Be wary of any business, charity, or individual requesting payments or donations in cash, by wire transfer, gift card, or through the mail. Don’t send money through any of these channels. Be cautious of “investment opportunities” tied to COVID-19, especially those based on claims that a small company’s products or services can help stop the virus. If you decide to invest, carefully research the investment beforehand. For information on how to avoid investment fraud, visit the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) website. For the most up-to-date information on COVID-19, consumers may visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) websites. The public is urged to report suspected fraud schemes related to COVID-19 (the Coronavirus) to the National Center for Disaster Fraud (NCDF) hotline by phone at (1-866-720-5721) or via an online reporting form available at www.justice.gov/disaster-fraud/webform/ncdf-disaster-complaint-form. The enforcement action taken today is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Carolyn B. Tapie of the Middle District of Florida and Trial Attorney Kathryn A. Schmidt of the Civil Division’s Consumer Protection Branch. HSI’s Tampa office is conducting the investigation.The claims made in the complaint are allegations that, if the case were to proceed to trial, the government must prove to receive a permanent injunction against the defendants. Additional information about the Consumer Protection Branch and its enforcement efforts may be found at www.justice.gov/civil/consumer-protection-branch. For more information about the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida, visit its website at www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl. For information about the Department of Justice’s efforts to stop COVID-19 fraud, visit www.justice.gov/coronavirus.

Maria Tam Wai-chu, deputy director of the Hong Kong SAR Basic Law Committee, told a seminar in southern China: "The soldiers stationed in Hong Kong are not straw men meant to just stay in the garrison, they are an important part of the 'one country, two systems'".

The United States Justice Department on Tuesday sued Google for antitrust violations, alleging that it abused its dominance in online search and advertising to stifle competition and harm consumers.The lawsuit marks the government’s most significant act to protect competition since its groundbreaking case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. It could be an opening salvo ahead of other major government antitrust actions, given ongoing investigations of major tech companies including Apple, Amazon, and Facebook at both the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.“Google is the gateway to the internet and a search advertising behemoth,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen told reporters. “It has maintained its monopoly power through exclusionary practices that are harmful to competition.”Antitrust cases in the technology industry have to move quickly, he said. Otherwise “we could lose the next wave of innovation.”Lawmakers and consumer advocates have long accused Google, whose corporate parent Alphabet Inc. has a market value just over $1 trillion, of abusing its dominance in online search and advertising to stifle competition and boost its profits. Critics contend that multibillion-dollar fines and mandated changes in Google’s practices imposed by European regulators in recent years weren’t severe enough and that structural changes are needed for Google to change its conduct. Post-truth politics: As Trump pushes ‘fraud,’ partisans pick their own realityThe Justice Department isn’t seeking specific changes in Google’s structure or other remedies at this point, but isn’t ruling out seeking additional relief, officials said.Google responded immediately via tweet: “Today’s lawsuit by the Department of Justice is deeply flawed. People use Google because they choose to – not because they’re forced to or because they can’t find alternatives.”The case was filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. It alleges that Google uses billions of dollars collected from advertisers to pay phone manufacturers to ensure Google is the default search engine on browsers. Eleven states, all with Republican attorneys general, joined the federal government in the lawsuit.But several other states demurred. The attorneys general of New York, Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah released a statement Monday saying they have not concluded their investigation into Google and would want to consolidate their case with the DOJ’s if they decided to file. “It’s a bipartisan statement,” said spokesman Fabien Levy of the New York State attorney general’s office. “There’s things that still need to be fleshed out, basically.”President Donald Trump’s administration has long had Google in its sights. One of Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers said two years ago that the White House was considering whether Google searches should be subject to government regulation. Mr. Trump has often criticized Google, recycling unfounded claims by conservatives that the search giant is biased against conservatives and suppresses their viewpoints, interferes with U.S. elections, and prefers working with the Chinese military over the Pentagon.Mr. Rosen told reporters that allegations of anti-conservative bias are “a totally separate set of concerns” from the issue of competition.Google controls about 90% of global web searches. The company has been bracing for the government’s action and is expected to fiercely oppose any attempt to force it to spin off its services into separate businesses.The company, based in Mountain View, California, has long denied the claims of unfair competition. Google argues that although its businesses are large, they are useful and beneficial to consumers. It maintains that its services face ample competition and have unleashed innovations that help people manage their lives.Most of Google’s services are offered for free in exchange for personal information that helps it sell its ads. Google insists that it holds no special power forcing people to use its free services or preventing them from going elsewhere.A recent report from a House Judiciary subcommittee, following a year-long investigation into Big Tech’s market dominance, concluded that Google has monopoly power in the market for search. It said the company established its position in several markets through acquisition, snapping up successful technologies that other businesses had developed – buying an estimated 260 companies in 20 years.The Democratic congressman who led that investigation called Tuesday’s action “long overdue” but said it’s important for the Justice Department to look beyond Google’s search business.“It is critical that the Justice Department’s lawsuit focuses on Google’s monopolization of search and search advertising, while also targeting the anticompetitive business practices Google is using to leverage this monopoly into other areas, such as maps, browsers, video, and voice assistants,” Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island said in a statement.The DOJ “filed the strongest suit they have,” said Columbia Law professor Tim Wu, who called it almost a carbon copy of the government’s 1998 lawsuit against Microsoft. He said via email that, for that reason, the DOJ has a decent chance of winning. “However, the likely remedies – i.e., knock it off, no more making Google the default – are not particularly likely to transform the broader tech ecosystem.”The argument for reining in Google has gathered force as the company stretched far beyond its 1998 roots as a search engine governed by the motto “Don’t Be Evil.” It’s since grown into a diversified goliath with online tentacles that scoop up personal data from billions of people via services ranging from search, video, and maps to smartphone software. That data helps feed the advertising machine that has turned Google into a behemoth.The company owns the leading web browser in Chrome, the world’s largest smartphone operating system in Android, the top video site in YouTube, and the most popular digital mapping system. Some critics have singled out YouTube and Android as among Google businesses that should be considered for divestiture.With only two weeks to Election Day, the Trump Justice Department is taking bold legal action against Google on an issue of rare bipartisan agreement. Republicans and Democrats have accelerated their criticism of Big Tech in recent months, although sometimes for different reasons. It’s unclear what the status of the government’s suit against Google would be if a Joe Biden administration were to take over next year.The Justice Department sought support for its suit from states across the country that share concerns about Google’s conduct. A bipartisan coalition of 50 U.S. states and territories, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, announced a year ago they were investigating Google’s business practices, citing “potential monopolistic behavior.”Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and Texas joined the Justice Department lawsuit.This story was reported by The Associated Press. AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke contributed to this report from San Ramon, California.

