By early October, even people inside the White House believed President Donald Trump's reelection campaign needed a desperate rescue mission. So three men allied with the president gathered at a house in McLean, Virginia, to launch one.The host was Arthur Schwartz, a New York public relations man close to Trump's eldest son, Donald Jr. The guests were a White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, and a former deputy White House counsel, Stefan Passantino, according to two people familiar with the meeting.Herschmann knew the subject matter they were there to discuss. He had represented Trump during the impeachment trial early this year, and he tried to deflect allegations against the president in part by pointing to Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine. More recently, he has been working on the White House payroll with a hazy portfolio, listed as "a senior adviser to the president," and remains close to Jared Kushner.The three had pinned their hopes for reelecting the president on a fourth guest, a straight-shooting Wall Street Journal White House reporter named Michael Bender. They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden's business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden's named Tony Bobulinski. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son's activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president.The Journal had seemed to be the perfect outlet for a story the Trump advisers believed could sink Biden's candidacy. Its small-c conservatism in reporting means the work of its news pages carries credibility across the industry. And its readership leans further right than other big news outlets. Its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, recently remarked at a virtual gathering of Journal reporters and editors that while he knows that the paper often delivers unwelcome news to the many Trump supporters who read it, The Journal should protect its unique position of being trusted across the political spectrum, two people familiar with the remarks said.As the Trump team waited with excited anticipation for a Journal expose, the newspaper did its due diligence: Bender and Beckett handed the story off to a well-regarded China correspondent, James Areddy, and a Capitol Hill reporter who had followed the Hunter Biden story, Andrew Duehren. Areddy interviewed Bobulinski. They began drafting an article.Then things got messy. Without warning his notional allies, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now a lawyer for Trump, burst onto the scene with the tabloid version of the McLean crew's carefully laid plot. Giuliani delivered a cache of documents of questionable provenance -- but containing some of the same emails -- to The New York Post, a sister publication to The Journal in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right-wing outlets. Giuliani's complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story -- as did The Post's reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son's activities.While the Trump team was clearly jumpy, editors in The Journal's Washington bureau were wrestling with a central question: Could the documents, or Bobulinski, prove that Joe Biden was involved in his son's lobbying? Or was this yet another story of the younger Biden trading on his family's name -- a perfectly good theme, but not a new one or one that needed urgently to be revealed before the election.Trump and his allies expected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late -- and could shape that week's news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An "important piece" in The Journal would be coming soon, Trump told aides on a conference call that day.His comment was not appreciated inside The Journal."The editors didn't like Trump's insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job," a Journal reporter who wasn't directly involved in the story told me. But the reporters continued to work on the draft as the Thursday debate approached, indifferent to the White House's frantic timeline.Finally, Bobulinski got tired of waiting."He got spooked about whether they were going to do it or not," Bannon said.At 7:35 Wednesday evening, Bobulinski emailed an on-the-record, 684-word statement making his case to a range of news outlets. Breitbart News published it in full. He appeared the next day in Nashville, Tennessee, to attend the debate as Trump's surprise guest, and less than two hours before the debate was to begin, he read a six-minute statement to the press, detailing his allegations that the former vice president had involvement in his son's business dealings.When Trump stepped on stage, the president acted as though the details of the emails and the allegations were common knowledge. "You're the big man, I think. I don't know, maybe you're not," he told Biden at some point, a reference to an ambiguous sentence from the documents.As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Areddy and Duehren's reporting. The core of it was that Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. "Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden," The Journal reported.Asked about The Journal's handling of the story, the editor-in-chief, Matt Murray, said the paper did not discuss its newsgathering. "Our rigorous and trusted journalism speaks for itself," Murray said in an emailed statement.And if you'd been watching the debate, but hadn't been obsessively watching Fox News or reading Breitbart, you would have had