A former Obama administration official and House counsel who helped draft the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump has a book coming out this summer. Eisen served as the ethics czar under President Barack Obama and as counsel to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment process.

In early March, while President Donald Trump’s loudest allies at Fox News downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, with some claiming it was nothing more than an “impeachment scam” to destroy the president, Tucker Carlson received widespread—and usual, considering his notoriously far-right rhetoric—praise for calling out his colleagues and Trump for “minimizing” the impending danger.The Fox News primetime star continues to receive plaudits for reportedly convincing the president to finally take the crisis seriously. Days after that March 9 monologue, which was delivered shortly after Carlson privately spoke with Trump about the virus, the president publicly addressed the nation and his administration began pushing social-distancing guidelines.While Carlson sounding the alarm much earlier than his Fox News peers may have a had a positive impact (on his viewers, especially, as studies show his audience took protective measures before Trump confidant Sean Hannity’s), it didn’t take long for the right-wing TV host to shift gears and rage against social distancing, lockdowns, and any other measure implemented to slow the spread of the virus.Over the past two months, Carlson has devoted much of his coronavirus coverage to discrediting public-health experts, specifically top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force. On top of telling his audience to stop listening to Fauci and other health officials, the Fox News star has repeatedly boosted a fellow contrarian, former New York Times reporter-turned-spy-novelist Alex Berenson, as an expert on the deadly virus.Less than a month after his much-lauded call to action on the virus, Carlson declared the crisis to be over—a claim that received far less attention from the mainstream press than his rogue stance against the president. Despite the United States having already experienced 13,000 deaths by that point, Carlson pointed to revised models showing lower expected deaths to call for the easing of stay-at-home orders, insisting that the “short-term crisis may have passed.”Since the Fox star’s assertion that the pandemic was essentially over and it was time to go back to business as usual, the nation has suffered roughly 115,000 more deaths and at least two million more confirmed cases.Carlson, in his quest to convince viewers that social distancing was futile and lockdowns were useless, began taking aim at Fauci almost immediately, framing the Medal of Freedom honoree as a power-hungry bureaucrat who had suddenly become the most powerful person in the world. Furthermore, the conservative talk-show host repeatedly portrayed the top doctor as incompetent and unknowledgeable about infectious diseases.One way Carlson often sharply criticized the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was by highlighting his shifting opinions on the virus as more information became known about the disease. In particular, he hit Fauci for initially saying mask-wearing was unnecessary—a position the renowned immunologist quickly reversed, as have other health officials who initially worried that masks might instill a false sense of security.Tucker Carlson Wants to Have It Both Ways on CoronavirusAt one point in mid-May, following Sen. Rand Paul dressing down Fauci in a Senate hearing, Carlson applauded the pro-Trump Republican before delivering his own lengthy takedown of Fauci, arguing that the top doctor’s advice was “buffoon-level stuff,” later describing him as “the chief buffoon of the professional class.” Weeks prior, Carlson called it “national suicide” for Fauci to urge aggressive social-distancing restrictions.“We should never let someone like that run this country,” he fumed.Besides repeatedly dismissing social distancing, Carlson has also told his viewers that the virus is just not that deadly, even as the death toll continues to rise. In late April, for instance, Carlson pointed to some antibody studies—which have since largely been dismissed due to a large number of false-positive statistical errors—and the laughable claims made by a pair of California doctors who pushed for reopening by claiming the disease “just isn’t nearly as deadly as we thought it was.”The segment was steeped in so much disinformation on the disease that MSNBC host Chris Hayes, his direct 8 p.m. time slot competitor, directly called out Carlson for peddling “coronavirus trutherism” the next evening, picking apart the arguments put forth by the Fox star.“There is a reason many of the employees of Fox News, which is based in New York, are working from home right now,” Hayes pointedly stated. “At least someone there understands why it is important to continue to keep physical distance.”Weeks later, Carlson again pointed to antibody tests and cherry-picked surveys to claim the deadly virus was relatively tame.