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro said Tuesday he has tested positive for the new coronavirus after months of downplaying its severity while deaths mounted rapidly inside the country.The 65-year-old right-wing populist who has been known to mingle in crowds without covering his face confirmed the results while wearing a mask and speaking to reporters huddled close in front of him in the capital, Brasilia. He said he is taking hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug that he, like President Donald Trump, has been promoting even though it has not been proven effective against COVID-19.“I’m, well, normal. I even want to take a walk around here, but I can’t due to medical recommendations,” Bolsonaro said. “I thought I had it before, given my very dynamic activity. I’m president and on the combat lines. I like to be in the middle of the people.”Brazil, the world’s sixth-biggest nation, with more than 210 million people, is one of the outbreak’s most lethal hot spots. More than 65,000 Brazilians have died from COVID-19, and over 1.5 million have been infected. Both numbers are the world’s second-highest totals, behind those of the U.S., though the true figures are believed to be higher because of a lack of widespread testing. On Tuesday alone, 1,254 deaths were confirmed.Other world leaders who have had bouts with COVID-19 include British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Britain’s Prince Charles, Prince Albert II of Monaco and Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.Bolsonaro is “the democratic leader who has most denied the seriousness of this pandemic,” said Maurício Santoro, a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “Him getting infected is a blow to his credibility. It will be seen as another example of the failure of his coronavirus response.”Bolsonaro has often appeared in public to shake hands with supporters and mingle with crowds, at times without a mask. He has said that his history as an athlete would protect him from the virus and that it would be nothing more than a “little flu” if he were to contract it. ADVERTISEMENTHe has also repeatedly said that there is no way to prevent 70% of the population falling ill with COVID-19 and that local authorities’ efforts to shut down economic activity would ultimately cause more hardship than allowing the virus to run its course. For nearly two months, Brazil’s fight against COVID-19 has been in the hands of an interim health minister with no health experience before April. He took over after his predecessor, a doctor and health care consultant, quit in protest over Bolsonaro’s support for hydroxychloroquine.Bolsonaro on Tuesday likened the virus to a rain that will fall on most people and said that some, like the elderly, must take greater care.“You can’t just talk about the consequences of the virus that you have to worry about. Life goes on. Brazil needs to produce. You need to get the economy in gear,″ he said. Brazilian cities and states last month began lifting restrictions that had been imposed to control the spread of the virus, as deaths began to decline along with the caseload in intensive care units.Bolsonaro supporter Silas Ribeiro said on the streets of Rio that the president is correct in saying the dangers of the virus have been exaggerated.“Our president is a popular man. He is showing that he isn’t afraid to die,” said Ribeiro, 59. “He is going to have health and get through this sickness.”Speaking near recently reopened shops in Rio, Wesley Morielo said he hopes Bolsonaro’s sickness prompts him to reassess his stance.“I think everything he said before, of not giving importance to COVID-19, came back against him,″ said Morielo, a 24-year-old student.The World Health Organization’s emergencies chief, Dr. Michael Ryan, wished Bolsonaro a speedy recovery and said his infection “brings home the reality of this virus” by showing that it doesn’t distinguish between “prince or pauper.”The president told reporters he underwent a lung X-ray on Monday after experiencing fever, muscle aches and malaise. As of Tuesday, his fever had subsided, he said, and he attributed the improvement to hydroxychloroquine.He stepped back from the journalists and removed his mask at one point to show that he looks well. Brazil’s benchmark Ibovespa stock index fell after Bolsonaro’s announcement, and closed 1.2% down on the day.Bolsonaro has repeatedly visited the hospital since taking office, requiring several operations to repair his intestines after he was stabbed on the campaign trail in 2018.He said on Tuesday that he canceled a trip this week to the country’s northeast region and will continue working via videoconference and receive rare visitors when he needs to sign a document.Unlike Britain’s prime minister, who moderated his rhetoric after testing positive for the virus, Bolsonaro will probably not change his stance, said Leandro Consentino, a political science professor at Insper, a university in Sao Paulo. “He’s going down a path of trying to indicate to his base of support that COVID-19 is just a little flu and take advantage of the illness to advertise for chloroquine,” Consentino said.On Tuesday afternoon, Bolsonaro posted a video to Facebook of him taking his dose of hydroxychloroquine. “I trust hydroxychloroquine. What do you think?” he said while laughing.Over the weekend, the Brazilian leader celebrated American Independence Day with the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, then shared pictures on social media showing him in close quarters with the diplomat, several ministers and aides. None wore masks.The U.S. Embassy said on Twitter that Ambassador Todd Chapman is not showing any symptoms but would be tested.Bolsonaro tested negative three times in March after meeting with the Trump in Florida. Members of his delegation to the U.S. were later reported to be infected.___AP video producer Diarlei Rodrigues contributed to this report from Rio.

transcriptListen to ‘The Daily’: The Articles of ImpeachmentHosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak and Michael Simon Johnson, and edited by Dave Shaw and Lisa TobinHouse Democrats appear united in their charge that the president abused his power and obstructed Congress. Behind the scenes, this wasn’t always the case.michael barbaroFrom The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”Today: House Democratic leaders have introduced two articles of impeachment against President Trump, charging him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. My colleague Nick Fandos on the unseen fight among Democrats over whether two articles of impeachment was enough. It’s Wednesday, December 11.Nick, how would you characterize the impeachment inquiry that we have all watched playing out over the past few weeks?nicholas fandosSo in an odd sense, there has been, for the last month or so, an air of inevitability about this inquiry, since Democrats decided to take it in the public and began holding fact-finding hearings, writing a written report that they released to the public, talking about the president’s pressure campaign on Ukraine. It seemed to all of us watching this closely that it was only going to end in one place, and that was with the impeachment of the president of the United States. But at the same time, privately, behind the scenes, there was a debate going on about one of the most fundamental unanswered questions about this. What exactly were they going to charge the president with? What was the case against him going to encompass?michael barbaroRight. What would be the articles of impeachment?nicholas fandosThat’s right, the constitutional term for charges, prosecutorial charges brought by the House against the president.michael barbaroAnd what exactly is this debate? I mean, if there have been public hearings, if there has been a report, and if there’s a unified front on just about everything leading up to that, what exactly is the debate?nicholas fandosWell, so, to answer that question, you have to go back a little ways to the summer and early fall, before most of us ever heard about Ukraine and what Rudy Giuliani or President Trump were trying to accomplish there, when the debate in Congress as it had to do with impeachment was really centered on another set of facts, on another country, on another report, and that was —archived recording 1Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the investigating —archived recording 2Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.archived recording 3Special Counsel Robert Mueller.nicholas fandos— Bob Mueller, the special counsel, and his report on Russian election interference in the 2016 campaign and whether or not President Trump had illegally obstructed justice when he tried through various means to try and undercut or thwart that investigation.michael barbaroI remember that. We did a few episodes on the subject.nicholas fandosWe did, although it’s easy to forget now. But Democrats spent months with Mueller’s report. There was very serious evidence before them that the president had, for instance, instructed his White House counsel to fire Mueller early in the investigation, had tried to instruct his attorney general to take control of the investigation again and curtail it so the president wasn’t in its sights. But as week after week went by, they struggled to figure out how to make it urgent, how to bring it to life, because the report, frankly, didn’t come to firm conclusions itself about legality. It was written in this kind of dense style that’s hard to penetrate for most people. And so the issue, as much as they tried, never quite caught on with the public.archived recording (veronica escobar)That process other than the criminal justice system for accusing a president of wrongdoing, is that impeachment?nicholas fandosThey put on a series of hearings, including with Mueller himself —archived recording (robert mueller)I’m not going to comment on that.nicholas fandos— and still couldn’t unite their caucus around moving towards impeachment on this issue. And you started to see a not insubstantial number of Democrats who felt fervently that they should move forward with impeachment even if the public wasn’t fully on board with this.michael barbaroMm-hmm.nicholas fandosBut enough were holding back that there was no way they were going to have the votes to make that happen, and Speaker Pelosi wasn’t going to fully let that happen. So that was basically the state of affairs this fall when, out of nowhere, an anonymous whistle-blower complaint fell into the lap of the House Intelligence Committee and, within a couple of weeks, turned out to be what we now know as the “Ukraine affair.”michael barbaroRight. And this suddenly unites just about all Democrats. It’s different.nicholas fandosIt’s remarkable. In a very short period of time, you have moderate Democrats who were opposed, vocally opposed, to moving forward with an impeachment investigation based on the grounds of the Mueller report coming forward and enthusiastically volunteering not only that they’re O.K. with an inquiry, but if these charges, these suspicions are proven out to be true, they think the president should be outright impeached, that they should take the next step and go all the way there. And so there is an active group of progressive lawmakers that still want to see the Mueller case live on, that don’t want to completely set it aside. They’re forced to move that to the back burner for the two months that it ends up taking to investigate what really went down between the president and Ukraine.archived recording (nancy pelosi)Therefore, today, I’m announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.michael barbaroAnd so, Nick, how does all of this that you have just told us