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Trump tries to nullify votes in Wisconsin recount (nationthailand.com)

Trump tries to nullify votes in Wisconsin recount

InternationalNov 23. 2020Election worker Marion Fields, 86, sorts ballots on the first day of the recount in Milwaukee County on Friday. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Taylor Glascock 

By The Washington Post · Rosalind S. Helderman, Dan Simmons · NATIONAL, POLITICS

President Donald Trump’s campaign is seeking to use a recount of the presidential election in Wisconsin to attempt to invalidate tens of thousands of votes in the state, making sweeping challenges to whole categories of ballots cast in the state’s two Democratic-leaning counties in his last-gasp effort to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s win.

Counting at the Wisconsin Center in Milwaukee was temporarily put on hold Friday after objections from President Donald Trump’s team about the distance of legal observers. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Taylor Glascock

As a recount began on Friday in Dane and Milwaukee counties – home to the cities of Madison and Milwaukee – Trump lawyers argued that officials should not merely retabulate all the votes cast in the Nov. 3 election to reconfirm they’d been counted properly.

Instead, they argued that large batches of ballots had been improperly accepted and counted in the first place. In both Dane and Milwaukee, they sought to disqualify all absentee ballots that had been cast before Election Day in person, rather than by mail.

Election workers in Milwaukee examine ballots on Friday. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Taylor Glascock

So far, their efforts have been rejected by the Democratic-majority boards of canvasses in both counties, which have denied attempts to set aside large categories of ballots and instead proceeded to a slow-moving process to retabulate all the votes.

The recount must conclude no later than Dec. 1, when the election is scheduled to be certified. At that point, the president’s campaign could file a lawsuit over its rejected challenges – potentially delaying certification.

Milwaukee Election Commissioner Tim Posnanski, center, listens to a question during recount proceedings. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Taylor Glascock

Trump’s aggressive posture in Wisconsin comes as his efforts to undo Biden’s national victory with false claims of widespread fraud have met with defeat after defeat, including in a ruling Saturday by a federal judge in Pennsylvania, who rejected the campaign’s efforts to stop that state from certifying its election results. The Trump campaign filed an appeal Sunday.

The president’s team is scrambling to try to head off other states from finalizing their vote tallies, filing a request late Saturday for another recount in Georgia and calling on Michigan’s state board of canvassing not to certify the vote when it meets Monday.

In Wisconsin, as in other states, Trump’s effort appears futile. The unofficial tally shows Biden defeated Trump there by about 20,600 votes – a margin unlikely to change substantially in an ordinary recount. In 2016, when Green Party candidate Jill Stein requested a more extensive statewide recount, it resulted in Trump widening his victory in Wisconsin by a mere 131 votes.

This year, Democrats said the Trump campaign appears to be using the recount process to cynically target urban voters, particularly in Milwaukee. At one point on Friday, some of the tables where Milwaukee city ballots were being processed inside the city’s convention center were surrounded by multiple Trump campaign observers – forcing the Milwaukee County board of canvassers to clarify that the campaigns could have just one representative per table.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said in an interview last week that he believed the Trump campaign’s decision to target for a recount only two counties – including Milwaukee, which has a large Black population – was no coincidence.

“It looks like he’s looking to pretty much everything he can to disenfranchise voters of color,” said Crowley, the first African American elected to the county post.

In a statement, Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis said, “Every American deserves to know that our elections are conducted in a legal manner, no matter who they are or where they live. That’s our only goal: to ensure safe, secure, and fair elections. That’s what our Constitution requires.”

The recounts are taking place in vast convention halls in Madison and Milwaukee to provide more room for large numbers of election workers, observers and media to crowd together indoors for hours on end amid the pandemic.

The process began on Friday, as hundreds of workers raised their right hands, most of them covered in blue surgical gloves, and recited their oath.

Trump campaign lawyer Stewart Karge almost immediately accused the newly sworn-in Milwaukee election workers of starting to open and look at ballot applications before the board of canvassers authorized it. “I’m just telling you what I’ve been informed,” he said to the board, citing no evidence.

Twice, Trump supporters erupted in cheers as he spoke, prompting an angry response from the board’s only Republican member.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we need this to be an orderly process,” thundered Rick Baas, staring down a group of Trump observers. “We will not be those other states!”

Other GOP officials in the state have pushed back against the president’s sweeping claims of fraud in cities.

Trump tweeted on Wednesday that Biden had received in Milwaukee a “dump of 143,379 votes at 3:42AM, when they learned he was losing badly. This is unbelievable!”

In fact, the late-reported batch of ballots that broke for Biden were absentee ballots cast by mail or in person before Election Day that election officials had long said would not be counted until after the polls closed.

The Republican majority leader of the Wisconsin State Assembly, Jim Steineke, posted a message on Facebook on Nov. 4 that the early-morning report was “NOT a surprise.”

“Them being reported late is NOT an indication of fraud,” he added.

Steineke did not respond to requests for comment.

On Sunday, Republican Robin Vos, speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, defended Trump’s right to seek a recount but noted that Biden’s margin was a “lot to overcome.”

“I assume Joe Biden is going to win, because I think it’s very unlikely that we’re going to find 20,000 cases of fraud,” he told Madison’s WKOW television station.

The count in Milwaukee proceeded slowly Saturday as county officials complained that Trump campaign observers appeared to be trying to stall the process.

“The Trump campaign is continually revisiting issues the commission has ruled on,” County Clerk George Christenson told reporters.

Christenson also complained about the behavior of Trump campaign inspectors, who fanned out at about 150 ballot-processing tables across the vast convention hall.

“The observers are disruptive, asking question after question” of the workers sorting and processing the ballots, he said. “It needs to stop.”

Trump representatives countered that they were not able to see every ballot adequately from the mandated three-foot distance and through the plexiglass shields that had been erected as a precaution because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Michael Maistelman, a Wisconsin election lawyer who has worked with Democratic candidates, said he believed the Trump campaign was issuing “frivolous, irrational objections” in Milwaukee to drag out the process.

Despite the president’s drumbeat of fraud claims, the Trump campaign has not alleged fraud was committed in Wisconsin.

Instead, the campaign has argued that election clerks statewide have adopted practices in soliciting and accepting absentee ballots that violate state law.

The largest category of ballots the Trump campaign has targeted were cast by voters who cast absentee ballots in person rather than by mail. Nearly 70,000 people cast absentee ballots in person in Dane County and another 108,000 in Milwaukee.

The campaign said that the paperwork filled out by people who voted in person did not constitute a proper application for a ballot, as required by state law.

“Wisconsin law expressly requires that absentee ballots may not be issued without receiving a written application requesting the ballot,” the campaign said in a statement, indicating that “despite this clear mandatory requirement, clerks uniformly issued absentee ballots without collecting a written application” from people who voted in person during a two-week period leading up to the election.

State officials have said voters who cast absentee ballots in person sign a document to certify their vote that also constitutes an application.

Such ballots were cast in the same way across much of Wisconsin – including counties that the president won.

But the Trump campaign is seeking only a recount in the two counties where Biden performed best: He won 75 percent of the vote in Dane and 69 percent of the vote in Milwaukee.

Trump was allowed to request a recount statewide, since Biden’s margin of victory – about 0.6 percent – is less than 1 percent. However, state law required that Trump pay for the recount upfront, and officials estimated a complete recount would cost $7.9 million. Instead, the Trump campaign opted to pay $3 million to recount the ballots only in two counties.

