In their first arguments of the impeachment trial, counsel for President Donald Trump accused House Democrats of obscuring facts while distorting the impeachment process. Inadvertently, they also presented an argument about past testimony that actually made Democrats’ rationale for calling more witnesses even stronger.Over the course of roughly two and a half hours on Saturday, Trump’s defense team laid out their case, focusing primarily on two threads.For one, they argued Democrats’ impeachment inquiry had nothing to do with concerns of the president’s wrongdoing but was actually aimed at overturning the results of the 2016 election — or, failing that, impeding Trump’s 2020 campaign.Additionally, they claimed the House impeachment managers who argued for Trump’s removal maliciously left out facts that prove the president did not condition military aid to Ukraine on the the announcement of investigations into his political rivals. Instead, they said his decision to withhold aid was driven by worries over corruption and burden-sharing with other nations.“They’ve basically said, ‘Let’s cancel an election over a meeting with Ukraine,’” White House counsel Pat Cipollone said. To provide support for the two prongs of their defense, Trump’s counsel addressed a wide range of topics, many of which have become familiar refrains: They attacked impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff (as he predicted on Friday), questioned the role of the whistleblower, and began confronting the facts of the case directly — something Senate Republicans were eager for them to do.“We believe when you hear the facts, and that’s what we intend to cover today, the facts, you will find the president did absolutely nothing wrong,” Cipollone said. “We intend to show you some of the evidence that they did in the House that they ... made a decision not to show you.”Utilizing video clips and excerpts from some of the same witness testimony and documents that impeachment managers showcased during their arguments, Trump’s counsel offered evidence aimed at undercutting the charges included in Trump’s articles of impeachment — particularly the charge that he abused his power.Among the points they made: Trump counsel Mike Purpura argued that EU ambassador Gordon Sondland’s knowledge of any quid pro quo was based on his own “presumptions,” an assertion highlighted by a supercut of Sondland’s remarks on the subject.However, Democratic impeachment managers have pointed to testimony from other officials, including acting ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, who previously said Sondland spoke with Ukrainian official Andriy Yermak and told him there would be no aid without the investigations.The managers also noted Sondland told State Department aide David Holmes that Trump only cared about “big stuff,” like the investigations, when it came to Ukraine. They further emphasized how acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, during a public press conference, explicitly referenced the conditioning of the release of military aid on an investigation into an alleged Democratic server in Ukraine.Trump’s counsel did not mention any of this, nor did they explain how Sondland saying he made some “presumptions” apparently negates the facts Democrats presented.Trump’s attorneys did, however, mention that Ukraine wasn’t aware of the hold until late in the summer, a detail intended to rebut the idea there was a pressure campaign tied to the political investigations. Like their arguments involving Sondland, this claim does not quite align with available testimony: Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, previously testified that Ukrainian officials inquired about the aid in late July, on the same day as Trump’s infamous call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.The defense did make one claim that is less disputed: that both Trump and Ukrainian officials, including Zelensky, have denied there was a quid pro quo with regard to the military aid.Both sides have incentives to do so, Democrats argued this past week: Trump to evade accountability, and Zelensky to maintain a positive relationship with the US president. The defense’s argument also ignored Zelensky’s recent comments to the press, which seem to indicate a willingness to abandon that cautious approach.In an interview with Time magazine and other news outlets published in early December, the president of Ukraine told reporters he was concerned the delay in military aid would make Ukrainians “look like beggars.”“We’re at war. If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us,” Zelensky added.Notably, Trump’s counsel further strengthened the case for calling more witnesses.As part of their opening arguments, the defense team said many witnesses Democrats brought in to testify in the House impeachment inquiry were unable to provide firsthand information about the hold on Ukraine aid and the political investigations Trump demanded.“Most of the Democrats’ witnesses have never spoken to the president at all, let alone about Ukraine security assistance,” Purpura said.One key reason for this is that several witnesses with more direct knowledge about these developments, including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, did not respond to House subpoenas. These witnesses could still testify in front of the Senate if lawmakers vote in favor of it. By drawing attention to the role that these witnesses could play, Trump’s counsel suggested there are unheard-from officials who could, in fact, offer more direct information about the charges levied against the president.Democrats emphasized this point after trial proceedings concluded for the day.“They made a really compelling case for why the Senate should call witnesses and documents,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters. “They kept saying there are no eyewitness accounts, but there are people who have eyewitness accounts.”Trump’s counsel, including celebrity lawyers Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz — who, like the president, has been accused of sexual misconduct, though he has denied the allegations — are slated to return to the Senate to continue their arguments on Monday and Tuesday. That means the question about additional witness testimony won’t be resolved for at least a few more days.In the meantime, expect to hear a lot more about the failings of the impeachment inquiry and arguments about the role of Congress in checking the president’s authority.

Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman to Donald Trump in his 2016 bid for the White House, has issued a lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the special counsel investigating the campaign’s possible ties to Russia in an attempt to fend off a criminal trial now just four months away.In a bold counter-attack, Manafort has moved to foil the inquiry led by the special counsel Robert Mueller, who has indicted him on money-laundering charges. With the trial set for 7 May, Manafort is asking a federal district court in Washington to set aside the charges and by implication halt the proceedings.The civil lawsuit, lodged with the US district court for the District of Columbia, accuses Mueller, as well as the DoJ and the acting attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, who instigated the Russia investigation, of going beyond the restricted terms of the special counsel’s role.He calls Mueller’s behavior “arbitrary, capricious, and not in accordance with the law”, adding that the way that the special counsel has interpreted his brief “has extended far beyond” the original terms of his inquiry.The lawsuit says that Mueller has been granted “carte blanche to investigate and pursue criminal charges in connection with anything he stumbles across while investigating, no matter how remote”.Manafort, along with his longtime business partner Rick Gates, were formally charged on 30 October in an indictment that cited detailed evidence of money movements through overseas shell companies and the purchase of properties in New York and elsewhere. They both pleaded not guilty.A third adviser in the Trump presidential campaign, George Papadopoulos, at the same time pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.Manafort worked as chairman of the Trump presidential campaign between March and August 2016. The total of 12 criminal charges filed against him caused huge political impact as they brought the Russia investigation’s focus to the Trump campaign’s inner team.The lawsuit marks the most direct attempt yet by anyone implicated in the Russia investigation to try and halt the work of the special counsel. Trump himself has frequently made critical comments about the investigation – last week he said it made the country look “very bad” – but so far has stopped short of trying to disrupt it.The lawsuit portrays the inquiry as a sort of legal witch hunt that has strayed far beyond the boundaries set for such inquiries by Congress. Manafort likens his treatment to a “constitutional Frankenstein’s monster” that should be “shoved firmly back into the ice from which it was initially untombed”.To support his argument of unfair treatment, he says that the charges against him include business dealings stretching back to 2005 – about a decade before Trump embarked on his presidential journey.Legal experts noted the unusual nature of Manafort’s counter-assault. The most common tactic by a defendant seeking to block criminal proceedings is to try to persuade a court to dismiss the case on technical grounds – rather than to sue the DoJ for having brought the charges.The case against Manafort relates to the lobbying work he carried out for the Ukrainian government between 2006 and 2016 and payments of up to $18m that the DoJ alleges he hid from federal authorities. The political consultant is alleged to have laundered the money through a complex web of offshore companies. Topics Paul Manafort Trump administration US politics Donald Trump Russia Robert Mueller Michael Wolff news