relate to the question of, what would be the articles of impeachment brought against President Trump?nicholas fandosSo as the facts of the Ukraine investigation become clearer, as they begin to crystallize as time goes on, the debate starts to naturally shift towards, O.K., so now, what are we going to do about it? We figured out what happened. What do we want to charge the president with? And as that discussion begins to happen around Ukraine articles, it becomes a natural time to say, hey, we’ve got this other thing, these developed set of facts, this investigation. It’s sitting on the back burner, good to go. Do we want to bring that in and marry it up? And in part, that’s a natural discussion as this process goes on, because there’s enough similarity between what’s being alleged in the Ukraine investigation, and particularly President Trump’s attempts to obstruct the House’s impeachment investigation with the earlier Mueller case, and the president trying to conceal his actions from another investigator.michael barbaroRight.nicholas fandosBut as this process moves forward and comes back into the House Judiciary Committee, which is the panel that traditionally is tasked with drawing up articles of impeachment, with drawing up the charges to recommend what the House ought to do about it, this becomes a very live issue. This isn’t just academic anymore, because they have to decide in a matter of a couple weeks, what are we going to charge the president with? And so it’s in that context in the last couple of weeks that Speaker Nancy Pelosi starts to more directly turn to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee, her kind of top lieutenants in the House, to start debating this problem. And it really culminates in a meeting in the speaker’s office last Thursday.michael barbaroWe’ll be right back.So, Nick, what happens last Thursday?archived recording (nancy pelosi)The president has engaged in abuse of power, undermining our national security and jeopardizing the integrity of our election.nicholas fandosSo Thursday morning, as you may remember, Speaker Pelosi goes out before television cameras, and addresses the nation, and says —archived recording (nancy pelosi)The facts are uncontested.nicholas fandosAt this point, we have seen enough evidence.archived recording (nancy pelosi)Today, I am asking our chairmen to proceed with articles of impeachment.nicholas fandosAnd I’m directing my House chairmen to begin drafting articles of impeachment.michael barbaroMm-hmm.nicholas fandosWell, a few hours later, Pelosi meets with those chairmen in her office suite. It’s already decorated for Christmas. They all sit around a wooden dining room table. There’s a portrait of Abraham Lincoln looking down at them. And here are the key players sitting around that table — there’s Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who oversaw the earlier investigation into Bob Mueller’s findings and was the one leading the push towards discussing impeachment around it. He’s the one who’s now going to be tasked with having to move these articles over the finish line. There’s Richie Neal. He’s the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Democrat from Massachusetts, who is going after the president’s tax returns, as it happens, but doesn’t have a particular dog in this fight. There’s Maxine Waters of California from the Financial Services Committee; Carolyn Maloney, the new Oversight Committee chairwoman; Eliot Engel, who’s the Foreign Affairs chairman, other New Yorker; and then Adam Schiff, the Intelligence Committee chairman who led the Ukraine investigation and really had been the face of the impeachment inquiry for its first two months or so. So it’s clear pretty quickly that this group is divided about exactly how they ought to go forward.michael barbaroHmm.nicholas fandosSo Jerry Nadler speaks up. And he basically lays out a case for three articles of impeachment. Two of those have to do with Ukraine. And they are that the president abused the power of his office by pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rivals for his own personal gain, that he conditioned official government acts to help himself, and then that he tried to conceal what had happened from Congress and took extraordinary steps to obstruct their impeachment inquiry. But then a third count of obstruction of justice based on the findings of the Mueller report.michael barbaroSo he wants to bring back the Mueller report.nicholas fandosExactly. And what he argues is, it’s important that we show a pattern of conduct by the president. Because what he was doing towards Ukraine and the efforts that he’s taken to try and conceal that scheme from Congress, that’s not completely new. Yes, the facts are unique to that case, but we’ve seen this president disregarding the rule of law, disregarding accountability, flagrantly messing with foreign countries as it relates to elections for a long time now, and I think our case is potentially strengthened if we build it out in that way. And by the way, we did a lot of work on this question of obstruction of justice, and it’s not good. And what message would it send if the House of Representatives were to impeach this president and not charge him based on that conduct?michael barbaroRight.nicholas fandosDoes that set a precedent in and of itself?michael barbaroRight. And perhaps he just didn’t want to see all that work tossed aside.nicholas fandosYeah, I think that that’s a possibility too. And Nadler gets some backup from some of the other chairs in the room. But then Richie Neal from Massachusetts speaks up. And he says something interesting. He says, we’d do well to remember what happened in 1998 when the Republicans, then in the House majority, impeached another president, Bill Clinton. And they recommended — the Judiciary Committee recommended four articles of impeachment on the House floor. But the Republicans couldn’t all hold together. And two of them failed, casting a kind of odd shadow over their case just as it headed to the Senate for a trial. And his argument essentially was, we ought to bring forward our strongest case and the case that unites us. We don’t want to run risks of putting up articles that might fail on the floor or bring down the strength of what we think this Ukraine case offers. And he’s thinking very much in his mind back to that debate during the summer and the early fall where Democrats really were not united around obstruction of justice and, I think, is fearful that that could happen on the floor and embarrass Democrats.michael barbaroSo the fear that he’s identifying here is not that the third article of impeachment would fail when it gets to the Republican-controlled Senate, but that it actually might fail in the Democratically-controlled House.nicholas fandosRight. And that if it did, it would in some ways undermine the kind of seriousness of the Democrats’ whole case. Because if they’re already expecting not to pick up any Republican votes and this is going to be a party-line impeachment, it looks a heck of a lot worse if you see some Democrats saying, eh, we don’t even necessarily agree with all of these charges. And when many of those Democrats who were opposed to pursuing impeachment based on the Mueller grounds came out in favor of an impeachment inquiry around Ukraine, they made very clear that there was a distinction in their minds.michael barbaroMm-hmm.nicholas fandosAnd as this process has gotten closer towards the drafting of articles of impeachment, they’ve started popping back up and reminding any reporter that wants to listen that they still view those things as something different. And so Neal is cluing in on something very specific and very real here, and it resonates with others in the room. And then there’s Adam Schiff, the Intelligence Committee chairman. And his argument is that after two months of fact-finding, this Ukraine matter that he’s been scrutinizing is something of a higher order, that is so urgent — has to do with the president’s behavior right now and affecting an ongoing election — that they really ought not let that get bogged down with earlier, hard-fought debates and an older set of facts, that it’s important to make the case to the American people that this is something different and the lights are flashing right now. And that is why the House is acting and why it’s justified in acting, i.e. voting on articles of impeachment. So with all of these different arguments swirling in the air and through a bunch of other conversations with her individual members, Speaker Pelosi is trying to make a final decision about how to go forward.People who are close to her say that she was always reticent to proceed on an obstruction of justice ground. But she wanted to hear out these arguments and see where her caucus was. But as time went on, it became clear that she identified with the arguments that people like Schiff and Neal were making and some of these freshmen moderate lawmakers were telling her directly, which is, we see Ukraine as something different. We really think this is where our attention ought to be focused. And so with all of that in mind, she begins to guide this group towards a narrower set of charges just around Ukraine, towards jettisoning obstruction of justice for now.michael barbaroSo she is moving Democrats toward two articles of impeachment, not three.nicholas fandosThat’s right. So by the end of the meeting last Thursday, the group, reluctantly for some, more enthusiastically for others, arrives at a kind of loose though not quite final agreement that it’s going to be two articles of impeachment, that they’re going to charge the president of the United States most likely with abuse of power and with obstruction of Congress, both having to do with Ukraine.michael barbaroAnd that means that Mueller is basically over as a matter of impeachment.nicholas fandosSo they arrive at a small workaround, at a kind of gesture at these earlier investigations, including in each of the articles that Democrats ultimately draft language that points back to earlier attempts by President Trump to solicit foreign interference and to obstruct United States government investigations. But that’s as far as they go. They never mention Bob Mueller. They don’t mention obstruction of justice in particular. And so if we saw this — what was once a pretty hot debate moved onto the back burner earlier this fall, it seems now that they’re turning off the stove on it, that for all intents and purposes what was pretty compelling evidence to a lot of lawmakers is basically going to go without an explicit and specified consequence for the president. Now, there are some who will argue that we may not be where we are today, that the House wouldn’t have been ready to impeach Donald Trump on the Ukraine episode, on the Ukraine scheme, if this hadn’t come first, if they hadn’t seen the president behave in the ways that the Mueller report chronicled. But that may be in the eye of the beholder.michael barbaroSo that pattern was meaningful for them. But in order to get to Ukraine and make Ukraine stick, something is sacrificed. And that is the Mueller investigation.nicholas fandosThat’s right. And they want to be able to tell the larger story, to situate what happened in Ukraine in a larger story. But at the end of the day, what they decide is that we’re just going to charge the president based on what happened in these particular episodes.michael barbaroAnd that, of course, brings us to Tuesday morning.archived recording (nancy pelosi)Good morning, everyone. On this solemn day, I recall that the first order of business for members of Congress is the solemn act to take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.nicholas fandosTuesday morning at 9:00 a.m., after staffers