no idea what Trump was talking about. The story the Trump team hoped would upend the campaign was fading fast.The Gatekeepers ReturnThe McLean group's failed attempt to sway the election is partly just another story revealing the chaotic, threadbare quality of the Trump operation -- a far cry from the coordinated "disinformation" machinery feared by liberals.But it's also about a larger shift in the American media, one in which the gatekeepers appear to have returned after a long absence.It has been a disorienting couple of decades, after all. It all began when The Drudge Report, Gawker and the blogs started telling you what stodgy old newspapers and television networks wouldn't. Then social media brought floods of content pouring over the old barricades.By 2015, the old gatekeepers had entered a kind of crisis of confidence, believing they couldn't control the online news cycle any better than King Canute could control the tides. Television networks all but let Donald Trump take over as executive producer that summer and fall. In October 2016, Julian Assange and James Comey seemed to drive the news cycle more than the major news organizations. Many figures in old media and new bought into the idea that in the new world, readers would find the information they wanted to read -- and therefore, decisions by editors and producers, about whether to cover something and how much attention to give it, didn't mean much.But the past two weeks have proved the opposite: that the old gatekeepers, like The Journal, can still control the agenda. It turns out there is a big difference between WikiLeaks and establishment media coverage of WikiLeaks, a difference between a Trump tweet and an article about it, even between an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal suggesting Joe Biden had done bad things, and a news article that didn't reach that conclusion.Perhaps the most influential media document of the past four years is a chart by a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Yochai Benkler. The study showed that a dense new right-wing media sphere had emerged -- and that the mainstream news "revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set."Bannon had known this, too. He described his strategy as "anchor left, pivot right," and even as he ran Breitbart News, he worked to place attacks on Hillary Clinton in mainstream outlets. The validating power of those outlets was clear when The New York Times and Washington Post were given early access in the spring of 2015 to the book "Clinton Cash," an investigation of the Clinton family's blurring of business, philanthropic and political interests by writer Peter Schweizer.Schweizer is still around this cycle. But you won't find his work in mainstream outlets. He's over on Breitbart, with a couple of Hunter Biden stories this month.And the fact that Bobulinski emerged not in the pages of the widely respected Journal but in a statement to Breitbart was essentially Bannon's nightmare, and Benkler's fondest wish. And a broad array of mainstream outlets, unpersuaded that Hunter Biden's doings tie directly to the former vice president, have largely kept the story off their front pages, and confined to skeptical explanations of what Trump and his allies are claiming about his opponent."SO USA TODAY DIDN'T WANT TO RUN MY HUNTER BIDEN COLUMN THIS WEEK," conservative writer Glenn Reynolds complained Oct. 20, posting the article instead to his blog. Trump himself hit a wall when he tried to push the Hunter Biden narrative onto CBS News."This is '60 Minutes,' and we can't put on things we can't verify," Lesley Stahl told him. Trump then did more or less the same thing as Reynolds, posting a video of his side of the interview to his own blog, Facebook.The media's control over information, of course, is not as total as it used to be. The people who own printing presses and broadcast towers can't actually stop you from reading leaked emails or unproven theories about Joe Biden's knowledge of his son's business. But what Benkler's research showed was that the elite outlets' ability to set the agenda endured in spite of social media.We should have known it, of course. Many of our readers, screaming about headlines on Twitter, did. And Trump knew it all along -- one way to read his endless attacks on the establishment media is as an expression of obsession, a form of love. This week, you can hear howls of betrayal from people who have for years said the legacy media was both utterly biased and totally irrelevant."For years, we've respected and even revered the sanctified position of the free press," wrote Dana Loesch, a right-wing commentator not particularly known for her reverence of legacy media, expressing frustration that the Biden story was not getting attention. "Now that free press points its digital pen at your throat when you question their preferences."On the Other Side of the GateThere's something amusing -- even a bit flattering -- in such earnest protestations from a right-wing movement rooted in efforts to discredit the independent media. And this reassertion of control over information is what you've seen many journalists call for in recent years. At its best, it can also close the political landscape to a trendy new form of dirty tricks, as in France in 2017, where the media largely ignored a last-minute dump of hacked emails from President Emmanuel Macron's campaign just before a legally mandated blackout period.But I admit that I feel deep ambivalence about this revenge of the gatekeepers. I