Thousands of firefighters have been battling wildfires across California, after warm temperatures, strong winds and low humidity turned the state into a 'tinderbox'. So is this the new normal? Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? California's fire season has been bad. But it could have been much worse

A deadly attack on the Syrian population began last night. Government-allied forces bombing a rebel-held suburb of Damascus killed at least 100 people, including civilians and children. Hospitals appeared to be the main target of the airstrikes, with five hospitals reportedly hit today, Feb. 20.The United Nations has run out of words to describe the tragedy—officially.This morning, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) addressed the attack in Ghouta. Its regional office issued a powerful blank statement—a desperate attempt to draw attention to the casualties of a war that the world appears to have given up on solving.The statement, released by director Geert Cappelaere, was followed by an explanatory note:“UNICEF is issuing this blank statement. We no longer have the words to describe children’s suffering and our outrage. Do those inflicting the suffering still have words to justify their barbaric acts?”Syria once had a population of 18 million. Since the beginning of the war, nearly half a million people have died in Syria, and 11 million have been displaced. Over six million of them are seeking asylum outside their country.According to Human Rights Watch, at least one million Syrians are currently living under siege from their own government or government-allied forces, and are in need of humanitarian help.The blank statement condemns the international community’s failure to protect Syrian civilians. But it also stands as powerful evidence of the United Nations’ own impotence in the face of just the kind of humanitarian disaster it was created to solve.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is seeking to revoke the bail of President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, for allegedly tampering with witnesses in the year-long probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, according to a court filing Monday night.Attorneys with the special counsel have accused Manafort of "attempting to tamper with potential witnesses" while awaiting his trial, which thereby "has violated the conditions of his release."In February, within days of Mueller's filing a 32-count superseding indictment against Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman allegedly contacted two individuals who worked with him on a lobbying scheme to aid his Kremlin-backed Ukrainian clients.The two individuals were members of the "Hapsburg group," described by Mueller in the February superseding indictment of Manafort as "a group of former senior European politicians to take positions favorable to Ukraine, including by lobbying in the United States."Mueller's team is asking the Washington, D.C., federal court to revoke Manafort's current $10 million bail and is asking that the court "promptly schedule the hearing called for by the statute to determine Manafort's release status."Representatives for the special counsel's office and for Mueller declined to comment to ABC News.Manafort faces two indictments in Washington, D.C., and Virginia on charges related to tax fraud and other financial crimes.The government has not charged Manafort with the crime of witness-tampering or obstruction of justice.On Tuesday morning, the judge overseeing Manafort's Washington, D.C., trial set a June 15 date to hear arguments for and against a possible bail revision.

Maybe it’s good that Amazon got smartphones out of its system back in 2014 with the ill-fated Fire phone. It may have cleared the decks and let the company’s best minds think about other things–other devices, different embodiments of artificial intelligence, and different human/machine interfaces–like natural language. While Apple’s ecosystem still rotates around the iPhone, Amazon’s is about an ever-growing number of specialized end points for the Alexa brain.This dynamic was on full display Thursday at Amazon’s mega-product-announcement event in Seattle. The company announced a bunch of Alexa-powered devices. There was a microwave, a wall clock, a new digital video recorder, and a gizmo for bringing voice control to old-school stereo systems. We saw devices for using Alexa in the car, the living room, the kitchen, and beyond. And phones didn’t play much of a role in this voice-centric vision. In Amazon’s world, you still need a smartphone, but you don’t rely on it for every single aspect of your digital life.Amazon appears to be taking steps to make Alexa even less dependent on smartphones. One of the main jobs of Alexa is to control connected home gear such as lights, locks, and garage doors. But when you get a new connected home device—say, a voice-controlled light for the bathroom—you have to download a manufacturer app and muck around in it to get your new gizmo connected to Wi-Fi and set up. Then you have to use the Amazon app to get it ready for voice control. This smartphone-based headache is a big reason people avoid automating their home. That’s why Amazon has been training Alexa to help homeowners set up new connected home devices using natural language dialog instead of tapping on smartphone apps in a smartphone.Two Echo Plus speakers and an Echo Sub subwoofer [Photo: courtesy of Amazon]Two approaches to voiceAll of this contrasts with Apple’s approach to voice input. For a long time, Apple people said that talking to Siri on an iPhone was just as easy as talking to an Alexa speaker. But Alexa devices have always had arrays of microphones built to detect voices talking naturally in their vicinity. The microphones in an iPhone are fewer in number, far smaller, and built for close talk. Apple finally accepted this reality when it decided to release the HomePod speaker, which has a fancy seven-microphone array for far-field natural language skills control.For most of its existence, Apple’s home automation platform HomeKit has used the iPhone as its main hub and controller. Only when the company launched the HomePod could people control HomeKit connected devices using ambient voice commands. While Apple doesn’t release sale numbers, most analysts believe the $349 HomePod hasn’t sold well. So for a great many HomeKit households, the connected devices around the house are still controlled via app iPhone-based taps or Siri commands.Apple’s approach to the car is also smartphone-centric. The company’s CarPlay software allows an automobile’s dashboard screen to act as a display and a controller for selected features and content on the iPhone. It also uses some of the car’s built-in buttons and knobs to control the content from the phone, and to play audio from the phone. The driver can also make Siri commands via a microphone built into the car. CarPlay only works in cars with the software built in or added through an aftermarket upgrade.Amazon’s new Echo Auto device works with any car that offers a way to connect with its audio system, such as Bluetoothor an auxiliary-in port. The content served by the device doesn’t come from apps on the phone, but rather from the Alexa brain in the cloud. The real draw of the device is the array of microphones inside that can hear through all the road noise, music, and back seat chatter to hear the user’s voice commands, allowing users to call up directions, find places, make phone calls, and hear audiobooks without moving their hands from the steering wheel or their attention from the road. The wireless connection provided by the smartphone in the car is just an enabler, and someday soon that connection might be a 5G connection built directly into the car, leaving the phone out of the picture entirely.With the launch of the first Echo back in June 2015, Amazon latched onto something people liked–a new way of interacting with technology (including AI) using natural language, as if talking to another person in the room. The company has an army of people working to improve Alexa’s understanding of both words and their meanings. And it’s growing more confident in this new kind of experience. “The idea of voice automation is not going away; it’s not a fad,” says Amazon senior VP of devices and services Dave Limp, who leads the Alexa effort at Amazon. “I wouldn’t have been as adamant about that a year ago.”The natural language technology is at a place now where Amazon feels confident enough to expand into new domains. “It’s no longer early days; clearly we’re now thinking about other places, like the car, the kitchen, and meetings–here we have an Echo Dot in every conference room,” Limp told me, hinting at future applications for Alexa in the workplace. “So we’re able to spread our wings a little bit and go out and find and test new environments where ambient user interfaces might work.”This year Amazon has focused Alexa on in-home audio and video, the connected home, and the car. Next year at this time, we may see Amazon announce products that bring natural voice computing a new set of environments. When you arrive at a very new user experience paradigm first, as Amazon has, you have the advantage of a head start and a lot of green field in front of you.