When the campaign filed a petition seeking the recount Wednesday, Jim Troupis, a lawyer for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, said in a statement that the campaign believed the Wisconsin Elections Commission had provided “unlawful advice” and “repeatedly failed to follow the law” about how to conduct the election and as a result “disenfranchised voters and undermined the integrity of this election.”

He wrote that the campaign was confident that “when all of the legal ballots are counted and illegal ballots are not counted, President Trump will be proven the winner.”

A lawyer for the Biden campaign countered that the recount would only reaffirm Biden’s victory in Wisconsin and expressed confidence that the Trump campaign’s 11th-hour bid to toss tens of thousands of ballots would fail.

“They are not actually interested in recounting the votes,” Danielle Friedman, a lawyer for Biden’s campaign, told reporters. “They’re interested in changing the way the election was conducted – after the votes were already cast and counted.”

Even if courts agreed with the campaign’s interpretation of the law, they would likely be loathe to throw out tens of thousands of otherwise legally valid ballots cast by voters in good faith, legal experts said.

Jeffrey Mandell, an election lawyer and founder of the Law Forward, a nonprofit liberal law firm that focuses on election issues, said he believed courts would view the challenges “very skeptically.”

“The timing alone is hugely problematic,” he said, arguing that if the Trump campaign did not like Wisconsin’s practices, it should have challenged them before the election.

Even if a court agreed with the campaign’s legal argument, he said it was unlikely a judge would agree the proper remedy would be to ditch tens of thousands of ballots from voters who did nothing other than follow the instructions they’d been given.

“To hold that against the voter and take their vote away from them, when they’ve done nothing wrong, I think it’s contrary to fundamental principles of justice, to how most courts see their role and to Wisconsin law,” he said.

The campaign also objected to two other processes that have been more controversial in the state – but have also been in place since before the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won and did not contest.

In one, clerks are allowed to fix some mail-in ballots that arrive with a tiny error. In Wisconsin, mail-in ballots require a certification that is signed by both the voter and a witness. Both people must include their address. If the witness fails to include or complete his or her address and that information is readily available to election workers via voter rolls or other information, election officials are allowed to add it to the document. The process was established in mid-October 2016.

Likewise, the Trump campaign has challenged a process in place since 2011 in which voters who declare themselves “indefinitely confined” due to age or disability and do not have to submit a photo identification, a requirement for others.

While the number of people who took advantage of the provision rose this year due to the pandemic, the rules have not otherwise changed. In all, more than 68,000 people sought the status in the two counties in which the Trump campaign has requested a recount – out of 215,000 who did so statewide.

“Absentee voting is a privilege – it should not be abused,” Karge told the Milwaukee board Saturday in seeking to question the validity of the ballots. He added that the distinction created “a separate class of voters.”

Biden lawyer Stacie Rosenzweig replied that the effort amounted to a “bald attempt to disenfranchise” hundreds of thousands of voters. She said the increase in voters unable for health reasons to leave home was understandable during a pandemic and called Karge’s arguments “simply meritless.”

The board agreed. Both Democratic members voted to reject the challenge, and Baas, the Republican, voted present. “I don’t believe this to be the appropriate body” to decide the matter, he said.

Rick Esenberg, a conservative election law expert and president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, said he did not believe the Trump campaign would fare better on the issue in court.

While he said there are “legitimate” questions about the state’s rules for people to declare themselves indefinitely confined that the state might examine in the future, he did not believe a court would be inclined to throw out the ballots given that it would be difficult to determine quickly whether any specific voters had unfairly taken advantage of the provision.

“I think it’s highly unlikely that the issue could result in a change in the outcome,” he said.

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Thanksgiving travels unravel college fears (nationthailand.com)

Thanksgiving travels unravel college fears

InternationalNov 23. 2020Maggie Pidto, 21, a senior at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, swabs inside her nose to test for the coronavirus at the Kohl Center arena, an on-campus testing site. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Lauren Justice 

By The Washington Post · Nick Anderson, Susan Svrluga · NATIONAL, HEALTH, EDUCATION, HEALTH-FEATURES

MADISON, Wis. – They have endured the strangest fall term in memory, cooped up in dormitories and apartments, taking classes mostly online, seeing professors in person only occasionally, if at all, hanging out with just a few close friends and imagining how this lakeshore capital in a state swamped by the coronavirus might someday recover its boisterous college vibe when the pandemic subsides.

The Kohl Center offers coronavirus testing for University of Wisconsin students and employees. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Lauren Justice

Now thousands of University of Wisconsin students are making getaway plans, part of a mass pre-Thanksgiving exodus from campuses nationwide that could spread the dangerous pathogen in hometowns across the country if students and schools aren’t careful.

Maggie Pidto is careful. The 21-year-old Wisconsin senior stopped by the Kohl Center arena one recent afternoon to swab inside her nose for a viral test that came back negative, her seventh of the semester. She planned to do it again the next day to get ready for her trip home to West Hartford, Conn. She wants to protect her parents.

The virus infected one of her roommates this fall, who then had to isolate in their off-campus apartment. But so far, Pidto has dodged infection. “I’m constantly stressed about it,” she said.

Thanksgiving has become a pivotal moment for higher education as the pandemic intensifies. It casts a spotlight not only on the risk of student travel plans, but also on how a wildly unpredictable semester has unfolded and what might happen next.

Isolation rooms are set aside for University of Wisconsin at Madison students who test positive. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Lauren Justice

Many schools that brought large numbers of students back to campus are dispersing them for the rest of the year – discouraging back-and-forth holiday travel – and pondering how much they can resume operations in January. Faculty are debating the wisdom of housing students and teaching in person under such challenging conditions.

Students are weighing how to keep their education on track and stay safe. But they also are tired of masks, social distancing and other restrictions as they approach a holiday known for gatherings of friends and family.

That exhaustion worries medical experts as the national death toll from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, has surpassed 250,000. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on Thursday that college students traveling home should be treated as “overnight guests” and take appropriate precautions. But many are unlikely to take the rigorous quarantine steps that public health experts advise.

“A lot of folks I think are reacting as if this is the last Thanksgiving we’ll ever have,” said Jill Foster, director of the division of pediatric infectious diseases and immunology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Families with college students need to have honest conversations about risk, she said, and not let down their guard. “I say, ‘Picture Thanksgiving 2021, sitting around the table. We’ve had the vaccine. The pandemic is under better control. Who’s not going to be at that table because this year you’re not patient?’ “

The tents are for items to be delivered to students who are being quarantined. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Lauren Justice

Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said most college students who come home should be considered a potential carrier of contagion. That is true, he said, even if schools provide exit testing.

“If tests are available, that can somewhat decrease their risk, but it’s not ironclad,” Adalja said in a press briefing. “Think about who’s in your household. … Is this a multigenerational household,which has elderly people or individuals with high-risk conditions?”

At Ohio State University, where more than 4,700 students have tested positive this fall, officials urged preholiday testing and caution at every step of their travels. “Though you may head home with a negative test result, your COVID-19 status could change as you are interacting with others and celebrating the holidays,” the university told students. Ohio State ended most of its in-person teaching Friday evening.

Many colleges are not investing much in viral testing. But with high stakes for public health, experts say testing volume matters.

