Politics and American Democracy – Page 194

Photos show the Mississippi River is so low that it’s grounding barges, disrupting the supply chain, and revealing a 19th-century shipwreck

Business Insider

Photos show the Mississippi River is so low that it’s grounding barges, disrupting the supply chain, and revealing a 19th-century shipwreck

Morgan McFall-Johnsen, Paola Rosa-Aquino – October 21, 2022

man sits on rock watches people walk across exposed river bottom to big rock island in the mississippi river — Randy Statler sits on a rock to watch people walk to Tower Rock, an attraction normally surrounded by the Mississippi River and only accessible by boat, in Perry County, Missouri, on October 19, 2022.Jeff Roberson/AP Photo

The Mississippi River is receding to historic lows amid drought across the Midwest.
Barges are getting stuck on sandbars and forced to reduce their cargo, disrupting a critical shipping route.
The low waters also revealed human remains and a 19th-century shipwreck.

The waters of the Mississippi River have fallen to historic lows, driving a shipping and industry crisis in the heart of the US.

The Mississippi is a major channel for shipping and tourism, running from northern Minnesota down through the Midwest plains and emptying through Louisiana, with numerous tributaries stretching east and west. All that boat-based commerce relies on the river’s deep waters, which can accommodate hefty vessels carrying cargo like soybeans, corn, fertilizer, and oil, or cruise-line passengers.

tow trailing five barges floats under bridge in low river waters with exposed dirt banks — A barge tow floats past the exposed banks of the Mississippi River in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on October 11, 2022.Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo

For the past month, though, the water has dwindled so low that ships are getting stuck in the mud and sandbars at the river bottom. The Coast Guard imposed new restrictions on how low ships and barges can sit in the water. The price of shipping goods along the river skyrocketed, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) began emergency dredging to deepen the river at more than a dozen key choke points, where a backup of about 2,000 barges built up.

A NASA satellite image from October 7 shows the parched river, with barges queued up along its shorelines.

satellite image mississippi river low levels with dry banks exposed barges lined up along shores — An image from a Landsat satellite shows the parched Mississippi River north of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on October 7, 2022.NASA Earth Observatory/USGS Landsat

“This is the most severe we’ve ever seen in our industry in recent history,” Mike Ellis, the CEO of American Commercial Barge Line, told CNBC on Wednesday.

satellite image mississippi river with arrows pointing to barges lined up on shore — A close look at the satellite image reveals barges waiting on the river’s shores.NASA Earth Observatory/USGS Landsat

“That’s a significant impact to our supply chain,” Ellis said, adding, “We can’t get the goods there.”

The water receded so much that it revealed human remains and a 200-year-old shipwreck along the river’s new banks. In Missouri, people are walking across the dry, exposed riverbed to an island that’s normally only accessible by boat.

man looks at wooden shipwreck on banks of low river waters — A man walking along the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, stops to look at a shipwreck revealed by the low water level on October 17, 2022.Sara Cline/AP Photo

On the Louisiana coast, the river is so low that ocean water from the Gulf of Mexico began pushing upstream. USACE is racing to build a 1,500-foot-wide underwater levee to prevent saltwater from creeping further up the river, where it could contaminate drinking water, CNN reported on Tuesday. Already, there’s a drinking water advisory in effect for the coastal region of Plaquemines Parish.

Drought is drying the Mississippi River to record lows

paddlewheel boat full of windows passes between two bridges with low water on mississippi river — A passenger paddle wheeler passes between the river bridges in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on October 11, 2022.Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo

Just a few months ago, the Mississippi River basin was flooding. This summer, historic rainfall caused flash flooding and overflowing rivers in Kentucky, St. Louis, Missouri, parts of Illinois, and Jackson, Mississippi.

Despite these extreme sporadic rainfall events, overall, the Midwest is in an abnormal drought. The Ohio River Valley and the Upper Mississippi aren’t getting enough rain to feed the giant river.

us drought map october 11 2022 — US Drought Monitor

Up and down the Mississippi, waters have dropped to levels approaching the record low set in 1988. In Memphis, Tennessee, the waters plunged below that record on Monday, according to data from the National Weather Service.

