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Biden’s path back to Iran nuclear deal won’t be easy or fast

InternationalNov 12. 2020Mourners carry images of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Iranian national flags during the funeral ceremony in Tehran on Jan. 6, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Ali Mohammadi.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Golnar Motevalli, David Wainer · NATIONAL, WORLD, POLITICS, NATIONAL-SECURITY, WHITEHOUSE, MIDDLE-EAST 
America’s European allies have struggled to keep the Iran nuclear deal alive after President Donald Trump quit the accord more than two years ago. Joe Biden’s election victory won’t provide a quick resuscitation.

Biden said during the presidential campaign that Trump’s Iran policy weakened U.S. national security and left Tehran closer than ever to being able to build a nuclear bomb. He vowed to get on the phone with allies on “day one” to begin rebuilding strained ties and said he’d give Iran a “credible path back to diplomacy.”

But Iran’s mid-2021 presidential election, as well as likely continued Republican control of the U.S. Senate, will put the brakes on quick, substantive action, according to U.S. and Iranian diplomats and analysts. In addition, Biden has signaled that his priorities starting Jan. 20 will be on the economy and getting the coronavirus pandemic under control.

“I am not optimistic at all that in the short term anything significant will happen between Iran and the Americans,” Saeed Laylaz, an economist and former adviser to ex-President Mohammad Khatami, said in an interview. “It’s not impossible, but it will be extremely difficult.”

Nuclear watchdogs and security analysts aren’t the only ones focused on what Biden could accomplish: Oil markets are betting on some easing of tensions by summer 2021 that will free the way for Iranian crude to return to global markets by year-end, Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Advisors, said on Bloomberg TV last week.

That could still be an optimistic timeline.

On Wednesday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani — who leaves office next year after staking his political legacy and reputation on the nuclear accord reached during the Obama administration — referred to Biden as “the new man who’s arrived” and had campaigned on returning to the accord. “If they stick to their responsibilities they can choose the new path,” he said.

But uncertainty about Rouhani’s successor, and the potential that elections could lead to a much harder-line government, will probably temper Biden’s enthusiasm to get something done quickly.

In addition, while presidents generally have some leeway on foreign policy, a Senate under Republican control would mean lawmakers would demand assurances on Biden’s Iran policy before they confirm his nominees, said Richard Goldberg, a former National Security Council official under Trump.

“Any effort to rejoin the Iran deal and build on it will be intensely scrutinized in Congress and among domestic critics,” said Ariane Tabatabai, a Middle East Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund.

If Biden pursues a rally-the-allies approach to Iran, that will likely include close consultations with everyone from Israel to the U.A.E., which aren’t likely to be as accommodating as European partners.

An official with Biden’s transition team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pressuring Biden to take the first step may be tough after the Trump administration spent four years highlighting the threat from Iran, which the U.S. sees as sowing turmoil across the Mideast and accused of hacking American voter data before the election.

Iran’s actions since the U.S. quit the 2015 nuclear deal — including its decision to ramp up uranium enrichment — have in some ways bolstered the Trump administration’s arguments.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said on Wednesday that Iran’s uranium stockpiles have grown eightfold since the U.S. quit the deal, and it now has enough supply to create three bombs if it enriches the material to weapons grade. Iran says its moves are reversible if the U.S. returns to the accord, and it has continued to host IAEA inspectors and meet other requirements of the nuclear deal.

Iran has signaled its requirements for reviving the multinational deal.

Its negotiators would want to see an authentic effort by Biden to not only scrap Trump’s approach but show that the U.S. had a longterm commitment to the accord, said a source close to official foreign policy circles in Tehran who didn’t want to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

An Iranian official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Biden would have to return to the nuclear accord without condition, compensation to Iran would have to be on the table and the U.S. would have to guarantee that it won’t invoke a “snapback” of United Nations sanctions as the Trump administration has tried to do.

Biden could take some smaller moves that would reduce the pressure on Tehran without committing the U.S. to a full-fledged detente. He could, for instance, ease the transfer of humanitarian aid to Iran, especially as the coronavirus batters the country’s health-care system, said Naysan Rafati, the International Crisis Group’s Iran analyst.

The U.S. can also try to help Iran gain access to a long-sought loan from the International Monetary Fund, he added. But even that would engender heavy scrutiny by Republicans, who are wary of providing funding to a government long listed by the U.S. as a state sponsor of terrorism.

That’s especially true now that the first of the accord’s “sunset” provisions, which expire at fixed dates, has already passed. An international ban on Iranian arms purchases lapsed in October and other restrictions built into the accord expire in less than five years.

The short time horizon of the 2015 deal between Iran and six world powers prompted Biden to say he wants to expand on the agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.

Iranian officials, while broadly welcoming Trump’s defeat, have repeatedly said that the original terms of the deal can’t be renegotiated.

“I don’t see Iran being willing to walk that path,” said Adnan Tabatabai, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Bonn-based Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient, adding that Iran would be “allergic” to any mention of a “JCPOA-Plus”.

A final hurdle could still come from Trump, as his team works to restrict options for the incoming administration. The administration has been working to create a layer of hard-to-reverse sanctions that could initially hobble Biden’s efforts.

Elliott Abrams, the State Department’s Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV Thursday that the Trump administration will impose new sanctions on Iran but declined to specify which Iranian entities would be targeted or when penalties were likely.

“The Trump administration’s approach now is to add more and more threads to this spider web and hope the next guy has a hard time washing them away,” said Rafati, the International Crisis Group’s Iran analyst. “There’s very little in here that’s totally irreversible. But these are harder to undo because you have to make the case that terrorism is no longer a concern.”

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Erdogan economy u-turn sparks market euphoria – and some doubts

InternationalNov 12. 2020A vendor assists a customer to pick fresh produce from a stall at the Carsamba market in Istanbul on Nov. 4, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Nicole Tung.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Onur Ant · BUSINESS, WORLD, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS, EUROPE, MIDDLE-EAST 
After more than two years of confrontation, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signaled a cease-fire with international investors, pledging to support his new economic managers with market-friendly policies.

Erdogan on Wednesday followed the ouster of the central bank chief and the departure of his son-in-law as economy czar in recent days with a commitment to contain inflation while putting Turkey on a sustainable growth path. Turkish assets soared, as investors saw a possible green light for interest-rate increases to stabilize a currency that has lost almost half its value against the dollar since May 2018.

“Evidence has been rapidly accumulating that Turkey is eager to execute a dramatic shift in policy making back toward a more orthodox framework,” said Phoenix Kalen, a strategist at Societe Generale in London. “We believe that the central bank will implement a substantial interest-rate hike” next week, possibly as much as 4 percentage points to 14.25%.

The currency gained 4.6% against the dollar on Wednesday. It’s headed for its biggest weekly gain in more than a decade even after retreating 0.6% on Thursday. The Borsa Istanbul 100 Index extended its winning streak to a ninth day, led by a surge in banking shares, which helped push Turkey’s benchmark gauge to an all-time high.

Erdogan’s remarks mark a dramatic U-turn from an approach that has hammered Turkish markets the past two years. Shortly before he was sworn in under a new constitution with near-total authority in 2018, Erdogan promised to take full control of monetary policy to implement his unorthodox view that lower interest rates promote slower inflation.

It didn’t work out, especially under the weight of the global recession spawned by the coronavirus pandemic.

To support the sinking lira, Turkish banks sold more than $100 billion this year alone, according to Goldman Sachs estimates. The effort saw net foreign-exchange reserves fall by more than half to $18.4 billion while money borrowed from banks under short-term swaps reached tens of billions of dollars. The lira touched consecutive record lows last week, extending 2020 losses to over 30%.

The remarks by the 66-year-old president who has led the country since 2003 reflected those pressures. “Like everywhere else around the world, in our country it is the central bank’s job to determine and implement policies needed to curb inflation,” he told lawmakers from his AK Party.

