In his first interview since testifying against President Trump during the impeachment trial earlier this year and subsequently leaving the U.S. Army after what he described as "a campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation," retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman used some colorful, poultry-based imagery to describe how he views Trump's relationship to Russia.The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg asked Vindman if he considers Trump a Russian intelligence asset. Vindman hedged a bit, instead labeling Trump as a "useful idiot" — which Goldberg notes is not a blunt insult, but a term commonly used to describe "dupes of authoritarian regimes" — and a "fellow traveler" of Putin, meaning he shares his Russian counterpart's "loathing for Democratic norms." That, Vindman said, "makes him an unwitting agent of Putin."He also said that if Russia does have "dirt" on Trump, as some of his critics have theorized, the Kremlin probably isn't actively blackmailing him. "They have more effective and less risky ways to employ him," Vindman said, adding that Trump looks up to Putin and wants to emulate him. Therefore, Moscow doesn't actually have to exert much energy to get what they want out of the American president. "In the Army," Vindman notes, "we call this 'free chicken,' something you don't have to work for — it just comes to you. This is what the Russians have in Trump: free chicken." And not many people are going to pass up free chicken. Read more at The Atlantic.More stories from theweek.com The climate refugees are here. They're Americans. Why global hegemony was the worst thing to happen to America Surprise resignation of federal prosecutor ups concerns Barr is leaning on Durham investigation

President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and a key Ukrainian ally in their plot to smear Former Vice President Joe Biden have both tried to distance themselves from collaborator Andriy Derkach after he was sanctioned and outed as an “active Russian agent” by the U.S. Treasury Department.Rudy Giuliani, who worked with Derkach and whose work as Trump’s lawyer and top Biden-dirt-digger culminated in his own client’s impeachment, told The Daily Beast on Friday that he was no longer in touch with the Russian intelligence asset.Asked if he was going to continue communicating with Derkach, Giuliani—who has since started working with the Trump 2020 campaign—simply replied, “Haven’t talk[ed] to him in months.” Asked if this week's news means his friendship and collaborations with Derkach are over, Giuliani tersely responded, “No idea.” According to Giuliani, no one from the Trump administration or elsewhere in the president’s orbit or inner circle ever warned him not to meet with Derkach, even though the Ukrainian lawmaker has long been under scrutiny for his Kremlin ties. Giuliani said nobody had even bothered checking in with him, after all this time and scandal, to express their reservations about Derkach.In his first substantive comments since Derkach was sanctioned, former Ukrainian diplomat Andriy Telizhenko claimed the Russian asset had never been a core member of the team along with him and Giuliani, who were looking to manufacture a political scandal in Ukraine that could damage Biden and his son Hunter ahead of November’s election.  “I never liked Derkach, never knew much about his background,” Telizhenko told The Daily Beast. “The methods Derkach used—including leaking some recordings—caused harm for the team. The U.S. intelligence services must have found solid evidence about the background of that man. I am sure that everybody who knows Derkach is not surprised to hear about the sanctions.” (After publication, Telizhenko reached out to explain that when he said “team” he meant “the Trump administration and [its] team.”) The Daily Beast previously reported that Derkach met with Giuliani in Kyiv last December after the Ukrainian lawmaker began to push a series of flagrantly untrue conspiracy theories claiming that he had enough evidence to bring down Biden and Trump’s previous presidential rival Hillary Clinton.   Although Telizhenko claims not to have been a close ally of Derkach, the pair have a history of working with Giuliani on propagating debunked conspiracy theories about Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. They’ve also team up with the president’s personal lawyer to dig up information about the Bidens and their political dealings in Ukraine. Telizhenko told Buzzfeed News in July that he warned Giuliani about working with Derkach because of his “pro-Russia associations.” Perhaps coincidentally, that article was published the same day the intelligence community offered warnings about Russian “proxies” interfering in the upcoming election.  Before this summer breakup, the three men seemed to have something of a symbiotic relationship. Giuliani has interviewed both Derkach and Telizhenko on his YouTube video series “Common Sense” about the Bidens. Derkach appeared for separate interviews with Giuliani in February. It appears that Telizhenko acted as a translator during Derkach’s meeting. (“I did not act as a translator for the Derkach interview with Mr. Giuliani but was asked a couple of days later by Mr. Giuliani to do a voiceover [for a video] after my meeting with Mr. Giuliani,” said Telizhenko after publication.All three men also participated in a three-part One America News Network (OAN) documentary on the Ukraine impeachment “hoax” which aired in December 2019. Giuliani traveled to Ukraine to meet with Telizhenko and Derkach. When asked for comment about Derkach on Friday afternoon, the network’s president Charles Herring responded with a 167-word text message. None of those words mentioned Derkach.In his meetings, Giuliani said he collected hundreds of pages of documents