Pentagon insists move is about long-term strategy but Trump says: ‘We’re reducing the force because they’re not paying their bills’The US is planning to pull nearly 12,000 troops out of Germany in a move the Pentagon insisted was about long-term strategy but which Donald Trump said was to punish Berlin for low defence spending.Of a total of 11,900 personnel that will be leaving Germany under the proposal, 6,400 will be returning to the US, from where they could be used for rotational deployments in eastern Europe and around the world, while 5,600 will be repositioned within other Nato countries, particularly Belgium and Italy.The defence secretary, Mark Esper, said the move would begin within weeks, but also stressed that planning for the redeployment was in its early stages and it would cost several billion dollars.He repeatedly denied that the decision was motivated by Trump’s frequently expressed desire to move troops out of Germany to teach Berlin a lesson for not spending enough on defence. The Pentagon put out a statement saying the withdrawal would “strengthen Nato, enhance the deterrence of Russia” and boost the flexibility of the US military.Minutes later, the president told journalists at the White House he had ordered the troop withdrawal because Berlin was being “delinquent” by not spending enough on defence.“[US troops] are there to protect Germany, right? And Germany is supposed to pay for it,” Trump said. “Germany’s not paying for it. We don’t want to be the suckers any more. The United States has been taken advantage of for 25 years, both on trade and on the military. So we’re reducing the force because they’re not paying their bills.”Trump wrongly claimed, as he has many times in the past, that Germany was not paying its “Nato fees”. In fact, the friction between the US and Germany, as well as other European allies, is about national defence spending. The allies agreed in 2014 to spend 2% of their GDP on defence by 2024. Germany is currently on 1.5%, but Belgium, where the US will move some of its European Command (Eucom) headquarters, spends less than 1%, and Italy, to where the US will move an F-16 fighter squadron and two army battalions from Germany, spends 1.2%.Diplomats and former US officials have described Trump as fixated on Germany and its chancellor, Angela Merkel.“He’s obsessed with the idea that Germany is taking advantage of the US, over defence, but on trade, selling too many cars to the US for example. He has always been particularly rude to Merkel,” a former White House official said.Emily Haber, the German ambassador to Washington, said US troops “have become neighbors, partners and friends while protecting transatlantic security and projecting American power and interests globally”.“We have been and are proud to host US troops,” Haber wrote on Twitter. “A strong, and united Nato is crucial for deterrence and power projection. Germany is a steadfast Nato ally and third largest contributor to its budget.”Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior fellow at the center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said: “I have sympathy for the criticism of Germany’s low defense spending, which does set a bad example for other member states who spend even less – it’s against Europe’s and our own interest.“Moving Eucom to Belgium actually makes sense, but I find the strategic rationale for the other movements much less persuasive.”Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, said: “Champagne must be flowing freely this evening at the Kremlin. The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw forces from Germany is not only an affront to one of our closest allies, but will ultimately weaken US efforts to counter Kremlin aggression in Europe.”Trump’s relationship with Moscow, the issue that triggered his impeachment, came under renewed scrutiny earlier on Wednesday morning, when he admitted he had not confronted Vladimir Putin with intelligence suggesting Russia was paying Taliban fighters bounties for killing US soldiers in Afghanistan.“I have never discussed it with him,” the president told Axios on HBO. “That was a phone call to discuss other things, and frankly that’s an issue that many people said was fake news.”Esper argued the redeployments would make troops available to rotate in and out of the Baltic states, Poland and the Black Sea region. The defence secretary said: “it enhances deterrence, strengthens the allies, reassures.” He claimed he had received “very positive feedback” from the Nato countries affected.He said US Africa Command, currently in Stuttgart, would be moved out, to a new headquarters yet to be decided.Critics of the move have said it would be very expensive, time-consuming and would damage Nato cohesion and deterrence against Russia. Rotating troops eastwards would be more expensive and build less trust in the host countries, they argue, while at the same time undermining morale by making soldiers spend more time away from their families.But retired Lt Col Daniel Davis, senior fellow at the Defense Priorities thinktank, argued that whatever the short-term justifications, pulling troops out of Germany made strategic sense.“We don’t have a need for that many troops,” Lt Col Davis said. “Because there’s no security threat that those troops actually help with, in my view. Russia is already deterred. If you took all the American troops out of Europe … that’s not going to change the deterrent factor for Russia because the Nato combined militaries are far more powerful than Russia, plus they have nuclear weapons.”