Harry Brighouse, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, teaches an in-person class. Some remote students join the discussion through video on Brighouse’s laptop. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Lauren Justice

In North Carolina, Duke University is testing 2,500 students a day, seven days a week, as the holiday approaches, said Thomas Denny, professor of medicine and chief operating officer of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. The university has had fewer than 150 positive cases among students this semester. The goal now is to identify infections, trace contacts and quarantine those who were exposed, Denny said, “so we won’t send people back to their home communities positive.” Duke’s semester wraps up just before Thanksgiving.

At the University of Georgia, surveillance testing doubled in the two weeks before Thanksgiving to 1,000 people a day. Officials asked students to consider quarantining for two weeks before heading home and for two weeks more once there. Classes and exams will be held online after the holiday. Since August, the university has logged more than 3,600 positive cases among students. “Stay Georgia strong/Dawg strong,” officials urged, appealing to their school spirit with a nod to the Bulldog mascot.

Clemson University in South Carolina began testing all students on campus every week in early October. Dorms are at normal capacity. More than 4,900 students have tested positive since June. Most cases have been mild or asymptomatic; school officials aren’t aware of any that required hospitalization.

“You must test – the virus is with us, whether we pretend like it is or not,” said Corey Kalbaugh, an assistant professor of public health sciences who is the school’s leadepidemiologist. “At Clemson, we haven’t pretended.”

For Thanksgiving, he said, “I would be far more worried if we weren’t testing. … The virus is what it is. You can never catch 100 percent of positive cases, but we’ll try to catch every one we can before we send students home to their families.” Clemson, like Wisconsin and many other schools, is finishing the semester remotely after the holiday.

Here in Madison, the state’s flagship university of 44,000 students is requiring those who live on campus to get tested before the holiday and encouraging those who live off campus to do so as well. To meet the demand, officials added testing times on the weekend before Thanksgiving.

The university had a rocky start to the semester as viral cases spiked in early September. The school imposed a temporary quarantine on two large dorms and paused face-to-face teaching for two weeks. Those measures, coupled with ramped-up viral testing, helped stabilize operations, said Rebecca Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In all, the university counts more than 4,200 positive viral tests among its students since the summer and more than 370 among employees. Those cases have led to one hospitalization, officials say, and no deaths. The university has set aside rooms in hotels and dorms to isolate those in campus housing who get infected and quarantine those who may have been exposed to the virus.

“We’re doing OK,” Blank said in a videoconference interview. “We have kept the campus reasonably safe from a health perspective. We’ve had no evidence of transmissions in our classrooms or laboratories.” That finding is echoed at many other schools.

In this regimented fall, Blank laments the loss of community rituals – the pep rallies with the Bucky the Badger mascot, and the afternoon crowds that would soak in sun and the sweeping vistas of Lake Mendota from the terrace of Memorial Union.

Some local authorities contend the university catalyzed regional health troubles when it opened dorms and classrooms in September. “There was a great surge in cases,” Dane County Executive Joe Parisi said. “It began on campus. There’s nothing that separates the campus from the greater community.”

Parisi, a Wisconsin graduate, is also the father of a student at the university. “If I had my druthers, it would all be virtual,” he said.

Blank disputes Parisi’s view. Positivity rates for the university’s viral testing, she said, are lower than rates for the county and the state. Even if the dorms had been closed, many thousands of undergraduates were living in apartments off campus. Opening the campus enabled the university to promote public health, she said. “If we simply were closed,” Blank said, “we would have no control whatsoever over their behaviors.”

Roughly 30 percent of classes this fall have had at least some face-to-face instruction. All courses with 50 or more students are remote. Much of the same teaching plan, with expanded viral testing, is expected in the spring term.

Professors are divided over the university’s strategy. Some say it would have been better for the health of students and the community to be entirely virtual from the start.

“It’s a mess,” said Sami Schalk, an associate professor of gender and women’s studies. “It’s been a hard semester and really scary.” Schalk said the stress on students, including those who hold part-time jobs in the city, has been enormous. While Schalk chose to teach her three courses remotely, she said some faculty have felt pressured to teach in person. She said she wants to return to the classroom when the conditions are right – and not before. “We just have to adapt to our moment and let go a little bit,” Schalk said.

Harry Brighouse, a professor of philosophy, teaches three face-to-face courses but totes a laptop around the classroom to help certain students who must participate online through video links. Those who can be there in person value the experience, he said, and are probably more risk-averse in their behavior. “I’ve had students tell me, ‘I’d be going to parties if I didn’t have an in-person class. It’s not worth it to me to jeopardize that,’ ” Brighouse said. He said he is “so grateful that it’s worked out.”

One afternoon last week, Brighouse donned a face mask to lead a class on the obligations of parents to children. More than 20 students joined him in a large circular lecture room, sitting at desks that appeared carefully spaced apart. In many ways, it seemed a lively but routine academic occasion. There was give and take, analysis of moral issues, small-group discussion of case studies. What was unusual: the Zoom connection for several remote students and the muffling effect that masks had on everyone’s speech. Brighouse concentrates on projecting his voice, getting students to speak up and keeping all engaged wherever they are. “Definitely requires more energy,” Brighouse said. “But it works.”

For Hannah Bounds, 20, a junior from Racine, Wis., this is her only in-person class. Hands down, she said, it is the academic highlight of her fall. Her remote courses often feel like a struggle in figuring out how to teach herself. “I’m not getting what I should out of those,” she said.

Bounds has felt the strain of the pandemic semester. She is a “house fellow” in a dorm, which means she lives with and helps guide freshmen through their first months of campus life. “First and foremost, it is kind of scary,” she said in a phone interview. “It’s scary to see residents test positive and know that I share the same living space.”

Every Monday, Bounds takes a viral test. So far, they have all been negative. She worries about the possibility of infecting her father, a motorcycle mechanic, or her mother, a medical-imaging technologist. But she plans to go home for Thanksgiving and afterward return to Madison to help the dorm wind down for any residents who remain through the end of the semester.

Yannis Pandiscas, 20, a junior from Aurora, Ill., hasn’t taken any viral tests since the semester started – “although I really probably should,” he said. He lives alone in a Madison apartment, studies mostly online, works out at a gymnasium, and shops and cooks for himself. He has no Thanksgiving getaway plan. He’ll stay here. His mother is immunocompromised, he said, and his father works in a casino.

“I am a little concerned for my family,” he said. “I can’t really know if I’ve been infected.” Even if he gets tested here and has a negative result, Pandiscas worries he could get the virus while riding a bus home. “I don’t want to bring it back,” he said.

Hannah Alpert, 19, a sophomore from Mill Valley, Calif., went home briefly in October to avoid a possible virus outbreak in her sorority house. Soon after she returned to Madison, she caught the virus herself. The sorority was not to blame, she said. There were no parties, and residents were careful to wear masks. After her positive test, Alpert went to a hotel room to isolate. Her symptoms are mild: She feels “run down,” she said, and has lost some sense of taste and smell.

“I do not want to expose my parents and sister in any sense,” Alpert said. But she has no regrets about coming here. “This semester has definitely been worth it,” she said. “By no means has it been easy. I couldn’t have predicted what happened, especially that I have coronavirus.”

Her mother feels the same. Madison was where her daughter wanted and needed to be this fall, Suzanne Alpert said. “She found her place last year, thriving academically and thriving socially,” the mother said. “So we decided to take the risk of letting her go back if she felt brave enough to go for it.”