WASHINGTON — The Democratic National Committee on Monday rejected a request from presidential candidate Andrew Yang to commission four early state qualifying polls ahead of the next Democratic debate in Iowa on Jan. 14.Yang made the proposal in a letter dated Dec. 21 to DNC Chairman Tom Perez, which was obtained Monday by NBC News, in which he argued that a "diverse set of candidates might be absent from the stage in Des Moines for reasons out of anyone’s control.""It has been 38 days since a qualifying poll in Iowa, New Hampshire, or Nevada was taken. As you know, big shifts can happen within short periods in this race, as we’ve already witnessed multiple times," Yang wrote.Yang then asked for the DNC to commission polls in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina by Jan. 10."It would provide an accurate snapshot of the current state of the race and where voters’ hearts and minds are, thus getting ahead of an imminent problem," he said.The DNC doesn’t typically conduct public polls, though it does conduct private polls for internal purposes, which are not released. In a statement later Monday, the DNC said it would not sponsor additional polls."The DNC has been more than inclusive throughout this entire process with an expansive list of qualifying polls, including 26 polls for the December debate, more than half of which were state polls," Deputy Communications Director Adrienne Watson said in a statement. "The DNC will not sponsor its own debate qualifying polls of presidential candidates during a primary. This would break with the long-standing practice of both parties using independent polling for debate qualification, and it would be an inappropriate use of DNC resources that should be directed at beating Donald Trump."A day before Yang’s letter, the DNC had announced new higher thresholds that candidates needed to reach in order to qualify for the January debate. The new standards require candidates to have 225,000 unique donors, as well as show 5 percent or more support in at least four national or single-state polls in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. Candidates could also qualify by reaching 7 percent or more support in two single-state polls in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.Yang is expected to raise at least $12.5 million in the fourth quarter from 1 million contributions and nearly 400,000 donors, according to figures confirmed by the campaign.All of the candidates who appear to have qualified for the January debate — former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. — are white. The lack of diversity among the top 2020 candidates, already a frequently discussed issue, became more apparent after Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., dropped out of the race earlier this month and Yang was the only nonwhite candidate to appear in the December debate.Yang's campaign says he's hit the 225,000 donor threshold but has only hit 5 percent in one poll.

Time for a recap:Brexit fears have dragged the pound down to its lowest level in almost a year.Sterling slid by three quarters of a cent today to hit $1.2920, its lowest point since September 2017, as City traders fretted about the slow pace of Brexit talks.The selloff was blamed on international trade secretary Sir Liam Fox, and his warning that a ‘no-deal Brexit’ was a 60:40 chance. Fox also attacked the European Commission for being intransigent, declaring. If the theological obsession of the unelected takes priority over the economic wellbeing of the people then it’s a bureaucrats’ Brexit. This latest sign that UK-Brussels negotiations are floundering also sent the pound down against the euro, losing half a eurocent to €1.119.Theresa May’s spokesman, though, insists that Britain is confident of getting a good deal (which sticking to its fallback position that no deal is better than a bad one).The EC have denied hampering Brexit talks, telling reporters that: “We are working constructively, day and night, to reach a deal with the United Kingdom and I think this is also reflected in the fact that the next negotiation round is scheduled for 16 and 17 of August.” City analysts are bracing for more volatility in the months ahead, as Britain heads towards Exit Day, 29th March 2019.Analysts at Capital Economics predict that the pound could fall to $1.20, if London can’t agree a deal with Brussels (or rise to $1.40 if the no-deal threat is avoided).Financial markets have also been jolted by a worrying drop in German factory orders. New manufacturing orders shrank by 4% in June, the biggest drop in almost 18 months.Orders from within Germany, across the eurozone, and beyond all fell -- a bad sign for economic prospects.The decline may show that Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs on China and the EU are damaging the global economy, denting confidence and cutting demand for German goods.Economists warned that the “horrendous” data suggests Europe’s powerhouse economy is weakening. And with trade war fears escalating, the situation could worsen this autumn.This has pulled several European stock markets into the red today, with Germany’s DAX index down 0.3%. Britain’s FTSE 100 ended the day flat, though, as the falling pound helped exporters and firms with overseas earnings.That’s probably all for today. Thanks for reading and commenting. GW

S9E23World News 01/31/18: Trump's Talk of Immigration Reform in State of the Union Falls Flat with Democrats20:24 | 01.31.18 | NR | CCSpike in drownings off the shores of several Maui beaches alarms officials; High school student who made half-court shot scores with Harlem Globetrotters

