After taking the summer off, the 45th season of Saturday Night Live returned this evening, anchored by host Woody Harrelson and musical performer Billie Eilish. And, despite Alec Baldwin’s recent confession that he absolutely “hates” playing Donald Trump on the late-night sketch show, the hot-headed actor returned to don the blonde wig and orange face paint for the night’s opening monologue—which saw the president frantically calling his confidantes to complain about the Democrats’ ongoing impeachment inquiry, triggered by the recent Ukraine whistleblower scandal. He began by calling Rudy Giuliani (played by the inimitable Kate McKinnon), his personal lawyer/consigliere, who’s also been implicated in the scandal. “What do you mean what’s new, Rudy? I’m being impeached! It’s the greatest presidential harassment of all-time—I would know. I’m like the president of harassment,” shouted Trump. “You gotta relax, Mr. Trump. We got nothing to worry about. Nobody’s going to find out about our illegal side-dealings with the Ukraine, or how we tried to cover up those side-dealings, or how we tried to cover up the cover-up,” offered Giuliani, before the two realized that the former mayor of New York City was actually on CNN. “Well, stay calm, Mr. President. I know things look tough right now, but I got our top guy on this,” Giuliani added, before throwing to Aidy Bryant as Attorney General William Barr. “Where are you going to find a sacrificial patsy who will do anything you say? Not it!” Barr exclaimed, with the action then cutting to Beck Bennett’s Vice President Mike Pence. “I’m just calling you about this whole Ukraine-whistleblower thing. It’s looking pretty bad for you,” Trump told Pence. “For me? But you’re the one who broke the law!” a confused Pence replied. Other cameos followed, including the president’s large adult sons, Eric Trump and Don Jr., with the latter whining, “I just can’t believe the lamestream media is focused on you and not the corruption of Joe Biden’s son!” Not to be outdone, North Korean dictator (and friend of Trump) Kim Jong Un—played by SNL newcomer Bowen Yang, the first cast member of Asian descent—offered his (questionable) advice on how he handles whistleblowers in the Hermit Kingdom: “Oh, that’s easy. You have a big ocean in your country? OK. Send whistleblower to the bottom of there.” The segment concluded with Chris Redd’s Kanye West and Kenan Thompson’s Don King finally breaking ties with Trump over the impeachment hullabaloo. “This whole impeachment thing is hurting our brand,” opined King, at which point West chimed in, “We gotta go, so say goodbye to the douchebag.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — From the moment Donald Trump became a national political figure, he has been shadowed by investigations and controversy.They have been layered, lengthy and often inconclusive, leaving many Americans scandal-weary and numb to his behavior. And with each charge against him, Trump has perfected the art of deflection, seemingly gaining strength by bullying and belittling those who have dared to take him on.Now Trump is facing a high-velocity threat like none he’s confronted before.It has rapidly evolved from a process fight over a whistleblower complaint to an impeachment inquiry within two weeks. Much of the evidence is already in public view. A rough transcript of a phone call in which Trump asks Ukraine’s president to help investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden. The whistleblower’s detailed letter alleging the White House tried to cover up the call, and possibly others.Unlike special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation, which circled an array of people in Trump’s orbit but not always the president himself, Trump doesn’t have the benefit of distance. His words and his actions are at the center of this investigation.“The Mueller report , it was always Manafort this and his son that. There was a cascade of players,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, referring to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. “This was just Donald Trump and a disturbing conversation with another world leader.”So, suddenly, Washington is different and the history of Trump’s presidency has changed. By year’s end, he could become only the third American president impeached by the House of Representatives.That new reality caught Trump and his advisers off guard, according to people close to the president. If anything, they thought the specter of impeachment had been lifted after the Mueller investigation ended without a clear determination that Trump had committed a crime.ADVERTISEMENTThe contours of that investigation played to Trump’s strengths. Mueller spent two years in silence, allowing the president to fill the vacuum with assertions that the investigation was a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” The details of the investigation that did leak out were often complicated and focused on people in Trump’s sphere. Even Mueller’s pointed statement that he had not exonerated Trump did not seem to stick. There was ultimately plenty of smoke, but no smoking gun.Numerous other Democratic inquiries appeared likely to meet a similar fate, including House investigation into Trump’s business dealings, his tax returns and a variety of administration scandals. For many Americans, they were one big blur of investigations without any clarity of purpose.Then the whistleblower gave the Democrats what they needed: a simple, easily explainable charge — that the president sought a foreign government’s help for personal political gain — and his words to back it up.For House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., and several Democratic moderates who had resisted calls for impeachment, the calculus shifted . It was now more of a risk to recoil from impeachment than charge ahead.“What we’re seeing right now is a completely different moment in the history of this country,” said Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, D-Fla.One thing that didn’t change — at least not immediately — was the clear partisan divide over Trump’s actions, both in Washington and across the country.According to a one-day NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted Wednesday, 49% of Americans approve of the House formally starting an impeachment inquiry into Trump. Among Democrats, 88% approve of the investigation, while 93% of Republicans disapprove.Mike Staffieri, a retiree and Republican who lives just outside of Richmond, Virginia, said Democrats were trying to “throw enough poop at the wall and hope something sticks.”On Capitol Hill, some Trump allies concurred, confidently dismissing the impeachment inquiry as just another partisan effort to take down a president who is despised by many Democrats. That rough transcript of a phone call in which Trump presses Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to work with Attorney General William Barr and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on an investigation into Biden? It’s just Trump being Trump, according to his backers.“You’ve heard President Trump talk. That’s President Trump,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and president of the LBJ Foundation in Austin, Texas, said it’s that enduring support from Republican lawmakers that currently separates Trump from Richard Nixon, who resigned in the midst of the Watergate impeachment inquiry because his party began to abandon him.“The big difference between this and Watergate is that you had both Republicans and Democrats being deeply concerned about the president being involved in criminal wrongdoing,” Updegrove said. “It was a bipartisan effort and you certainly don’t have that here.”But it is early, compared with Watergate. There were small signs that some Republicans were trying to keep some measure of distance from the president. Some GOP lawmakers fled Washington for a fall break claiming they hadn’t yet read the whistleblower’s complaint. Others said they were open to learning more about the situation.Trump’s hold on the Republican Party makes it nearly impossible to foresee a scenario in which the GOP-controlled Senate convicts Trump if he were impeached by the Democratic-run House.The president is acutely well aware that it’s his party alone that can protect him. In the midst of the past week’s firestorm, he tweeted to Republicans: “Stick together, play their game and fight hard Republicans.”He later deleted the tweet.___AP polling editor Emily Swanson and Associated Press writers Alan Fram in Washington and Alan Suderman in Richmond, Virginia, contributed to this report.___

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Paul Manafort’s former son-in-law has been sentenced in Los Angeles to nine years in prison for pulling a series of schemes totaling more than $13 million, including one that bilked $3 million from actor Dustin Hoffman. U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte Jr. ordered Jeffrey Yohai to pay $6.7 million in restitution on Friday for the schemes, some of which were carried out while he was released on bond for similar crimes. “This is an individual who has an evil mind — I don’t know how else to say it,” the judge said. “It seems he felt he could do whatever he wants ― but that buck stops here.” Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Jeffrey Yohai is seen with his then-wife Jessica Manafort in 2013. Yohai was sentenced to nine years in prison and ordered to pay $6.7 million on Friday. Yohai pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud for schemes that included renting out luxury homes without the permission of their owners and selling non-existent backstage passes for the Coachella music festival. Prosecutors said Yohai persuaded Hoffman and his son Jacob to invest in a real estate project, but he used their money for personal expenses and to pay debts. When his credit rating plummeted, prosecutors said Yohai used his cousin’s identity to run up $108,000 in credit card charges, they said. Eduardo Munoz / Reuters Yohai's former father-in-law is Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Manafort, who is seen in June, was convicted of federal crimes. “Defendant has done tremendous damage to a huge number of victims,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Brown wrote in a court filing. Yohai “has shown an almost unbelievable compulsion to defraud others, to the point that he could not stop even while awaiting this court’s judgment on him in the first case, which strongly suggests that he will continue on his criminal path despite having been blessed with so many advantages.” “Worse, he seems to enjoy committing fraud and revels in cheating others out of their hard-earned money, as though he thought real work was only for patsies,” Brown added. Yohai had once been married to Manafort’s daughter, Jessica. Yohai’s name surfaced during the bank and tax fraud trial for Manafort, the former campaign chairman for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Manafort has been convicted several federal crimes and agreed to cooperate with investigators in the Russia probe. RELATED... Roger Stone Goes On Trial For Lying About His Plan To 'Save Trump's Ass' Mueller Memo Bombshell: Michael Cohen Told If He Stuck To Russia Story, Trump 'Loves You' A Lot Of Trump's Ukraine Conspiracy Theories Come From One Right-Wing Columnist Giuliani Reportedly Contacted Imprisoned Manafort To Bolster Ukraine Conspiracy Theory Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost

closeVideoNancy Pelosi accuses the White House of a 'cover-up' as Democrats look to intensify impeachment pushHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi blasts Attorney General William Barr; chief congressional correspondent Mike Emanuel reports from Capitol Hill.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Saturday that she has "no idea" how long House Democrats' impeachment inquiry into President Trump will take."It's in the [House Intelligence] committee. I'm not here to talk about how they will do their work [or] what their time table is," Pelosi said at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin. "It will take as long as the intelligence committee follows the facts and when they are ready." Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaks at The Texas Tribune Festival in Austin Saturday. (Nick Wagner/Austin American-Statesman via AP) On Tuesday, Pelosi formally announced an impeachment inquiry into Trump over his July 25 phone call with newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Democrats have claimed the president threatened to withhold $400 million in military aid unless Ukraine investigated former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and their business dealings in the country.The probe was prompted by a complaint from an intelligence community whistleblower who accused Trump of "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election."Video"What happened in that phone conversation, that a president of the United States would withhold military assistance that was paid for by taxpayer money to essentially shake down the leader of another country unless he did him a favor -- it is so clear," Pelosi said Saturday.The president "did not see it was wrong to do that," she later said.TRUMP SLAMS DEMOCRATS, WHISTLEBLOWER OVER 'WITCH HUNT' IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY: 'OTHERS ENDED IN ASHES!'A memorandum of the Trump-Zelensky made public Wednesday shows that while Trump sought an investigation into the Biden family for corruption, the president did not explicitly leverage military aid.Trump has repeatedly defended his conduct of the call with Zelensky and calls the latest Democratic probe "another witch hunt.""The Whistleblower’s complaint is completely different and at odds from my actual conversation with the new President of Ukraine. The so-called 'Whistleblower' knew practically NOTHING in that those ridiculous charges were far more dramatic & wrong," Trump tweeted Saturday.VideoDuring a meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly this week, Zelensky told reporters that "nobody pushed me" during the call with Trump."This is very bad news for our country," Pelosi said. "If it is as it seems to be, the president engaged in something so far beyond what our founders had in mind."Trump on Saturday issued a social media blitz attacking Democrats and the whistleblower, telling his supporters that the Democrats are "trying to stop me because I am fighting for you!"

