Vice President Mike Pence joined a conservative chorus blasting Chief Justice John Roberts over recent Supreme Court decisions, calling the George W. Bush appointee a “disappointment to conservatives.” 

President Donald Trump’s No. 2 said in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network he has respect for the Supreme Court as an institution.

But, he said that recent decisions on abortion and coronavirus-related restrictions on church services were “a reminder of just how important this election is for the future of the Supreme Court.” 

“We remember the issue back in 2016, which I believe loomed large in voters’ decisions between Hillary Clinton and the man who would become president of the United States,” Pence said in the interview published published Wednesday evening. “And some people thought it would not be as big an issue these days, but I think that’s all changed.”

The Supreme Court term that ended last month, the first full term with both of Trump’s appointees on the bench, had Republicans up in arms over what some called politically biased decisions.

While the court handed major wins to both conservatives and liberals in several major cases, high-profile rulings on reproductive rights activists, LGBT workers and the young migrants known as “Dreamers” earned fury from those on the right. 

In the interview, Pence singled out the abortion ruling. The case concerned a Louisiana measure that required abortion providers in the state to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

The nine-member court struck down the law 5-4, with Roberts joining the court’s four Democratic appointees. 

Pence called the Louisiana law a “very modest restriction” and said the case was “a wake-up call for pro-life voters around the country who understand, in a very real sense, the destiny of the Supreme Court is on the ballot in 2020.” 

While Roberts voted with the liberals to strike down the law, he pointedly did not agree with their reasoning, and said his vote was bound by a precedent from 2016, where the court had struck down a nearly identical law in Texas.

Liberals suspected that Roberts’ move meant that, even given the loss for conservatives in the Louisiana case, the top court was likely to allow more restrictive abortion laws than it had in the past. That view was bolstered when the court a few days later ordered the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider rulings striking down Indiana abortion laws, including one that Pence had signed as governor. 

Roberts did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Pence’s remarks.

Trump has sought to make the Supreme Court a key issue for conservatives ahead of the election, including by promising a new list of potential nominees by the fall.

There is evidence that a similar tactic was successful last cycle. More than a quarter of Trump voters told pollsters after the 2016 race that the vacancy on the court at the time was the most important issue shaping their vote. 

Whether the top court will be as influential this cycle remains an open question. One key difference is that, at the moment, the court has no vacancies, though its eldest member, 87-year-old liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, continues to fight health problems. 

A recent survey by Morning Consult found that the court is one of the less important issues for voters, with 57% of Democrats and 53% of Republicans saying it was very important. 

Pence’s comments come as other influential conservatives and Republican elected leaders target the Roberts court. One prominent example is Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who once clerked for Roberts.

Hawley called the abortion decision a “disaster” and said after the court turned back Trump’s efforts to end the Obama-era DACA program that it was the “most disappointing week at #SCOTUS in years.” 

Josh Blackman, a constitutional scholar at the South Texas College of Law, went further. In an opinion article for Newsweek published Monday, he suggested that Roberts should resign, citing recent leaks from the court to CNN. 

While Pence has been relatively restrained about criticizing specific justices, Trump has frequently gone on the offensive, reserving his most heated attacks for Roberts. The chief justice has typically followed the Supreme Court’s regular practice of not engaging, though he did speak up once in 2018 after Trump accused a lower court judge of being an “Obama judge.”

Roberts said at the time that America does not have “Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”

“What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them,” he said.

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Former First Lady Michelle Obama says racial inequality amid the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic has left her feeling that she has “some form of low-grade depression,” NBC News reported.

“Not just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife, and just seeing this administration, watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting,” she said in the latest episode of her podcast released Wednesday.

Obama added that the mounting stories of Black people being wrongfully arrested, killed or “dehumanized” have been weighing on her. And while Floyd’s death in police custody sparked an outpouring of outrage, the issue of racism in America has long preceded the incident.

“I’d be remiss to say part of this depression is also a result of, what we’re seeing in terms of the protests, the continued racial unrest, that has plagued this country since its birth,” she said.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

The New York prosecutor who has been fighting, unsuccessfully so far, to get President Donald Trump’s tax returns had better luck last year getting a bank to turn over his financial records.

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance sent a subpoena last year to Deutsche Bank as part of its investigation into Trump’s business dealings, The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing four people familiar with the inquiry.

The bank complied with the subpoena, turning over records including financial statements Trump gave the bank when he was borrowing money, two of those people told the Times.

Vance’s office declined to comment on the report. Attorneys for Trump and for Deutsche Bank didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Manhattan prosecutor, who is a Democrat, was among several authorities in New York who launched investigations last year after Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, told congress that the president had a practice of misleading business associates and tax officials about the value of his assets.

Vance hasn’t disclosed details about his probe, but his lawyers told a federal judge this week that it was a “complex financial investigation” that followed public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.”

As part of the investigation, Vance asked Trump’s accountants to turn over eight years of his personal and corporate tax records. The accounting firm has yet to comply as Trump and Vance have battled in court over the validity of the subpoena.

Other investigators have requested records from Deutsche Bank, which was one of the few banks willing to lend to Trump after a series of corporate bankruptcies starting in the early 1990s.

Two congressional committees, both controlled by Democrats, subpoenaed the bank for documents related to Trump, who sued to block their release.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, also a Democrat, also subpoenaed the bank for records related to Trump last year following Cohen’s testimony.

Trump has said the investigations are all politically motivated. Earlier this week, he called Vance’s investigation “a continuation of the witch hunt.”

In response to a question about his tweet to “all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” President Donald Trump suggested that an Obama administration fair housing rule required the construction of low-income homes in suburban areas. It doesn’t.

“So we ended a rule that was a very horrible rule for people in suburbia — in the suburbs,” Trump said in July 31 remarks from the White House South Lawn. “It’s a rule that, basically, you build low-income housing and you build other forms of housing — also having to do with zoning — and destroy people that have lived in communities in suburbia.”

Experts on regulatory processes and community development told us that the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2015 final rule on “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing,” implemented under then-President Barack Obama, did not mandate either low-income housing or rezoning.

In its published rule, HUD said of the regulation: “This rule does not impose any land use decisions or zoning laws on any local government.”

But on July 29, Trump wrote on Twitter: “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood … Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the [Barack] Obama-[Joe] Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”

Two days later, as Trump prepared to board Marine One, the president had this exchange with a reporter who asked about his tweet:

Reporter, July 31: On the “suburban lifestyle dream,” why would low-income housing in the suburbs destroy the “suburban lifestyle dream”?

Trump: So we ended a rule that was a very horrible rule for people in suburbia — in the suburbs. And that rule has been a very unfair rule for a long time and it was going to be made a lot worse by [presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe] Biden and [Sen.] Cory Booker.

It’s a rule that, basically, you build low-income housing and you build other forms of housing — also having to do with zoning — and destroy people that have lived in communities in suburbia. For years, they’ve lived there, and they want to destroy their lives and destroy what they have. And it’s been going on for a long time. I ended the rule, so people living in the suburbs will no longer have that problem.

We asked the White House about the president’s comments, but haven’t received a response.

Trump appeared to be referring to HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s July 23 announcement that the department “will ultimately terminate the Obama Administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation issued in 2015.” Carson said the rule, which he proposed changing in January, was found to be “unworkable” and “ultimately a waste of time.”

It’s also unclear whether the rule had any impact at all, as Carson had suspended the rule’s requirements in early 2018.

AFFH Final Rule of 2015

The 2015 rule was intended to reinforce a clause of the Fair Housing Act that requires HUD and other federal agencies to “affirmatively” further fair housing in “their programs and activities relating to housing and urban development.” The 1968 law prohibits discrimination in housing.

As the American Bar Association noted in November 2019: “Although this AFFH provision has been part of the Fair Housing Act for 50 years, historically HUD permitted local jurisdictions to largely ignore that duty even as those jurisdictions collected billions of dollars in federal grants annually for housing and community development.”

Before the 2015 rule, HUD asked jurisdictions to do an “analysis of impediments” to fair housing and encouraged, but didn’t require, jurisdictions to report the findings and subsequent actions taken to government officials, according to a June 2018 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

The Obama-era rule established a more structured reporting process by which all jurisdictions that receive funding from HUD would use HUD-provided data and tools to develop a plan to address fair housing issues in their communities. Those jurisdictions were required to complete a new “Assessment of Fair Housing” that would have to be reviewed and approved by HUD.

A HUD fact sheet at the time defined “affirmatively furthering fair housing” as “taking meaningful actions, in addition to combating discrimination, that overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities free from barriers that restrict access to opportunity based on protected characteristics.”

HUD said the rule was made partly in response to a 2010 report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. 

The GAO found that some jurisdictions getting HUD funding were either not preparing the fair housing reports that were already required, or were not regularly updating their reports according to HUD guidance. The GAO recommended HUD issue a regulation requiring HUD funding recipients to submit — in a special format — detailed analyses of impediments to fair housing, such as restrictive zoning or segregated housing.

What the rule didn’t do was require those getting HUD money to build low-income housing in the suburbs — or anywhere else — as Trump’s remarks implied.

“No, it emphatically does not require low-income housing to be built in suburban areas,” Cary Coglianese, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and director of the Penn Program on Regulation, told us in an email. “It also does not impose federal control over local zoning laws. Rather, it clarified a planning process that local governments already had a statutory obligation to undertake in connection with the receipt of federal HUD funding.”

Indeed, Obama’s HUD made that clear in the text of its regulation, which states: “While the statutory duty to affirmatively further fair housing requires program participants to take actions to affirmatively further fair housing, this final rule (as was the case in the proposed rule) does not mandate specific outcomes for the planning process. Instead, recognizing the importance of local decision making, the new approach establishes basic parameters to help guide public sector housing and community development planning and investment decisions in being better informed about fair housing concerns and consequently help program participants to be better positioned to fulfill their obligation to affirmatively further fair housing.”

In response to public comments that claimed the new rule would allow the federal government to dictate zoning, rents and the placement of infrastructure to local governments, HUD also wrote: “This rule does not impose any land use decisions or zoning laws on any local government. Rather, the rule requires HUD program participants to perform an assessment of land use decisions and zoning to evaluate their possible impact on fair housing choice. This assessment must be consistent with fair housing and civil rights requirements, which do apply nondiscrimination requirements to the land use and zoning process. However, this rule does not change those existing requirements under fair housing and civil rights law.”

It is true that some “jurisdictions might identify” low-income housing or zoning reform “as remedies,” Robert Silverman, a professor in the University at Buffalo’s urban and regional planning department, told us in an email. But there could be many methods used to address fair housing issues, he said.

“It would depend on the nature of an impediment,” Silverman explained. “For instance, if an impediment involved discrimination in the mortgage process or landlord discrimination, different remedies would be involved, etc.”

The Impact

As for Trump’s claim that “it’s been going on for a long time,” it’s not clear what he meant.

The rule promulgated during the Obama administration went into effect in August 2015. However, in early 2018, the Carson-led HUD suspended the requirement for local governments to submit, and for HUD to review, assessments of fair housing filed under the regulation.

“Before the process could get fully up and running, the Trump administration suspended the rule,” Silverman said. “This meant that AFH reports were put on hold until 2024 and the assessment tool that would be used to do the reports was removed from HUD’s website. So, for all intents and purposes, the Trump administration blocked the rule from being implemented, impediments to fair housing remain undocumented and detected, and no formal remedies to them are being pursued under the suspended AFFH rule.”

So, the rule that Trump criticized didn’t mandate low-income housing, and it was essentially ended before it had a chance to have a measurable impact.

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The State Department says Russia is using a well-developed online operation that includes a loose collection of proxy websites to stir up confusion around the coronavirus by amplifying conspiracy theories and misinformation.

The disclosure on Wednesday was rare for the Trump administration, which has been cautious about blaming the Kremlin for disinformation campaigns, especially around the U.S. election. Despite evidence that Russia launched a divisive disinformation operation on social media during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the State Department’s report did not examine how — if at all — Russia is waging another online influence campaign in this year’s election.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did, however, announce Wednesday that the U.S. would offer a reward of up to $10 million for information that identifies people working with foreign governments to interfere in the U.S. election through illegal cyber activity.

The department detailed a Russian-backed misinformation cycle that spreads false information online through state officials and state-funded media reports, by infiltrating U.S. social media conversation, and leveraging a deceptive internet framework of websites. The Kremlin’s efforts have most recently focused on conspiracy theories around the pandemic, the report found.

“Russia is playing a significant role in creating and spreading misinformation and propaganda around many topics,” said Lea Gabrielle, head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.

The department named more than a half-dozen websites that, serving as “proxies” for Russia, have peddled a series of conspiracy theories about the pandemic that have been widely spreading and hotly debated across social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The online news outlets appear independent from the Russian government, but in reality serve as a “connective tissue” between the Kremlin and state-funded media that often promote the same misinformation from their own channels, Gabrielle said.

“That’s what makes them effective,” Gabrielle said. “It’s difficult for the average person online to look at these sites and know the Russian affiliation.”

Russia has regularly denied claims from the U.S. that it is behind online disinformation campaigns, last week calling similar assertions “persistent phobia.”

The websites the State Department identified Wednesday have promoted unsupported conspiracy theories that allege COVID-19 was created in a lab as a bioweapon, billionaire Bill Gates is plotting to use the pandemic as an excuse to microchip people, and that plans for a coronavirus vaccine are simply a ploy for pharmaceutical companies to make money. There is no evidence behind those claims.

The origin of the novel coronavirus remains unknown, but the emerging scientific consensus is that humans were first infected in China, at a Wuhan animal market. Around the globe, leaders are investing in a vaccine as the best bet to beat the virus. And Gates has repeatedly rejected that he wants to start tracking people.

“Russia has a long history of spreading disinformation around health and science issues,” Gabrielle said. “The Russian disinformation ecosystem exploits fear and confusion.”

While building up a following on Facebook and Twitter, some of the websites have downplayed their ties to Russian intelligence or concealed funding from the Kremlin, the State Department’s report found.

One of the sites, Canadian-based Global Research, has amassed an audience of nearly 300,000 followers on Facebook. The website regularly publishes articles from fictitious personas created by Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU. The headline of a recent Global Research article suggested the coronavirus originated in the U.S., and it was shared by a Chinese spokesman on Twitter before the website took the unsubstantiated claim down.

Chinese, Iran and Russian government leaders have regularly echoed one another on social media and in state media reports.

Another website, NewsFront, pitches itself as an “alternative” news source to Western audiences, despite its reported Kremlin funding and being registered with the Russian government, according to the State Department’s report. Facebook removed dozens of accounts and pages associated with NewsFront for inauthentic, coordinated behavior in April.

Most of the other websites are far more fringe, with only small social media followings and articles pushing coronavirus conspiracy theories that have only been shared by the dozens.

Last week, U.S. officials toldThe Associated Press that Russian intelligence are using another trio of English-language websites to push disinformation about the pandemic.

Progressive Democrats celebrated two primary victories Wednesday, claiming the protests over George Floyd’s death and a renewed focus on racial and economic justice have given their candidates new momentum after some rough patches this year.

Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a member of the “squad” of four first-term congresswomen of color who have drawn attention for their liberal views and distaste for President Donald Trump, scored a convincing victory over Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones. Jones had criticized Tlaib as being too divisive. There also was a stunning win Tuesday by Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush over longtime Rep. William Lacy Clay in a heavily Democratic St. Louis-area district.

Both Tlaib and Bush, who says she was beaten while protesting the death of Black 18-year-old Michael Brown by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, had support from multiple national progressive organizations. They have rejected corporate political action committee money and called for greater action on climate change, “Medicare for All” and more police accountability. They framed their victories as wins for working people and those who have taken to the streets in recent weeks to demand more than incremental change.

“We are at a turning point in this country as we face down unprecedented crises,” Bush said in a victory speech. “Y’all, we about to change the world.”

Beyond signaling momentum, the victories are giving progressives confidence about two upcoming tests. Next week, squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota will face a challenge from a well-funded opponent, Antone Melton-Meaux. On Sept. 1, progressive Alex Morse, the 31-year-old mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts, will try to knock off Rep. Richard Neal, one of the most powerful House Democrats.

The year did not start out on such a positive note.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist whose 2016 presidential bid mobilized progressives, dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary in April after a series of losses to former Vice President Joe Biden, an establishment candidate who said policies like Sanders’ Medicare for All went too far. In March, a party-backed favorite easily defeated a progressive hopeful in Texas’ Democratic Senate primary. Rep. Henry Cuellar, one of Congress’ most conservative Democrats and a top target of progressive groups such as Justice Democrats, also won his primary.

But there were other notable triumphs, especially in the weeks after Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis in May sparked global protests.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another “squad” member whose 2018 win over a longtime incumbent made her a progressive icon, easily won her New York primary. Middle school principal Jamaal Bowman unseated veteran Rep. Eliot Engel for a Bronx-based seat.

In March, Marie Newman knocked off Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, an abortion opponent who compared progressive Democrats to a “tea party of the left.”

While progressives “are going to win some and lose some,” former Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir said progressive candidates and their ideals are becoming more popular, and forcing change within the party.

“Progressives are in the ascendancy within the Democratic party, there’s no doubt about it,” said Shakir, who is now an adviser to Sanders and to the political action committee Fight Corporate Monopolies, which ran ads blasting Clay for being too cozy with corporate America.

Waleed Shahid, spokesman for Justice Democrats, said Bush — who lost to Clay by 20 percentage points in 2018 — was aided this time by a much bigger coalition of progressive supporters and the increased popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The future of the Democrat party looks a lot more like the squad, and the squad is here to stay,” Shahid said.

In Detroit, Andrew Bryant said he voted for Tlaib because she has been outspoken on behalf of the city’s working class and poor, and especially against water service shut-offs for people unable to pay their bills. The 71-year-old said he’s among the many Black voters who have seen the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality grow, and believe the time is now to show their power to enact change.

“We need to get out and vote our opinion,” he said while voting at a church on Detroit’s west side Tuesday morning. “It’s important for us as Black people because it seems we’ve been dealt the short stick … for the longest time, and it’s our turn to speak up and be represented.”

At an event Wednesday in St. Louis, Bush said that “we have to have people who are supporting and advocating for the everyday people,” and warned that members of Congress who are “just holding a seat but not affecting their communities” need to be targeted.

“Those are the ones that people will hopefully rise up and run against,” she said.

Associated Press writer Corey Williams in Detroit and Jim Salter in St. Louis contributed to this report.

The State Department’s acting inspector general resigned abruptly on Wednesday following the firing of his predecessor in circumstances now being investigated by Congress.

Stephen Akard announced his resignation just two days after Democrats issued subpoenas for several of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s top aides to answer questions about the shakeup in the watchdog’s office. The department said Akard would return to the private sector but offered no other reason for his departure.

“We appreciate his dedication to the department and to our country,” the department said in a statement. Akard’s deputy, Diana Shaw, will serve as the new acting inspector general once Akard leaves on Friday.

Although Akard, a close ally of Vice President Mike Pence, had not been expected to become the permanent inspector general, his departure underscores the tumult and uncertainty in the office, which has been wracked by Republican charges of leaks and politically biased investigations.

Democrats have alleged that Pompeo sought the ouster of Akard’s predecessor, Stephen Linick, because Linick was investigating allegations of impropriety by Pompeo.

Pompeo has denied the allegations but acknowledged he asked President Donald Trump to fire Linick for poor performance. Akard, who had also served as the director of the Office of Foreign Missions at the State Department, had withdrawn from those investigations after Democrats complained his holding both jobs was a significant conflict of interest.

Asked about Akard’s resignation, Pompeo had little to say to reporters at a news conference. “He left to go back home,” Pompeo said. “This happens. I don’t have anything more to add.”

Inspectors general are independent watchdogs empowered by Congress to evaluate the performance of executive branch agencies and investigate allegations of wrongdoing by government officials. President Donald Trump has taken exception to the work of several of the inspectors general and removed them despite congressional objections.

On Monday, congressional Democrats subpoenaed four senior Pompeo aides for interviews, saying the Trump administration was stonewalling their investigation into Linick’s firing in May. Akard was not among those subpoenaed.

Linick had appeared before investigators in June and said top department officials tried to bully him and dissuade his office from conducting a review of a multibillion dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia before he was fired. He also said his office was looking into allegations that Pompeo and his wife may have misused government staff to run personal errands and several other matters.

The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, said the investigation will not end and he expressed concern about Akard’s departure.

“I do not believe he was the right choice to lead the office, but I am concerned that his sudden resignation leaves another opportunity for the Trump qdministration to try to weaken oversight and accountability,” Menendez said. “The ongoing bicameral investigation into the abrupt and unexplained dismissal of IG Linick will continue full speed ahead.”

The House Foreign Affairs and House Oversight committee chairs, Democratic Reps. Eliot Engel and Carolyn Maloney, both of New York, said Akard’s resignation “must not further disrupt the Office of Inspector General’s important investigations” and warned against appointing a political loyalist to succeed him.

“Any effort by the Trump administration to install another political loyalist would further undercut the ability of the office to properly carry out its critical mission,” they said.

The subpoenas for closed-door depositions are for Undersecretary of State for Management Brian Bulatao, acting State Department legal adviser Marik String, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Michael Miller and senior adviser Toni A. Porter.

The department flatly rejected the Democrats’ allegations as “egregiously inaccurate” but did not say whether the officials would comply with the subpoenas. Pompeo has rejected allegations that Linick was fired for investigating alleged impropriety and Pompeo has denied he was aware of any such probe into his or his wife’s matters. He has said Linick was removed for not doing his job.

Linick, who had been inspector general since 2013, said he was in a “state of shock” when he was fired. He told congressional investigators that he had opened a review of last year’s $8 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia at the request of lawmakers who claimed Pompeo had inappropriately circumvented Congress to approve the deal. He said Bulatao and String then tried to stop him.

Over the last seven days, a grim new COVID-19 calculus has emerged: one person died every 80 seconds from the coronavirus in America.

And the pace at which those 7,486 people died appears to be accelerating, a new NBC News tally revealed Wednesday.

In July, a total of 26,198 deaths were reported, meaning one every 102 seconds. As of Wednesday morning, more than 158,000 people in the U.S. had died of the virus since the start of the pandemic.

For more on this story, go to NBC News.

Joe Biden is pushing back at Republican assertions that he should take a cognitive test to disprove President Donald Trump’s claim that the Democrat isn’t fit for the Oval Office.

Biden grew testy when CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett asked the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee about the matter in a recent interview.

“No, I haven’t taken a test? Why the hell would I take a test?” Biden said.