Enlarge this image President Trump has hailed his appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, but Gorsuch sided against the administration Tuesday in an immigration case. Drew Angerer/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Drew Angerer/Getty Images President Trump has hailed his appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, but Gorsuch sided against the administration Tuesday in an immigration case. Drew Angerer/Getty Images President Trump is already tweeting his displeasure about a Supreme Court decision that makes it more difficult to deport a small number of lawful permanent residents convicted of crimes.In a 5-to-4 decision Tuesday, the court overturned the deportation of a 25-year legal U.S. resident from the Philippines who was convicted of two burglaries.James Dimaya came to the U.S. at age 13 as a legal permanent resident. More than two decades later — after he was convicted of two home burglaries in California and sentenced to a total of four years in prison — the government sought his deportation under a "violent crime" immigration law, though neither of Dimaya's crimes involved violence. The statute defines a violent crime as one involving force or the "substantial risk" of force.The Supreme Court, however, said that language is so vague that it invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.Writing for the court majority, Justice Elena Kagan said the ruling is compelled by the court's decision in a similar case, Johnson v. United States — a decision written by the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in 2015, a year before his death.Pointing to that decision and others like it, Kagan quoted Scalia from a dissent on the subject of following these precedents: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.""We abandoned that lunatic practice" the last time the court ruled on this issue, Kagan said, adding that there is "no reason to start it again."Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, Scalia's successor, cast the fifth and decisive vote, along with four liberal justices. In a lengthy concurring opinion, he said the "Constitution looks unkindly on any law so vague that reasonable people cannot understand its terms and judges do not know where to begin in applying it."The dissenters were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Roberts and Thomas wrote dissenting opinions for a total of 47 pages.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has accused Donald Trump’s former campaign chief Paul Manafort of witness tampering. Manafort allegedly tried to hide his communications with potential witnesses using the encrypted messaging apps WhatsApp and Telegram, but prosecutors appear to have accessed the messages via his iCloud account.Manafort is the highest-profile member of Trump’s team to be indicted by the special counsel, who is investigating Russian meddling in the US election. The court put Manafort under house arrest, on a $10 million bond. Prosecutors say the messages violated the terms of Manafort’s release, which means he might have to go to jail.The special counsel’s filing to a Washington DC’s district court yesterday included Manafort’s messages, described as “an effort to secure materially false testimony.” Manafort messaged people from The Hapsburg Group, a firm he worked with and funded to lobby for Ukraine’s interests in the United States. According to the filing, he was trying to convince them to lie to investigators about the group’s activities.WhatsApp has a setting that automatically backs up messages to iCloud. If enabled, this would render the app’s famous end-to-end encryption useless in terms of hiding from law enforcement equipped with a search warrant. The prosecutors also had statements and documents from the two potential witnesses, as well as phone records, but the iCloud account helped them confirm the messages and phone calls that Manafort had attempted. The US government routinely requests information from internet companies through warrants and subpoenas.

As the confirmation fight over Brett Kavanaugh ended, the opening rounds of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary began.Only hours after he cast his vote against Kavanaugh’s confirmation, senator Cory Booker appeared on stage to a crowd of roughly 1,000 people at an Iowa Democratic dinner, where he repeatedly brought the crowd to its feet in the course of a freewheeling 45-minute speech.It was the first visit to Iowa by the New Jersey senator, who has long been considered a potential top-tier Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, only hours after Donald Trump yet again took shots at him in a campaign rally at Kansas.Addressing a crowd of loyal Democrats, Booker preached an attitude of resilience in the aftermath of Kavanaugh’s ascension to the supreme court to activists deeply disappointed by the result. It was as much a therapy sessions as a stump speech for a crowd of Democrats approaching tight races across Iowa in just over a month.Booker repeated the mantra “stay faithful” that he learned while living in a Newark, New Jersey, project from a woman named Virginia Jones. “She doesn’t allow her inability to do everything to undermine her ability to do something,” Booker said of Jones.The New Jersey senator called on attendees not to get caught up in a state of “sedentary agitation” – something he confessed to sometimes feeling while “sitting at home late at night watching Rachel [Maddow]”. Instead, he harkened back to the fight for civil rights, talking about the despair felt by activists after Bloody Sunday, when police beat marchers in Selma, Alabama, and repeated the words of Martin Luther King: “The moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice.” ‘Great way to introduce himself to Iowa Democrats’: Cory Booker receives rave reaction at the party dinner. Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/APThe speech received rave reactions from the crowd. Jerry Crawford, a key Iowa Democratic powerbroker, told the Guardian that Booker “stamped himself as a top-tier candidate” and described his remarks as “one of the top five party speeches ever given in Iowa”.Norm Sterzenbach, a veteran Democratic operative, told the Guardian that Booker “owned the room in a way I haven’t seen at a Democratic dinner in a long time. He was engaging and charismatic.” Sterzenbach particularly noted that instead of evoking “anger”, the New Jersey Democrat took a different tone.“What we need for the future is aspiration,” Sterzenbach said. “We are missing a leader that understands who we are as Americans, what binds us together. That is the speech he chose to give. It is what this room needed to hear. It was a great way to introduce himself to Iowa Democrats.”Tim Gannon, the Democratic nominee for secretary of agriculture in the state, echoed this praise, saying that Booker “brought the kind of optimism that folks needed to hear to be ready to spend the next 31 days working for something positive”.The speech represented the first stop on a three-day trip that Booker would take across Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation caucuses. The New Jersey senator would also stump for candidates across the state, as well as attend a family reunion, a preview of which could be seen tonight as 50 relatives cheered on in the cavernous ballroom.Speaking to reporters afterwards, Booker dodged the obvious question about a potential presidential bid. When asked if he was running, Booker initially joked: “I do need to get in shape, so I will probably go jogging here in Iowa in the morning.” He added that in “all seriousness, we’re here to focus on the election coming up in 31 days”.Booker, though, has already taken a number of steps to lay the ground for a potential run and has placed staffers on several campaigns throughout the state, a move that potential presidential candidates have often taken to build up a political infrastructure. He was also well prepared to answer a question about farm policy and the ability of an elected official from an urban state like New Jersey to connect to rural voters.

The British strategy for dealing with Huawei has traditionally involved containment. The country operates a research lab outside London to review Huawei’s products and code, and publishes an annual review of the company’s technology. Last year, Britain criticized Huawei for engineering and supply-chain flaws.“We will monitor and report on progress, and we will not declare the problems are on the path to being solved unless and until there is clear evidence that this is the case,” Mr. Martin said in his remarks on Wednesday. “We will not compromise on the improvements we need to see from Huawei.”American officials have argued that 5G networks are much more complex than existing systems, and that the many lines of constantly updating code make the systems nearly impossible to protect entirely.Peter Chase, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund specializing in trans-Atlantic policy, said that a determination by British officials that Huawei could be handled as a manageable risk would undercut the argument that the company posed an existential risk.“They’ve made a pretty hardheaded evaluation that the United States was exaggerating the extent of the problem,” said Mr. Chase, a former American diplomat to London. “I don’t think they did that to please the Chinese.”In his speech in Brussels, Mr. Martin said cybersecurity risks were not confined to one company.“The supply chain, and where suppliers are from, is one issue, but it is not the only issue,” he said. Last year, he added, his organization “publicly attributed some attacks on U.K. networks, including telecoms networks, to Russia.”