Fox News attempted to help “acting” White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney clean up his admission of a “quid pro quo” with Ukraine, but Fox & Friends Weekend host and reporter Ed Henry wasn’t quite ready to let him off the hook.After telling the press corp on Thursday that there is “going to be political influence in foreign policy” and that they should just “get over it,” Mulvaney released a statement later in the day that walked back his comments and blamed the media for supposedly twisting his words.“Once again, the media has decided to misconstrue my comments to advance a biased and political witch hunt against President Trump,” Mulvaney said. “Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election.” When he heard those words read aloud on Fox Friday morning, Henry said, “I’m not sure what Mick Mulvaney’s case is. The media is to blame for writing down what he said, for Fox recording on video what he said? He stood at the podium and connected the dots for Democrats!” It was only after both Democrats and some Republicans pounced on what Mulvaney had said that he decided to walk it back, Henry explained. “So if it’s the media’s fault, I’m not quite sure why the White House chief of staff is clarifying,” he added. Henry has been straddling the line between Trump critic and defender on impeachment for the past few weeks after the president lashed out at him for daring to suggest that pressuring a foreign country for dirt on a political opponent may be inappropriate. He later lauded Trump as “honest and transparent” for admitting his offenses out loud instead of doing them only in secret. Here, he seemed to be splitting the difference and laying most of the blame not on President Trump but on Mulvaney for admitting the truth. “There may not be a quid pro quo but Mick Mulvaney, the president’s own chief of staff, sort of messed it up and made it seem like there was,” Henry said. “So he’s hurting their own case.”“Well, maybe there was,” his colleague Juan Williams replied. “Maybe he’s trying to say, that’s the reality, and now he’s trying to walk back to the truth because he wants to save his ‘acting’ job.”

Call it a credibility crisis; call it chaos. My colleague Peter Nicholas reports on how these twin problems are inextricably linked. Misinformation feeds the chaos; chaos gives rise to more misinformation. One former aide told me that Trump had a habit of coming downstairs from the White House residential quarters calling for some action that would have upended his staff’s planning. Trying to figure out where the president got the idea, the aide would scan the previous night’s Fox News shows for hints. Members of Congress often insist to White House staff that Trump state his position in a tweet, knowing they can’t rely on assurances from anyone in the West Wing, a second former aide told me. “He changes his mind. That’s the fundamental point,” this person said. Read the rest.—Saahil Desai*« SNAPSHOT »(Andres Martinez Casares / Reuters)Migrants traveling mainly from Central America in a caravan against a backdrop of security forces are seen near Frontera Hidalgo in Chiapas, Mexico today.*« IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS »Chief Justice John Roberts arrives at the U.S. Capitol to preside over the impeachment trial. (SARAH SILBIGER / REUTERS)1. “[Mitch] McConnell has created the mistaken impression that the Constitution does not provide any guidance about the impeachment process, and that the procedures for the trial—including motions to call witnesses—can be determined by a majority vote.”The Senate had voted along party lines, blocking Democratic efforts to compel testimony from additional witnesses such as John Bolton or Mick Mulvaney. Democrats can try again next week after Trump’s defense team completes their arguments, but if no witnesses end up being called, the trial should be considered unconstitutional, one former Manhattan DA’s office prosecutor argues.2. “They are the latest faded luminaries seeking to revive their fame—and blemish their reputation—by shilling for Donald Trump.”With the return of the like of Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr in Trump’s impeachment trial, it can feel like the 1990s never ended. That’s because Trump’s whole presidency continues to function as a “revenge of the has-beens,” Peter Beinart argues.3. “It felt like the setup to a joke: So the richest tech CEO in the world and a crown prince were texting one day ...”While reports that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was hacked via a DM from Saudi Arabia’s crown prince may be shocking to read, the news of their close relationship shouldn’t be surprising, Alexis Madrigal writes. The rich have always been tight-knit, but the world’s ultra-rich are even closer.*« EVENING READ »Kelsey Juliana, a lead plaintiff in the case arguing that the federal government must act on climate change, outside the Supreme Court. (KEVIN LAMARQUE / REUTERS)A Climate-Lawsuit Dissent That Changed MindsTwenty-one children sued the government alleging inaction on climate change, arguing that the federal government was stripping future generations of Americans of their constitutional rights.

Amazon says it will move forward with plans for a new office building in Seattle after the city council slashed a proposed corporate tax by nearly half.Amazon halted plans for the new building earlier this month in response to the proposed tax, which is designed to help the city's growing homelessness problem. The city council approved the smaller tax bill unanimously on Monday, and Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan promised to sign it. But Amazon still isn't happy."We are disappointed by today’s city council decision to introduce a tax on jobs," Amazon spokesperson Drew Herdener said in a statement. "While we have resumed construction planning for Block 18, we remain very apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger businesses, which forces us to question our growth here."Amazon hasn't yet decided whether to use space it leased in another Seattle building or sublease it, as it had threatened to do. Meanwhile, the company is still planning a second headquarters somewhere outside of Seattle.As originally proposed last month, the tax would have imposed a per-employee fee of about $500 a year on Seattle companies with revenue of $20 million or more. That would have worked out to less than one percent of Amazon's annual profit. In 2021, the per-employee tax would have become a 0.7 percent payroll tax.Durkan negotiated the compromise version of the bill, which will impose an annual fee of about $275 per employee and will not convert into a payroll tax. City council estimates the tax will raise $50 million per year.The council passed a non-binding resolution Monday to spend 66 percent of the money on affordable housing; 32 percent on homelessness-related costs such as emergency shelters, trash pickup, and raises for service workers; and 2 percent on administration, the Seattle Times reports. Seattle's unsheltered population grew by 44 percent to 5,500 over the past two years, according to a recent US Department of Housing and Urban Development report. The city hosts the third-largest homeless population in the country.Amazon says the city doesn’t need more money, saying city revenue grew to $4.2 billion in 2017, from $2.8 billion in 2010. "This revenue increase far outpaces the Seattle population increase over the same time period,” Herdener said in a statement. “The city does not have a revenue problem---it has a spending efficiency problem.”Amazon was far from alone in that sentiment. More than 100 Seattle based companies, including tech companies like Expedia, Chef Software, and Tableau, signed a letter urging the city council to reject the tax, arguing that it will punish businesses for creating jobs."If they cannot provide a warm meal and safe bed to a five-year-old child, no one believes they will be able to make housing affordable or address opiate addiction," Starbucks spokesman John Kelly said of the city government in a statement. Starbucks did not sign the letter opposing the tax. "This city pays more attention to the desires of the owners of illegally parked RVs than families seeking emergency shelter."Supporters of the tax were more happy with the compromise. "Given extortion from @JeffBezos & Goliath-like clout of @amazon, even a smaller tax is huge victory & pushback on corporate bullying," tweeted socialist city councilor Kshama Sawant, who actually proposed doubling, instead of halving, the corporate tax.More Great WIRED StoriesThe teens who hacked Microsoft’s Xbox empire—and went too farKetamine offers hope—and stirs up controversy—as a depression drugPHOTO ESSAY: Want to hunt aliens? Go to West Virginia’s low-tech ‘quiet zone’How red-pill culture jumped the fence and got to Kanye WestWaymo’s self-driving car crash revives hard questions

Andrew Yang, the former Democratic presidential hopeful, has said that he plans to distribute $1m to low-income workers across the country in response to the coronavirus pandemic through his not-for-profit group, Humanity Forward.The organization plans to distribute $500,000 to 500 working poor households in New York City’s Bronx. By the end of March each family will receive $1,000.The move echoes Yang’s signature policy proposal during his 2020 bid: a universal basic income paid directly to Americans.The organization also plans to team up with the not-for-profit group One Fair Wage (OFW) to bolster its OFW Emergency Coronavirus Tipped and Service Worker Support Fund throughout New York.Yang’s organization will help fundraise for the program and offer assistance to OFW as it implements payments to New York City workers who have suffered the economic consequences of the coronavirus.Additionally, Humanity Forward will issue one-time basic income payments to individuals who ask for emergency funds from the organization. According to the organization’s announcement: “Humanity Forward has pledged to match the first $500,000 in additional donations to go to those in need.”“We’re in a crisis and my entire jam is that we need to put money in people’s hands so that we’re stronger and healthier and mentally healthier and that’s what I stand for, that’s what I my organization stands for,” Yang said in an interview on Thursday. “We’re in the midst of a crisis so I’m going to demonstrate what we should be doing.”The question of a universal basic income has returned to national prominence since the coronavirus outbreak began. Lawmakers in both the Republican and Democratic parties have been increasingly supportive of a one-time direct payment to Americans to help them weather the impending financial crisis. On Thursday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, introduced an emergency stimulus package that, among other proposals, would issue direct payments of as much as $1,200 to individual Americans.