Erdogan’s comments capped a tumultuous stretch that began when he ousted central bank Governor Murat Uysal early Saturday after a series of interest-rate increases failed to stem the lira’s decline. On Sunday evening, Berat Albayrak announced his resignation as treasury and finance minister on Instagram, citing health reasons.

Still, there were doubts about Erdogan’s change of heart and how long it will take before his electoral priorities might cause yet another policy reversal.

“Can a leopard really change its spots?” said Nigel Rendell, a senior analyst at Medley Global Advisors. “There will be a significant degree of skepticism about what Erdogan has said, which will temper some enthusiasm.”

Erdogan’s battle with markets began in earnest in 2018, a year when he was sworn in with additional powers and appointed Albayrak to the top economy position. The appointment was soon followed by a diplomatic row with U.S. over accusations against an American pastorin Turkey. The president blamed a shadowy “interest-rate lobby” for speculative attacks against the currency as the lira plunged.

Erdogan wasn’t completely unaware of the transactions involving Turkey’s foreign reserves, but the crunch came after he sought an explanation from the central bank for its September decision to raise the benchmark one-week repo rate to 10.25%, according to officials familiar with the matter.

Ensuing conversations with former Governor Uysal and other top officials including Agbal allowed Erdogan to get a fuller picture of the FX liabilities and how they compared to net reserves, they said, asking not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.

The president’s support is critical for new central bank Governor Naci Agbal, who will face a credibility test at his first Monetary Policy Committee meeting on Nov. 19, and new Treasury and Finance Minister Lutfi Elvan. With Erdogan saying he won’t interfere, optimism has grown that Turkey will allow interest rates to rise to offer a sufficient inflation-adjusted return.

Agbal has begun meeting top banking executives to tell them he was appointed with a mandate to lower the inflation rate, which is just under 12%, people familiar with the meetings said, asking not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Even before Erdogan’s speech, Agbal and Elvan have been doing the rounds to convey market-friendly messages to Turkish businesses while they prepare for the rates decision.

To be sure, Erdogan’s career saw previous attempts to appease investors, which proved short-lived. Even in Wednesday’s speech, he repeated his widely discredited view that lowering interest rates will also lead to lower inflation.

“Erdogan’s priority is to consolidate support and maintain the popularity of his party,” Nihat Ali Ozcan, a strategist at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara, said by phone on Wednesday. “He is a pragmatic leader and the economy management appointed by the president are unlikely to act independently. His arguments are aimed at preventing the economy, which is badly hurt by the pandemic, from deteriorating further.”

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Taiwan reaches out to Biden amid speculation on call

InternationalNov 12. 2020Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s foreign minister, during a Bloomberg Television interview in Taipei, Taiwan, on Aug. 24, 2018. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Billy H.C. Kwok.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Samson Ellis, Cindy Wang · WORLD, ASIA-PACIFIC 
Taiwan is “considering various ways” of congratulating President-elect Joe Biden, the island’s foreign minister said, amid speculation about whether Taipei was looking for a repeat of its convention-breaking call with Donald Trump.

Taiwan’s government was in discussions about communications between President Tsai Ing-wen and Biden, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told lawmakers Thursday in Taipei.

“On the topic of congratulating the U.S. president-elect, we will do it in the most appropriate way,” Wu said. “We are communicating about this. We are considering various ways, including a telegram, to congratulate the new president.”

Four years ago, Donald Trump took a congratulatory call from Tsai, the first time a U.S. president-elect had spoken to a Taiwanese head of state since Washington broke ties with Taipei in 1979. The Communist government in Beijing, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory despite never having controlled the island, dismissed the call as a gimmick.

Asked by lawmakers if a Biden refusal to take Tsai’s call would represent a diplomatic setback for Taiwan, Wu said any call would have no bearing on the health of ties with the U.S.

Tsai was among the first to congratulate Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their election victory, saying in a tweet that she looked forward to working together to further strengthen U.S.-Taiwan relations and contributions to international society.

Biden’s decision on whether to have a phone call with Tsai could help clarify whether he planned to continue the Trump administration’s tough stance on China — or show greater deference to Chinese sensitivities, especially in his dealings with Taipei. While Biden offered to deepen ties with Taiwan in an op-ed in the largest U.S.-based Chinese-language newspaper last month, he has stopped short of offering specifics on which parts of Trump-era China policies he would change.

Biden spoke to the leaders of Japan and South Korea on Thursday, reassuring them of his commitment to maintaining security alliances with both countries. While the U.S. doesn’t formally recognize Taiwan as a country, Washington is the democratic island’s main security backstop against Beijing’s ongoing threats of invasion.

The Trump administration last week agreed to sell Taiwan four Reaper drones, the latest in almost $5 billion of military sales announced over the past few weeks designed to make Chinese strategists think twice about attempting to capture the island. The sales come as China’s air force continues to pile pressure on Taiwan, with regular sojourns into the island’s Air Defense Identification Zone.

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Chief of staff pick signals end of Trump-era chaos

InternationalNov 12. 2020Ron Klain, President-elect Joe Biden’s newly chosen chief of staff, in his office in 2015. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Bill O’Leary

By The Washington Post · Michael Scherer · NATIONAL, HEALTH, POLITICS, SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT

WASHINGTON – President-elect Joe Biden has chosen longtime Washington operative Ronald Klain as White House chief of staff, sending an early signal that he intends to rely heavily on experience, competence and political agility after a Donald Trump presidency that prized flashiness and personality.

Klain, 59, has been a senior adviser to Democratic presidents, vice presidents, candidates and senators. His appointment marks a homecoming of sorts, since Klain served in the late 1980s as a top aide to Biden when he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and ran Biden’s office when he first became vice president.

“Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together, including as we rescued the American economy from one of the worst downturns in our history in 2009 and later overcame a daunting public health emergency in 2014,” Biden said in a statement. “His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again.”

A strategist with a legal mind and political ear, Klain is the sort of behind-the-scenes Washington hand more common in decades past, an operative who has managed everything from an Ebola outbreak to candidate debates to judicial confirmations.

“This town is brimming with smart people and high school valedictorians,” said Jared Bernstein, an economic adviser to Biden when he was vice president. “Ron brings something extra to the table, which is an ability to quickly process complex, conflicting streams of information and zero in on the optimal solution.”

Often called the second-hardest gig in Washington, the White House chief of staff holds what is traditionally the most important unelected position in government not subject to a Senate confirmation, a person who must wake the president in a crisis and decide who gets to be in the room to shape his views.

The job has often gone to the most talented advisers in both parties – people such as Republican James Baker and Democrat Leon Panetta. Under President Trump, however, the role of the chief of staff has shifted, with the position falling to officials with strained relations and limited sway with Trump. Bucking convention, Trump’s son-in-law, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, established an independent locus of power inside the West Wing.

Choosing Klain reflects Biden’s plan to move beyond that chaos-driven presidency. The internal White House structure will probably revert to form, with a single manager in charge surrounded by senior officials who also have direct relationships with the president. Mike Donilon, who helped write Biden’s campaign strategy, and Steve Ricchetti, the campaign chairman, are well positioned to land influential positions inside the White House, according to people with knowledge of the internal dynamics who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount private conversations.

Other top campaign advisers, including Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director, and her husband, former White House counsel Bob Bauer, are expected to stay out of government this time around.

Many in Biden’s orbit have long seen Klain as the most obvious pick for chief of staff after more than 30 years of background roles. After a falling-out with Biden’s team when he offered early support to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid, Klain has worked his way back into the upper echelons of Biden’s trusted circle.

He consulted with Biden on general strategy even before the former vice president announced his presidential campaign last year, and since August he has served as an unpaid senior adviser to the campaign and led Biden’s extensive debate preparation.