outlining Biden’s corruption in Ukraine, saying the information would expose the presidential candidate as a “fraud.” Telizhenko helped Giuliani during his trip, he said, but claims he and the rest of his “team” did not arrange the Trump adviser’s meeting with Derkach. (Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a Ukrainian gas tycoon accused of embezzlement, has also worked with Giuliani in the past. He was arrested in Germany in December 2019 around the time of Giuliani’s trip to Kyiv.)Telizhenko told The Daily Beast that former lawmaker Andrey Artemenko, who was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship in 2017 for proposing a deal to lease Crimea to Russia, set up the meeting between Giuliani and Derkach in December. Artemenko, under the name Andry Kuchma, filed paperwork with the U.S. Department of Justice this spring to work in the country to help set up meetings between Derkach and members of Congress, including members of the House and Senate foreign affairs committees. “It makes sense that [Telizhenko] would want to try and distance himself from Derkach now. It’s laughable but not surprising,” said one former senior U.S. official who worked on Ukraine policy. “He doesn’t want what happened to Derkach to happen to him. It would be wise of Telizhenko to not engage in the same behavior as Derkach if he wants to stay safe from sanctions.”The Treasury and State departments have for months worked on putting together a plan for sanctioning Derkach, an individual with direct knowledge told The Daily Beast. That process included the revoking of Derkach’s U.S. visa earlier this year. It’s unclear if the administration has scrutinized Telizhenko to the same degree as Derkach. Telizhenko told The Daily Beast his U.S. visa is still valid and that he plans on returning to the U.S. when the coronavirus pandemic begins to wind down.Despite trying to distance himself from Derkach, Telizhenko admits to smoking cigars with Giuliani and helping to organize his trip to Kyiv. “Mr. Giuliani and I traveled together from Budapest; we spoke for hours about corruption in Ukraine,” Telizhenko said. “I helped to organize a few meetings for Mr. Giuliani in Kyiv.” (Telizhenko said after publication that he “never admitted to… smoking cigars with Mr. Giuliani, only traveling with him back to Kyiv from Budapest.”)Telizhenko said he had continued to work on exposing a so-called scandal in Ukraine that would damage Biden, and had given evidence to Sen. Ron Johnson’s investigation over the past year. “I have been [providing evidence] at the Senate, about the U.S. officials of high and low levels involved in corrupt schemes on the territory of Ukraine under the Obama administration,” he said. “The results of the Senate’s investigation will be published in two weeks.”“Telizhenko and Derkach have credibility problems,” said the former senior official. “It’s been known for some time that Derkach is acting in Russia’s interests and is an active peddler of disinformation. Johnson knows this. He knows he can’t rely on this kind of information.”Telizhenko said he had passed many emails from the U.S. officials to the Senate. “My prediction is that Donald Trump wins the election in November,” he said, claiming his “team would be happy to help with the peace process” in Ukraine in a second Trump term, by which he likely means appeasing Russian aggression in the region.In a statement released on Thursday responding to Treasury’s announcement, Johnson and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) bizarrely accused the Democrats of relying on disinformation from Guiliani’s contact Derkach, falsely accusing them of interacting with the Russian agent: “Foreign election meddling in all of its forms from any corner of the globe cannot be tolerated. We commend the Trump Administration for holding accountable perpetrators of foreign interference, and I hope my Democratic colleagues in Congress will finally stop relying on disinformation from the likes of Andriy Derkach to smear their political rivals.”Since last year, Giuliani’s Biden-Ukraine crusade and his chumminess with figures such as Derkach alarmed various Trump lieutenants and allies on Capitol Hill, who viewed much of what Giuliani was bringing back to Trump and Washington as part of a disinformation campaign, or even Russian propaganda.Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a top Trump ally and confidant on the Hill, told The Daily Beast in December that “Giuliani would be [wise] to share what he got from Ukraine with the [intelligence community] to make sure it’s not Russia propaganda. I’m very suspicious of what the Russians are up to all over the world.” (At the time, Giuliani simply insisted that what he’d obtained was “not Russian propaganda.”)However, Graham’s criticism was muted, if not absent, on Friday and he declined to address Derkach or Giuliani specifically when asked in a brief phone interview. The GOP senator instead offered up “just a general proposition.”“No matter what comes out of the Ukraine, we need to make sure the intelligence community takes a good look at it… because businesses and other entities there are easily manipulated,” Graham said. “My advice would be to keep your guard up… with anything that comes out of the Ukraine… I believed that then and believe that now. That doesn’t mean you can’t look at abuse of power or misconduct, [however].”Given Giuliani’s current, Biden-related work with the Trump campaign, Giuliani’s recent collaborations with a Russian agent brings back uncomfortable echoes of the Kremlin “collusion” narrative that haunted the first Trump campaign and the administration for so long. However, it’s a parallel that Team Trump appears to be shrugging off. Two senior Trump campaign officials and another source close to the team say they aren’t aware of anybody on staff who sees this as any serious concern this week.