for the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee stayed up overnight finalizing, tweaking these articles of impeachment, the six chairs that had gathered in Speaker Pelosi’s office over and over again met up with her, and they all gathered in a wood-paneled reception room just off the floor of the United States House chamber. They had four American flags behind them and a portrait of George Washington. And the speaker introduced the subject.archived recording (nancy pelosi)I also want to thank the staff of those committees and the committee members for all of their work over this period of time to help us protect and defend. Now pleased to yield to distinguished chair of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Nadler.nicholas fandosAnd then Chairman Nadler came forth and said —archived recording (jerry nadler)Thank you, Madam Speaker. Over the last several months, the investigative committees of the House have been engaged in an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s efforts to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 elections.nicholas fandosHere today, we have decided to pursue charges against the president of the United States for high crimes and misdemeanors. And he weighed out two counts, abuse of power —archived recording (jerry nadler)That is exactly what President Trump did when he solicited and pressured Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 presidential election.nicholas fandos— and obstruction of Congress.archived recording (jerry nadler)A president who declares himself above accountability, above the American people, and above Congress’s power of impeachment, which is meant to protect against threats to our Democratic institutions, is a president who sees himself as above the law. We must be clear. No one, not even the president, is above the law. I want to recognize the great contributions of the investigative chairs, particularly —nicholas fandosAnd with that, President Trump has now become just the fourth president in American history to be staring down his likely impeachment by the House of Representatives for high crimes and misdemeanors.[music]michael barbaroNick, thank you.nicholas fandosThank you, Michael.archived recording (donald trump)Now, after two and a half years, now that the Russia witch hunt is dead, a big, fat, disgusting fraud, the congressional Democrats are pushing the impeachment witch hunt having to do with Ukraine.michael barbaroOn Tuesday night, during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, President Trump mocked the articles of impeachment that Democrats plan to bring against him, specifically mentioning that there were just two of them.archived recording (donald trump)This is impeachment lite. This is the lightest impeachment in the history of our country by far. It’s not even like an impeachment. These people are stone-cold crooked. But today, the —michael barbaroWe’ll be right back.Here’s what else you need to know today.archived recording (nancy pelosi)This is a day we’ve all been working to and working for on the path to yes.michael barbaroDespite the rancor over impeachment, the president and House Democrats reached a rare agreement on Tuesday over a new trade deal between the U.S., Mexico and Canada that would replace Nafta.archived recording (nancy pelosi)There is no question, of course, that this trade agreement is much better than Nafta.michael barbaroThe Democrats said they had won key concessions from the White House, adding a provision that allows Mexican workers to unionize and removing a measure that allowed pharmaceutical companies to charge higher prices for prescription drugs. The agreement now has the support of all three countries involved and is expected to quickly become law.That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

In the 1980s, under the Reagan administration’s lax enforcement of antitrust laws, corporate mergers in the U.S. began to jump. Since then, the market power of America’s biggest corporations has only continued to increase, with this result: A tiny number of companies dominate slews of major industries—from pharmaceuticals and retailers to hospitals and meat processors to defense contractors and social media, to many, many others. This issue was thrown into stark relief during the pandemic when behemoths such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Walmart saw their market values skyrocket while smaller companies all over the country went bankrupt.Zephyr Teachout contends that monopoly is the forgotten issue of our time.Monopoly, argues the law professor and former New York congressional and gubernatorial candidate, is a key driver of modern society’s biggest problems, such as low wages, income inequality, financial speculation, restrictions to worker freedom, declining entrepreneurship, and racism.With her new book, Break Em’ Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money, Teachout seeks to make anti-monopoly a top issue for progressives again. I recently spoke to her by phone about how the Left has missed the monopoly problem, why her book is more about power than economics, and why we need to strive for a “fuck off” economy.In your introduction, you write that humans have a drive for power that must be checked or tyranny will result. Why did you start like this?So many questions about politics, power and the economy are really questions about human nature. When we treat Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg as only about the bottom line, we’re misunderstanding motivations. It’s much more than greed. As I write in the book, these are “William the Conqueror” types. They're out to accumulate power. We need to confront that if we’re going to deal with those pathologies.You’ve called monopolies “private systems of government.” What did you mean by that?Certain companies basically regulate us in totally unaccountable ways. So they’re acting like governments in the scope of their power. When Zuckerberg makes privacy decisions, we treat it like a governmental action and the impact is as great or greater than a federal law. But our response is to petition Facebook instead of saying, “Let’s change privacy law altogether for this essential infrastructure.” We need to acknowledge their power and then say this is not a legitimate form of government.“Our 40-year merger wave has led to the decimation of Black businesses.”Republicans tout increased competition as the key to a well-functioning market. Why would the age of mega-mergers, which restrict competition, begin under Reagan?The ideology that Reagan, William Baxter, and Edwin Meese ushered in says that mergers are good if they benefit consumer welfare. That basically means lower prices. But a major purpose of anti-monopoly law is to constrain tyrannical private power, and they basically stripped that out. Monopolization used to be thought of as a form of theft, like highway robbery. But since the ’80s we’ve moved away from thinking about it like that.It’s interesting that changing antitrust policies was tied to their mass incarceration and anti-civil rights agenda. Why? Perhaps they wanted a white-controlled, top down society with more mergers. Maybe it was more of a bargain in that they were able to sell the corporate agenda to working class whites who were hungry for dog-whistle politics. It’s a question that needs more exploration.How does monopoly power drive racism?A lot of monopoly power is white power. Look at the Fortune 500: the farther up you go, the whiter the club becomes. The impact of mergers has been to erase a lot of Black economic power by wiping out Black-owned newspapers, funeral homes, and insurance companies. That matters in elections and it matters in protests. It was essential that the civil rights movement had Black businesses supporting it. There’s more to study in this area, but when you see that our 40-year merger wave has led to the decimation of Black businesses, that’s not irrelevant to contemporary politics.You spend a lot of time discussing surveillance and argue that we should ban “surveillance capitalism.” Why?So much of modern life involves centralized power surveilling us. It changes our relationship to each other, to power, and increases paranoia. But we discuss surveillance like it’s a passive fact of technology instead of understanding that we can change it. We should not allow a surveillance-based funding model for any platform that’s infrastructure-like. Amazon, Facebook, and Google are essential communications infrastructure, and it’s crazy to fund infrastructure with targeted ads. The incentives are not to provide a neutral platform, not to provide good information, but to push what’s inflammatory without regard to truth. We have better ways to fund infrastructure. I prefer a fee-for-service model but the state could pay for it.“Fear is a fact of life for so many small businesses right now.”The plight of chicken farmers is an important thread in your book. You argue that “chickenization” is spreading as a new model of centralized control.The system that Tyson, Perdue, and others innovated looks like farmers competing in a decentralized market but it is, in fact, completely controlled by distributors. Tyson contracts with chicken farmers and the only way they can get their goods to market is if they follow the dictates of Tyson: Use the advisers recommended by Tyson, the feed Tyson gives them, the eggs Tyson gives them, and they’re forced to sign arbitration agreements that mandate any conflicts stay out of court. They’re also prohibited from talking to other farmers about this. So instead of a competitive market, you have one where Tyson is the puppeteer. Tyson could say “This week let’s give some farmers worse feed and see what happens.”You say that experimentation is a common feature of “chickenization.”We’re in a system that encourages the abuse of power to maximize profit. One of the goals of centralized control is to instill fear. Fear is a fact of life for so many small businesses right now. Whether you’re talking about franchisees who run their own McDonald’s, or restaurant owners getting sucked into the platform control of Seamless and Uber. Experimentation is part of that control. We know that Uber experiments on drivers. Pearson experimented on students by adding different psychological messaging to some versions of its tests. Facebook constantly experiments to see how our moods affect behavior.You mention Perdue. Sonny Perdue is the current secretary of agriculture. Is this not a blatant case of the foxes guarding the henhouse? The GOP has a long history, going back at least as far as Earl Butz under Nixon, of appointing agriculture secretaries who are mouthpieces for agribusiness.Yes, this is wrong and important. In theory, there are two ways that monopolies are taking over government: directly, by regulating and controlling us; and indirectly, by buying politicians. Sonny Perdue is an example of how these bleed into each other. He is part of a growing social, political, and economic club that rules us in different ways. We sometimes call the lower level version of this club the “revolving door,” but revolving door is too benign a description: it’s an elite power club, whose members are ideologically committed to their own superiority and their right to use their power to extract power from the rest of us. As you point out, this is, in a sense, nothing new. But what is new is that 40 years into this system, the combination of forms of power has worn people down, and gradually replaced the planks of the good ship democracy—some of which are always rotten—with the new corporate ship.You describe Uber’s entry into New York as blatant predatory behavior that used to be illegal. How did they get away with it?Because of the glamor that