“He is the logical choice and brings the complete package – universally acknowledged ability, a broad range of experience, chemistry with the president-elect – and he is a strategic thinker that brings results,” said Pete Rouse, who was a top aide to President Barack Obama.

At times Klain appears to have worked with every Democratic leader of the past three decades. As counsel to the Judiciary Committee, Klain advised then-Sen. Biden during Clarence Thomas’s volatile Supreme Court confirmation hearings. He worked in the Bill Clinton White House to confirm Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, served as chief of staff to Attorney General Janet Reno and was a top policy aide to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.

Klain also served as chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore and led Gore’s legal efforts to force a recount of Florida ballots after the 2000 election – actor Kevin Spacey played him in the 2008 movie “Recount.”

“People frequently tell me that I should ‘get over’ the 2000 election and the recount,” Klain tweeted in 2019. “I haven’t, and I don’t think I ever will.”

Along the way, Klain has developed a specialized role as the Democrats’ preeminent coach for presidential debates. He worked on debate preparations for Bill Clinton in 1992 and Gore in 2000, and he has led the debate prep for every Democratic nominee since – John Kerry, Obama, Hillary Clinton and Biden.

Klain’s debate rules for candidates, versions of which long ago became public, have been a mainstay of both party’s strategies for these presidential matchups. “Write your ‘dream’ post-debate headline,” one bullet point says. “Dress so no one will talk about it,” says another.

“A stumble, fumble, or gaffe can cost you a debate, right up to the last second,” he wrote in one memo that became public. “But while you can lose a debate at any point, you can only win a debate in the first twenty minutes.”

But it is Klain’s experience battling both a recession and a pandemic that could come most quickly into play as Biden confronts the nation’s crises. “He knows Biden and he is loyal to Biden, and he absolutely has Biden’s trust,” Dunn said. “There is no one who works harder than Ron, whether it is on a debate book or covid policy.”

As Biden’s vice-presidential chief of staff, Klain oversaw the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a stimulus package that helped ward off a deeper recession after the 2008 economic collapse.

Klain was considered for White House chief of staff during Obama’s second term. That job ultimately went to Denis McDonough, a longtime Obama policy adviser, after Klain withdrew from consideration for personal reasons.

But he returned to the White House to become the point man for the administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak, which has now made him one of the Democratic Party’s go-to experts for responding to the coronavirus.

“It’s hard to prove a counterfactual, but I believe that Ron Klain is the reason we did not have an Ebola epidemic in the United States,” said Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to Obama. “He is well respected by all the people with whom I have worked.”

When Klain was chief Democratic counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Christopher Coons, D-Del., served as an intern there. About a quarter century later, they worked together again on the U.S. response to Ebola. “Ron Klain brought focus, professionalism, no drama, high competency to our Ebola response,” said Coons, who led the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa.

But Klain has not escaped the friction that is a constant at the highest reaches of government. He resigned as chief of staff to Gore in 1999, in the middle of Gore’s presidential campaign, after it emerged that he was in the room with President Bill Clinton when the president called a reporter for a story about the Gore campaign’s struggles.

Clinton had been seeking to convey to the reporter that Gore’s campaign was now doing well after initial stumbles. But Gore was furious at the implicit criticism in that message and at Clinton for delivering it.

Klain said he had opposed Clinton’s call, but the fallout only deepened divisions between the campaign and the vice president’s White House team. Klain left his job about a month later and was hired back into Gore’s team only after a shake-up in the senior campaign leadership.

More recently, Klain infuriated some in Biden’s inner circle by signing up to advise Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign before Biden, who was mourning his son Beau’s death from cancer, had decided to take a pass on the race. Klain helped prepare Clinton for her first debate against Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., which took place days before Biden announced he would not run.

After the campaign, Ricchetti, who also served as chief of staff to Biden in the vice president’s office, arranged for a meeting between Klain and Biden to clear any lingering bad feelings, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Ron’s value is that Biden trusts him completely and Ron has no fear of telling him exactly what he thinks,” said Jay Carney, a former White House press secretary whom Klain hired previously to work for Biden. “He does it respectfully and bluntly, which is what Biden wants and expects.”

Klain also has private-sector experience, which he got after leaving the Gore campaign. He became a litigator and registered lobbyist from 2001 to 2004, working out of the law firm O’Melveny & Myers for a range of clients, including AOL Time Warner and the federal mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

He then went to work for Revolution, a firm that has invested in companies such as Sweetgreen, Cotopaxi and DraftKings. The company was started by Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL.

Klain is married to Monica Medina, an environmental policy consultant who previously held positions at the Defense Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Biden’s experts navigating Trump’s transition blockade

InternationalNov 12. 2020President-elect Joe Biden and wife Jill Biden, along with Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney make a Veterans Day stop at the Korean War Memorial Park in Philadelphia on Wednesday. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman

By The Washington Post · Sean Sullivan, Lisa Rein, John Hudson, Laura Meckler · NATIONAL, POLITICS

WASHINGTON – President-elect Joe Biden has tapped a vast network of allies with extensive government experience and relationships to spearhead a transition of power carefully calibrated to work around the Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to obstruct a smooth changeover.

With the Trump White House blocking the administration from formally cooperating with Biden, the members of the Democrat’s transition team are under strict orders not to have any contact with current government officials, even back-channel conversations, according to people with knowledge of the situation, who presented several explanations for the directive.

Biden transition team members are instead making contact with recently departed government officials and other experts to help them prepare for the new administration. And they are relying on a team led by a former senior State Department official to handle an influx of calls from foreign leaders – all without the benefit of a secure government line or language interpretation services provided by the current State Department.

The scramble shows how President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat has become much more than a symbolic stand. His administration’s blockade comes amid a deadly pandemic, an economic downturn and volatility abroad, stoking growing concerns that it will set back Biden’s effort to meet the swirl of crises confronting the nation.

“The problems become much more severe the longer this goes,” said Max Stier, the president of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, which assists on presidential transitions, including the current one. “Our government is the biggest and most complex organization not only in this country, but probably in the world and probably in history. So, taking it over effectively is a huge task.”

Details about the Biden strategy came from interviews with transition team members, lawmakers and other Democrats with knowledge of the situation. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid or because they were not authorized to talk on the record. A Biden transition spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

On Tuesday, Biden sought to play down the significance of Trump’s resistance. “We’re already beginning the transition. We’re well underway,” he said. “The fact that they’re not willing to acknowledge we’ve won is not of much consequence.”

The same day, he announced his selection of scores of experts and former government officials to serve as team members who are prepared to go into each agency and begin setting the stage for a Biden agenda.

The agency review teams that Biden announced are filled with experts on a variety of policies who served in the last administration. A majority of the names on the Veterans Affairs team, for example, served under Robert McDonald, President Barack Obama’s second secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

These members normally would gain funding and access to rooms and people inside their assigned agencies such as the Defense Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department. But since the General Services Administration has not recognized Biden as the next president and has not officially started the transition process, they are unable to enter the various agency buildings and receive information.

The Biden team has drawn up lists of recently departed senior officials at key agencies to help transition officials get up to speed on ongoing projects, budgets, trouble spots, technology and personnel, a senior transition official said, describing “a whole plan for this contingency where we don’t have cooperation but have to move forward.” The plan was put in place to anticipate refusals of some agency heads to engage even if the GSA declares Biden the winner, the official said, for example from John Ratcliffe, the Trump-appointed director of national intelligence.

Over a decades-long career in Washington, Biden has cultivated a long list of friends, associates and former aides with deep ties in just about every corner of government. Those connections and that experience are reflected in the team he has assembled. Now, their abilities to prepare for a new administration under extraordinary circumstances are being tested.

“While there are certain things that we can’t do, like be in touch with the people in the federal agencies now, the teams are moving forward as aggressively as they can,” said former Delaware governor Jack Markell, a Biden ally who is involved with the transition.