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee waited months for the chance to interrogate Attorney General William Barr on everything from his handling of sensitive prosecutions to his clampdown on police protests. And by the time the five-hour hearing wrapped on Tuesday, they were claiming success in eliciting the type of newsworthy admissions and made-for-Twitter exchanges that could bolster their broader criticisms of the Trump administration.But the journey to those victories was decidedly rocky. And in the eyes of some friendly observers, Tuesday’s slugfest raised real questions about how the panel’s chairman and its most senior members are approaching oversight in the Trump era. The armchair quarterbacking began almost immediately after the hearing opened. But those doing it were not merely Twitter talking heads but top legal voices upon which the party relies. After Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) opened the hearing by trying to pin down Barr on whether the Department of Justice’s crackdown on Black Lives Matter protesters was informed by politics, Daniel Goldman—a former aide to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) who was a lead inquisitor during Trump’s impeachment—tweeted tersely that the New York Democrat had conducted an “ineffective opening line of questioning.” Goldman’s charge raised plenty of eyebrows among Democratic staffers on Capitol Hill. But, privately, many didn’t disagree with his point. “Nadler is always trying to hit a target he can’t seem to hit,” said one Democratic staffer, who requested anonymity to discuss the committee candidly. “I think he feels the criticism.” AG Barr Calls Black Lives Matter Protests in Portland ‘an Assault’ on U.S. Government in Testy HearingThe criticisms weren’t limited to Nadler. When it was Rep. Steve Cohen’s (D-TN) turn to question Barr, the result was a five-minute block that included an outraged reference to Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody. Prominent former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara tweeted “disappointing hearing.” Four minutes later, he added, “getting worse.”Another former prosecutor and cable news fixture, Elie Honig, tweeted after the first hour of the hearing that Democrats “have to bring it. Direct, factual, undeniable yes/no questions on the areas of most vulnerability. They have not done that at all so far.”The failure to knock Barr off-message risked depriving Democrats of the one chance they had to quiz a figure at the center of a myriad of controversies, seriously raising the possibility that the attorney general would skate through the final months of President Trump’s first term without the intense scrutiny on key points that many Democrats believe he deserves.And then, things changed. As House Judiciary Democrats went deeper into their bench, less senior lawmakers managed to get under the skin of the notoriously testy attorney general. Indeed, some of the most memorable admissions from Barr ended up coming from freshman lawmakers, like Reps. Joe Neguse (D-CO) and Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA). To many Democrats, the flow of the hearing raised familiar questions about the party’s ability to effectively push back on the Trump administration. It also refreshed a long-running debate about the strength of the more aggressive, younger generation of Democratic lawmakers—and the need, perhaps, for the old guard to make way for them.The newer Democratic lawmakers study hard, said Philippe Reines, a longtime Democratic operative who worked in the House and Senate and has done hearing prep like this before. “They are also on fewer big committees so aren’t stretched as thin as more senior members. And more of them have prosecutorial backgrounds, or are closer to their prosecutorial days. It’s a hundred things. Including the likeliest: they’re really worked up about these issues / events.”The Barr hearing, said the Democratic staffer, “proves how impressive this freshman class is, and how senior members are still trying to figure out how to operate in the majority.” Judiciary Committee Demands Testimony From Prosecutors Who Quit Stone CaseThe criticism represents another rough spot for Nadler, who since taking the Judiciary gavel in January 2019 has faced strong headwinds in holding Trump to account. The chairman has had a dogged time getting Barr to hand over key documents and appear before the committee. And when Trump’s impeachment finally became unavoidable after news of Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign came to light, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) effectively gave the ball to Schiff, and even came close to wresting any control over the process out of Nadler’s committee entirely. But Nadler has plenty of defenders on and off Capitol Hill. In response to a question from The Daily Beast about the criticism directed at Nadler and other members, a spokesperson for the committee said, “we worked with every single member of the Committee on their questions, and worked through the themes we were trying to hit in today’s hearing, both in terms of substance and style.” “In the end, it is up to each member to make