spent my career, before arriving at The Times in March, on the other side of the gate, lobbing information past it to a very online audience who I presumed had already seen the leak or the rumor, and seeing my job as helping to guide that audience through the thicket, not to close their eyes to it. "The media's new and unfamiliar job is to provide a framework for understanding the wild, unvetted, and incredibly intoxicating information that its audience will inevitably see -- not to ignore it," my colleague John Herrman (also now at The Times) and I wrote in 2013. In 2017, I made the decision to publish the unverified "Steele dossier," in part on the grounds that gatekeepers were looking at it and influenced by it, but keeping it from their audience.This fall, top media and tech executives were bracing to refight the last war -- a foreign-backed hack-and-leak operation like WikiLeaks seeking to influence the election's outcome. It was that hyper-vigilance that led Twitter to block links to The New York Post's article about Hunter Biden -- a frighteningly disproportionate response to a story that other news organizations were handling with care. The schemes of Herschmann, Passantino and Schwartz weren't exactly WikiLeaks. But the special nervousness that many outlets, including this one, feel about the provenance of the Hunter Biden emails is, in many ways, the legacy of the WikiLeaks experience.I'd prefer to put my faith in Murray and careful, professional journalists like him than in the social platforms' product managers and executives. And I hope Americans relieved that the gatekeepers are reasserting themselves will also pay attention to who gets that power, and how centralized it is, and root for new voices to correct and challenge them.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

SEOUL—Now the battle rages for “the Republic of Samsung.”The death Sunday of Samsung boss Lee Kun-hee, probably Korea’s most admired, if hated, man, leaves his son, Lee Jae-yong, battling the authorities and a legion of lawyers for control of the empire that controls 20 percent of the Korean economy. The world’s biggest smartphone manufacturer has a turnover that exceeds many republics.Lee Jae-yong, or Jay Lee, was in Vietnam where Samsung Electronics produces the majority of its smartphones, when he got word that his father was on the verge of death.Jay Lee, who is 52, made it to his father’s bedside in a Samsung hospital here in Seoul before he breathed his last. His father, 78, had been bed-ridden and mostly in a coma since suffering a heart attack six years ago.While in Vietnam, Jay Lee had managed to avoid the opening of the latest trial by prosecutors who are out to get him on charges of manipulating share prices in two Samsung companies in a bid to guarantee his inheritance.Having already spent a year in jail while on trial on charges of bribing the ousted Korean president Park Geun-hye, Lee now faces more jail time if prosecutors can pin another conviction on him—this time for lowering the share price of one company to merge it with another. By pulling off that merger—Hey Presto!—Lee hoped to have enough shares in the combined companies to hold a controlling stake in Samsung Electronics, the crown jewel of an empire whose 80 or so enterprises range from ship-building to insurance to construction to an amusement park rivaling any Disneyland.Jay Lee is an engaging figure unlike his stern father, who took over the group from his own father, the Samsung founder Lee Byung-chull, more than 30 years ago. And, just to show he means well, he formally apologized for his rule-bending efforts to secure what he sees as his dynastic right.“I and Samsung have been reprimanded for the succession issue,” he said, looking suitably penitent when promising to “try to not have additional controversy regarding the management succession.”Those nice words are scorned by reform-minded authorities, however, and it’s the matter of succession that’s sure to consume his energies once he’s gone through an elaborate funeral. His father was the country’s richest man, whose net worth of nearly $21 billion made him the world’s 67th richest person, according to Forbes.Jay Lee, already Korea’s second richest man with a net worth of $6.4 billion, has perfected the art of displays of humility in the face of powers-that-be. But Korean president Moon Jae-In wants to reform the country’s traditional dynastic conglomerate system, known as chaebol, which keeps huge businesses in the hands of a few rich families and effectively controls the entire economy. The current system has led to wild disparities between rich and poor—brilliantly captured by the Oscar-winning movie Parasite.Geoffrey Cain, author of the newly published Samsung Rising, the Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech, sees the HBO series Succession as an even more suitable artistic representation. Scene after scene captures the battle to secure a family enterprise making it “an apt show for understanding the Lees,” said Cain.It’s not as though Jay Lee’s two sisters, who stand to inherit lesser shares of the empire, are fighting him for a bigger slice of the inheritance, but the machinations to seize and hang on against enemies do bear distinct similarities.