Among its activities, the Biden team is processing the commitments he made during the campaign and figuring out personnel decisions, including Cabinet secretaries, Markell said. He saw a silver lining in the difficult situation created by the Trump administration: Some of the people Biden is relying on “have not been out of government for so long.”

Other Democrats expressed a similar confidence in the team’s familiarity with the inner workings of the federal bureaucracy, wagering that their experience could help overcome the stonewalling by the current administration.

Democrats have been out of power in Washington for less than four years. Think tanks and nonprofit groups are populated by Obama administration veterans, particularly in the active areas of environmental protection. Several prominent Democrats said the Biden team has workarounds at its disposal, among them the testimony of Trump officials before Congress and insight from congressional Democrats on government operations.

Another recent trend is just as significant: Hundreds of senior civil servants and government leaders appointed by Trump have left the government in frustration or because they were forced out.

Still, Democrats say, there is no substitute for the kind of cooperation that Obama gave to Trump or that other presidents have provided to their successors. “A messy transition is especially dangerous this year, given the state of the pandemic and the number of simmering crises around the world that have been mishandled by Trump,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.

The limitations have grown clear to those involved in the process. Transition team members have received some informal outreach from career employees at the Education Department but were told not to engage with the civil servants, according to two transition advisers.

The thinking, one of these advisers said, is that any communication between the administration and the transition groups could undermine possible legal action down the road. If the Trump administration is able to argue that Biden’s transition advisers are getting what they need without the formal process, that could undercut a possible case, the adviser said.

Others offered different explanations, such as a desire to wait for GSA clearance and do the transition by the book, or to protect agency staffers who may be violating the law by working with the Biden team without GSA certification.

The inability to get information could be increasingly problematic in the days ahead, with the transition seeking information about personnel vacancies, pending litigation, contracts and procurement. All of the related questions cannot be answered simply by consulting outside people, the transition adviser said.

Foreign policy also has proved to be a challenge. The Biden team has juggled a flurry of phone calls from the leaders of the most powerful U.S. allies, including Japan, Britain, France, Canada and South Korea since Monday.

Under a normal transition, the State Department would be facilitating those calls on a protected line to avoid surveillance by hostile foreign intelligence services and other malign actors. The department also would be providing government-trained interpreters so that the Biden team does not have to rely on its own people or a foreign government’s interpreters, who can offer a different flavor to a bilateral discussion.

The Biden team has relied on a former senior State Department official to handle the influx of calls from allies seeking to start on the right foot with a new American president, according to foreign diplomats familiar with the discussions.

The order from Trump officials to prohibit contacts with the Biden team also is thwarting Biden’s aides’ ability to receive need-to-know classified information about foreign threats on U.S. adversaries and infectious-disease and vaccine-development issues related to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

“You only have public information, but what’s classified you don’t have, and that is the single biggest issue you’re not going to get” without access to current government officials, said Jeffrey Neal, who retired from the Department of Homeland Security in 2011 and was a consultant to federal agencies until last year.

The turmoil at many agencies in the Trump era, when key government departments were left with leaders in acting roles, could have benefits for the incoming Biden team, some former government officials said.

Veterans Affairs, left without a Senate-confirmed leader of its massive health system for four years, focused largely on refining some key policies that were priorities under Obama, such as the prevention of veteran suicides and expanding veterans’ medical care outside the VA system.

“There hasn’t been leadership in place in the health system to put in big policy changes or initiatives, so the [agency review] teams will walk into a familiar environment,” said David Shulkin, who served as the head of the health system under Obama before becoming Trump’s first VA secretary. He said he has been in close touch with the Biden transition team.

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Trump rails against ‘medical deep state’ after Pfizer vaccine news comes after Election Day

InternationalNov 12. 2020

By The Washington Post · Laurie McGinley, Josh Dawsey, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Carolyn Y. Johnson · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, HEALTH, POLITICS, SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is lashing out at the Food and Drug Administration following a disclosure Monday that an experimental coronavirus vaccine from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is more than 90% effective, convinced the timing – six days after Election Day – proves the “medical deep state” deliberately tried to sabotage his electoral prospects by delaying the results.

Shortly after Trump heard the news Monday, he demanded Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar “get to the bottom” of what happened with Pfizer, according to a senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the president’s actions.

A few hours later, the issue was front and center at a meeting of the White House coronavirus task force when FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn briefed members about the vaccine data.

The meeting agenda that day had been drafted so Hahn could walk members through the vaccine approval process, a senior administration official said. Hahn said the timing was the sole result of independent decisions made by Pfizer on collecting and reviewing the information, according to three senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal affairs.

Azar, Hahn’s boss, pointedly contradicted Hahn in front of Vice President Mike Pence, asserting that the FDA’s actions had in fact contributed to a delay in Pfizer’s announcement. He also asked questions that some officials thought suggested Azar believed Pfizer’s timing was affected by political motivations.

Trump weighed in Monday night, tweeting without evidence that the FDA and Pfizer intentionally withheld the news until after the election.

“As I have long said, @Pfizer and the others would only announce a Vaccine after the Election, because they didn’t have the courage to do it before. Likewise, the @US_FDA should have announced it earlier, not for political purposes, but for saving lives!” Trump wrote. “The @US_FDA and the Democrats didn’t want to have me get a Vaccine WIN, prior to the election, so instead it came out five days later – As I’ve said all along!”

Trump’s anger at the FDA raises fresh questions about whether Hahn will hang on to his job until Jan. 20 – when Trump leaves office – in an administration intent on purging officials deemed insufficiently loyal. Trump called Hahn shortly before he tweeted Monday and was “screaming at him” about the Pfizer announcement, in the words of one senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters. The accusations against the FDA may further fuel baseless conspiracy theories that the election was stolen from Trump.

The FDA and HHS declined to comment.

Although there is no evidence that Pfizer withheld data or did not report it as soon as it was available, a White House official said without evidence that Pfizer “either knew the data and sat on it, or intentionally did not review it as originally planned, in order to push it beyond the election for political purposes.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

But Pfizer did not have access to the data until the Sunday after the election and could not have known the results before then. Neither the trial participants nor the company knew who was getting the vaccine, and the company did not know how many cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, there were on Election Day. An independent monitoring committee analyzed the data Sunday and informed Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla, who learned of the results at 2 p.m. that day. The company announced the news the next morning.

An examination of decisions made by Pfizer and the FDA in recent months shows that while their actions inevitably affected the timing of the clinical trial results, there is no proof decisions were made with the intent of imperiling Trump’s reelection prospects.

Rather, the drug company and regulatory agency were reacting to an unprecedented and evolving situation with the goal of dramatically compressing the timeline for vaccine development – it routinely stretches for years – into 10 months without sacrificing safety, according to numerous individuals who were involved in the process or had knowledge of it.

They were also responding to public pressure from scientists who repeatedly voiced concerns that Trump would try to force a vaccine decision before Election Day. On several occasions, Trump said he hoped a vaccine would be ready before Nov. 3. Several Trump administration officials said they were frustrated that some of the scientists expressing concerns included experts advising Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden.

“What’s going on is they are trying to say there was collusion between FDA and Pfizer to delay this analysis of the trial data so that it wouldn’t benefit Trump in the election, and there’s no basis to that,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not have permission to speak about the issue.

Bourla said Election Day did not factor into the company’s decisions.

“If it was before [the election], I would have released it before. If it is now, I’ll release them now. I learned about those results yesterday, Sunday, at 2 o’clock,” Bourla told Axios on Monday.

Wednesday afternoon, two days after Pfizer announced its results, biotechnology firm Moderna announced its vaccine trial had also reached enough cases of covid-19 for an independent data committee to assess whether its vaccine works.