“If the ‘Resisters’ want to make this campaign about Russia again, that would be a terrible strategy. Have at it,” said a Republican close to the Trump campaign.UPDATE 5:55pm: This story has been updated throughout with additional comments from Telizhenko.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. 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The president’s personal lawyer has been working closely with “an active Russian agent” trying to smear the president’s chief political rival.That’s the conclusion of the U.S. Treasury Department, which sanctioned on Thursday one of Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian allies for interference in the upcoming U.S. elections. Andriy Derkach worked closely with Giuliani—and with the Trump-friendly cable network, OANN—to push accusations of political misconduct against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Derkach, a member of Kyiv’s parliament and son of a former KGB officer, has also been supplying documents to Republicans on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is conducting an election-eve investigation into the Bidens. Derkach—described by the Treasury Department as “an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services”—stands accused of orchestrating a “covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives” about the Bidens via “edited audio tapes and other unsupported information,” which launched “corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United States designed to culminate prior to election day.” As The Daily Beast previously reported, Derkach has been cozying up to team Trump for months—meeting with Giuliani in Kyiv in December of last year to push the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election. (That’s “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services,” Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top aide for Russia policy, told Congress.)Nevertheless, Trump’s media allies have been quick to run with Derkach’s claims. As The Daily Beast previously reported, John Solomon, the famously Trump-friendly and ethically-compromised former editor at The Hill, published a story mirroring Derkach’s assertions about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Meanwhile, the Russophilic, Trumpy cable channel OANN featured Derkach prominently in its series promising to “negate the Democrat impeachment narrative.”Rudy Giuliani—and Russia—Pay Close Attention to This Ukrainian Conspiracy-PeddlerIn May, Derkach released edited audio recordings of what he claimed were compromising conversations between Joe Biden and former Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko. In the tapes, Biden praises Poroshenko for appointing a new prosecutor general and promises to sign a $1 billion loan guarantee in return for anti-corruption efforts. Derkach claimed that investigative journalists had leaked the phone calls to him. Trumpworld figures framed the tapes as evidence of a long-running Republican conspiracy that Biden tried to force out the old prosecutor general to head off an investigation into the Ukraine gas company Burisma, where his son Hunter sat on the board. But Joe Biden’s campaign called the audio recordings a “nothingburger” and his team has denied that the former vice president’s push with Poroshenko had anything to do with Burisma. (Biden did not mention Burisma or Hunter Biden on the leaked tapes, and he has previously acknowledged that U.S. loans to Ukraine were tied to anti-corruption progress.)Derkach claims that that he sent his information on the Bidens—which the Treasury Department described as “unsubstantiated”—to Sen. Johnson, who has been heading up a Congressional committee to look into the Burisma affair. But Johnson and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) continue to insist that they have “neither sought out, relied upon, nor publicly released anything that could even remotely be considered disinformation.” But election security watchers have for months underscored the possibility that Johnson’s committee is laundering Derkach's disinformation through intermediaries such as Solomon as a way to create some distance between the investigation and the accused “Russian agent.”Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress have hit back at Johnson’s probe and slammed Derkach’s efforts as election meddling. The Director for the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) agreed, citing Derkach and the leaked tapes back in August as an example of Russian-backed interference in the 2020 elections, part of a “range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment.’’ The NCSC notes that Russia and its President Vladimir Putin are still hostile to Biden over the Obama administration’s past support of an independent Ukraine and its backing of anti-Putin opposition leaders.Three other individuals linked to a Russian troll factory were sanctioned alongside Derkach on Thursday.  The U.S. Treasury singled out Russians Artem Lifshits, Anton Andreyev, and Darya Aslanova as agents of the Internet Research Agency and its “Russian financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin.” (Known as “Putin’s chef,” the fearsome Prigozhin also controls the shadowy Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin was previously sanctioned over funding the IRA to meddle in the 2018 midterms.) Treasury accused Lifshits, Andreyev and Aslanova of using “cryptocurrency to fund activities in furtherance of their  ongoing malign influence operations around the world.” Derkach’s sanctions come on the same day that Microsoft revealed it had thwarted Kremlin-backed attempts to hack into a public relations firm with deep ties to the Biden campaign. 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.