“There is no rain in sight, that is the bottom line,” Lisa Parker, spokeswoman for the USACE Mississippi Valley Division, told the Journal. “The rivers are just bottoming out.”

dock full of boats sits on mud with river waters receding in the background — Boats rest in mud at Mud Island Marina as the water on the Mississippi River continues to recede in Memphis, Tennessee, on October 19, 2022.Scott Olson/Getty Images

Scientists must conduct rigorous analysis to attribute any single event to climate change. However, this year’s extreme conditions of both drought and floods is consistent with what scientists have been predicting and observing: Rising global temperatures are driving more weather variability in the central US, fueling both more severe droughts and one-off rainfall events.

That’s because climate change, driven by all the greenhouse gasses that humans have released into the atmosphere, is changing the planet’s water cycle. Rising temperatures are increasing water evaporation and changing the atmospheric and ocean currents that distribute moisture across the globe.

Droughts are unearthing relics and remains of the past

wooden remains of a ship in dry dirt near green grass and trees — The remains of a ship lay on the banks of the Mississippi River after recently being revealed due to the low water level, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on October 17, 2022.Sara Cline/AP Photo

The severe drought along the river is so intense that it uncovered a centuries-old shipwreck. In early October, low water levels revealed the old sunken ship along the banks of the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Archaeologists believe these remains are from a ferry that sunk in the late 19th or early 20th century, The Associated Press reported.

Though this is the first time the ship has been fully exposed, it’s not a new discovery. Small parts of the vessel emerged from low waters in the 1990s.

“At that time the vessel was completely full of mud and there was mud all around it so only the very tip tops of the sides were visible,” Chip McGimsey, Louisiana’s state archaeologist, told the AP. “They had to move a lot of dirt just to get some narrow windows in to see bits and pieces,” McGimsey said.

aerial photo show long wooden shipwreck on dry banks of low green river — A shipwreck is exposed along the banks of the Mississippi River due to low water levels, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on October 18, 2022.Stephen Smith/AP Photo

McGimsey thinks the ship could be the Brookhill Ferry, which carried people and possibly horse-drawn wagons across the Mississippi, until it sunk in a storm in 1915, according to news stories from the State Times archives.

The river’s receding waters also led to a more gruesome discovery. On Saturday, a Mississippi woman found human remains while searching for rocks with her family on the banks of the drought-stricken river. The remains included a lower jawbone, rib bones, and some unidentified bone pieces, Scotty Meredith, Coahoma County’s chief medical examiner, told CNN.

“Because these water levels are so low that we knew it was only a short matter of time before human remains were found,” Crystal Foster, the woman who found the remains, told WMC.

They are the latest in a bevy of discoveries to surface from receding waters. Over the summer, multiple set of remains were found in Nevada’s Lake Mead, which fell to historically low levels amid climate change-fueled drought.

But it’s not all bad news. Shrinking bodies of water could be a boon for experts tasked with solving missing persons cases, according to Jennifer Byrnes, a forensic anthropologist who consults with the Clark County coroner’s office, which reviews deaths in Lake Mead.

“A big body of water disappearing is going to help us, from a forensic perspective,” Byrnes told Insider.

Correction: October 21, 2022 —A photo caption in an earlier version of this story misstated the location of Vicksburg. The city is in Mississippi, not Louisiana.

Trump’s years-long crusade against Ukraine has finally come home to roost as Republicans call for abandoning Kyiv

Insider

Trump’s years-long crusade against Ukraine has finally come home to roost as Republicans call for abandoning Kyiv

John Haltiwanger, Sonam Sheth – October 20, 2022

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California. Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Trump’s years-long crusade against Ukraine has finally come home to roost as Republicans call for abandoning Kyiv

US aid to Ukraine could be in jeopardy if Republicans win the House in the midterms.
Several GOP lawmakers and candidates have signaled they would support reducing or cutting off Ukraine aid.
“Ukraine unfortunately has been hijacked sometimes in domestic politics. Now and then that happens,” a Zelenskyy advisor told Insider.

In a phone call with Ukraine’s president this month, US President Joe Biden pledged continued solidarity with Ukraine as it battles Russia’s military invasion and illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory.