When the clinical trial for the coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer and its German biotech partner, BioNTech, began in late July, the pandemic seemed to be coming under control. The company drafted an aggressive timeline for the review of data. The plan, which raised eyebrows among some vaccine experts, was designed to allow an independent monitoring committee to take more frequent and earlier peeks at the data than other manufacturers working on coronavirus vaccines.

The first analysis of the data was scheduled to occur after only 32 cases of covid-19 were reported in a trial that at that time included 30,000 participants. That was about half the number of positive cases being used for initial data analysis by vaccine trials funded and facilitated by Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration effort to speed up treatments and vaccines.

From the start of the Pfizer trial, the FDA was concerned that 32 cases would be too few and urged the company to wait for more cases, Kathrin Jansen, head of vaccine research and development for Pfizer, said in an interview.

“We heard the FDA, but we were concerned it would take us too long to get to the cases” if it raised the number for the first analysis, Jansen said. “And so the FDA said, ‘Okay, fine, it’s your trial.’ “

But many in the scientific community expressed concerns that reporting interim data based on just 32 positive cases was insufficient. Critics also questioned the FDA’s plans to use an emergency authorization, rather than full approval, to expedite the vaccine to consumers. Emergency authorization typically relies on much less evidence than full licensure, and the FDA has used the process only once for a vaccine: the anthrax vaccine, under sharply different circumstances.

Fueling the worries were Trump’s repeated promises there would be a coronavirus vaccine by Election Day – a piece of good news he desperately hoped would bolster his chances. Scientists on Twitter and elsewhere said they feared the FDA would be pressured to approve a vaccine before it was proved to be safe and effective.

By the fall, FDA officials, hoping to reassure scientists and the public, were stressing they would apply a rigorous new standard before authorizing a vaccine – one that would be roughly comparable to full approval.

But when the agency tried to publish that new standard, which required two months of follow-up safety data on half the participants, the White House tried to block it, realizing the guidelines made it extremely unlikely a vaccine could be authorized before the election. In October, the FDA published a condensed form of the guidance and the White House backed down.

The new standards meant Pfizer would not have sufficient safety data to apply for an emergency authorization until the second half of November. As cases began to surge in mid-October, Pfizer’s scientists considered simply waiting to do their first analysis at 62 cases, which would provide more confidence about the result and wouldn’t cause much of a delay.

The rapid surge of coronavirus infections in the cooler months, while devastating for the country, means the trial is rushing toward completion faster than company executives anticipated. With more people being exposed to the virus amid the surge, testing the vaccine becomes easier – and faster.

In late October, in a public meeting, the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee ridiculed the notion of reporting data on 32 cases. Soon afterward, Pfizer decided to revise its protocol to wait for 62 cases, a decision welcomed by the FDA. Pfizer temporarily stopped evaluating test samples from participants while officials discussed the case-count issue and other complex protocol changes with the agency.

“Nobody was trying to do anything bad to anyone’s reelection,” said a senior administration official. “Everyone was wanting to do the right thing by public health.”

But Trump was furious Pfizer’s promising results came shortly after the election. In Monday’s task force meeting, hours after the Pfizer news was released, Azar said the FDA’s tougher guidelines provided an incentive for the company to wait longer to determine results; there was little upside to disclosing effectiveness data on 32 cases when the company still would have to wait for safety information before applying for emergency authorization.

Azar, who as a board member of Operation Warp Speed does not take part in the FDA’s decisions, has worked to distance himself from the FDA’s decisions with the president and top White House aides.

Hahn told the task force that Pfizer’s vaccine could be authorized soon. Azar again corrected him, saying the FDA should not overpromise given that it took the agency longer than initially expected to issue an emergency use authorization for a promising antibody treatment also announced Monday.

Given the timing of the Pfizer announcement, Trump and his allies are convinced he has been right all along about a “medical deep state,” a senior administration official said.

The president and his aides were annoyed when Pfizer’s Jansen, in responding to a question from the New York Times, distanced the company from Operation Warp Speed, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private discussions.

Pfizer did not take money from the government for research and development; instead, it spent $2 billion of its own money. It has a $1.95 billion contract with Operation Warp Speed for distribution of its vaccine assuming its candidate is successful. Pfizer spokeswoman Amy Rose said the company is working closely with Operation Warp Speed on distribution, but that Jansen was referring to Pfizer not receiving government funding for research and development.

Some Trump aides said it was probably better for vaccine confidence for the data to be released after the election.

“Honestly, from my perspective, it’s probably better that we announced anything about the vaccine after the election because it’s going to be more trusted by the American people,” said a senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized to discuss the matter. “I’m not sure Pfizer did the wrong thing.”

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Trump insists he will be proven the winner, but aides say he has no serious plan to overturn election

InternationalNov 12. 2020A Marine stands guard outside the West Wing, signifying the President is in the Oval Office, at the White House on Tuesday. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford

By The Washington Post · Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker · NATIONAL, POLITICS, COURTSLAW, WHITEHOUSE

President Donald Trump declared Wednesday on Twitter, “WE WILL WIN!”

But, in fact, the president has no clear endgame to actually win the election – and, in an indication he may be starting to come to terms with his loss, he is talking privately about running again in 2024.

Trump aides, advisers and allies said there is no grand strategy to reverse the election results, which show President-elect Joe Biden with a majority of electoral college votes, as well as a 5 million-vote lead in the national popular vote.

Asked about Trump’s ultimate plan, one senior administration official chuckled and said, “You’re giving everybody way too much credit right now.”

Republican officials have scrambled nationwide to produce evidence of widespread voter fraud that could bolster the Trump campaign’s legal challenges, but no such evidence has surfaced. And Biden’s lead in several states targeted by the Trump campaign has expanded as late-counted votes are reported. In all-important Pennsylvania, the Democrat now leads by more than 50,000 votes.

Still, the absence of evidence and of a comprehensive and realistic plan to overcome Trump’s significant deficit and secure him a second term have not stopped some of the leading figures in the administration and the Republican Party from amplifying the president’s misinformation about the election outcome.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent pledge for “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” and Vice President Mike Pence’s assertion that the election was not over have helped sow public doubt about the integrity of the vote and raised concerns from allies abroad about the state of America’s democracy.

Save for a visit Wednesday to Arlington National Cemetery in observance of Veterans Day, Trump has not appeared in public since last Thursday, when he delivered a statement challenging preliminary election results. He has instead addressed the election in social media posts or through his spokespeople, promising to keep fighting until he is declared the winner.

Trump has been spending his days largely on the phone, calling advisers, allies and friends. The president has been “trying to find people who will give him good news,” one adviser said.

Still, Trump has indicated in some of these conversations that he understands Biden will take over the presidency on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day. Rather than talking about a second term, Trump has been matter-of-factly discussing a possible 2024 campaign – an indication that he knows his time as president is coming to an end, at least for now.

“I’m just going to run in 2024. I’m just going to run again,” Trump has been saying, according to a senior administration official who has spoken with him this week.

That official, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly recount sensitive internal conversations.

Doug Deason, a top Trump donor who attended the election night party at the White House, said the president deserves “two or three weeks” to investigate his assertions, despite no evidence of widespread fraud so far. Deason said “some people are writing big checks” to fund legal challenges because they are so fired up, but he has not.

“More than likely, they will find some fraud, but there won’t be enough to justify disqualifying enough votes for Trump to win enough states to win the presidency, but it could,” Deason said. “It probably won’t. But it will give Trump supporters the comfort that Biden won it fair and square.”

Even the possibility of a future Trump run would help keep him relevant – and in the media spotlight – and effectively freeze the GOP primary field. Many of the party’s rising stars and buzzed-about 2024 hopefuls – including Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and Pence – are unlikely to run if Trump is planning another campaign, Trump allies said.

Despite losing out on a second term, Trump maintains a viselike grip on a large portion of the Republican Party – especially the populist base that helped lift him to power in 2016 and turned out for him again this year. GOP officials and Trump advisers say most elected Republicans are fearful of provoking Trump’s ire.