For your average Chief Operating Officer, a lifetime spent living in the shadows on assumed identities and looking over one’s shoulder might seem a fate considerably worse than a spell in a German jail.But Jan Marsalek, 40, was never an average COO. The high-living former COO of Wirecard, a German payments processing behemoth that collapsed in June amidst allegations of a staggering $2.25 billion fraud, is now thought to be living under a false identity in the former USSR. Interpol say Marsalek, who is Austrian by birth, is wanted for violation of German securities trading acts, criminal breach of trust, and an “especially serious case of fraud.” Three of his erstwhile executive colleagues are languishing in German jails accused of fraud, embezzlement, and market manipulation, while a fourth was released on bail this week. But the authorities just can't seem to catch up with Marsalek. He joined Wirecard in 2010, as the protégé of the company’s swashbuckling CEO Markus Braun, who was regularly hailed by analysts and the German financial press as a “visionary” and “mastermind,” as Wirecard’s star rose.Working with Braun, Marsalek hopscotched around the world by private jet, putting together a series of deals that helped transform a rather boring payments company into one of Germany’s hottest and most glamorous fintech stocks, which aimed at nothing less than making cash obsolete.By 2018, the company had a valuation of €21 billion ($24.85 billion)— overtaking Deutsche Bank, Germany’s biggest conventional bank—and became a major component of Germany’s prestigious Dax 30 index.That Braun and Marsalek had been supremely successful at building Wirecard into a stock market juggernaut was not in doubt, but nor was Marsalek’s unconventionality, including his frequent hints that he was connected to a variety of international intelligence agencies.For example, at a February 2018 meeting at his palatial Berlin home, ostensibly called to discuss humanitarian reconstruction in Libya, attendees were startled when Marsalek started watching “extremely violent” body camera footage, it was reported in the Financial Times. It appeared to show unknown groups of gunmen engaged in action in the troubled African country. As he watched the footage, Marsalek conducted a conversation about getting “equipment” to Libya, the FT reported.Even more extraordinary than the body cam footage were the documents in his possession when Marsalek hopped off his private jet in London a few months later.He was in the British capital on a mission to talk down speculators who were short-selling the company’s stock, after a series of articles by the FT’s investigation team, spearheaded by journalist Dan McCrum, questioned the company’s financial bona fides.Along with the dry spreadsheets of figures, profit and loss and turnover, he also produced four highly sensitive, classified reports from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. They contained the precise formula for Novichok, the Russian nerve agent used in March of that year to poison a GRU defector, Sergei Skripal, in the English city of Salisbury.What was the COO of a financial payments company doing getting mixed up in Libya’s civil war and walking around with formula for nerve agents in his brief case?“The challenge with Marsalek is that it’s hard to know where his claims of contacts began and the truth finishes.”— Dan McCrumJust last week, German authorities said the fugitive executive could be an informer for Austria’s BVT intelligence agency (he is Austrian by birth). It has also emerged that he held a diplomatic passport.The Daily Beast asked McCrum if he thought Marsalek was a spy.“The challenge with Marsalek is that it’s hard to know where his claims of contacts began and the truth finishes,” McCrum told The Daily Beast. “He clearly has some sort of secret service connections, possibly more than one, but the extent to which he was a source or a contact or actively involved in that world is still hard to say. He very clearly had his hands on some highly classified documents. The nerve gas-related things that we reported on. If you are bandying that around then you clearly have some interesting contacts, but at the same time, would a spy really do that?”Wirecard went to great lengths to try and silence McCrum, who had been investigating the company at the FT since 2014. He endured years of intimidation, surveillance, and threats by Marsalak’s network of goons, spies, and “risk management agencies.”Wirecard even managed to convince the German authorities that McCrum was a bad actor: the German financial regulator, BaFin, filed a criminal complaint against McCrum, accusing him of planting fake stories in the FT as part of a strategy to enrich short traders. His colleagues would welcome him to the newsroom each day with a cheery greeting of, “Have you been arrested yet?”However, by mid-2018, the journalist was on the point of revealing definitive evidence that half of Wirecard’s claimed business simply didn’t exist.Did McCrum ever feel personally threatened? “There were some parts of it that were deeply intimidating,” he said. “We knew there was a lot of surveillance going on. And when we began to report on Marsalek’s adventures in Libya and Russian nerve gas…” His voice trailed off.“You never expect anything to happen, and you tell yourself that something happening to a journalist in London will get way more attention than esoteric financial fraud, so you take comfort in that. But at the same time, we also knew we were dealing with this character who had all of these resources and moved in these circles, so, yes, that makes it slightly nerve-racking.”The paper finally published, on Oct. 14 2019, a bombshell story complete with evidence showing that around half of Wirecard’s claimed business didn’t exist.Wirecard said cash was sitting in third-party trustee bank accounts in East Asia, but it just wasn’t there. Marsalek had been the man in charge of the company’s Asian operations.Wirecard blustered on for eight more months, but on June 18 this year, the company finally admitted that €1.9 billion ($2.25 billion) was “missing.”It was Germany’s biggest financial fraud since World War II. Wirecard immediately collapsed into insolvency. Braun and other senior executives were arrested and thrown in jail, but Marsalek, as usual, was one step ahead of the game.He reportedly told his colleagues that he was going to the Philippines to chase and find the missing billions, in order to prove his innocence. Airline bookings and immigration records duly showed he had arrived in Manila on June 23 and headed from there to China, but this was later discovered to be an elaborate red herring. Incredibly, immigration records had been forged on his behalf.He went nowhere near Manila—the investigative journalism site Bellingcat established that Marsalek actually fled to the capital of Belarus, Minsk. He was registered as having entered Belarus via a private jet on 19 June 2020.“If you are anticipating being on the run for the next 20 years, you need somewhere to hole up in the near term where you have friends who will not betray you...and you need to change your appearance.”— Dan McCrumAfter that the trail goes cold, but given that border records show he never left the country, it is widely assumed he headed to Russia. There is no hard border to cross when traveling from Belarus to Russia, and Marsalek had been a frequent visitor to Russia, making over 60 trips to the country in the last 10 years, Bellingcat says. In 2016 he visited Russia 16 times using chartered business jets flying into St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan. Does McCrum think he is in Russia?“If you’re Marsalek and you are anticipating being on the run for the next 20 years, you need somewhere to hole up in the near term where you have friends who will not betray you, and then you need a long-term plan, and you need to change your appearance,” McCrum said.“It’s hard to think of places where he can do all of that and still be safe given that he appears to have stolen a very large amount of money and anyone who harbors him will know that.”For the other Wirecard executives, life has been less exciting.Wirecard’s former CFO Burkhard Ley was released on bail this week, but three other suspects—Braun, Stephan von Erffa, and Oliver Bellenhaus—remain in jail. The prosecutors have accused all four of fraud, embezzlement and market manipulation.Bellenhaus has reportedly turned into a chief witness and is co-operating with the prosecutors. The other three deny wrongdoing. Nobody has been yet been charged as the criminal investigation is ongoing.Whether prosecutors will ever catch up with Jan Marsalek, and Wirecard’s missing billions, is an altogether different question.