In a preview of Bob Woodward's forthcoming book Rage published Wednesday in The Washington Post, President Trump went on the record with some pretty disturbing revelations: He knew in February that COVID-19 was "deadly stuff," but told Woodward in mid-March that "I wanted to always play it down" anyway.Democrats quickly condemned the comments, and even conservatives, including the Post's Jennifer Rubin, suggested it warranted a second round of impeachment proceedings.> He should resign. Period. If not, House should impeach yet again. I'm serious> > -- Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) September 9, 2020The conservative, anti-Trump Lincoln Project tweeted a reminder that a president can be impeached twice, and then twisted Trump's words into a scathing ad.> Trump knew it was worse than the flu. > > Trump knew coronavirus was deadly. TrumpKnew and he did nothing. pic.twitter.com/rWKzj5Ti1i> > -- The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 9, 2020Meanwhile Republican senators uniformly insisted they hadn't read the report in question, even when reporters read it to them.> Several GOP senators react to Woodward book saying "haven't read it"@tedcruz: "haven't seen the book"@SenRickScott: "I've not read it"@SenJohnKennedy: "I haven't read it.@SenCapito & @senrobportman said haven't read it, despite being read parts> > h/t @FoxReports @LACaldwellDC> > -- Ali Zaslav (@alizaslav) September 9, 2020And Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), one of Trump's few Senate GOP foes, only gave a tepid condemnation of Trump's deliberate underreaction to the coronavirus, saying "that's not ideal to me."Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro, who was quoted by Woodward, declared that the reporter "put words in my mouth I never said." And inside the White House, aides and advisers were reportedly arguing over just who let the president talk to Woodward in the first place. > A number of top advisers talked. Kushner is on the record extensively. The president spoke 18 times.> > -- Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) September 9, 2020More stories from theweek.com Trump knew it all along The true Election Day nightmare scenario The staggering consequences of Trump's coronavirus lies

A recent deep dive in the Washington Post’s Outlook section, “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” exploring various potential outcomes of the 2020 presidential election, found that in “every scenario except a Biden landslide, our simulation ended catastrophically.” According to the Post, any other outcome is destined to spark “violence” and a “constitutional crisis.”Or, in other words, nice country you got there . . .Every assumption in the article, written by Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor and co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project, is awash in the conspiratorial paranoia that’s infected the modern Democratic Party. It’s a world where Trump officials -- played, quite implausibly, by Joe Biden partisans Michael Steele and Bill Kristol -- are “ruthless and unconstrained right out of the gate” but the genteel statesmen of Team Biden “struggled to get out of reaction mode.” It is place where Republicans aren’t only reflexively seditious and autocratic, but a “highly politicized” Supreme Court tries to steal the election.In their “war game” scenarios, however, it’s the Democrats who refuse to accept the will of courts to adhere to the constitutionally prescribed system rather than hysteria, and it’s the Democrats who wishcast the wholly imaginary “popular vote” into existence.One of the scenarios, we learn, “doesn’t look that different from 2016” -- a contest in which, it must be pointed out, not one vote has been proven to be uncounted or altered. In that outcome, America is confronted with “a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat.”In the real world, incidentally, that scenario is called a “Trump victory.”In the fictional war game, however, John Podesta, playing the role of Biden, contends that his party won’t let him concede the race, and instead alleges “voter suppression” -- the catch-all go-to every time a Democrat loses -- and persuades the Democratic governors of Trump-won states such as Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College. In the meantime, California, Oregon, and Washington threaten to secede from the union if Trump takes office. The Democratic House unilaterally names Biden president. “At that point in the scenario,” the New York Times’ Ben Smith explains, “the nation stopped looking to the media for cues, and waited to see what the military would do.”This scenario is what a real-life “coup” might resemble. It is, needless to say, utterly insane that Democrats would destroy the nation’s long-standing and peaceful transition because they refuse to accept the mandated process of electing the president. All of which is to say the proactive -- and retroactive -- delegitimization of the Trump presidency has been a successful four-year project. It permeates the entire Democratic Party’s information complex.First, Democrats convinced millions of Americans that a handful of inept and puerile social-media ads were enough to overturn a presidential election in the most powerful nation on earth. By 2017, a majority of Democrats believed that vote tallies had been tampered with by Russians, somehow without a trace of evidence.Since then, Democrats have been working to convince themselves there is no legitimate way in which Trump could win the election again. A large number of high-profile left-wing columnists have laid the groundwork to make this case and high-profile politicians have joined them. Hillary Clinton’s advice to Biden not long ago was to not concede defeat on the night of the November 3 election no matter what happens. In January during the impeachment trial, Representative Adam Schiff said, “The President's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.” House speaker Nancy Pelosi has noted that “Let the election decide’” is a “dangerous position” position because Trump is already “jeopardizing the integrity of the 2020 elections.”“It’s worth pointing out that *almost* no one thinks Trump will actually win more votes,” Chris Hayes told his followers not long ago. “I think if he wins the electoral college and loses the popular vote *again* you’re looking at the worst legitimacy crisis since secession.”A far bigger crisis for the United States is that liberal pundits tell their audience that the method of winning an election in the United States, one that every president in history of the country relied on, should be considered a crisis of legitimacy.What is worth pointing out as well is that the dynamics of the presidential election would be completely different if the popular vote actually existed. But candidates do not compete for the popular vote, so they can neither “win” nor “lose” it. If they did try to win the popular vote, they would cater to the largest population centers, and no one else, and elections would look very different. I’m not sure that that setup would work out for Democrats exactly as they imagine, but it doesn’t matter. A popular vote undercuts federalism, one of the foundational ideas of the Founding. And that’s the point.If you haven’t noticed, it’s working. A recent USA Today poll found that 28 percent of Biden's supporters say they aren't prepared to accept a Trump victory as “fairly won,” and 19 percent of President Trump's supporters say the same about a potential Biden victory. So a significant minority of American voters don’t believe the next election will be legitimate before it has even been conducted. What happens when every long line at the polls and every Facebook meme and every delayed mail-in ballot is turned into a nefarious plot by the enemy to snatch democracy from the rightful winner? It’s going to be ugly, indeed. If their “war games” are to be believed, that’s what Democrats are counting on.Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article stated that "almost half" of Americans doubt the legitimacy of the next election. It has been updated to more accurately reflect the poll numbers it cites.