He then told Barnett: “That’s like saying … before you got on this program, you’re taking a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think? Huh? Are you a junkie?”

The former vice president, who is 77, also tried to turn the matter back around on the 74-year-old president in the latest jousting over the two men’s fitness for office.

“Well, if he can’t figure out the difference between an elephant and a lion, I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about,” Biden said, appearing to refer to Trump’s public discussion about his own clinical examinations that physicians often give older patients to identify early signs of dementia.

Biden’s exchange with Barnett was part of an interview conducted with the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. It was scheduled to air in full on Thursday.

In a recent interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, Trump hailed his own mental acuity by referencing his recent examinations. Trump framed his results as a sign of intellectual prowess. He recalled in another Fox News interview that he successfully repeated back to a physician a series of words he’d been given audibly: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”

Trump and his allies have repeatedly raised questions about whether Biden has been administered such an examination.

Biden told reporters in June that he is “constantly tested” by the rigors of the presidential campaign and said he’s eager to match wits against Trump in fall debates. He repeated those sentiments with Barnett.

“I’m so forward-looking to have an opportunity to sit with the president or stand with the president and the debates,” Biden said. He later said he was “very willing to let the American public judge my physical, mental — my physical, as well as my mental fitness and to, you know, to make a judgment about who I am.”

Allies of both Trump and Biden often seize on the other’s verbal slips. Both men have provided enough material to generate widely shared video mashups of their mistakes. Biden’s third White House bid has drawn renewed attention on his lifelong struggle as a stutterer.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of political communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said voters and the media should try to discern whether presidential candidates have the reasoning skills and temperament to handle the job. But she cautioned against using verbal inaccuracies to settle on a conclusion.

“You don’t always know what that means,” Jamieson said, adding that biases about age can influence how voters and media treat an older candidate’s syntax. “But you do know when you have an exchange in real time whether a person can handle the questions and answers and as a result is able to function” in the White House.

“Some cues don’t really say anything about governance,” Jamieson said. “If you can’t focus, that’s a problem. If you can’t provide a coherent answer, that’s a problem. (But) sometimes what you’re seeing, it may be annoying, but it doesn’t speak to a person’s capacity to govern.”

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Joe Biden will not travel to Milwaukee to accept the Democratic presidential nomination because of concerns over the coronavirus, party officials said Wednesday, signaling a move to a convention that essentially has become entirely virtual.

It is the latest example of the pandemic’s sweeping effects on the 2020 presidential election and the latest blow to traditional party nominating conventions that historically have marked the start of fall general election campaigns.

“From the very beginning of this pandemic, we put the health and safety of the American people first,” said Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez. “We followed the science, listened to doctors and public health experts, and we continued making adjustments to our plans in order to protect lives. That’s the kind of steady and responsible leadership America deserves. And that’s the leadership Joe Biden will bring to the White House.”

Neither the Biden campaign nor DNC officials offered details about how Biden might accept the nomination, which even in the pandemic could be a made-for-screen event that reaches tens of millions of voters via television and online.

A DNC official said all speakers and presenters for the Aug. 17-24 convention are now expected to speak from remote locations.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said Biden made the right decision.

“A lot has changed since we set out on this journey more than a year ago now, but the one thing that hasn’t is Democrats’ commitment to putting health and safety first,” Evers said in a statement. “It has never been more important for elected officials to lead by example — that’s the kind of leader Joe is, and that’s the kind of president we need. I know he will continue to have a presence in Wisconsin, virtually or otherwise, and I look forward to doing everything we can to win Wisconsin.”

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett told reporters he learned of the decision early Wednesday in a phone call with the leadership team of the Democratic National Convention.

“I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that I’m very, very disappointed in this, professionally and personally, because I think we all have had so much pride in having Milwaukee chosen to host the 2020 Democratic National Convention,” Barrett said.

But Barrett, a Democrat, added that the higher priorities are public health, economic recovery and nation’s reckoning on systemic racism. “I think all of us have to keep this in perspective,” he said.

President Donald Trump has abandoned his own plans to accept the Republican nomination in person. On Wednesday, he mused about potentially making his acceptance speech from the White House.

Biden and Democrats for months have moved toward a virtual convention, first by delaying the convention from its original mid-July date to the week before Republicans’ scheduled convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.

DNC officials later authorized organizers to plan for virtual proceedings, then added an explicit call for delegates not to travel to Milwaukee. More than 4,000 delegates already were casting mail ballots for Biden’s nomination and a platform that had been written and approved in meetings conducted online. But until Wednesday, it was expected that Biden and his running mate would speak from Milwaukee.

Biden is in the final days of deciding on a vice president, who he has said will be a woman.

Trump was far more reluctant than Biden to alter his convention plans, as he sought to downplay the pandemic’s significance and push the country to return to normal operations. Trump jousted with North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, because Cooper wouldn’t guarantee the president that he’d lift restrictions on large public gatherings so that Trump could pack Charlotte’s NBA arena.

Trump then said he’d travel to Jacksonville, Florida, to make his address, a decision welcomed at the time by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. Florida has since seen its COVID-19 cases spike, part of a national trend that led Trump to yield to public health experts and cancel the event.

The historian who has correctly predicted every presidential election since 1984 – including President Donald Trump’s win in 2016 – has announced his pick for 2020: Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Allan Lichtman, an author and history professor at American University, revealed his prediction in an op-ed video for The New York Times published Wednesday.

Lichtman’s predictive method – which puts him squarely in the minority of analysts who were right in calling Trump’s win – largely ignores the detailed cross-tab polling analyses and swing state bean counting that are often prioritized in modern political punditry.

“The pollsters and the pundits cover elections as though they were horse races,” Lichtman said in the Times’ video. “But history tells us voters are not fooled by the tricks of the campaign. Voters vote pragmatically according to how well the party holding the White House has governed the country.”

Polls are “snapshots in time,” Lichtman said. “None of this in the end has any impact whatsoever on the outcome of a presidential election.”

Lichtman’s prediction model looks at 13 different categories, dubbed the “Keys to the White House,” that have more to do with the record of the incumbent party occupying the White House than the nominees themselves.

The keys are presented as true-false statements, framed to favor a win for the incumbent party if true. But if six or more of the statements are false, the challenger – in this case, Biden – is predicted to win the election.

Lichtman’s verdict? “The keys predict that Trump will lose the White House.”

Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh pushed back on that prediction in a statement to CNBC.

“This is an election like no other in history and the choice couldn’t be more clear – between President Trump’s established record of accomplishment for all Americans and Joe Biden’s 47 years of failure and acquiescence to the extreme left,” Murtaugh said. “American voters will decide this election, not academics or professors.”

The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.

The model favors Biden on seven of the 13 prompts. They touch on issues such as which party has a mandate – Republicans lost House seats in the 2018 midterms – and the short-term and long-term economy under Trump.

“The [coronavirus] pandemic has pushed the economy into recession,” Lichtman said in the video.

Despite his impressive track record, Lichtman’s simple-seeming model has its skeptics. Nate Silver, the writer and analyst at FiveThirtyEight who was famously correct in predicting every state outcome in the 2012 election, wrote in 2011 that Lichtman’s results “should be taken with a grain of salt.”

Lichtman himself offers a note of caution in his video for the Times. “There are forces at play outside the keys,” he said, such as voter suppression and potential Russian election meddling.

Here’s where Trump and Biden stand in Lichtman’s model, along with Lichtman’s responses from the video:

1. Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the House than it did after the previous midterm elections. False. “Republicans lost the U.S. House midterms in 2018.”

2. Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination. True. “No Republicans challenged Trump.”

3. Incumbency: The sitting president is running for re-election. True. “Doesn’t look like he’s stepping down.”

4. Third Party: There is no major third-party challenge. True. “Despite claims by Kanye West to be running, this is a two-party race.”

5. Short-Term Economy: The economy during the election season is not in recession. False. “The [coronavirus] pandemic has pushed the economy into recession.”

6. Long-Term Economy: Real annual per-capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the two previous terms. False. “The pandemic has caused such negative GDP growth in 2020 that the key has turned false.”

7. Policy Change: The incumbent causes major changes in national policy. True. ”Through his tax cut, but mostly through his executive orders, Trump has fundamentally changed the policies of the Obama era.”

8. Social Unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the campaign. False. “There has been considerable social unrest on the streets, with enough violence to threaten the social order.”

9. Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandals. False. “As I predicted, Trump was impeached. Plus, he has plenty of other scandals.”

10. Foreign or Military Failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. True. “We’ve had some very difficult moments with Donald Trump, but so far, true.”

11. Foreign or Military Success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs. False. “While Trump hasn’t had any big, splashy failures, he hasn’t had any major successes either.”

12. Incumbent Charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic. False. “Trump is a great showman, but he only appeals to a narrow slice of Americans.”

13. Challenger Charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic. True. “Biden is a decent, empathetic person, but he’s not inspirational or charismatic.”

This story first appeared on CNBC.com. More from CNBC:

• New York City sets up quarantine checkpoints as it toughens state travel restrictions
• Moderna is pricing coronavirus vaccine at $32 to $37 per dose for some customers
• Even though $600 unemployment boost has lapsed, Congress likely will make new relief retroactive

Cori Bush, a onetime homeless woman who led protests following a white police officer’s fatal shooting of a Black 18-year-old in Ferguson, ousted longtime Rep. William Lacy Clay Tuesday in Missouri’s Democratic primary, ending a political dynasty that has spanned more than a half-century.

Bush’s victory came in a rematch of 2018, when she failed to capitalize on a national Democratic wave that favored political newcomers such as Bush’s friend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But this time around, Bush’s supporters said protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis and outrage over racial injustice finally pushed her over the edge.

An emotional Bush, speaking to supporters while wearing a mask, said few people expected her to win.

“They counted us out,” she said. “They called me — I’m just the protester, I’m just the activist with no name, no title and no real money. That’s all they said that I was. But St. Louis showed up today.”

Bush’s campaign spokeswoman, Keenan Korth, said voters in the district were “galvanized.”

“They’re ready to turn the page on decades of failed leadership,” Korth said.

Bush, 44, also had backing from political action committee Justice Democrats and Fight Corporate Monopolies this election. She campaigned for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders during his presidential bid.

Bush’s primary win essentially guarantees her a seat in Congress representing the heavily Democratic St. Louis area. Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, which encompasses Ferguson, has been represented by Clay or his father for a half-century. Bill Clay served 32 years before retiring in 2000. William Lacy Clay, 64, was elected that year.

Clay didn’t face a serious challenger until Bush. This year, he ran on his decades-long record in Congress.

“This election is a simple choice,” Clay said in a Monday statement. “Cori Bush’s Empty Rhetoric, or my record of real results and real reforms for the people.”

Both Clay and Bush are Black, and Black residents slightly outnumber whites in the district that includes St. Louis and north St. Louis County.

Bush became ill while pregnant with her second child in 2001 and had to quit her job at a preschool. When she and her then-husband were evicted from a rental home, the couple, their newborn and 14-month-old son lived out of a Ford Explorer for several months.

Eventually, the couple divorced. Bush earned a nursing degree. She also became a pastor.

Michael Brown’s death in 2014 in Ferguson vaulted her into another role: activist. She became a leader of some of the many protests that followed the fatal police shooting of the Black, unarmed 18-year-old. She was back on the streets in 2017 after a white St. Louis officer was acquitted in the shooting death of a Black suspect.

She continues to lead protests.

“She’s being buoyed by this movement, and the movement’s origin is in Ferguson,” Justice Democrats spokesman Waleed Shahid said.

—-

Associated Press writer Sara Burnett contributed to this report from Chicago. Reporter Jim Salter contributed from O’Fallon, Mo.

In an abrupt reversal, President Donald Trump is encouraging voters in the critical swing state of Florida to vote by mail after months of criticizing the practice — and while his campaign and the GOP challenge Nevada over its new vote-by-mail law.

Democratic requests to vote by mail have surged in Florida, a state that Trump almost certainly must win to secure a second term. Democrats currently have about 1.9 million Floridians signed up to vote by mail this November, almost 600,000 more than the Republicans’ 1.3 million, according to the Florida secretary of state.

In 2016, both sides had about 1.3 million signed up before the general election.

“Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail!”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany rejected the notion that the Republican president has changed his views. She said Trump supports absentee voting by mail for a reason, as opposed to states mailing out ballots to all voters regardless of whether they requested them. Election officials say there is little effective difference between absentee voting and voting by mail, and the verification process is the same for both.

“There is no rigid screening process that distinguishes the two methods of voting,” said Darren Hutchinson, a law professor at the University of Florida and an elections expert. Once registration and address are verified, the elections office will process the request and send the ballot. In Florida, almost 30% of votes in the last presidential election were cast by mail, and voters did not have to provide an excuse, be absent from the state, or go through an enhanced screening process. On this issue, Trump is simply wrong.”

Trump elaborated Tuesday on why he supports voting by mail in Florida but not elsewhere.

“They’ve been doing this over many years, and they’ve made it really terrific,” he said during a news conference.

“This took years to do,” he added. “This doesn’t take weeks or months. In the case of Nevada, they’re going to be voting in a matter of weeks. And you can’t do that.”

Nevada officials joined several states that plan on automatically sending voters mail ballots. Two states, California and Vermont, moved earlier this summer to adopt automatic mail ballot policies.

“The Post Office will never be equipped to handle it,” Trump claimed about Nevada “blanketing” the state with mail-in ballots in an interview Wednesday on “Fox and Friends.” “It will be a disaster,” he added.

With the bill passed by lawmakers on Sunday, Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, signed it into law on Monday. In a tweet Trump called the bill’s passage “an illegal late night coup” and accused Sisolak of exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to ensure votes would favor Democrats.

Making good on Trump’s threat of legal action, his campaign and the national and state GOP filed suit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Nevada against the secretary of state to stop the plan. Contending the new law would undermine the election’s integrity, the suit included the argument that Nevada would violate federal and constitutional law by requiring election officials to accept and count ballots received after Election Day even when those ballots lacked objective evidence that they were cast on or before that day.

Trump’s praise of its voting aside, Florida hardly has a history of flawless elections, most notably in 2000, when the state’s disputed vote count had to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court, delivering the presidency to Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore.

On Wednesday, Trump cited a New York race as an example of what can go wrong, claiming on Fox News that no one could know the winner “for years” and suggesting there was fraudulent voting. In that race, a judge ruled Monday that about 1,000 disputed ballots should be counted. That will likely not affect the outcome since the incumbent, longtime Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, is leading her closest challenger by about 3,700 votes.

“I think they have to do the election over,” Trump said. “That election is no good.”

More voters during this year’s primary elections opted to vote by mail, and several states relaxed restrictions for voting absentee through the mail. Trump himself voted by mail in the Florida primary this year.

Five states have relied on mail-in ballots since even before the coronavirus pandemic raised concerns about voting in person, but there is no evidence to support Trump’s assertion that voting by mail leads to widespread fraud.

Trump has gone so far as to suggest by tweet that the November election should be delayed “until people can properly, securely and safely vote.”

States that use mail-in votes exclusively say they have necessary safeguards in place to ensure that a hostile foreign actor doesn’t disrupt the vote. Election security experts say voter fraud is rare in all forms of balloting, including by mail.

With Florida’s large retirement population, voting by mail is expected to become a more popular option this November. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., was asked Saturday if he had concerns about the option. “No, I’m not concerned about mail-in voting in Florida,” he said tersely.

Reminded on Fox News that seniors have real, legitimate concerns about in-person voting in a pandemic, Trump said Wednesday that Nov. 3 is an “eternity” away and, “By the time we get there, we’ll probably be in very good shape.”

“It’s going to be very safe,” he added.

Florida’s presidential contests are usually close, with Trump winning by just 1.2 percentage points in 2016 and George W. Bush winning by just 537 votes in 2000.

In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, President Donald Trump was flanked in the White House briefing room by a team of public health experts in a seeming portrait of unity to confront the disease that was ravaging the globe.

But as the crisis has spread to all reaches of the country, with escalating deaths and little sense of endgame,a chasm has widened between the president and the experts. The result: daily delivery of a mixed message to the public at a moment when coherence is most needed.

Trump and his political advisers insist that the United States has no rival in its response to the pandemic. They point to the fact that the U.S. has administered more virus tests than any other nation and that the percentage of deaths among those infected is among the lowest.

“Right now, I think it’s under control,” Trump said during an interview with Axios. He added, “We have done a great job.”

But the surge in infections, hospitalizations and deaths tells a different story. And it suggests that the president is increasingly out of step with the federal government’s own medical and public health experts.

The U.S. death toll, which now stands at 155,000, is expected to accelerate. The latest composite forecast from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects an average of nearly 1,000 deaths per day through Aug. 22.

Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus task force coordinator, warned this week that the virus has become “extraordinarily widespread.”

Trump didn’t like that. He dismissed her comment as “pathetic” and charged she was capitulating to criticism from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had earlier criticized Birx.

Adm. Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services who has avoided contradicting the president throughout the crisis, said on Sunday it was time to “move on” from the debate over hydroxychloroquine, a drug Trump continues to promote as a COVID-19 treatment even though there is no clear evidence it is effective.

Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, last week acknowledged during an ABC News interview that the initial federal government response to the virus too slow.

“It’s not a separation from the president, it’s a cavernous gap,” said Lawrence Gostin, a public health expert at Georgetown University. “What we’re seeing is that scientists will no longer be cowed by the White House.”

Until recently, the medical experts on the White House coronavirus task force have walked a tightrope. They have been pressing to deliver the best science to the public while trying to avoid appearing to directly contradict Trump — in hopes of maintaining influence in the decision-making process.

The effort has played out, at moments, as an awkward dance.

For months now, the West Wing has controlled the media schedule of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who drew the ire of the president and his advisers in the early days of the pandemic because of the outsized media attention he received and his perceived willingness to contradict the president, according to three White House officials and Republicans close to the West Wing not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, has struck a far more cautious tone than Trump or any other member of the task force about the nation’s move to “reopen,” provoking the frustration of a president who sees a resurgent economy as key to winning another four years in office.

Birx, until recently, had largely stayed on the president’s good side, though her rosy depictions of the pandemic fight drew recent skepticism from Democrats and other public health officials. But Trump also shredded Birx privately as well as in his public comments this week for not striking a more optimistic tone about states that are doing well and for saying she had “tremendous respect” for Trump’s rival Pelosi, the officials said.

Throughout the pandemic, some government public health officials have privately expressed worry to West Wing staffers that they are fearful of contradicting the president even as they try to focus on the data and the science behind the administration’s response to the virus, officials said. But publicly, there has been a concerted effort to appear that the team and the Oval Office are speaking with one voice.

Redfield disputed on Monday that the health officials were looking to distance themselves from the president.

“I don’t think that’s an accurate characterization,” Redfield said in an interview. He added, ”I think we communicate freely and directly as we see the outbreak as members of the task force.”

On Monday, Trump seemed to walk back from his criticism that Birx was “taking the bait” from Pelosi and said that he had great respect for the doctor.

He suggested his frustration was spurred by his administration not receiving proper credit for testing so many people or for pushing to replenish the stockpile of ventilators early in the crisis. On Tuesday, he boasted that the U.S. has increased testing capacity by 32,000% since March 12 and has “far and away the most testing capacity in the world.” Trump in early March declared “anybody that needs a test gets a test.” Yet, in many parts of the country, it can still take a week or longer for patients to receive test results.

His positive self-evaluation gives short shrift to the fact that the U.S. has the world’s fourth highest per capita virus death rate, according to Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus resource center.

In the Axios interview, Trump insisted that the appropriate statistic to judge the virus response is the ratio of deaths to cases. By that metric, the U.S. ranks 14th among the 20 countries most affected by COVID-19. Chile, India, Argentina, Russia, South Africa and Bangladesh all have lower rates of deaths to infections, according to the Johns Hopkins-compiled data.

“It’s not a bragging right that over 3% in your country that’s infected is dying,” Georgetown University’s Gostin said.

Trump’s undercutting of his health advisers makes it all but impossible for the federal government to speak with a single, authoritative voice at a time of national crisis, critics say.

“It’s a very dangerous place for the country to be,” said Kathleen Sebelius, health and human services secretary under President Barack Obama. “The reason I say it is very dangerous, is that we continue to have a White House that has made a public health crisis in this country into a debate about whether people like Donald Trump or not. We have never seen a situation like this before, and we are paying the price.”

___

Associated Press writer Mike Stobbe in New York contributed reporting.

In a flurry of tweets and remarks, President Donald Trump continued to distort the facts on the coronavirus pandemic:

• In a series of comments focused on the surging number of COVID-19 cases elsewhere in the world, Trump left the misleading impression that the U.S. is doing better than several countries seeing recent upticks in cases. But nearly all of the nations he mentioned still have fewer new daily per capita cases than the U.S.
• The president said Dr. Anthony Fauci, a coronavirus task force member, was “wrong” that Europe was more successful in reducing new cases partly because countries had more restrictive lockdowns than the U.S. Instead, Trump inaccurately insisted that the U.S. has more cases because of more testing.
• Trump repeated the misleading claim that COVID-19 cases are “up” in the U.S. “because of BIG Testing.” Cases are high because of ongoing transmission, not just because of testing. Coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that the recent outbreaks, unlike those in the early days of the pandemic, are “extraordinarily widespread.”

Resurgences in Other Countries

In recent remarks, Trump has noted that other nations are currently experiencing worrisome upticks in coronavirus cases. While this is true, his emphasis and description of these surges could leave audiences incorrectly believing the U.S. is in better shape than certain parts of Europe and Asia.

In a July 30 press briefing, for example, the president referred to “tremendous problems” occurring across the globe.

Trump, July 30: All over the world, they’re having tremendous problems. A resurgence has taken place in many countries that people thought were doing well. Despite a wide range of approaches to the pandemic between countries, this resurgence in cases is occurring throughout large portions of our planet — in Japan, China, Australia, Belgium, Spain, France, Germany, Hong Kong — places where they thought it was — they had really done great. It came back. And in a couple of cases, it came back very strongly.

He then gave a few eye-popping statistics of the amount of growth in coronavirus cases in select countries. 

“Since the beginning of June,” he said, “daily new cases have increased by a factor of 14 times in Israel; 35 times — that’s 35 times — in Japan; and nearly 30 times in Australia, just to name a few. These were countries that were doing incredibly well; leadership was being praised.”

Later, in an Aug. 2 tweet, Trump retweeted information about a state of disaster declaration in Victoria, Australia, adding, “Big China Virus breakouts all over the World, including nations which were thought to have done a great job. The Fake News doesn’t report this. USA will be stronger than ever before, and soon!”