The last time Andrew Yang was on The Ezra Klein Show, he was just beginning his long-shot campaign for the presidency. Now, he’s fresh off a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention and, as he reveals in this episode, talking to Joe Biden about a very specific role in a Biden administration.Which is all to say: A lot has changed for Andrew Yang in the past few years. And even more has changed in the world. So I asked Yang back on the show to talk through this new world and his possible role in it.We discuss how a universal basic income could shape the way we rebuild our economy, why Democrats need to take technological change more seriously, how Covid-19 has accelerated job automation, what it would take to make government actually work for people, why Yang is worried about a possible Cold War with China, and much more.A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows. The full conversation can be heard on The Ezra Klein Show.This story is part of The Great Rebuild, a project made possible thanks to support from Omidyar Network, a social impact venture that works to reimagine critical systems and the ideas that govern them, and to build more inclusive and equitable societies. All Great Rebuild coverage is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.When you began your presidential campaign, I understood it as a campaign based on ideas that you thought should be in the national conversation and weren’t. And then what surprised me about the way it played out was how much it emphasized an approach to politics, a way of talking to each other, a way of talking about each other that felt different. And that really resonated with people. What values were missing in politics that you felt able to bring to the race?When I showed up on the scene, I thought I would be perceived as being to the left of Bernie, because even Bernie didn’t go so far as to talk about giving everyone money. I used to joke that I was going to be like Bernie but younger and more Asian. But that’s not how I was received at all. I was received as this realignment-type figure who was talking in terms that other candidates were not.What’s funny for me is, it was just the way I communicate. I was arguing from facts and figures. It was my concern about the fact that we eliminated 5 million manufacturing jobs — 4 million due to automation — primarily in the swing states that decided the 2016 election. And by talking the way I talk, it ended up being a different approach to politics that some people got excited about.That was something I did not anticipate. I learned that there are a lot of people that do want us to approach politics in a different way than we have been over the last number of years.But there are plenty of other facts and figures candidates, like Elizabeth Warren. You talked about Bernie Sanders and imagined yourself to the left of him, but ideology is only one way people experience politics. They also experience it on the axis of how confrontational you are. You have a pretty left policy agenda, but your approach to politics isn’t nearly as confrontational. You would talk to people Democrats would rarely talk to and go on programs they would rarely go on. You really never seemed to dislike anybody on the campaign trail. Even now, on Twitter, I think you cultivate a very nice persona in a very not-so-nice space.I’d like to hear a bit about how you think about that. It seemed to have more power than I would have expected.I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. It’s the case that I like most Americans. I naturally don’t get angry at people that disagree with me. I kind of expect a degree of political asynchrony, because it’s not like someone’s gonna believe everything you believe.I think people have gotten driven into different corners and pitted against each other in a way that’s unproductive. One of the things that I did find running for president was that the media would often try and goad me into conflicts: “This person said this, what do you think about that?”The dynamic was supposed to foment an expression of outrage. I think that the outrage cycle is very negative. And I think a lot of Americans, including me, are very tired of it.I think it also reflects the media you came up through. When most Democrats run for president, they think about getting coverage on MSNBC and liberal publications, which tend to reward a more confrontational approach.But when you came up, you did Joe Rogan’s podcast, Sam Harris’s podcast, a lot of YouTube-world things. That’s a more mixed space — those are different worlds where people have different political concerns. Some of these folks on YouTube are able to command audiences in the millions that rival the cable networks. But it doesn’t have the mainstream establishment respect that a cable network does, so it gets ignored even though it’s no worse a way to reach people.How much do you think the Democratic Party, or just politicians in general, are leaving on the table by not pursuing those avenues?This is something we should talk about more. The shifting media landscape is going to impact politics very dramatically, and some folks are going to be late to it.If you look at the cable news audiences, you’re looking at low millions — and it tends to be the same 2 million people over and over again. The cable newscasts then drive this media-narrative bubble that then gets self-reinforcing. Everyone looks out and says, “Aren’t you concerned about whatever the heck we were concerned about yesterday?” And meanwhile, like, they’re just listening to Joe Rogan or whoever and getting a very different perspective. They are hearing about issues that are more relevant to them.The biggest example of that on the trail was impeachment. I don’t think I got a single question about impeachment the entire time, and this was when [Trump] was actually getting impeached. So there are different conversations happening. It would be very beneficial for politicians generally, but Democrats in particular, to start trying to broaden their universe.But you obviously had to get on all these other big shows. Joe Rogan has a lot of choice in guests, and not everyone who wants to be on his program gets the invite. What always struck me as significant about your campaign is it had a very different ordinal ranking of priorities. Washington politics has developed a set of things that it considers the questions of the day, the week, the month, the year, which include things like taxes and impeachment and health care. And those are important. I cover them all the time. But it’s not the only set of things people care about. So you have these other communities that are very ill-served in the debate.There’s this whole world that is very focused on AI risk, for example. And when you came up and wanted to move that issue up on the political agenda, there was a world of people who were receptive to that because they were already having that conversation.That’s right. If you talk to techies, they’re much more concerned about AI. And the central argument of my campaign was around automation. A lot of Americans were happy to talk to a political figure who is talking about something that they’d been thinking about for months or years.One of the funny byproducts of it all was that I ended up having conversations with people that didn’t feel terribly political. Because of that, I ended up reaching audiences that generally did not consider themselves political, and hopefully, I broadened the range of concerns that we should be looking at as a country.One of the things that I think politics systematically underrates in importance is technological change. We functionally live in a gerontocracy. I think Nancy Pelosi is 80. Trump is 74. Joe Biden is 77. Mitch McConnell is 78. This is not the most technologically sophisticated group you could possibly imagine. And so a lot of what is changing in technology gets underplayed.So let’s move the conversation to AI. How has your thinking changed on it in the past few years?A lot of the things I was concerned about have now come into full view because of the pandemic. Companies that were considering investing in AI and robot meatpackers, robot cleaners, robot grocery store clerks, and the rest of it are accelerating those investments. If you get a Domino’s Pizza from a self-driving car, you’re excited because it means less human contact, whereas before it seemed a little bit creepy. Same with the self-checkout aisle. There’s this new release that now can do a lot of writing and basic summaries on a level that’s indistinguishable from human journalists.And two years ago, if you’d asked me, hey, is software going to get to this point? I would have said yes. But then you could still argue over it. And now, two years later, it’s here. You can see the commercial potential of this technology.One of the reasons why I was so concerned about the impact of AI on our labor force as well is that I know how many, frankly, inefficient jobs there are in a lot of these major companies. If you gobble up another company and you have two different systems, you might keep dozens, even hundreds of folks around just to keep the systems talking to each other. A lot of our work is more replaceable than we like to think. And what’s funny is if you ask Americans about this, they will actually say a majority of other people’s jobs are automatable and subject to technological replacement. And then if you ask them about their own job, the vast majority will say, not my job. You know, that’s just the way we’re wired.I have some slightly different views on how many jobs are automatable and what the coronavirus is going to do to the desire for human contact, but something I do think is true is we are going to see a bunch of jobs get automated in the near future as people need to find ways to do things with less human contact.This moment is a very deep reminder that people don’t have control over their economic fortunes — that all of a sudden, a pandemic or some technological advance could happen in your industry that lays you off or that destroys the economy in your town.So there’s been a lot of movement toward just giving people money during this pandemic. That’s not how we’ve done things during past crises. So I’d like to hear you talk a little bit about why you think that’s happened, and what you think we can learn from its performance so far.It’s just common sense now. When you look around and you see that there are tens of millions of Americans who’ve gotten shoved out of the labor force by no fault of their own, then cash relief is the only sensible solution.The $1,200 going out had a really positive effect on many households and on propping up our economy. But we need to make that regular, recurring, predictable. We’ve been living off of the first CARES Act, but now that benefits have [lapsed], you’re going to see distress and disintegration pick up in many households and communities. And there really is no feasible way to help so many households manage this except for direct cash relief.Last I saw, 76 percent of Americans are pro-cash relief during the pandemic. And 55 percent are now pro-universal basic income. So it’s no longer the magical Asian man making this case. The majority of Americans realize it’s common sense and something we need to do.There’s a big jump between using cash transfer for relief and moving to a basic income floor. And the argument against a basic income is the same one Republicans are now making when it comes to opposing extending the expanded unemployment insurance: If people can get paid and can support themselves in their lives without working, they won’t work. What is your response to them?I think that argument is really out of date. It harkens back to some 1970s or ’80s notion of employment where if you work for a company, they’ll treat you right and give you benefits, and you’ll be able to live a fine middle-class life. We’re now living in an era when most of the jobs that have been created are gig and contract and temp jobs that don’t have benefits. In many cases, it also doesn’t include caregivers and stay-at-home parents like my wife, who has been at home for a while, in part because one of our boys is autistic and was very much in need of her time.So to me, this is not an argument that liberals and progressives should fall for. I 100 percent agree with the statement that if you’re working full-time in the United States of America, you should not be poor. But I also think that my wife works harder than I do most every single day. And there are moms around the country [who are] in the same boat, and they should not be poor either.Trying to define work as this anachronistic “show up to an office or factory 40 hours a week” is missing the evolution of our economy that’s been happening for decades.Why UBI rather than the negative income tax?I am a huge fan of a negative income tax, but I prefer a UBI for multiple reasons. It lowers the administrative burden because you don’t need to figure out how much I made last year. It removes any strange shenanigans in terms of trying to report a low income. It alleviates a payments timing issue — you’re not likely to get your negative income tax when you might need it. And politically, I think it’s more appealing to be able to say to everyone: You have intrinsic value. This is how much you get for being an American, [a] human being.But I would be thrilled with a negative income tax if that’s where we wound up. If you can alleviate and eradicate poverty, I am all for it.Do you think the US government has a spending constraint on it? Could we do a UBI and a Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all and just put it on the national credit card? Or do we have limited resources, and we have to make choices between them?The biggest winners in the 21st-century economy are paying zero or near-zero in taxes very often. And if you harness the gains from the Amazons and Apples and Netflixes of the world, then you have a lot more revenue to work with very quickly. And then if you put that money into people’s hands, that money does not disappear. It ends up going right back into the local economy, in the form of car repairs and day care expenses and the occasional meal out. And those businesses all then create more opportunities and can create virtuous cycles that help end up creating jobs and human well-being.I agree with you on that, but even if we did everything progressives have proposed in terms of taxing the rich more, it couldn’t come near paying for Medicare-for-all, UBI, and a Green New Deal. So the question is: Should we raise taxes more broadly? Or do you think there’s some value to the Modern Monetary Theory argument, that maybe we don’t need to figure out how to pay for it?I’ve seen the math. I know the price tags on some of the things we’re talking about. But what is the cost of not addressing climate change? Climate change is going to cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of human lives if we were to do nothing. The cost of inaction is in the trillions.So the way I’d answer your question is to say that we should not be thinking we can just do everything under the sun and put it on the government’s bottom line. But we can be much, much more aggressive than we currently are about making large-scale investments in our own future, in our infrastructure, addressing climate change and putting universal basic income into our hands. Because in many cases, these investments will end up paying us back in both human ways and economic ways.That actually gets to the core of the series on remobilizing the economy that this podcast is a part of. As the potential Joe Biden administration thinks about what to do first, there is going to be a tension between the government trying to remobilize the economy toward a given purpose, say, a Green New Deal on climate change, or mobilize around getting money into people’s hands to create a demand-side stimulus. As somebody who has been in the UBI game for a long time but also takes climate change seriously, what would you like to see happen first?I think we should be investing in people immediately because I’m terrified as to what’s happening in households and families around the country right now. It’s a stressful time for me and Evelyn and my kids, and we’re very fortunate. If you look at the mental health statistics right now, they’re staggering in terms of depression and use of the Crisis Text Line — there’s a lot of pain right now. So the first thing we have to do is make sure people can put food on the table and keep a roof over their head, and not have mass evictions and the rest of it.But those are temporary measures. I think the emphasis has to be jobs, jobs, jobs. And you can get a lot of stuff done while you’re just talking about jobs. You can put cash into people’s hands and say this will be good for local businesses, which it will be. You can hire thousands of people to go to our forest lands and start actually trying to manage the tinderbox that a lot of our forests have become.We just need to create jobs in any way we can. The labor market is in such a disastrous condition. And so if you can tie that to infrastructure, solar panels, Green New Deal, things that help us modernize, then I am all for it. But you shouldn’t stop there. If there is anything we can do to get people into some kind of productive mindset or environment, then we should just do it. And this is one thing where I think it’s very time-sensitive. I’m hopeful that Joe and Kamala decide to go big immediately.One of the things that has often appealed to people about UBI and cash transfer in general, I think, is that it is a way of getting around the inefficiencies and lack of capacity of the state. We saw this with the rollout of Obamacare, for instance, and more recently with how much trouble state governments are having with unemployment insurance. Meanwhile, Social Security is a cash-transfer program that works really well.I’m curious how you think about the problem of the deep lack of trust Americans often have in the federal government to do hard things. How should a Democratic administration think about and address that fundamental failure and political problem?This was a big element of my pitch to folks. A lot of people are not that confident in our government’s ability to deliver value in a way that you’ll actually feel and be able to utilize every single day. But if it’s in the form of cash in your hands, then you’ll be able to utilize it in a way that benefits you the most. You solve your own problems.There are a lot of folks who were not traditional Democrats who are very sympathetic to that line of thought, which I happen to believe and agree with. If you’re a Democrat and progressive, which I consider myself, you have to have ambition as to what government can do but also a sense of reality as to how government can deliver that value to folks.And if the government puts cash into people’s hands, it’s going to produce so much increased confidence in government among Americans, where you can look up and say: The government got this right — this cash helped me a lot. Instead of me just telling them about it, it’s something that they’ll see in their bank account every month. It’s just a very different experience that I think can actually bring the country together in a powerful way.I take the point you’re making here about a policy feedback cycle where, say, a relief payment creates a sense that the government can actually help you. And so you should trust the government to do more, and maybe you build up the ladder that way. But I also just wish I heard more from Democrats in power about how you’re actually going to make the government work.In my experience, Democrats actually give very little thought to the capacity of the state to accomplish their goals: the way the federal government is structured, the way elections happen, but then also within the government itself, how procurement works, how regulatory feedback works. I think that progressives overestimate how well the government is actually working right now, or at least how well it would work if they controlled it.We’ve gotten so trapped in this “government good or bad” argument that you end up having a lot less focus than we need on how the government works and what you do when it’s not working. How do you fix that?I cannot tell you how much I agree with what you just said. It is so important. There’s this entire “government good, government bad” argument. And instead, what Americans hunger for is smart, effective government. We can see that government has become less effective, certainly at the congressional level, very obviously, but also in other aspects. And no one’s having the right conversation around that. I am 100 percent with you, and I’ve been thinking about the exact same thing.This is why it infuriates me to see Democrats so lackadaisical on the filibuster, although this seems to be changing now. Because what you’re basically saying is that you are more concerned about esoteric, unbelievably misused rules of the Senate than about addressing all these crises — many of them literally life and death — that you’ve promised people you’ll do something about.There was this piece by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen awhile back called “It’s Time to Build.” And I wrote a response to it, which argues that a lot of why we can’t build is that the government and institutions can’t operate.I am really struck by how much elected Democrats do not believe what they say on the campaign trail. They do not believe that the problems they are facing are as bad as they say on the stump. And I’m talking here mainly about Senate Democrats, because if they did believe things were as bad as they say, they would get rid of the filibuster and do other things to make government work better.Ezra, this is my new mission in life, which is to try and fix the mechanics of our government so it can actually deliver to us. When I ran for president, I kept getting goaded into making these very grand statements. And I had this reflection, where I thought: What’s the point of making these arguments if you’re accepting a government that can’t deliver on them anyway?And so you need to get rid of the filibuster. You need to have the operating system of government get refreshed and updated. I’m for term limits in part for this reason. I’m very, very passionate now about trying to actually get in and fix the mechanics so that our government can function.I’m not a term-limits fan, but I think what you’re saying in general here is really important. I remember watching 2020 Democratic presidential debates, and just thinking — as people argued this Medicare-for-all plan or that Medicare-for-most plan, or this gun control plan that won’t pass or that gun control plan that won’t pass — that it was just a fantasyland debate. It let people off the hook for how they’d do any of it. All they had to say was what they supported in theory.The two questions that matter most, assuming Democrats win the White House, are: Did Democrats win Congress? And did Senate Democrats do something about the filibuster? And if the answer to either of those questions was no, then virtually everything else they talked about was gone.It seemed like a bizarre theater performance. And this is from someone who was part of it.Let’s get real, stop playing in fantasyland, and say, what can we actually get done? What are the rules we need to change to get it done? Who do we need? Because so much of our politics is degenerating into value statements.The main problem I want to solve is that people are poor for no reason, and I believe that if we change that, we’d change a lot of other things very positively — including, I believe, our fractured politics, at least in some measure. But if you have a filibuster, it doesn’t matter if I change a couple seats here and there. You’re never gonna get to a threshold where you can pass over the filibuster.There’s nothing in the Constitution about a filibuster. It is just some weird, arcane, esoteric Senate rule that took on a life of its own. And so if you’re willing to put that rule above getting stuff done, then what are you doing?While we’re talking about the Democratic debates, I appreciated how you would inject questions about technology into them. You often would do this when it came to climate change, talking about things like fourth generation nuclear.I’ve realized that a lot of the problems that I care most about solving have a huge technological dimension to them. I care about animal suffering, and by far, the most promising way to do something about that is plant- and cell-based meat. I’ve had Saul Griffith on the show talking about how we could fix climate change without any new technology being invented, but there’s just no doubt it would become a lot easier if we can invent some great new stuff. Artificial intelligence often gets talked about in a dystopic way, but if we really could invent it, it could make life pretty amazing. Better technologies in how we fight cancer, and gene therapies and other things, could make our health care system much better.Something that has struck me is that I don’t think progressives have much of a theory of technology anymore. It’s often talked about in this dystopic way. I often felt you oscillated between a very scary story about AI and then also a real interest in technology as a way of solving problems. What do you think the political orientation to technology in general should be?I think that ideally, progressives are for progress. What is going to enable a ton of progress is technology.One of the fun things about my campaign was I was making some very dark arguments about the impact of technology, which I completely believe. But I also agree with you that if you’re trying to make people smarter, healthier, mentally healthier, or you’re trying to clean up our planet or feed people in a way that doesn’t brutalize animals, technology is a part of every single one of those solutions in a very central way.One of the dangers, to me, about a lot of our politics now is we’re each arguing for different brands of nostalgia. Meanwhile, time only goes in one direction.When you go to some of the folks in California who are working on the future, some of the things that they’re working on are very positive and inspirational. Some of them are very depressing and dystopian. But they’re all packaged together. We should not be a group of people or a party that also has our heads in the sand about the positive and negative changes that technology brings. We have to be the party that is hard-nosed and realistic, but also willing to embrace the technologies that could lead us to something that more closely resembles utopia than this current mess we’re living.So I completely agree. We need to be embracing these technologies at a much higher level. And I may be a part of that in this next administration, if we succeed in getting Trump out of the way.I want to follow up on that tantalizing “I may be a part of that.” Is there a job you’ve been talking about?I’ve had some very general, informal conversations with the Biden camp about trying to take on some sort of technology-facing role, involving some of the concerns that I campaigned on and trying to address them. One thing we haven’t talked about but I’m very passionate about is the effect of social media and technology on our kids’ mental health.Right now you have massive levels of anxiety and depression among teenage girls in particular in order to make certain companies like Facebook richer, which is not a good look. But our government is way behind the curve on these issues. I’ve offered my help in trying to catch us up, and there’s some interest in taking me up on that.A minute ago, you talked about how some of the technology people in Silicon Valley are working on is very utopian, and some of it is very dystopian. And what always strikes me is that the way that plays out, in most cases, is not intrinsic to the technology. Oftentimes it is actually about the way markets, rules, regulations, but also to some degree government implementation, taxation etc. is going to interface with technology that determines whether it ends up being utopian or dystopian.So there seems to me to be a more obvious approach here, which is for both parties to use the government as a research and innovation accelerant. But then it also has to be a more central priority for the government to have views and to care about how technology is rolled out, who has access to it, and also what rules it operates under.AI is the most obvious example, just given the size of its potential impact. But we could also put a lot of money into drug development, which we already do, and then insist on very different rules for how patents work and how quickly things move to generic. One of my favorite Bernie Sanders health care policies, going way back in his Senate career, is his idea to create prizes of, say, $5 billion to create a drug that cures X problem. And then if you do it, you’ll get the $5 billion and the drug is generic from the minute it goes forward.That is spot on. Right now our government is out to lunch on most of these technology issues, and we need to change that. This should be central for both parties because the rate of change is just getting faster and faster. We got rid of the Office of Technology Assessment in 1995.We can all sense that — it’s embarrassing really. Everyone has this collective groan when it comes to government and technology. And that’s something that we should try and rev up and invest in meaningfully. The US Digital Service, which came about in the aftermath of HealthCare.gov, is still operating, but it’s down to something like 180 people. If you look at the scope of the federal workforce, that’s not enough. And those people are not empowered. But even within their constraints, they’re projected to save something like $600 million in government costs.If you were helping to modernize government on technology in a future administration, where would you start? What would be the kinds of things you would imagine doing?Ramp up the US Digital Service and empower it. You and I both know that there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of very talented technologists, designers, coders who would help government if they had a runway to do so and felt like they could actually be empowered — as opposed to getting their hands tied in red tape and bureaucracy and the rest of it. Instead of 180, you should have 10 to 20 times that number of folks working to help implement some of the policies that folks are envisioning for us digitally. That would be step one. You take what’s been working and then you pour fuel on it.The other thing is I think that there should be some kind of West Coast base of operation as part of the talent enlistment, because there are a lot of techies that might not want to uproot their families. Then we need to have actual experts getting into the guts of the social media companies and the apps, because each of these companies is its own thing. You can’t really have a one size fits all, like 20th-century antitrust rules. There are all of these features that are company specific — you need real expertise to try and get to the bottom of [it] and see if you can curb the worst of the excesses.What do you think a second Trump term would look like?It would be catastrophic. We’re seeing the deterioration and disintegration of our way of life, and I don’t see that reversing itself under Trump. I think with Joe and Kamala, there is at least a chance that we’ll get enough of a consensus to invest trillions of dollars in jobs, infrastructure, economic relief, health care, climate change mitigation, you name it.We have a multi-trillion-dollar hole that’s been blasted in our annual economy, and tens of millions of us have gotten pushed to the side. We have to give ourselves a chance, and we at least get our fighting chance with Joe and Kamala. So hopefully they’re our next president and vice president.You talked a fair amount about Asian-American discrimination during the campaign, so when you listen to Trump during his convention speech, calling it the China virus and saying reelect him and he’ll make sure to make China pay, how did that strike you personally? How do you see that playing out?I felt like it was Trump reverting to his usual playbook of distracting from his own failures. Certainly as an Asian American, it’s painful because there’s always a sense that somehow your Americanness is in question. Having Trump double down on that is really corrosive for the country, but it’s painful for Asian Americans in particular. I feel like our Americanness has been questioned to a higher degree in the wake of the coronavirus than has been the case that really any point in my memory.When I started in politics as a journalist in the early 2000s, there was a real hunger for an external enemy, especially post-9/11. People talked about the clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. I think among politicians who are comfortable in a Cold War framework, there’s this real desire to find the new external threat.Now, I’m not a big fan of the way China withheld information on the coronavirus, and I’m certainly not a fan of their increasing authoritarianism or their brutal treatment of the Uighurs. But I’m really scared of this idea of creating an oppositional relationship between America and China, which is something I think would be very prominent in a second Trump term.Politicians who see their own political safety in creating an enemy and creating fear in a world where we have to actually work together on threats like pandemics is such a potentially dangerous thing. I think people’s feelings toward China’s leadership right now should be complicated, but nevertheless, very little would be as bad as a “clash of civilizations” narrative becoming the dominant foreign policy framework toward China.I agree with you on all fronts. You and I agree on a lot of things. Who knew?There’s too much agreement in this conversation. It’s a disaster.I agree with you that Trump’s playbook is to find an enemy. And in this case, it’s going to naturally head toward China and the East, to disastrous consequences.I agree it’s a very complex, fraught relationship, with some massive problems and concerns around the things you described and then some — like the theft of our intellectual property. But you need to have some kind of relationship with China in order to guard against the next pandemic, to make progress on climate change, to make progress on data concerns, to make progress on North Korea. There is a much less safe world if you aren’t in touch with the Chinese government to the point where you even can’t speak to them about something that’s happening that would concern American well-being.That’s the reality. And unfortunately, we are getting to a point now where folks feel better served politically by trying to present a different version of reality for purposes that benefit them, their party, certain economic interests, but are really bad for all of us long term.And to your point, too, as someone who grew up in this country, one of the simmering fears you have as an Asian American is that if you wind up with a US-China geopolitical conflict, Asian Americans will end up being caught right in the middle.What is one way you’d like to change the Democratic Party?I think Democrats need to figure out why it is that many working-class Americans do not feel like we are fighting for them or we stand for them. I ran into this all the time on the trail. When a waitress or a truck driver or a retail clerk found out I was a Democrat, it was like I had said a dirty word. And I thought to myself, “Shouldn’t you be who we are fighting for?” I think we’ve gotten caught in these exchanges that don’t actually feel like they’re relevant to those folks, and we need to get better at it.Unfortunately, Republicans have become more effective at communicating to certain groups of people than we have. So instead of saying, well, it’s their fault, we should do some soul-searching: Why is it that they don’t think that we’re speaking to them?We do not want to be characterized as the party of the educated elite or folks who just live in big cities. Because if that’s the case, then trying to reach folks that we’re going to need to reach around the country is going to be very difficult. That would be one big message I’d have. I’m obviously, like, on board with a lot of the policy prescriptions that we have. I just want to try and present them to folks in a way that makes them feel like it’s going to touch them and improve their lives every single day.ntribute today from as little as $3. 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.