decisions on what they want their 5 minutes to focus on and how they want to conduct their questioning,” said the spokesman. “We felt all of the Committee Members did an excellent job today of showcasing the overt politicization AG Barr is carrying out on behalf of President Trump, which is exactly what this hearing was focused on.” The hearing with the attorney general—who had never appeared before the committee that oversees his department—was, indeed, highly anticipated by Democrats for over a year as a crucial opportunity to interrogate a man they see as Trump’s ruthless legal enforcer. Lawmakers were eager to press Barr not only on the Russia investigation but also the Department of Justice’s aggressive response to recent police protests, its efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act in court, and its stances on a range of issues from immigration to voting rights. The proceeding on Tuesday was tense throughout, with Democratic lawmakers and Barr frequently raising their voices and cutting each other off, while the GOP side of the dais needled Democrats and bucked up Barr. Against that backdrop, some observers felt that Nadler did a fine job in an unenviable situation. Max Bergmann, head of the Center for American Progress think tank’s Moscow Project, which focuses on Trump’s ties with Russia, said some of the criticism directed at Nadler was too harsh.“Nadler, to me, is the quarterback of the team—maybe his line of questioning could have been slightly more effective, but Barr is a formidable adversary,” said Bergmann. “I think Nadler laid out pretty clearly the critique and the concerns that Democrats have of Barr.”And Sean Vitka, senior policy counsel at the progressive group Demand Progress, said if Democrats’ goal was to show that Barr operates as an arm of Trump, they succeeded. “I thought they covered a lot of ground, more ground than I would have expected,” said Vitka. “With everything going on that needs to be asked of Barr, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they didn’t get to half the territory they got to today.”From the outset, Nadler signaled that pressing Barr over his handling of protests—specifically, his deployment of federal law enforcement in Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., to push back against demonstrators—would be a priority. But in his questioning, the chairman zeroed in on attempting to get answers about a DOJ rebrand of a specific inner-city law enforcement operation known as “Operation Legend” in the wake of protests over George Floyd’s death. Nadler got Barr to acknowledge that he misspoke in saying the program had resulted in the arrests of 200 people in Kansas City, when it had in fact resulted in one arrest. But he had a harder time wringing out of that point any larger admission from Barr over election-year politics at work in a DOJ operation. While Barr acknowledged that he speaks to the president about the election—itself, a revealing statement—he didn’t offer much more in the way of context, and pointed to the disruption of the coronavirus outbreak as an explanation for some of the DOJ's law enforcement plans.Other senior members were able to land fewer blows against Barr, but when some mid-level and junior members got their turns, they honed in on clear areas of vulnerability for the attorney general. One was his ouster of Geoffrey Berman, who was prosecutor for the Southern District of New York. On June 19, Barr issued a statement saying Berman was “stepping down” from the post. The statement was deliberately untrue. Barr had been trying privately to get Berman out of his post and had failed to that point. Under questioning from Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), a second-term member, Barr admitted what Berman had told the committee before: that Barr was lying when he stated Berman was stepping down. When Neguse asked him about it later, Barr made one of the more eyebrow-raising admissions of the day: “he may not have known it yet,” the AG said of Berman, “but he was stepping down.”Later into the hearing, Scanlon scored another admission from Barr, who has himself raised Trump’s unsupported theories that foreign countries could manipulate the U.S. election by counterfeiting mail-in ballots. Asked by the congresswoman if he had any evidence for that claim, Barr conceded: “no, I don’t, but I have common sense.” To some Democrats observing, these questions from the so-called “bottom row” of the dais were the strongest moments of the hearing, and many lament that they tend to come hours into the proceeding after viewer’s appetites tend to wane.“There’s a real energy there, that we need to stand up to this” said Bergmann of the new guard. —With reporting from Sam SteinRead more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. 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Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul breaks down why he thinks the coronavirus lockdowns led to a crippling of the economy and haven’t ‘done much to curb the virus’ on ‘America’s Newsroom.’

George Kent, who testified last year about Trump allies' efforts to influence Ukraine, has agreed to sit for an interview as early as Friday.