“In matters of statecraft and leadership, conceding when you lose is a hallmark of George Washington’s republic; what Trump is doing is more akin to something you would see in a banana republic,” said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor. “Trump is trying to establish the premise that he was robbed by voter fraud and use that as his power base within the Republican Party going forward.”

Congressional Republicans are also largely placating Trump and his false claims of victory because of political considerations, a senior Republican congressional aide said. With both Georgia Senate seats coming down to a Jan. 5 runoff, top Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are loath to do anything that could anger Trump.

Other GOP lawmakers, especially those up for reelection in two years, don’t want to risk offending the president to the point that he urges his base to oust them in a primary, that aide added.

“If the party doesn’t fight on the recount, the grass roots is going to leave the party,” said one senior Republican involved in the discussions. “That’s the choice they have. That’s why they are doing it. It’s less about the president than it is his voters.”

Pence told Senate Republicans at a lunch Tuesday he found it odd that a pro-GOP electoral trend – from state legislatures to congressional races – would stop at the top of the ticket, according to two people familiar with his remarks. Republicans came away with the impression that Pence was making the case for why the campaign was continuing to legally dispute the results, although the vice president did not explicitly make that link when speaking with senators, according to another official present for the comments.

Meanwhile, Trump and members of his family are determined to keep fighting, especially his two oldest sons, Don Jr. and Eric. Trump is said to be consulting both, as well as son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, throughout the process.

The Trumps have been asking other advisers about conducting a sophisticated analysis of voting trends in states to reveal potential aberrations, according to officials.

A senior Trump campaign official said their strategy is focused on recounts, as well as a messaging push that will underscore their legal efforts. For instance, campaign aides have begun highlighting stories of alleged voting by dead people.

“This will be a methodical process and every step we take brings us closer to our goal of re-electing the president,” Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said in a statement. “More than 70.5 million Americans voted for President Trump and they deserve to know that the election was fair and secure, and so does everyone who voted for Joe Biden. The goal is to make sure legal votes are counted and illegal votes are discarded, not only for this election, but for every election in the future.”

Trump has also raised the idea of pressuring state legislators to pick electors favorable to him, in the hope that could offer a viable path to an electoral college victory, though most of his advisers are warning against such a tactic.

The scenario is highly unlikely, legal experts say, and Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania have already indicated that they are not interested in that approach.

The campaign remains especially focused on Pennsylvania, two officials said, because there is no “real path” without the state, in the words of one adviser.

The president’s mood and thinking, meanwhile, have ping-ponged since Election Day, with Trump offering drastically different perspectives depending on the day, said one Republican involved in the campaign.

Some senior administration officials – including Pence, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought – are also trying to encourage their staffs by insisting the president still could win, aides said.

Every federal agency has prepared a transition document for the Biden team but so far has been told not to provide it. And Trump continues to complain that Fox News and some world leaders are, in his view, being overly deferential to Biden.

A Republican National Committee official said the organization had retained law firms in various states. Meanwhile, the RNC laid off hundreds of employees Monday, per several officials, part of a natural downsizing for party committees following elections.Ronna McDaniel, its chairwoman, has told others she is taking her cues from the White House and the campaign but understands the fight cannot go on much longer unless evidence of wider fraud is found.

Inside the president’s orbit, many aides find themselves grappling with a dual reality – pretending, and some perhaps believing, that Trump has a shot at holding the White House while they also look for their next opportunity, said one senior administration official who spent part of Tuesday and Wednesday searching for a job. Two administration officials added that many in the West Wing are updating their résumés, talking to headhunters and looking for work. But they are also living in fear, with senior Trump adviser Johnny McEntee promising to terminate anyone who gets caught seeking employment, officials said.

The White House now is far more vacant than it has been in weeks, with many aides concerned about catching coronavirus – or self-quarantining after having been exposed to it.

Trump is now working without a number of his top advisers. Chief of staff Mark Meadows is out with the coronavirus, as is David Bossie, an outside adviser helming the campaign’s legal effort. Brian Jack, the White House political director, also has the virus, along with a number of other staffers in political affairs and assistants to several top administration officials, according to a White House official.

The Trump campaign has tried to assuage the concerns of donors and surrogates with regular calls to keep them focused on supporting the president, people familiar with the calls said. The campaign’s argument is that some states are still winnable – particularly Arizona and Georgia – according to a person on the call. But, this person added, “it’s not that convincing.”

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Daily coronavirus infections surpass 3,000 in Washington, D.C., region, setting record for eighth day

InternationalNov 12. 2020

By The Washington Post · Erin Cox, Dana Hedgpeth · NATIONAL, HEALTH, HEALTH-NEWS

Coronavirus infections across the greater Washington region surged past the 3,000 mark Wednesday for the first time, spreading with relative ease as the average number of daily caseloads set another record high.

The seven-day average of new cases across Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia stood Wednesday at 3,015, making it the eighth consecutive day with a record number of new cases. The continued surge comes as local leaders are reimposing restrictions and monitoring a leap in cases tied to a nationwide spike.

The region Wednesday recorded 3,514 new infections – the second-highest number in a single day since the start of the pandemic. The daily total trailed only Saturday, when 3,612 cases were reported.

The 206 new cases Wednesday in the District were, by far, the most in a single day since May. They sent the city’s seven-day average caseload to 111 – up from 36 on Oct. 1.

Maryland’s daily caseload of 1,714 also was the highest in one day since May, sending its recent average to a record high of 1,380 cases. More than 800 people are hospitalized in the state, the most since mid-June.

The spike in cases comes a day after Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, reimposed coronavirus restrictions that had not been in place since the summer.

Maryland restaurants must reduce indoor dining capacity from 75 percent to 50 percent. The health advisory urges a 25-person cap on indoor gatherings and limits nonessential travel to 35 states.

Hogan said the indoor-dining and small-gathering measures were tailored to reduce the virus’s spread. Both involve activities that contact tracers have identified as sources of infections.

Maryland has allowed local governments to impose more-restrictive policies than the state, and leaders in the Washington region generally have opted to reopen more slowly.

Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman, a Democrat, plans to announce tougher coronavirus restrictions Thursday, including a smaller cap on the size of social gatherings. A spokesman for Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr., a Democrat, said that jurisdiction is considering similar restrictions.

In Montgomery County, lawmakers on Tuesday approved an order by County Executive Marc Elrich, a Democrat, to limit gatherings to a maximum of 25 people and reduce capacity for restaurants and shops from 50 percent to 25 percent.

Virginia’s 1,594 new cases Wednesday were short of a one-day record, but the state’s seven-day average of 1,524 daily cases did enter new territory.

Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, on Tuesday urged residents to follow health protocols to slow the virus’s spread, but said it is not the time to toughen enforcement or impose new restrictions. District officials this week said they are regularly evaluating restrictions.

Maryland is recording an average of 23 new cases each day per 100,000 residents, a statistic that stands at 18 in Virginia and 16 in the District. The national average Wednesday stood at 37 new cases per 100,000 residents.

Caseloads have been rising in the Washington region for weeks. Health experts say colder weather has pushed activities indoors and that the public is increasingly letting down its guard with regard to social distancing, mask-wearing and limiting social interactions.

Contact tracing shows much of the spread is occurring during social and family gatherings. Officials also have sounded the alarm in recent weeks about holiday travel potentially increasing the virus’s spread.

More than 350,000 people opted into Maryland’s smartphone contact-tracing app on Tuesday, the first day it was operational, state officials said. The app, available on Apple and Android phones, assigns users random numbers that can be used to trace whether they have encountered someone who later tests positive for the virus.

Some of Maryland’s highest rates of infection are in rural areas that were largely spared in the spring when the virus swept through the state’s populated Washington suburbs and the Baltimore area. The seven-day average of new cases in Western Maryland’s Allegany County is more than five times that of 14 days ago.