closeVideoMark Levin blasts media narrative of Trump-Ukraine transcriptMark Levin blasts media narrative of Trump-Ukraine transcriptMark Levin dismissed the media's narrative that President Trump tried to cover up a quid pro quo with Ukraine in order to damage former Vice President Joe Biden.Levin, in the latest episode of "Life, Liberty & Levin," claimed the plain text of the transcript disproves the existence of such a deal between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.Levin also claimed that even though no past president has ever released such a transcript in a similar situation -- as Trump did -- the media still claims he is trying to "cover up" unethical or illegal behavior. The host rejected the claim the White House keeping the transcript on a "secured server" was proof he was trying to hide an inappropriate act."Folks, do you understand the president of the United States could just say he's covering this [up] by executive privilege and it would never see the light of day?" he asked.Video"There is not a court in America that would overturn his decision, given that this is a discussion between one president to another president. "It doesn't matter if he had it on a secured server or not. He could have it under his mattress if he wanted to."Levin then claimed the president has the constitutional authority to keep accounts of conversations with foreign leaders private and that such decisions are within his constitutionally delegated power to conduct foreign policy on behalf of the United States.He said Trump released the transcript for the simple reason that it "exonerates" him from Democrats' claims that he committed impeachable offenses.VideoMimicking the media's reporting, Levin later remarked: "'Oh my God -- he mentioned Biden eight to nine times.' No, he didn't. 'Oh, there's a quid pro quo.' No there wasn't -- remember all that reporting?"He then read from Trump's comments in the transcript text -- which he held up to the camera:"'I would like you to do us a favor' -- and this is where the left and the media -- the Democrats, all the same -- get 'a favor.' The president said, 'Do me a favor [and] get dirt on Biden?' "No, he didn't say that," Levin said, contending the president's comments were more to the effect of: 'I would like you to do us a favor because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.'"To Levin, the president simply wanted to have Ukraine help investigate foreign influence in the 2016 election.Levin paused before returning to the topic of the media's coverage, claiming outlets have the essence of the transcript completely wrong and noting that Democrats have tried to tie the word "favor" to Biden and his son Hunter."There is no link of the word 'favor' with Biden," Levin claimed, calling that part of the exchange with Zelensky a "nothing statement."