“The biggest question is how Jay Lee will cement shareholding control when he might not have enough shares to control the company,” Cain told The Daily Beast. One huge problem: “He might have to sell shares to pay his colossal inheritance tax estimated at $6 billion divided between him and his sisters.”He also faces a maternal problem. His mother, Hong Ra-hee, “gets a sizable share of the chairman’s assets that could hamper Jay Lee’s quest to control the company,” said Cain. “Jay Lee’s succession is not guaranteed.”One reason prosecutors are reportedly so eager to punish Jay Lee—as seen in his current trial—is resentment over the breaks that Lee Kun-hee got from conservative presidents over the years before the Candlelight Revolution of 2016 ousted Park Geun-hye.Jay Lee’s father was forgiven in 1997, when the conservative Kim Young-sam exonerated him after he and others had been convicted of bribery charges, and again 10 years later when he was convicted of evading massive taxes, among other things. Forced to resign as chairman of Samsung Electronics, he got totally off the hook when Lee Myung-bak, the conservative businessman who was then president, gave him a complete pardon in 2009.Jay Lee, however, does have plenty of sympathizers. One advocate, Tara Oh, a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, who founded and now serves as president of the East Asia Research Center in Washington, accuses the government of “aggressive and unreasonable investigations against the company” and denounces the charges against him as “frivolous, without merit and unjust.”In a lengthy study of the whole case against Samsung, Oh claims that Jay Lee was “convicted of a crime without evidence” simply as justification for the impeachment of Park Geun-hye, who was convicted of corruption and influence-peddling and sentenced to 25 years in prison. It was Samsung’s gift of two horses for the equestrian daughter of a confidante of Park that triggered a series of events that precipitated Park’s downfall. “My Kingdom for a Horse,” was the headline over a Wall Street Journal story at the time.“The Moon administration appears to be interested in taking over control of Samsung,” Oh wrote. “Globally, the actions of the Moon administration threaten the future of 5G technology developments as well as the global supply chain for critical life-saving biopharmaceuticals and COVID-19 treatments.”Jay Lee himself avoids what might appear as incendiary statements. In meetings with executives as well as occasional sessions with lower-level staffers, he appears almost soft-spoken and modest, quite the opposite of his late father.Lee Kun-hee, who set Samsung Electronics on its trajectory as the world’s leading smartphone manufacturer and also the producer of almost half the world’s memory chips, is remembered for berating those around and below him, haranguing them in 10-hour meetings and once simply destroying Samsung products that he said were inferior to those of rivals.Appropriately, he is most quoted for shouting “Change everything but your wives and children!” at executives during a meeting in Frankfurt in 1993.After presiding over Samsung’s rise from an also-ran competitor to global dominance, Lee Kun-hee’s final years were marked by debilitating illness. Long before suffering his heart attack in 2014, he had been treated for cancer and lung disease and got about in a wheelchair.The bombastic formal statement issued by Samsung after his death did not overstate his success: “Chairman Lee was a true visionary who transformed Samsung into the world-leading innovator and industrial powerhouse from a local business.”That much was true, but the final line of the statement is still up for grabs. “His legacy will be everlasting,” it read. If prosecutors get their way at the latest trial of his son, the Lee legacy may not last forever after all.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is “lying to the American people” about his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, claimed Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) on Saturday.The House Intelligence Committee member's comments came during an appearance on Fox & Friends Weekend, in which she accused the former vice president of lying when he issued his denial of wrongdoing during Thursday night’s presidential debate. Stefanik detailed her experience asking each witness in President Trump’s impeachment hearings whether there was a conflict of interest, or an appearance of one, created by Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Ukrainian natural-gas firm Burisma Holdings during Joe Biden’s time as vice president. All of the witnesses said yes, she recalled.She said the Obama administration “proactively brought this up as a conflict of interest” while preparing former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch for her Senate nomination. “This is Joe Biden running from his record and trying to wipe away this very clear conflict of interest,” Stefanik said."This is not just a Hunter Biden scandal. This is a Joe Biden scandal, and it's not just Burisma. It's also now the Chinese Communist government and the Chinese Communist Party," she added, referring to allegations of a business arrangement between a Chinese company and the Biden family.During Thursday’s debate, the former vice president claimed there was “nothing unethical” about Hunter Biden’s involvement in Burisma.He said though questions had arisen over whether he had done something wrong in respect to Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma that, “every single solitary person, when [Trump] was going through his impeachment, testifying under oath, who worked for him said I did my job impeccably, I carried out U.S. policy, not one single, solitary thing was out of line.”