Amazon had a significant head start in the voice-based personal assistant wars when it introduced its Echo speaker in 2014. That original Echo, it turned out, was just the first vehicle for Alexa’s artificial intelligence and natural language technologies. Three years later, Amazon is pushing Alexa in all sorts of directions, including new apps, platforms, and gadgets from both Amazon and third parties. And while much of that product vision comes from inside Amazon, the company is wisely looking for the service to be shaped by outsiders, too.Enter the Alexa Fund. Born with a $100 million investment from Amazon in 2015, the year after the debut of the Echo, the fund is part of the company’s effort to identify more Alexa-showcasing companies and products around the world. It isn’t just a fund. It’s come to comprise three parts–a VC-style investment arm, an accelerator, and a university fellowship program. You can think of these as different ways of reaching innovators and entrepreneurs at various stages, from training to ideation to execution as a real company.Paul Bernard, Alexa Fund manager [Photo: courtesy of Paul Bernard]The accelerator program–which is run in partnership with preeminent startup accelerator Techstars–is targeted at young startups that are developing their product and beginning to think about its potential place in the world. After an initial accelerator class that began last summer, the company said Wednesday that it and Techstars will fund a second accelerator of 13 companies hosted in Seattle and London later this year. The announcement follows the tech giant’s commitment in November to invest another $100 million in the fund, with an emphasis on locating more portfolio companies outside the United States.These startups aren’t just sitting around creating new Alexa skills. How the companies’ technologies fit into the Alexa vision is more nuanced than that. Some of the companies work with natural language in a way that could impact Alexa’s language skills and personality in the future. Others provide enabling technologies that help Alexa work in new places or use less power.In fact, only about half of the companies in the fund’s portfolio make consumer-facing products accessed or operated via Alexa and voice. But all of the startups live in places where Amazon thinks digital assistants are headed.“We try to lean forward in identifying companies that will map to the next domain, or the next set of experiences that are going to be relevant,” says fund director Paul Bernard, a former Nokia executive with a background in business development and investments.The First Accelerator ClassWhen I visited the accelerator in its temporary home in October, inside the Startup Hall on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, I saw mostly young men scattered around the shared work tables in rows from the entryway to the back wall. A small sign with the Alexa Fund logo stood on a tripod stand at the front. Nothing fancy–just whiteboards, coffee, and code.The accelerator’s managing director, Aviel Ginzburg, told me that a big part of his job is working through the Techstars network of accelerators all over the world to locate companies that might be right for the Alexa program. “We are looking for the entrepreneurial pull,” Ginzburg says, meaning that Amazon wants to talk to entrepreneurs who want to pull others into their own strong vision of how Alexa might be used in the future.“We aren’t going out and looking for companies that are doing what we think should be done with Alexa,” Ginzburg says. “Startups are best at pulling the future forward.”Ginzburg says he often asks startups if they’ve considered adding a voice capability to their product that allows users to talk to it instead of opening up and app and tapping buttons. Often, the startup founders haven’t even considered the idea, he says; for many of them, it flips a switch in their thinking. The best candidates for the accelerator, Ginzburg says, are those who can see that voice interaction could become one of the “main pillars” of their products.Among the companies in the first class: Play Impossible. The company makes a $99 inflatable ball (“Gameball”) that contains motion sensors and a small brain (a physics engine, like in game controllers), and connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone app. The app guides users to play games with the ball, like Jostle, an enhanced version of keep-away. The ball can also connect with a Fire TV streamer to turn the TV room into a sort of workout or game space. Sensible Object. One of the Alexa Fund accelerator companies, Sensible Object, is developing board games that integrate voice in creative ways. In its When In Rome game you fly around to different cities on the board and Alexa asks you trivia questions about that city when you get there. And the voice you hear asking the questions bears the accent of the people who live there. Botnik. This two-person startup created a predictive text keyboard that uses AI to generate word suggestions based on a custom set of words (like the full set of lyrics from David Bowie songs or negative reviews of the Statue of Liberty). Cofounder Jamie Brew told me the tool can be used to help creative types (including comics and poets) get the creative juices flowing and face down the blank page. Brew was an editor at The Onion, while his cofounder, Bob Mankoff, spent 40 years as the New Yorker‘s cartoon editor–they’re pretty funny. Pulse Labs helps Alexa skill developers test their voice apps with users in the hopes of improving engagement and retention. Pulse recently received a $2.5 million investment from a group of investors including the Alexa Fund and CEO Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions fund. The accelerator’s first class also included Novel Effect, which has a skill that adds sound effects to a story that’s read aloud (by a human) from a book; Comet (formerly Semantica Labs), which helps developers track machine learning code, experiments, and results; and Tinitell, which makes a simple cell-phone wearable for kids. Amazon and Techstars invest up to $120,000 in each accelerator startup in exchange for 6 percent of common stock. For the selected startups, their involvement also means lots of attention: Ginzburg says last year’s accelerator companies got the chance to pitch their products to 100 different investors over the course of the program.For the accelerator’s second class—a 13-week session that will begin in the third quarter of 2018—Amazon and Techstars intend to recruit 10 companies that will work in Seattle, and another three “international” companies that will work in both in Seattle and in the London Techstars offices.After the conclusion of the first accelerator class in October, Bernard, Ginzburg, and others took several months to parse the results, both tangible and intangible.“From the applicants through to the selected companies, the companies showed us that there continues to be a lot of early-stage voice-related startups across several domains, and that activity is coming from all over the world,” Bernard told me in a January email.Read more: As Amazon’s Alexa Turns Three, It’s Evolving Faster Than EverLike A VC, But DifferentThe Alexa Fund is run something like a venture capital business in some ways but with a slightly unusual emphasis. Its MO is to locate and support promising new technologies–its focus has mostly been on early-stage startups–but in a wider sense, it aims to extend and promote the Alexa platform. Or, as Bernard puts it, win hearts and minds.Where a traditional venture capital firm might focus on helping companies find their markets and eventually exit well, the Alexa fund also promotes a cause.“The main focus is how do we get this storytelling around what’s possible with Alexa by getting the companies excited, as well as the people who hear about it,” Bernard says. With a few big exceptions, the fund’s estimated average size of investment so far has been in the range of $250,000 to $500,000, according to Pitchbook.The fund, says Bernard, doesn’t try to be the lead investor in any round. “Our priorities are more about supporting them [portfolio companies] on their Alexa integrations.”These investments often create situations where portfolio companies can help Amazon develop the Alexa platform. For instance, the Fund made an investment in Ecobee, which is Nest’s close competitor in the smart thermostat space. Bernard says the fact that Amazon was an investor in the company opened the door to the two companies working closely together on defining the Alexa API for smart thermometers. In simple terms, the API contains all the technical hooks necessary to let Alexa initiate the control and monitoring of a thermostat based on voice commands given by the user.“It helps [Ecobee] because they’re getting what they want into the API, and it helps us because we’re getting a lot of access to customers who know what they want,” Bernard explains. “That type of thing happens a lot easier if we’re an investor, because we can tell the organization that our interests here are one.”For the portfolio companies the capital is important, but the access they get to groups within Amazon may be equally important, Bernard says. The fund provides them with a single point of contact who helps them communicate with all of Amazon’s groups, something the startups are encouraged to do.That closeness with Amazon hasn’t always been seen as a good thing for participating startups, however.Amazon faced questions about its potential conflicts of interest last May when it released its new Echo Show device, which looked suspiciously similar to an existing product produced by an Alexa Fund portfolio company called Nucleus. Amazon said it had been working on the idea for the Show well before it made its investment in Nucleus, and that it informed Frankel and company of its product roadmap.Some have also pointed to similarities between Amazon Key, the company’s smart lock product, and a device built by August, another startup that Amazon invested in through the fund. Amazon released Key in October 2017, over a year it reportedly made a $100 million offer to buy August, an offer the startup turned down.Amazon insists it doesn’t use information gained through its investments to develop competing products. For instance, its “experience in retail, hardware, cloud technology, and logistics led to the creation of Amazon Key,” a company spokesperson told The Information this week. Still, following the release of the Echo Show last year, fund managers sought to calm the potential anxieties of other portfolio companies by telling founders that a “firewall” exists between the Alexa Fund and Amazon’s product development teams, CNBC reported.Sometimes the fund’s investments don’t appear to have anything to do with the Alexa itself. It’s very hard to see any connection between Botnik’s text-based AI and Alexa’s voice-based platform, for example.The same might be said about what’s likely to be the fund’s largest and most high-profile investment to date. This came last August when it took part in a funding round for Essential Products, the consumer hardware company founded by Android creator Andy Rubin. Essential makes a high-end smartphone and a smart home hub. The total size of the round wasn’t disclosed, but Bernard told me it was “in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”Last week, the investment yielded a modest partnership: Essential announced a new version of its first edition smartphone, a “Halo Gray” phone that comes with the Alexa app preinstalled and will only be available for order at Amazon. There’s also a chance that the as-yet-unavailable Essential home hub will support Alexa in some way.Alexa Goes To CollegeThe investment fund and the accelerator are the main parts of the Alexa Fund, but it has one other main spoke. Bernard and his team realized that engaging with promising technologists–and potential Alexa ambassadors–after they left school may simply be too late.To that end, the Alexa Fund’s fellowship program sponsors a PhD candidate or a post-doctorate in a university’s artificial intelligence department or natural language lab.“There’s an Alexa fellow, who is like the Alexa czar for the AI department, and they create a curriculum for building on Alexa,” Bernard says. So far, the Fund has sponsored fellows at Carnegie-Mellon, Johns Hopkins, the University of Southern California, and the University of Waterloo. Bernard says there’s been lots of interest among other universities to host the Alexa fellowship.While in some cases it’s not easy to immediately see how the fund’s investments help Alexa, it’s clear that Amazon is trying to carefully seed the parts of an already-sprawling ecosystem.For startups, it’s an attractive bargain. As we saw yet again at CES in January, Alexa is the place to be if you’re a developer with a product or service that’s naturally summoned up by the human voice. Amazon has put a lot of energy into making integration with Alexa easy for skill developers and device makers. Many of these companies see Alexa as an important new aggregation point for consumers, a natural voice gateway where people access all sorts of internet content and services, and the internet of things. It also doesn’t hurt that Alexa comes with built-in connections with both Amazon’s massive e-commerce platform and Amazon Web Services.Amazon, after failing with its own smartphone, happened upon a voice platform that people like to use and has so far protected its lead in the smart speaker and digital assistant market. Maintaining that lead in the coming years may depend on how creatively and wisely it pushes its natural language interface into new domains and new use cases. That takes vision, and lots of hard work. One of Amazon’s best sources for that stuff may be the little companies camped out in Startup Hall.CORRECTION: A previous version of this story said that Amazon’s investment in Essential Products was in the “hundreds of millions.” That was an approximation of the size of the whole round, with Amazon being one of the smaller contributors. Read more: Can Mycroft’s Privacy-Centric Voice Assistant Take On Alexa And Google?