Last week, the family was counting the days until Hannah could fly safely. “She won’t come home until we’re very sure that she’s not contagious,” Suzanne Alpert said.

With the virus surging, some students were reshuffling plans and leaving the week before Thanksgiving.

“Covid was getting a little crazy,” Olivia Moffitt said. “So I decided to come home early.” Moffitt, 18, a freshman from Chevy Chase, Md., said some students in her dorm had tested positive, and she didn’t want to risk getting exposed and then stuck in a Madison quarantine.

“It was mostly a personal choice, but my parents were definitely on board with it,” she said. Moffitt proclaimed herself happy with the first-year experience so far even though all her classes were online. “It was nice to meet new people, get out of my comfort zone and have a sense of normalcy,” she said. She spoke over the phone from the basement of her family house, quarantining there as she awaited results from yet another viral test.

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G20 leaders close Riyadh summit with calls for coordinated response to coronavirus pandemic (nationthailand.com)

G20 leaders close Riyadh summit with calls for coordinated response to coronavirus pandemic

InternationalNov 23. 2020

By The Washington Post · Kareem Fahim · WORLD

ISTANBUL – Little was expected of this year’s Group of 20 Leaders’ Summit. It was a muted affair, presented virtually during a resurgent global pandemic. Its host, Saudi Arabia, was criticized by human rights groups for a record of abuses. And its most prominent participant was President Donald Trump, an ardent opponent of the kind of collective global action the summit set out to achieve, who leaves office in less than two months.

Even so, as the two-day conference ended Sunday, its organizers hailed it as a success. A final communique heralded achievements, including an offer of debt relief to developing nations and a commitment to ensuring equitable access to coronavirus treatments. But it also laid out a frightening litany of challenges facing economies and societies that the scaled-back summit, or any global gathering, would be hard-pressed to meet.

“We underscore the urgent need to bring the spread of the virus under control,” the leaders of the G-20 nations said in the communique. And throughout a summit, dominated by the pandemic and its ravages, they argued that only collective action could bring the crisis to heel.

The plea for a coordinated response reflected the struggles faced by countries such as France, India and Turkey as infection rates soar. It was also a retort to the Trump administration and its go-it-alone approach to international challenges ranging from the pandemic to climate change.

“We have seen very clear signs but also actions by the G-20 supporting multilateralism,” Mohamed al-Jadaan, Saudi Arabia’s finance minister, told a news conference at the summit’s conclusion. He mentioned the group’s support for institutions including the World Health Organization. The Trump administration gave a year’s notice of the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO in July; President-elect Joe Biden has said he would stop that process.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Saturday that “if we stand together worldwide, we can control and overcome the virus and its consequences.”

Trump confirmed his attendance at the summit the day before it began. In remarks to the group Saturday, he touted his administration’s record in combating the virus, saying it had “marshaled every resource.” He made no promise to expand the availability of U.S. vaccines. Then he played golf.

On Sunday, he addressed a summit session on the environment titled “Safeguarding the Planet.” His administration has weakened regulations intended to reduce pollution generated in the United States. He called his record on protecting the environment “historic” and attacked the Paris climate accord.

On the day after the election this month, the United States became the first and only nation to withdraw from the 2015 agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

“The Paris accord was not designed to save the environment,” Trump told the summit. “It was designed to kill the American economy.”

Biden, who has called climate change “the existential threat to humanity,” has pledged to rejoin the Paris accord.

In the weeks leading up to the summit, the kingdom faced protests from Saudi and international human rights groups demanding that world leaders downgrade their representation or boycott the gathering altogether. They argued that the summit conferred respectability on a government accused of grave abuses, including jailing and torturing female activists and the killing of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

No invited world leader boycotted. But neither did the remote gathering, which participants attended by video link, provide Saudi Arabia with the kind of platform it had sought to showcase its accomplishments.

The World Bank has said the pandemic could drive as many as 150 million people into extreme poverty, reversing decades of progress. UNICEF has warned that unequal access to technology among students in poorer countries threatens to “deepen the global learning crisis.”

Collaborative, global efforts are needed to meet the “huge challenges” facing students and schools worldwide as they strain to adapt to distance learning, Hamad el-Sheikh, Saudi Arabia’s education minister, said Sunday.

Saudi Arabia, with virtually unmatched financial resources, has been able to dedicate satellite channels to distance learning, he said. The kingdom has partnered with Microsoft to boost server space for online instruction. Education that “blended” in-person and distance learning would become the norm, even after the worst ravages of the pandemic had passed.

“No one expected that 1.6 billion students will be outside of schools,” el-Sheikh said. He acknowledged that few countries have comparable resources to respond to such a crisis.

“Some countries don’t have the capability to launch satellite stations,” he said.

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Trump administration exits Open Skies treaty (nationthailand.com)

Trump administration exits Open Skies treaty

InternationalNov 23. 2020

By The Washington Post · Paulina Firozi · NATIONAL, WORLD, NATIONAL-SECURITY

The United States has formally withdrawn from the Treaty on Open Skies, a decades-old pact meant to reduce the chances of an accidental war by allowing mutual reconnaissance flights by parties to the 34-nation agreement. The exit comes six months after President Trump first announced his intention to withdraw, saying Russia has been violating the pact.

“Today marks six months since the United States submitted our notice of withdrawal from the Treaty on Open Skies,” White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien said in a statement. “We are now no longer a party to this treaty that Russia flagrantly violated for years.”

O’Brien said Trump has “never ceased to put America first by withdrawing us from outdated treaties and agreements that have benefited our adversaries at the expense of our national security.”

Russia has denied violating the treaty and earlier this year chided the move as merely the latest abandonment by the Trump administration of major arms-control agreements.

The move risks sowing further divisions between the United States and European allies, some of which called on the administration to stay in the pact despite concerns about Russia.

In a statement in May, Joe Biden said that in announcing the intention to withdraw, Trump “doubled down on his short-sighted policy of going it alone and abandoning American leadership.”

“I supported the Open Skies Treaty as a Senator, because I understood that the United States and our allies would benefit from being able to observe – on short notice – what Russia and other countries in Europe were doing with their military forces,” his May statement added.

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Actually, it makes perfect sense that Biden would get more votes than Obama (nationthailand.com)

Actually, it makes perfect sense that Biden would get more votes than Obama

InternationalNov 22. 2020

By The Washington Post · Philip Bump · NATIONAL, POLITICS 
VOTING-ANALYSIS: As part of a lengthy Twitter thread aimed at bolstering President Donald Trump’s wild and baseless allegations of electoral impropriety, cartoonist Scott Adams distilled a common argument about President-elect Joe Biden’s win.

“No one believes Biden got far more votes than Obama,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday.

This claim comes up a lot as Trump supporters like Adams seek to bolster the idea that somehow Trump was cheated out of a victory. How could Biden, a guy who barely drew any crowds, get more support than Barack Obama, whose 2008 campaign was historically popular? And if Biden didn’t get that many votes, why do national tallies say he did?

Simple. Biden outpaced Obama’s totals in 2008 and when he was re-elected in 2012 because: 

1. The country has gotten more populous

2. There was a lot of enthusiasm for voting this year, and 

3. Much of that enthusiasm from Democrats was targeted not at Biden, but at Trump.

In 2008, the population of the United States was about 299 million. Four years later, it was up to about 309 million. Now, it’s more than 330 million. The number of adult citizens – that is, those eligible to vote – has also increased, up an estimated 25 million since 2008.