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Thursday called Rudy Giuliani a “Russian pawn” and claimed stories of his involvement in his son’s foreign business dealings are “not true,” saying he has “not taken a penny from any foreign source in my life.”The comments came during the final presidential debate on Thursday evening. Earlier in the day the recipient of an email that purportedly detailed a business arrangement between a Chinese company and the Biden family confirmed that the email is “genuine” and said the family “aggressively leveraged the Biden family name to make millions” from foreign entities. Giuliani provided a trove of documents to the New York Post last week that includes a number of emails between Hunter Biden and foreign business partners. One email exchange between the younger Biden and representatives of a Chinese energy firm reads, “20” for “H” and “10 held by H for the big guy?” Tony Bobulinski, who is listed as a recipient of the email, told Fox News that the "big guy" is a reference to Joe Biden, who was slated to receive a ten percent equity stake in the joint venture.Biden lashed out at Giuliani at the debate.“We are in a situation where we have foreign countries trying to interfere in the outcome of our election,” he said. “[Trump’s] own national security advisor told him that what is happening with his buddy Rudy Giuliani — he’s being used as a Russian pawn, he’s being fed information that is Russian, that is not true,” he said.Though Biden claimed that Giuliani has been fed untrue information, he has not come out and said the emails were forged.President Trump pushed back, accusing Biden of "getting a lot of money from Russia.""You probably still are, but now with what came out today it's probably even worse. All of the emails … of the kind of money that you were raking in, you and your family," he said.Biden responded: "I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.""I don't make money from China, you do," Trump responded. "I don't make money from Ukraine, you do. I don't make money from Russia, you made $3.5 million, Joe, and your son gave you — they even have a statement that 'We have to give 10 percent to the big man.' You're the big man."The former vice president claimed there was "nothing unethical" about Hunter Biden's involvement in Ukranian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings.He said though questions had arisen over whether he had done something wrong in respect to Hunter Biden's role on the board of Burisma that, "every single solitary person, when [Trump] was going through his impeachment, testifying under oath, who worked for him said I did my job impeccably, I carried out U.S. policy, not one single, solitary thing was out of line."He accused Trump of "trying to bribe the Ukranian government to say something negative about me, which they would not do and did not do because it's never, ever happened.""My son has not made money in terms of this thing," he said.Later, the pair clashed again when Trump accused Biden of being a "corrupt politician" over the news of the Biden family's foreign dealings."There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant," Biden said. "Five former heads of the CIA — both parties — say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend Rudy Giuliani."The documents Giuliani had given the New York Post were reportedly recovered from a laptop computer that was dropped off at a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019 but never retrieved that purportedly belongs to Hunter Biden. Fox News reported Thursday that the FBI had subpoenaed the laptop in connection with a money laundering investigation."You mean the laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?" Trump asked. "The laptop is Russia, Russia, Russia? You have to be kidding me, here we go again with Russia."

Trump lashes out at Congressman Adam Schiff, accusing him of keeping returning to his ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ talking points during the election

The Utah senator and 2012 GOP presidential nominee was the only Republican senator who voted to convict the president in his impeachment trial.