surrounds tech and the language of disruption. A lot of disruption is just law breaking. But we’ve allowed Big Tech to get away with it by adding glamor. A friend of mine, Tom Streeter, wrote about how one of the great cons in modern American history was when the language of the ’60s got embedded in techno-utopianism. This hippie, we’re-all-connected language allows these rapacious companies to cloak what they basically are: the mafia coming to town, breaking the laws, and then changing the laws.You argue that the Left has failed to understand the magnitude of the concentration problem. Why have they missed it?The Left has focused on other things, like after-the-fact taxation. I agree we should have wealth taxes and the rich should pay their share, but that’s not ambitious enough. We should not accept that these companies make money by effectively stealing from workers and producers. Also, the Left has bought into a consumer model. In the book I talk about the danger of seeing our central role as consumers as opposed to citizens. Instead of organizing boycotts, we should talk about certain corporations as illegitimate.You say your goal is to reach a “moral economy.” What does that look like?For starters, markets without profit maximization being their driving ideology. I’m also talking about financialization, which is the power behind monopolies. Warren Buffet was once asked what’s the best business to invest in and he said “monopolies!” So embracing markets that allow businesses to pay their workers decently instead of markets that drive towards sucking every penny out of workers and giving them to shareholders. People should have autonomy in their work lives. For many that will still mean working for someone else, but you have autonomy if you know you can get another job.You call that the “Fuck off economy.”Exactly. You’re like, “OK, I’m choosing this job. It kind of sucks but if I wanted to, I could say ‘fuck off.’” That changes every interaction with your boss. Business owners should also have autonomy. I know a lot of small business owners and some want to maximize profit but some don’t. A moral economy is one where they can say, “I want to make enough profit where I can take a few weeks vacation and treat my workers well. But I don’t want to feel like I’ve succeeded only when I’ve squeezed everybody that I’m engaged with to the maximum degree.” Which is what our current system pushes them to do.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and RuPaul Charles are cousins, and they both have nothing but nice things to say about one another. The “RuPaul’s Drag Race” host participated in the latest season of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” which explores the “DNA of American culture” by analyzing and comparing DNA codes to trace celebrities’ connections and ancestry. A deep dive into RuPaul’s genetics reveals that he and Booker, who was on Season 1 of the series, share a long stretch of identical DNA. “He looks like my kin,” RuPaul said when learning the news in an episode that aired earlier this month. “There’s a sweetness about him that I’ve always loved and an intellect that’s undeniable. But every time I’ve ever seen him, he reminds me of my cousin Yula.” On “The Wendy Williams Show” on Tuesday, Booker said he “told everybody that would listen in my world” about the news. “So yeah, my mom knows, I just, I love RuPaul, and I haven’t had a chance to talk to him since the news was revealed but I was very happy about that news and I hope that he and I can have a family reunion sometime.” The two cousins have even met up before. Last year, Booker, who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination at the time, appeared on the drag icon’s talk show “RuPaul.” — Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) June 12, 2019 Watch Booker’s sweet reaction below. And see RuPaul finding out the news here. Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost

Boris Johnson has banned himself from using the phrase “special relationship” to describe Britain’s longstanding links with the United States: it sounds, he says, “a bit needy”. But as Donald Trump’s White House lurches from one crisis to the next – the latest being his remarks about migrants from “shithole” countries – Britain’s foreign secretary has no intention of distancing himself from the controversial president.“It’s a crucial relationship, and it’s a very positive relationship,” he enthuses, speaking to the Guardian on Monday morning over tea in the opulent surroundings of the Foreign Office, as he prepared to fly to Vancouver for an international meeting on North Korea.Hardly immune from the odd ill-chosen comment himself, Johnson adds that when he meets Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, at the summit, he will remind him of the open invitation for a state visit.“I think that we will have a visit in due course,” he says, adding that Guardian readers ready to pick up their placards and protest, “should understand that America, for better or worse, in our lifetimes, has incarnated values of liberty and fairness and freedom around the world, and it still does”.Asked whether Trump represents those values, he adds: “Let us have a grown-up conversation with our American friends about the things we want to do together.”Johnson’s shadow, Emily Thornberry, has described Trump as an “asteroid of awfulness”; when Jeremy Corbyn was asked by ITV’s Robert Peston on Sunday whether the relationship with the US was Britain’s most important, he said, “No. I think there are many important relationships.”But Johnson hits back: “For Jeremy Corbyn to say that this relationship doesn’t matter, is I think insanity, and irresponsible. And to try to banish the president of the United States from visiting the UK when he’s had trips to France, to Germany, to Japan, to China, is, I think, for the Labour party extremely odd.”He has struck up a warm relationship with Tillerson (“Rex”), and it is clear Johnson will be in Vancouver to back Tillerson’s approach to North Korea, rather than validating Trump’s twitter spats with Kim Jong-un.“The approach that Rex Tillerson has been taking has been entirely right, which is to build an international consensus,” he says. “Kim Jong-un, the language that he has used: destroying not just parts of his neighbours but parts of the United States; his incipient ability to launch a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile – a threat of the kind the world has not known since the dawn of the atomic age. “We have a genuine possibility of a rogue state capable of nuclear blackmail and capable of nuclear destruction. I think that’s something that we cannot ignore.”He suggests China will have an important role to play in bringing North Korea in from the cold. “In the end, the people who can really solve the problem are the Chinese.” He adds: “I think one of the reasons for being optimistic about the world generally is, there are places around the world where you can see the Chinese ability to play a positive role in global diplomacy, and increasing Chinese interest in doing that.”The shifting balance of diplomatic power is the stuff of high politics, of a kind that has long preoccupied the foreign secretaries who have occupied this vast, ornate office overlooking Horse Guards Parade.But today, Johnson also wants to talk about his latest preoccupation, which is on an altogether more domestic scale: advancing women’s education around the world.“I genuinely think, having done this job now for 18 months, having been to about 62 countries, having seen many of the problems of the world much more clearly than I ever saw them before, I really think that that is the number one challenge that we have – and also the biggest opportunity to transform the world,” he says.He argues that providing girls with 12 years of good-quality education is “the Swiss army knife, the universal spanner” to tackle a range of problems, from radicalisation to poverty – and in particular, population growth. “You open it up and it’s got all the tools,” he says.“All the evidence is that if you educate a girl in sub-Saharan Africa, broadly speaking, you will reduce the family size by roughly half – and that in the end is going to make a big, big difference to humanity.”He brushes off the idea that by advocating women’s education as a tool for tackling overpopulation, Britain could be accused of arrogance, or even neo-imperialism, saying, “I think sometimes we’ve got to be very frank about our ambitions.”And he adds: “In societies where young men do not think of women as equals, they don’t think of them as economic equals, they’re more likely to be prone to ideas that I think are deeply damaging – radicalisation and all the rest of it.”Global development is not formally part of Johnson’s brief. Tony Blair created the Department for International Development in 1997 to prevent aid spending being used as a tool of Britain’s foreign policy.But Johnson’s department has long wanted to exert influence over DfID’s considerably larger spending power. His may be one of the great offices of state, but spending cuts mean that by 2020-21, the Foreign Office budget is due to be almost a tenth that of DfID’s.Quick GuideBoris Johnson's errors of judgmentShowNazanin Zaghari-RatcliffeBoris Johnson said that the British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, convicted of spying in Iran, was “simply teaching people journalism” – a statement her family and her employer both said was untrue. His comments were subsequently cited as proof that she was engaged in “propaganda against the regime”.'Dead bodies'After Johnson suggested that the Libyan city of Sirte might become a new Dubai once “the dead bodies” were removed, Downing Street said it was not “an appropriate choice of words”.MyanmarThe foreign secretary was accused of “incredible insensitivity” after it emerged he recited part of a colonial-era Rudyard Kipling poem in front of local dignitaries while on an official visit to Myanmar.Whisky sourJohnson apologised after causing a “livid” reaction in a worshipper in a Sikh temple in Bristol by discussing his enthusiasm for ending tariffs on whisky traded between the UK and India. Alcohol is forbidden under some Sikh teachings.Continental driftBoris Johnson referred to Africa as “that country” in his Conservative party conference speech.Tweet like TrumpThe foreign secretary suggested he wished he could tweet like Donald Trump, despite intense criticism of the US president’s use of Twitter, on which he has launched personal attacks against his foes.And with Brexit permanently branded on his political CV, Johnson is keen to show that he is a liberal internationalist, not a Little Englander – or, as some of his Conservative colleagues see him, a dilettante.The past two years have been bruising and strewn with missteps, from his fumbled remarks about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British citizen imprisoned in Iran, to toting the Libyan city of Sirte as a potential tourist resort once they “clear the dead bodies away”.He says he is working closely with the new international development secretary, Penny Mordaunt – and Britain’s push for women’s education will involve both aid spending and diplomacy.“We are going to put it at the heart of everything we do, and we are campaigning for 12 years of quality education for every girl. That’s the ambition. And it’s the men who run the countries who are not doing enough to emphasise it,” he says.“We already provide the funding for about a million girls, and we have various ambitions which we’re going to announce at the Commonwealth summit in April. It’s the 12-year plan at the heart of the Commonwealth summit, and we’re trying to think of a logo. Twelve years is the strapline.”