Biden earned about 80 million votes. (This will increase given outstanding ballots in New York and California.) That’s 11 million more than Obama in 2008. Assume that two-thirds of the newly added adult citizens voted this year, and that’s an addition of 17 million more people to the voter pool, even ignoring issues of enthusiasm. Split that in half, and Biden would just need to find 2.5 million more votes somewhere.

We can look at the boost for Biden in another way. Biden’s total this year is about 15 percent higher than what Obama got in 2008 and 21 percent higher than his total in 2012. Trump’s total this year is 23 percent higher than what then-Sen. John McCain got in 2008 – and an equivalent 21 percent higher than what Mitt Romney got eight years ago.

Trump supporters will say that this is impossible, that Trump was clearly the focus of more enthusiasm. Given the president’s rallies, Biden should not have been able to keep pace.

But that’s wrong for two reasons. The first is that Trump’s rallies are being compared with Biden events that were specifically meant to be small. Why? Well, there’s a pandemic going on, as you’ve probably heard, and not everyone probably gained immunity to the novel coronavirus after an outbreak at their place of employment. Trump possibly did, and, given his indifference to the virus’s spread, he moved ahead with his large events.

The second is that rallies aren’t a great marker of enthusiasm anyway. That’s true generally because getting 20,000 people to turn out in a heavily partisan area is only a tiny fraction of the actual voting population (if those 20,000 people can all vote, which is unlikely). It’s also true because people can be enthusiastic about voting without going to a rally.

In 2020, the preliminary data suggests that turnout relative to the adult-citizen population was probably higher than at any point in the last century. Indicators that enthusiasm was high emerged soon after the 2018 midterms and carried into Gallup’s final polling on the question.

What’s important here is that Democrats were as likely to say they were more enthusiastic about voting than past elections as they were in 2008. Republicans were more likely to say that than they were in 2008, helping push the overall turnout rate even higher.

Democratic enthusiasm and Democratic votes were high in 2008, down in 2012, flat four years later and then back up. This wasn’t 2016. Polls showed that Democrats viewed the 2020 election much as they did Obama’s first – with a lot more voters in the mix.

Again, this was heavily because of Trump. The president’s focus on goading the left and delivering for his base over his time in office helped make him the most polarizing president on record. Republicans loved him and Democrats hated him, as polling repeatedly showed. When Fox News asked poll respondents why they were supporting Trump or Biden, 8 in 10 Trump voters said they were supporting him because they liked him. Four in 10 Biden voters said they were supporting Biden to oppose Trump.

In other words, even if Biden would not have matched Trump’s crowds had there not been a pandemic – which is probably generally true – it didn’t matter. A lot of the reason many Democrats saw the election as being so important was simply that they wanted Trump out of office, a motivation that was more important than the identity of the person who replaced him.

If any Trump supporter finds this dynamic hard to believe, that may be a function of the sort of isolation that Trump frequently suggests is a feature of his opponents. In 2016, it was red states in which people were the most likely to live in precincts with others who overwhelmingly voted the same way as them. In September, a Pew Research Center poll found that about 40 percent of both Trump and Biden supporters knew no one who was planning on supporting the other candidate. That was more true of Trump supporters who lived in more heavily Trump-supportive counties.

There are other likely factors, too. The expansion of mail-in and early voting made it easier to vote, probably meaning that some more infrequent voters cast ballots. After Trump’s narrow 2016 win, there were efforts introduced to encourage voting from Democrats who had stayed home. Georgia’s Stacey Abrams has been given a lot of credit for helping to overhaul the turnout operation in that state, which Biden won.

Given all of the above, the math becomes easy. Biden outperformed Obama because there were more voters from which to cull votes. At the same time, enthusiasm was similar among Democrats in 2008 and 2020, in part because Democrats were so eager to see Trump ousted – and in part to avoid what happened in 2016.

If no one Scott Adams knows believes that could be true, that’s a reflection of the bubble in which Adams apparently lives, not of the reality of politics this year.

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Saudi minister highlights ‘huge’ strains on global education as G-20 tackles pandemic (nationthailand.com)

Saudi minister highlights ‘huge’ strains on global education as G-20 tackles pandemic

InternationalNov 22. 2020Saudi Education Minister Hamad al-Sheikh 

By The Washington Post · Kareem Fahim · WORLD 
ISTANBUL – International efforts were needed to meet the “huge challenges” facing global educational systems as they strained to adapt to distance learning while accommodating children with special needs, Saudi Arabia’s education minister said Sunday at the Group of 20 summit in Riyadh.

His comments kicked off the second day of a summit that is being held virtually and has been dominated by discussions about the pandemic and its disastrous fallout.

“No one expected that 1.6 billion students will be outside of schools,” said Hamad al-Shaikh. “No education system in the world had expected that they will face a prolonged time where students are staying at home in lockdowns.” 

Leaders attending the summit represent nations that top the world in the rate of infections, including the United States, India, Brazil and France. 

On Saturday, the summit’s first day, most world leaders stressed the need for greater global cooperation to ensure that vaccines against the virus are affordable and widely distributed, including in developing nations. 

A notable exception was President Donald Trump, whose disdain for multilateralism has been a hallmark of his tenure. In perfunctory remarks to the group that he followed with a round of golf, Trump made no promise to expand the availability of U.S. vaccines and touted his administration’s record in combating the virus, saying it had “marshaled every resource.” 

On Sunday, Trump, who has weakened regulations designed to reduce pollution generated by the United States, addressed a summit session on the environment titled “Safeguarding the Planet.” He called his administration’s environmental protection record “historic” and attacked the Paris climate accord, from which the United States formally withdrew this month – becoming the first and only nation to do so. 

“The Paris accord was not designed to save the environment, it was designed to kill the American economy,” he said. 

Even before his comments, expectations were low for the summit, an annual gathering of leaders of the world’s largest economies. The meeting was expected to finalize a framework for granting poor nations debt relief and promoting international vaccine collaborations such as Covax, an effort linked to the World Health Organization that seeks to expand vaccine distribution to the developing world. 

The gathering also prompted protests from Saudi and international human rights groups,as well as some U.S. and European lawmakers, which called on world leaders to boycott or downgrade their representation over the kingdom’s abuses, including jailings of female activists and the killing of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

No world leaders boycotted, but neither did the remote gathering provide Saudi Arabia with the kind of platform it had sought to showcase its accomplishments. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s day-to-day ruler and a lightning rod for criticism over human rights, was expected to address the gathering later on Sunday. 

The World Bank has said the pandemic could drive as many as 150 million people into extreme poverty, reversing two decades of steady progress in alleviating the suffering of the world’s poorest people. UNICEF has warned that unequal access to technology among students in poorer countries threatens to “deepen the global learning crisis.” 

Saudi Arabia, with virtually unmatched financial resources, has been able to dedicate satellite channels to distance learning and partnered with Microsoft to boost server space for online instruction, said Sheikh, the education minister. Education that “blended” in-person and distance learning would become the norm, even after the worst ravages of the pandemic had passed. 

But “some countries don’t have the capability to launch satellite stations,” he noted. 