On Wednesday, Frostburg State University in Allegany County suspended in-person courses for the rest of the semester following a campus outbreak. Forty-five students and employees who have contracted the virus are in isolation.

The University of Maryland on Wednesday canceled Saturday’s football game against Ohio State University after eight Maryland players tested positive for the virus this week.

Wednesday’s seven-day average of 3,015 new infections in Virginia, Maryland and the District was well above the peak seen during the first wave of the pandemic. Before this recent surge in cases, a record high of 2,218 average daily infections had stood since May 31.

Despite the sharp rise in caseloads, the number of coronavirus-related fatalities in the region has generally held steady, with the seven-day average standing at 21 on Wednesday. The region added 31 new deaths Wednesday, with 16 in Maryland, 15 in Virginia and none in D.C.

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State Department sets business-as-usual course while ignoring Biden

InternationalNov 12. 2020Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, center/ file photo 

By The Washington Post · Karen DeYoung, Carol Morello · NATIONAL, WORLD, POLITICS, NATIONAL-SECURITY

WASHINGTON – The many foreign leaders who have tweeted good wishes to President-elect Joe Biden and called him directly cannot rely on the State Department to forward congratulatory missives through diplomatic channels. 

The department has been collecting those messages but will not turn them over to the Biden team until President Donald Trump’s General Services Administration, which so far has refused to authorize a transition, gives the go-ahead.

“I’ve found myself saying formally that I can’t OK the delivery of a message to the president-elect because he’s not officially that,” said a current official. “They go into some box somewhere.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week discussed the state of affairs in a telephone call with politically appointed ambassadors, according to a second current official and a former official familiar with the matter, telling them not to forward congratulations through official channels.

“This is clear paranoia of not saying or doing anything that might upset the big man,” the current official said, referring to Trump. The official, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Six current officials inside the department, who were not authorized to speak to the news media, said they had received no guidance from leadership, and that it was unclear how they should proceed amid Pompeo’s assertion at a news conference this week that he expects “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

While much of the administration has descended into turmoil – obsessively searching for nonexistent ballot fraud, as Cabinet secretaries and other senior officials are fired, resign or are stricken with the coronavirus – the State Department has calmly set a course toward business as usual.

Pompeo leaves Friday for an 11-day trip, with a full agenda, to seven countries in Europe and the Middle East – all of whose leaders have publicly congratulated Biden on his victory. This week, the department released a slew of new economic sanctions on its least-favored countries, held an economic dialogue with Israel and a counterterrorism forum with Nigeria, and congratulated “the people of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on their successful election.”

“There’s still a great deal of work to be done, and this work will continue in this year and next,” Pompeo told Fox News during one of several interviews with conservative news outlets Tuesday.

Asked about Pompeo’s call to political ambassadors and the lack of internal department guidance, a State Department spokesman said: “It’s been made very clear that we still have work to do at the department and everyone should stay focused on the mission.”

“It’s also not unusual for the secretary to pick up the phone to call staff and leadership throughout the department,” said the spokesman, speaking on the condition of anonymity under rules imposed by the State Department.

But even as Pompeo expressed confidence in Trump’s eventual victory, his flurry of speeches and media appearances on Tuesday also sounded like a legacy-building farewell, as he congratulated himself and the president on changing the world and boosting U.S. standing.

In an address on Tuesday at the virtual launch of the Ronald Reagan Institute in Washington, Pompeo drew a direct line from the popular 40th president, who he said did more than any other “to restore America’s confidence and advance human freedom in the post-World War II era,” to the “accomplishments” of the 45th. Trump’s foreign policy, Pompeo said, “will steer a generation of American foreign policymakers” to come.

At the top of his list, Pompeo placed”delivering peace” to the Middle East, moving the world to “wake up” to the threat posed by China, and reversing the “days when America sacrificed its natural leadership to morally pliant multilateral institutions.” 

One of the few top administrations officials who has lasted throughout Trump’s term, Pompeo has rarely, if ever, experienced the president’s wrath. He deflects all questions about his own political ambitions – including mentions of a possible presidential run in 2024 – by saying he is focused on his current work and happy to do it as long as Trump wants him.

One former senior official described Pompeo as less willing to incur Trump’s anger because he had little independent base of support outside the administration. “Pompeo has political ambitions, and those ambitions are tied to Trump,” the former official said. “He goes nowhere without Trump.” 

But assuming that Pompeo leaves office in January, his record will be mixed. Many of the administration’s signature foreign policy priorities, with which he was closely associated, have made little or no progress. 

Despite U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and new sanctions heaped on Iran almost weekly, Tehran did not buckle and change its “malign behavior.” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro remained stubbornly in power despite efforts to turn his own military against him and push him into exile. North Korea remains a belligerent nuclear power.

While Pompeo has been successful in persuading some countries to reject Chinese technology, it remains unclear whether administration efforts to curb Chinese expansionism will succeed. 

One area where he has claimed a significant measure of success has been his efforts to elevate religious freedom as a foreign policy priority.

An evangelical Christian who said he prays on the elevator up to his seventh-floor office every day, he put religious freedom at the top of his list of “inalienable rights” that many saw as a way to downgrade less-traditional legal freedoms related to gender issues and abortion.

When Pompeo became secretary in April 2018, a sense of relief washed over the State Department, where diplomats and civil servants had grown deeply demoralized under his predecessor. Rex Tillerson, the ExxonMobil executive who served as Trump’s first secretary, imposed hiring freezes, restricted spousal assignments and acquiesced to attempts to weed out officials who had worked in the Obama administration.

Viewing Pompeo as someone who had Trump’s confidence, professional diplomats who had felt marginalized and usurped by the White House thought that under Pompeo they would once again become players in foreign policy. 

From the beginning, however, Pompeo struck many as an unlikely choice to be the nation’s top diplomat, because he was so often undiplomatic. It was a reputation cemented by his attack-dog belligerence as a congressman from Kansas during the House inquiry into the department and then-Secretary Hillary Clinton over Benghazi.

As secretary, Pompeo was sometimes as dismissive of Congress as he was of the news media, whose questions he often labeled “crazy” and “ridiculous.”

Disenchantment with Pompeo inside the department started gradually, when he issued an “ethos” statement on the need to promote U.S. interests and values around the world with “unfailing professionalism.” The elementary points, suggesting they had not been lived up to before, rankled many veteran diplomats.

“I don’t think there will be many people sorry to see him go,” said one of the current officials who discussed Pompeo’s tenure. While Pompeo was an improvement over Tillerson, he has little communication with the staff outside a handful of top lieutenants seen as loyal, and is widely known as a hothead whose blowups are sometimes laced with profanity.

Although he routinely spoke publicly of his admiration for the diplomats he led, Pompeo undercut the power of his own words when he stood beside Trump in March and amiably chuckled as the president mocked the “Deep State Department.”

Events surrounding Ukraine and Trump’s subsequent impeachment were a hinge moment for Pompeo and the department he led. Despite resistance from his own aides, he failed to defend Marie Yovanovitch, the highly regarded career Foreign Service officer who was the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, and bowed to Trump’s demand that he fire her, after a smear campaign against her led by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Many of the State Department’s personnel problems, and its fading relevance vis a vis the White House and Pentagon, as the driver of U.S. foreign policy, predate Trump.

But under Trump, what former Trump aide Stephen Bannon called the hoped-for “deconstruction of the administrative state” has been particularly pernicious.

“The wreckage at the State Department runs deep,” William Burns, who retired from 33 years in Foreign Service in 2014 as deputy secretary of state, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a former ambassador and assistant secretary for Africa who now heads Biden’s State Department transition team, wrote in this month’s Foreign Affairs.