“We now know, thanks to widespread blood testing, that the virus isn't that deadly,” he said on May 21. “An enormous percentage of coronavirus infections produce mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, they're asymptomatic. The death toll is a tiny fraction of what we were told it would be.”Carlson, meanwhile, has also seemed more than willing to accept that the death toll—which is now approaching 130,000—is overinflated and possibly a hoax, despite overwhelming evidence showing it has likely been undercounted. Besides giving airtime to “COVID Contrarian” Berenson, who has repeatedly suggested the death toll is inflated or would remain low, he has also hosted Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume to make those same claims. “Dr. Birx said tonight during the briefing at the White House that all deaths from anyone who died with coronavirus is counted as if the person died from coronavirus. Now, we all know that isn’t true,” Hume said on April 7 before relaying anecdotal evidence: “ I remember my own doctor telling me at one point when I was discussing prostate issues, he said about prostate cancer—I didn't have it, as it happened, but he said, ‘You know, a lot more people die with it than die from it.’”In recent weeks, amid nationwide unrest following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, Carlson has spent far more time demonizing the Black Lives Matter movement than covering the outbreak of new coronavirus cases, many of which are occurring in the states that rushed to reopen. When the Fox host did shift from fear-mongering about a race war to cover the virus, however, he actively minimized the damage of the pandemic while once again claiming lockdowns do not work.Just as multiple states began seeing a massive uptick in confirmed cases following relaxed restrictions and Memorial Day weekend celebrations, Carlson definitively declared social-distancing rules to be useless.“We do think it’s worth, for a minute, taking a pause to assess whether or not they were in fact lying to us about the coronavirus and our response to it,” he said on June 10, taking issue with media criticizing lockdown protests but praising police brutality demonstrations. “And the short answer to this is: Yes, they were definitely lying.”“As a matter of public health, we can say conclusively the lockdowns were not necessary. In fact, we can prove that and here’s the most powerful evidence: states that never locked down at all, states where people were allowed to live like Americans and not cower indoors alone, in the end turned out no worse than states that had mandatory quarantines, the state you probably live in,” Carlson continued. “The states that did lock down at first but were quick to reopen have not seen explosions of coronavirus cases.”Since making that proclamation, Florida, Texas and Arizona have all set single-day records for confirmed cases, and have reported newly overwhelmed hospitals and ICU capacity. Presented with Carlson's repeated claims that social distancing and stay-at-home orders have been unnecessary, Dr. Irwin Redlener, a Daily Beast contributor and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University outright dismissed the TV host’s analysis.“Tucker Carson is one of the most fervent anti-science commentators on the airway,” the public-health activist told The Daily Beast. “He, like Sean Hannity, seems to relish in unwavering support for Donald Trump, no matter how outlandish, dishonest or ignorant the president’s statements or policies might be. I assume that Tucker is probably a bright guy, but his uncritical support of Trump is a dangerous disservice to his audience.”While Carlson has privately advised the president on several issues and is regularly cited by the president's Twitter account, he has also stood out among his Fox primetime peers in offering up criticism of Trump. Besides subtly calling the president out over his COVID-19 response, Carlson has also knocked the president for not being tough enough in dealing with the protests, arguing that it is placing him on a trajectory to lose.An analysis from Columbia University, meanwhile, has found that if the United States had implemented physical-distancing guidelines just one week earlier in March, as many as 36,000 American lives could have been saved.I Spent a Week Down the Right-Wing Media Rabbit Hole—and Was Mesmerized by ItAs Carlson has dismissed the expertise of epidemiologists and scientists, while boosting spy novelists and talking heads, he has occasionally sought the advice of actual medical professionals to provide pandemic analysis. One of the most frequent voices on his show in this respect has been Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel.While the Fox News primetime star has blasted Fauci and others for their inaccurate predictions and so-called buffoonery, he doesn’t seem to have an issue with Siegel’s history of comically over-the-top projections and medical punditry that seemingly bends over backwards to please the Fox audience.For example, Siegel, who infamously said in March that the “worst-case” for coronavirus is that it “will be the flu,” told Carlson last month that “we're not going to have a big second wave,” citing the low number of cases in Australia. “That’s the southern hemisphere,” he said. “That’s essentially our November right now.”He would eventually walk back that claim on Carlson’s show days later, noting that Brazil—which is also in the southern hemisphere—was experiencing a huge surge in cases. And last week, Siegel lashed out at the European Union for possibly banning American visitors due to the latest rise in cases. “Could this be retaliatory? Possibly,” he huffed. “Could it be public health? Whatever it is, it is not the tone they sounded back in March, when they were horrified at our travel ban, at a time when thousands and thousands of cases were coming here.” And then the unmistakably Carlson-esque reactionary barb. “So I have a message for the European Union tonight: How about remembering what we did for you in the middle of the 20th century?”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.