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Panic buying returns on covid jump (nationthailand.com)

Panic buying returns on covid jump

InternationalNov 22. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Anne Riley Moffat, Carolina Gonzalez, Sarah McGregor · BUSINESS, RETAIL We’re out of toilet paper again.

Households across the U.S. are once again filling grocery carts brimful in a second round of panic buying as the virus surges and states clamp down on economic activity. Defensive purchasing is affecting everything from paper towels to bacon. Even the world’s biggest retailer is reporting shortages of high-demand items, including cleaning supplies, breakfast foods — and the most important commodity in any bathroom.

“It really does have everything to do with what’s happening with Covid cases in any particular community,” Walmart’s chief executive officer, Doug McMillon, said on an earnings call in the past week. “We’re going to be able to respond in this instance better than we did in the first half of the year, although we’re still — as a total supply chain — stressed in some places.”

The new wave of pantry stockpiling hits about eight months after the March boom, meaning makers of packaged food and household items have had some time to prepare. General Mills added 45 external production lines through contractors this year, while Campbell Soup spent $40 million to expand production of Goldfish crackers, a must for parents cooped up with toddlers. Still, at-home demand is surging, accelerated by a new wave of indoor-dining bans.

Cathy Smith had a pack of toilet-paper rolls in her cart at the checkout of a Ralph’s grocery in West Los Angeles at midday Friday with a few “last-minute” items to prepare her Thanksgiving meal, including a 16-pound turkey.”I’m not totally in panic mode yet,” she said. “I don’t watch the news, because it is too depressing, but my husband did and he warned me that things are getting worse. So I thought I’ll stock up.”

Over the last three weeks, demand for non-perishable items such as paper goods, canned goods, spices, broths and canned vegetables jumped 60-70%, according to Centricity Inc., a platform that tracks online activity like searches and e-commerce.

That’s on top of “meteoric” year-over-year increases for pantry staples, said Mike Brackett, Centricity’s chief executive officer.

Shoppers may start to see purchase limits again, said Jim Dudlicek, spokesman for the National Grocers Association. Consumers should shop earlier in the day to “have best pick from freshly stocked shelves, but to be mindful of their neighbors and take only what they need,” he said. Some grocers are using social media to provide updates on hot products, and at least one is providing bulletins on a radio program.

Kraft Heinz Co. CEO Miguel Patricio said in an interview last month that the company has been finding new partners and investing in the productivity and capacity of its factories to meet rising demand.

That means “new machinery, or even bringing back to life lines that we considered in the past as obsolete,” he said. The company is working on “all possible fronts to increase capacity and we’ve been able to increase it substantially. We increased capacity on average by 20% and that goes up to 56% on products where there’s a higher demand,” like Philadelphia Cream Cheese or macaroni and cheese, he said.

Mark Schiller, CEO of Hain Celestial Group Inc., said that the company, which makes Terra vegetable chips and plant-based Dream milks, was readier for this round of panic buying.

“We are far better prepared,” he said. “We have about 50 million more dollars of inventory on hand, of all the things that have the longest supply chain and the least amount of backups.”

Toilet paper is a tougher one to find, with consumers sharing on Twitter photos of bare shelves — and pleas to fellow shoppers to share the supply. “March 2.0,” observed one tweeter.

Kimberly-Clark Corp., maker of Scott and Cottonelle toilet paper, said it was cooperating with its clients and customers to keep tabs on supplies and fill inventory gaps. The company has accelerated production since the pandemic hit, including making fewer variants of products and finding capacity in its global paper supply network, said Arist Mastorides, president of the family care unit in North America.

Procter & Gamble Co. spokeswoman Jennifer Corso said the maker of Charmin continues “to work around the clock to produce product as quickly as possible.”

“Paper towel consumption is related to increased cleaning situations, as consumers are cleaning more frequently,” she said. “Toilet paper consumption is tied to the increased amount of time consumers are spending at home. For both, people are consuming more and stocking their pantries at a higher level than before the pandemic.”

Panic buying is also hitting another part of the consumables market.

Ben Kovler, CEO of Chicago cannabis company Green Thumb Industries Inc., said on an earnings call this month that while purchases aren’t yet back to March’s booming levels, it’s “marching back there slowly.”

Unlike at Walmart, where shoppers are coming less often but buying more, Green Thumb’s Rise stores are seeing more customers, he said. And unlike staples that get used at a steady rate, when people buy twice as much cannabis, they quickly use it. These are, after all, stressful times.

“They consume more,” Kovler said. “That’s not a bad thing for the business. We don’t think that’s a bad thing for the consumer.”

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Legislators hope Intel committee can be less polarized (nationthailand.com)

Legislators hope Intel committee can be less polarized

InternationalNov 22. 2020(L-r) Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat and Republican, respectively, oversee witness testimony during an impeachment inquiry hearing on Nov. 21, 2019. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Matt McClain 

By The Washington Post · Karoun Demirjian · NATIONAL, POLITICS, CONGRESS, NATIONAL-SECURITY 
After four years of bitter partisan feuding over its investigations into President Donald Trump, the House Intelligence Committee is facing perhaps its steepest challenge yet: restoring bipartisan functionality to the panel that is supposed to be Congress’s first line of defense against the nation’s most existential threats.

Back-to-back Russia probes and an impeachment investigation soured the committee’s traditionally apolitical culture and catapulted its leaders into the sharply partisan limelight as they defended or excoriated Trump. As Democrats accused top Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of California of conspiring to protect the president, and Republicans accused top Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California of making up lies to smear him, each assumed the joint role of hero to his party and boogeyman to the other side – and the panel became the scorched earth in between.

Even after investigations cadenced, scars remain. For months, Republican members have boycotted all but one of the committee’s public events, as well as unclassified private briefings. The panel also has yet to produce a single piece of legislation or statement of policy that has not split along party lines.

“There’s a part of me that thinks it’s almost biblical, like Moses, and that generations are going to have to come and die out before everything is cleansed,” Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., a member of the panel, said in an interview. “But there are still things that are bipartisan: threats to national security, homeland security. … Heaven forbid something dramatic happens, which tends to be a unifier. And then it’s really up to people to decide to move on or not.”

In a series of interviews, Democratic and Republicans panel members expressed a common hope that, in a post-Trump Washington, the committee could restore a less-divisive work ethic. But more often than not, that hope was coupled with feelings of futility and finger-pointing across the aisle.

“Not with Adam Schiff as chair,” Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., answered when asked if the panel could set aside past differences. “He has politicized and broken that committee, he has overseen a committee that has leaked like a sieve, and it’s a toxic, toxic environment because of Adam Schiff’s failure of leadership.”

Rep. Denny Heck, D-Wash., who is retiring from Congress at the end of the year, offered a similar assessment of Nunes.

“There’s a rumor that Mr. Nunes is trying to become the ranking member of Ways and Means. … If he is successful, we’ll have a chance to hit the reset button, and I think that would be healthy for everybody,” Heck said. “I don’t think there’s any constructive purpose in this point about pointing the finger. … I just have my fingers crossed that there will be a change so we can return to some state of bipartisanship.”

Schiff is expected to remain the chairman next year, and nearly all of the Democrats on the committee now are expected to return in the new Congress. Republicans already have at least three slots to fill due to members who have or will be retiring, regardless of whether Nunes inherits the top GOP slot on another panel, and they could add a seat to their roster to reflect the party’s gains in the election.