More than 20 progressive groups signed a letter Tuesday urging House Democrats to impeach Attorney General Bill Barr in an attempt to delay Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation vote until after the November 3 election.In a letter addressed to House speaker Nancy Pelosi, groups including Demand Progress, Our Revolution, and the Sunrise Movement outlined a list of what they consider impeachable offenses by the attorney general.The letter reads:> Dozens of members of your caucus and various outside groups have for months urged an inquiry into Barr’s impeachment on any of several grounds. They include: misleading Congress with respect to the Mueller investigation and other matters; overruling career prosecutors for political purposes, such as helping the president’s allies; sanctioning investigations into the president’s political rivals; supporting the use of federal troops against protestors in support of racial justice while standing aside for armed right-wing protestors; prohibiting the referral of an Intelligence Community whistleblower complaint to Congress; and failing to comply with subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives while ordering others to not comply with subpoenas from the House of Representatives.> New: 20+ progressive groups, including the Sunrise Movement and Our Revolution, signed onto a letter urging Nancy Pelosi to back impeaching AG Barr. They said it "would have the salutary effect of delaying the confirmation process and may help push it towards after Election Day." pic.twitter.com/con05vfwuF> > -- Holly Otterbein (@hollyotterbein) October 21, 2020The letter claims Barr has “made a career out of undermining our democracy” and accuses the attorney general of “ramping up efforts to undermine the upcoming elections and invalidate the votes of millions of Americans.”Instead the group suggests that House Democrats serve as a roadblock to both Barr and the Senate’s confirmation of Barrett, which is expected next week, by impeaching Barr and forcing action in the Senate, delaying the confirmation process."Should you impeach Attorney General Barr prior to October 23rd, the Senate would be required to take one of two actions. On one hand, the Senate would be obligated to hold a trial, which would occupy a day or more of floor time and delay the hasty and irregular consideration of Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court associate justice," the groups explained. "In the alternative, Senate Republican leadership would be forced to go 'nuclear' by changing the rules that govern how that chamber responds to receiving articles of impeachment from the House of Representatives.""Either outcome is desirable," the groups concluded.Democrats have fought hard against Barrett’s confirmation, accusing Republicans of being hypocritical in going back on the standard they set in 2016 by refusing to consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, months ahead of an election. With a Republican majority in the Senate, Democrats have had no recourse for stopping or delaying Barrett’s confirmation. However, many in the party have called on Democrats to add additional seats to the Supreme Court in retaliation if Barrett is confirmed.

Joe Biden is reportedly considering tapping former Republican senator Jeff Flake for a position in his Cabinet should he be elected president next month.Officials close to the Democratic presidential nominee's transition process told Politico that the former vice president's team is vetting the backgrounds and resumes of several Republicans as they compile a list of candidates for potential high-level Cabinet positions.Among those who could be tapped is Flake, who was a senator from Arizona from 2013 to 2019. Before his election to the Senate, he had represented Arizona in the House of Representatives since 2001.In August, Flake joined more than two dozen fellow former GOP members of Congress in backing a “Republicans for Biden” effort is his first formal endorsement of Biden for president.Before leaving Congress last year, Flake emerged as a vocal Republican critic of President Trump and his administration and clashed frequently with the president. He backed the impeachment effort against Trump and has said he will not vote for his party's incumbent presidential nominee in 2020.In 2017 when announcing his decision not to run for reelection, Flake slammed Trump's "flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons".Trump in turn has called Flake "toxic" and had favorable words for his former primary opponent in Arizona."There may not be a place for a Republican like me in the current Republican climate or the current Republican Party," Flake said at the time.Biden also reportedly considering several other Republicans for Cabinet positions, including former Ohio Governor John Kasich, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, and former Pennsylvania congressman Charlie Dent.Biden is currently leading President Trump by about nine points nationally, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls.