Activists targeted several 'smart' lamp-posts equipped with sensors, cameras and data networks in anti-surveillance protests over the weekend. Protesters, many of whom disguised their identities with masks and umbrellas, fear the devices can be used by China to collect personal information. Authorities insist the lamp-posts only collect air quality, traffic and weather data Hong Kong riot police beat protesters at anti-surveillance rally

WASHINGTON ― Explosive testimony from a hotelier who turned a $1 million inaugural donation into a glamorous ambassadorship has largely left the White House with a single defense of President Donald Trump: that coercing foreign leaders into investigating a political rival is completely legal and not at all impeachable. Trump, his White House staff and his allies have for weeks been pointing to a Sept. 9 text message from Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union, to his State Department colleagues, describing a phone conversation he’d had with Trump: “The president has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind.” But in an impeachment hearing Wednesday before the House Intelligence Committee, Sondland testified that not only was there a quid pro quo with Ukraine, but virtually every top official in the Trump administration was well aware of it. “Was there a quid pro quo? As I testified previously … the answer is yes,” Sondland said in his opening statement, which heavily revised what he had told lawmakers in closed-door testimony on Oct. 17. “Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret.” Sondland’s appearance Wednesday also confirmed testimony by several other witnesses that $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine was being blocked by the White House until the new Ukrainian president announced investigations into two matters: alleged corruption by the Democrat Trump most feared in 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden, and a debunked conspiracy theory falsely claiming that Russia had not helped Trump win the 2016 election but that Ukrainian officials had planted false evidence implicating Russia. All this material will likely make it more difficult for Trump’s defenders in the Senate, should there eventually be a trial on impeachment charges, to argue that Trump did not withhold official benefits to Ukraine in return for politically useful favors to himself, former prosecutors said. “His best remaining argument is that what he did was wrongful but should not result in his removal from office,” said Renato Mariotti, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago. Andrew Harnik/AP Photo Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, testifies before the House Intelligence Committee on Nov. 20, 2019. The White House has struggled to settle on a coherent defense of Trump’s actions, at first arguing that the impeachment process itself was flawed and therefore unfair to Trump. Then, the main thrust became that Trump has a legitimate interest in ensuring that U.S. taxpayer money is not wasted in countries with rampant corruption ― but that was undermined by the lack of any record of Trump criticizing corruption in instances other than the allegations about Biden’s son’s work with a Ukrainian natural gas company. This could leave the White House pushing the most basic argument: that Trump as president has broad authority to set foreign policy, even if it benefits him personally. This argument has been made by outside White House allies as well as Republicans on Capitol Hill. “The president can meet with whoever he wants to meet for good reason or no reason at all,” said Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn. One White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Trump has been denied the opportunity to participate in the proceedings. “We don’t have to accept as compelling evidence testimony from any witness we haven’t been able to cross-examine. The president has been denied all levels of due process,” the official said. On Wednesday, despite all the witness testimony to the contrary, Trump personally continued repeating his claim that he did not try to coerce Ukraine to help him damage Biden. He read from handwritten notes before boarding a helicopter, repeating what he said he’d told Sondland in a September phone call: “‘I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky’ ― President Zelensky ― ‘to do the right thing.’ So here’s my answer: ‘I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.’” If a mobster, caught in the act of kneecapping a victim, were to tell the cops: ‘I am definitely not committing an extortive act under Title 18, United States Code, section 1951,’ it likely would not be an overly persuasive line of defense. Danya Perry, a former federal prosecutor in New York City Republicans in the impeachment hearing, meanwhile, continued to make a separate argument ― that the entire question is moot because the aid was ultimately delivered. “The fact is the aid was given to Ukraine without any announcement of new investigations,” said Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York. “They got the money, they got the money. God bless America, it all worked out, right?” added Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said their argument made no sense, given that the military aid was only released after the White House learned that a whistleblower complaint on the matter was about to make its way to Congress, despite White House attempts to block it. “Getting caught is no defense,” said Schiff. Danya Perry, a former federal prosecutor in New York City, said the Republicans’ related argument that Trump could not have committed bribery or extortion because he never used those words is similarly nonsensical. “If a mobster, caught in the act of kneecapping a victim, were to tell the cops: ‘I am definitely not committing an extortive act under Title 18, United States Code, section 1951,’ it likely would not be an overly persuasive line of defense,” she said. HuffPost reporter Igor Bobic contributed to this report. Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost

closeVideoThis Day in History: March 7Take a look at all of the important historical events that took place on March 7th.On this day, March 7 …2019: Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is sentenced to 47 months in prison on eight counts of bank and tax fraud. (A federal jury in Virginia had convicted him in August 2018.)Also on this day:1793: During the French Revolutionary Wars, France declares war on Spain.1850: In a three-hour speech to the U.S. Senate, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts endorses the Compromise of 1850 as a means of preserving the Union.1911: President William Howard Taft orders 20,000 troops to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border in response to the Mexican Revolution.1912: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen arrives in Hobart, Australia, where he dispatches telegrams announcing his success in leading the first expedition to the South Pole the previous December.1926: The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversations take place between New York and London.1936: Adolf Hitler orders his troops to march into the Rhineland, thereby breaking the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact.1955: The first TV production of the musical “Peter Pan” starring Mary Martin airs on NBC.Video1965: A march by civil rights demonstrators is violently broken up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse in what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”1975: The U.S. Senate revises its filibuster rule, allowing 60 senators to limit debate in most cases, instead of the previously required two-thirds of senators present.1981: Anti-government guerrillas in Colombia execute kidnapped American Bible translator Chester Bitterman, whom they accused of being a CIA agent.1994: The U.S. Navy issues its first permanent orders assigning women to regular duty on a combat ship. American actor Gary Lockwood on the set of "2001: A Space Odyssey," written and directed by Stanley Kubrick. (Photo by Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)1999: Movie director Stanley Kubrick, whose films include “Dr. Strangelove,” `’A Clockwork Orange” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” dies in Hertfordshire, England, at age 70, having just finished editing “Eyes Wide Shut.”2014: Russia is swept up in patriotic fervor in anticipation of bringing Crimea back into its territory, with tens of thousands of people converging on Red Square in Moscow chanting, “Crimea is Russia!”2018: The White House says Mexico, Canada and other countries can be spared from President Trump’s planned steel and aluminum tariffs under national security “carve-outs.” Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox ArrivesWeekdays Subscribe Subscribed Subscribe You've successfully subscribed to this newsletter!