Nancy Pelosi tried so hard to shield Joe Biden from Donald Trump’s expected “skullduggery” on the debate stage that she enabled a bit of it elsewhere.The top Democrat in the House said during a press briefing on Aug. 27 that the former vice president should refuse to go one-on-one with the president in the fall because, in her evaluation, Trump will likely just “belittle what the debates are supposed to be about.”“They’re not to be about skullduggery on the part of somebody who has no respect for the office he holds,” she said from the Capitol.But regardless of intention, Pelosi’s words sharpened a weapon the Trump campaign has already started to use against Biden: claiming, contrary to evidence, that he may try to avoid facing Trump live on stage. With an official government transcript and video footage at their disposal, Pelosi gifted her Republican opponents days of quotable material to turn against the Democratic nominee just as the race started to tighten up. Biden was saddled with the question in television interviews that took place in the hours after her remarks, and was still repeating the same answers—that yes, he will happily debate Trump—nearly one week later. “I’m looking forward to debating the president, and I’m going to lay out as clearly as I can what I think we have to do to bring this country back and build it back better,” Biden said to a reporter’s question following a speech in Delaware on Wednesday. “And I’m looking forward to the debate.” (The Biden campaign brushed off Pelosi’s difference of opinion saying that they agree on “her views of the president’s behavior.”)On Sunday, the Trump campaign circulated a letter signed by the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to the Commission of Presidential Debates urging that they require Biden to give “written assurance” that he will show up to wrangle. Earlier last month, they petitioned the group to bump up the planned schedule, a request they vetoed.“Pelosi the master strategist didn’t screw up,” a senior Trump campaign official theorized. “She’s clearly laying the groundwork for Joe Biden to withdraw from the debates.”When asked about the Trump campaign’s use of Pelosi’s stance to put pressure on Biden, the speaker’s spokesperson pointed to an interview she gave after her press conference, during which she clarified her statement was intended solely as a reflection on Trump. “Why I said he shouldn’t debate him has nothing to do with Joe Biden. Joe Biden will be great,” Pelosi said on MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber. “My concern was that the president has not shown any respect for the office that he holds, and I don’t expect that he will have any respect for the debates for that office as he has not shown any respect for giving people the right to vote without intimidation.”Forget Biden vs. Trump, It’s Biden vs. Himself at Fall DebatesTo observers of Pelosi on the Hill, that explanation checked out, and most say she genuinely believes that Trump is an unworthy sparring partner for Biden. Some allies also concede that she might have been trying to safeguard him from the president’s unpredictable nature. But in interviews, some Democrats winced at her remark and suggested that in the moment, Pelosi—considered even by her critics to be a ruthlessly strategic operator—may have followed her disdain for the president straight into a misstep. “It’s not strategic,” said one Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, of the crack. “She hates that motherfucker.”In the past, Pelosi has strongly objected to the insinuation that she despises Trump, adamantly telling a reporter in December: “I don’t hate anybody. We don’t hate anybody. Not anybody in the world. Don’t accuse me.”Despite her attempt at better public relations, it’s conventional wisdom that the two leaders have perhaps the most abysmal relationship between a president and a House speaker in recent memory. Pelosi and Trump have not directly spoken since October 2019, when she and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) walked out of a White House meeting with the president, claiming he’d had a “meltdown.” Before the Trump-Ukraine revelations forced her hand, Pelosi suggested that Trump’s behavior didn’t merit the weighty, solemn rebuke of impeachment. “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country,” she said in March 2019. “And he’s just not worth it.”More than a few Democrats heard echoes of the impeachment saga in Pelosi’s misgivings about Trump’s worthiness for something so important as a presidential debate. “She thinks Biden shouldn’t even grace the stage with that guy,” said the Democratic congressional aide.At least one member of the Democratic caucus wholeheartedly endorsed her position that Trump had not earned the right to appear in the matchup. “Right now, you just can’t have a serious presidential debate with this guy,” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) told The Daily Beast, referring to Trump. “It’d be a food fight. And he’s gonna be the one throwing all the food.”“It would serve to legitimize this guy who, a long time ago, stopped telling the truth and just bet everything on these alternate facts, conspiracy theories, and lies that he repeats over and over everywhere he goes,” he said. Other Hill Democrats defended Pelosi, arguing instead that she may have actually helped Biden manage expectations. Another Democratic staffer posited that it “seems possible that she wants to help the Trump campaign bungle the expectations game, just as they did before the conventions, when they led people to believe Biden would be a yammering, senile old man incapable of speaking in coherent sentences, a description which wound up applying much better to Trump’s convention appearances.”