The following day, Trump alluded to other countries having a “major second wave” of cases in another tweet, and said that the U.S had handled the virus “MUCH better.”

The White House did not respond to our request for more information, so we are not sure which exact days or the source he used in making his comparisons. The factor increases Trump cited are in line, if not lower, than the numbers from Our World in Data, a project based at the University of Oxford. But importantly, the large changes are only possible because those countries had very few new coronavirus cases in early June.

Japan, for instance, had only 33 new cases on June 1, which increased some 34 times to 1,126 cases by July 30, the day of Trump’s remarks. Similarly, Australia and Israel had only 10 and 59 cases, respectively, on June 1, which rose 28 and 34 times to 278 and 2,001 cases on July 30.

In contrast, the U.S. didn’t experience such a large change — less than a 4-fold increase — but started and ended with more daily cases: 19,807 new cases on June 1 and 74,985 new cases on July 30.

Adjusted for population, only Israel is similar to the U.S. in terms of new COVID-19 cases, and had a slightly higher seven-day average figure than the U.S. on July 30. As of Aug. 4, Israel has dipped below the U.S.; Australia has more than nine times fewer new cases per capita than the U.S. and Japan has more than 16 times fewer cases, per Our World in Data’s seven-day rolling average.

Importantly, all of the nations Trump singled out for having resurgences successfully reduced their case numbers to low levels in May and June, which the U.S. did not manage to do.

And even with the rise in cases now, all the nations Trump mentioned, other than Israel, are far below the U.S.’s seven-day average per capita case count of 183 cases per million people per day.

Hong Kong, which is not included in Our World of Data, is posting no more than 150 cases per day, per Worldometer, or about 20 cases per million people. The U.S. has more than nine times that many new daily cases per million people. 

And while Trump repeatedly suggests that the U.S. has more cases because of more testing, it isn’t true that these other nations aren’t testing as much. With the exception of Hong Kong, all of the nations singled out by Trump have been conducting more tests per coronavirus case identified than the U.S.

In an Aug. 3 press briefing, the president again noted “very significant flare ups” in Spain, Germany, France, Australia, Japan and Hong Kong, and in response to a question about the state of the pandemic in the U.S., said, “I think we’re doing very well, and I think that we have done as well as any nation.”

“If you really look, if you take a look at what’s going on, especially now with all these flareups and nations that they were talking about,” he said. “Don’t forget, we’re much bigger, other than India and China. China’s having a massive flareup right down. India has a tremendous problem. Other countries have problems.”

The U.S., by a variety of metrics, has not “done as well as any nation.”

The outbreaks in numerous countries have been smaller and led to fewer deaths, even when including more recent upticks. South Korea, for instance, quickly brought its number of cases down after a burst of infections in March and has largely kept it that way, limiting the total number of cases to fewer than 15,000 and deaths to 301. Australia’s outbreak has also been puny by comparison, with fewer than 20,000 cumulative COVID-19 cases and 232 deaths as of Aug. 4. 

The U.S., meanwhile, has racked up more than 4.7 million cases and more than 156,000 deaths, according to the COVID-19 dashboard from Johns Hopkins University. That works out to 14,240 cases per million U.S. residents, versus 281 per million in South Korea and 718 per million in Australia.

As of Aug. 4, the U.S. had a mortality rate of 47.5 per 100,000 people, but Australia (0.93), Japan (0.8), South Korea (0.58) all have mortality rates of less than 1 person per 100,000, according to Johns Hopkins.

In an interview with Axios that aired Aug. 3, Trump objected to focusing on deaths as a proportion of the population, pointing instead to deaths as a proportion of total cases. “You have to go by the cases,” he said, claiming that the statistic showed the U.S. is “lower than Europe.”

The U.S. has a case-fatality rate of 3.3%, lower than many countries in Europe, including France, Spain and Germany. But there are also many countries with lower rates than the U.S., including Australia (1.2%), Japan (2.5%), Israel (0.7%) and South Korea (2.1%).

That measure shows how deadly the disease has been for those who have been identified as infected, but looking at deaths per 100,000 population shows how the disease has affected the total population of a country.

Nor is the current situation in the U.S. particularly rosy. On July 29, researchers at Johns Hopkins released a report urging changes to America’s pandemic response. “Unlike many countries in the world,” the authors wrote, “the United States is not currently on course to get control of this epidemic.”

All countries must be prepared for resurgences in COVID-19 cases, which at times may grow rapidly. But Trump omits the fact that viral transmission in the U.S. never declined substantially, unlike many of the countries experiencing upticks, and that there are more new daily per capita cases in the U.S. than in virtually all of the nations he highlighted.

Fauci on Europe’s Shutdown

The president also claimed in a tweet that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was “wrong” in saying in a July 31 congressional hearing that more restrictive lockdowns in European countries led to a sharper decline in cases than what the U.S. has achieved. Trump falsely claimed the difference was due to testing. “We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country,” he said.

In the congressional hearing, Fauci was asked by Rep. James Clyburn, chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, “why Europe has largely contained the virus” while “the United States has seen a continued rise in new cases?” Clyburn showed a chart of the daily new confirmed coronavirus cases per million people for the U.S. and Europe.

Fauci, July 31: The answer to that question is really somewhat complex but I’ll try maybe to very briefly go through what I believe are at least some of the factors that were involved. If you look at what happened in Europe when they shut down or locked down or went to shelter in place, however you want to describe it, they really did it to the tune of about 95 plus percent of the country did that. When you actually look at what we did even though we shut down, even though it created a great deal of difficulty, we really functionally shut down only about 50% in the sense of the totality of the country. Which means when we reached our peak as they did, they came down almost to a low baseline as you’ve shown very clearly.

But take a look at what happened to our baseline, we came up, down and then we plateaued at about 20,000 cases a day. So, we started off with a very difficult baseline of transmission that was going on at the time that we tried to open up the country.

Fauci went on to say that some states reopened “very well” and others didn’t, and the latter “led to the surging that you’re showing on your chart there. And one of the reasons is not doing some of the things that [CDC Director] Dr. Redfield mentioned in his opening statement, universal wearing of masks, avoiding crowds, forced physical distancing, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s a complicated reason why those charts are that way and hopefully as we’re going forward we can turn those around and I do believe we can.”

Here’s a version of the chart Clyburn showed:

Trump’s alternative explanation for the difference — “We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country” — reminded us of the president’s claim in a July “Fox News Sunday” interview that other countries, later mentioning Europe, are only testing for COVID-19 if someone is “really sick” and that the “massive” testing in the U.S. “skews the numbers.” As we found, many countries, including in Europe, have conducted more tests per confirmed case than the U.S.

Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told us in an email that “tests per confirmed case provides an indication of how aggressively a country is testing. And many countries are at much higher rates than the US.”

As of Aug. 3, the U.S. had conducted 12.3 tests per confirmed case of COVID-19, using the seven-day rolling average figures from Our World in Data. That’s fewer tests per case than 20-some European countries, with the exclusion of France and Sweden – though the available information for those two countries dates back to early July and May.

Among the countries the president has recently mentioned, Spain has conducted 16.3 tests per confirmed case as of July 30, and Germany has done 39 as of July 26. Israel (26.4), Japan (22.3) and Australia (244.8) all have conducted more tests per confirmed case.

Testing Not Sole Cause of Increase in Cases

Trump once again made the misleading claim, in an Aug. 3 tweet, that coronavirus cases in the U.S. have gone “up because of BIG Testing.” As we’ve written, increased testing will lead to more cases, but it doesn’t account for all of the uptick in some parts of the country. The percentage of tests that were positive also went up in many states.

When we looked into this issue in June, Katherine Ellingson, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, told us that the data on cases and testing “suggests that community transmission is increasing, and that increasing case counts are not simply an artifact of testing.”

In some of the hard-hit states, the percentage of tests that were positive increased significantly this summer. For example, in Arizona, the seven-day average for the test positivity rate, as analyzed by Johns Hopkins University, was around 7% in mid-May, spiked to more than 27% in July and has now declined to 18%.

Florida had a 5% positivity rate or lower for nearly all of May, but for most of July into August, the rate has been above 18%. In Texas, the positivity rate was around 5% at the end of May, hit nearly 18% in July and was about 12% to 14% in recent days.

As of Aug. 4, Johns Hopkins University shows 33 states experiencing an increase in the seven-day positivity rate.

Trump chooses to focus instead on states that are below 5%. He said in an Aug. 3 press briefing: “Meanwhile, 18 states continue to have very low case numbers and low test positivity rates under 5%,” mentioning Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey and New York, among others.

Some areas also have seen increases in COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths, which should not occur if additional testing is the only driver of more coronavirus cases.

Two members of the White House’s coronavirus task force also have contradicted Trump’s claims about testing. Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the task force, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Aug. 2 that the U.S. was in a “new phase” of the outbreak and that the virus was “more widespread.”

“What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It’s into the rural as equal urban areas,” Birx said. “To everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus.”

She recommended those in multigenerational households in areas where there is an outbreak “consider wearing a mask at home, assuming that you’re positive, if you have individuals in your households with comorbidities.”

(Trump tweeted that after being criticized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Birx “took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!”)

Fauci told members of the House in that July 31 hearing: “We see, if you do more testing, you’re going to see more cases. But the increases that we’re seeing are real increasing in cases, as also reflected by increasing in hospitalization and increasing in deaths.”

The seven-day rolling average of deaths per million people in the United States has gone up, from less than or around 2 in late June and early July to 3.38 on July 31, the day Fauci made his remarks, according to Our World in Data.

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Neil Young sued President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign Tuesday for copyright infringement, saying he doesn’t want his music used as a theme song for a “divisive un-American campaign of ignorance and hate.”

The Grammy-award winning Canadian-born musician filed the lawsuit through his lawyers in Manhattan federal court, seeking up to $150,000 in statutory damages for each infringement.

A message seeking comment was left with a campaign spokesperson.

The legendary singer cited repeated use of two songs: “Rockin’ in the Free World” and “Devil’s Sidewalk.”

The campaign has used the tunes numerous times at rallies and political events, including on June 20 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the lawsuit said.

Young said he was not suing to “disrespect the rights and opinions of American citizens, who are free to support the candidate of their choosing,” the lawsuit said.

“However,” it added, “Plaintiff in good conscience cannot allow his music to be used as a ‘theme song’ for a divisive, un-American campaign of ignorance and hate.”

Young first complained about the use of the 1990 single, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” in June 2015, when the song accompanied Trump’s announcement of his presidential campaign, according to the lawsuit.

The campaign’s insistence in a statement then that it had obtained permission to use the music only proved that it was aware it needed permission, the lawsuit said.

It said Young has voiced continuous and public objections to the use of the music.

“The campaign has willfully ignored Plaintiff’s telling it not to play the Songs and willfully proceeded to play the Songs despite its lack of a license,” according to the lawsuit.

New York attorney Ivan Saperstein, who filed the lawsuit on Young’s behalf along with attorney Robert S. Besser of Santa Monica, California, declined comment.

On July 3, Young lodged a complaint on the “Neil Young Archives” website, where a copy of Tuesday’s lawsuit was also posted, after Trump visited Mount Rushmore for an event.

“I stand in solidarity with the Lakota Sioux & this is NOT ok with me,” he said in support of over 100 protesters who forced the closing of a road leading to the landmark.

He complained after “Like a Hurricane” and other songs were played when Trump visited the site.

“Imagine what it feels like to hear ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ after this President speaks, like it is his theme song,” Young said on the website. “I did not write it for that.”

Other artists have also complained after their songs were played at Trump’s events.

In June, the Rolling Stones threatened to sue after the 1969 classic “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was played at Trump’s Oklahoma rally, where critics said the indoor event threatened to spread the coronavirus.

The family of the late rock musician Tom Petty said it had issued a cease-and-desist order after Trump used the song “I Won’t Back Down″ in Tulsa.

“Trump was in no way authorized to use this song to further a campaign that leaves too many Americans and common sense behind,″ the statement said.

Associated Press Writer Jonathan Lemire contributed to this story.

In an abrupt reversal, President Donald Trump now is encouraging voters in the critical swing state of Florida to vote by mail after months of criticizing the practice, and only days after threatening to sue Nevada over a new vote-by-mail law.

His encouragement follows a surge in Democratic requests to vote for mail in Florida. Democrats currently have about 1.9 million Floridians signed up to vote by mail this November, almost 600,000 more than the Republicans’ 1.3 million, according to the Florida Secretary of State.

In 2016, both sides had about 1.3 million signed up before the general election.

“Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True. Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail!,” Trump tweeted Tuesday.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany rejected the notion that the president has changed his views. She said he supports absentee voting by mail for a reason, as opposed to states mailing out ballots to all voters regardless of whether they requested them. Most election officials say there is little effective difference between absentee voting and voting by mail.

More voters during this year’s primary elections opted to vote by mail, and several states relaxed restrictions for voting absentee through the mail. Trump himself voted by mail in the Florida primary earlier this year.

Five states have relied on mail-in ballots since even before the coronavirus pandemic raised concerns about voting in person, but there is no evidence to support Trump’s assertion that voting by mail leads to widespread fraud.

Trump has gone so far as to suggest by tweet that the November election should be delayed “until people can properly, securely and safely vote.”

States that use mail-in votes exclusively say they have necessary safeguards in place to ensure that a hostile foreign actor doesn’t disrupt the vote. Election security experts say voter fraud is rare in all forms of balloting, including by mail.

With Florida’s large retirement population, voting by mail is expected to become a more popular option this November. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., was asked Saturday if he had concerns about the option. “No, I’m not concerned about mail-in voting in Florida,” he said tersely.

Nevada lawmakers have recently passed a bill that would add the state to a growing list of U.S. states mailing active voters ballots ahead of the November election.

The bill, which was passed Sunday, was signed into law Monday by Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat. Nevada joins seven states that plan on automatically sending voters mail ballots, including California and Vermont, which moved earlier this summer to adopt automatic mail ballot policies.

Trump called the bill’s passage “an illegal late night coup” in a tweet Monday morning. He accused Sisolak of exploiting COVID-19 to ensure votes in Nevada would favor Democrats.

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Frustrated Senate Republicans re-upped their complaints on Tuesday that Democratic negotiators are staking too hard a line in talks on a sweeping coronavirus relief bill, but an afternoon negotiating session brought at least modest concessions from both sides, even as an agreement appears far off.

Top Democrats emerged from a 90-minute meeting with Trump administration officials to declare more progress. The Trump team agreed with that assessment and highlighted its offer to extend a moratorium on evictions from federally subsidized housing through the end of the year.

“We really went down, issue by issue by issue slogging through this. They made some concessions which we appreciated. We made some concessions that they appreciated,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “We’re still far away on a lot of the important issues but we’re continuing to go back.”

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Tuesday’s session was “probably the most productive meeting we’ve had to date.” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the two sides set a goal of reaching an agreement by the end of the week to permit a vote next week.

“I would characterize concessions made by Secretary Mnuchin and the administration as being far more substantial than the concessions that had been made by the Democrat negotiators,” Meadows said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., issued a pointed reminder that she and Schumer are “legislators with long experience” and a track record of working complicated deals — a rejoinder to critics complaining that they are being too tough and that the talks are taking too long.

“We agree that we want to have an agreement,” Pelosi said. “Let’s engineer back from there as to what we have to do to get that done.”

Another glimmer of hope emerged as a key Senate Republican telegraphed that the party may yield to Democrats on an increase in the food stamp benefit as part of the huge rescue measure, which promises to far exceed a $1 trillion target set by the GOP.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said Tuesday that “you can make an argument that we need some kind of an increase” in food stamps and that he’s raised the topic with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He added that an agreement on that issue could lead to further overall progress on the legislation, which remains stalled despite days of Capitol negotiations.

“They are taking a look at it and I think we can get a positive result,” Roberts told The Associated Press. “If we can get a breakthrough on that, it could lead to some other stuff.”

The food stamp issue — left out of earlier relief bills — is a top priority for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, among other powerful Democrats, who have passed a 15% increase in the food stamp benefit as part of their $3.5 trillion coronavirus relief bill.

The overall talks are grinding ahead slowly, though urgency is growing among Senate Republicans, several of whom face tough election races and are eager to deliver a bill before heading home to campaign this month.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Monday that the chamber should not go on recess without passing the huge relief measure, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., offered a jobless benefit proposal that’s more generous than a pending GOP alternative. Both are facing closer-than-hoped reelection bids in states that should be easy holds for Republicans.

Multiple obstacles remain, including an impasse on extending the$600-per-week pandemic jobless benefit aid to the renters facing eviction. The benefit has helped sustain consumer demand over recent months as the coronavirus has wrought havoc. Pelosi, D-Calif., wants to extend it through January at a $400 billion-plus cost, while Republicans are proposing an immediate cut to $200 and then replacing the benefit with a cumbersome system that would attempt to provide 70% of a worker’s “replacement wage.”

They are also pressing for funding for the Postal Service. Schumer and Pelosi summoned Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to the Capitol on Wednesday to discuss the agency’s worsening performance and need for emergency funding.

“We’ve seen the delay of mail, and we’re very worried about that affect on the election,” Schumer said.

On the Senate floor, McConnell, R-Ky., continued to protest that Democrats are taking too tough a line. But he signaled he’s far more flexible now than he was weeks ago.

“The American people in the end need help,” McConnell told reporters. “And wherever this thing settles between the president … and the Democrats is something I am prepared to support even if I have some problems with certain parts of it.″

Most members of the Democratic-controlled House have left Washington and won’t return until there is an agreement to vote on, but the GOP-held Senate is trapped in the capital.

Areas of agreement already include another round of $1,200 direct payments and changes to the Paycheck Protection Program to permit especially hard-hit businesses to obtain another loan under generous forgiveness terms.

The House passed a $3.5 trillion measure in May, but Republicans controlling the Senate have demanded a slower approach, saying it was necessary to take a “pause” before passing additional legislation. Since they announced that strategy, however, coronavirus caseloads have spiked and the economy has absorbed an enormous blow.

The Senate GOP draft measure carries a $1.1 trillion price tag, according to an estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Republicans have not released any estimates of their own.

___

Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

She’s too ambitious. She’s not apologetic enough. She should smile more.

The debate over Joe Biden’s running mate has recently ticked through a familiar list of stereotypes about women in politics as the Democratic presidential candidate and his allies stumble through a search they had hoped would stand out for its inclusion and diversity.

Instead, the vice presidential vetting has resurfaced internal party divisions between the old-guard establishment and a younger generation that’s more attuned to gender and racial biases and willing to speak out. Some contend it’s just more evidence of why Biden needs a woman on his ticket.

“The fact is that although we’ve come really far in the last 100 years, we haven’t come far enough for women candidates to be treated with the same level of decency as the male candidates are,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic National Committee chair.

Biden, the presumptive nominee, has said he will pick a woman as his number two and he would probably reach a decision this week, though a formal announcement could come later.

The scrutiny of his choices has intensified in recent weeks, while allies have weighed in, sometimes in ways that feed the tensions.

On Monday, Ed Rendell, a former Democratic Party chair and a Biden ally, was quoted in The Washington Post noting that there has been recent buzz about former national security adviser Susan Rice. He observed that Rice was smiling during a TV appearance, “something that she doesn’t do all that readily,” and that she was “actually somewhat charming.”

Rendell, 76, has commented on another candidate’s demeanor, too, telling CNN last week that California Sen. Kamala Harris can “rub people the wrong way.”

Some see that sort of commentary — docking women for being aggressive and rewarding them for intangibles such as likability — as the sort of bias they say has dogged women in politics for decades.

Rendell said in a phone interview Monday that any suggestions his comment about Rice was sexist were “ludicrous.” He said it was a compliment, a description of a good candidate, no different from when people commented on Richard Nixon smiling more on the comeback trail.

“This country is so nuts,” he said of criticism of his choice of words, blaming it partly on the media. “We’re going crazy.”

Politico recently reported that former Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, the co-chair of Biden’s vetting committee, was concerned that Harris, a former presidential candidate, was not sufficiently regretful about attacking Biden during a primary debate. Others have criticized Harris, who is considered a top prospect, as too ambitious.

Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and 2018 governor candidate, was similarly criticized for touting her credentials for the VP job. She pushed back, saying it would be a disservice to women of color and “women of ambition” to not be forthright.

She said Sunday on MSNBC, “When you do something different, when you meet the standards that are normative for men with a behavior that they don’t expect from you, either as a woman or person of color, then you’re going to get critiqued.”

Rice is Black. Harris’ parents are both immigrants, her father from Jamaica, her mother from India.

That some comments and criticism are coming from older, white men with longtime relationships with the 77-year-old, white Biden has been noted.

Glynda Carr, president of Higher Heights for America, a group that aims to help increase Black women’s political power, said she believes it’s a reaction — conscious or subconscious — from male leaders who “may feel their type of leadership will be hard to maintain” with today’s electorate.

Carr compared them, without naming names, to “dinosaurs in extinction.” She urged the Biden campaign to wrap the process up soon.

“I do think the longer we go there are diminishing returns because everybody feels they need to chime in,” she said.

Comments focusing on gender — as well as the media’s focus on them — are a sore spot for Democrats who fear a repeat of 2016, when they believe presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was defeated in part because of sexist attitudes.

They note that Biden himself is a former vice president — with enough ambition to fuel his third run for the presidency — and say no one would criticize Republican Vice President Mike Pence for eyeing the top job. And they say the conversation about the candidates has been focused on motives, demeanor or personality traits at a level far greater than it would be, or has been, when men are being considered.

Antjuan Seawright, a veteran South Carolina Democratic strategist, says the media are intent on ginning up conflict and finding dirt on rising leaders.

“I hope that this process doesn’t devolve into what some are trying to make it out to be — and that’s pitting two African American women that are pivotal to this party and this country against each other,” he said.

However, lifelong experience with sexism and racism will only help potential running mates make better leaders for a country dealing with a global pandemic, racial injustice and other crises, said the Rev. Barbara Williams-Skinner, one of more than 100 Black clergy who have urged Biden to choose a Black woman as a running mate.

“It is always harder for women. When you’re at that level of power, you have to be ready for that fight, and you have to expect it,” she said, adding that the scrutiny men face is “much fairer.”

“We’d all like to see a day when women are treated more fairly,” she said. “We’re not in that day.”

___

Jaffe reported from Washington.

House Democrats have subpoenaed four top aides to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, saying that the Trump administration is stonewalling their investigation into the firing of the State Department’s top independent watchdog earlier this year.