Bolton provides new evidence that Trump flagrantly abused power and confirms our central impeachment charge that Trump put his interests above America's.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler suggests Attorney General Bill Barr could face impeachment probe; Congressman Doug Collins weighs in on ‘Sunday Morning Futures.’

Congressional Republicans have largely rejected what John Bolton has to say in his newly released memoir about his time working for Donald Trump. What’s less clear is whether they’ll reject Bolton’s money.Bolton, the ultra-hawkish former national security adviser to Trump, is a longtime fixture in Republican politics, and for years he’s used a personal political action committee to direct campaign money to politicians whose values align with his own. Since the 2014 election cycle, Bolton’s PAC has doled out $1.6 million to a number of sitting GOP lawmakers. Two out of every five current GOP senators have cashed a check from Bolton at some point in the last six years, and dozens of U.S. House members, former lawmakers, and candidates have, too. For the 2020 election, Bolton has backed three GOP senators up for re-election—Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Cory Gardner (R-CO), and Thom Tillis (R-NC)—as well as two House members, Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Lee Zeldin (R-NY). Each has received the maximum $10,000 contribution from his PAC.In addition to those contributions, Bolton’s sister super PAC ran a handful of Facebook ads in late 2019, seemingly designed to build up its voter contact list with petitions to “defend Ambassador John Bolton” from “the radicalized liberal Left.” But both the PAC and super PAC have remained largely dormant so far this year.If Bolton decides to reactivate his political operation, though, it will have a significant war chest at its disposal. All told, the PAC and super PAC are still sitting on roughly $2.5 million in cash, largely raised during previous election cycles. Bolton’s plans for the two groups and the substantial sums they still command aren’t yet clear. A spokesperson for the PACs did not respond to questions about their activities going forward.Bolton Says Jared Kushner Was the Most Important Person in the White HouseWhen Bolton’s book dropped and alleged that Trump had, among other things, attempted to persuade Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win re-election by buying U.S. exports from farm states, Tillis told reporters that he agreed with the blistering response from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who said Bolton was “unpatriotic” for putting his testimony in a book instead of under oath during Trump’s impeachment trial. “I got a long reading list ahead of me, and it’s not going to go to the top of the stack,” Tillis said of Bolton’s book. Cotton, meanwhile, said on Fox News that he found Bolton’s claims to be “simply implausible.”All five of Bolton’s current endorsees for this election cycle were contacted by The Daily Beast; none indicated they’d return Bolton’s money. Asked directly on Capitol Hill if he’d considered returning Bolton’s contributions, Cotton declined to comment. A spokesman for his campaign later told The Daily Beast in an email, “We’re keeping the contribution and will be using it to run ads against Joe Biden for his failure to stand up to the woke liberal mob.”The apparent reluctance among Republican politicians to cut all ties with Bolton, especially supportive ones, may speak to the power of lingering good feelings toward the GOP stalwart, even as he derides the leader of their party as unfit for the presidency. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), who took $10,000 from Bolton’s PAC in 2016, said he’d take a check from him again. “He's been a valued adviser on foreign policy for a long time and he's helped a lot of Republicans running for office,” Blunt told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “He established a PAC just to do that. And I suspect that will continue to be the case. “Per federal campaign finance records, however, Bolton’s PAC has been quiet since Sept. 23, 2019, two weeks after he left the White House on poor terms with the president. On that day, the PAC dropped $50,000 to support its five initial endorsees for 2020, but no disbursements have been made since. As recently as May 2020, the PAC has continued to spend money on overhead such as fundraising expenses, rent, and payroll. Bolton’s super PAC has been spending money on similar things through March, though it has not directed any money toward ads or other communication yet for the 2020 cycle.If holding onto Bolton’s money hasn’t proven thorny for the Republicans who already have it, it’s unclear what might happen if he decides to spread the wealth to more candidates, just as he has in the last three election cycles.In particular, several of the candidates Bolton has supported in the past find themselves in tough elections in which some extra dollars would be welcome—but Bolton’s imprimatur might not. Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ), for example, has long been one of Bolton’s favorites. His PAC has given $35,000 to her campaigns since 2014—that year, her successful bid to unseat a Democratic House incumbent was actually the first that Bolton’s PAC officially endorsed. McSally, a former fighter pilot and a strident hawk, has previously been effusive in her praise for the former national security adviser, calling Bolton a “true patriot” in 2018.But McSally, who’s seriously at risk of losing the seat she was appointed to after Sen. John McCain’s death, has hugged Trump closely. Her campaign did not respond to a question from The Daily Beast about whether she’d return any of Bolton’s money or welcome it again in the future.Tillis, whose re-election battle in North Carolina could be among the hardest-fought in the country, has received $20,000 from Bolton over the years. In 2014, Bolton’s super PAC spent $1.3 million on ads boosting Tillis’ first successful bid for Senate. Two other top Democratic targets, Sens. David Perdue (R-GA) and Steve Daines (R-MT), also received Bolton contributions during their 2014 campaigns. Another current Bolton-supported candidate, Zeldin, is a marginal Democratic target in the House but maintains close ties with Trump and Trumpworld. He was a vocal defender of the president during the impeachment inquiry, and traveled with Trump on Air Force One to his recent rally in Oklahoma. A frequent tweeter, Zeldin has not mentioned Bolton’s allegations since they were revealed on June 17. 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.

It would be hard for any attorney general to withstand a deputy attorney general of the same party calling him “the greatest threat in my lifetime to our rule of law.” It would be harder still to withstand congressional testimony from two serving Justice Department prosecutors about his subordination of justice to the wishes of the president. But Bill Barr had a fantastic day in Congress on Wednesday. That’s not because either official, antitrust prosecutor John Elias and ex-Roger Stone prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, had their stories unravel. It’s because Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee stood enthusiastically behind Barr. And it’s also because Democrats offered little beyond harsh invective, thanks to a deep reluctance amongst their own leadership to get into another impeachment fight. When Elias and Zelinsky testified about inappropriate antitrust investigations or leniency shown to convicted friends of the president, panel Republicans applauded the attorney general as the slayer of a Deep State out to entrap Donald Trump. Either that, or they went after Elias, Zelinsky, or former George H.W. Bush Deputy Attorney General Donald Ayer, who went far further in lambasting Barr as a kind of anti-constitutional officer.   Bill Barr Gives House Dems an Extended Middle Finger and They’re Not Quite Sure How to React“Bill Barr is trying to do the Lord’s work to clean it up, so it doesn’t happen again,” intoned Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the senior GOPer on the panel, after again portraying the 2016-19 investigations of Trump as a witch hunt by Obama cronies. Jordan set the tone. Barr, with his “exemplary record,” was “restoring integrity” within the department, said Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH). The hearing was a “farce,” said Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), with Democrats knifing Barr for “trying to clean up and clear up messes made by the previous administration.” Most ominously, Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) told the three witnesses that “history will not judge you kindly in the days ahead… whether we get to continue this experiment in self-government or not.” A spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether Gohmert believes the American republic is in danger of collapse.It was the most foursquare defense of Barr from Hill Republicans yet. Their support for Trump, post-Russiagate and post-impeachment, is compulsory at this point. But on Wednesday, they went