The FBI is investigating the purloined laptop materials from Joe Biden’s son as part of a possible foreign disinformation operation, a congressional source told The Daily Beast—an investigation at odds with a statement from President Trump’s director of national intelligence.John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, told Fox Business on Monday that the dissemination of materials from Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop was not part of a Russian disinformation campaign.“The intelligence community doesn't believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that,” Ratcliffe said.But that assessment gets out in front of the FBI, which took custody of the laptop and an external hard drive as early as in December, according to the New York Post. The bureau, according to the congressional source, is looking into the provenance of the material. And among the questions they're seeking to answer is whether the laptop dump is part of what the intelligence community’s counterintelligence chief has already described as a Russian disinformation effort targeting the 2020 election.The FBI declined comment, “in keeping with our standard practice of neither confirming nor denying the existence of our investigations,” said spokesperson Kelsey Pietranton. But the bureau’s investigation into the Hunter Biden laptop material has previously been reported by NBC, the AP and USA Today.A spokesperson for the office of the director of national intelligence said they had nothing to add to Ratcliffe's comments.New York Post Reporter Refused to Put Name on Hunter Biden Article: ReportOne senior intelligence official told The Daily Beast that the community is still working to determine if the Hunter Biden materials—which were leaked to the press by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani—stem from a specific Russian intelligence operation. Giuliani has for years worked with Ukrainian parliamentarians with links to Russia, including one “Russian agent,” to propagate disinformation about the Obama administration and the Biden family, including Hunter Biden. While Giuliani and his confidantes have previously spoken publicly about Hunter Biden’s drug use, intelligence officials are investigating whether this last-minute push to release material through Trump-friendly media outlets stems from some particular directive from Moscow or whether it is an extension of Giuliani’s years-long effort to use Ukrainian intermediaries to dig up dirt on the Bidens.Whatever the case may be, intelligence officials say the recent packaging of the Hunter Biden material looks similar to something the Russians would do to sow chaos in U.S. domestic politics. But, officials say, Moscow wouldn’t necessarily need to muddy the waters by being directly involved in the latest dissemination of materials because Giuliani has already taken the lead.“The Intelligence Community has stated publicly that Russia is once again seeking to benefit Donald Trump’s election campaign by denigrating Joe Biden,” said Patrick Boland, spokesman for Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee. “The new wave of attacks we are seeing … are consistent with the false and unsubstantiated narratives that the President, his personal lawyer, and a sanctioned Russian agent have been pushing for well over a year. They appear intended to distract from recent reports that the White House, as early as December 2019, was made aware that Rudy Giuliani was being leveraged by Russian proxies as part of Kremlin efforts to interfere in our election.”During his Fox Business interview on Monday, Ratcliffe took a shot at Schiff, saying “apparently Chairman Schiff wants anything against his preferred political candidate to be deemed as not real.” Boland replied that Ratcliffe is “purposefully misrepresenting Chairman Schiff’s words in an effort to mislead the public and validate the latest attacks by President Trump and his allies on Vice President Biden.”Ratcliffe, a Trump loyalist in Congress before his appointment as director, has come under withering criticism from intelligence veterans for manipulating intelligence to aid his boss’ reelection.“Everyone knows the deal here,” Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer, told The Daily Beast recently. “They know Ratcliffe is irresponsible.”But with the FBI custody of the laptop comes increased pressure from the right on FBI Director Christopher Wray. Wray has recently experienced the ire of the president and his allies after contradicting Trump on white supremacist violence, the nature of antifa, and the primary foreign interference threat to the election coming from Russia. Trump has told associates he plans on pushing Wray out if reelected.Trump allies seized on one detai in the Post story — a subpoena that purported to show that the FBI had seized the laptop — to claim that Wray was somehow covering up the laptop’s contents to hurt Trump.“He must be fired NOW!” Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett tweeted on Sunday.> Christopher Wray, the current FBI Director, continues to cover this up. I have long called for his termination. He must be fired NOW! The truth will never be exposed until Wray is sacked. He is James Comey in disguise —ruthless, unscrupulous, and unprincipled. He is corrupt.