A spokesman for Nunes did not respond to a request for an interview. But Schiff said in an interview that he would be a “willing partner” in moving the committee beyond its discordant past, provided Republicans were willing to meet him halfway.

“The minority over the last few years viewed themselves not as an oversight body, but essentially defense counsel for the president … so I think the minority only has itself to blame for the poisoning of the relationship,” Schiff said of the panel’s GOP members. “We are extending a hand, notwithstanding that history.”

Schiff acknowledged that “it’ll take time to restore trust,” both between the two parties and between the panel and the intelligence agencies, but expressed confidence that “it can be done.”

“A lot of the areas of friction will have departed along with the Trump administration,” Schiff added. 

Trump’s combative approach to the U.S. intelligence community, and his quest to replace or retaliate against those who have contradicted his worldview, has complicated the business of intelligence gathering and fueled the partisan warring in Congress. But while the Trump factor has made the current intelligence panel’s challenges unique, it has not rendered them entirely unprecedented.

It’s been about a decade since the last time the panel has had to right itself following a period of discord and breakdowns with the intelligence community, after a highly charged investigation into whether the CIA misled Congress about its use of interrogation techniques during the war on terrorism.

“When Dutch Ruppersberger (Democrat from Maryland) and Mike Rogers (Republican from Michigan) took the reins, we were in a wreck as well,” recalled Rep. K. Michael Conaway, R-Texas, who will retire at the end of this year. “They made a conscious effort to reset, not only on the committee, but with the agencies themselves – so it’s possible to make it happen.”

A new agenda could help, even absent new leadership. 

Members on both sides have expressed interest in focusing attention on cybersecurity and the rise of China. Schiff also has promised to pair a focus on traditional “hard targets” with attention to “softer” emerging threats, such as climate change, technological development and pandemics. 

“The priorities should be the original intent of the committee: provide oversight over intelligence, to go travel the world and find out what’s happening with our agencies in the Middle East, in China, in places in the world that we’re concerned about,” said Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, who would be likely to ascend to the panel’s top GOP spot if Nunes departed.

Democrats also surmise that a change in occupancy at the White House could itself provide new opportunities for cooperation.

“Structurally I expect my Republican friends to rediscover their interest in oversight with a President Biden,” said Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., currently the panel’s second-highest ranking Democrat. “So I think there’s reasons to be optimistic, but it’s going to require people letting bygones be bygones.”

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Trump’s post-presidency will be cluttered with potentially serious legal battles (nationthailand.com)

Trump’s post-presidency will be cluttered with potentially serious legal battles

InternationalNov 22. 2020President Donald Trump discusses his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic during a Nov. 13 briefing in the White House Rose Garden. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford 

By The Washington Post · Shayna Jacobs · NATIONAL, COURTSLAW 

NEW YORK – President Donald Trump’s ongoing court battles are unlikely to pose significant legal jeopardy for him before he leaves office, but the swirl of criminal investigations and civil complaints stemming from his business activities and personal conduct could prove potentially more serious once he departs, experts say.

Among Democrats, there is a palpable desire to pursue the harsh accountability for Trump that many feel he has avoided by virtue of his office. But his successor, President-elect Joe Biden, reportedly has little appetite for doing so, having signaled to advisers that unleashing the federal government to settle scores would undermine his goal of unifying the country. 

A spokesman for Biden’s transition team declined to comment but pointed to statements Biden made previously affirming that he would not interfere with a Justice Department investigation into Trump nor pardon his predecessor. “It is not something the president is entitled to do, to direct a prosecution or decide to drop a case,” Biden told MSNBC in an interview in May. “It’s a dereliction of duty.”

Lawyers for Trump did not respond to requests for comment. Across the breadth of cases in which he’s been forced to defend himself or protect his interests, though, they have vigorously disputed allegations of wrongdoing while upending the proceedings by seeking delays and making other time-consuming requests.

As it stands, Trump faces several lawsuits and at least two active investigations by state or local authorities in New York alone. The city was the president’s longtime home before he redesignated Florida as his permanent residence, and it remains the Trump Organization’s base of operations. 

Trump’s lawyers are likely to be most focused on minimizing the risk of criminal prosecution, which he could attempt to achieve on his own at the federal level by pre-emptively pardoning himself, as he has mused in the past, and members of his inner circle. There is no consensus among constitutional law experts on whether a president can pardon himself – and importantly, any pardons would not be binding on state and local authorities, whom experts view as his biggest threat.

The Manhattan district attorney’s ongoing investigation into Trump and his family-run business appears to be the most significant problem he faces; were Trump to be charged and convicted, he could face the prospect of incarceration. 

That case is examining whether fraud was committed when alleged hush-money payments were made ahead of the 2016 election to two women who said they had affairs with Trump years before he became president – claims he denies. Prosecutors also are said to be looking at the possibility that false information was submitted on loan applications to obtain favorable rates and whether any information was manipulated in the pursuit of tax benefits.

The president’s lawyers have dismissed the district attorney’s effort as a politically driven fishing expedition.

To be sure, it remains to be seen whether this investigation will result in any charges, as prosecutors have yet to obtain Trump’s tax records and related documents deemed crucial to their case. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., a Democrat, is in litigation to obtain that material, having won a series of victories in lower courts but now awaiting a final say from the U.S. Supreme Court – which has been silent on the matter for several weeks after Trump asked that it get involved. 

A spokesman for Vance declined to comment on the status of the case.

Andrew Weissmann, a prosecutor involved in Robert Mueller III’s special counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, said Vance’s team appears to be doing a “classic following-the-money case.” He likened it to the bank-fraud case Mueller’s team brought against Trump’s former 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort. 

“Accounting records are critical to that,” Weissmann said.

Separately, the New York State Attorney General’s Office is conducting a wide-reaching civil fraud investigation, including into whether Trump and the Trump Organization sought to minimize tax liability by misrepresenting to lenders the value of certain assets.

The New York Times, which ahead of this month’s election published an expansive investigative series based on several years of Trump’s tax records that the newspaper obtained, reported Thursday that Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James also are looking at Trump’s use of consulting fees, some of which may have been directed to his daughter Ivanka, as a means to lower his taxable income between 2010 and 2018.

An attorney for the Trump Organization has said that the company followed the law and guidance of tax experts and that all applicable taxes were paid. Ivanka Trump has called the inquiries “harassment pure and simple” and “part of a continued political vendetta.”

The state attorney general’s probe amounts to a thorough auditing of the president and the Trump Organization, including whether either “improperly inflated the value of Mr. Trump’s assets on annual financial statements in order to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits,” according to a recent court filing. If substantiated, such charges could result in financial penalties or potential restrictions on Trump’s business operations. 

Then there’s the Internal Revenue Service. As the Times also has reported, Trump could owe the government as much as $100 million. 

“His dispute with the IRS, if it’s not resolved before he leaves office, is the same kind of huge potential exposure anyone would have in that kind of dispute with the IRS,” said Stephen Saltzburg, a former Justice Department official and director of the Litigation and Dispute Resolution program at George Washington University Law School. 

Trump also will have to face a pair of high-profile defamation lawsuits in New York, stemming from accusations of personal misconduct. In federal court in Manhattan, advice columnist and author E. Jean Carroll awaits the advancement of her case after a judge ruled that the Justice Department could not intervene on Trump’s behalf, as it had attempted to do. 