“Career diplomats have been systematically sidelined and excluded from senior Washington jobs on an unprecedented scale. The picture overseas is just as grim, with the record quantity of political appointees serving as ambassadors matched by their often dismal quality.”

The Foreign Service, they wrote, “has experienced the biggest drop in applications in more than a decade,” while “painfully slow progress on recruiting a more diverse workforce has slid into reverse.” Only four of the 189 U.S. ambassadors serving abroad are Black.

“No amount of empty rhetoric about ethos and swagger can conceal the institutional damage,” they wrote.

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Azerbaijan’s drones owned the battlefield in Nagorno-Karabakh – and showed future of warfare

InternationalNov 12. 2020

By The Washington Post · Robyn Dixon · WORLD, EUROPE 
MOSCOW – The drone’s-eye-view over Nagorno-Karabakh defined much of the six-week war in the mountainous enclave within Azerbaijan: The video first showed soldiers below in trenches, then came blasts and smoke, then nothing. 

Drone strikes – targeting Armenian and Karabakh soldiers and destroying tanks, artillery and air defense systems – provided a huge advantage for Azerbaijan in the 44-day war and offered the clearest evidence yet of how battlefields are being transformed by unmanned attack drones rolling off assembly lines around the world.

The expanding array of relatively low-cost drones can offer countries air power at a fraction the cost of maintaining a traditional air force and, as in Nagorno-Karabakh, underscored how drones can suddenly shift a long-standing conflict and leave ground forces highly exposed. 

On Tuesday, Armenia accepted a cease-fire on punishing terms to possibly end the latest round of fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave controlled by ethnic Armenian factions but inside the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan.

“Drones offer small countries very cheap access to tactical aviation and precision guided weapons, enabling them to destroy an opponent’s much costlier equipment such as tanks air defense systems,” said Michael Kofman, military analyst and director of Russian Studies at the Center for Naval Analyses in Arlington, Va.

“An air force is a very expensive thing,” he added. “And they permit the utility of air power to smaller, much poorer nations.”

In Azerbaijan, the videos of the drone strikes have been posted daily on the website of the country’s Defense Ministry, broadcast on big screens in the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, and tweeted and retweeted online.

They were also studied by Western military analysts to track Azerbaijan’s swift military gains.

Thousands of protesters gathered in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, on Wednesday as pressure grew for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to step down after agreeing to a deal that will see a 2,000-strong Russian peacekeeping mission and Azerbaijan regaining territory it lost in war in the early 1990s.

The deal came just after Azerbaijan took the strategic city of Shusha (known in Armenia as Shushi), a town of cultural importance to Azerbaijan perched high above the Nagorno-Karabakh capital, Stepanakert. As Azerbaijan forces advanced toward Shusha, its military propagandists published gruesome videos of drones destroying forces in trenches.

Armed drones have increasingly become part of warfare since the Pentagon deployed its Predator drone in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Missile-firing drones are now produced in many countries including Turkey, China and Israel, and have been used by various sides in battles including Libya’s proxy war.

In a matter of months, however, Nagorno-Karabakh has become perhaps the most powerful example of how small and relatively inexpensive attack drones can change the dimensions of conflicts once dominated by ground battles and traditional air power. 

It also highlighted the vulnerabilities of even sophisticated weapons systems, tanks, radars and surface-to-air missiles without specific drone defenses. And it has raised debate on whether the era of the traditional tank could be coming to an end.

Azerbaijan used its drone fleet – purchased from Israel and Turkey – to stalk and destroy Armenia’s weapons systems in Nagorno-Karabakh, shattering its defenses, enabling a swift advance. Armenia found that air defense systems in Nagorno-Karabakh, many of them older Soviet systems, were impossible to defend against drone attacks, and losses quickly piled up.

Franz-Stefan Gady, a research fellow on future conflict at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said traditional military equipment such as tanks and armor vehicles will not become obsolete. 

But Nagorno-Karabakh has shown “the ever-increasing importance” of using armed drones along with other weapons and highly trained ground forces and “the exponentially more devastating consequences of failing to do so in future wars,” he said.

The separatist region in Azerbaijan with a largely Armenian population broke away in the late 1980s leading to war and Azerbaijan’s humiliating loss of the enclave and seven surrounding districts. A decades-long process, led by the United States, France and Russia, failed to reach a settlement.

Armenia became content with the status quo of a frozen conflict, retaining territory. But Azerbaijan, frustrated at a peace process that it felt delivered nothing, used its Caspian Sea oil wealth to buy arms, including a fleet of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones and Israeli kamikaze drones (also called loitering munitions designed to hover in an area before diving on a target).

When fighting flared again on Sept. 27, the drone videos playing on big screens in Baku and on YouTube stoked popular support for the war, even as Azerbaijan hid figures on its own war dead.

“It’s pretty obvious that Azerbaijan has been preparing for this. Azerbaijan decided it wanted to change the status quo and that the Armenian side had no interest in a war because they wanted to keep what they had,” said Tom De Waal, expert on the Caucasus at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Clearly the decisive factor in this conflict is Turkey’s intervention on Azerbaijan’s side. They seem to be heavily coordinating the war effort,” he said adding that it appeared Turkey had moved Syrian mercenaries into Azerbaijan two weeks before the conflict.

Turkey denies recruiting Syrian mercenaries to fight in Nagorno-Karabakh.

And then there were the drones. Their targets included fortified positions from the 1990s.

“There were massive losses,” De Waal said. “Possibly around a third of Armenian tanks have been destroyed. That’s obviously been a critical factor in taking all those territories.”

Unable to match Azerbaijan’s drone power Armenian forces, demoralized and wracked by covid-19 suffered military calamities.

Officials from Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh said they had no choice by to sign Tuesday’s truce to avoid further losses of life and territory.

In the early stages of the war, Azerbaijan used 11 slow old Soviet-era An-2 aircraft that had been converted into drones and sent them buzzing over Nagorno-Karabakh as bait to Armenian air defense systems, tempting them to fire and reveal their positions, when they could be hit by drones.

It used surveillance drones to spot targets and sent armed drones or kamikaze drones to destroy them, analysts said.

Turkey, which took part in joint military exercises with Azerbaijan forces in Azerbaijan over the summer, supports its ally but denies direct involvement in the fighting.

But Azerbaijan likely benefited from Turkey’s experience of its recent use of drones in Syria as well as Libya, where its drones trounced the Russian-made Pantsir S1 air defense systems used by the Libyan National Army forces of Khalifa Hifter in May.

Videos posted by both sides in Nagorno-Karabakh – including drone hits and soldiers advancing through villages and towns – enabled military analysts to tally confirmed hits. 

Stijn Mitzer, an analyst writing in the military affairs blog Oryx, noted that both sides used propaganda to play up their military gains but analysis of video footage made it possible to verify the claims. The group published a list of the destroyed military hardware, including photographic or video evidence for each tanks and weapon system. 

Their tally, which logs confirmed losses with photographs or videos, listed Armenia losses at 185 T-72 tanks, 90 armored fighting vehicles, 182 artillery pieces, 73 multiple rocket launchers, 26 surface-to-air missile systems include a Tor system and five S-300s, 14 radars or jammers, one SU-25 war plane, four drones and 451 military vehicles.

Azerbaijan, the group concluded, had visually confirmed losses of 22 tanks, 41 armored forced vehicles, one helicopter, 25 drones, and 24 vehicles. The full tally of losses on both sides cannot be independently verified, however Armenian losses appear significantly higher, according to military analysts.

The leader of Nagorno-Karabakh Arayik Harutyunyan said Tuesday that all of Nagorno-Karabakh would have been taken “within days” had fighting continued, citing the “very heavy human losses” inflicted by drones.

Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote on the Real Clear Defense website that systems such as the kamikaza, or loitering, drones likely will become more prevalent as technology improves and costs go down.

“That’s a potential game-changer for land warfare,” he wrote.