The Seattle City Council voted 9-0 last month to approve an annual $275-per-employee tax on big employers like Amazon. The tax was expected to raise about $47 million a year for services for the homeless and construction of affordable housing. But Tuesday, less than a month after passing the tax, the council voted 7-2 to repeal it.The victory for Amazon comes amid growing concern about the power and influence of big tech companies, and their responsibility for the spread of fake news, sloppy handling of user data, rising income inequality, and other ills. But a look at this week's headlines shows getting tough on tech is harder than many expected. The most tech-friendly candidate in San Francisco's mayoral race appears to have won. The Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules are no more, freeing broadband providers favor certain content over others, and to charge companies extra fees for "fast lane" access. And AT&T got the go-ahead to buy Time Warner, overcoming an federal antitrust challenge.Seattle's corporate tax looked at first like an example of elected officials standing up to a tech giant. But the version that passed last month was a compromise. Councilmembers originally proposed a $500-per-employee tax that would have eventually transitioned into a payroll tax on companies making at least $20 million in revenue. In response, Amazon announced it was halting construction on a new office building and considering subleasing space in another instead of hiring more staff in Seattle.Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan negotiated a compromise, cutting the tax nearly in half. Amazon announced it would resume construction after the measure passed, but company spokesman Drew Herdener warned the company still wasn't happy and suggested it might hire fewer people in Seattle. Amazon donated $25,000 to a campaign for a ballot measure to overturn the tax in November.Councilmember Lisa Herbold told the Seattle Times she voted to reverse the tax to avoid a months-long battle over a ballot measure, and because of recent polling on the issue. A KIRO-TV poll found that 54 percent of respondents opposed the corporate tax and only 38 percent favored it.Meanwhile in San Francisco, mayoral candidates Mark Leno and Jane Kim teamed up to oppose London Breed, perceived as the tech industry's favored candidate. Although Leno and Kim didn't explicitly target Breed over tech-industry support, the candidates urged voters to "stand against special-interest Super PAC spending."It doesn't look like voters were swayed. Ballot counting moved slowly under San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting system, but Wednesday afternoon, Leno conceded the race.On the other hand, the end of the FCC's net neutrality protections might seem like a setback to big tech. Giants such as Google and Facebook generally favored the rules, largely through the Internet Association trade group. They’re also helping fund the legal fight against the FCC's decision. But the biggest names in tech were relatively quiet on the subject of net neutrality this year. That could be in part because net neutrality doesn't affect their business models as much as it did in the past.In fact, the end of net neutrality could help the incumbents more than it hurts them, if upstarts are forced to pay extra or negotiate special deals in order to offer content at the same speeds that, say, Netflix and YouTube do. That makes the end of net neutrality protections more of a victory for big telecom companies than a problem for tech giants.