Former State Department Inspector General Steve Linick appeared for a closed-door interview in the probe in June and told investigators that top department officials tried to bully him and dissuade his office from conducting a review of a multibillion-dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia before he was fired.

Linick also said he was looking into previously reported allegations that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his wife may have misused government staff to run personal errands and several other matters. Trump abruptly fired him late on May 15 with what Linick said was no warning or cited cause.

Democrats announced Monday that they had subpoenaed the officials because they were “refusing to negotiate in good faith” and talk to the committee.

“That stonewalling has made today’s subpoenas necessary, and the committees will continue to pursue this investigation to uncover the truth that the American people deserve,” according to a statement from House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez.

The subpoenas for closed-door depositions are for Undersecretary of State for Management Brian Bulatao, Acting State Department legal adviser Marik String, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Michael Miller and senior adviser Toni A. Porter.

The State Department flatly rejected the Democrats’ allegations as “egregiously inaccurate” but did not say whether the officials would comply with the subpoenas.

“We have provided a very clear path for every individual requested to engage with the committees,” the department said in a statement. “All of the offers have been rejected, manipulated by the committees, or outright ignored. These series of offerings are more than generous in an accommodations process and as a historical matter, rarely turned down.”

Pompeo has rejected allegations that Linick was fired for investigating alleged impropriety and denied he was aware of any such probe into his or his wife’s affairs. He has said Linick was removed for not doing his job.

Linick, who had been inspector general since 2013, said he was in a “state of shock” when he was fired. He told the committees that he had opened a review of last year’s $8 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia at the request of lawmakers who claimed Pompeo had inappropriately circumvented Congress to approve the deal. He said Bulatao and String then tried to stop him.

In the statement announcing the subpoenas, the Democrats said they had also interviewed a separate State Department official, Charles Faulkner, and that interview “raises additional questions” about the Saudi arms sale.

Pompeo, Bulatao and others have said Linick was dismissed in part because of the alleged leak of one of his office’s reports into accusations of political reprisals by Trump appointees against career State Department officials. Linick denied his office was responsible for the leak and said an investigation by the Defense Department inspector general cleared him and his office.

AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.

Democrats are condemning President Donald Trump’s appointing of a staunch loyalist to a senior Pentagon job after it became clear that getting the retired general confirmed to a higher post would be difficult if not impossible.

Trump appointed retired Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata to a job performing the duties of the deputy undersecretary for defense policy, amid ongoing furor over offensive remarks Tata made, including about Islam. Last week the Senate canceled a hearing on Tata’s nomination to become defense undersecretary for policy, the third-highest civilian post at the Pentagon.

Tata, who also has been a Fox News commentator, withdrew his name from consideration for the undersecretary job over the weekend, and was then appointed by Trump to serve in the deputy’s post.

According to media reports, Tata posted tweets in 2018 calling Islam the “most oppressive violent religion I know of,” and he called former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” and referred to him as Muslim. The tweets were later taken down.

“It’s hard to see how Gen. Tata can do an effective job given the serious questions raised by both parties during a closed executive session of the Armed Services Committee last week, and Gen. Tata’s many incorrect and divisive public commentary,” said Sen., Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

Reed said Tata was on the verge of being rejected by the panel, and “until the issues raised by senators of both parties can be resolved, Gen. Tata should not be serving in a position in the Defense Department.”

Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash. and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Trump must not prioritize loyalty over competence and install someone in a job if the “appointee cannot gain the support of the Senate, as is clearly the case with Tata.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee chair, Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., canceled the panel’s hearing last Thursday just hours before its scheduled start saying members didn’t have enough information to consider Tata for the job.

Trump’s latest move sets up a complex, yet largely temporary, situation in the Pentagon’s policy shop.

John Rood was forced to resign as undersecretary for policy in February. He had drawn White House ire for warning against the U.S. withholding aid to Ukraine, the issue that led to the president’s impeachment.

James Anderson, who had been serving as Rood’s deputy, is currently the acting policy undersecretary — the job Tata was initially nominated to fill. Now Tata instead will be “performing the duties of” Anderson’s deputy. Officials who carry the “acting” title have more authority than those who are “performing the duties of” the job.

The Pentagon in a statement said Tata, who had been working as an adviser to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, “looks forward to continuing to help implement the president’s national security agenda.”

Muslim groups have repeatedly voiced opposition to Tata. On Monday, Scott Simpson, director of the Muslim Advocates Public Advocacy, said he must resign.

“A position of leadership for him is an insult to Muslims, to Black people, to Latinos, to the military and to us all,” said Simpson.”

The House Oversight Committee has invited the new postmaster general to appear at a hearing next month to examine operational changes to the U.S. Postal Service that are causing delays in mail deliveries across the country.

The plan imposed by Louis DeJoy, a Republican fundraiser who took over the top job at the Postal Service in June, eliminates overtime for hundreds of thousands of postal workers and orders that mail be kept until the next day if postal distribution centers are running late.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat who chairs the Oversight panel, said the Sept. 17 hearing will focus on “the need for on-time mail delivery during the ongoing pandemic and upcoming election,” which is expected to include a major expansion of mail-in ballots.

President Donald Trump has warned that allowing more people to vote by mail will result in a “CORRUPT ELECTION” that will “LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY,” even though there’s no evidence that will happen. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and other top administration officials frequently vote absentee themselves.

Last week, Trump even floated on Twitter the prospect of delaying the Nov. 3 election — an idea lawmakers from both parties quickly shot down.

Trump also has called the Postal Service “a joke” and said that package shipping rates should be at least four times higher for heavy users like Amazon. But shipping and packages are actually a top revenue generator for the Postal Service, and critics say Trump is merely looking to punish Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos in retaliation for unflattering coverage in The Washington Post, which Bezos owns.

The Oversight committee intended to have the hearing with DeJoy this week, Maloney said, but was told that DeJoy could not attend because of a meeting of the Postal Service’s Board of Governors. DeJoy has confirmed his availability for the September session, she said.

The hearing comes as the Postal Service is reeling from mail delays and financial problems, even as record numbers of mail ballots are expected in the presidential elections because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Postal Service officials, bracing for steep losses from the nationwide shutdown caused by the virus, have warned they will run out of money by the end of September without help from Congress. The service reported a $4.5 billion loss for the quarter ending in March, before the full effects of the shutdown sank in, and expects losses totaling more than $22 billion over the next 18 months.

“The Postal Service is in a financially unsustainable position, stemming from substantial declines in mail volume and a broken business model,” DeJoy said in a statement last week. “We are currently unable to balance our costs with available funding sources to fulfill both our universal service mission and other legal obligations. Because of this, the Postal Service has experienced over a decade of financial losses, with no end in sight, and we face an impending liquidity crisis.”

Bills approved by the Democratic-controlled House would set aside $25 billion to keep the mail flowing, but they remain stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate. Congress has approved a $10 billion line of credit for the Postal Service, but it remains unused amid restrictions imposed by the Trump administration.

The Postal Service and Treasury Department announced an agreement in principle on loan terms last week, with a formal agreement expected in the next few weeks. Even with the loan, the Postal Service, “Remains on an unsustainable path and we will continue to focus on improving operational efficiency,” DeJoy said.

Besides cutting overtime, the new plan halts late trips that are sometimes needed to ensure on-time delivery. If postal distribution centers are running late, “They will keep the mail for the next day,″ Postal Service leaders say in a document obtained by The Associated Press.

“One aspect of these changes that may be difficult for employees is that — temporarily — we may see mail left behind or mail on the workroom floor or docks,″ another document says.

Democratic lawmakers have demanded answers from DeJoy following complaints from constituents about mail service delays and other problems.

“It is essential that the Postal Service not slow down mail or in any way compromise service for veterans, small businesses, rural communities, seniors and millions of Americans who rely on the mail – including significant numbers who will be relying on the Postal Service to exercise their right to vote,” a group of Democratic senators wrote in a letter to DeJoy last week.

The senators, including Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the top Democrat on a panel that oversees the Postal Service, said any changes to Postal Service operations “must be carefully considered to ensure they do not limit service for Americans who rely on the mail for essentials, especially during a pandemic.”

In a separate letter, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., asked DeJoy to clarify whether the Postal Service plans to close some post offices and reduce hours at others in his rural state. Signs at some locations announced proposed closures as soon as Aug. 22 or 24, Manchin said, calling any such action a violation of both federal law and Postal Service rules that require 120 days’ notice before any closures.

“In many areas where reliable broadband is not an option, the Postal Service is their only link to medicine, Social Security checks and family members,” Manchin said. “Under new social distancing mandates, the Postal Service has become even more essential in keeping rural communities connected and economically viable.”

President Donald Trump said Monday that he had fired the chair of the Tennessee Valley Authority, criticizing the federally owned corporation for hiring foreign workers.

Trump told reporters at the White House that he was formally removing chair Skip Thompson and another member of the board, and he threatened to remove other board members if they continued to hire foreign labor. Thompson was appointed to the post by Trump.

The TVA was created in 1933 to provide flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing and economic development to the Tennessee Valley, a region that was hard hit by the Great Depression. The region covers most of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Kentucky as well as small sections of Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

Trump also removed board member Richard Howorth, another presidential appointee.

Trump also urged the TVA board to immediately hire a new chief executive officer who “puts the interests of Americans first.” According to the president, the current CEO, Jeff Lyash, earned $8 million a year.

“The new CEO must be paid no more than $500,000 a year,” said Trump, who lacks the authority to remove the CEO. “We want the TVA to take action on this immediately. … Let this serve as a warning to any federally appointed board: If you betray American workers, you will hear two words: ‘You’re fired.’”

Trump said the authority was replacing many of its in-house technology workers with contractors who rely heavily on foreign workers under the H1-B visa program for highly skilled workers.

“All TVA employees are U.S. based citizens,” said authority public information officer Jim Hopson. “All jobs related to TVA’s Information Technology department must be performed in the U.S. by individuals who may legally work in this country.”

“As a federal corporation, TVA’s Board members serve at the pleasure of the President,” Hopson added.

As Trump was meeting with workers who would shortly be laid off by the authority, he was passed a note from chief of staff Mark Meadows that said Lyash had called the White House and was promising to address the labor concerns. Some of the attendees, who are set to see their last paycheck at the end of the month, teared up as Trump read the message.

Trump acknowledged that he was made aware of the issue after seeing a television ad that aired in prime time on Fox News and was produced by U.S. Tech Workers, a nonprofit that wants to limit visas given to foreign technology workers.

The group, led by Kevin Lynn, criticized the TVA for furloughing its own workers and replacing them with contractors using foreign workers with H-1B visas. The ad, Lynn said, had an “audience of one,” aiming to persuade Trump to stop the TVA from outsourcing much of its information technology division.

Trump made the announcement as he signed an executive order to require all federal agencies to complete an internal audit to prove they are not replacing qualified American workers with people from other countries. The White House said the order will help prevent federal agencies from unfairly replacing American workers with lower cost foreign labor.

The order followed the TVA’s announcement that it would outsource 20% of its technology jobs to companies based in foreign countries. TVA’s action could cause more than 200 highly skilled American tech workers in Tennessee to lose their jobs to foreign workers hired on temporary work visas, according to the White House.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said the TVA doesn’t get any taxpayer money and defended the CEO’s salary, saying it is in the bottom fourth of what his counterparts earn at other big utilities.

“TVA may have shown poor judgment hiring foreign companies during a pandemic, but, on most counts, it does a very good job of producing large amounts of low-cost, reliable electricity. Residential electric rates are among the 25 percent lowest in the country, and industrial rates are among the lowest 10 percent,” Alexander said in a statement. “TVA’s debt is the lowest in 30 years, its pension fund is stronger and TVA leads the country in new nuclear power plants.”

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. could be investigating President Donald Trump and his company for possible insurance and bank fraud, the prosecutor’s office revealed Monday in a new court filing.

In the filing, Vance’s office urged a federal judge to toss out Trump’s new legal effort to prevent prosecutors from getting his tax returns and other records from his accountants through a grand jury subpoena.

Vance’s office already was known to be seeking Trump’s financial records from the accounting firm Mazars USA as part of a probe into how the president’s company, the Trump Organization, accounted for a hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who says she had sex with Trump years ago. Trump has denied having sex with Daniels.

The White House, the Trump Organization and Trump’s lawyer had no immediate comment on Vance’s filing.

Trump, when asked at a White House press briefing Monday evening about the possible criminal probe of his business, said, “This is just a continuation of the witch hunt.”

The president likened the District Attorney’s possible move to other investigations involving him since his 2016 presidential run, including special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian election interference and the impeachment proceedings spurred by the House of Representatives.

“It’s Democrat stuff, they failed with Mueller, they failed with everything, they failed with Congress, they failed at every stage of the game,” Trump said.

“This is a continuation of the worst witch hunt in American history and there’s nothing that I know even about it,” Trump added. “It’s a terrible thing that they do, it’s really a terrible thing. The witch hunt has gone on long enough.”

Trump was impeached in the Democrat-led House on articles of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress; he was acquitted in the GOP-majority Senate.

The filing Monday by Vance’s office in U.S. District Court in Manhattan did not explicitly say what it is probing beyond the hush-money payment.

But the filing noted that the office is seeking up to a decade’s worth of the financial records to see if they contain evidence of other “potentially improper financial transactions by a variety of individuals and entities over a period of years.”

“At the time the Mazars Subpoena was issued, there were public allegations of possible criminal activity at Plaintiff’s New York County-based Trump Organization dating back over a decade,” Vance’s office wrote, citing news reports last year.

“These reports describe transactions involving individual and corporate actors based in New York County, but whose conduct at times extended beyond New York’s borders,” the filing said.

The filing also cited a prior court ruling which noted that the “investigation may result in ‘a favorable outcome . . . substantially related to[,]’ among other things, ‘alleged insurance and bank fraud by the Trump Organization and its officers.’”

Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen testified to Congress last year that Trump had both inflated and deflated the value of real estate assets for tax and insurance purposes.

Vance’s office in its court filing also said that Trump’s second lawsuit seeking to block the subpoena “merely regurgitates allegations and arguments this Court has rejected before.”

The president’s ”‘new’ filing contains nothing new whatsoever, and [Trump] has utterly failed to make a ‘stronger showing’ of bad faith than he previously made to this Court,” Vance’s office said.

Prosecutors also argued to Judge Victor Marrero that Trump’s suit opposing the subpoena “merely serves to delay the grand jury’s investigation.”

The office said: “Every day that goes by is another day Plaintiff effectively achieves the ‘temporary absolute immunity’ that was rejected by this Court, the Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court.”

The DA also argued that further delay increases the chance of loss of evidence and of the expiration of the statute of limitations for certain crimes.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month rejected Trump’s bid to block the subpoena, ruling that presidents do not have immunity from being investigated for crimes by state prosecutors while in office.

But the Supreme Court allowed Trump to raise other arguments opposing the subpoena at the federal district court level.

The president’s lawyers did so last week in their new lawsuit.

That suit said the subpoena “amounts to harassment of the President in violation of his legal rights,” is “wildly overboard” in the records it seeks and “is not remotely confined to the grand jury investigation that began in 2018.”

Trump’s lawyers also argue in the suit that the subpoena “was issued in bad faith.”

Trump has refused to release his income tax returns to the public, reversing more than four decades of practice by other presidents.

This story was first published on CNBC.com. More from CNBC:

• Microsoft has until Sept. 15 to resolve a lot of thorny questions if it wants to buy TikTok
• Airlines, unions push for billions in additional federal aid to save airline jobs as cuts loom
• Trump attacks Dr. Birx after she said U.S. reached ‘new phase’ in coronavirus fight

Presidential politics move fast. What we’re watching heading into a new week on the 2020 campaign:

Days to general election: 92

Days to first state offering early voting (North Carolina): 33

THE NARRATIVE

With early voting fast approaching, both presidential camps are feverishly making final preparations for the post-summer sprint to Election Day as the coronavirus pandemic and related economic devastation show few signs of improving.

Democrat Joe Biden is on the verge of picking a running mate, if he hasn’t already, a decision that is likely the most significant of his decades-long political career. And President Donald Trump’s team is fighting to settle on a campaign message as the Republican president himself takes dramatic steps to undermine the integrity of the election in case he loses.

Never has an incumbent U.S. president so blatantly attacked the election process itself and done so little to try to fix it. Trump spent much of last week decrying the expected surge in mail voting during the pandemic, going so far as to suggest delaying the election date. While congressional leaders in both parties slapped down the idea, Trump did not back away from the shocking suggestion or his baseless claims that the 2020 election will be rigged against him. At the same time, the Trump administration has opposed any significant efforts in the latest coronavirus rescue package to protect and strengthen mail voting.

But this week largely belongs to Biden, who is days away from announcing the winner of the veepstakes. The public and private jockeying among the prospective picks has intensified, but expect it to get even hotter before it’s over. Beleaguered Republicans are praying for a flawed pick who would help make the 2020 contest a binary choice instead of a referendum on Trump.

THE BIG QUESTIONS

And the veepstakes winner is?

A smart operative told us over the weekend that only an extremely small circle — maybe three or four people — truly knows Biden’s thinking regarding his running mate, and those people aren’t talking.

That means much of what you see and hear in the coming days is likely a reflection of spinning by the supposed finalists and by Washington group think that may or may not be connected to reality.

We know for sure that Biden will pick a woman, and he said he would make his decision this week, although his campaign has raised the possibility that a formal announcement wouldn’t come until next week. The finalists are thought to include California Sen. Kamala Harris, former national security adviser Susan Rice, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and California Rep. Karen Bass, and it’s always possible the choice will be someone else.

Many establishment voices are urging Biden to go with Harris, a potential fundraising star who has already been vetted on the presidential stage and been elected statewide multiple times. Some Obama allies are pushing Rice, who has never run for public office but has an unrivaled command of global affairs and experience working at Biden’s side. Many progressives are hoping for a more “exciting” pick — such as Warren or Bass — who could help energize the party’s left flank.

This marks the last major moment of the 2020 campaign truly under Biden’s control.

Will Trump do anything to strengthen vote by mail?

Trump last week floated the idea of delaying the November election until the pandemic improves to a level where it’s safer for most people to vote in person. To be clear, the election date will not be delayed. Republicans and Democrats in Congress, who would have to change federal law to move the election, have overwhelmingly rejected the idea.

The question then becomes whether the Trump administration will do anything to address his concerns about mail voting. Experts say that the threat of major fraud is virtually nonexistent, but the postal service is legitimately overwhelmed and state elections officials struggled to count the explosion of mail ballots throughout the primary season, which delayed final results by weeks in some cases.

This is a very foreseeable crisis. Yet so far, Trump seems far more willing to undermine voter confidence in the election than address serious concerns. Republicans have an opportunity to strengthen mail voting in the new coronavirus rescue package, but absent Trump’s support, it’s hard to imagine Trump’s party doing much to address the issue.

What’s happening to the economy?

Last month’s optimism about the economy seems to be fading. The government released new numbers last week documenting a record drop for the nation’s gross domestic product last quarter in addition to rising unemployment applications. At the same time, Republican governors, including staunch Trump allies like Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, are openly contemplating rolling back reopening plans, if they haven’t already, should coronavirus infections continue to strain their states’ health care systems.

This is bad news for Trump politically and bad news for millions of Americans whose livelihoods are at stake. To make matters worse, Congress failed to pass an economic relief package last week as enhanced unemployment benefits expired for nearly 30 million people. It’s easy to imagine the loss of such income having a further chilling effect on an already shaky U.S. economy.

The longer this economic pain lasts, the harder it will be for Trump to convince voters that he’s better positioned than Biden to rebuild the economy. The coronavirus death toll, meanwhile, continues to surge.

Will anyone see Trump’s formal nomination?

GOP officials said over the weekend that the vote to formally give Trump his party’s 2020 presidential nomination will be conducted in private later this month. While Trump called off the public components of the convention in Florida last month because of the pandemic, more than 300 delegates are scheduled to gather in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Aug. 24 to make Trump the GOP standard-bearer once more.

The moment is usually a highlight of the national presidential conventions, but a spokeswoman for the Republican National Convention said that the press would not be allowed to cover it because of health concerns. While Trump’s nomination is assured, the decision to block coverage of the historic moment is curious.

Nominating conventions are traditionally meant to be media bonanzas, as political parties seek to leverage the attention the events draw to spread their message to as many voters as possible. If the GOP decision stands — an official later said the decision wasn’t final — it will be the first party nominating convention in modern history to be closed to reporters.

THE FINAL THOUGHT

One of Obama’s top advisers, David Axelrod, said a presidential campaign is an “MRI of the soul.” That’s especially true for a first-time candidate.

But most Americans know Biden from his long tenure. This time, it may be his running mate who gets even more scrutiny. The less time that person has spent on the national stage, the more likely of unforeseen controversy.

Bass, who has never sought national or statewide office, faced tough questions on the Sunday morning talk show circuit about her decades-old travels to Cuba and, more recently, her warm description of its leader Fidel Castro after his death.

As she’s learning, that kind of thing doesn’t play so well in Florida, a vital general election battleground. And that’s before the video surfaced of Bass seeming to praise aspects of Scientology at a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Just two of Biden’s finalists — Harris and Warren — have been vetted already under the bright lights of presidential politics. For everyone else, there is a real element of uncertainty. With every risk, however, there could be a reward.

Negotiators on a huge coronavirus relief bill reported slight progress after talks resumed Monday afternoon in the Capitol, with issues like food for the poor and aid to schools struggling to reopen safely assuming a higher profile in the talks.

Multiple obstacles remain, including an impasse so far on extending a $600-per-week pandemic jobless benefit, funding for the Postal Service, and aid to renters facing eviction. Democratic negotiators spoke of progress at almost the very moment that top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell was slamming them for taking a hard line in the talks.

“We are really getting an understanding of each side’s position. And we’re making some progress on certain issues moving closer together,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “There are a lot of issues that are still outstanding. But I think there is a desire to get something done as soon as we can.”

After the meeting, Pelosi told her Democratic colleagues on a call that she’s hopeful a deal could be reached this week, but doesn’t know if it’s possible, according to a Democratic aide who was granted anonymity to describe the private discussion.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a lead negotiator for President Donald Trump, said afterward that “we continue to make a little bit of progress” and that the administration is not insistent on a small-bore approach centered on extending the supplemental unemployment benefit and leaving other items for later. A GOP move to advance a slimmed-down relief package has been a recent point of conflict, with Democrats insisting there must be a comprehensive deal.

“We’re open to a bigger package if we can reach an agreement,” Mnuchin said.