In her memoir, Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s – which Trump has adamantly denied, calling her a liar and suggesting he was not attracted to her. Carroll’s lawyers have proposed that Trump be deposed and provide a DNA sample in the coming months. His DNA is required for comparison to a stain that was on the dress Carroll said she wore the day of the encounter.

Roberta Kaplan, who represents Carroll, said she has sent Trump’s legal team a proposed schedule to proceed. His attorney in the case, Marc Kasowitz, had not responded as of Friday, Kaplan said. If a schedule isn’t agreed upon by the parties, they are set to meet in court Dec. 11. Kaplan said she anticipates that Trump will try to delay further.

“We haven’t heard back, but we assume Trump will take the position there should be no discovery pending appeal,” Kaplan said. 

A similar lawsuit brought by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos is pending in front of New York state’s highest court. A date for a hearing has not yet been scheduled.

More recently, the president’s niece, Mary L. Trump, has sued him, his sister Maryanne Trump Barry and the estate of his late brother Robert Trump, claiming they defrauded her of tens of millions of dollars when family patriarch Fred Trump’s estate was settled after his death in 1999. 

Mary Trump recently published an explosive book about the Trump family and her uncle’s rise to the presidency, and she was a vocal critic of him ahead of the election. Lawyers for the president have not formally responded to the lawsuit. When it was filed, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said that it was Mary Trump who committed fraud by surreptitiously recording her aunt disparaging the president. McEnany said that Mary Trump had “really discredited herself.”

Former federal prosecutor Jessica Roth, who teaches at Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan, said this jumble of personal and business-related cases may amount to years-long legal dramas for Trump. “The sheer number of them makes the task of dealing with them really daunting,” Roth said. “And none of those actors are bound by the decisions made by the other one.”

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Year-end fiscal cliffs are approaching for millions of Americans (nationthailand.com)

Year-end fiscal cliffs are approaching for millions of Americans

InternationalNov 22. 2020A boarded-up Hard Rock Cafe temporarily closed in Memphis on Nov. 15, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Nina Westervelt 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Reade Pickert, Olivia Rockeman · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, HEALTH, POLITICS 

A whole range of pandemic aid programs are set to expire in the new year, leaving millions of Americans without the government support that’s helped keep them afloat and threatening a rebounding economy.

The biggest blow will likely come from the end of two federal unemployment-insurance programs, with roughly 12 million people facing a late-December cutoff, according to a study released Wednesday by The Century Foundation. Also, measures that froze student-loan payments, offered mortgage forbearance and halted evictions have a year-end deadline — and so do Federal Reserve lending facilities for small businesses and local governments.

Some covid-19 assistance could be attached to a spending bill needed to avoid a federal government shutdown, but with Congress deadlocked and a White House transition looming, the outlook for another stimulus package this year is bleak.

President Donald Trump hasn’t outlined a plan to extend the aid programs via executive order, and his successor, Joe Biden, won’t take office until the second half of January.

All this poses risks to a U.S. economy that’s recovered faster than expected yet still has a long way to go, particularly with the resurgence of covid-19 cases bringing a new wave of restrictions on business. While in aggregate household finances are in great shape, the strength is uneven, with jobs still 10 million below February levels.

Following is a roundup of the support that’s poised to be withdrawn — and the people who benefited from it.

Pandemic Unemployment Assistance has been a safety net for those who aren’t typically eligible for jobless benefits, like self-employed and gig workers. As many as 9.4 million people were claiming PUA in late October. The final payable week is currently the second-to-last week of December.

Larry Long of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, got his first check under the program in July — and expects the last one to arrive in the coming weeks.

Before the pandemic, the 63-year-old helped plan charity fundraisers and corporate parties, until covid-19 brought cancellations and work dried up. An additional supplemental benefit of $600 a week expired months ago, and he hasn’t been able to pay his bills in full since then.

“Basically all I can do is try to have food in here and to make arrangements with utilities and the landlord,” Long said.

Now, with both PUA and eviction moratoriums expiring, he’s also worried about losing his home.

“I am extremely worried about the virus. As an older Black male with a touch of diabetes, I am scared to death,” Long said. “I’m scared to death to go outside. I’m scared to death to stay home.”

The second expiring jobless program, Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, extends benefits for up to 13 extra weeks. As of the week ending Oct. 24, 4.1 million people were claiming it.

Most states offer 26 weeks of unemployment payments before applicants need to roll onto PEUC. In others like Florida and North Carolina, the period is much shorter — meaning that many Americans have already exhausted such benefits.

Jennifer Marshall, of Hendersonville, N.C., is one of them. She was working at a barbecue joint when the state imposed curbs on restaurants, and she filed for unemployment on March 18.

Since then Marshall, 51, has exhausted regular state benefits, PEUC and another program called Extended Benefits. “All of a sudden, I’m looking at nothing,” she says.

A diabetic and a cancer survivor, both high-risk categories for covid-19, Marshall has borrowed money from friends and relatives. She’s listed her microwave for sale online and is preparing to unload her car.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she says. “I’m literally sitting here with $4 in my wallet.”

The Cares Act, the main pandemic relief measure passed in March, prohibited landlords with federally guaranteed mortgages from evicting tenants. When that moratorium expired in July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention halted evictions of eligible tenants through Dec. 31. Several states have enacted their own suspensions; just a handful extend beyond year-end.

When protections end, many landlords may have no choice but to evict. An Urban Institute survey of 1,381 landlords found that more than one-third weren’t paid full rent for September.

“Landlords are also in a predicament here,” said Kate Reynolds, a researcher at the Urban Institute. “Especially landlords that have mortgages. They need to be able to pay their bill as well.”

Lori Fulton, 57, of Philadelphia, used to work part-time in a real-estate attorney’s office, while also earning through gigs as a singer, voice actor and fitness instructor. Then the gym closed, entertainment bookings dried up and the attorney contracted covid-19.

Her unemployment benefit payments are ending soon, and she’s worried about finding a new home because her landlord is lining up a family member to move into the house where she currently lives.

“Who’s going to rent a place to you when you have no income?” she says. “If 2021 doesn’t look better, I’ll be homeless.”

Some homeowners are also facing a steep cliff. Under the Cares Act, homeowners with federally guaranteed mortgages could demand loan forbearance for up to 360 days — but they won’t be entitled to do so after Dec. 31.

A total of 2.7 million eligible homeowners were in forbearance as of Nov. 8. The number has declined in recent months, while remaining well above pre-pandemic levels.Homeowners who went into forbearance after the Cares Act face another deadline in March: They need to work out how they will catch up on the skipped mortgage payments.

Americans have $1.7 trillion in student debt. Most of it is owed to the federal government, and qualified for relief under the Cares Act — which suspended payments, waived the accumulation of interest and halted collection of defaulted debt. Trump authorized the secretary of education to extend those protections until year-end.

The New York Fed has estimated that the freeze would save student borrowers about $7 billion a month. As things stand, they’ll have to resume payments in January.

Some of the Fed’s coronavirus lending programs are set to expire at the end of this year, including the Main Street Lending Program for small- to midsize businesses, and the Municipal Liquidity Facility, which backstops the debt market for state and local governments.

Even though participation in both has been low, some lawmakers and businesses have called for the programs to continue into 2021 — to keep the credit lifelines in place in case they’re needed.

Some legal experts say the facilities could continue to function using money already transferred to them by the Treasury Department, but the Treasury said last month it opposes an outright extension of some facilities.