(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump doesn’t want Democrats to grab all the attention as the Iowa caucuses near, and is looking to steal back some of the political limelight.The Republican Party and the Trump campaign have planned days of counter-programming to the Democratic caucuses: Events spread all over the state, backed by cabinet secretaries and the president’s children and topped by a Thursday night rally headlined by the candidate himself.Trump, who’s still undergoing an impeachment trial in the Senate, isn’t facing a viable primary threat. Traditionally, unchallenged incumbents often stand back and let the opposing party’s candidates battle among themselves for the nomination.Trump has decided to put himself front and center. Earlier this month, he held a Milwaukee rally on the same day as the Democratic candidates’ seventh debate, in Des Moines, Iowa, giving politically oriented viewers a choice of what to watch.His campaign also flew a banner over Des Moines in the hours before the debate.Frank Seydel, from Ames, was among a handful of people that gathered at a local coffee shop for a Trump campaign gathering on Tuesday. The 75-year-old retired professor says the meetings are just as much about discussing ways to help Trump at the local level as they are an opportunity to connect and chat with other supporters of the president.“For the last month and a half, in the Des Moines Register, there are articles all about the Democrat candidates, who’s leading,” Seydel said. “As a Republican I’m tired of that. Why don’t they take some of the attention away” from the Democrats?Trump’s visit to the state will be brief, but Iowans will be encountering plenty of campaign surrogates before and after the rally.On Thursday morning, Vice President Mike Pence will be in Sioux City for an “Evangelicals for Trump” event, then take a bus to Council Bluffs to campaign before joining the president at the Des Moines rally. On Monday, the president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as well as Eric’s wife, Lara, and former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, also Donald’s girlfriend, will be campaigning for the president in Iowa.They will be joined by some 80 other surrogates, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, among others. The campaign has also scheduled a news conference Monday afternoon in West Des Moines.As of Tuesday, people had already started waiting in line for the rally at Drake University’s Knapp Center.“We’re blanketed by surrogates at” this time of year all the time, said Connie Schmett, co-chairwoman of the Polk County Republican Party. “These tremendous rallies, it is unusual. It’s all people are talking about: Are you going to the rally?”The effort is also designed to remind Iowa Republicans that they’re having a caucus, too. Low turnout could embarrass the Trump campaign, especially if the relatively few supporters of challengers Joe Walsh, a conservative radio host and former Illinois congressman, and former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld show up.Trump lost the Iowa caucuses in 2016 to Texas Senator Ted Cruz.Schmett, sitting in her office with a photograph of President Ronald Reagan in Iowa hanging behind her, said Trump’s presence in the state as the caucus nears makes it easier for her to get people to go out in frigid temperatures for an incumbent.Richard Goughnour, 89, co-chair of the Des Moines County Republicans, is among the president’s supporters in the county, a traditionally Democratic stronghold that Trump won in 2016. He says that his phone and his neighbors’ phones have been “ringing off the wall,” from Democrats trying to woo them back by saying, “Don’t elect that crook.”So Goughnour, who owned and edited a newspaper in Mediapolis, Iowa, for many years, is joining in Trump’s counter-programming efforts. He’s putting together a watch party for the rally on Thursday night at a local tavern, where he’ll sell hats, T-shirts and bumper stickers.(Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)To contact the reporter on this story: Mario Parker in Washington at mparker22@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Wendy Benjaminson, John HarneyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