On the Senate floor, McConnell, R-Ky., re-upped his complaint that Democrats are taking too tough a line. McConnell is not a direct participant in the talks but is likely to be an important force in closing out any potential agreement.

“The Speaker of the House and the Democratic Leader are continuing to say ‘our way or the highway’ with a massive wish list for left-wing lobbyists that was slapped together a few weeks ago called a coronavirus bill,” McConnell said.

Speaking to reporters after the two-hour session, Democratic negotiators pressed the case for additional food aid, funding for the Postal Service, and the $600-per-week jobless benefit that lapsed last week. The benefit has helped prop up the economy and family budgets as the coronavirus has wrought havoc.

The White House is seeking opportunities to boost Trump, like providing another round of $1,200 stimulus payments and extending the supplemental jobless benefit and partial eviction ban. Pelosi appears intent on an agreement as well, but she’s made it clear she needs big money for state and local governments, unemployment benefits and food aid.

“It was productive, we’re moving down the track. We still have our differences, we are trying to have a clearer understanding of what the needs are, and the needs are that millions of children in our country are food insecure,” Pelosi said. “Millions of people in our country are concerned about being evicted. Tens of millions of people are on unemployment insurance.”

Most members of the Democratic-controlled House have left Washington and won’t return until there is an agreement to vote on, but the GOP-held Senate is trapped in the capital.

“I can’t see how we can go home and tell people we’ve failed, so I think that’s going to be a lot of pressure on everybody to come up with something,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “It really is a matter of will. It’s not a matter of substance at this point. This is just a painful period between people finally deciding OK, we want a deal, and then what that deal will ultimately look like.”

Areas of agreement already include the $1,200 direct payment and changes to the Paycheck Protection Program to permit especially hard-hit businesses to obtain another loan under generous forgiveness terms.

But the terms and structure of the unemployment benefit have remained a sticking point, along with the money for state and local governments. Democrats want almost $1 trillion for localities grappling with pandemic-related revenue losses.

Speaking to reporters Monday evening, Trump made clear the two sides were still far apart on that issue.

“They want to bail out cities and states that have been in trouble for years of bad management,” Trump said. “In all cases Democrat-run cities, and we don’t think that’s fair.”

McConnell is insistent on a liability shield against lawsuits by workers, students, and others against institutions seeking to remain open during the pandemic, including businesses, universities and charities.

On Monday, unions representing professional athletes — including NFL players and Major League Basesball players — weighed in against McConnell’s proposal, saying in a letter to lawmakers, “It makes little sense during these uncertain times to both ask employees to return to work and, at the same time, accept all the risk for doing so.”

On unemployment, Pelosi said she’d consider reducing the $600 benefit for people in states with lower unemployment rates. Republicans want to cut the benefit to encourage beneficiaries to return to work and say it is bad policy since it pays many jobless people more money than they made at their previous jobs.

Another sticking point is that Republicans want to give more school aid to systems that are restarting with in-school learning, even as Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s top coronavirus adviser, cautioned that schools in areas with spikes in cases should delay reopening.

Pelosi said Monday’s talks featured extensive discussion on reopening schools. Schumer said the discussion got into the details on the dollar figures involving school aid and food aid.

The House passed a $3.5 trillion measure in May, but Republicans controlling the Senate have demanded a slower approach, saying it was necessary to take a “pause” before passing additional legislation. Since they announced that strategy, however, coronavirus caseloads have spiked and the economy has absorbed an enormous blow.

___

Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

The little girl ran up to her, wide-eyed and giddy.

“Are you Charisse Davis?” the fourth grader asked.

Davis was stunned. A former kindergarten teacher and librarian, she was more accustomed to shuttling her two sons to basketball practice than being seen as a local celebrity. But now she had been elected the only Black woman on the Cobb County School Board, gaining office in a once conservative suburban community where people who look like her rarely held positions of power.

Something had changed in this place, and something had changed in her.

“I love your hair — your hair looks like my hair,” the girl squealed, calling friends over.

It was a moment both innocent and revealing: Not just a child seeing herself in an elected leader, but also a reflection of the rapidly building power of Black women. It’s a momentous change that could make history on a national ticket and determine the outcome of the presidential race.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — Americans are preparing to choose a leader and a path through a time of extraordinary division and turmoil. Associated Press journalists tell their stories in the series “America Disrupted.”

___

Black women have long been the heart of the Democratic Party — among the party’s most reliable and loyal voters — but for decades that allegiance didn’t translate to their own political rise. There have been zero Black female governors, just two senators, several dozen congresswomen.

And the people representing them instead have not met their needs: Disparities in education and opportunity resulted in Black women making on average 64 cents for every dollar a white man makes. Long-standing health inequities have caused Black people to die disproportionately from COVID-19.

And countless cases of police brutality have left many Black women terrified every time their children pulled out of the driveway, fearing that they might not make it home alive.

Now Black women are mobilized and demanding an overdue return on their investment. Over the last several years and across America, Black women ran and won elections in historic numbers, from Congress to county school boards.

This transformation is taking place in once unlikely places, suburban counties in the South. Places like Cobb, a rambling expanse of strip malls and subdivisions just north of Atlanta that doubled in population midway through the last century as white people fled the city. Then, slowly, families of color followed, also seeking bigger yards and better schools.

The year Charisse Davis was born, 1980, Cobb County was 4.5% African American. Now it’s more than 27% Black and 13% Hispanic. Its politics caught up with its demographics: In 2016 Hillary Clinton was the first Democratic presidential candidate to eke out a win in Cobb County since Jimmy Carter, a Georgian, in 1976.

President Donald Trump’s presidency, which has fueled racial divisions and appealed to white grievance, unleashed for some here an overwhelming urgency. They added their names to down-ticket ballots; they canvassed; they knocked on doors.

When Stacey Abrams, a Black progressive Democrat, ran for governor in 2018, she focused her campaign on women of color. In that election, more than 51,000 Black women in Cobb County cast ballots — 20,000 more than voted in midterm elections four year earlier.

Although Abrams lost narrowly statewide, she won Cobb County handily. Meanwhile, Lucy McBath, a Black mother whose 17-year-old son was killed by a white man who thought his music was too loud, won a congressional seat that includes part of the county, a district once held by conservative firebrand Newt Gingrich.

Charisse Davis looked at the school board members and saw no Black women, so she ran and won. Another Black woman became the chair of the county’s young Republicans. Two joined the Superior Court bench. A teenager ran for class president, and she won, too.

“We’ve been watching from the sidelines and allowing other people to take their turns, and take these positions of power,” Davis said. “Now here we are to essentially fix it.”

___

The first county Democratic Party meeting after Trump’s election was standing room only.

“It was almost like a support group. We had to be together, we had to grieve and yell,” Davis said. “What happened?”

Across the county, there was soul searching over how Clinton lost white, working-class voters, but much less on why Democrats also lost some of the support of this core constituency.

Historically Black women vote in extraordinary numbers, and they don’t vote alone: They usher their families, their churches, their neighbors to the polls.

But in 2016, African Americans did not turn out in the numbers the party had come to expect. For the first time in 20 years, their turnout declined in a presidential election. About 70% of eligible Black women voted in 2012 when President Barack Obama, the first Black president, secured a second term. But in 2016 that number slipped to 64%, its pre-Obama level.

While there were multiple reasons for Clinton’s loss, including a large defection of white voters, some saw the drop-off as a sign that Black voters had been taken for granted. Organizations sprang up across the country to motivate Black women to organize, run and win.

“We have never been at this moment,” said Aimee Allison, who in 2018 founded the network She the People, which is working to turn out a million women of color across seven battleground states. “For us as a group to recognize our own political power means that we also are demanding to govern.”

The power of Black voters was demonstrated when they overwhelmingly backed Joe Biden in the South Carolina primary, giving him a staggering victory that rescued his campaign and set him on a path to the nomination. Black women made up about one-third of the Democratic voters in the state and roughly two-thirds voted for Biden, according to the AP VoteCast survey.

Biden has pledged to pick a woman as his running mate, and at least six of the contenders are Black — including California Rep. Karen Bass, who said, “I think what we’re looking for is representation, acknowledgement, inclusion.”

Those who advocate for Black women in politics say the stakes have never been higher.

They emphasize that Trump’s administration has failed to contain the coronavirus that has killed more than 154,000 Americans, a disproportionate share of them African Americans. He has responded to mass demonstrations over police violence by calling protesters thugs and encouraging law enforcement to beat them back with force.

“Given how directly Black women have been impacted by the incompetence and the malfeasance of the Trump administration, Black women are going to be at the forefront, not only giving rise to voter turnout, but also shaping the conversations that we will be having in this election season,” said Abrams, whose name has also been widely circulated as a possible Biden running mate. “It has been a sea change in how vital our voices have been.”

Black women can meet this moment in a way no one else can, they say: The world watched the video of George Floyd begging for his mother as he was dying under a police officer’s knee.

Charisse Davis’ sons, 10 and 14 years old, asked her: Why won’t the officer just let him get up?

When she looks at her own sons, she sees her babies. But the older boy is now taller than she is. He likes hoodies. She worries a stranger might see him as a menace, not a boy whose mother still has to remind him to floss his teeth.

“That is the reality of being a Black mother in this country,” she said.

She gets messages after school board meetings: “People like you are the problem,” one said. “She’s a racist,” a man wrote. Another described her as “defiant,” and said he had his son watch school board meetings “to see how he shouldn’t behave.”

She hears: You don’t belong there.

“You are dismantling the machine, rocking the boat, and all of those things are the way that they are by design,” she said, and added that one of the high schools in the district she represents is named after a Confederate officer.

“That is what the country is built on, that is racism, that is systemic racism, that is white supremacy. It’s all these things we don’t talk about. But if not now, when?”

___

When Chinita Allen’s 20-year-old son was home from college earlier this year, he and a friend went to work out at their old high school in the affluent, predominantly white part of the county where they live. He had been a football star there. But someone saw two Black men and called the police to report suspicion.

She posted her son’s story on Facebook, and it rocketed around this community.

In the not-so-distant past, she might not have spoken up. A soccer mom and educator, she had long avoided talking about race, rocking the boat — until Trump won. Now she’s the president of Cobb Democratic Women and leading the charge to try to turn the county totally blue.

“It’s all about knowing your worth,” she said. “We’ve always been here, like the Underground Railroad. But it’s surfaced now. In a big way. It’s a rail train.”

Black women powered the civil rights movement, but rarely became its stars. Women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, Myrlie Evers, Ella Baker and Dorothy Height never held political office, but they played a critical role, said Nadia Brown, a Purdue University political science professor.

Only occasionally did their work lead to elective office, as it did when Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress, in 1968, and a candidate for president in 1972.

But the landscape changed dramatically over the last several cycles. Just two years ago, five Black women were elected to Congress, four of them in majority-white districts, according to the Higher Heights Black Women in American Politics 2019 survey. Congress now has more Black women than ever before: 22 congresswomen and one senator, Kamala Harris, who is just the second to serve in that chamber and a prominent contender to be Biden’s running mate.

The change has extended to state and local offices. Two black women are running for governor in Virginia, and if either of them win, she would become the nation’s first Black female governor.

In Cobb County, Kellie Hill made history in June as one of two Black women elected to the Superior Court bench. When she first moved to Georgia 30 years ago, fellow lawyers assumed she was her secretary’s assistant.

“I said for years, ‘Maybe one day they’ll be ready for me,’” Hill said. “And as exciting as it is to be the first, it’s a little unbelievable that we’re having a conversation about being the first in the year 2020.”

Although they make up about 7.5% of the electorate, less than 2% of statewide elected executive offices were held by Black women as of November 2019. They account for less than 5% of officeholders elected to statewide executive offices, Congress and state legislatures, according to the Higher Heights survey.

“Black women have done everything that America told us was going to make us successful and we’re still at the bottom in terms of our return,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter.

Black women are posting faster educational gains than any other demographic group in the U.S. — seeing a 76% jump in the number of college degrees earned over the past 20 years, but they aren’t reaping the promised economic benefits. On average, Black women made 64 cents for every dollar a white man makes. But that drops to 55 cents for Black women with a professional degree compared to white men with the same level of educational attainment.

“People told us that education is key to being successful,” Brown said. “What did Black women do? Black women, out of any constituency group in this country, we enter college more than any other group in this country. Then why does the wealth not reflect that?”

As a result, said Bev Jackson, chair of the Democratic Party’s Cobb County African American caucus, Black women have a special resiliency: They have no safety net, so Black women just learn to walk the tightrope better.

Jackson thought about how much she wished her parents had lived to see a Black woman come so close to the Governor’s Mansion. Her family’s roots in Cobb County go back more than 100 years. Her parents went to segregated schools and sipped out of separate water fountains.

Once, when Jackson was a little girl, she sat down at a lunch counter because she wanted a cherry Coke. The waitress just passed her by, refusing to serve her.

Now Black women around her are daring to run, to win and to demand their leaders fix the broken system that maintains disparities in policing, health care, education, economics.

“You have taken our votes for granted for years. But guess what?” she said. “It’s payback time: What are you going to do for us?”

___

Republicans aren’t immune to this awakening.

DeAnna Harris was recently elected chair of the Cobb County Young Republicans, the first Black person in the post. To highlight local Black Republicans — the district attorney, deputy sheriff, a former state representative — she held her inaugural event at the historic African American church she attends. The crowd was diverse, she said, and she was proud of that.

She tries to make a conservative pitch to other Black voters by touting the ideals she believes in: small government, gun rights, religious freedom, anti-abortion. The response is generally something along the lines of, “but I don’t like Trump.”

“He’s never served the role of politician, who gets up there and smiles and says all the right things and winks at the camera, and then when you turn around they stab you in the back,” Harris said. Though she doesn’t like his tone or his tweets, she supports Trump because of his conservative policies.

But she also believes it’s imperative that Republicans broaden their base. The party should look like America, she thinks, and right now it doesn’t.

The Democratic Party of Georgia is confident that enthusiasm is on its side. Fair Fight Action, the organization Abrams founded, calculated that Georgia has more than 750,000 new voters who were not registered in 2018, 49% of them voters of color. And despite a pandemic and hourslong lines in some polling places, more Democrats voted in June’s presidential primary than in 2008, when Obama was on the ticket.

That Democratic energy can be particularly seen in these northern Atlanta suburbs. McBath, the incumbent in the 6th Congressional District, ran unopposed and got 26,000 more primary votes than the five Republicans candidates combined. In Cobb County, almost 33,000 African Americans voted in the 2016 primary. In the 2020 primary: more than 52,000. Both of the state’s Republican senators are up for election, putting Georgia on the front lines of the fight for control of the Senate.

“The 2020 election cycle is going to be key to changing the course of history in this country,” said Nikema Williams, chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia, who was selected to replace Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights leader who died in July, on the November ballot. “We’re a battleground in Georgia now, and Black women are leading the way.”

In Cobb County, even some who can’t vote themselves are determined to thwart Trump’s chances of reelection. Gabby Bashizi was one of thousands of teenagers who plotted on the social media site TikTok to reserve tickets to Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, then not show up.

Trump said he expected a million fans to attend. There were about 6,000, and lots of empty seats.

“I think he’s really dangerous,” said Bashizi, 17. Her father is an immigrant from Congo, so it feels personal every time Trump calls immigrants criminals or Black Lives Matter protesters “thugs.” “We all feel it. We all go home scared. Is it going to be me next?”

When she was younger she struggled to find self-worth. No Disney princesses looked like her. People touched her hair, like it was a strange curiosity. In the sixth grade, she buzzed it to the width of a bottle cap, and cried and cried.

Then she started seeing Black women ascend.

“Seeing them fight their fight on the national stage has led me to be able to fight my fight on a personal level,” she said. She grew her hair out again.

Charisse Davis said that it is these young women who give her hope for a better day: They are idealistic, coming of age in a time when Black women are rising, and they can look around, see people like themselves and believe anything is possible.

She knows an 18-year-old named Audrey McNeal. McNeal ran to be the class president at her mostly white high school, and lost. She thought of a poem she once wrote about a princess envious of her brother because one day he would be king; she wanted to be powerful. She ran again, and won.

“It’s about time we represent ourselves,” McNeal said. Now she’s a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. She’s heading to Barnard College to study politics.

She thinks she’ll be secretary of state one day. And then, maybe, president.

___

Associated Press writers Angeliki Kastanis, Josh Boak, Emily Swanson and Hannah Fingerhut contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump is making grandiose claims about slashing drug prices and the efficacy of a treatment for COVID-19 that don’t hold up to reality.

In a tweet Sunday, he asserts that he will reduce drug prices by at least 50%. That’s highly unlikely. Measures announced last month by the president will take time to roll out and their effects are uncertain. They also have been less ambitious than a plan by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that passed the House.

Meanwhile, Trump once again asserted that hydroxychloroquine is a drug safe and effective for treating COVID-19, only to be firmly rebutted Sunday by his own testing coordinator, who said people should “move on” to more effective measures, such as social distancing and wearing masks.

A look at Trump’s statements on health care:

PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

TRUMP: “When you see the Drug Companies taking massive television ads against me, forget what they say (which is false), YOU KNOW THAT DRUG PRICES ARE COMING DOWN, BIG.” — tweet Sunday.

TRUMP: “We think we’re going to cut prescription drug prices 50, 60, even 70%.” — remarks Thursday to New Hampshire supporters.

TRUMP, promising a big reduction in drug prices: “No other President would be able to produce what I have.” — tweet Tuesday.

THE FACTS: Actually, no massive, across-the-board cuts are in the offing for drug prices.

Efforts announced last month by the president — such as allowing importation of medicines from countries where prices are lower — take time to roll out. It remains to be seen how much they’ll move the needle on prices.

Drug importation, for example, requires regulatory actions to be taken and supply chains to be established, a tall order when the election is just three months away.

Trump has taken actions to reduce patient costs for some drugs, such as insulin, but the steps have been less ambitious than those in a bill from Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the House passed last year. Her proposal would authorize Medicare to negotiate prices for expensive medications and use savings from lower drug costs to establish Medicare coverage for dental care, hearing and vision.

She would cap Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket costs for medicines at $2,000 a year. No limit exists on those annual costs now. The vast majority of Medicare recipients have low drug costs, but the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that in 2017, about 1 million Medicare recipients paid much more, averaging $3,200 in a year.

White House actions, while not insignificant, don’t amount to the massive changes Trump brags about. One major initiative would give people on Medicare the option of limiting their out-of-pocket costs for insulin to $35 a month starting next year, by picking an “enhanced” prescription drug plan for a slightly higher premium.

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VIRUS DRUG

TRUMP, on the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat or try to prevent the coronavirus: “I happen to be a believer in hydroxy. I used it. I had no problem. I happen to be a believer.” — remarks Wednesday to reporters.

THE FACTS: Trump’s continued promotion of the anti-malaria drug for COVID-19 has been repeatedly dismissed by his own health experts, including Adm. Brett Giroir, the administration’s lead official on testing, who made clear Sunday he does not recommend the treatment.

“Most physicians and prescribers are evidence-based, and they’re not influenced by whatever is on Twitter or anything else,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” In this case, “anything else” includes endorsements of the drug by the president.

Giroir said “the evidence just doesn’t show hydroxychloroquine is effective right now.”

He said people need to “move on” and “talk about what is effective.” He pointed to measures such as hand-washing, social-distancing and wearing masks, as well as treatments such as remdesivir and steroids.

Trump’s own health agencies as well as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious diseases expert, have cautioned that taking hydroxychloroquine to stave off the virus could be dangerous due to side effects. If the president is to be believed, he took the drug himself.

Trump repeatedly has pushed hydroxychloroquine, with or without the antibiotic azithromycin. But no large, rigorous studies have found them safe or effective for COVID-19, and they can cause heart rhythm problems and other serious side effects. The Food and Drug Administration has warned against the drug combination and said hydroxychloroquine should only be used for the coronavirus in hospitals and research settings.

___

TRUMP, on hydroxychloroquine: “Many, many people agree with me. A great test just came out from the Ford clinic in Michigan — very respected.” — remarks Wednesday to reporters.

THE FACTS: Trump is cherry picking a study widely criticized as flawed, ignoring multiple studies finding hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help.

Numerous rigorous tests of hydroxychloroquine, including a large one from Britain and one led by the National Institutes of Health, concluded that the anti-malaria drug was ineffective for treating hospitalized coronavirus patients.

The Henry Ford Health System study that Trump refers to was an observational look back at how various patients fared. It was not a rigorous test where similar patients are randomly assigned to get the drug or not and where each group is compared later on how they did.

In the study, some people with heart or certain other conditions were not given the drugs, which can cause heart rhythm problems, so those patients were fundamentally different from the group they were compared with. Researchers said they adjusted statistically for some differences, but the many variables make it tough to reach firm conclusions.

Some patients also received other treatments such as steroids and the antiviral drug remdesivir, further clouding any ability to tell whether hydroxychloroquine helped.

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It’s getting late early.

President Donald Trump is privately reassuring Republicans anxious about his deficits to Democrat Joe Biden, noting there are three months until Election Day and reminding them of the late-breaking events that propelled his 2016 comeback.

But four years later, the dynamics are very different.

Aides are increasingly worried that the 2020 campaign may already be defined as a referendum on Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and will feature a historic shift to remote and early vote options. The president’s campaign is scrambling for a reset, pausing advertisements while struggling to find both a cohesive message and a way to safely put the president on the road in front of voters.

Trump added to the tumult by publicly wondering if the election should be delayed while making the unfounded claim that the tilt toward mail-in balloting would lead to widespread voter fraud. That suggestion drew a rare rebuke from Republicans, many of whom quietly warned the White House that it could be interpreted as an admission that the president was losing and could hurt their chances of retaining the Senate.

And they warned that time is running out: The first state to hold early voting, the vital battleground of North Carolina, begins the process Sept. 4.

Decision 2020

Fact Check Aug 1

Fact Check: Trump's Election Agitations and Distortions

Election 2020 Aug 1

Foreign Threats Loom Ahead of US Presidential Election

“He’s losing and the trajectory of the race is moving away from him,” said Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser on Republican John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and an opponent of Trump’s reelection. “People vote at a moment in time: Even if there is something of a political recovery for the president in October, that is irrelevant for those who already voted.”

A sudden halt in Trump’s expensive television advertisements last week highlighted the campaign’s challenge. It came just two weeks after a staffing shakeup and two months after Trump’s previous campaign manager unleashed a “Death Star” ad blitz on Biden that only coincided with the president’s support falling even further.

The campaign downplayed the ad pause, saying that the new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, wanted to analyze when and where Trump’s advertising message was being delivered. A significant amount of TV ad time has already been reserved from Labor Day until the election, and the campaign said it would reboot its advertising on Monday.