But that level of support could be in jeopardy if the GOP gains control of the House of Representatives in this year’s midterm elections.

The warning signs have been building for months.

In April, 10 House Republicans voted against a bill allowing the Biden administration to more easily lend military equipment to Ukraine. The following month, 57 House Republicans voted “no” on a nearly $40 billion aid package for Ukraine. Both measures ultimately passed the chamber.

“I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who’s favored to become House Speaker if the GOP retakes the chamber, recently told Punchbowl News. “They just won’t do it.”

Ukraine has repeatedly defied expectations since Russia launched its unprovoked invasion, delivering a blow to the Russian military’s prestige. With the help of Western aid and at a massive personal cost, Ukrainian forces prevented Russia from seizing Kyiv in the early days of the war and more recently launched a counteroffensive that’s shown major signs of success.

But a far-right faction of the GOP has increasingly pushed against continued assistance to Ukraine, saying the billions the US has provided to Kyiv is too costly and not worth the risk of sparking a wider conflict with Russia.

President Donald Trump (right) meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (left) — In this Sept. 25, 2019 file photo President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the InterContinental Barclay New York hotel during the United Nations General Assembly in New York.AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File

A remarkable shift

The GOP’s gradual shift away from Ukraine and toward Russia has been years in the making, but right-wing hostility toward Ukraine hit a pivotal point during Donald Trump’s presidency.

In addition to peddling the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 US election, Trump was impeached in 2019 for withholding hundreds of millions in vital aid to Ukraine as it fought a war against Kremlin-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region.

While withholding the aid, Trump and his allies pressured Zelenskyy, a political neophyte who won the 2019 election in a landslide victory, to launch an investigation targeting the Bidens ahead of the 2020 US election.

Foreign policy experts said Trump’s actions — dangling security assistance in exchange for political favors — were a threat to the US’s national security and bipartisan support for Ukraine. But the vast majority of congressional Republicans rallied to Trump’s defense, and ultimately, just one Senate Republican, Mitt Romney, voted to convict the former president over his actions.

In the years since, Trump has continued to take a controversial stance on Ukraine, praising Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for invading as “genius” and “savvy.” The former president has often lauded the Russian leader, going out of his way to avoid criticizing Putin amid a historically contentious period in US-Russia relations.

Anti-Ukraine sentiment doesn’t just come from the top of the GOP. Putin has long been seen as a hero by the alt-right and white nationalists, and since Russia invaded Ukraine, many prominent right-wing politicians and media figures have moved in lockstep with the Kremlin, creating a feedback loop where each side amplifies and recycles the other’s propaganda.

On Fox News, for instance, the far-right host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly echoed a nonsense conspiracy theory, which originated in Moscow before taking root in the US, suggesting that Ukraine houses US-funded bioweapons labs.

Russian state-sponsored media outlets in turn frequently feature Carlson’s segments, and in March, Mother Jones reported that the Russian government instructed state media that it was “essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson” to spread negative information about Ukraine, the US, and NATO.

“When we see Fox News commentators, from our perspective, promote isolationist positions — that looks like support for Russia,” Mykola Kniazhytskyi, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, recently told NPR.

Some GOP opposition to continuing aid to Ukraine is tied to Trump’s “America First” policy vis-a-vis foreign affairs. Trump embraced a non-interventionist stance and was often critical of US spending abroad, particularly when it came to NATO and European security.

Congressional Republicans like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have echoed these sentiments in their criticism of US assistance to Ukraine.

It’s a remarkable shift for the Republican Party, which for years touted a hawkish position on foreign policy, especially as it related to leading adversaries like Russia. But under Trump’s stewardship, the party has become increasingly isolationist, and its growing opposition to aiding Ukraine is the latest and clearest sign of that.

Biden, meanwhile, has made the case that supporting Ukraine is part of a wider fight between democracy and autocracy. But a growing number of Republicans say sending aid to Kyiv should not be prioritized in Washington amid concerns over inflation and a potential recession.

“When people are seeing a 13% increase in grocery prices; energy, utility bills doubling … if you’re a border community and you’re being overrun by migrants and fentanyl, Ukraine is the furthest thing from your mind,” GOP Rep. Kelly Armstrong told Axios.

