A federal judge on Wednesday delayed the trial of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two associates of U.S. President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, on charges of violating campaign finance laws to Feb. 1, 2021 because of difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The four-month delay means Parnas and Fruman, who were involved in an alleged Ukraine pressure campaign that underlay Trump's recent impeachment trial, will likely not be in the media glare in the final weeks of Trump's reelection campaign leading up to the Nov. 3 presidential election. The Ukraine-born Parnas and Belarus-born Fruman were charged over their alleged use of a shell company to make an illegal $325,000 donation to a committee supporting Trump's re-election.

There was compelling evidence by late December that the new coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was spreading from person to person, but Chinese officials didn't take the threat of a significant outbreak seriously until the coronavirus was detected in Thailand on Jan. 13, The Associated Press reports, citing internal documents and interviews with Chinese officials. Top officials in Beijing started preparing for a pandemic on Jan. 14, but secretly, keeping the public in the dark as the virus spread for six days. President Xi Jinping issued a televised warning on Jan. 20, at which point more than 3,000 people had been infected.Chinese officials spent the six days distributing test kits to trace the virus nationwide, ordering wider screening of patients, preparing hospitals for an infectious virus, and easing the stringent rules for confirming coronavirus infections, AP reports. During that week, Wuhan "hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people" and "millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.""If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient," Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told AP. "We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan's medical system," and lives would have been saved. Researchers later estimated that if the public had been warned a week earlier and told to wear masks, forego travel, and social-distance, cases could have been cut by up to two-thirds.China denies that it hid the outbreak early on, and some outside experts argue that Beijing's actions were defensible given its private actions and the risk of provoking unnecessary hysteria. "But the early story of the pandemic in China shows missed opportunities at every step," AP reports. "Under Xi, China's most authoritarian leader in decades, increasing political repression has made officials more hesitant to report cases without a clear green light from the top." Read more at The Associated Press.More stories from theweek.com Why can't you go fishing during the pandemic? Legal scholar who defended Trump during impeachment objects to his idea of adjourning Congress Trump threatens to adjourn Congress to allow recess appointments

Two key Republican senators on Tuesday raised alarm about President Donald Trump’s recent hostility toward the government’s internal watchdogs, tacitly warning that he has threatened their independence and asking the president to support, rather than undermine, them.

In a letter to the president, Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) also urged Trump to nominate permanent officials to fill the powerful positions, rather than relying on temporary fill-ins that circumvent the Senate’s traditional confirmation process.

“Recent statements and actions in the administration have raised concerns on Capitol Hill and among the IG community about the administration’s support for IGs and the statutory authorities Congress has granted them,” the senators wrote — a reference to Trump’s amped-up hostility toward inspectors general in recent days that has prompted many of his congressional allies to speak out against him in rare form.

“We would hope the White House would view IGs as your partners in objectively identifying and rooting out waste within the federal government,” Lankford and Portman added.

Their plea for support of the dozens of inspectors general throughout the government comes one day after Trump blew past a deadline to provide a bipartisan group of senators with a fuller explanation of his decision to fire the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, late at night on April 3.

The GOP senators’ gentle rebuke of Trump is the latest in an unusually concerted push by Democrats, Republicans and the federal watchdog community overall to brush back the president for his incursion on the independence of inspectors general.

And it came just minutes before a bipartisan duo, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote to Michael Horowitz, who leads the council of inspectors general, demanding information about the White House’s process for vetting and submitting nominees for confirmation by the Senate.

Atkinson, who was nominated by Trump and later confirmed by the Senate, provoked the president’s fury by informing Congress of a whistleblower complaint that led to his impeachment in December. Trump also sidelined Glenn Fine, the former acting Pentagon inspector general expected to lead oversight of the $2.2 trillion coronavirus emergency relief measure, effectively demoting him just days after his fellow inspectors general picked him for the role.

Trump’s recent actions have galvanized an unlikely coalition of critics, headlined by several of his longtime congressional who are often loath to criticize him, even indirectly.

In their letter, Lankford and Portman specifically asked Trump to protect and support whistleblowers, whom they said “play a key role in assisting IGs identify waste, fraud, and abuse.”

“We encourage you to send a strong message to the executive branch to work with IGs, not against them,” the senators added.

Trump has also assailed the Health and Human Services Department’s watchdog — who has spent 21 years serving administrations of both parties — attacking her as a political operative over her finding that hospitals across the nation were unprepared for the coronavirus crisis.

And Trump has threatened another core function of inspectors general, telling Congress last month that he is the ultimate authority on whether federal watchdogs — technically employees of the Executive Branch — can share certain findings with lawmakers. Portman and Lankford indicated they were particularly concerned about the ability of inspectors general to report their findings in an “unbiased” way to Congress, pointing to a potential intra-GOP clash over the matter.

And Trump has relied heavily on acting inspectors general, sometimes for years, to perform functions that often require Senate confirmation. Though he recently nominated a slate of five inspectors general to fill vacant positions permanently, the ranks of more than six-dozen inspectors general are replete with temporary appointments, which gives Trump more direct influence than he would have over Senate-confirmed appointees.

Though Trump’s attacks on these officials have intensified of late, he has long swiped at independent overseers, including Horowitz, who has led two high-profile reviews of the FBI investigations that have in part defined Trump’s presidency: the probe of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information and the investigation of the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia during the 2016 election.

“As bad as the I.G. Report is for the FBI and others, and it is really bad, remember that I.G. Horowitz was appointed by Obama,” Trump said of the inspector general who was confirmed with unanimous support in 2012 and had previously been confirmed to a separate role by the GOP-led Senate in 2003. “There was tremendous bias and guilt exposed, so obvious, but Horowitz couldn’t get himself to say it. Big credibility loss.”