beyond allegiance to Trump to affirmatively portray Barr as the one out to drain the swamp. They did so days after perhaps the lowest point in Barr’s brief tenure. On Friday, Barr lied that the U.S. attorney in New York had resigned, prompting a weekend standoff over ousting Geoffrey Berman before Barr partially backed down. It remains unclear if Barr will himself testify before the House committee, but he knows he has a GOP firewall if he does. Against all that, Democrats had rhetoric. Their leadership doesn’t want to impeach Barr. Their caucus is internally divided on what to do about him. Their response, which frequently overshadowed their focus on the substance of Elias and Zelinsky’s testimony, was to hurl invective at Barr. Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called him Trump’s “fixer.” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) called the politicization of the Justice Department “worse than Watergate, worse than Nixon.” Referring to Barr’s violent suppression of the June 1 protest in Lafayette Square, Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA) said that to the attorney general, friends of the president get pardons and reduced jail time, but “if you’re peacefully protesting brutality, you get tear-gassed.”But despite their portrayal of Barr as a legal vandal, only one of them advocated removing him from office. “We should pursue impeachment of Bill Barr,” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), “because he’s raining terror on the rule of law.” Amidst the rhetoric, Justice Department prosecutors Zelinsky and Elias occasionally got to testify. Elias, from the antitrust division, told the panel that his office was pressured to pursue cannabis-firm mergers, sometimes not among competitors, because Barr finds marijuana disreputable. He further recounted political appointees atop the division pressing them to investigate California’s auto emissions deal with car manufacturers after Trump tweeted negatively about “California regulators.” Bill Barr Has Pie on His Face, and One More Trick Up His Sleeve With John Durham’s October SurpriseZelinsky, far more famously, was a prosecutor for Russiagate Special Counsel Robert Mueller who successfully convicted Trump consigliere Stone before a Barr ally intervened to give the president’s friend a lenient sentencing recommendation. Both Zelinsky and Elias opened themselves up to career reprisal by testifying, as the impeachment aftermath showed Trump purging the administration of numerous meddlesome witnesses and inspectors-general. Republicans were not interested in their testimony. They attempted derailing the hearing because Zelinsky testified remotely—something he explained was to protect his newborn baby from COVID-19. Later, they figured having one of Mueller’s “merry band of Never Trumpers,” in Pennsylvania Republican Guy Reschenthaler’s phrase, was a good opportunity to go after Russiagate. Zelinsky instead batted away questions by pleading that the Justice Department had restricted him from testifying about anything about Mueller beyond his 2019 findings. Jordan reprised an impeachment tactic by saying that because Zelinsky hadn’t talked to Barr, he had no basis to say that there was anything political about the Justice Department overruling his team of career prosecutors to go easy on Stone. (Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida even went to the extent of predicting, “Roger Stone will be pardoned.”) Elias they portrayed as a Democratic hack for being detailed to the Obama White House and seeking an early 2019 assignment to House Democrats, which they claimed was enthusiasm for impeaching Trump.    Donald Ayer, who preceded Barr as deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, didn’t have any inside knowledge about Barr’s attorney generalship. Instead, Ayer urged the committee “to distrust everything he says,” from his actions to suppress anti-white supremacy protests to the “Obamagate nonsense that’s being spewed by the president” and laundered into John Durham’s inquiry into the origins of Russiagate. With Barr publicly describing Durham’s ongoing investigation—to the point of the attorney general hinting at prosecutions to come—“no one is in a position to say he’s wrong, but he’s wrong,” Ayer said.“Frankly,” Ayer continued, “my worry is he’s going to do it more and more in the weeks and months ahead as we get closer to the election.” With Republicans lining up behind Barr and Democrats confused about what they’ll do, Ayer’s worries are unlikely to abate. 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.