Democrats are more optimistic about retaining the Senate, but according to forecaster FiveThirtyEight, their chances have gone down in recent weeks based on polling in four key contests in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and North Carolina.

And in Ohio, GOP Senate candidate JD Vance has made it clear that he would vote against sending more aid to Ukraine, saying in September that “we’ve got to stop the money spigot to Ukraine eventually. We cannot fund a long-term military conflict that I think ultimately has diminishing returns for our own country.”

‘The cards have been dealt’

There are some in Kyiv who believe that US support to Ukraine will continue regardless of which party controls Congress.

“Ukraine unfortunately has been hijacked sometimes in domestic politics. Now and then that happens,” Tymofiy Mylovanov, an advisor to Zelenskyy who previously served as Ukraine’s economic minister, told Insider. “We try our best to stay away from this. We would like to stay away from this.”

“Despite all that rhetoric, the support has always been bipartisan,” Mylovanov said, adding that the amount of assistance Ukraine needs is a small fraction of the US GDP. “In terms of what it means in the budget — it means nothing. It’s not trillions of dollars,” he said.

The US has provided over $20 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014. The Biden administration has sent Ukraine $18.2 billion in military aid, including roughly $17.6 billion since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in late February.

Other Western countries have provided important assistance to Ukraine, but the US has contributed the most of any individual country so far.

Weapons the US sent, including Javelin anti-tank missiles and High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), have turned the tables on Russia by blunting its previous advantages in armored vehicles and artillery. If US aid to Kyiv suddenly dried up, it would likely curtail Ukraine’s ability to oust sizable Russian columns from dug-in positions.

Trump, meanwhile, called for a negotiated settlement to the war during a rally earlier this month. “We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War III,” he said at the time.

But Putin has shown little interest in negotiating, as evidenced by the drastic steps he’s taken in recent weeks. Beyond the illegal annexations, Putin announced a partial military mobilization — calling up hundreds of thousands of men — and imposed martial law in the regions Moscow claims are now part of Russia but does not fully control.

Russia has also ramped up missile and drone attacks against civilian areas while destroying key infrastructure across Ukraine.

But Mylovanov, the former economic minister who is also the president at the Kyiv School of Economics, said that while Russia wants Ukraine to surrender, the “Ukrainian people will not have it.”

“People think that what happens in Kyiv is decided either in Moscow or Washington or Brussels, or maybe Beijing. It is not, it’s decided in Ukraine,” Mylovanov said.

“The cards have been dealt,” he added, and it’s up to the US if it wants to be at the table.

Trump drops F-bombs and shares potentially sensitive information in newly released audio

Yahoo! Entertainment

Trump drops F-bombs and shares potentially sensitive information in newly released audio

Stephen Proctor – October 19, 2022

Previously unheard audio featuring former President Donald Trump aired Tuesday on Anderson Cooper 360. Famed journalist Bob Woodward recorded 20 conversations he had with the former president, with Trump’s knowledge, from 2016 through 2020. Trump, who is facing possible legal peril for taking classified documents when he left office, appears in one recording to share sensitive information with Woodward.

“I have built a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before,” Trump said. “We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before.”

Trump also spoke of Russia’s nuclear capabilities.

“Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing, alright?” Trump said. “Especially because they have 1,332 nuclear f***ing warheads.”

Throughout his presidency, Trump was criticized for his apparent affinity for authoritarian leaders, which he spoke about to Woodward.

“It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, OK,” Trump said. “But maybe it’s not a bad thing. The easy ones are the ones I maybe don’t like as much or don’t get along with as much.”

In another recording, Trump brags about how he handled being impeached, while at the same time taking shots at two of his predecessors who also faced impeachment.

“There’s nobody that’s tougher than me,” Trump said. “Nobody’s tougher than me. You asked me about impeachment. I’m under impeachment, and you said, you know, you just act like you won the f***ing race. Nixon was in a corner with his thumb in his mouth. Bill Clinton took it very, very hard. I just do things, OK?”

In 2016, Woodward asked then-candidate Trump about having his staff sign non-disclosure agreements. Woodward recorded Trump talking to his staff about who had and who had not yet signed one. Trump was confident in the effectiveness of these agreements at the time, but a multitude of former officials wrote tell-all books after leaving the administration.