Of the packages discovered on Friday, the one addressed to Mr. Clapper, the former senior intelligence official, was meant for the New York offices of CNN, where he works as an analyst, but was intercepted at a mail facility in Midtown Manhattan, police officials in New York City said.The package addressed to Mr. Booker was found in Florida.The device sent to Ms. Harris’s district office in Sacramento, Calif., was discovered at a mail facility there, she said in a statement on Friday. Mr. Steyer said the device addressed to him had been intercepted at a mail facility in Burlingame, Calif.Speaking on CNN on Friday, Mr. Clapper said he was not surprised that a device had been sent to him.“This is definitely domestic terrorism,” Mr. Clapper said. “Anyone who has in any way been a critic, publicly been a critic of President Trump, needs to be on an extra alert.”Other packages have been addressed to former President Barack Obama; former Secretary of State Clinton; former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; John O. Brennan, a former C.I.A. director, the actor Robert De Niro; and George Soros, the billionaire Democratic donor.

“If the ultimate objective is to continue to try to undermine the credibility of Mueller and his prosecutors, it could have some value,” said Jimmy Gurulé, a Notre Dame law professor who was a senior Justice Department official in the administration of the first President George Bush. “But in terms of a legal strategy, it’s highly unlikely to prevail.”Worse for the White House, the lawsuit also invites Mr. Mueller to give a “devastating response” that spells out all the ways Mr. Manafort is relevant to Mr. Trump and the Russia investigation, said Peter Zeidenberg, a former prosecutor who worked on a special counsel investigation during the George W. Bush administration. “If I’m the government, I’m licking my chops to file this response. He’s going to tie a bow on this,” he said of Mr. Mueller.Even if Mr. Manafort succeeds at every turn, his problems are not over. He could still face charges if new prosecutors decided to bring them. But any court ruling that narrowed Mr. Mueller’s authority would give him less leeway to use unrelated charges as leverage against people close to the president.Mr. Mueller won the cooperation of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, for instance, after investigating him for unregistered foreign lobbying and lying to the F.B.I. on matters unrelated to the election.The lawsuit provides fodder for Republicans who are trying to discredit Mr. Mueller’s investigation. As evidence that Mr. Mueller is biased, critics have pointed to Democratic donations by members of his team and anti-Trump text messages sent by an F.B.I. agent whom Mr. Mueller removed from the investigation.The accusations in the charges against Mr. Manafort date back years, well before he began working for Mr. Trump. His lawyers argue that Mr. Mueller should be allowed to investigate only matters that directly arise from the Russia investigation. That theory echoes comments made by Mr. Trump, who has said that Mr. Mueller cannot investigate his family’s finances.

Kim Kardashian West and dozens of other celebrities have announced they will freeze their social media accounts to protest against the spread of "hate, propaganda and misinformation"."Misinformation shared on social media has a serious impact," Kardashian West wrote in a statement on Tuesday.The move is part of the #StopHateforProfit campaign which was organised by civil rights activists.The celebrities will freeze their accounts for 24 hours on Wednesday."I can't sit by and stay silent while these platforms continue to allow the spreading of hate, propaganda and misinformation - created by groups to sow division and split America apart," Kardashian West said."Misinformation shared on social media has a serious impact on our elections and undermines our democracy," she added. Facebook 'profits from hate' claims engineer who quit Coca-Cola suspends social media advertising Facebook to tag ‘harmful’ posts as boycott widens Other celebrities that have agreed to take part in the boycott include actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Sacha Baron Cohen and Jennifer Lawrence, as well as singer Katy Perry."I can't sit idly by while these platforms turn a blind eye to groups and posts spreading hateful disinformation," Perry wrote on Instagram.Actor Ashton Kutcher, who has millions of followers and is also joining the boycott, said "these tools were not built to spread hate [and] violence".The organisers of the #StopHateforProfit campaign, which was launched in June, accuse Facebook and Instagram of not doing enough to stop hate speech and disinformation. The group has focused on Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp and last year attracted advertising revenue of almost $70bn (£56.7bn).Thousands of businesses and major civil rights groups - including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Anti-Defamation League (AD) - have signed up to the campaign."We are quickly approaching one of the most consequential elections in American history," the group said in a statement. "Facebook's unchecked and vague 'changes' are falling dangerously short of what is necessary to protect our democracy."In June, Facebook said it would label potentially harmful or misleading posts left up for their news value.Founder Mark Zuckerberg also said the social media company would ban advertising containing claims "that people of a specific race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, gender identity or immigration status" are a threat to others.All you need to know about US election"The 2020 elections were already shaping up to be heated," he wrote in a statement. "During this moment, Facebook will take extra precautions to help everyone stay safe [and] stay informed."But the #StopHateforProfit campaign called for more to be done, and more than 90 companies subsequently paused advertising in support of its efforts.As a result of the boycott, shares in Facebook fell dramatically and US media reported that $7.2bn had been knocked off Mr Zuckerberg's personal net worth.Regulators and policy-makers around the world are concerned about the growth of hate speech, not just on Facebook but on all social media platforms, with many countries launching enquiries into how the tech firms are dealing with the issue.

Byin Beirut,Nour Alakraain Berlin andin Washington July 9, 2018 10:38 am ET Islamic State fighters who fled into the desert to escape U.S.-backed forces in Syria and Iraq are now drawing on stashed weapons and ammunition to stage renewed attacks in both countries, as friction among foreign powers hampers efforts to finish the terror group off. The attacks are a sign of Islamic State’s advance planning, and they have complicated the Trump administration’s plans to withdraw U.S. troops. Before retreating from its urban strongholds, Islamic State decentralized its command structure, set up sleeper cells,... To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership View Membership Options