The US president has responded to shocking testimony from Gordon Sondland on the existence of a quid pro quo by saying that he wanted ‘nothing’ from Ukraine. Speaking to reporters on the White House lawn on Wednesday, Trump added that the impeachment hearings should be brought to an end.Trump's comments came after Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, said that he was forced to work with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, against his will, and criticised the White House and state department for failing to provide records

Ahead of the Democratic presidential primaries that begin Monday with the Iowa caucus, presidential candidate Andrew Yangcalled for a global ban on the use of autonomous weaponry. In atweet, Yang called for U.S. leadership to implement a ban on automated killing machines, then shared a link to a Future of Life Institute video titled "Slaughterbots," which offers a cautionary and dystopian vision of the future. From a report:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ambassador Gordon Sondland declared to impeachment investigators Wednesday that President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani explicitly sought a “quid pro quo” with Ukraine, leveraging an Oval Office visit for political investigations of Democrats. But he also came to believe the trade involved much more.Besides the U.S. offer of a coveted meeting at the White House, Sondland testified it was his understanding the president was holding up nearly $400 million in military aid, which Ukraine badly needed with an aggressive Russia on its border, in exchange for the country’s announcement of the investigations.ADVERTISEMENTSondland conceded that Trump never told him directly the security assistance was blocked for the probes, a gap in his account that Republicans and the White House seized on as evidence the president did nothing wrong. But the ambassador said his dealings with Giuliani, as well as administration officials, left him with the clear understanding of what was at stake.“Was there a ‘quid pro quo?’” Sondland asked. “With regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes.”The rest, he said, was obvious: “Two plus two equals four.”Later Wednesday, another witness undercut a main Republican argument — that there could be no quid pro quo because Ukraine didn’t realize the money was being held up. The Defense Department’s Laura Cooper testified that Ukrainian officials started asking about it on July 25, which was the day of Trump’s phone call with the country’s new president when Trump first asked for “a favor.”Her staff received an email, Cooper said, from a Ukrainian Embassy contact asking “what was going on with Ukraine’s security assistance.” She said she could not say for sure that Ukraine was aware the aid was being withheld but “it’s the recollection of my staff that they likely knew.”Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union and a major donor to Trump’s inauguration, was the most highly anticipated witness in the House’s impeachment inquiry into the 45th president of the United States.In often stunning testimony, he painted a picture of a Ukraine pressure campaign that was prompted by Trump himself, orchestrated by Giuliani and well known to other senior officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Sondland said he raised his concerns about a quid pro quo for military aid with Vice President Mike Pence — a conversation a Pence adviser vigorously denied.Pompeo also dismissed Sondland’s account.However, Sondland said, “Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret.”The ambassador said that he and Trump spoke directly about desired investigations, including a colorful cellphone call this summer overheard by others at a restaurant in Kyiv.Trump himself insists daily that he did nothing wrong and the Democrats are just trying to drum him out of office.ADVERTISEMENTAs the hearing proceeded, he spoke to reporters outside the White House. Reading from notes written with a black marker, Trump quoted Sondland quoting Trump to say the president wanted nothing from the Ukrainians and did not seek a quid pro quo.“I want nothing, I want nothing,” insisted the president, who often exhorts Americans to “read the transcript” of the July phone call in which he appealed to Ukraine’s leader for “a favor” — the investigations.The impeachment inquiry focuses significantly on allegations that Trump sought investigations of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son -- and the discredited idea that Ukraine rather than Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election -- in return for the badly needed military aid for Ukraine and the White House visit.In Moscow on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was pleased that the “political battles” in Washington had overtaken the Russia allegations, which are supported by the U.S. intelligence agencies.“Thank God,” Putin said, “no one is accusing us of interfering in the U.S. elections anymore. Now they’re accusing Ukraine.”Sondland said that conditions on any potential Ukraine meeting at the White House started as “generic” but more items were “added to the menu including -- Burisma and 2016 election meddling.” Burisma is the Ukrainian gas company where Biden’s son Hunter served on the board. And, he added, “the server,” the hacked Democratic computer system.During questioning in the daylong session, Sondland said he didn’t know at the time that Burisma was linked to the Bidens but today knows “exactly what it means.” He and other diplomats didn’t want to work with Giuliani. But he and the others understood that Giuliani “was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.”He also came to understand that the military aid hinged on the investigations, though Trump never told him so directly.Sondland, a wealthy hotelier, has emerged as a central figure in an intense week in the probe that is featuring nine witnesses testifying over three days.The envoy appeared prepared to fend off scrutiny over the way his testimony has shifted in closed-door settings, saying “my memory has not been perfect.” He said the State Department left him without access to emails, call records and other documents he needed in the inquiry. Republicans called his account “the trifecta of unreliability.”Still, he did produce new emails and text messages to bolster his assertion that others in the administration were aware of the investigations he was pursuing for Trump from Ukraine.Sondland insisted, twice, that he was “adamantly opposed to any suspension of aid” for Ukraine. “I followed the directions of the president.”The son of immigrants who he said escaped Europe during the Holocaust, Sondland described himself as a “lifelong Republican” who has worked with officials from both parties, including Biden.Dubbed one of the “three amigos” pursuing Ukraine policy, Sondland disputed that they were running some sort of “rogue” operation outside official U.S. policy. He produced emails and texts showing he, former special envoy Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry kept Pompeo and others apprised of their activity. One message from Volker said, “Spoke w Rudy per guidance from S.” He said, “S means the secretary of state.”Democratic Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff of California said, “The knowledge of this scheme was far and wide.”Schiff warned Pompeo and other administration officials who are refusing to turn over documents and testimony to the committee “they do so at their own peril.” He said obstruction of Congress was included in articles of impeachment during Watergate.The top Republican on the committee, Devin Nunes of California, decried the inquiry and told the ambassador, “Mr. Sondland, you are here to be smeared.”Nunes renewed his demand to hear from the still-anonymous whistleblower whose complaint about Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy led the House to open the impeachment inquiry. Sondland’s hours of testimony didn’t appear to sway Trump’s GOP allies in the Senate, who would ultimately be jurors in an impeachment trial.Mike Braun of Indiana said the president’s actions “may not be appropriate, but this is the question: Does it rise to the level of impeachment? And it’s a totally different issue and none of this has.”“I’m pretty certain that’s what most of my cohorts in the Senate are thinking and I know that’s what Hoosiers are thinking — and most of middle America.”____Associated Press writers Colleen Long, Laurie Kellman, Zeke Miller, Matthew Daly and Andrew Taylor in Washington contributed to this report.

“It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Mrs. Clinton replied.“Because you would be in jail,” Mr. Trump shot back.During the presidential race, Mr. Whitaker, a former United States attorney, also said he would have indicted Mrs. Clinton, contradicting Mr. Comey’s highly unusual public announcement that he would recommend the Justice Department not charge her over her handling of classified information while secretary of state.“When the facts and evidence show a criminal violation has been committed, the individuals involved should not dictate whether the case is prosecuted,” Mr. Whitaker wrote in an op-ed in USA Today in July 2016.Two weeks after his surprise victory, Mr. Trump backed off. “I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Times. “She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways, and I am not looking to hurt them at all. The campaign was vicious.”Nonetheless, he revisited the idea both publicly and privately after taking office. Some of his more vocal supporters stirred his anger, including the Fox News commentator Jeanine Pirro, who has railed repeatedly on her weekly show that the president is being ill served by the Justice Department.Ms. Pirro told Mr. Trump in the Oval Office last November that the Justice Department should appoint a special counsel to investigate the Uranium One deal, two people briefed on the discussion have said. During that meeting, the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, told Ms. Pirro she was inflaming an already vexed president, the people said.Shortly after, Mr. Sessions wrote to lawmakers, partly at the urging of the president’s allies in the House, to inform them that federal prosecutors in Utah were examining whether to appoint a special counsel to investigate Mrs. Clinton. A spokeswoman for the United States attorney for Utah declined to comment on Tuesday on the status of the investigation.

But those chances aren’t zero. So what would it take for Trump to win?The most likely victory scenario for the president is a bit of a stretch, but not that complicated.First, he needs about a 3-point polling error or a late switch of votes in his favor in most swing states. Going off FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, that would be enough to push Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Iowa — states Biden narrowly leads — into Trump’s column. But that on its own wouldn’t provide Trump enough electoral votes.Trump also needs to win a big state or multiple smaller contests where Biden has a larger lead. His best prospect for that appears to be Pennsylvania, where Biden is up by a little over 5 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s average.There’s little indication that this is a particularly likely scenario. Experts who picked up on signs that Trump could win in 2016 are generally not seeing the same signs this time around. But it is a scenario that can’t entirely be ruled out until the votes are counted. Indeed, it’s pretty similar to the analysis of Trump’s path to victory I wrote just before the last presidential election: run the table in the very close states, and then break into the blue wall. The difference is that Biden’s poll margins in key states are currently better than Clinton’s were. So think of Trump’s victory path as 2016, but bigger.Let’s start off by reviewing what the electoral map would look like if the FiveThirtyEight polling averages were exactly on target.Biden would win all the states Hillary Clinton won last time, plus Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, Maine’s Second District, and Nebraska’s Second District. That would give Biden a decisive win with 357 electoral votes.But when you look a little closer, some of those leads for Biden in key states aren’t really that large. FiveThirtyEight has him ahead by just 1 to 3 points in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, and Maine’s Second District. (Biden trails narrowly in Texas and Ohio.)Poll leads of 1 to 3 points are not safe. Polling errors of that magnitude are common, and several (though not all) swing state polling averages underestimated Trump’s margin by a few points or more in 2016. Specifically, of the states listed above, the RealClearPolitics averages undershot Trump’s margin by 6.5 points in Iowa, 2.7 percentage points in North Carolina, 1 point in Florida, and 0.3 percentage points in Georgia, while they underestimated Clinton’s margin by 0.5 percentage