The congressional impeachment inquiry into US president Donald Trump’s Ukraine dealings, and his administration’s claims of executive privilege—that oft-cited excuse to withhold information from investigators and the public—put Americans in uncharted legal territory.Executive privilege isn’t written into the Constitution, however, the Supreme Court has held that such a privilege stems from the president’s constitutionally-derived powers and duties. Yet the limits of this vague privilege have never been tested in the context of a court case about a congressional impeachment inquiry of a president.Trump, his lawyers, and executive agency officials all claim that information about the administration’s Ukraine dealings isn’t subject to review because it’s shielded by a blanket protection. But there is no precedent to support their claims. Much remains unknown about the limits of executive privilege, and what is known indicates that Trump’s view of his own right to privacy as absolute is unfounded.Executive privilege allows the president and high-level executive branch officials to keep certain communications private if disclosure would disrupt official functions or jeopardize national security. Still, the protection isn’t unlimited. The sole Supreme Court case to consider presidential privilege arose under different circumstances, but indicates the president’s view of this protection is too expansive.In 1974, the Supreme Court decided US v. Nixon, a matter arising from a special prosecutor’s criminal grand jury investigation of president Richard Nixon’s White House aides, the ones involved in the Watergate break-ins. The prosector subpoenaed audio tapes of conversations recorded by Nixon in the White House. The president refused to turn them over, claiming executive privilege. But the high court strongly disagreed with the president, and its decision effectively ended his presidency, prompting him to quit before a formal impeachment trial in the Senate.The justices held that presidential privilege does not extend to information that’s germane to criminal investigations.Their unanimous 8-0 ruling wasn’t all bad news for presidents, though. It found “constitutional underpinnings“ for executive privilege, though it isn’t mentioned in the Constitution. “Whatever the nature of the privilege of confidentiality of Presidential communications in the exercise of Article II powers, the privilege can be said to derive from the supremacy of each branch within its own assigned area of constitutional duties,” the court wrote.Still, it can’t be an absolute privilege because if it was, the court explained, it would conflict with the judiciary’s work. The judicial branch needs information to do its job, which is seeking justice in criminal prosecutions. It’s impossible for the president’s work to necessarily trump the needs of those in equal branches of government, so conflicts must be resolved in “a manner that preserves the essential functions of each branch.”The Trump impeachment inquiry—a congressional investigation rather than a criminal prosecution— presents different facts from Nixon’s case. But the 1974 ruling indicates that if a legislative branch’s request for information is pitted against executive privilege, courts will consider their competing interests in fulfilling their constitutional duties.And if the past is an indication, then it’s not clear that the president’s need for privacy trumps representatives’ interests in accessing information for their investigation.The Nixon court held that “historic commitment to rule of law” outweighs a president’s generalized need for privacy. Congress is constitutionally tasked with investigating alleged wrongdoing and voting on articles of impeachment for a president, when appropriate. Thus, the interest of investigators in uncovering the truth would be weighed against the president’s interest in keeping communications private if subpoena challenges do end up in court.The justices in 1974 also ruled that presidential privilege “is limited to communications in performance of (a President’s) responsibilities … of his office,” made while shaping policies and decisions. But Trump is accused of using his presidential powers to shape policies that advance his own personal interests, so the information he wants shielded might not ultimately be deemed protected by executive privilege.Executive privilege cases have come up in lower courts since the 1970s. Though none have to do with a presidential impeachment inquiry, there are a few DC circuit court decisions that shed light on the protection, explained University of Texas School of Law professor Steve Vladeck in SCOTUSBlog.These cases show that executive privilege can apply to communications that don’t involve the president if related to “official government matters” calling for his “direct decision-making.” Still, protection can only be claimed by senior White House advisers and their immediate staffers, and the scope of the privilege is to be construed “narrowly.”A 2008 case, House Committee on the Judiciary v. Miers, is especially relevant when considering Trump administration claims, Vladeck notes. The judge held that senior advisers to the president—past or present—could not use executive privilege to shirk valid congressional subpoenas.Congress’s power of inquiry “lies at the very heart” of its constitutional role, the judge wrote. Using US v. Nixon, the court concluded that congressional subpoena power involves an equal Congress performing its duties alongside the executive branch, just as Nixon’s case involved a clash between two equal government branches. As such, executive privilege couldn’t just trump congressional inquiry powers as an absolute.It seems, based on the prior rulings, that a clash with Congress won’t necessarily be resolved in favor of the president in court. “Much remains unanswered by the courts, but the guidance from [these cases] should go a long way toward separating colorable privilege claims from those that are patently meritless,” Vladeck writes.If talk of executive privilege sounds familiar, yet incomprehensible, it’s because you’ve heard the claim of blanket protection from the Trump administration before, and it was no more evident then that the president is entitled to such extensive protection.In May, the president claimed executive privilege shielded all the underlying materials in special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 US elections and alleged obstruction of justice by Trump. Some legal analysts suggested then that claiming privilege was just a stalling tactic: Trump wants cases to play out in court as the 2020 elections approach because he thinks he’ll win and will shut down Democratic opposition, preventing any further inquiries into the matter.Assistant Tennessee solicitor general Jonathan Shaub explained in Lawfare that “over the past 40 years, the executive branch has been steadily developing a comprehensive, and largely consistent, doctrine of presidential control over information—one that has never been tested by an appellate court.”Shaub argued that Trump has been taking an even more expansive approach by making “protective assertions.” Essentially, the president asserts a blanket privilege, reserving the right to withhold all information as a preliminary step before officially claiming privilege and facing the balancing of interests test used by the Supreme Court in 1974. Shaub says the administration is carving a new kind of protection out for presidents, one that’s unconstitutional when pitted against the needs of an equal branch of government.No one really knows the precise limits of executive privilege in this situation. While past cases indicate it isn’t as simple or expansive as the Trump administration claims, the best case scenario is perhaps for his privilege assertions to never be tested in court at all and for us to keep not having the answers because it would show the government branches are operating properly, which is to say, cooperating.Most disputes over information exchanges between the legislative and executive branches are resolved with negotiations, not litigation, according to a 2014 Congressional Research Service report on executive privilege. Ideally then, the government branches would resolve the disputes as is customary, negotiating a mutually satisfactory conclusion, like leaders, instead of warring in the courts.

When Andrew Yang ran for president, he wanted to initiate a national discussion about giving Americans direct cash payments. Now, to a degree, that discussion is happening. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration is looking to send one-off payments of as much as $1,200 to taxpayers, as part of a $1tn economic stabilization proposal.Yang doesn’t think it’s enough.“I think we should be looking at trillions of dollars of stimulus and the lion’s share of that should go to people,” said the tech entrepreneur who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, in an interview with the Guardian.“That would be the most effective thing. A thousand dollars per person should be the baseline.“If you’re looking at larger amounts than that, I’m thrilled. Whatever we do it should be regular and predictable so that after someone gets it in March or April, they also know they’re going to get it in May. And that they can look forward to it and not be stressed out.”Yang said he would like to see a regular direct payment of something like double the $1,000 one-off payment being proposed by the Trump administration.“So I think you should be looking at somewhere in the order of magnitude of several thousand dollars per household,” he said, “which would depend upon the size of the household, the composition of adults and children.“So the bare minimum I suggested before is $1,000 per adult and $500 per child, which depending on the way your household is set up, it’s probably $2,000 to $3,000 a month. As a baseline I think amounts that are higher than that would be excellent. I would be all for it. But that to me would be the absolute minimum.”The national discussion around direct payments is not exactly what Yang has been pushing. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who in 2008 was director for domestic and economic policy for John McCain’s presidential campaign, said that even with the direct payment proposal from the Trump administration, the country would not be close to implementing a universal basic income.“I don’t see that as likely in the future,” Holtz-Eakin said when asked if direct payments would become a regular occurrence. “Americans have a deep reverence for work, we work more than other countries for a reason, and we’re not just going to mail checks to people regardless. I do not see that happening.”Nonetheless, the spotlight has swung back to Yang. On Friday morning, his Humanity Forward not-for-profit group announced that it would distribute $1m in direct payments to low-income workers in New York and around the country.Meanwhile, Republican and Democratic senators ranging from Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton to Sherrod Brown and Michael Bennet have rolled out direct payment proposals to help workers losing their jobs because of the pandemic.“Obviously there have been cash rebates as part of a stimulus in the past but I think everyone agrees that this time the direct cash payments to people are a significant proportion of the measures that are being discussed,” Yang said.“And I feel like the public discussion is very different this time, where this is the key component whereas at other times if you look at it both as a dollar amount and also as a level of discussion, the direct rebates were relatively minimal. This time it’s the direct topic of conversation.”Asked if he thought the enthusiasm for direct payments among congressional leaders and the White House would lead to regular direct payments, Yang said he hoped direct payments would at least recur while the pandemic lasts.“I don’t want to distract from a crisis, and we just need to get money into people’s hands, but by arguing for permanence … I mean, everyone knows I think it should be permanent,” he said. “But in the absence of it being permanent, that we should say it lasts the duration of the crisis. I think that would be immensely helpful.”Recently, Yang said, the White House reached out to him and his team, asking for “information and studies” related to direct payments.“We tried to send them information that would be helpful,” he said.The White House did not respond to inquiries from the Guardian.Yang argued that the Trump administration has not been fast enough in addressing the pandemic or its economic ramifications.“I think the Trump administration missed the ball at the most crucial time where this crisis is concerned,” he said.“Because early on you might’ve been able to trace individual people and the people they had contact with and because we missed that window we’re not in mediation mode [and we have] social distancing and closing down schools and all of that stuff.“If we could’ve avoided this, think of that potential preservation of value. We’re teetering towards a depression. A recession’s already here. Imagine if you could’ve prevented that. It’s conceivable you could’ve prevented that if we’d been incredibly on the ball from day one.”There have been rumors that Yang might run for mayor of New York, which he hasn’t shot down completely. His group’s move to make direct payments is likely to add fuel to such speculation.Asked if he will run for office again, Yang said: “Well, we’re looking at it. We’re looking at several things. I want to try and do the most good I can. New York’s a great city. I love New York. But I love the United States too.” Topics Coronavirus Universal basic income Democrats US politics interviews

closeVideoFox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 14Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 14 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.comThe U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, is expected to tell congressional lawmakers on Thursday that President Trump told him there was no quid pro quo when it came to Trump’s controversial July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy.A person familiar with his planned testimony told Fox News that Sondland is expected to say that his text message reassuring another envoy that there was no quid pro quo in their interactions with Ukraine was based on a phone call he had with Trump that lasted less than five minutes.Sondland is also expected to tell Congress he has no knowledge of whether Trump was telling him the truth – only that he told him there was no quid pro quo --and that he believes the president’s reassurances and passed along in a text message exchange his own belief that the White House was not making military aid to Ukraine contingent on an investigation into a company linked to the family of a chief Democratic presidential rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.‘WHERE’S HUNTER?’ TRUMP ASKS, AS BIDEN’S SON PROMISES NOT TO WORK WITH FOREIGN COMPANIES IF FATHER WINS PRESIDENCY IN 2020In the text exchange, the diplomats raised alarm that Trump appeared to up the ante, withholding military aid to Ukraine over the investigation.One seasoned diplomat on the text message, William Taylor, called it "crazy to withhold security assistance" to Ukraine in exchange for "help with a political campaign."VideoSondland responded that the assertion is "incorrect" about Trump's intentions. "The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo's of any kind," he said in the text message.Sondland was subpoenaed by several House committees when he failed to appear for questioning after the Trump administration blocked him from testifying. He announced Friday that he would appear for questioning on Capitol Hill this week, in apparent defiance of the State Department.“Ambassador Sondland has requested that the Department of State allow him to testify as soon as possible,” Jim McDermott, a lawyer representing Sondland, said in a statement emailed last Thursday. “Precisely because no one is above the law, Ambassador Sondland has turned over all relevant documents sought by Congress to the Department of State, as the Federal Records Act requires.”One witness who may not be called before Congress is the still-anonymous government whistleblower who touched off the impeachment inquiry. Top Democrats say testimony and evidence coming in from other witnesses, and even the president himself, are backing up the whistleblower's account of what transpired during Trump's July 25 phone call with Zelenskiy. Lawmakers have grown deeply concerned about protecting the person from Trump's threats over the matter and may not wish to risk exposing the whistleblower's identity.VideoDemocratic Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday, "We don't need the whistleblower, who wasn't on the call, to tell us what took place during the call. We have the best evidence of that."Schiff said it "may not be necessary" to reveal the whistleblower's identity as the House gathers evidence. "Our primary interest right now is making sure that that person is protected," he said.Fox News’ Mike Emanuel and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Donald Trump may be the great white hope of the Republican party, but his dislike of sharks is well known.It seemed odd, then, that in a Sunday feeding frenzy of retweets attacking a Fox News pundit, the president gave voice to a bot that seeks to satirise his rampant galeophobia.Trump appeared to have been watching TV at the White House, before leaving for a second straight day at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia.On Fox & Friends, host Ed Henry had asked the radio presenter Mark Levin if he thought the president did anything “illegal” in the 25 July phone call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which is at the heart of impeachment proceedings.True to form, Levin reacted angrily. This seemed to please the president, who retweeted more than 20 tweets about the exchange.One referred to another Fox News anchor whose coverage of the Ukraine scandal has stoked turmoil at the network: “Can we face off Levin and worlds [sic] worst anchor Chris Wallace?”Others included: “Mark Levin ripped Ed Henry a new one” and “Mark Levin sure put that lying shit head Ed Henry in his place didn’t he?”In less vulgar fashion, the president also relayed a message from @TBASharks.The account is a bot, full title Trump But About Sharks, which explains its mission thus: “Trump apparently hates sharks, so this bot does some word replacement on his tweets to make them about sharks.”The message retweeted by the president therefore read: “RT @BulldawgDerek @foxandfriends A Sunday Morning; Amen Mark Levin, Preach Brother! You shut down Ed Henry and the Pro Shark Media with the fac[ts]”.The original tweet, which Trump also retweeted, referred to “the fake news”, a common target for Trump if not usually including hosts of Fox & Friends.Trump’s fear and dislike of sharks is well established. In 2013, two years before he emerged Jaws-like from the depths to savage the body politic, he tweeted: “Sharks are last on my list – other than perhaps the losers and haters of the world!”In 2018, the adult film-maker and actor Stormy Daniels revealed that during the brief affair she claims to have had with Trump in 2006 – which he denies – he enthused about a TV special about a shipwreck.“It was like the worst shark attack in history,” said Daniels. “He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks. He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ He was like riveted. He was like obsessed.“It’s so strange, I know.” Topics Donald Trump Fox News news