Woodward plans to release the more than eight hours of recordings as an audiobook titled The Trump Tapes on Oct. 25.

Former DOJ official says Trump’s reaction to the January 6 panel is starting to look like the makings of an insanity defense

Business Insider

Former DOJ official says Trump’s reaction to the January 6 panel is starting to look like the makings of an insanity defense

Cheryl Teh – October 17, 2022

The former DOJ official Neal Katyal commented on Donald Trump’s 14-page response to the DOJ.
Katyal said he did not think the response would help Trump unless he was trying to plead insanity.
He said Trump’s response showed “evidence” of an insanity plea.

Neal Katyal, a former Justice Department official, says former President Donald Trump’s written response to the House Capitol-riot panel’s intention to subpoena him looks like an insanity defense.

Katyal — a law professor and an Obama-era acting solicitor general — made an appearance on NBC on Sunday, three days after the House panel investigating January 6, 2021, unanimously voted to subpoena Trump. The subpoena will compel the former president to cooperate with the committee or be held in contempt of Congress and referred to the Justice Department for prosecution — much like Trump’s allies Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro.

In response to the decision, Trump sent a document to the panel that started with the sentence, “THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN!” and contained multiple baseless claims of election fraud. It also included four photos of the crowd near the Washington Monument on January 6, 2021.

“Yeah, so, this is a 14-page screed, Jonathan, that’s very hard to follow. But it does seem to dig the hole in deeper for Donald Trump,” Katyal told the MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart.

“I can’t see it in any legal way helping him unless he is trying to go for the insanity defense, of which this paper seems, you know, to be some evidence of,” Katyal added.

Katyal also said he thought it was a “pretty fanciful” idea that Trump would just give in and testify to the panel because of the congressional subpoena.

“I mean, this is a man who took the Fifth Amendment more than 400 times the last time he was questioned under oath. And I doubt he’s suddenly become eager to testify,” Katyal said.

Katyal was referencing Trump’s deposition in August during New York Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation into the Trump Organization’s business practices, during which he pleaded the Fifth more than 440 times and answered only a question about what his name was.

Katyal added that he thought Attorney General Merrick Garland would indict Trump, as there’s overwhelming evidence to do so and “no contrition whatsoever” on Trump’s part.

A representative at Trump’s post-presidential press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As FBI probed Jan. 6, many agents sympathized with insurrection, according to newly released email

USA Today

As FBI probed Jan. 6, many agents sympathized with insurrection, according to newly released email

Will Carless, USA TODAY – October 15, 2022

A “sizable percentage” of FBI employees felt sympathy towards the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, and considered the riot at the U.S. Capitol “no different than the BLM protests,” according to a warning email sent to a top FBI official by someone with apparent connections to the bureau.

In the email, which is included in a trove of documents released by the bureau this week, the sender’s name is redacted. The documents indicate the message came from an email address outside the bureau, though the subject line is “Internal concerns.”

The email was sent to Paul Abbate, now the second highest official at the FBI, who responded an hour later, thanking the sender for the message.

USA TODAY investigation: FBI agents monitor social media. As domestic threats rise, the question is who they’re watching

FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate at a news conference in 2021.

The Jan. 13, 2021, email contained a stark warning about attitudes toward the insurrection within the bureau:

“I literally had to explain to an agent from a ‘blue state’ office the difference between opportunists burning and looting during protests that stemmed legitimate grievance to police brutality vs. an insurgent mob whose purpose was to prevent the execution of democratic processes at the behest of a sitting president,” the email states. “One is a smattering of criminals, the other is an organized group of domestic terrorists.”

And it relayed concerns from agents within the bureau:

“I’ve spoken to multiple African American agents who have turned down asks to join SWAT because they do not trust that every member of their office’s SWAT team would protect them in an armed conflict.”

More: Police were warned about right-wing extremism as far back as 2009

Michael German, a former FBI special agent and a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University and an outspoken critic of the bureau, said the email didn’t surprise him.

“It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t expect already, but I think it’s important to substantiate the suspicions me and many other people had,” German said. “They clearly are on notice about a much more serious problem within the FBI.”