The wide-ranging squeeze on the IG community prompted an unusual pushback from the normally technocratic and muted watchdog community itself. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, lamented Trump’s decision to remove Atkinson for doing his job properly, and he vowed that other IGs would not be dissuaded from “aggressive, independent oversight of the agencies that we oversee.”

Horowitz is due to name a successor to Fine to oversee federal coronavirus relief efforts, though he has asked lawmakers for the power to choose from a broader pool of officials than the law currently allows.

Trump’s recent moves have also prompted outrage from House Democrats, who accused Trump of attempting to erode one of the few functional checks on the mismanagement and abuse in the Executive Branch.

Top House Democrats have proposed measures that would prohibit Trump from removing inspectors general without “good cause.” And some also proposed legislation that would allow Fine to return to the coronavirus oversight role he was initially eyed for.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has pressed Trump’s acting intelligence community leader, Richard Grenell, for details on whether Atkinson was impeded from conducting any of his investigations before his ouster, as well as a pledge that he wouldn’t exact retaliation against any intelligence officials over perceived disloyalty to Trump.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Tuesday that Democrats were more worried about President Trump’s impeachment during February than the novel coronavirus.The South Carolina senator asserted in a tweet that “most Democrats and the media” were more...

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump publicly signaled his frustration Sunday with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government's top infectious disease expert, after the doctor said more lives could have been saved from the coronavirus if the country had been shut down earlier.Trump reposted a Twitter message that said "Time to FireFauci" as he rejected criticism of his slow initial response to the pandemic that has now killed more than 22,000 people in the United States. The president privately has been irritated at times with Fauci, but the Twitter post was the most explicit he has been in letting that show publicly.The message Trump retweeted came from a former Republican congressional candidate. "Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could've saved more lives," said the tweet by DeAnna Lorraine, who got less than 2% of the vote in an open primary against Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month. "Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US at large. Time to Fire Fauci."In reposting the message, Trump added: "Sorry Fake News, it's all on tape. I banned China long before people spoke up."The tweet came amid a flurry of messages blasted out by the president Sunday defending his handling of the coronavirus, which has come under sharp criticism, and pointing the finger instead at China, the World Health Organization, President Barack Obama, the nation's governors, Congress, Democrats generally and the news media.Trump did not "ban China," but he did block foreign nationals who had been in China in the past 14 days from coming into the U.S. starting Feb. 2. Despite the policy, 40,000 Americans and other authorized travelers have still come into the country from China since then.Fauci and other public health experts were initially skeptical that the China travel restrictions would be useful when the president was first considering them, but then changed their minds and told Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, on the morning of Jan. 30 that they supported them.Trump has repeatedly pointed back to those travel limits to defend his handling of the pandemic, but experts have said the limits were useful mainly to buy time that the administration did not then use to ramp up widespread testing and impose social distancing policies before infections could begin growing exponentially.By the third week of February, advisers had drafted a list of measures they believed would soon be necessary, like school closures, sports and concert cancellations and stay-at-home orders, but the president did not embrace them until mid-March.Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said Sunday that earlier imposition of such policies would have made a difference."I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives," he said on "State of the Union" on CNN. "Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you're right. Obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down."Fauci's comments, and the president's pushback, come at a critical time as Trump wrestles with how fast to begin reopening the country. Public health experts like Fauci have urged caution about resuming normal life too soon for fear of instigating another wave of illness and death, while the president's economic advisers and others are anxious to restart businesses at a time when more than 16 million Americans have been put out of work.Fauci and the president have publicly disagreed on several issues, including how long it will take to develop a vaccine and the president's aggressive promotion of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, whose effects are unproven against the coronavirus. At a coronavirus task force briefing last week, Trump stopped Fauci from answering a question on the drug.Fauci has become a celebrated figure among much of the public, which trusts him far more than Trump, according to polls. A Quinnipiac University survey last week found that 78% of Americans approved of Fauci's handling of the crisis compared with 46% who approved of the president's response. That has prompted resentment among other government officials, some of whom have privately criticized Fauci for playing to the media and not always sending consistent messages.Trump spent much of Easter Sunday deflecting criticism and finding other targets. "If the Fake News Opposition Party is pushing, with all their might, the fact that President Trump 'ignored early warnings about the threat,' then why did Media & Dems viciously criticize me when I instituted a Travel Ban on China?" he wrote. "They said 'early & not necessary.' Corrupt Media!"He cited a businessman in saying that "Congress was too distracted by the (phony) Impeachment Witch Hunt when they should have been investigating CoronaVirus when it first appeared in China." He blamed states for not being ready. "Governors, get your states testing programs & apparatus perfected," he wrote. "Be ready, big things are happening. No excuses!"He retweeted a message saying that the World Health Organization "enabled China's obfuscation on coronavirus, and that it could have been containable had Beijing not lied to the world." He also retweeted a post from a friendly conservative television outlet saying that the "Obama admin. repeatedly cut PPE stockpile," referring to personal protective equipment, and "failed to replenish" it.The president seemed particularly upset about a New York Times article documenting the administration's slow response to the virus. "The @nytimes story is a Fake, just like the 'paper' itself," he wrote Sunday night, denying that Azar warned him "until later" and dismissing an early memo by another adviser, Peter Navarro, who warned of the prospect of 500,000 deaths. "Fake News!"He did not explain why, if he thought the stockpile was inadequate, he did nothing in his three years in office to replenish it. And in none of his messages did he say why he waited to recommend social distancing measures that experts have credited with helping to stem the spread of the virus.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company