> > — Gregg Jarrett (@GreggJarrett) October 18, 2020Trump’s congressional supporters have ramped up the pressure on Wray as well, with Senate Homeland Security chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) sending out a list of questions about the laptop.Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), a staunch Trump ally and Senate candidate, appeared on Fox Business on Friday to call for Wray’s resignation.“Chris Wray needs to resign,” Collins said. “The FBI had these emails last December. When I was fighting the sham impeachment they had these emails.”-with reporting by Erin BancoRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Rudy Giuliani has dismissed concerns that his latest anti-Biden smears are part of a foreign-election interference plot, but a Ukrainian lawmaker recently deemed an “active Russian agent” by the U.S. Treasury is now touting further details to come.Andrii Derkach, one of the key players in Giuliani’s years-long dirt-digging mission against Joe Biden in Ukraine, piggybacked on the former New York City mayor’s latest Biden smears—supposedly involving a forgotten laptop. Derkach claimed on Facebook that there is a “second laptop” with evidence of corruption involving the Biden family.Chinese Billionaire’s Network Hyped Hunter Biden Dirt Weeks Before Rudy GiulianiThe claim appears to muddy the waters around Giuliani’s latest “smoking gun” charge against Hunter Biden. He says they came to light after an obscure Delaware computer repair shop owner found Biden’s laptop in his possession and copied the hard drive before alerting federal authorities and inexplicably Giuliani’s own lawyer. Now, with Derkach jumping in with claims of a “second laptop,” that would mean private computer contents allegedly connected to Hunter Biden have somehow found their way into the hands of three separate parties: A media empire controlled by a Chinese billionaire who’s tight with Steve Bannon; a random Delaware shop owner who is outspoken in his support of Trump; and Derkach, a Ukrainian conspiracy theory peddler who studied at Moscow’s FSB academy.Derkach wrote on Facebook about the questionable New York Post report that relied on unverified images of emails provided by Trump allies to supposedly prove a corruption scheme by Biden and his son involving Ukrainian gas company Burisma. He then said there was a second laptop, which was used by “two representatives for the interests of [Burisma founder Mykola] Zlochevsky.”“That laptop was given to Ukrainian law enforcement,” Derkach wrote, adding that the Burisma representatives who used the laptop were now serving as “witnesses in criminal proceedings.” He said the witnesses were ready to testify about an international corruption scheme involving Biden and his son, Hunter, who served on the board of the gas company. It has already been reported that Russian intelligence agents successfully hacked into Burisma computer networks last year, although it is not clear how much they were able to access and copy.Despite what Team Trump would have the public believe is a towering mountain of evidence, neither Joe or Hunter Biden have been charged with any wrongdoing, and Ukrainian prosecutors confirmed months ago that they had found no evidence of any crimes.Derkach is no newbie to the Biden saga. While cozying up to Trump allies like Giuliani during impeachment proceedings, he held repeated press conferences in Kyiv touting purported proof of corruption by the former vice president, and claiming it was not Russia that interfered in the 2016 election, but Ukraine. He also featured prominently in an “exposé” by the Trumpian One America News Network, and met with Giuliani in Kyiv last year as part of their anti-Biden mission. His claims have not held up under scrutiny. After Derkach was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in September for working as a foreign operative, Giuliani insisted he had not seen “any evidence” to conclusively say whether Derkach was working as a Russian agent or not. He told The Daily Beast this week that he believed it was a toss up whether his partner in the Biden smearing campaign was an active intelligence operative. “The chance that Derkach is a Russian spy is no better than 50/50,” he said.Rudy: Only ‘50/50’ Chance I Worked With a ‘Russian Spy’ to Dig Dirt on Bidens and UkraineBut U.S. intelligence officials had begun warning in spring 2019 that Derkach was part of a Russian effort to worm their way into the U.S. presidential election and spread the narrative that Biden and his son were involved in nefarious corruption schemes overseas. Giuliani’s allegations against Biden have evolved drastically since he first began his attacks on Trump’s then presumed 2020opponent by claiming the former vice president improperly forced out a Ukrainian prosecutor. After numerous “exposés” on Biden’s supposed abuse of power aired on OAN largely failed to gain much traction, Giuliani shifted his focus to Biden’s son, Hunter, who he has now deemed a “national security risk.”Bizarrely, even Giuliani’s allegations against the younger Biden have pinballed all over the place, from his initial claim that Hunter used access to his father to line his own pockets, to his very personal attacks on his admitted struggles with substance abuse, and, perhaps most desperately, his latest smear that Hunter Biden engaged in “disgusting sexual behavior.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.