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the email.

While there may be some sympathy towards the Capitol rioters within the FBI, the bureau’s investigations have nonetheless contributed to Justice Department prosecutions of almost 900 people who were there that day. Scores of defendants have received jail time for their crimes. Dozens more have agreed to cooperate with the prosecutions.

But there has been pushback. Earlier this year, FBI special agent Stephen Friend was suspended for refusing to participate in prosecutions of Jan. 6 protesters. Friend’s stance was praised by Republican lawmakers, who called him “patriotic.”

The FBI email sheds more light on a problem that has been endemic in American law enforcement for decades, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, who has studied white supremacists since the 1980s.

“The situation has been serious enough that the FBI for almost 20 years, has been warning of insider threats from cops,” Beirich said. “And the thing is, nobody’s done anything about it.”

Military extremists: How the Navy and Marine Corps quietly discharged white supremacists

A 2009 warning about extremists recruiting members of the military and police officers went largely ignored by the federal government, and resulted in the ostracizing of the author of the study, a senior Department of Homeland Security official.

Ten years later, a 2019 study by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of active duty police officers were active inside racist, Islamophobic and anti-government groups on Facebook. Another study by the Plain View Project compiled hundreds of hateful and racist posts made on Facebook by police officers. Last year, USA TODAY found more than 200 people who claimed they worked for police departments in a leaked database of members of the Oath Keepers, an armed extremist group that is now the subject of one of the biggest prosecutions emerging from Jan. 6.

Oath Keepers trial: 1800s-inspired defense meets most significant Jan. 6 prosecution yet

And as USA TODAY reported last month, the FBI itself has also been heavily criticized for directing domestic extremism investigations overwhelmingly towards left-wing targets.

The FBI has a long and troubled history of focusing on groups on the left of the political spectrum while largely turning a blind eye to domestic extremists on the far-right, Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told USA TODAY.

“Both historically speaking and in current events, we’ve seen the amount of surveillance that has been marshaled specifically against groups fighting for racial justice increased exponentially than from what we’ve seen being monitored on the right,” said Guariglia, who holds a doctorate in the history of police surveillance.

Beirich said given the conservative nature of law enforcement, there is bound to be some “overlap” into far-right extremism within the ranks. The biggest problem is a lack of action taken by departments to root out extremists on the payroll, she said.

“Even right now, there aren’t policies in a whole lot of departments about what to do with these guys — there’s no screening mechanisms,” Beirich said. “There’s no effort to really deal with it.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert Ripped By GOP Primary Opponent In Op-Ed

Lee Moran – October 15, 2022

Colorado Republican Don Coram urged voters to back Democratic challenger Adam Frisch in the upcoming November election.

A former GOP primary challenger to far-right U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado took the bold move this week of endorsing her Democratic rival in the 2022 election.

In an op-ed Wednesday for the Montrose Daily Press, Republican state Sen. Don Coram painted Boebert as a liar who “claims credit for things she had absolutely nothing to do with.”

Coram urged Colorado voters to back Adam Frisch, a former member of the Aspen City Council, in what the polls currently predict will be a close race in November.

Boebert “spends her time jet-setting around the country promoting herself and extreme rhetoric that only divides this country further,” wrote Coram. “It’s disgraceful and we should expect more from our United States representative.”

He added, “I believe Adam Frisch is a good man,” and said the Democrat is “decent, honest, and persistent.”

Frisch has “demonstrated that he is more interested in representing the district than being a celebrity,” Coram wrote. “That’s important.”

A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes from a Mar-a-Lago storage room before and after the DOJ subpoenaed Trump for top-secret documents

Insider

A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes from a Mar-a-Lago storage room before and after the DOJ subpoenaed Trump for top-secret documents: NYT

Cheryl Teh – October 13, 2022

Walt Nauta, a longtime Trump aide, was seen moving boxes out from a storage room the FBI searched.
The incidents were caught on security footage, The New York Times reported.
Nauta was seen moving boxes before and after the DOJ demanded top-secret files be returned in May.

A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes out of a storage room in Mar-a-Lago, per a report from The New York Times. The Times did not view the security footage and Insider was not independently able to verify its contents.