If there was a country that could have been expected to have a hard time with this virus, it was Hong Kong. It’s one of the most dense cities in the world, with crowded high-rise housing squeezed into almost every available space, and more cross-border traffic with China than anywhere else in the world. The region relies on an efficient but packed mass-transportation system—trains run every few minutes but many are stuffed to the gills during many hours of the day. There is little open public space, and little room to naturally spread out. Many of my favorite restaurants in Hong Kong seat diners elbow to elbow, knee to knee.Unsurprisingly, Hong Kong has had a long history of epidemics. The 1968 flu pandemic that killed 1 million people around the world started in Hong Kong, and killed at least many thousands of the city’s residents, and became known as the Hong Kong flu. Hong Kong also lost the most people outside of mainland China to the 2003 SARS epidemic.It wouldn’t have been shocking if, like many pathogens before it, this coronavirus had spread wildly through Hong Kong. The city is connected to Wuhan, where the pandemic started, via a high-speed-train line and many daily flights. More than 2.5 million people came to Hong Kong from mainland China just in January of 2020. The city also lacks a competent government with a strong basis of legitimacy. The people don’t have full voting rights and the region’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, who was hand-picked by Beijing, failed to muster an effective response when the protest movement engulfed the city in 2019. The region’s economy was already in recession before the pandemic, and things have worsened since. Lam is extremely unpopular, with a staggering 80 percent disapproval rating.Lam fumbled the response to the pandemic as well, reacting with ineptitude, especially at first. Hong Kong’s first coronavirus case was reported when she was having dim sum with world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, and there was an outcry over the fact that she did not quickly return. She dragged her feet in closing the city’s borders, and never fully closed down the land border with China. The hospitals suffered from shortages of personal protective equipment. Lam wavered on masks, and even ordered civil servants not to wear them. There were shortages of crucial supplies and empty shelves in stores, as well as lines for many essentials. In early February, the financial outlet Bloomberg ran an opinion piece that compared Hong Kong to a “failed state”—a striking assessment for a global financial center and transportation hub usually known for its efficiency and well-functioning institutions.And yet there is no unchecked, devastating COVID-19 epidemic in Hong Kong. The city beat back the original wave, and also beat back a second resurgence due to imported cases. But unlike in Taiwan or South Korea, this success can’t be attributed to an executive that acted early and with good governance backed by the people.

“President Trump is not a big fan of foreign aid. Never has been. Still isn’t. Doesn’t like spending money overseas, especially when it's poorly spent, and that is exactly what drove this decision,” Mulvaney told ABC News’ Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl during a White House briefing. “I've been in the office a couple of times with him, talking about this, and he said, ‘Look, Mick, this is a corrupt place. Everybody knows it's a corrupt place.’”In a terse statement issued Thursday evening, Trump's personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said, "The President's legal counsel was not involved in acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney's press briefing."After hours of backlash, Mulvaney attempted to clarify his comments in a statement the White House released shortly afterward.“Once again, the media has decided to misconstrue my comments to advance a biased and political witch hunt against President Trump. Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election," Mulvaney noted. "The president never told me to withhold any money until the Ukrainians did anything related to the server. The only reasons we were holding the money was because of concern about lack of support from other nations and concerns over corruption."The "server" reference is to a debunked conspiracy theory that Trump has long clung to: that the Democratic National Committee’s hacked email server was being held in Ukraine – and that individuals in Ukraine were behind an effort to sabotage his 2016 election. Last month, Trump’s own former homeland security adviser called the theory “completely false.”Mulvaney added in the statement that he repeatedly cited the president's interest in "rooting out corruption in Ukraine, and ensuring taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly and appropriately" during the news conference."There was never any connection between the funds and the Ukrainians doing anything with the server - this was made explicitly obvious by the fact that the aid money was delivered without any action on the part of the Ukrainians regarding the server," he said. "There never was any condition on the flow of the aid related to the matter of the DNC server.”Earlier Thursday, Mulvaney had recounted that the president told him he didn’t want to send Ukraine “a bunch of money and have them waste it, and have them spend it, have them use it to line their own pockets.”“Those were the driving factors,” Mulvaney said. “Did he also mention to me in the past that the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely, no question about that. But that’s it and that’s why we held up the money.”“So the demand for an investigation into the Democrats was part of the reason that he ordered you to withhold funding to Ukraine?” Karl asked.“’Look back to what happened in 2016,’ certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with the nation,” Mulvaney said. “And that is absolutely equivalent.”“What you described is a quid pro quo,” Karl pressed. “It is: Funding will not flow unless the investigation into the Democrats’ server happens as well.”“We do that all the time with foreign policy,” Mulvaney answered. “We were holding up money at the same time for, what was it? The Northern Triangle countries. We were holding up aid at the Northern Triangle countries so that they -- so that they would change their policies on immigration.”Mulvaney did not mention that a rough White House transcript of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy shows the investigation into alleged corruption Trump and the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, wanted specified a probe of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma where former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board.Asked whether Giuliani's role was problematic, Mulvaney dismissed questions raised about having a private citizen, not a government official, involved in U.S. foreign policy."It is not illegal, it is not impeachable. The president gets to use who he wants to use. If he wants to fire me and hire someone else, he can. The president gets to set foreign policy. He gets to choose who to do so. As long as it does not violate law or laws regarding confidential information or classified material or anything like that the president can use who he wants tom" he argued.Mulvaney, who stepped into the role of acting chief of staff from his post as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, insisted that an investigation of Joe Biden was not part of the equation, and dismissed the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry as a “witch hunt.”“I have news for everybody: Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy,” Mulvaney said. “That is going to happen. Elections have consequences and foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration.”While previous American presidents have pressured foreign leaders in order to achieve U.S. policy objectives, it has not been considered acceptable that they could do so for the personal benefit they might get from an investigation into political opponents, and many Democrats have said doing so, by itself, is grounds for impeachment.Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee and is leading the impeachment investigation, called Mulvaney's blocking of the aid "illicit.""With his acknowledgement now that military aid to a vital ally, battling Russia as we speak, was withheld in part out of the desire by the president to have Ukraine investigate the DNC server or Democrats of 2016, things have just gone from very, very bad to much, much worse," Schiff said. "The idea that vital military assistance would be withheld for such a patently political reason, for reason of serving the presidential election campaign, is a phenomenal breach of the president’s duty to defend our national security."ABC News' John Santucci and Benjamin Siegel contributed to this report.

When President Donald Trump appeared at a Tupelo, Mississippi, rally Friday to energize voters for the state’s Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves — who is facing a tight race for governor against Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood on November 5 — it didn’t take long for the president to start stumping for himself instead. In his first rally since the House of Representatives’ Thursday vote on the impeachment inquiry, the president did find some time to ask voters to support Reeves, who he brought on stage, but spent the majority of his address attacking lawmakers, the press, and political opponents to defend himself against growing scrutiny. A day before the rally, the House voted to endorse an impeachment inquiry into the president’s efforts to pressure Ukraine into opening an investigation against his political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Biden’s son, Hunter. As the House’s hearings with state officials are bringing potentially damaging information to light, Trump was eager to paint the investigation as a “hoax.” Proclaiming his innocence, he attacked Democratic leadership and threw a question back at the crowd: “How do you impeach a president who didn’t do anything wrong?”“The [Democratic Party] leadership, they have no clue,” Trump continued. “They’re just very vicious people — actually, they’re sort of mentally violent people. But we’ve got it under control. It always help when you didn’t do anything wrong.” Trump, alluding to impeachment, threatens that "if they ever do anything bad to us ... that stock market will crash like you have never seen a crash before." He then describes Democrats as "mentally violent." pic.twitter.com/3avrDRQlN9— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 2, 2019 After spending time attacking his usual foils, including former President Barack Obama, former presidential rival Hillary Clinton (whose mention was greeted by chants of “Lock her up”), and Republican Sen. Mitt Romney (who has said he has some concerns about Trump and Ukraine), Trump told the crowd he doesn’t fear his critics or impeachment, because he believes he will come out on top.“They figured they could take us out a different way, very dishonestly: with the lying and the spying and the leaking,” Trump said. “And we are kicking their ass, I tell you.”Recent revelations from the House’s closed-door hearings indicate a different story, however. On Tuesday, Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer and a US Army lieutenant colonel, said he had expressed concerns internally over Trump’s push for Ukraine’s investigation into the Biden family. Adding credence to his words was the fact that he was party to the now infamous July 25 call in which Trump explicitly asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate both the Bidens and the Democratic Party.Tim Morrison, the top White House aide for Europe and Russia policy, also testified on Thursday, confirming Trump offered Zelensky a quid pro quo arrangement.This didn’t stop Trump from placing the blame for the impeachment inquiry elsewhere on Friday, including on the press. He blamed the media for framing his phone call with Zelensky as improper. And despite the fact the public record of the call came from the White House, he said journalists intentionally removed the sarcasm and laughter from the call “because they’re dishonorable people.”The president also colored the investigation as not only an attack against him, but a threat to democracy itself. “The Democrats voted to potentially nullify the votes of 63 million Americans, disgracing themselves and bringing shame upon the House of Representatives,” Trump said, according to Politico. “Make no mistake they are coming after the Republican Party and me because I’m fighting for you.”The House’s vote on Thursday wasn’t about whether or not Trump should be impeached —we’re still far away from that vote. It did, however, set guidelines on how the impeachment inquiry will be handled from now on.The resolution passed almost entirely on party lines: all but two Democrats voted yes — Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson and New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew broke from their party — while all Republicans voted no. Independent Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, who is a former Republican, joined Democrats on the issue. In response to the vote, Trump lashed out on Twitter, calling the investigation a “witch hunt” and claiming it was hurting the stock market. Although the vote didn’t really change the status quo of the investigation, Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains it has interesting political implications: Thursday’s vote is intriguing politically for two reasons. First, this is a vote that Pelosi has spent all year trying to stave off thanks to fear of putting vulnerable House Democrats from Trump-friendly districts in a tough spot. Second, and relatedly, Republicans have spent weeks making the lack of this vote a key talking point in their criticisms of Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. In fact, House rules do not require a vote to start such an inquiry, nor does the Constitution, as Vox’s Ella Nilsen explained. But now that Democrats have decided to hold one anyway, Trump’s defenders will have to find some other process complaint to gripe about. Under the new resolution, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will hold open hearings. The inquiry has reached a new phase — one where the public will be more closely involved. Early on, Democratic leadership had been wary of pursuing an impeachment inquiry due to concerns over potential political consequences. And while impeachment remains a partisan issue, recent polling is showing growing support for an investigation. Polling from the New York Times/Siena College last week showed that a majority of voters in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — five battleground states that Trump won in 2016 and will heavily rely on in 2020 — support an impeachment inquiry. The same poll indicates that these voters are still against removing Trump from office. As Vox’s Aaron Rupar explains, however, open hearings could change their mind: That same poll indicates that majorities in each of those states currently oppose Trump’s removal from office. But as the Nixon Watergate hearings taught us, public hearings laying out the evidence that Trump abused his office during his dealings with the new Ukrainian government could change that in a hurry, and those hearings are likely to begin as soon as later this month.Trump should also be worried that his overall approval rating among Republicans has also dropped to a record low of 74 percent, according to a Washington Post/ABC poll released on Friday. And even the support of Senate Republicans, who had been staunch supporters of Trump through thick and thin, is beginning to show signs of weakening. On Thursday, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) told reporters, “There’s lot of things that concern me” when asked about the allegations of wrongdoing Trump faces. And Scott, while in the minority, is not alone. Other senators, from Romney to Susan Collins have expressed concern.“Everybody wants us to do the right thing,” Scott said. “In order to do the right thing, we want to see all that there is.” 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.