For a while, at least, it seemed The View didn’t quite know what to do with John Bolton. Under questioning from Joy Behar, the former national security advisor deftly evaded a commitment to testify to Congress if subpoenaed ahead of the 2020 election. A question from Meghan McCain about his Broadway-inspired book title was even more useless. “Do you understand that it’s insulting to those of that are fans of Hamilton to co-opt art from Lin-Manuel Miranda for your own political purposes?” she asked, nonsensically. But the hosts did eventually find their footing late in the interview when it came to Bolton’s refusal to voluntarily share his damning information about President Trump during the impeachment trial—instead of holding onto it for his book. Stacey Abrams Repeatedly Shuts Down Meghan McCain on ‘The View’After Sunny Hostin confirmed with Bolton that he knew Trump tried to get dirt on Joe Biden’s family in exchange for unfreezing aid to Ukraine, Whoopi Goldberg said, “So this is information that you didn’t share with Congress, but you knew all of the hoops everyone was jumping through. You knew the impeachment trial was being set up to fail. You say that the Democrats committed impeachment malpractice, but I think everyone who was in power there did this.”“Everyone did this to the American people, and you knew!” she continued. “I want to believe that the great American that you are thought of knew this was going on and wanted to do something and just felt that your hands were tied. Because if you knew all this was happening, why didn't you step up and say, I don’t care, this is not how America is supposed to be. Why didn’t you step up?!” In response, Bolton avoided the question by highlighting the actions he took when he was still part of the Trump administration and calling the impeachment trial a “partisan shouting match.” But after a break, Hostin returned once more to this same line of questioning.Clearly exasperated with their guest, Hostin said, “You say that Trump’s not fit to be president, and 120,000 people have died from the coronavirus. Race relations in our country are at an all-time low, and just today you’ve admitted that you were in the room when President Trump exacted a quid pro quo with Ukraine. You were in the room when he was asking for China to meddle in our election.” Holding up his book, she said: “You were in the room, which is what you say is the title of your book, and you chose not to testify!” “You are the one of the very reasons, if not the reason, that President Trump is still in office and wasn't impeached,” Hostin added. “Help me understand why your silence is not complicity in this. You were in the room where it happened!” When Bolton told her that his testimony “wasn’t going to make any difference,” Hostin shot back, “That’s not true!” “Let me finish, please,” Bolton replied, before shifting the blame to Democrats once more. “Because of the Democratic impeachment malpractice, they drove the parties into their partisan corners, and that’s where it stayed.” “I’ve chosen a different route,” he continued. “I’ve laid the evidence before the ultimate judges who are the American people, and if you don't trust their judgment, then there's a real problem with our democracy and our Constitution. They’re the ones that should make this decision, and what better time to assess the competence and character of Donald Trump than the middle of an election?” Stephen Colbert Laughs in John Bolton’s Face: How Could You Be So ‘Naive’ About Trump?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.

Joe Biden has taken a commanding lead over President Donald Trump in the 2020 race, building a wide advantage among women and nonwhite voters and making deep inroads with some traditionally Republican-leaning groups that have shifted away from Trump following his ineffective response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new national poll of registered voters by The New York Times and Siena College.Biden is currently ahead of Trump by 14 percentage points, garnering 50% of the vote compared with 36% for Trump. That is among the most dismal showings of Trump's presidency, and a sign that he is the clear underdog right now in his fight for a second term.Trump has been an unpopular president for virtually his entire time in office. He has made few efforts since his election in 2016 to broaden his support beyond the right-wing base that vaulted him into office with only 46%of the popular vote and a modest victory in the Electoral College.But among a striking cross-section of voters, the distaste for Trump has deepened as his administration failed to stop a deadly disease that crippled the economy and then as he responded to a wave of racial-justice protests with angry bluster and militaristic threats. The dominant picture that emerges from the poll is of a country ready to reject a president whom a strong majority of voters regard as failing the greatest tests confronting his administration.Biden leads Trump by enormous margins with black and Hispanic voters, and women and young people appear on track to choose Biden by an even wider margin than they favored Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016. But the former vice president has also drawn even with Trump among male voters, whites and people in middle age and older -- groups that have typically been the backbones of Republican electoral success, including Trump's in 2016.Arlene Myles, 75, of Denver, said she had been a