The Times spoke to three people familiar with the matter, who said longtime Trump staffer Walt Nauta was seen on Mar-a-Lago’s security footage moving boxes out of a storage room that was later searched by the FBI. This took place both before and after the Department of Justice issued a subpoena in May ordering Trump to hand over classified documents, per the NYT’s sources.

Intrigue has swirled around what was kept in the storage room, and whether anything was removed from it before the DOJ searched Trump’s property. The Times’ piece dropped hours after The Washington Post reported that Trump himself explicitly directed employees to move boxes of White House documents from the storage room. These boxes were taken from the storage area to the former president’s private residence after Trump advisers received the DOJ’s subpoena in May, per The Post.

The FBI also interviewed Nauta several times before it raided Mar-a-Lago on August 8, according to one of The Times’ sources.

After the raid, the FBI carted off 11,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago, including some that were marked “CLASSIFIED.” Investigators found documents inside a closet in Trump’s office and a storage area in the property’s basement. Some of the documents the FBI found were so sensitive that investigators needed further clearance to view them. Among the documents retrieved was classified information on a foreign country’s nuclear defenses, The Washington Post reported.

The DOJ is currently investigating whether Trump broke three federal laws — including the Espionage Act — by keeping the files at his Florida residence. In an August court filing, the Justice Department said it had evidence “that government records were likely concealed and removed” from the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, and that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”

Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., declined to comment on The Times’ reporting. Taylor Budowich, Trump’s spokesman at his post-presidential press office, told The Times the Biden administration was “colluding with the media through targeted leaks in an overt and illegal act of intimidation and tampering.”

Budowich and Woodward Jr. did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.

Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes from a Mar-a-Lago storage room before and after the DOJ subpoenaed Trump for top-secret documents:

Business Insider

A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes from a Mar-a-Lago storage room before and after the DOJ subpoenaed Trump for top-secret documents: NYT

Cheryl Teh – October 13, 2022

Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images
A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes from a Mar-a-Lago storage room before and after the DOJ subpoenaed Trump for top-secret documents: NYT

Walt Nauta, a longtime Trump aide, was seen moving boxes out from a storage room the FBI searched.
The incidents were caught on security footage, The New York Times reported.
Nauta was seen moving boxes before and after the DOJ demanded top-secret files be returned in May.

The FBI also interviewed Nauta several times before it raided Mar-a-Lago on August 8, according to one of The Times’ sources.

Budowich and Woodward Jr. did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.

Republicans Plan to Use Debt Limit Leverage to Reduce Social Security, Medicare: Report

The Fiscal Times

Republicans Plan to Use Debt Limit Leverage to Reduce Social Security, Medicare: Report

Michael Rainey – October 12, 2022

Republicans in the House are planning to use a potential showdown next year over raising the federal debt limit to make changes in Social Security and Medicare, Bloomberg’s Jack Fitzpatrick reports.

The developing plan hinges on Republicans winning control of the House in the midterm elections, an outcome that is looking likely. Four GOP lawmakers who are vying for leadership of the House Budget Committee in the event of a Republican victory told Fitzpatrick that the need to raise the debt ceiling could give them the leverage they need to force Democrats to make concessions.

“The debt limit is clearly one of those tools that Republicans — that a Republican-controlled Congress — will use to make sure that we do everything we can to make this economy strong,” Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), the senior Republican on the current Budget Committee, said.

Republicans are still discussing exactly what changes they might try to enact. “What would we consider a win?” said Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA), who is interested in the top spot on the Budget Committee. “What would we consider to be a fiscally responsible budget?”

Although the details are still up in the air, one theme is clear: House Republicans want to reduce federal spending, and the major entitlement programs are a target. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) Carter said that Republicans’ “main focus has got to be on nondiscretionary — it’s got to be on entitlements.”

Shrinking the safety net: One option reportedly being discussed is raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare, the two largest mandatory spending programs. Each faces financial squeezes in the coming years as the baby boomers age and continue to retire. Under current rules, the Social Security system would be forced to cut benefits starting in 2034, while Medicare could run short of funds by 2028.