The purchase was made with an eye on the new electoral calendar. The old adage that most of America doesn’t start paying attention to a campaign until Labor Day has been tossed aside in a year in which the novel coronavirus has killed more than 150,000 people in the U.S. and rewritten the rules of American society.

The new ad campaign will be a national buy but also target states that are among the earliest to vote. Trump campaign officials said the focus in August will be on states where more than half of the ballots will be cast before Election Day.

“The digital countdown clock on the wall may say 90-some days, but we all know the calendar is condensed with early voting,” said campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh.

Still, the Trump campaign has been wavering for weeks.

It has struggled to land effective blows on Biden. Trump and his allies have recently sought to tie Biden to the extreme leftist elements of his party, an uneasy fit for a moderate who has been in the public eye for more than four decades.

The campaign has all but pulled the plug on competing in Michigan and, privately, acknowledges deficits in vital battleground states like Florida, Wisconsin and Arizona, though it insists the margins are manageable and smaller than what is reflected in public polling. They also downplayed the chances of losing reliably Republican states, though Trump did make a campaign stop in Texas last week.

Trump’s support collapsed after the pandemic reached America’s shores and crushed its economy. With the Republican National Convention scaled back and rallies seemingly impossible to hold, Trump is running out of headline-grabbing set pieces to change the momentum of the race.

Many around the president are focused on the debates as perhaps the best chance, pushing for more showdowns with Biden to increase the chance of the former vice president faltering on stage.

“A lot of people are going to start voting before Sept. 29. The idea that they would not have seen one presidential debate by then, to me, seems ridiculous,” said former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Trump ally. “I think we should either move the dates up or add additional debates.”

The president’s advisers are also trying to re-imagine a campaign without its trademark rallies. Trump has been traveling to both smaller campaign gatherings and official events in swing states — on Friday, he attended one of each in Florida — and White House aides are readying a calendar full of day trips for the weeks ahead.

The convention is also being redrawn. Trump will likely travel several times during the last week of August, when the massive gathering was initially scheduled. He’s expected to stop in North Carolina during one day of the dramatically revised convention.

Trump will also deliver an acceptance speech in a high-profile location on the Thursday of what would have been convention week, according to campaign and White House officials who requested anonymity to discuss planning.

And while Trump has customarily taken a multiweek vacation at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course in August, there is not one currently slated for this month.

The president has noted to advisers that it was later in August 2016 when he brought in Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway to his campaign, the eventual winning campaign leadership combination. But the president was behind until late that October when FBI Director James Comey announced the reopening of an investigation into Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, a seismic event that reshaped the race.

As Trump sows doubt about the integrity of the election this year, questions are swirling about access to voting during the pandemic as well as the potential for more foreign electoral interference. Campaign advisers are increasingly pinning their hopes on the unlikely occurrence of another big October surprise, such as the development of a coronavirus vaccine.

But some Republicans believe there is still time to make a more effective response to the virus the center of his case for a second term.

“By the speed at which news and events move in 2020, it’s not necessarily the case that he is running out of time,” said Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to President George W. Bush. “Much of the public will not pay attention to what he will say on law and order and the economy until he gets over the COVID hurdle first.”

Despite fears that the coronavirus pandemic will worsen, Victor Gibson said he’s not planning to take advantage of Michigan’s expanded vote-by-mail system when he casts his ballot in November.

The retired teacher from Detroit just isn’t sure he can trust it. Many Black Americans share similar concerns and are planning to vote in person on Election Day, even as mail-in voting expands to more states as a safety precaution during the pandemic.

For many, historical skepticism of a system that tried to keep Black people from the polls and worries that a mailed ballot won’t get counted outweigh the prospect of long lines and health dangers from a virus that’s disproportionately affected communities of color. Ironically, suspicion of mail-in voting aligns with the views of President Donald Trump, whom many Black voters want out of office.

Trump took it a step further Tuesday, suggesting a “delay” to the Nov. 3 presidential election — which would take an act of Congress — as he made unsubstantiated allegations in a tweet that increased mail-in voting will result in fraud.

“I would never change my mind” about voting in person in November, said Gibson, who is Black and hopes Trump loses. “I always feel better sliding my ballot in. We’ve heard so many controversies about missing absentee ballots.”

Decades of disenfranchisement are at the heart of the uneasy choice facing Black voters, one of the Democratic Party’s most important voting groups. Widespread problems with mail-in ballots during this year’s primary elections have added to the skepticism at a time when making Black voices heard has taken on new urgency during a national reckoning over racial injustice.

Patricia Harris of McDonough, Georgia, south of Atlanta, voted in person in the primary and said she will do the same in November.

“I simply do not trust mail-in or absentee ballots,” said Harris, 73, a retired event coordinator at Albany State University. “After the primary and the results were in, there were thousands of absentee ballots not counted.”

In Georgia, roughly 12,500 mail-in ballots were rejected in the state’s June primary, while California tossed more than 100,000 absentee ballots during its March primary.

Reasons vary, from ballots being received after the deadline to voters’ signatures not matching the one on file with the county clerk. Multiple studies show mail-in ballots from Black voters, like those from Latino and young voters, are rejected at a higher rate than those of white voters.

In Wisconsin’s April primary, thousands of voters in Milwaukee said they didn’t receive absentee ballots in time and had to vote in person. Lines stretched several blocks, and people waited two hours or more.

Decision 2020

Fact Check Aug 1

Fact Check: Trump's Election Agitations and Distortions

2020 Presidential Race Jul 31

Fact Check: Trump's View of Flawed Voting Is Baseless

In Kentucky’s June primary, more than 8,000 absentee ballots were rejected in Jefferson County, which includes Louisville.

Many people in Louisville’s historically Black West End neighborhood voted in person because they didn’t receive an absentee ballot or simply wanted to vote in a way that was familiar to them, said Arii Lynton-Smith, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Louisville.

“That’s particularly why we knew we had to have the poll rides as an option,” she said, referring to groups offering voters free transportation to polling places. “It’s not as easy to do an absentee ballot and the things that come along with it than it is to just go in person.”

Mistrust by Black voters runs deep and is tightly bound within the nation’s dark past of slavery and institutional racism.

Black people endured poll taxes, tossed ballots, even lynchings by whites intent on keeping them from voting. Over the decades, that led to a deep suspicion of simply handing off a ballot to the post office. Black people were the demographic least likely to cast votes by mail in 2018, with only 11% using that method, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By comparison, 24% of whites and 27% of Latinos reported voting by mail that year.

“For Black folks, voting is almost like a social pride because of the way they were denied in the past,” said Ben Barber, a researcher and writer for the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, North Carolina.

Among the places where Black voters say they have had to overcome institutional obstacles is Shelby County, Tennessee, which includes Memphis. In the past, voters have received ballots for the wrong district, and groups have sued to challenge the security of electronic voting machines, invalidation of voter registration forms and failure to open polling places near predominantly Black neighborhoods.

The Rev. Earle Fisher, senior pastor at Abyssinian Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis and a prominent Black civil rights activist, is one of the plaintiffs in a state lawsuit calling for mail-voting access for everyone. He said he’s not pushing his community to vote by mail but wants to ensure it’s an option given the health dangers.

To ease doubts, he wants voters to be able to drop off their ballot at a polling place so they won’t have to worry about the post office delivering it on time.

“I would like to see every righteous and creative method and measure taken, but we are up against a voter suppression apparatus that oftentimes is orchestrated by, or at least sustained by, people who are elected or appointed to office,” Fisher said.

Trump has made clear he believes widespread mail-in voting would benefit Democrats. He has alleged — without citing evidence — that it will lead to massive fraud, and the Republican National Committee has budgeted $20 million to fight Democratic lawsuits in at least 18 states aimed at expanding voting by mail.

The extent to which Black voters adopt it in November is likely to be dictated by the coronavirus. As infections surge, there are signs more Black voters may be willing to consider the option. In Detroit, for example, about 90,000 requests for mail-in ballots have been made so far — the most ever, City Clerk Janice Winfrey said.

How well the option is promoted also is important. In 2018, Democrat Stacey Abrams’ campaign mailed 1.6 million absentee ballot requests to Georgia voters during her unsuccessful bid for governor, emphasizing that it was a safe, easy way to vote.

Record numbers of Black voters voted by mail in that election. That shows they will embrace the process if they hear from friends and family that it works, said Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’ campaign manager.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson praised how Abrams was able to bridge that gap but said this year is different. The model can’t be replicated nationwide before Nov. 3, he said.

“Stacey did a good job in the four years leading up to 2018 to build out a program to get it done,” Johnson said. “The runway between now and November isn’t long enough to get it done.”

Associated Press writers Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, Nicholas Riccardi and Adrian Sainz contributed to this story.

Microsoft confirmed Sunday it is in talks with Chinese company ByteDance to acquire the U.S. arm of its popular video app TikTok and has discussed with President Donald Trump his concerns about security and censorship surrounding such an acquisition.

In a statement, Microsoft said Microsoft and ByteDance have provided notice of their intent to explore a deal resulting in Microsoft owning and operating the TikTok service in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The company said it expects those talks to conclude by Sept. 15.

Trump said on Friday that he would soon ban TikTok in the United States. Trump and CEO Satya Nadella have spoken, the company said, and Microsoft was prepared to continue exploring the purchase of TikTok’s U.S. operations after their conversation.

“Microsoft fully appreciates the importance of addressing the President’s concerns. It is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury,” the Microsoft statement said.

The White House did not immediately comment on the Microsoft statement.

Previously, there were reports that Microsoft was in advanced talks to buy the U.S. operations of TikTok, which has been a source of national security and censorship concerns for the Trump administration. Earlier Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo again raised the administration’s warnings about social media platform.

“These Chinese software companies doing business in the United States, whether it’s TikTok or WeChat — there are countless more … are feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist Party, their national security apparatus,” Pompeo said on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“Could be their facial recognition patterns. It could be information about their residence, their phone numbers, their friends, who they’re connected to. Those — those are the issues that President Trump has made clear we’re going to take care of,” Pompeo said.

In its statement, Microsoft said it may invite other American investors to participate on a minority basis in the purchase of TikTok. Financial terms were undisclosed.

TikTok’s U.S. user data is stored in the U.S., with strict controls on employee access, and its biggest investors come from the U.S., the company said earlier Sunday. “We are committed to protecting our users’ privacy and safety as we continue working to bring joy to families and meaningful careers to those who create on our platform,” a TikTok spokesperson said.

A federal committee has been reviewing whether Trump could ban TikTok in the U.S. Its members agree that TikTok cannot remain in the U.S. in its current form because it “risks sending back information on 100 million Americans,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.

“We all agree there has to be a change … everybody agrees it can’t exist as it does,” Mnuchin said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

As speculation grew over a ban or sale of the social media platform’s U.S. business, TikTok posted a video on Saturday saying, “We’re not planning on going anywhere.”

TikTok’s catchy videos and ease of use has made it popular, and it says it has tens of millions of users in the U.S. and hundreds of millions globally. Its parent company, Bytedance Ltd., launched TikTok in 2017. It bought Musical.ly, a video service popular with teens in the U.S. and Europe, and combined the two. It has a similar service, Douyin, for users in China.

But TikTok’s Chinese ownership has raised concern about the potential for sharing user data with Chinese officials as well as censorship of videos critical of the Chinese government. TikTok says it does not censor videos and it would not give the Chinese government access to U.S. user data.

“The President, when he makes his decision, will make sure that everything we have done drives us as close to zero risk for the American people,” Pompeo said. “That’s the mission set that he laid out for all of us when we get — we began to evaluate this now several months back. We’re closing in on a solution. And I think you will see the president’s announcement shortly.”

The debate over TikTok parallels a broader U.S. security crackdown on Chinese companies, including telecom providers Huawei and ZTE. The Trump administration has ordered that the U.S. stop buying equipment from those providers to be used in U.S. networks. Trump has also tried to steer allies away from Huawei over concerns that the Chinese government has access to its data, which Huawei denies.

AP Business Writers Anne D’Innocenzio and Tali Arbel contributed to this report.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is perhaps the most forthcoming member of the Supreme Court when it comes to telling the public about her many health issues. But she waited more than four months to reveal that her cancer had returned and that she was undergoing chemotherapy.

One big difference from her past battles with cancer is that Ginsburg and the rest of the court have been out of the public eye since early March because of the coronavirus pandemic. That’s when they decided to close the building except for official business, then later postponed arguments and agreed to meet by telephone.

In some ways, the court was more accessible to the public than ever with its decision to provide live audio of telephone arguments in May. But the inability to see the justices and, after arguments concluded on May 13, hear them, made what went on in the late spring and early summer even harder to read than usual.

In an institution that zealously guards the justices’ privacy, only a justice can decide when an injury or illness should be made public. And because life tenure comes with the job, it’s also up to them alone to decide when to retire.

Ginsburg, who was in and out of the hospital last week, said she intends to remain on the court, a decision that likely was influenced by the conservative nominee President Donald Trump would put up to replace her if she were to retire.

“If there is one iron rule that the court tries to follow more than any other, it is that the justices do all that they can to protect their institution from political attacks during presidential election years when public scrutiny of government is heightened. Ginsburg may simply be trying, to the extent she can, to protect the court and herself, from becoming a campaign issue in 2020,” said Artemus Ward, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University who has written about the politics of court retirements.

Ginsburg started receiving chemotherapy in May, a time of year when the justices typically take the bench at least once a week to announce decisions, and when the public can observe them in the courtroom.

Similarly, Chief Justice John Roberts suffered a forehead injury that required stitches on Father’s Day. In a normal year, the court would have met in public the next day and Roberts’ wound would have been easy to see.

Instead, opinions were released electronically, as they were throughout the spring and early summer. Only after inquiries from The Washington Post did the court confirm that Roberts had taken a fall that kept him in the hospital overnight.

Ginsburg issued a statement on July 17 saying that a medical scan in February revealed lesions on her liver, which a subsequent biopsy determined were cancerous. She declined an interview request from The Associated Press.

The lesions are the fifth time Ginsburg has dealt with cancer since 1999, when she first underwent surgery for colorectal cancer.Surgeries for tumors on her pancreas and lung took place in 2009 and 2018, respectively, and Ginsburg underwent radiation therapy for a new growth on her pancreas last year.

By Supreme Court standards, Ginsburg was downright speedy in her most recent public announcement.Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018, said nothing publicly when he had a stent inserted to restore blood flow in an artery after experiencing mild chest pain in 2005. The court revealed the procedure 10 months later, when Kennedy returned to the hospital to have the stent replaced.

In July 2007, Roberts suffered a seizure while on vacation in Maine. The court issued an initial statement little more than an hour after the incident, saying only that Roberts had fallen and was taken to a hospital. Several hours later, the court confirmed that he had suffered a seizure, but has never provided details of what tests Roberts underwent or whether he was prescribed medication. He had a similar episode in 1993, long before he was a justice. The court said doctors had ruled out a seizure in the June fall.

Only after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016 did the public learn that he had coronary artery disease, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, sleep apnea, high blood pressure and several other ailments that probably contributed to the heart attack that killed him, according to his doctor.

“The lack of health information about individual justices is a glaring problem. Declining, even incapacitated, justices hold their offices until they die. And because justices play politics with their departure decisions, trying to retire under a politically favorable president and Senate if possible, the court’s history has been filled with declining justices who compromised the court’s work because they refused to depart for political or personal reasons,” Ward said.

Like other Americans, Supreme Court justices live and work with a range of ailments. Justice Sonia Sotomayor has had diabetes since childhood. Also, both she and Justice Stephen Breyer injured their shoulders so badly they needed replacement surgery. Sotomayor had a fall at home and Breyer suffered a bicycle accident. Both made prompt announcements of those incidents.

Her frail appearance may fool people, but Ginsburg has been remarkably resilient through her many health crises, which also have included broken ribs, infections and her own artery-clearing stent.

She had no surgery to remove the latest cancerous growth, and her treatment is ongoing. She has said she will receive doses of the chemotherapy drug gemcitabine every two weeks.

Ginsburg’s statement came 10 days after she said another medical scan “indicated significant reduction of the liver lesions and no new disease.”

In that same period, the court also issued the last of its opinions and Ginsburg was in and out of the hospital for treatment of an infection that she said was unrelated to the cancer. She maintained that she kept up with opinion writing and all other court work throughout her treatment and hospital stays.

The vote to renominate President Donald Trump is set to be conducted in private later this month, without members of the press present, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Convention said on Saturday, citing the coronavirus.

However, a Republican National Committee official contradicted that assessment Sunday, emphasizing that no final decisions have been made and that logistics and press coverage options were still being evaluated, The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

While Trump called off the public components of the convention in Florida last month, citing spiking cases of the virus across the country, 336 delegates are scheduled to gather in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Aug. 24 to formally vote to make Trump the GOP standard-bearer once more.

Nominating conventions are traditionally meant to be media bonanzas, as political parties seek to leverage the attention the events draw to spread their message to as many voters as possible. If the GOP decision stands, it will be the first party nominating convention in modern history to be closed to reporters.

Decision 2020

Elections 2020 Aug 2

Clock Is Ticking on Trump Comeback as Early Voting Nears

Elections 2020 Aug 2

Despite Virus Threat, Black Voters Wary of Voting by Mail

“Given the health restrictions and limitations in place within the state of North Carolina, we are planning for the Charlotte activities to be closed press Friday, August 21 – Monday, August 24,” a convention spokeswoman said. “We are happy to let you know if this changes, but we are working within the parameters set before us by state and local guidelines regarding the number of people who can attend events.”

The decision was first reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Privately some GOP delegations have raised logistical issues with traveling to either city, citing the increasing number of jurisdictions imposing mandatory quarantine orders on travelers returning from states experiencing surges in the virus.

The subset of delegates in Charlotte will be casting proxy votes on behalf of the more than 2,500 official delegates to the convention. Alternate delegates and guests have already been prohibited.

Associated Press writer Zeke Miller contributed to this report.

Heads snapped and eyes rolled when President Donald Trump made a case for considering an election postponement in the pandemic. Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who agree on precious little, said forget about it.

Among them, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed Nov. 3 is set in stone. But with Trump previewing his angry discontent if the election is not to his liking, will the foundational rock of the republic hold?

Such questions will shadow the remainder of the campaign now that Trump has explicitly challenged a process that has unfolded on schedule through world wars, the Civil War and every existential calamity in history.

A look at Trump’s statement on the subject, his latest distortions of Democratic rival Joe Biden’s record and more from the past week:

ELECTION AGITATION

TRUMP: “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!” — tweet Thursday.

TRUMP: “I want to have the result of the election. I don’t want to be waiting around for weeks and months.” — news conference Thursday.

THE FACTS: He’s demanding something no one can deliver. The president appeared unaware that American democracy can’t be shaped to produce a same-day result to sate his impatience.

There’s certainly no requirement for a winner to be declared election night, and the prospect of having to wait to know who won has not been used as justification to try to delay the vote itself.

State election officials in some battleground states recently warned it may take days to count an expected surge of ballots that people send by mail because they don’t feel safe showing up to the polls. In an election as close as 2016′s, a delayed tally in key states could keep the outcome from being quickly known.

Delayed results are common in a few states where elections are already conducted largely by mail. But a presidential election hasn’t been left in limbo since 2000, when ballot irregularities in Florida led to weeks of chaos and court fights.

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TRUMP: “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: Trump has persistently theorized about voter fraud and never supported those theories with facts. He appointed a commission to get to the bottom of voter fraud and it disbanded without making any findings.

Time and again, voter fraud has proved exceedingly rare, and voting without going to polling places has become more common.

Multiple checks, such as signature verification in many states, must happen before a ballot can be counted, and experts say any fraud can be detected.

Five states relied on mail-in ballots even before the coronavirus pandemic raised concerns about voting in person. Those states say they have the necessary safeguards in place to ensure that a hostile foreign actor doesn’t co-opt the vote. More states intend to rely more heavily on mail-in voting for the same reason.

“Trump is simply wrong about mail-in balloting raising a ‘tremendous’ potential for fraud,” Richard L. Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, wrote recently. “While certain pockets of the country have seen their share of absentee-ballot scandals, problems are extremely rare in the five states that rely primarily on vote-by-mail, including the heavily Republican state of Utah.”

Indeed, election experts widely say that all forms of voter fraud are rare. The Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 ranked the risk of ballot fraud at an infinitesimal 0.00004% to 0.0009%, based on studies of past elections.

Even so, Trump has sketched wild scenarios, recently imagining “thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place.”

As for the extraordinary step of moving the Nov. 3 election, the chances are almost nil.

The date of the presidential election — the Tuesday after the first Monday in November in every fourth year — is enshrined in federal law and would require an act of Congress to change. Democrats, who control the House, will not support Trump on this. Republicans, who control the Senate, are unlikely to, either.

___

TRUMP: “Mail-In Voting is an easy way for foreign countries to enter the race.” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: No, it’s one of the most difficult ways for a foreign adversary to meddle in a U.S. election.

Swaying a federal election using absentee ballots would mean paying thousands of U.S. citizens, carefully selected in key cities in battleground states, who are willing to conspire with a foreign government and risk detection and prosecution.

Far easier and cheaper would be a social media campaign seeking to discourage certain groups of people from voting, something the FBI has already warned about. Or launching a sophisticated cyberattack on voter registration data that would eliminate certain voters from the rolls, causing havoc at polling places or election offices as officials look to count ballots from people who are “missing” from their voter databases.

Last month Attorney General Bill Barr raised the possibility that a “foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots.” He argued they would be hard to detect, but that’s been disputed by election experts.

Absentee ballots are printed on special paper and must be formatted correctly in order to be processed and counted. Ballots are specific to each precinct, often with a long list of local races, and would be easily identified as fraudulent if everything didn’t match precisely.

“This is a complete red herring,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s completely not plausible, and not something that security and election experts are actually worried about.”

___

BIDEN’S PLATFORM

TRUMP: “Biden came out against fracking. Well, that means Texas is going to be one of the most unemployed states in our country. That means Oklahoma, North Dakota, New Mexico are going to be a disaster. Ohio, Pennsylvania — disaster. No fracking.” — news conference Thursday.

THE FACTS: No, that’s not Biden’s position at all.

In a March 15 primary debate, Biden misstated his fracking policy to suggest he’d ban it and his campaign quickly corrected the record. Trump continually ignores the correction.