“It wasn’t an error,” said a third former senior Democratic Hill staffer well versed in both chambers. “The only thing that’s going on here is that she has so little regard for the president that part of her doesn’t want to have Biden go through with this. He’s just going to spend his whole time going in the gutter,” the source said. “It is what it is.”Despite Biden’s insistence that he will debate, top Trump allies made it clear they were not ready to let it go. And for good reason, Ed Rollins, the chair of the pro-Trump Great America PAC, explained. Her comments “reinforced the message that we’ve been pushing that he’s not capable of being out on the campaign trail,” he said. “I think it may have helped that premise.” On a call with reporters on Wednesday morning, Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, noted that the recent chatter about Biden possibly forgoing the televised event did not originate from inside their campaign, but “from the speaker of the House, the highest ranking Democrat in this nation.”The first debate, which is scheduled for Sept. 29 in Cleveland, Ohio, is expected to be a major momentum-grabbing moment for Democrats. Fox News host Chris Wallace will moderate, the debate commission announced. And some outside Democratic groups have indicated they are open to pitching in with messaging.“We may certainly consider increasing [our] spend online as people are watching,” Guy Cecil, chairman of the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, told The Daily Beast. “In particular online, so that we can drive our targeted universe to, for example, apply for their ballot.”Biden, too, revealed that he has already started getting ready.“I’ve begun to prepare by going over what the president has said, multiple lies he’s told,” he said following his address in Wilmington. “What I’d love to have is a crawler at the bottom of the screen, a fact-checker when we speak.”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.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump refused to promise to accept the results of the election. Likewise, in 2020, his continued assault on the reliability and legitimacy of mail-in voting has laid the groundwork for challenging a loss on the basis of voter fraud. He has also refused to promise to observe the 2020 results.This has led some to worry that a contested election would severely undermine faith in American democracy.Yet the United States has a long history of such contested elections. With one exception, they have not badly damaged the American political system.That contested 1860 election – which sparked the Civil War – happened in a unique context. As a political scientist who studies elections, I believe that, should President Trump – or less likely, Joe Biden – contest the results of the November election, American democracy will survive. Legitimacy and peaceful transitionsMost contested presidential elections have not posed threats to the legitimacy of government. Legitimacy, or the collective acknowledgment that government has a right to rule, is essential to a democracy. In a legitimate system, unpopular policies are largely accepted because citizens believe that government has the right to make them. For example, a citizen may despise taxes but still admit that they are lawful. Illegitimate systems, which are not supported by citizens, can collapse or descend into revolution. In democracies, elections generate legitimacy because citizens contribute to the selection of leadership.In the past, contested elections have not badly damaged the fabric of democracy because the rules for handling such disputes exist and have been followed. While politicians and citizens alike have howled about the unfairness of loss, they accepted these losses. Contested elections and continuityIn 1796, both Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr received the same number of votes in the Electoral College. Because no candidate won a clear majority of Electoral votes, the House of Representatives followed the Constitution and convened a special session to resolve the impasse by a vote. It took 36 ballots to give Jefferson the victory, which was widely accepted. In 1824, Andrew Jackson won a plurality of the popular and electoral vote against John Quincy Adams and two other candidates, but failed to win the necessary majority in the Electoral College. The House, again following the procedure set in the Constitution, selected Adams as the winner over Jackson.The 1876 election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden was contested because several Southern states failed to clearly certify a winner. This was resolved through inter-party negotiation conducted by an Electoral Commission established by Congress. While Hayes would become president, concessions were given to the South that effectively ended Reconstruction.The contest between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon in 1960 was rife with allegations of voter fraud, and Nixon supporters pressed for aggressive recounts in many states. In the end, Nixon begrudgingly accepted the decision rather than drag the country through civil discord during the intense U.S.-Soviet tensions of the Cold War. Finally, in 2000, GOP candidate George W. Bush and Democratic candidate Al Gore tangled over disputed ballots in Florida. The Supreme Court terminated a recount effort and Gore publicly conceded, recognizing the legitimacy of Bush’s victory by saying, “While I strongly disagree with the Court’s decision, I accept it.”In each case, the losing side was unhappy with the result of the election. But in each case, the loser accepted the legally derived result, and the American democratic political system persisted. The system collapsesThe election of 1860 was a different story. After Abraham Lincoln defeated three other candidates, Southern states simply refused to accept the results. They viewed the selection of a president who would not protect slavery as illegitimate and ignored the election’s results. It was only through the profoundly bloody Civil War that the United States remained intact. The dispute over the legitimacy of this election, based in fundamental differences between the North and South, cost 600,000 American lives. What is the difference between the political collapse of 1860 and the continuity of other contested elections? In all cases, citizens were politically divided and elections were hotly contested. What makes 1860 stand out so clearly is that the country was divided over the moral question of slavery, and this division followed geographic lines that enabled a revolution to form. Further, the Confederacy was reasonably unified across class lines. While the America of today is certainly divided, the distribution of political beliefs is far more dispersed and complex than the ideological cohesion of the Confederacy. [Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter.] Rule of lawHistory suggests, then, that even if Trump or Biden contest the election, the results