New York Times reporter Julian Barnes implied on Tuesday that some intelligence officials believe that the Kremlin is fanning corruption allegations against Joe Biden's son Hunter in order to "obscure" Russia's ongoing election interference attempts.During an MSNBC interview, host Nicole Wallace referred to Russian disinformation campaigns that she said appear to have "infected" the House Intelligence Committee, asking Barnes, "What access to any information or briefings do Democrats really have?""Russia uses these disinformation campaigns to deflect from what they did in 2016," Barnes, who reports on national security for the Times, responded. "A lot of intelligence officials believe the sort of Burisma accusations that are being revived are once again trying to obscure what Russia is up to."On Monday, top congressional Democrats led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi released a letter alleging a foreign disinformation campaign aimed at influencing the 2020 presidential election and interfering with Congress. The letter included few specifics, but Democrats demanded an FBI briefing to warn members of Congress about the threat. Officials familiar with an addendum to the letter said it referred to a potential Russian attempt to harm Biden's presidential campaign, Barnes reported for the Times.Barnes continued that he believes Democrats published the letter because "the only remedy that really works is the resilience of a population, and a population can only be resilient if they know what's going on. So much of this stuff is secret, falls into bitter, partisan divisions, but it's important for voters not to be affected by the disinformation campaign, and that requires talking about it, putting some of this stuff out in the open, realizing when it is being done to the American public."Hunter Biden was appointed to Burisma’s board in 2014 while his father was vice president and resigned from the board in April of last year.During a July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump asked Zelensky to help his administration investigate allegations that Biden used his position as vice president to help Burisma avoid a corruption probe soon after his son was appointed to the board— a controversy that became the focal point of the impeachment probe against Trump.In spring, 2016, Biden called on Ukraine to fire the prosecutor who had been investigating the energy company paying his son. The vice president threatened to withdraw $1 billion in U.S. military aid to Ukraine if the country did not fire the prosecutor, who was accused by the State Department and U.S. allies in Europe of being soft on corruption.

For the first time ever, Congress’ most MAGA contingent on Tuesday decided to test the rule that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) is the only high-profile Republican who can criticize President Trump and get away with it. By the end of the day, their efforts had made abundantly clear that Cheney can, in fact, still get away with it—at least for now—with her reputation largely unscathed. At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans—their first fully in-person meeting since early March—several lawmakers who present themselves as unflinchingly loyal to Trump took the opportunity to execute what struck some as a coordinated broadside on the third-ranking House Republican. According to Politico, Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chip Roy (R-TX), and others attacked Cheney for being insufficiently supportive of Trump and his agenda, for supporting Dr. Anthony Fauci, and for backing a primary challenger to Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), among other things. After the news of the meeting broke, Gaetz upped the ante by publicly calling on Cheney to step down from her position as conference chair. “Liz Cheney has worked behind the scenes (and now in public) against @realDonaldTrump and his agenda,” tweeted Gaetz. “Liz Cheney should step down or be removed.” The call was amplified with a well-timed release of an episode of Gaetz’s podcast, “Hot Takes with Matt Gaetz.”At least one high-profile denizen of Trumpworld clearly heard the call: The president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., piggybacked on Gaetz’s tweet, saying “We already have one Mitt Romney, we don’t need another.” Trump, Jr. is an influential and well-connected figure in House GOP circles. But, as Cheney pointed out at a press conference later, Trump’s son is “not a member of the House Republican conference.”Ultimately, none of Gaetz’s band of rabblerousers backed his call to remove Cheney from her post—even those who reportedly aired their grievances against her Tuesday morning. In fact, one after the other, those reportedly involved changed the subject. “I am focused on making sure the President wins re-election and helping us take back the majority. I want to stay focused on that, that should be what we’re doing,” said Jordan, when asked if he had confidence in Cheney. “We had a good robust private conversation,” Roy said—and called Cheney a friend, “just like all my other colleagues in this conference are friends. We’re going to get busy making sure we’re going to win this fall.”And Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), who was not at the meeting but is close to the Trump family, also declined to take the bait on Cheney, telling The Daily Beast, “I’ve gotten along with her the entire time that she’s been here. And my interactions with her, where we’re aligned on issues, has been only positive.”Other Republicans chided the push: Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-MI), who is retiring, said it was a bit “extreme” to try to oust Cheney over her views on Trump. “She’s done what she thinks is right,” said Mitchell. “I’m not endorsing it, it’s just if that’s the criteria we use, I don’t think unquestioning support of the president is in the job description of conference chair.” Trump himself, meanwhile, did not publicly weigh in on the dust-up, and to date has never publicly attacked Cheney in the merciless style he’s gone after other Republicans he views as critical of him. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Cheney and the GOP meeting. With the would-be insurgents largely silent, Cheney ended the day pocketing public praise from allies and the full backing of House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who appeared beside her at a press conference and proclaimed “we’re honored to have her as conference chair.”Privately, too, many Republicans seethed at the optics of outspoken male lawmakers going after a highly visible Republican woman. “Where is the party struggling right now? With women,” said one House Republican aide. “And the game plan is to go after the top female elected Republican in all of Congress?”“There is zero appetite,” said another House Republican aide, “to get rid of the only woman in leadership.”Indeed, it was unlikely that a fit from House conservatives, who historically love to rattle their leaders, would result in any meaningful effort to oust Cheney. But their first shot at it may portend future turbulence within the Republican Party—especially a post-Trump party that so many believe that Cheney is positioning herself to lead. The timing of the attack, which was unconnected to any specific bit of news or provocation by Cheney, was “quite intentional,” according to a former House Republican aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe conference dynamics freely.“It’s also misplaced and purely personal. Cheney is a strong supporter of the President, wants him to win in November, and is arguably more conservative than those chirping,” said the aide. “But, those that have risen in influence because of President Trump’s personal and punch-driven politics made it clear today they will not go quietly if he falls in November. The fight for the future of the Republican Party has broken out into the open.” The third-term congresswoman’s willingness to push back on Trump at all—where she could easily remain silent or supportive of him—has given rise to chatter that she is planning for a future where the party has moved on from Trump. Her criticisms of Trump have hardly risen to the level of someone like Romney, who voted with Democrats in an impeachment Cheney slammed as permanently damaging to the country. According to trackers like FiveThirtyEight, Cheney has voted more frequently with Trump’s agenda in her career than detractors questioning her loyalty to the president, such as Gaetz, who did time of his own in the White House doghouse in January over his high-profile fight to rein in Trump’s war powers on Iran. But within the House GOP’s Trump cheering section, Cheney’s at-times harsh criticism has stuck out—particularly when it comes to Trump’s national security platform and the petty controversies the president reflexively kicks up regularly—putting her in contrast with Republicans like Jordan, who have thrown in their lot so clearly with the president that the association will be hard to shake, no matter what happens to him in November.  Indeed, Trump’s political fortunes were a focal point of the closed-door discussion Tuesday morning, with Cheney’s critics accusing her of undermining the president’s chances at reelection and saying she wasn’t a “team player.” Cheney, a top fundraising officer on the Trump campaign, reportedly parried the attacks with subtle digs at her rivals, wishing Gaetz luck on his new HBO documentary and raising Jordan’s past reputation as anything but a team player.But leaving that meeting, Cheney illustrated a reason why she’s been able to get so far while lodging criticism of the president—picking her battles. "We had an exchange of views,” Cheney told reporters, saying not a word about what she’d just confronted. “I think it's all clear we're unified in terms of recognizing the danger... if Joe Biden were elected President. We talked at length about Vice President Biden, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and the kind of America we'd be living in if they prevail. That was really the focus of it. We had a healthy exchange of views.”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 U.S. Senate voted along party lines on Monday to confirm Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget, eight months after Vought defied a congressional subpoena and refused to testify in President Donald Trump's impeachment. The vote was 51-45 to confirm Vought, as all of Trump's fellow Republicans backed the nomination and every Democrat voted no. Vought, 44, has held the post of OMB director on an acting basis since January 2019, when his predecessor, Mick Mulvaney, became acting White House chief of staff.

Puerto Rico’s governor and other top officials on Monday became the formal targets of an in-depth government investigation into recent corruption allegations. The U.S. territory’s Special Independent Prosecutor’s Panel agreed to probe the allegations against Gov. Wanda Vázquez and others following a referral from the island’s Department of Justice that ended with two justice secretaries stepping down earlier this month and led to calls for impeachment against the governor. “This is very serious,” Edgardo Román, president of the Bar Association of Puerto Rico, told The Associated Press.

The 2016 GOP presidential candidate has criticized President's Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic and supported his impeachment.

Former U.S. Rep. Allen West of Florida, a firebrand conservative who once called for President Barack Obama's impeachment following a short stint in Congress, was elected chair of the Republican Party of Texas during a turbulent virtual convention early Monday. West's ascension comes four months before what could be an unusually competitive Election Day in America's biggest red state. Democrats need just nine seats to flip the Texas House for the first time in 20 years, and Joe Biden this month put up a modest ad buy in Texas, raising questions about President Donald Trump’s vulnerability in the longtime Republican stronghold.