Biden has been otherwise consistent on his middle-of-the-road position, going so far as to tell an anti-fracking activist that he “ought to vote for somebody else” if he wanted an immediate fracking ban. He proposes to deny new fracking permits only on federal lands. Such a limited step cannot spell “disaster” for entire states. By far the most fracking happens on private land.

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TRUMP: “Joe Biden said he would defund the police. Biden would defund them. He’d abolish them, I guess.” — remarks Thursday to New Hampshire supporters.

THE FACTS: We’ve heard this falsehood many times. What’s new is that Trump was informed face to face nearly two weeks ago that Biden does not propose defunding or abolishing police, yet he is still saying it.

Biden actually proposes more money for police departments and he has explicitly rejected the calls of some on the left to defund or abolish departments. He’d spend more to support improvements in police practices.

Two weeks ago, Fox News reporter Chris Wallace confronted Trump on the matter when the president tried to hang a defund-abolish label on Biden. Trump cited a policy documentdrafted by aides to Biden and ex-rival Bernie Sanders. It contains recommendations, not necessarily policies embraced by the candidate. But even that document would not defund or wipe out police departments.

It seeks, for example, “increased funding for officer health and well-being in police departments across the country, including for personal safety equipment and mental health services.”

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PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

TRUMP: “We think we’re going to cut prescription drug prices 50, 60, even 70%.” — remarks Thursday to New Hampshire supporters.

TRUMP: “What I have done will lead to a 50% REDUCTION in prices, at least, & Big Pharma is not happy about it. No other President would be able to produce what I have.” — tweet Tuesday.

THE FACTS: No massive, across-the-board cuts are in the offing for drug prices.

Efforts announced last month by the president — such as allowing importation of medicines from countries where prices are lower — take time to roll out. It remains to be seen how much they’ll move the needle on prices.

Drug importation, for example, requires regulatory actions to be taken and supply chains to be established, a tall order when the election is just three months away.

Trump has taken actions to reduce patient costs for some drugs, such as insulin, but the steps have been less ambitious than those in a bill from Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the House passed last year. Her bill would authorize Medicare to negotiate prices for expensive medications and use savings from lower drug costs to establish Medicare coverage for dental care, hearing and vision.

She would cap Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket costs for medicines at $2,000 a year. No limit exists on those annual costs now. The vast majority of Medicare recipients have low drug costs, but the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that in 2017, about 1 million Medicare recipients paid much more, averaging $3,200 in a year.

Pelosi has challenged Trump to order Republican senators to pass her bill.

White House actions, while not insignificant, don’t amount to the massive changes Trump brags about. One major initiative would give people on Medicare the option of limiting their out-of-pocket costs for insulin to $35 a month starting next year, by picking an “enhanced” prescription drug plan for a slightly higher premium.

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RUSSIAN BOUNTIES

TRUMP, on a U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia was paying a bounty to militants in Afghanistan to kill Americans there. “If it reached my desk I would have done something about it.” — interview Tuesday with “Axios on HBO.”

THE FACTS: His claim that the matter didn’t reach him is unconvincing.

The Associated Press reported in June that the assessment was included in at least one of Trump’s written daily intelligence briefings last year. As well, then-national security adviser John Bolton told colleagues he briefed Trump on the intelligence assessment and the subject was the sole purpose of that meeting with the president.

This was according to U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the intelligence who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the highly sensitive information publicly.

Trump said this past week he did not raise the matter in recent phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would not tell senators in testimony whether he has brought it up with his Russian counterpart. He said he discusses with the Russians all threats that they pose to Americans and U.S. interests.

White House officials have argued that Trump wasn’t briefed on the suspected bounties because the assessment is not conclusive. However presidents are commonly informed of the most consequential intelligence even if the findings are not complete, so they can make decisions about potential or emerging threats.

Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy, Ellen Knickmeyer, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.

Microsoft is in advanced talks to buy the U.S. operations of TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned video app that has been a source of national security and censorship concerns, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity to the negotiations.

The potential deal would be a victory for both companies, making Microsoft Corp. a major player in the social media arena and providing relief to TikTok and its parent company, Bytedance Ltd., a target of President Donald Trump’s.

Trump said Friday that he would take action as soon as Saturday to ban TikTok in the United States. Trump’s comments on Friday aboard Air Force One came after published reports that the administration is planning to order China’s ByteDance to sell TikTok.

“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump told reporters Friday on Air Force One as he returned from Florida.

Trump said he could use emergency economic powers or an executive order to enforce the action, insisting, “I have that authority.” He added, “It’s going to be signed tomorrow.”

Microsoft declined to comment.

Reports by Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal citing anonymous sources said the administration could soon announce a decision ordering ByteDance to divest its ownership in TikTok.

There have been reports of U.S. tech giants and financial firms being interested in buying or investing in TikTok as the Trump administration sets its sights on the app. The New York Times and Fox Business, citing an unidentified source, first reported Friday that Microsoft isin talks to buy TikTok.

TikTok issued a statement Friday saying that, “While we do not comment on rumors or speculation, we are confident in the long-term success of TikTok.”

On Saturday it posted a short video from its U.S. General Manager Vanessa Pappas saying that “We’re not planning on going anywhere.”

ByteDance launched TikTok in 2017, then bought Musical.ly, a video service popular with teens in the U.S. and Europe, and combined the two. A twin service, Douyin, is available for Chinese users.

TikTok’s fun, goofy videos and ease of use has made it immensely popular, and U.S. tech giants like Facebook and Snapchat see it as a competitive threat. It has said it has tens of millions of U.S. users and hundreds of millions globally.

But its Chinese ownership has raised concerns about the censorship of videos, including those critical of the Chinese government, and the potential for sharing user data with Chinese officials.

TikTok maintains it doesn’t censor videos based on topics sensitive to China and it would not give the Chinese government access to U.S. user data even if asked. The company has hired a U.S. CEO, a former top Disney executive, in an attempt to distance itself from its Chinese ownership.

U.S. national-security officials have been reviewing the Musical.ly acquisition in recent months, while U.S. armed forces have banned their employees from installing TikTok on government-issued phones. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this month that the U.S. was considering banning TikTok.

These national-security worries parallel a broader U.S. security crackdown on Chinese companies, including telecom providers Huawei and ZTE. The Trump administration has ordered that the U.S. stop funding equipment from those providers in U.S. networks.It has also tried to steer allies away from Huawei because of worries about the Chinese government’s access to data, which the company has denied it has.

The Trump administration has stepped in before to block or dissolve deals on national-security concerns, including stopping Singapore’s Broadcom from its $117 billion bid for U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm in 2018 in an effort to help retain U.S. leadership in the telecom space. It also told China’s Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. to sell off its 2016 purchase of gay dating app Grindr.

Other countries are also taking action against TikTok.India this month banned dozens of Chinese apps, including TikTok, citing privacy concerns, amid tensions between the countries.

The U.S. government’s poor track record in bolstering Americans’ data privacy more broadly lessens its credibility in taking on Chinese-owned companies, according to Susan Ariel Aaronson, a professor at George Washington University and a data governance and national-security expert. The federal government has not passed broad privacy or data-security legislation despite efforts to do so last year, and the Justice Department has tried to undermine encryption – which makes sure only a sender and receiver can see content they exchange – for law-enforcement reasons. Tech companies have pushed back against that.

“I continue to be wary of forcing a sale of TikTok without data protection laws they could try to follow,” Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer at Facebook who now studies internet security at Stanford University, tweeted on Friday. He added that Microsoft “has one of the best child safety teams, which is a larger risk on TikTok right now.”

Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, is the No. 4 digital ad company in the U.S., after Google, Facebook and Amazon. Still, buying TikTok would be a significant change of direction from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s focus on workplace software that makes people more productive, said technology industry analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy.

Unlike Google or Facebook, which dominate the digital advertising industry, Microsoft hasn’t been under the intense scrutiny of U.S. politicians and antitrust regulators lately over its market power. Moorhead said that might make it easier to swoop in and acquire TikTok, which poses a competitive threat to social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Google’s YouTube and Snapchat. It’s an interesting irony that it was Microsoft at the center of the landmark antitrust case 20 years ago.

If the deal goes through, “it would definitely make Microsoft a much more competitive advertising system in years to come,” said eMarketer analyst Ross Benes.

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Kevin Freking aboard Air Force One and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report

As the Nov. 3 presidential vote nears, there are fresh signs that the nation’s electoral system is again under attack from foreign adversaries.

Intelligence officials confirmed in recent days that foreign actors are actively seeking to compromise the private communications of “U.S. political campaigns, candidates and other political targets” while working to compromise the nation’s election infrastructure. Foreign entities are also aggressively spreading disinformation intended to sow voter confusion heading into the fall.

There is no evidence that America’s enemies have yet succeeded in penetrating campaigns or state election systems, but Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential campaign confirmed this week that it has faced multiple related threats.

The former vice president’s team was reluctant to reveal specifics for fear of giving adversaries useful intelligence.

Because of such secrecy, at least in part, foreign interference largely remains an afterthought in the 2020 contest, even as Republicans and Democrats alike concede it poses a serious threat that could fundamentally reshape the election at any moment. Biden’s campaign is increasingly concerned that pro-Russian sources have already shared disinformation about Biden’s family with President Donald Trump’s campaign and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill designed to hurt the Democratic candidate in the days leading up to the election.

When asked directly, the Trump campaign refused to say whether it had accepted materials related to Biden from any foreign nationals. Trump was impeached last year after being caught pressuring Ukrainian leaders to produce damaging information about work Biden’s son did in the country, even though repeated allegations of corruption against the Bidens have been widely discredited.

A Biden spokesman said “absolutely not” when asked if the campaign had received any materials from foreign actors.

“Joe Biden has been demonstrating international leadership to protect the sovereignty of our democracy for years, whereas Donald Trump has actively encouraged attacks on our elections,” said Biden spokesman Andrew Bates.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, a key Trump ally and chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, denied having accepted any damaging materials on Biden from foreign nationals after at least one Ukrainian national, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, told The Washington Post he had shared tapes and transcripts with Johnson’s committee and Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. House Democrats announced Friday they have subpoenaed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for documents he turned over to Johnson’s panel.

“It does a disservice to our election security efforts when Democrats use the threat of Russian disinformation as a weapon to cast doubt on investigations they don’t like,” Johnson spokesperson Austin Altenburg said.

The 2020 campaigns and party committees have been receiving regular briefings from the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, whose director, Bill Evanina, released a rare public statement last week confirming Russia’s continued work to meddle in the U.S. election.

Evanina said that Russia, as part of an effort to weaken the U.S. and its global standing, has been spreading disinformation to undermine confidence in American democracy and “to denigrate what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment’ in America.”

The threat is not limited to Russia. China, a target of escalating condemnation across the Trump administration in recent weeks, has been looking for ways to affect American policy, counter criticism of Beijing and pressure political figures it views as opposed to Chinese interests, Evanina said, while Iran has been involved in circulating disinformation and anti-American content online.

Trump’s team reported no specific foreign threats against the president’s campaign, but campaign general counsel Matthew Morgan highlighted the Republican Party’s yearslong effort to install various voter ID requirements across the country — including photo verification, signature matching and witness requirements — as an important tool to block foreign interference.

“Contrary to their narrative, the Democrats’ efforts to tear these safeguards apart — as they sue in 18 states across the nation — would open our election system up to foreign interference,” Morgan said. “That’s why we’re fighting back — to protect the sanctity of our election system.”

Despite Morgan’s argument, there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in U.S. politics, whether by American voters or foreign nationals.

And there is no evidence, as Trump repeatedly charges, that an increased reliance on mail balloting this fall leaves the electoral system particularly vulnerable to outside meddling. The president pointed to those baseless claims this week to suggest delaying the election, something that can’t be done without support in Congress, where Democrats and Republicans alike rejected the notion.

There is ample evidence, however, that foreign powers are trying to sow confusion by spreading misinformation in addition to seeking to hack into political campaigns, as Evanina said last week.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, a Republican, described Trump’s warnings about mail voting “absurd” and “ridiculous.”

“He should be far more forceful and far more direct in condemning foreign interference,” Ridge said in an interview. “The enemy is not within.”

Foreign interference played a significant role in the 2016 election, of course.

U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russian operatives seeking to boost Trump’s campaign hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s servers and later shared damaging messages with WikiLeaks while running a covert social media campaign aimed at sowing discord among American voters.

All told, the Justice Department charged 25 Russian nationals in a covert effort to spread disinformation on social media and in the hacking of Democratic emails. While Trump has downplayed the threat of Russian meddling, he authorized a 2018 cyberattack against the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.

Lest there be any doubt about continued foreign interference in 2020, U.S. officials confirmed this week that Russian intelligence services have been using a trio of English-language websites to spread disinformation about the politically charged coronavirus pandemic.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that foreign adversaries “never stopped trying to interfere with our election process.”

He noted that the foreign meddling includes some new tactics compared with 2016. He noted, for example, that the Internet Research Agency is operating under a different name.

Warner declined to be more specific about 2020 interference, which has been discussed in classified briefings. He said he has a “huge concern” that voters don’t appreciate the true nature of the threat.

“The idea that we could be headed into Labor Day without the American public being officially put on notice seems grossly inappropriate,” Warner said.

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Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington contributed to this report.

As Joe Biden nears the announcement of his vice presidential choice, the top contenders and their advocates are making final appeals.

The campaign hasn’t finalized a date for naming a running mate, but three people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the plans said a public announcement likely wouldn’t happen before the week of Aug. 10. That’s one week before Democrats will hold their convention to officially nominate Biden as their presidential nominee.

Biden said in May that he hoped to name his pick around Aug. 1 and told reporters this week that he would “have a choice in the first week of August.” He notably stopped short of saying when he would announce that choice.

Running mates are often announced on the eve of a convention. As Biden prepares to make his choice, a committee established to vet running mates has provided him with briefing materials. Biden will likely soon begin one-on-one conversations with those under consideration, which could be the most consequential part of the process for a presidential candidate who values personal connections.

The leading contenders include California Sen. Kamala Harris, California Rep. Karen Bass and Obama national security adviser Susan Rice. The deliberations remain fluid, however, and the campaign has reviewed nearly a dozen possible running mates.

Representatives for Biden declined to comment.

The selection amounts to the most significant choice Biden has confronted in his nearly five-decade political career. He has pledged to select a woman and is facing calls to choose the first Black woman to compete on a presidential ticket.

On Friday, more than 60 Black clergy leaders called on Biden in an open letter to pick a Black woman as his running mate, saying the U.S. is facing a “moment of racial reckoning” that cannot be ignored.

“Too much is at stake for our community and we believe having a Black woman vice presidential candidate is the clearest path to the victory in November that our country needs to move forward,” said Rev. Matthew Watley, of Kingdom Fellowship AME Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, who signed the letter.

As a decision looms, the camps are jockeying for position.

Harris’ allies mobilized this week after Politico reported that the co-chair of the vetting committee, former Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, was concerned about Harris’ tough debate stage performance and that she hasn’t expressed regret.

Several California elected officials and labor leaders initiated a call with the vetting team to emphasize that Harris has strong support among labor and political leaders in her home state. The call was organized by Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis.

“A group of us really felt we needed to organize and speak out and correct the record because she has tremendous support,” Kounalakis said.

They also pushed back against the idea that Harris wouldn’t be a loyal partner, a sentiment echoed by a number of prominent donors.

“By all objective standards, Kamala Harris should be the overwhelming favorite for the job,” said Michael Kempner, a major Democratic donor based in New York.

Harris, while not directly addressing her vice presidential prospects, said Saturday that anyone who tries to shatter a glass ceiling faces naysayers.

“Breaking barriers involves breaking things. And sometimes you get cut,” Harris, who is Black, told attendees of an online convention held by the Ohio Democratic Party. “Sometime it hurts, but it is worth it.”

Biden allies say his wife, Jill, and sister, Valerie Biden Owens, are likely to play a key role in the decision, as they have with many of Biden’s biggest political decisions throughout his career. Jill Biden has held online campaign events and fundraisers with virtually all the potential contenders in recent weeks, as has Biden himself, effectively offering the contenders a try-out opportunity with the presumptive Democratic nominee.

On Thursday night, Bass joined Biden for a virtual fundraiser that raked in $2.2 million. She has also taken steps to build her national profile, including providing interviews to multiple outlets over the past week.

But she’s facing growing scrutiny over past remarks. A video surfaced of a 2010 speech in which she praised Scientology during an opening ceremony for a church facility in Los Angeles.

“The Church of Scientology I know has made a difference, because your creed is a universal creed and one that speaks to all people everywhere,” Bass said of an organization that has come under criticism following allegations of criminal activity and mistreatment of members and employees.

She tweeted a statement on Saturday noting that she attends First New Christian Fellowship Baptist Church in South Los Angeles.

“Back in 2010, I attended the event knowing I was going to address a group of people with beliefs very different than my own, and spoke briefly about things I think most of us agree with, and on those things — respect for different views, equality, and fighting oppression — my views have not changed,” she said.

Bass also faced criticism over a 2016 statement in which she said the death of former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was “a great loss to the people of Cuba.”

Some Democrats have expressed concern that the comment could hurt the party with Hispanic voters in the critical swing state of Florida.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., seized on that point Saturday.

“If, God forbid, Joe Biden is elected president and Congresswoman Bass becomes vice president, she’ll be the highest-ranking Castro sympathizer in the history of the United States government,” Rubio said.

Bass has said she better understands the sensitivity of her comment after speaking with Florida colleagues, and she believes she can still reach out to Cuban voters in the state, where the coronavirus is a top issue.

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Associated Press writers Julie Pace, Kevin Freking and Brian Slodysko in Washington, Steve Peoples in New York, Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento, Calif., contributed to this report.

Lawmakers reported progress on a huge coronavirus relief bill Saturday, as political pressure mounts to restore an expired $600-per-week supplemental unemployment benefit and send funding to help schools reopen.

“This was the longest meeting we’ve had and it was more productive than the other meetings,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who was part of the rare weekend session. “We’re not close yet, but it was a productive discussion — now each side knows where they’re at.”

Schumer spoke alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., after meeting for three hours with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The Democratic leaders are eager for an expansive agreement, as are President Donald Trump and top Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. But perhaps one half of Senate Republicans, mostly conservatives and those not facing difficult races this fall, are likely to oppose any deal.

Prior talks had yielded little progress and Saturday’s cautious optimism was a break from gloomy private assessments among GOP negotiators. The administration is willing to extend the newly expired $600 jobless benefit, at least in the short term, but is balking at other Democratic demands like aid for state and local governments, food stamp increases, and assistance to renters and homeowners.

Pelosi mentioned food aid and funding for voting by mail after the negotiating session was over. She and Schumer appeared more upbeat than they have after earlier meetings.

“We have to get rid of this virus so that we can open our economy, safely open our schools, and to do so in a way that does not give a cut in benefits to American workers,” Pelosi said.

Mnuchin said restoring the $600 supplemental jobless benefit is critically important to Trump.

“We’re still a long ways apart and I don’t want to suggest that a deal is imminent because it is not,” Meadows said afterward. “There are still substantial differences, but we did make good progress.”

The additional jobless benefit officially lapsed on Friday, and Democrats have made clear that they will not extend it without securing other relief priorities. Whatever unemployment aid negotiators agree on will be made retroactive — but antiquated state systems are likely to take weeks to restore the benefits.

Republicans in the Senate had been fighting to trim back the $600 benefit, saying it must be slashed so that people don’t make more in unemployment than they would if they returned to work. But their resolve weakened as the benefit expired, and Trump abruptly undercut their position by signaling he wants to keep the full $600 for now.

On Friday, Trump used Twitter to explicitly endorse extending the $600 payment and to criticize Schumer.

Washington’s top power players agree that Congress must pass further relief in the coming days and weeks. At stake beyond the $600 per week jobless benefit is a fresh $1,200 direct payment to most Americans, and hundreds of billions of dollars in other aid to states, businesses and the poor, among other elements.

Democrats hold a strong negotiating hand — exploiting GOP divisions — and they are expected to deliver a necessary trove of votes.

The COVID package will be the fifth legislative response to the pandemic and could well be the last one before the November election. The only other must-pass legislation on the agenda is a stopgap spending measure that should advance in September.

Since May, Republicans controlling the Senate had kept the relief negotiations on “pause” in a strategy aimed at reducing its price tag. But as the pandemic surged back over the summer — and as fractures inside the GOP have eroded the party’s negotiating position — Republicans displayed some greater flexibility.

Even with signs of progress in the talks, the list of items to negotiate remains daunting.

McConnell’s must-have item is a liability shield from lawsuits for businesses, schools, and charities that reopen as the pandemic goes on. The GOP’s business allies are strong backers but the nation’s trial lawyers retain considerable clout in opposition. A compromise is probably a challenging but necessary part of a final deal.

Among the priorities for Democrats is a boost in food stamp benefits. Republicans added $20 billion for agribusinesses but no increase for food stamp benefits in their $1 trillion proposal. Meadows played a role in killing an increase in food aid during talks on the $2 trillion relief bill in March, but Pelosi appears determined. The food stamp increases, many economists say, provide an immediate injection of demand into the economy in addition to combating growing poverty.

Food aid was the first item Pelosi mentioned in a letter to fellow Democrats apprising them of the progress.

“This is a very different kind of negotiation, because of what is at stake. Millions of children are food insecure, millions of families are at risk of eviction, and for the nineteenth straight week, over 1 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance,” Pelosi said.

The Supreme Court declined by a 5-4 vote Friday to halt the Trump administration’s construction of portions of the border wall with Mexico following a recent lower court rulingthat the administration improperly diverted money to the project.

The court’s four liberal justices dissented, saying they would have prohibited construction while a court challenge continues, after a federal appeals court ruled in June that the administration had illegally sidestepped Congress in transferring the Defense Department funds.

“The Court’s decision to let construction continue nevertheless I fear, may operate, in effect, as a final judgment,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a brief dissent for the four liberals.

Friday’s order means the court is not likely even to consider the substance of the issue until after the November election, while work on the wall continues.

Last summer, at an earlier stage in the case, the justices also split 5-4 along ideological lines to allow the administration to begin construction using $2.5 billion in Defense Department funds.

That allowed President Donald Trump to make progress on a major 2016 campaign promise heading into his race for a second term. The administration wanted to use the money to replace a total of 129 miles (208 kilometers) of rundown or outdated fencing in New Mexico, Arizona and California. As of mid-July, 92 miles (148 kilometers) have been completed according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Following the latest appeals court ruling, the wall’s challengers returned to the high court to ask that construction be halted.

The Trump administration opposed the request and said it would file paperwork in August asking the Supreme Court to hear arguments in the case.