would not be catastrophic. The Constitution is clear on what would happen: First, the president cannot simply declare an election invalid. Second, voting irregularities could be investigated by the states, who are responsible for managing the integrity of their electoral processes. This seems unlikely to change any reported results, as voter fraud is extraordinarily rare. The next step could be an appeal to the Supreme Court or suits against the states. To overturn any state’s initial selection, evidence of a miscount or voter fraud would have to be strongly established. If these attempts to contest the election fail, on Inauguration Day, the elected president would lawfully assume the office. Any remaining ongoing contestation would be moot after this point, as the president would have full legal authority to exercise the powers of his office, and could not be removed short of impeachment. While the result of the 2020 election is sure to make many citizens unhappy, I believe rule of law will endure. The powerful historical, social, and geographic forces that produced the total failure of 1860 simply are not present.This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.Read more: * ‘Stolen’ elections open wounds that may never heal * Putin’s interference in US elections undermines faith in American democracyAlexander Cohen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Like nearly every member of Congress, Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA) has received a deluge of calls, emails, and letters from his constituents over the past month asking about recent delays and service cuts at the U.S. Postal Service.In his mailed responses to constituents’ concerns, two of which were reviewed by The Daily Beast, Garcia touts a pair of bills: the HEROES Act and the Moving Forward Act, both of which passed the U.S. House this summer. Garcia’s prominent reference to the postal legislation’s generous funding of the USPS, and their provisions for “modernizing” the agency, leave the reasonable impression that he is offering the bills up to constituents as a possible solution to the issues facing the Postal Service—or, even, that he supported them. The only problem: he did not. That fact is omitted from his letters.A former U.S. Navy fighter pilot, Garcia is among the newest members of Congress. On May 13, he won a hotly contested special election to represent California’s 25th District, a battleground seat that encompasses the suburbs to the north of Los Angeles. Two days later, the House voted to approve the HEROES Act, a sweeping, $3 trillion stimulus bill to counter the COVID-19 pandemic, which also included $25 billion in emergency funding for the USPS. Garcia did not have the chance to vote on the HEROES Act—he would be sworn into office on May 19—but all of his fellow GOP colleagues to-be, save for one, voted against the legislation. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the House GOP leader, routinely described the bill as a bloated vehicle for Democrats’ alleged push to “enforce their socialism.” Then, in July, the House voted to approve the Moving Forward Act, a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill that appropriated another $25 billion for USPS investments in “modernizing postal infrastructure and operations, processing equipment, and other goods,” as Garcia describes it. He noted to constituents that the legislation passed the House and awaits consideration in the U.S. Senate.But on July 1, only three House Republicans voted with Democrats to pass the bill; Garcia was not one of them. A press release from Republicans on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, of which Garcia is a member, argued that the bill “disguises a heavy-handed and unworkable Green New Deal regime of new requirements as an ‘infrastructure bill.’”A spokesperson for Garcia did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast about why the congressman was referencing bills he did not support in response to constituent concerns about the USPS, or if the congressman now supported either of those bills.The freshman Republican’s muddled messaging on the Postal Service is reflective of the political bind facing some in the GOP. But while Garcia floats solutions he actually did not himself back, other House Republicans have responded to the public outcry over mail delays by breaking with their party’s official line that USPS concerns amount to a Democratic “conspiracy theory.”On Aug. 22, the House convened in a rare, late-summer Saturday session to consider a bill that would roll back recent service changes implemented at the USPS by the new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Most Republicans denounced the bill in strong terms as a political ploy from Democrats. “Like the Russia hoax and impeachment sham, the Democrats have manufactured another scandal for political purposes,” said Rep. James Comer (R-KY) during debate on the House floor.But the legislation passed with the support of 26 House Republicans—an unusually high number in the House on such charged bills—who joined all Democrats in voting yes. Garcia was not one of them. The operational reforms, made by USPS leadership in the name of efficiency and fiscal viability, led to delays in medication, food, and other supplies that were felt by residents in Garcia’s district as much as anywhere in the country. On Aug. 19, the local radio station KHTS reported that eight mail sorting machines—a target of recent USPS initiatives—were dismantled over the summer in the Santa Clarita Valley, which comprises the central part of the 25th District. The area accounted for nearly 9 percent of the total number of sorting machines that were taken offline in the entire state of California. In a statement to the Ventura County Star ahead of the Aug. 22 vote, Garcia said that providing an additional $25 billion to the USPS—the very sum he mentioned in his previous letters to constituents—would be unnecessary.  “I believe that we, as elected representatives of the people, have an obligation and a responsibility to safeguard taxpayer dollars," Garcia said. "While I cannot support this superfluous legislation, I continue to support and stand with the men and women of the USPS who are entrusted with our nation’s mail."Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet 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.