Earlier this year, the Republican Study Committee released a plan to raise the eligibility age for Social Security to 70 and the eligibility age for Medicare to 67. The increases would be phased in over time and once the target is reached, the eligibility age would then be indexed to life expectancy. The lawmakers also called for increased means testing in the Medicare program, and a privatization option for Social Security.

Other options being considered include more stringent work requirements and income limits for what Smith called “welfare programs,” including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program more commonly known as food stamps. And new caps on discretionary spending could limit spending increases over 10 years.

One thing that won’t be cut: defense spending. Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX) told Bloomberg that he wants to cut nondefense spending in order to provide more money for the military.

Willing to risk “catastrophe”? Republicans say they are leery about pushing too far in their demands, but many experts think that any effort to use the debt limit as leverage in negotiations is unacceptably risky. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that defaulting on U.S. debt payments — which would occur if the U.S. failed to raise the debt ceiling — would cause a “catastrophe” in the global economy.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) accused the GOP of taking huge risks in order to cut important social programs. “House Republicans are openly threatening to cause an economic catastrophe in order to realize their obsession with slashing Medicare and Social Security,” a Pelosi spokesperson told Bloomberg. “As House Republican leaders’ own words constantly reveal, dismantling the pillars of American seniors’ financial security is not a fringe view in the extreme MAGA House GOP, it is a broadly held obsession at the core of their legislative agenda.”

House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth (D-KY) also criticized Republican plans. “Holding the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to implement an extreme and unpopular agenda is not governing, it’s desperation,” Yarmuth said in a statement. “Congressional Republicans are so hellbent on gutting Social Security and ending Medicare as we know it that they are willing to risk economic catastrophe to get it done. This is a desperate attempt to shower the wealthy and big corporations with even more tax giveaways by intentionally sacrificing the needs of American families.”

Democrats do have one option for disarming Republicans ahead of a debt ceiling showdown: They could attempt to raise the ceiling on their own during the lame-duck session at the end of the year, potentially denying the GOP the use of that weapon. But both Yarmuth and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) told Bloomberg there has been no discussion among Democrats about such a plan.

The bottom line: Taking a page from the tea party playbook from a decade ago, expect to see Republicans attempting to force spending reductions in the next Congress — reductions that could involve fundamental changes in the way the country’s top safety net programs operate.

Members of Nevada Senate candidate’s family endorse opponent

Associated Press

Members of Nevada Senate candidate’s family endorse opponent

Gabe Stern – October 12, 2022

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Less than a month before Election Day, 14 members of Nevada Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt’s family sent a letter endorsing his opponent, Democratic U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

“We staunchly believe that Catherine is well equipped with her own ‘Nevada grit’ — a quality that she will take forward in representation of our home state for six more years across the halls of Congress,” the letter states.

The letter, first obtained by The Nevada Independent, does not mention Laxalt by name.

Instead, it talks of Cortez Masto’s understanding of “the daily realities of dogged hard work” and mentions her experience in public education as well as her commitment to law enforcement.

The family members also wrote that Cortez Masto’s career demonstrates she is “an authentic advocate of Nevada.”

It marks the second time that some of Laxalt’s family has endorsed his opponent. During his unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2018, a dozen family members endorsed Democrat Steve Sisolak in an op-ed to the Reno Gazette-Journal. That letter more explicitly criticized Laxalt, saying he “leveraged and exploited” the family name throughout his campaign.

That letter prompted 22 of his family members to send another op-ed, defending Laxalt and calling the other letter “vicious and entirely baseless.”

The grandson of former U.S. Sen. and Nevada Gov. Paul Laxalt and the son of former Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, Laxalt is seen by many as the best opportunity for Republicans to pick up a seat that could give them the majority in the Senate.

In a tweet on Wednesday afternoon, Laxalt said it is “not surprising” that family members, most of whom he said are Democrats, are supporting Cortez Masto.

“They think that Nevada & our country are heading in the right direction. I believe Nevadans don’t agree,” he said.

The Laxalt family joins a growing list of endorsers from across the aisle, Cortez Masto spokesperson Sigalle Reshef said in a statement, citing law enforcement organizations and rural lawmakers who have endorsed the Democratic candidate.

Stern is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.