The case has its origins in the 35-day partial government shutdown that started in December of 2018. Trump ended the shutdown after Congress gave him approximately $1.4 billion in border wall funding, but that was far less than the $5.7 billion he was seeking. Trump then declared a national emergency to take cash from other government accounts to use to construct sections of wall.

At the time, the money Trump identified included $2.5 billion in Defense Department money, $3.6 billion from military construction funds and $600 million from the Treasury Department’s asset forfeiture fund.

The case before the Supreme Court involved just the $2.5 billion in Defense Department funds. The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the Trump administration on behalf of Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition, has said it will seek to tear down sections of the wall that were built with the money.

“Every lower court to consider the question has ruled President Trump’s border wall illegal, and the Supreme Court’s temporary order does not decide the case. We’ll be back before the Supreme Court soon to put a stop to Trump’s xenophobic border wall once and for all,” Dror Ladin, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a statement following the court’s order Friday.

The Supreme Court is on break for the summer but does act on certain pressing items. It will begin hearing cases again in October.

President Donald Trump recently signed executive orders that he says will reduce drug prices by 50% “and even greater, in certain instances.” That could happen for some individuals, but it remains to be seen how the orders will be implemented and whether they will result in such large reductions.

The orders, which largely revive past administration proposals, require the Health and Human Services secretary to take various actions, such as moving through the federal rule-making process.

Two of the orders pertain to Medicare beneficiaries — one of those, which is still subject to negotiation with pharmaceutical companies, pertains to only a certain class of drugs. Another order concerns insulin and epinephrine for low-income individuals, and the fourth involves allowing the importation of some drugs.

Trump signed the four orders on July 24, and tweeted the following day: “Yesterday I signed four measures that will massively reduce the prices of prescription drugs, in many cases by more than 50%.”

In a July 28 briefing, Trump repeated the claim:

Trump, July 28: We’re going to do tremendous — we just signed it three days ago — we’re doing tremendous prescription drug price reductions. Tremendous. It could be over 50% — whether it’s favored nations clauses or anything else. I mean, it’s tremendous numbers we’re talking about. …

Other thing: In 51 years, we got — as you know, last year, drug prices came down. First time in 51 years that they came down. Now, with what I signed last week, I think that drug prices can come down by numbers like 50% and even greater, in certain instances.

Trump is wrong to say drug prices decreased last year for the first time in “51 years,” as we’ve explained before, and that talking point is now outdated. By the administration’s own measure, the drop was the first decrease in five-and-a-half years, and the recent data shows drug prices have now increased.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index for prescription drugs — a measure of drug price inflation that aims to capture what consumers, along with their insurance companies or other payers, are paying for a basket of retail prescriptions — shows the CPI decreased year-over-year in nine out of 10 months, beginning in December 2018. That was the longest sustained drop in the measure since the early 1970s. But the year-over-year measure has now gone up for nine months straight.

The CPI has its shortcomings, but one expert told us it is “the best that is available.”

Here, we’ll go through the four executive orders Trump signed and what impact they might have.

Medicare Drug Rebates

“I think it’s important to remember that almost all of the Trump administration’s rule-making in this context is restricted to the Medicare program,” Rachel Sachs, a professor at the Washington University in St. Louis’ School of Law who has written about several of the administration’s proposals, told us. So, a “fairly small number of Americans” would be affected by the policies.

About 65 million Americans, or 14% of the population, are enrolled in Medicare.

One executive order, which applies to Medicare, would eliminate rebates that drug manufacturers give to pharmacy benefit managers or health plans that negotiate discounts on the list prices of drugs. Instead, these discounts would be passed along to Medicare beneficiaries. An HHS spokesperson told us that this “could also achieve substantial savings, particularly in light of the fact that existing rebates on some drugs within the Part D program are over 50%.”

Sachs said that “it’s possible that a small number of Medicare beneficiaries would see their out-of-pocket costs for particular drugs go down. In some cases, these costs might go down by more than half.” But analyses of this rebate rule showed premiums for beneficiaries would go up, as would federal government spending.

The administration actually proposed this rule in February 2019 but later withdrew it. Both the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary found that it would increase federal spending, because without the rebates, health plans would raise Medicare premiums, most of which are paid by the government. That would mean an increase in premiums for beneficiaries, too, though seniors who need certain drugs with high rebates would see lower out-of-pocket costs.

“Federal spending would increase by $196 billion over the 10-year period, while average beneficiary costs and manufacturer concessions would decrease,” the CMS actuary report said. “Though average beneficiary costs would decrease, the majority of beneficiaries would see an increase in their total [out-of-pocket] and premium costs. The minority of beneficiaries who utilized drugs with significant manufacturer rebates would experience a substantial decrease in costs, causing average beneficiary cost across the program to decline.”

Trump’s July 24 executive order about this proposed rule, however, says the HHS secretary must make sure whatever action is taken doesn’t increase federal spending, Medicare premiums or total out-of-pocket costs.

That stipulation in the order, Sachs told us, “has been very confusing to people who watch this space. … It is difficult to imagine how the HHS secretary could credibly finalize this rule as it exists today.”

The administration could propose a new rule, though it “wouldn’t be able to move forward before the election,” Sachs said. It could include in the rule a greater ability for health plans to negotiate the costs of drugs, she said, something the administration had considered before. The pharmaceutical industry could also bring a legal challenge to this proposal.

Another analysis of the rule, by Milliman, an actuarial consulting firm, found that, depending on various potential changes in behaviors among manufacturers, health plans and pharmacy benefit managers, government costs could go up or down. “While it is difficult to predict what other kinds of changes may result from this potential change, all stakeholders would likely change behavior as a result of this change,” the report said.

Insulin and Epinephrine for Low-Income Patients

Another executive order pertains to insulin and epinephrine. It calls on the HHS secretary to require Federally Qualified Health Centers, or FQHCs, to make those drugs available at low prices to low-income individuals who don’t have health insurance or have high cost-sharing for those drugs.

More specifically, the order aims to have the FQHCs, which provide primary care in underserved areas, offer the drugs to those individuals “at the discounted price paid by the FQHC grantee or sub-grantee under the 340B Prescription Drug Program” plus a “minimal” fee. The 340B program enables certain entities to buy drugs at discounted prices.

Karyn Schwartz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, noted in a Twitter thread that the 340B price for insulin and epinephrine “will be a penny in many cases,” but the FQHCs “already have requirements to have a sliding fee scale and not charge people below poverty.” So the potential impact of this order would depend on how the HHS secretary defines “low income.”

“If ‘low income’ is defined as under 100% of poverty, this may not really change anything. Even if the income level is set somewhat higher, most patients likely would still have been protected by the sliding fee scale without this change,” Schwartz wrote.

Importing Drugs

A third executive order aims to increase the importation of drugs. It says the HHS secretary shall expand access to cheaper imported drugs by granting waivers to individuals to legally import drugs, allowing the reimportation of insulin if needed for “emergency medical care,” and finishing the rule-making process to allow the importation of some drugs from Canada.

The HHS spokesperson told us that, for example, “insulin is available at substantially lower prices in Canada, far more than 50% less, and such savings could be captured through the re-importation pathway. The state importation and personal importation pathways could also achieve similar levels of savings.”

Since 2003, U.S. law does allow the importation of some drugs from Canada but only if the HHS secretary certifies that it would “pose no additional risk to the public’s health and safety” and “result in a significant reduction in the cost of covered products to the American consumer,” as Sachs explained in a blog post for the journal Health Affairs. But no HHS secretary has done so. A Kaiser Family Foundation report says this is mainly because of safety concerns.

In late 2019, the Food and Drug Administration issued a proposed rule on how states or other entities could submit importation plans, for time-limited pilot projects, to meet those stipulations.

The FDA gave no estimates of cost savings in its proposed rule. “As we lack information about the expected scale or scope of such programs, we are unable to estimate how they may affect U.S. markets for prescription drugs. In particular, we are unable to estimate the volume or value of drugs that may be imported under the [importation programs] or the savings to U.S. consumers who may participate in such programs,” it said.

Sachs said while there are certainly drugs that are more than 50% cheaper in Canada, that “doesn’t mean that price is available to Americans.” Canada gets those prices through stronger price controls and negotiation than we have in the U.S.

“The FDA itself is skeptical that the US can obtain those prices through importation,” Sachs told us in an email. “This is because we can expect both Canada and the pharmaceutical industry to take action to protect their lower prices in that market and discourage or even prevent importation. But even if we are able to obtain lower costs, it would be for a particular subset of drugs, as only some drugs are able to be imported under the relevant statute.”

Canadian officials objected to this idea in 2019 when the administration proposed it, citing potential harm to the country’s drug supply and an increase in costs for Canadians, according to a Reuters report.

Sachs said the HHS secretary could take action relatively quickly on this order. Secretary Alex Azar could authorize plans proposed by states, such as Florida and Vermont, to import prescription drugs.

A Potential Fourth EO

Finally, the fourth executive order hasn’t been formally released by the White House, and the president indicated it may not be. The order would tie Medicare prices for drugs administered in a doctor’s office, such as intravenous and injectable drugs, to the prices other countries pay.

Trump called that order “the granddaddy of them all” on July 24 but also said he would be meeting with drug company executives at the White House “on Tuesday” to see if they had another idea. “But the fourth order, we’re going to hold that until Aug. 24th, hoping that the pharmaceutical companies will come up with something that will substantially reduce drug prices,” he said.

That meeting, however, didn’t happen.

The HHS spokesperson said this policy, too, could lead to substantial savings, for some, saying the plan would ensure Medicare doesn’t pay more for these so-called Part B drugs “than any economically comparable OECD country” and that Medicare “currently pays roughly 80% more than other countries” for such drugs.

Medicare Part B covers medical services, including some outpatient drugs administered by a physician.

The administration proposed something similar in 2018, but this policy would go further, Sachs said, as Trump indicated it would be a “most favored nation” program. That would tie the drug prices to the lowest price paid among a basket of countries. The former proposal would have been based on an international benchmark price, as Sachs explained in a 2018 blog post for Health Affairs.

CMS estimated the international pricing model would produce “roughly a 30 percent savings in total spending for the selected Part B drugs in the model.”

Sachs told us “it’s hard to say what the impact would be” of Trump’s executive order, “since we haven’t seen the EO.”

The pharmaceutical industry opposes the plan. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America President and CEO Stephen J. Ubl said in a statement that “this administration has decided to pursue a radical and dangerous policy to set prices based on rates paid in countries that he has labeled as socialist, which will harm patients today and into the future.” He called the proposal “a reckless distraction that impedes our ability to respond to the current pandemic.”

Negotiations between top Democrats and the Trump administration on a coronavirus relief package have hit a standstill, guaranteeing that millions of people will lose critical unemployment benefits on Friday — with no clear path ahead for a new aid package.

Negotiations were in a tenuous place, as the administration and Democrats remained miles apart on a litany of issues. Further complicating talks: Senate Republicans were not in agreement with the White House on core issues of liability protection and an evictions moratorium.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows offered to extend the $600-per-week federal benefit in unemployment insurance for one additional week, according to three people familiar with the negotiations.

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., rejected the offer late Thursday night, saying that a temporary patch would be useless unless negotiations were mostly complete.

“Let’s say that the path that they have taken us down with their delay, their denial, their distortions have caused death — speaking alliteratively — has caused deaths unnecessarily,” Pelosi told reporters Friday.

The dialed-up attacks as the Senate and House left town for the weekend served as a clear signal that negotiations on Capitol Hill — where progress behind closed doors typically leads to at least a temporary pause in public antagonism among party leaders — would instead be a drawn-out process.

Read the full story at NBCNews.com.

President Donald Trump said he will take action as soon as Saturday to ban TikTok, a popular Chinese-owned video app that has been a source of national security and censorship concerns.

Trump’s comments came after published reports that the administration is planning to order China’s ByteDance to sell TikTok. There were also reports Friday that software giant Microsoft is in talks to buy the app.

“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump told reporters Friday on Air Force One as he returned from Florida.

Trump said he could use emergency economic powers or an executive order to enforce the action, insisting, “I have that authority.” He added, “It’s going to be signed tomorrow.”

Reports by Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal citing anonymous sources said the administration could soon announce a decision ordering ByteDance to divest its ownership in TikTok.

There have been reports of U.S. tech giants and financial firms being interested in buying or investing in TikTok as the Trump administration sets its sights on the app. The New York Times and Fox Business, citing an unidentified source, reported Friday that Microsoft isin talks to buy TikTok. Microsoft declined to comment.

TikTok issued a statement Friday saying that, “While we do not comment on rumors or speculation, we are confident in the long-term success of TikTok.”

ByteDance launched TikTok in 2017, then bought Musical.ly, a video service popular with teens in the U.S. and Europe, and combined the two. A twin service, Douyin, is available for Chinese users.

TikTok’s fun, goofy videos and ease of use has made it immensely popular, and U.S. tech giants like Facebook and Snapchat see it as a competitive threat. It has said it has tens of millions of U.S. users and hundreds of millions globally.

But its Chinese ownership has raised concerns about the censorship of videos, including those critical of the Chinese government, and the potential for sharing user data with Chinese officials.

TikTok maintains it doesn’t censor videos based on topics sensitive to China and it would not give the Chinese government access to U.S. user data even if asked. The company has hired a U.S. CEO, a former top Disney executive, in an attempt to distance itself from its Chinese ownership.

U.S. national-security officials have been reviewing the Musical.ly acquisition in recent months, while U.S. armed forces have banned their employees from installing TikTok on government-issued phones. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said earlier this month that the U.S. was considering banning TikTok.

These national-security worries parallel a broader U.S. security crackdown on Chinese companies, including telecom providers Huawei and ZTE. The Trump administration has ordered that the U.S. stop funding equipment from those providers in U.S. networks.It has also tried to steer allies away from Huawei because of worries about the Chinese government’s access to data, which the companies have denied it has.

The Trump administration has stepped in before to block or dissolve deals on national-security concerns, including stopping Singapore’s Broadcom from its $117 billion bid for U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm in 2018 in an effort to help retain U.S. leadership in the telecom space. It also told China’s Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. to sell off its 2016 purchase of gay dating app Grindr.

Other countries are also taking action against TikTok.India this month banned dozens of Chinese apps, including TikTok, citing privacy concerns, amid tensions between the countries.

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Associated Press writers Kevin Freking aboard Air Force One and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam announced Friday that the government will postpone highly anticipated legislative elections by one year, citing a worsening coronavirus outbreak in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.

The Hong Kong government is invoking an emergency ordinance in delaying the elections. Lam said the government has the support of the Chinese government in making the decision to hold the elections on Sept. 5, 2021.

“The announcement I have to make today is the most difficult decision I’ve had to make in the past seven months,” Lam said at a news conference.

“We want to ensure fairness and public safety and health, and need to make sure the election is held in an open, fair and impartial manner. This decision is therefore essential,” she said.

The postponement is a setback for the pro-democracy opposition, which was hoping to capitalize on disenchantment with the current pro-Beijing majority to make gains. A group of 22 lawmakers issued a statement ahead of the announcement accusing the government of using the outbreak as an excuse to delay the vote.

“Incumbent pro-democracy legislators, who represent 60% of the public’s opinion, collectively oppose the postponement and emphasize the responsibility of the SAR government to make every effort to arrange adequate anti-epidemic measures to hold elections in September as scheduled,” the group said, referring to the territory’s official name, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

“Otherwise, it is tantamount to uprooting the foundation of the establishment of the SAR.”

The city of 7.5 million people has had a surge in coronavirus infections since the beginning of July. Hong Kong has recorded 3,273 infections as of Friday, more than double the tally on July 1.

The government has tightened social distancing restrictions, limiting public gatherings to two people, and banned dining-in at restaurants after 6 p.m.

The lead-up to the elections had been closely watched after a national security law that took effect in late June stipulated that candidates who violated the law would be barred from running.

The new law was seen as Beijing’s attempt to curb dissent in the city after months of pro-democracy and anti-government protests rocked Hong Kong last year over a controversial — but now withdrawn — extradition bill that would allow suspects to be sent to the mainland for trial.

The monthslong protests plunged Hong Kong into its largest ever political crisis, with clashes between protesters and police turning violent at times. Over 8,000 people have been arrested in connection to the protests since June 2019.

Dissatisfaction with the Hong Kong government helped the pro-democracy bloc achieve a landslide victory in district council elections last November, a momentum that the opposition was hoping to ride to gain a majority in the legislature.

In Washington, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Friday the Trump administration strongly disapproved of Hong Kong’s decision to postpone the election.

“We condemn the Hong Kong government’s decision to postpone for one year its legislative council elections and to disqualify opposition candidates,” McEnany said. “This action undermines the democratic processes and freedoms that have underpinned Hong Kong’s prosperity and this is only the most recent in a growing list of broken promises by Beijing which promised autonomy and freedoms to the Hong Kong people until 2047 in the Sino-British joint declaration.”

China’s foreign ministry insisted that Hong Kong’s legislative elections are an “internal affair.”

“It is the responsibility of the Hong Kong SAR government to ensure that the elections for the 7th Legislative Council are held in a safe, orderly, fair and just environment,” ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Friday. “We believe that the Hong Kong SAR government will proceed from the current anti-epidemic situation in Hong Kong and handle relevant matters in accordance with the law.”

On Thursday, 12 pro-democracy candidates including prominent pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong were disqualified from running for not complying with the city’s mini-constitution or pledging allegiance to the local and national governments.

“Beyond any doubt, this is the most scandalous election ever in Hong Kong history,” Wong said at a news conference Friday. “I wish to emphasize that no reasonable man would think that this election ban is not politically driven.”

“Beijing has staged multiple acts to prevent the opposition bloc from taking the majority in the Hong Kong legislature,” he said.

Germany, which currently holds the European Union’s rotating 6-month presidency, said it was suspending its extradition agreement with Hong Kong to protest the decision to postpone the elections and disqualify the candidates.

“We have repeatedly made clear our expectations that China will comply with its obligations under international law,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said. “This includes protecting the freedoms and rights guaranteed in the Basic Law, and this includes the right to free and fair elections.”

The postponement also drew criticism from the New York-based group Human Rights Watch.

“Postponing the September elections for a year is a cynical move to contain a political emergency, not a public health one. This simply allows Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam to deny Hong Kong people their right to choose their government,” said Sophie Richardson, the group’s China director.

“Without making any attempt to look at alternative methods of voting, or ensuring all voting rights will be respected, Lam and her backers in Beijing are merely masking repression under the guise of public health,” she said.

Separately, mainland state broadcaster CCTV said Friday that Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Nathan Law, former British Consulate employee Simon Cheng and four others were wanted under the national security law on suspicion of inciting secession and collusion with foreign forces.

The six are currently overseas, according to CCTV. Law fled Hong Kong for the U.K. in early July and Chen was granted political asylum in Britain.

Hong Kong police declined to comment.

Leaders in Portland, Oregon, caught their breath and moved forward with cautious optimism Friday after the first nightly protest in weeks ended without any major confrontations, violence or arrests.

The dramatic change in tone outside a federal courthouse that’s become ground zero in clashes between demonstrators and federal agents came after the U.S. government began drawing down its forces in the liberal city under a deal between Democratic Gov. Kate Brown and the Trump administration.

As agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Marshals Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement pulled back, troopers with the Oregon State Police took over. There were no visible signs of any law enforcement presence outside the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse, where a protest lasted into early Friday.

“Last night, the world was watching Portland. Here’s what they saw: Federal troops left downtown. Local officials protected free speech. And Oregonians spoke out for Black Lives Matter, racial justice, and police accountability through peaceful, non-violent protest,” Brown said in a tweet Friday.

Mayor Ted Wheeler also struck an optimistic tone but cautioned that there was much work to be done after more than 60 days of protests — and not just in cleaning up downtown Portland.

Leaders in Oregon are pushing for a raft of measures that would address systemic racism in everything from policing to housing. Those proposals could be fast-tracked for consideration in a special legislative session later this summer.

The governor also announced the creation of a Racial Justice Council to advise her on criminal justice reform and police accountability, health equity, economic opportunity, housing and homelessness, and environmental justice.

“The council will examine and begin to dismantle the racist policies that have created grave disparities in virtually every part of our society,” Brown’s office said in a statement.

A majority of the group’s members will be people of color and include state lawmakers to help get policies passed next year.

Portland’s City Council also voted this week to refer a ballot measure to voters in November that would create a police review board independent from any elected official or city department.

“We need the time to heal. We need the time to allow people to come back downtown and experience the great downtown that people remember from just a few months ago,” said Wheeler, a Democrat. “The mass demonstrations that we’ve seen over many, many weeks, those demands have been heard. The demands have been understood.”

The scene outside the federal courthouse stood in sharp contrast to the violent clashes between protesters and the agents that President Donald Trump sent to Oregon’s largest city in early July. Protests have roiled Portland for more than two months following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

And while thousands have marched and rallied peacefully, Portland’s federal courthouse became a target for some protesters. Smaller numbers of demonstrators tried to tear down a fence erected to protect it, lit fires at the courthouse entryway and hurled fireworks, flares and bricks at the agents holed up inside. Most nights, the agents responded by firing tear gas.

But at the protest that began Thursday night, there was little violence and few signs of confrontation as several thousand people gathered near the courthouse .

A handful of protesters pointed lights and lasers at the building, but state troopers remained inside and did not respond. Soon afterward, hundreds of demonstrators gathered about a block from the courthouse to listen to speeches, with little sign of a law enforcement presence. The mood remained calm into early Friday as the crowd dwindled to about 500 demonstrators.

In preparation for the handover from federal authorities to state troopers, the local sheriff and Portland police met and agreed not to use tear gas except in situations with a threat of serious injury or death, the mayor said.

Wheeler, who was gassed when he joined protesters outside the courthouse last week, added that tear gas “as a tactic really isn’t all that effective” because protesters have donned gas masks and often return to the action after recovering for a few minutes. He apologized to peaceful demonstrators exposed to tear gas used by Portland police before federal officials arrived.

Under the deal announced by the governor, the agents will withdraw in phases. But federal officials insisted that the agents will not leave the city completely and will be kept on standby.

Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell said he believes the new collaboration between local law enforcement agencies will be seen “as a victory in many ways.”

“A lot of people came out to express their displeasure of folks from the federal government here and engaging in crowd control with members of our community,” Lovell said. “So I’m hoping that on many levels that people are happy in this development.”

The U.S. government had arrested 94 people as of Wednesday, the most recent accounting. Since the protests began, Lovell said local police made more than 400 arrests.

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Selsky reported from Salem. Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative corps member Sara Cline contributed from Salem. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.