Pete Souza has worked for two presidents, and he took some of the Obama administration’s most iconic photographs, but most people who’ve heard of him know him from Instagram. In the wake of President Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Souza began sharing photos from his days in the White House, usually showing President Obama behaving in a way that was diametrically opposed to something that Trump had done that day, with a sly caption. View this post on Instagram POTUS with a peach as opposed to an impeached POTUS. A post shared by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Jan 17, 2020 at 6:19am PST View this post on Instagram They competed against one another during the 2008 Presidential election. And yet they respected each other. As politicians. And as human beings. President Obama would certainly never have tolerated a deplorable comment against John McCain by a commissioned officer on his staff. A post shared by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on May 14, 2018 at 10:27am PDT View this post on Instagram 46 minus 1 continues to spew out falsehoods on Twitter (no surprise there). Here are the facts: Robert Mueller was named FBI Director in 2001 by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the US Senate for one 10-year term. President Obama extended Mueller’s term for an additional two years. In 2013, President Obama nominated James Comey to replace Mueller as FBI Director (this picture was made during that announcement). Comey was confirmed by the US Senate for a ten-year term, until he was fired by 46 minus 1 last year because...well, you know, that Russia thing. #throwshadethenvote #TheTruthSquad A post shared by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Nov 15, 2018 at 1:15pm PST Souza recently relied on that same sensibility to compile a book called Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents. Each two-page spread features a tweet by Donald Trump on one page, followed by a photo of Obama, with a caption, on the facing page. And in Dawn Porter’s new documentary The Way I See It, which centers on Souza’s work and how it has shaped his view of the presidency, Souza talks about how the idea occurred to him to start juxtaposing Trump and Obama on Instagram. He also discusses his time in the White House, explains his view of the duty of a White House photographer, and recalls key moments in Obama’s presidency as seen from his unique perch.Souza says in the documentary that he hadn’t always thought of himself as particularly political. (Prior to working for Obama, his first White House job was to photograph Ronald Reagan, whom he says he disagreed with politically but speaks of a bit more fondly as a person.) Once Trump took office, he felt his outlook changing. He grew concerned about the direction of the presidency for a number of reasons, one of which is that he sees the current president as lacking in a kind of fundamental empathy and humility that’s necessary to do such a difficult and consequential job.I spoke with Souza by phone just before The Way I See It premiered as part of the Toronto International Film Festival, ahead of its US release on September 18. We talked about the power of the still image, why the Trump administration struggles to create iconic photographs, and what he’ll tell the new White House photographer if Joe Biden wins the election.At one point during The Way I See It, you say that you prefer still images to moving ones because a photograph has a different kind of power from a video. The still image sears in your brain in a way that video doesn’t. We can all conjure up iconic images — they’re always there. The shooting at Kent State. Some of the Vietnam pictures. Nixon waving goodbye after his resignation. You can’t ever forget those images, the still images, and I just think they’re more powerful, and last longer, than a video.And you can put them in a book. You can put them in a book!The new documentary also covers the time you spent working as a photographer in the Reagan administration, and I know one thing that marked Reagan’s White House is that the cameras were always rolling, too. Did that experience have an effect on how you thought about the power of the presidential photograph? It shaped my belief that visually documenting the presidency for history is important. The ’80s were a different time. Even with the news magazines, if they were doing a big story on Reagan, the magazine’s photographer assigned to the White House would request 15 minutes with the president and orchestrate the photo. Set up lights. “You do this, Mr. President.” That was just the way it was done during the ’80s. To me, the most valuable photographs I made of Reagan were the fleeting moments, the authentic moments — and many of those were never published during his presidency. To me, that was a mistake on the administration’s part, to not show Reagan as a human being, somebody who’s vulnerable but also quite playful behind the scenes. I don’t think people got the full picture of Reagan. I mean, it was a different time. There wasn’t any internet or social media, so there wasn’t an easy means to get those photographs out, but at the same time, I think the administration was overly protective of Reagan’s image.One risk with photographs of public figures is that people will look at the photo and supply the context themselves, even if the context is wrong. The meaning of the photo can change depending on who’s looking at it. Do you think about that risk while you’re taking the photos?No, I’m not thinking about it, but I think it is interesting. As I said, the approach that I took was to make authentic photographs — and fortunately, when I published my book I was able to add context to it. But it’s interesting. There’s a guy who runs a nonprofit called Reading the Pictures, Michael Shaw. During the Obama administration, he would always analyze my pictures and add context. That just kind of blew my mind, because the things he was talking about played no part at all in a) making the photograph in the first place and b) making it public. Then, Michael and I did a talk at Photoville in 2017, I think. And it was pretty fun to do because with so many of the photos he was talking about, I thought they were off the wall. But at the same time, everybody brings their own background and biases into looking at a picture. It makes you stop and think more about the carefulness that you might have before you make a photograph public. This has been discussed a lot lately with Black Lives Matter and certain photos, how they’re viewed by the public. It’s an interesting time right now for that, with everything else that’s going on in the country.It seems like one challenge with shooting people who are public figures is that they never really have a private moment — they don’t really “own” their image in the way that a private citizen does. Does that bring any challenges in thinking about how to show the moments where they’re most “human”? To me, one of the values of being a still photographer at the White House, being the official White House still photographer, is you have access that no video camera does. Because video has sound, right? So, you can’t have a video camera in the situation room during these highly classified meetings. That enables me to make these really revealing pictures that help show what Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan were like as human beings. They’re such fleeting moments, and they’re often intimate and very personal, and I think it shows the value of having an official photographer to capture those moments for history. I really do.I feel like the Trump administration has really struggled to make photos that are intimate and personal, photos that aren’t instantly divisive. I suspect one of the most iconic images from the Trump administration will be the photo of him holding up a Bible in front of a church, having just gassed protesters to clear that path. But there are different ways people are going to interpret that image. Am I on the right track here? Does it seem like the Trump administration has taken a distinctly different approach to its photographs?Yeah. I think that the Trump presidency is a reality show, by and large. Even if there’s a cabinet meeting, it’s not really a meeting. It’s an hour-and-a-half session, with the entire press corps present, [in which the officials are] trying to make Trump look good. Everybody goes around the table, and they say all kinds of positive things, and there’s no constructive dialogue taking place. It’s as if we’re living in the 1950s, where the photographs are like ribbon-cuttings. The only real authentic pictures I’ve seen of the Trump presidency — when I say “authentic,” I mean a behind-the-scenes image that makes you say, “Wow, that’s a telling image” — was the picture of Nancy Pelosi in the cabinet room, standing up, pointing her finger at Trump. I look at that picture and I’m like, “What a badass Speaker of the House. She’s standing up to the president. How does that picture get out? How did it get out to the public?” Trump himself tweeted it out because he thought it made him look good. Different people look at pictures in different ways; I don’t know that there was anybody in America that thought that picture made Trump look good. Yet, he thought it did. That was a really revealing picture in particular, which we have not really seen before or since.And you also wonder what people will think when they see that photo in 50 years!You started posting on social media following the end of your White House term. You became Instagram famous, and then the book grew out of that. Having gone through that experience, what do you think will change when we eventually have a president who grew up with selfies and phones and social media? Will that change the way we think about images of the presidency in the future? That’s a good question. President Obama happened to be president when social media exploded, and he utilized it in a way that no one had before. Trump’s done the same thing, but the imagery does not fit the tool; it’s all reality show pictures, and not really that revealing. Each administration going forward is going to have to wrestle with this. My one concern — and if Joe Biden is elected, I will weigh on this — my one concern is that I don’t want the next official White House photographer to think that their number one goal is to make pictures for social media. That is not the primary purpose of that position. That position is to document the presidency for history, which was my primary mission as well. That’s not to say that an administration cannot use the photographs that the White House photographer takes for social media, but there’s got to be a separation in the purpose of your position, and your position should be documenting the presidency for history. I will weigh on that, or I may go to some of the Biden people I know and say, “Do not lose sight of this fact: You need to have a visual record of your presidency for history.”The Way I See It premieres in limited theaters on September 18 and on MSNBC on October 16.Help keep Vox free for allMillions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work, and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. Contribute today from as little as $3.