Republican for nearly six decades before switching her registration to independent earlier this year during Trump's impeachment trial. Myles said that when Trump was first elected, she had resolved to "give him a chance," but had since concluded that he and his party were irredeemable."I was one of those people who stuck by Nixon until he was waving goodbye," Myles said. "I thought I was a good Republican and thought they had my values, but they have gone down the tubes these last few years."Myles said she planned to vote for Biden, expressing only one misgiving: "I wish he was younger," she said.Most stark may be Biden's towering advantage among white women with college degrees, who support him over Trump by 39 percentage points. In 2016, exit polls found that group preferred Clinton to Trump by just 7 percentage points. The poll also found that Biden has narrowed Trump's advantage with less-educated white voters.The exodus of white voters from the GOP has been especially pronounced among younger voters, an ominous trend for a party that was already heavily reliant on older Americans.Fifty-two percent of whites under 45 said they supported Biden while only 30% said they supported Trump. And their opposition is intense: More than twice as many younger whites viewed the president very unfavorably than very favorably.Tom Diamond, 31, a Republican in Fort Worth, Texas, said he planned to vote for Trump but would do so with real misgivings. He called the president a "poor leader" who had mishandled the pandemic and said Biden seemed "like a guy you can trust." But Trump held views closer to his own on the economy, health care and abortion."Part of you just feels icky voting for him," Diamond said. "But definitely from a policy perspective, that's where my vote's going to go."Some unease toward Trump stems from voters' racial attitudes. According to the poll, white voters under 45 are overwhelmingly supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement, while older whites are more tepid in their views toward racial justice activism. And nearly 70% of whites under 45 said they believed the killing of George Floyd was part of a broader pattern of excessive police violence toward African Americans rather than an isolated incident.What's striking, though, is that even among white seniors, one of Trump's strongest constituencies, he has damaged himself with his conduct. About two-fifths of whites over 65 said they disapproved of Trump's handling of both the coronavirus and race relations.Trump retains a few points of strength in the poll that could offer him a way to regain a footing in the race, and the feeble condition of his candidacy right now may well represent his low point in a campaign with 4 1/2 months still to go.His approval rating is still narrowly positive on the issue of the economy, with 50% of voters giving him favorable marks compared with 45% saying the opposite. Should the fall campaign become a referendum on which candidate is better equipped to restore prosperity after the pandemic has subsided, that could give Trump a new opening to press his case.The president is also still ahead of Biden among white voters without college degrees, who hold disproportionate influence in presidential elections because of how central the Midwest is to capturing 270 electoral votes.Yet if Trump still has a significant measure of credibility with voters on the economy, he lacks any apparent political strength on the most urgent issues of the moment: the pandemic and the national reckoning on policing and race.Nearly three-fifths of voters disapprove of Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including majorities of white voters and men. Self-described moderate voters disapproved of Trump on the coronavirus by a margin of more than 2-1.Most of the country is also rejecting Trump's call to reopen the economy as quickly as possible, even at the cost of exposing people to greater health risks. By a 21-point margin, voters said the federal government should prioritize containing the coronavirus, even if it hurts the economy, a view that aligns them with Biden.Just a third of voters said the government should focus on restarting the economy even if that entails greater public-health risks.That debate could become the central focus of the campaign in the coming weeks, as coronavirus outbreaks grow rapidly in a number of Republican-led states that have resisted the strict lockdown measures imposed in the spring by Democratic states like New York and California.The public also does not share Trump's resistance to mask wearing. The president has declined to don a mask in nearly all public appearances, even as top health officials in his administration have urged Americans to do so as a precaution against spreading the coronavirus. In the poll, 54% of people said they always wear a mask when they expect to be in proximity to other people, while another 22% said they usually wear a mask.Just 22% said they rarely or never wear a mask.Trump's job approval on race relations was just as dismal. Sixty-one percent of voters said they disapproved of Trump's handling of race, versus 33% who said they approved. By a similar margin, voters said they disapproved of his response to the protests after the death of Floyd.Trump has sought several times in the last month to use demonstrations against the police as a political wedge issue, forcing Democrats to align themselves squarely either with law-enforcement agencies or with