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said Sunday that he expects the whistleblower at the heart of impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump to testify “very soon.”“All that needs to be done, at this point, is to make sure that the attorneys that represent the whistleblower get the clearances that they need to be able to accompany the whistleblower to testimony,” said Schiff, D-Calif., “and that we figure out the logistics to make sure that we protect the identity of the whistleblower.”As Democrats and the director of national intelligence worked out key arrangements, Trump’s allies erupted in a surge of second-guessing and conspiracy theorizing across the Sunday talk shows, suggesting the White House strategy is unclear against the stiffest challenge to his presidency. One former adviser urged Trump to confront the crisis at hand and get past his fury over the probe of Russian election interference.“I honestly believe this president has not gotten his pound of flesh yet from past grievances on the 2016 investigation,” said Tom Bossert, Trump’s former homeland security adviser. “If he continues to focus on that white whale,” Bossert added, “it’s going to bring him down.”The Ukraine investigation produced what the Russian probe did not: formal House impeachment proceedings based on the president’s own words and actions.The White House last week released a rough transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as well as the whistleblower’s complaint alleging the U.S. president pressured his counterpart to investigate the family of Joe Biden, the former vice president who is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Trump’s reelection next year.In a series of tweets Sunday night, Trump said he deserved to meet “my accuser” as well as whoever provided the whistleblower with what the president called “largely incorrect” information. He also accused Democrats of “doing great harm to our Country” in an effort to destabilize the nation and the 2020 election.Trump has sought to implicate Biden and his son Hunter Biden in the kind of corruption that has long plagued Ukraine. Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at the same time his father was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic dealings with Kyiv. There has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either of the Bidens.The House forged ahead, with Schiff’s committee leading the investigation. Democrats are planning a rapid start to their push for impeachment, with hearings and depositions starting this week. Many Democrats are pushing for a vote on articles of impeachment before the end of the year, mindful of the looming 2020 elections.Schiff has said the whistleblower has agreed to testify, but the logistics involving security had yet to be set. Lawyers for the whistleblower expressed concern about that individual’s safety, noting that some have offered a $50,000 “bounty” for the whistleblower’s identity. They said they expect the situation to become even more dangerous for their client and any other whistleblowers, as Congress seeks to investigate this matter.On a conference call later Sunday, Pelosi, who was traveling in Texas, urged Democrats to proceed “not with negative attitudes towards him, but a positive attitude towards our responsibility,” according to an aide on the call who requested anonymity to share the private conversation. She also urged the caucus to be “somber” and noted that polling on impeachment has changed “drastically.”A one-day NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted last Wednesday found that about half of Americans — 49% — approve of the House formally starting an impeachment inquiry into Trump.There remains a stark partisan divide on the issue, with 88% of Democrats approving and 93% of Republicans disapproving of the inquiry. But the findings suggest some movement in opinions on the issue. Earlier polls conducted throughout Trump’s presidency have consistently found a majority saying he should not be impeached and removed from office.On the call, Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries of New York urged the caucus to talk about impeachment by repeating the words “betrayal, abuse of power, national security.” At the same time, Democrats’ campaign arm was mobilizing to support the candidates, according to a person on the call who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the details.In contrast, Republicans offered a televised array of strategies to a president who spent the day at his golf club in Virginia and prefers to handle his own communications.Stephen Miller, the president’s senior policy adviser, called the whole inquiry a “partisan hit job” orchestrated by “a deep state operative” who is also “a saboteur.”“The president of the United States is the whistleblower,” Miller said.And House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said Trump had done nothing impeachable.“Why would we move forward with impeachment? There’s not something that you have to defend here,” the California Republican said.Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who has been encouraging Ukraine to investigate both Biden and Hillary Clinton, promoted a debunked conspiracy theory, insisting that Ukraine had spread disinformation during the 2016 election.Bossert advised that Trump drop that defense.“I am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the president. It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again,” said Bossert, who also was an adviser to President George W. Bush. “That conspiracy theory has got to go, they have to stop with that, it cannot continue to be repeated.”ADVERTISEMENTGiuliani not only repeated it but also brandished what he said were affidavits that support them and claimed that Trump “was framed by the Democrats.”Schiff said in one interview that his committee intends to subpoena Giuliani for documents and may eventually want to hear from Giuliani directly. In a separate TV appearance, Giuliani said he would not cooperate with Schiff, but then acknowledged he would do what Trump tells him. The White House did not provide an official response on whether the president would allow Giuliani to cooperate.“If they’re going to obstruct,” Schiff warned, “then they’re going to increase the likelihood that Congress may feel it necessary to move forward with an article on obstruction.”Two advisers to the Biden campaign sent a letter Sunday urging major news networks to stop booking Giuliani on their shows, accusing Trump’s personal attorney of spreading “false, debunked conspiracy theories” on behalf of the president. The letter added: “By giving him your air time, you are allowing him to introduce increasingly unhinged, unfounded and desperate lies into the national conversation.”Biden advisers Anita Dunn and Kate Bedingfield sent the letter to the presidents of ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, MSNBC, CNN and Fox News as well as executive producers and anchors of their news shows. The advisers also asked that if Giuliani continues to appear, the networks give equivalent time to a Biden campaign surrogate and admonished the networks for giving Giuliani time in the first place, calling it “a disservice to your audience and a disservice to journalism.”Giuliani appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and CBS’ “Face the Nation,” while Schiff was interviewed on ABC, NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CBS’ “60 Minutes.” Bossert spoke on ABC and Miller on “Fox News Sunday.” McCarthy’s remarks were broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes.”___Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Eric Tucker and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington; writer Bill Barrow in Atlanta; and AP Polling Director Emily Swanson contributed to this report.___

President Donald Trump has built his political brand by posting a steady stream of misleading information, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks on Twitter. Now that Twitter did something unprecedented and fact-checked two of his tweets, he’s escalating his typical behavior. After Twitter called out Trump’s false statements about vote-by-mail ballots, the president fired back, tweeting that social media platforms “totally silence conservatives voices” [sic] and threatening to “strongly regulate” social media companies or “close them down” altogether. Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that....— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020 And on Wednesday, reports indicated that Trump plans to sign an executive order pertaining to social media as soon as Thursday. We don’t know the details of what the executive order would do, but if it’s an attempt to “close them down,” as he threatened, it’s likely to be immediately challenged in court.So, does this mean Trump can actually shut down Twitter and other social media platforms?It’s unlikely. Despite Trump’s indications to the contrary, Twitter is not violating the First Amendment by marking up his tweets. Unlike the government, Twitter is a private company that can moderate its users’ speech as it pleases, without legal penalty. But Trump can still make things harder for these platforms, particularly bigger companies like Facebook and Google that have become targets of antitrust scrutiny. Trump can also use Twitter’s fact-check of his tweets to bolster the unfounded claim he and other Republicans have pushed that Big Tech has an anti-conservative bias. And beyond that, his anti-tech crusades serve to sow confusion and distract the public from larger issues at hand: the persistent spread of the coronavirus, the crashing job market, and how economic inequality in the US was a growing problem even before the pandemic.Conservatives like Trump have long argued, without evidence, that they’re being silenced on social media despite the fact that some of the most popular Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts are run by conservative political and media figures. The complaints usually arise when a social media company deletes a conservative figure’s tweets or takes action against their account for violating the rules — for example, when Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube eventually booted conservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in 2018 after multiple violations of their policies.But Twitter’s recent fact-check of Trump’s tweets isn’t really “silencing” Trump. The company hasn’t deleted any of his tweets; it merely placed a label underneath two of his posts and linked to fact-checked information that corrects his inaccurate claims.And even if Twitter did delete Trump’s tweets, it has every legal right to do that — though, as my colleague Peter Kafka wrote this week, it’s hard to imagine it ever would. Public figures and world leaders whose posts are considered “newsworthy” are granted exceptions to Twitter’s usual rules.Regardless, the First Amendment does not limit Twitter, Facebook, Google, or any social media platform. It limits the government, not private companies, from infringing on people’s freedom to say what they please. That means you can’t go to jail for, say, blogging unfounded conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, but you can get kicked off a social network — just like you could get fired from your job for lying or for saying something racist to a colleague. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe breaks it down well: Just to be clear: Trump’s statement that Twitter, a private company, is abridging his First Amendment freedom of speech by tagging his wild tweets about write-in voter fraud as misleading is totally absurd and legally illiterate. This thread explains why:— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) May 27, 2020 Ironically, it’s actually Trump — not Twitter — who is wading into unconstitutional territory here. If Trump were to try to shut down social media companies in retaliation for Twitter’s fact-check of his tweets, that would be a clear violation of the First Amendment. It would be sure to invite a fierce legal challenge and would signal an alarming attempt by the president of the United States to wield his executive power against one of the most fundamental rights in this country.One thing Trump can do is try to regulate tech companies like Twitter in other ways. He could press for a repeal of Section 230, a law that’s part of the internet’s foundation and which shields tech platforms from being sued over content that users post on their sites.Some, like Sen. Josh Hawley, have called on Congress to repeal Section 230, which would allow anyone who feels they are victims of anti-conservative discrimination on these platforms to take legal action against the platforms themselves. So far, the repeal efforts have failed to garner significant bipartisan congressional support. Trump could also try to use his feud with social media platforms as political ammo in supporting the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigations into major social media companies. But while Facebook and Google are obvious targets for antitrust regulation, Twitter has less to worry about. It’s hard to argue that Twitter, which is a much smaller company than Facebook or Google, has monopolistic power on social media, as former spokesperson Nu Wexler pointed out. Note that Trump has much less leverage over Twitter than other companies. Twitter don’t sell political ads, they’re not big enough for an antitrust threat, and he’s clearly hooked on the platform.— Nu Wexler (@wexler) May 27, 2020 That may be part of the reason why Twitter has been more willing, at least in this scenario, to fact-check Trump than its social media peers.While Trump may not be able to do much legally to Twitter, he can and certainly is escalating his optics assault on Twitter, Facebook, and Google.The morning after Twitter’s fact-check, Trump surrogate Kellyanne Conway appeared on Fox News and slammed a Twitter executive named Yoel Roth for tweets he’d posted over the years that criticized the president and suggested there are Nazis in the White House. During the interview, she suggested viewers would follow his account and give him a piece of their mind — and after the clip aired, hundreds of users began hounding Roth’s account, posting angry and at times threatening replies.Twitter has said Roth wasn’t the one making the final call on Trump’s fact-check. But it doesn’t matter. Roth is just the latest target for the Trump administration to paint a caricature of Big Tech as being purportedly biased against conservative users. This has all been part of Trump’s campaign playbook since the beginning, and he’s leaning into it even harder with the presidential election less than six months away: create political boogeymen (in this case, the liberals running social media) and rile up support among prospective voters by promising to be the candidate who will fight for them. 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.