points in Arizona. Now, pollsters have made some changes aimed at fixing the problems of 2016. Many more are weighting for the education level of respondents, since the failure to do this in 2016 often led to underestimating the amount of non-college-educated Trump voters. We should also be open to the possibility that the polling error could be in Biden’s favor this time. But polling errors are hard to predict in advance — that’s why they’re errors.It’s also possible that there could be a very late shift of voters into Trump’s camp, as happened in 2016 after then-FBI Director James Comey released his infamous letter announcing new emails of Hillary Clinton had been discovered. But by this point in 2016 (about a week before the election), the tightening of the race was already evident in polls. So far, there’s no indication of recent significant tightening this time around.Overall, though, for Trump to win, a necessary but not sufficient condition is for Biden’s small polling leads in Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Iowa, and Georgia to mostly not pan out. And Biden would likely also have to fail to win the close races in Texas and Ohio where polls show him narrowly trailing. If all those states where Biden leads by about 1 to 3 points do end up flipping to Trump — but Biden wins everywhere polls show him up by more — this is what the map would look like. Trump is still 11 electoral votes short of victory.So a generalized polling error of 3 points wouldn’t be enough for Trump. He also needs to come up with 11 electoral votes from places where Biden’s lead is bigger. Here’s the next tier of competitive states, per FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages on October 28: Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes): Biden +5.3 Nevada (6 electoral votes): Biden +6.5 Nebraska’s second district (1 electoral vote): Biden +6.6 Wisconsin (10 electoral votes): Biden +7.1 Michigan (16 electoral votes): Biden +8.3 Minnesota (10 electoral votes): Biden +9.1 The clearest opportunity for a clean win for Trump is in Pennsylvania — which is the closest of these states and has the most electoral votes of them.Trump, of course, won Pennsylvania last time. But polls in 2016 didn’t show him behind by as much as he is now. (The RealClearPolitics average showed Clinton leading by 2.1 percentage points; Trump won by 0.7 percentage points, so Trump’s margin was underestimated by 2.8.) If Trump loses Pennsylvania, his path to victory is more challenging. Nevada is polling almost as close as Pennsylvania, but it’s a small state with just six electoral votes at stake, so Trump would need to win somewhere else as well to get the 11 electoral votes he needs.Winning just Michigan would get Trump over the top, but Biden’s poll lead is 8.3 percentage points there. Winning just Wisconsin or just Minnesota would get Trump to 269 electoral votes, but if he doesn’t win Nebraska’s Second District as well, then the election would be tied at 269-269 and would be decided by the House of Representatives. (It’s not a straightforward vote of House members. Whichever party gets majorities in more state delegations in this year’s elections would be able to crown the next president in January.)But several of these targets for Trump have something in common: They’re part of a region that shifted dramatically toward Trump in 2016.Polls underestimated Trump’s margin in most states in 2016, but the misses were bigger than average in or near the Upper Midwest (underestimating Trump by 8 points in Minnesota, a little over 7 points in Wisconsin, a little over 6 points in Ohio and Iowa, nearly 4 points in Michigan, and nearly 3 points in Pennsylvania). Note that all of these polling errors were in the same direction; no swing states in this region underestimated Clinton.And as David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report writes, it’s not clear that state pollsters fully fixed their Midwest problems after 2016. Polling averages of key races in the 2018 midterms tended to underestimate Republicans there again, though usually by less than in 2016. (One possibility: Voters with low social trust are disproportionately less likely to speak to pollsters.)Still, the polls are now bad enough for Trump that he has to hope that, on top of a national polling error that will help him out in other swing states, there’s an extra-large Midwest polling error or late shift — enough to tip Pennsylvania or Michigan or some combination of other contests to his side. That’s his Electoral College path to victory. It’s unlikely, but it’s not impossible.This would be Trump’s path to a legitimate victory. But he may also have something else up his sleeve, based on the expectation that mail votes will be more Democratic-leaning while in-person votes will be more Republican-leaning.Trump has heavily implied that he hopes to declare victory on election night — and then, if slower counts of mail ballots tip the key states toward Biden, he will attempt to disparage those mail votes as fraudulent or illegitimate. Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 26, 2020 If Trump goes down this path, he will be trying to erase millions of legitimately cast mail votes in an attempt to effectively steal the election from Biden.You might be comforted by the idea that state election officials are too professional to let this happen. But the president is technically named by the Electoral College — and those electors themselves can be named by state legislatures, which in several key states are controlled by Republicans. So if Trump tried to declare victory based on phony accusations about mail votes, would GOP legislatures go along with it? We can’t say for sure, and the Atlantic’s Barton Gellman ran down some of the more alarming scenarios a few weeks back. If the legislatures did this, would the courts allow it? We also can’t say for sure, but two Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — made clear this week that they believe state legislatures indeed have preeminent power over how elections in their state work.There’s a catch for Trump, though. Due to the differing ways states carry out their vote counts, the scenario that has been called a “red mirage” — a seeming Republican lead on election night that gradually vanishes as more Democratic mail votes are slowly counted — is only likely to occur in a few key swing states this year. Most notably, it’s the classic trio of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, all of which have Republican legislatures. (The mail vote count will be slow in all three because GOP legislators refused to let ballot processing start earlier.)So in some other swing states, we might actually get a “blue mirage” — where lots of the mail vote is counted quickly but then the in-person count subsequently improves Republicans’ totals. This is likely to occur, for instance, in Florida. And many of the states in which Biden currently leads — Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Iowa, and Georgia — are expected to conduct their counts relatively quickly. So if Trump were to want to pursue this ugly strategy, it could only really work if Biden falls short in all those states on election night and the race comes down to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan again. Will you help keep Vox free for all? Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. And that kind of work takes resources. Even after the economy recovers, advertising alone will never be enough to support it. If you have already made a contribution to Vox, thank you. If you haven’t, help us keep our journalism free for everyone by making a financial contribution today, from as little as $3.

President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial kicks off in earnest this week, with the action on the Senate floor beginning Tuesday at 1 pm Eastern. And that means that soon, we’ll finally see the prosecution (the House impeachment managers) and the defense (Trump’s legal team) make their cases on whether Trump should be removed from office. It’s a historic moment, as it’s only the third impeachment trial in American history — yet unless something dramatic changes, Trump appears to be on the road to an acquittal, due to the chamber’s Republican majority.The first order of business for the Senate Tuesday will be to vote on a resolution laying out a plan and procedures for the first phase of the trial. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan, which it currently looks like he has the votes to pass, would allot 24 hours for opening arguments for each side, and 16 hours for senators can submit questions. Only after all that is done, in McConnell’s plan, would the Senate attempt to resolve the contentious issue of whether to subpoena witnesses for testimony. Senate Democrats have demanded that Republicans agree to subpoena four witnesses with knowledge of Trump’s efforts to block military aid to Ukraine for testimony as the trial kicks off — but Republicans have refused, and are punting on the issue for now. But Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will likely force a vote on the witness issue this week, so expect some grandstanding.Once these initial votes are done, opening arguments will begin. The House impeachment managers — Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), Val Demings (D-FL), and Jason Crow (D-CO) — will present their case over several days. Their case will probably be familiar from what they’ve said in the House, but it could rely on some new evidence, such as documents recently obtained from Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas.Then Trump’s legal team — White House counsel Pat Cipollone, White House Counsel’s Office attorneys Michael Purpura and Patrick Philbin, White House adviser Pam Bondi, Trump’s personal attorneys Jay Sekulow and Jane Raskin, and outside attorneys Ken Starr, Robert Ray, and Alan Dershowitz — will present their opening arguments. Trump’s team didn’t engage in the House process, so what to expect from them is less clear, though they will naturally assert the president did nothing wrong.From here on out, the trial is expected to take place six days a week (all but Sunday), starting at 1 pm Eastern each day, though the Senate can alter that schedule. It’s expected to last at least two weeks, and could take longer. You can watch it on C-SPAN 2 or other news networks, and a livestream is embedded in this post as well.Last month, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump — that is, to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors that merit his removal from the presidency. Specifically, the House approved two articles of impeachment: Article I, “Abuse of Power,” accuses Trump of pressuring the Ukrainian government into announcing an investigation into the Bidens by withholding both a White House meeting and military aid. Article II, “Obstruction of Congress,” accuses Trump of trying to impede the impeachment inquiry by urging government agencies not to comply with subpoenas and witnesses not to cooperate. But it’s up to the Senate to decide whether Trump is guilty of each of these charges — and whether he should, in fact, be ousted from the presidency. So that’s what this trial will focus on. It will contain many of the trappings of an ordinary criminal trial, with a “prosecution” and “defense,” Chief Justice John Roberts sitting there to preside, and the Senate as a mostly silent jury — though, unlike an ordinary jury, they will also determine the scope, length, and structure of the trial, and can overrule any decision by Roberts with a majority vote.All the proceedings on the Senate floor will be televised. However, there will be some differences from ordinary congressional hearings. For instance, senators mostly cannot speak and will have to submit their questions for the prosecution and defense in writing, to be read out by Chief Justice Roberts. It is also possible that if witnesses are subpoenaed for testimony, the questioning will occur behind closed doors (that’s how it happened in 1999, though it was videotaped).At the end of the road will be a final vote on each article of impeachment. Crucially, conviction requires a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate — a simple majority won’t do the trick. That means it would take 67 senators to convict Trump, and since there are only 47 Democrats in the chamber, that’s a very high bar to clear so long as nearly all Republicans keep standing by Trump.Still, a vote to convict on even one article would oust Trump from office, and make Vice President Mike Pence the president of the United States.For more on the mechanics of the Senate impeachment trial, check out our longer explainer. Will you help keep Vox free for all? Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. And that kind of work takes resources. Even after the economy recovers, advertising alone will never be enough to support it. If you have already made a contribution to Vox, thank you. 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