the most strident anti-police demonstrators.The poll suggested most voters were rejecting that binary choice, as well as Trump's harsh characterization of protesters: Large majorities said they had a positive overall assessment of both the Black Lives Matter movement and the police.The picture of Biden that emerges from the poll is one of a broadly acceptable candidate who inspires relatively few strong feelings in either direction. He is seen favorably by about half of voters and unfavorably by 42%. Only a quarter said they saw him very favorably, equaling the share that sees him in very negative terms.Trump, by contrast, is seen very favorably by 27% of voters and very unfavorably by 50%.Harry Hoyt, 72, of York County in Southern Maine, said he has sometimes voted for Republican presidential candidates in the past and cast a grudging vote for Clinton in 2016. He felt better this time about his plan to vote for Biden."Biden would be a better candidate than Trump, simply because he's a nice person," Hoyt said. "One of the most important things to me is the character of the man in charge of our country."Significantly, one group that saw Biden as far more than just acceptable was black voters. Fifty-six percent of black respondents in the poll said they saw Biden very favorably, a far more enthusiastic judgment than from any other constituency.The limited passion for Biden among other Democratic constituencies does not appear to be affecting his position against Trump. Though only 13% of people under 30 said they had a very favorable opinion of the former vice president, that group is backing Biden over Trump by 34 percentage points.Nicholas Angelos, a 20-year-old voter in Bloomington, Indiana, who said he supported Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, said he would vote for Biden as the "lesser of two evils." He said he believed the former vice president would "try his best," in contrast to Trump, whom he described as "an autocrat" and "anti-science.""We all have to compromise," said Angelos, who described himself as very liberal. He added of Biden, "I don't think he's anything special."For the moment, voters also appear unpersuaded by one of the primary attack lines Trump and his party have used against Biden: the claim that, at age 77, he is simply too old for the presidency. Trump, 74, has mocked Biden's mental acuity frequently over the last few months and his campaign has run television advertisements that cast Biden as absent-minded and inarticulate.But three in five voters said in the poll that they disagreed with the claim that Biden was too old to be an effective president. The percentage of voters who agreed, 36%, exactly matched Trump's existing support in the presidential race.Lindsay Clark, 37, who lives in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, was among the voters who said she would probably vote for Trump because she was unsure Biden was "physically and mentally up to the task" of being president. But Clark expressed little admiration for Trump, whom she called unpresidential.Clark, who voted for a third-party candidate in 2016, said she was hard-pressed to name something she really liked about Trump, eventually settling on the idea that he expressed himself bluntly."I was just trying to think if I could think of something off the top of my head that I was like, 'Yes, I loved when you did that!'" she said of Trump. "And I kind of just can't."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton joins Bret Baier on 'Special Report' to discuss his days in the Trump administration and his new book, 'The Room Where It Happened.'

House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) confirmed Monday night that his committee was preparing to subpoena Attorney General Bill Barr for his testimony, despite saying earlier this month that such a move was unlikely."We have begun the process to issue that subpoena," Nadler told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in an interview. On June 2, Nadler shot down the idea of subpoenaing Barr, saying, "I am not going to spend months litigating a subpoena with an Attorney General who has already spent years resisting the courts and legitimate congressional oversight.”On Sunday, Nadler claimed that Barr “deserves impeachment" for his alleged politicization of the Justice Department, but said trying to do so would be "a waste of time" because “corrupt” Senate Republicans would not vote to convict."We know that we have a corrupt Republican majority in the Senate which will not consider an impeachment no matter what the evidence and no matter what the facts," Nadler said.Nadler’s spokesman Daniel Schwarz first confirmed to Axios that the subpoena was in the works. Democrats have called to investigate Barr over the abrupt decision to oust Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, Geoffrey Berman, who has been in charge of several investigations connected to President Trump.House Judiciary ranking member Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) slammed the decision to subpoena Barr in a letter to Nadler, saying “however much you disagree with the Justice Department’s policy decisions—or agree with the Obama-Biden Administration’s targeting of the Trump campaign—those are not legitimate reasons to compel Attorney General Barr’s testimony at this time.”Barr was supposed to appear in front of the House Judiciary Committee on March 31, but the hearing was called off due to the coronavirus pandemic.