Four years ago, Rudy Giuliani took to the stage at the Republican National Convention to deliver a shouty monologue about how his friend Donald Trump would usher in a new era of law and order and end the racial strife prompted by police killings of Black men. Four years later, Giuliani is back at the RNC. He’s still shouty. And this time he’s monologuing about how  an unprecedented wave of protests, civil strife, and outrage over yet another new round of police shootings is why we need to re-elect Trump.Claiming that “my city is in shock” over a rise in shootings since the George Floyd protests began and with “a self described Progressive Democrat” in charge (shootings in New York City are up sharply this year, though still well below the levels they were at then Giuliani left office after 2001), Trump’s lawyer called Joe Biden, a “Trojan horse” after yelling to the cameras: “Don’t let Democrats do to America what they have done to New York!”Despite the references in Giuliani’s speech Thursday night to rising urban crime rates and attacks on Democratic mayors, the speech from “America’s mayor,” as Oprah Winfrey deemed him after 9/11, had little to do with cities and everything to do with launching a broadside in the battle of the suburbs. Polls show suburban women and college-educated whites deserting Trump and leaning towards Biden. The president has responded on Twitter with dog whistles about affordable housing bringing minorities into the suburbs and housewives fearing that low income families would “invade” their communities. Trump campaign surrogates have tried to seize on the narrative by pointing to dire footage of cities on fire and warn that they’re an omen of an America under Biden—while forgetting to acknowledge that it’s the present under Trump.The unspoken subtext of Giuliani’s speech tried to resolve that contradiction: Trump can’t be held responsible for what happens in the Democratic-run cities and minority neighborhoods because he’s not the president of cities and Black Americans; he’s your president, the president of white suburbans. “It is clear that a vote for Biden and the Democrats creates the risk that you will bring this lawlessness to your city, town or suburb,” Giuliani warned.He ticked off the names of innocents killed in recent months — 4-year old LeGen Taliferro in Kansas City , 17-year-old basketball star Brandon Hendricks in the Bronx days after graduating High School and passed with only brief mention, and 1-year-old  Davell Gardner, Jr. in Brooklyn,” before declaring that “For President Trump, and for us Republicans, all Black Lives Matter and the lives of LaGen, Brandon and Davell matter to us. All lives matter to us.”A few sentences later, he managed to use those names to blame Barack Obama and Biden, declaring that “It has been like this for decades and it’s been controlled throughout by Democrats. In fact, shamefully Obama and Biden did nothing at all to quell the carnage. I guess these Black lives”—again referring to people killed this year, during the Trump presidency—”didn't matter to them.”Perhaps not coincidentally, Biden was the candidate who punctured what remained of Giuliani’s aura when both men were running for president early in the 2008 campaign. The soon to be vice president famously said of then-Republican frontrunner, that “there's only three things he needs to make ... a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”Speaking directly after Pat Lynch, the leader of the NYPD’s biggest union, which endorsed in a presidential race for the first time this year declared that "you won't be safe in Joe Biden's America," Giuliani again reached into subtext to criticize the Democratic nominee. The former mayor had spent the lead-up to the convention in a campaign of amateur gerontology in an attempt to suggest that Biden was senile and insinuated his diagnosis again on Thursday, alebit with more subtlety. Biden, Giuliani said, was “an obviously defective candidate” incapable of leaving his basement. The role of floating trial balloons in poor taste on the candidate’s behalf was once reserved for another Trump advisor, Roger Stone. But since then Giuliani has stepped into the role with enthusiasm. Giuliani’s most cherished trial balloon was notably absent from his speech and the convention in general. Trump’s personal attorney spent much of 2019 roaming about Ukraine in search of dirt that could put Hunter Biden in the crosshairs of a foreign prosecutor and his father at a safe remove from the White House. Even for a campaign that’s still in search of attack lines that will stick to the Democratic nominee, no one—not even Rudy—appears to have felt the Ukraine narrative was worth airing. Trump’s impeachment appears to be the only thing Giuliani got for his effort to find what many once thought would be a political deathblow for Biden. 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.

The twin brother of a key witness in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump has filed a federal complaint alleging retaliation by the White House and possible ethical violations and sexist behavior by top officials, including Robert O’Brien, now national security adviser. In the August complaint, Lt. Col Yevgeny Vindman alleges he faced retaliation from Trump and White House officials after raising concerns about the president’s pressure on Ukrainian officials to investigate Democrat Joe Biden’s family — the heart of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.