(Bloomberg) -- Senator Lindsey Graham, a top Trump ally, is targeting giant internet platforms with a child protection measure that could threaten tech companies’ use of encryption and a liability exemption they prize.The draft bill from Graham, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, mounts a double attack against encrypted services such as Apple Inc.’s iCloud and Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp chat. It jeopardizes technology companies’ immunity to lawsuits by victims for violating child exploitation and abuse statutes and it lowers the standard to bring such cases.The bipartisan measure, which was obtained by Bloomberg and hasn’t yet been formally introduced, would affect a wide range of social media companies, cloud service providers, email and text platforms and other technology services. It could put Facebook in the government’s crosshairs for its plans to encrypt all of its messaging apps and undercut Apple’s refusal to create back doors into its devices and services.Graham’s bill, which Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut is also working on, calls for Congress and the administration to establish a commission to determine best practices for tech companies to prevent online exploitation of children and allows the attorney general to modify the recommendations.“The absolute worst-case scenario could easily become reality,” said Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom, a libertarian think tank aligned with technology companies. “DOJ could effectively ban end-to-end encryption.”Attorney General William Barr is taking aim at both encryption and the liability shield as he increases scrutiny of technology companies. The Justice Department has tentatively scheduled a Feb. 19 meeting on the future of the immunity known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, according to a person familiar with the plans. The provision protects platforms from responsibility for content posted by third parties.Although the measure doesn’t directly mention encryption, it would require that companies work with law enforcement to identify, remove, report and preserve evidence related to child exploitation -- which critics said would be impossible to do for services such as WhatsApp that are encrypted from end-to-end.If technology companies don’t certify that they are following the best practices set by the 15-member commission, they would lose the legal immunity they currently enjoy under Section 230 relating to child exploitation and abuse laws. That would open the door to lawsuits for “reckless” violations of those laws, a lower standard than contained in current statutes.The timing of the bill’s introduction remains unclear with senators serving as jurors in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.Facebook and other companies have extensive systems to find, remove and report child-abuse images, as well as other prohibited content such as terrorist propaganda. Their monitoring ability, however, doesn’t extend to systems that are encrypted end-to-end. Online safety experts have said Facebook’s efforts to root out this content will suffer as the company pivots to closed communications modeled on its WhatsApp chat service.That move “will make it harder to detect -- and stop -- child abuse and similar crimes,” Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said in prepared testimony before Graham’s committee in December. In addition, Apple’s encryption had stymied a sex trafficking investigation that authorities wanted to pursue after hearing a prison telephone call by a suspect, he said.A spokeswoman for Graham’s committee emphasized that the document is a draft and isn’t final. The Justice Department declined to comment.Barr has pressured Apple to provide back-door access to encrypted data for law enforcement investigations, urging the company to unlock iPhones used by the gunman behind a Dec. 6 terrorist attack on a Florida Navy base.Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has conceded the company’s moves may make it harder to find offensive content, but he nonetheless pledged on a Wednesday earnings call to uphold his most controversial positions, including “standing up for encryption, against those who say that privacy mostly helps bad people.”The Information, a technology news website, earlier reported some details of Graham’s bill, known as the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act, or EARN IT Act.The draft bill represents the latest effort to weaken liability protections for technology platforms after a 2018 measure that pared the exemption for content related to online sex trafficking.Passage of that law indicated that the rules are changing for an industry that had been the darling of Washington but is now facing a broad, bipartisan backlash.On Tuesday, a top House Democrat, Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, said she’s reviewing whether the provision should be further revised to stem election misinformation.Lawmakers have also raised concerns about whether the shield fosters online drug sales and other issues. There have also been complaints from conservatives of political bias. Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, has introduced his own bill to withdraw the legal immunity if companies can’t prove to the U.S. that they moderate content in a politically neutral way.While there are signs there’s bipartisan support to tackle the issues raised by encryption and the liability shield, Congress doesn’t appear to have a unified approach and passage of the measure could be difficult in an election year.\--With assistance from Rebecca Kern, Kurt Wagner and Sarah Frier.To contact the reporters on this story: Ben Brody in Washington, D.C. at btenerellabr@bloomberg.net;Naomi Nix in Washington at nnix1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, John HarneyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that the U.S. and Britain would retain and enhance their special relationship once the U.K. leaves the European Union this week. As President Donald Trump's Senate impeachment trial neared a close in Washington, Pompeo met with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to re-register American concerns about Huawei. Pompeo played down concerns that Huawei's presence in Britain's 5G network would severely disrupt intelligence sharing within the so-called “Five Eyes” partnership of English-speaking nations that includes the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Trump's campaign described the parade of events in Iowa as a warning to Democrats that their operation is far better organized than it was in 2016.

       

President Trump's defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz pulled the old quote-the-dictionary trick in Trump's Senate impeachment trial, arguing that Trump -- or, in fact, any president -- cannot be impeached for abuse of power because the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution rejected adding the word "maladministration." In this case, though, the dictionary wasn't much use -- "maladministration," according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, means "inefficient or dishonest administration; mismanagement," and literally it means "bad management" -- so Dershowitz turned instead to the thesaurus."The framers rejected maladministration," Dershowitz told the senators. "And what's a metaphor, or what's a synonym for maladministation? Abuse of power. And when they rejected maladministration, they rejected abuse of power." If you look up maladministration in the dictionary, he added later, "and you look up synonyms, the synonyms include abuse, corruption, misrule, dishonesty, misuse of office, and misbehavior."The thesaurus argument doesn't exactly hold up, either.> Weird, it doesn't seem that "maladministration" is remotely a synonym for "abuse of power." pic.twitter.com/fKlKS9cpwc> > -- Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) January 29, 2020Dershowitz is an expert in criminal law and a famous defense lawyer. Almost all constitutional scholars disagree with his views on impeachment. Clark D. Cunningham, a scholar on the original meaning of the Constitution at Georgia State University College of Law, offered some historical context in Politico, noting that while James Madison rejected the word "maladministration" as an impeachable offense, he understood the "misdemeanors" part of "high crimes and misdemeanors" to mean "misconduct" or "misbehavior," and certainly "a different and broader meaning than criminal acts." Dershowitz and Jeffrey Toobin argued over whether "maladministration" equals "abuse of power" on CNN Tuesday. "Alan, you are equating maladministration with the abuse of power -- you are the only scholar who does that," Toobin said. Dershowitz pointed to a new New York Times op-ed by Harvard's Nicholas Bowie that says "maladministration, abuse of office, abuse of power." You can read the op-ed, which doesn't mention the word "maladministration," at the Times, and watch the spirited argument below. More stories from theweek.com Mitch McConnell's rare blunder John Bolton just vindicated Nancy Pelosi 7 witheringly funny cartoons about the GOP's John Bolton problem