F.B.I. Searches Giuliani’s Home and Office, Seizing Phones and Computers

 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Today, the Department of Justice executed search warrants on both the Manhattan home and the office of Trump’s ally and former lawyer Rudy Giuliani as part of an investigation into Giuliani’s adventures in Ukraine as he tried to dig up dirt on Biden’s son Hunter. Experts say such a search against a lawyer, and against a president’s former lawyer, to boot, is extraordinary. To get a warrant, investigators had to convince a judge that they believed it would turn up evidence of a crime that they knew had been committed. Political appointees in Trump’s Department of Justice had blocked such a warrant in the past, but Attorney General Merrick Garland lifted the block.

Federal officials also executed a search warrant on Victoria Toensing, a media personality and lawyer associated with Giuliani on his Ukraine work.

Also today, federal prosecutors have added conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction to the charges against three men who allegedly plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and a jury in New York today convicted a Trump supporter of making a death threat against elected officials for his statements in a video he posted online after the January 6 insurrection calling for the “slaughter” of Democratic senators. The penalty for such a crime is up to ten years in prison.

While authorities seem finally to be exploring the potential lawbreaking of the previous administration, Biden is properly entrusting law enforcement to the branch of government responsible for it, leaving the actions of the previous administration to the Department of Justice and state and local authorities. He is also refusing to engage in the rhetorical brawls the right wing is trying to spark, ignoring, for example, the ridiculous story that he was going to outlaw the consumption of meat, or that the federal government had bought and distributed copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’s children’s book to incoming refugees, both of which then blew up in the faces of those who had pushed them.

 

Feds want a search warrant to obtain Rudy Giuliani's emails and electronic communication 'over his dealings in Ukraine' in move that may have already been secretly granted permission by Bill Barr's Justice Department, NBC reports

Federal prosecutors are said to be looking into making a legal request for Rudy Giuliani's emails. The investigation into Donald Trump's personal attorney is 'very active', NBC reports. Sources tell the network prosecutors for the Southern District of New York have spoken about getting access to his electronic communications. New York prosecutors need the approval of Washington before they can move forward with obtaining a search warrant for materials that may be protected by attorney-client privilege. It is not known whether Bill Barr's Justice Department has granted that approval. Giuliani has reportedly been under investigation by federal prosecutors in New York over his work in Ukraine, which became the heart of Trump's impeachment.

Trump’s ugly pattern of attacking urban areas spotlights failure to act like president for all Americans

 

Election workers in Georgia's Fulton County count ballots by hand. (Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP)

WASHINGTON POST DAILY 202

There are literally hundreds of examples from the nearly four years that have followed of this president stereotyping urban areas and scapegoating their leaders with characterizations contradicted by the ground truth. Trump has governed more like the president of the Red States of America than the United States of America. He has often treated blue states and big cities more like adversaries than constituents.

Suggestions from Trump and his allies that the urban areas which overwhelmingly opposed him in battleground states are dens of corruption have reached a fever pitch over the last two weeks. 

When a Republican election official in Philadelphia went on CNN to denounce Trump’s claims of widespread fraud as “completely ridiculous,” the president immediately attacked him on Twitter: “A guy named Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia Commissioner and so-called Republican (RINO), is being used big time by the Fake News Media to explain how honest things were with respect to the Election in Philadelphia. He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty. We win!”

“I have seen the most fantastical things on social media, making completely ridiculous allegations that have no basis in fact at all,” Schmidt said, responding to Trump’s claims. “One thing I can’t comprehend is how hungry people are to consume lies.” “Trump is trying to cling to power by disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Black voters,” writes columnist Eugene Robinson. “In Wisconsin, Trump's campaign has paid for recounts in just two counties, one of which is Milwaukee County. In effect, Trump is arguing that Black people have no right to vote him out of office.”

Trump denigrated Baltimore last summer as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” 

Trump called Chicago an “embarrassment” to America and claimed that “Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison.”

He claimed Los Angeles and San Francisco had squandered their “prestige” by not expelling homeless people. “What they are doing to our beautiful California is a disgrace to our country,” he said last summer.

Trump has often claimed that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They are not.

In September, Trump issued an order aimed at defunding police departments in large Democratic-led cities – specifically naming New York, the District, Seattle and Portland, Ore. – even as he falsely accused Biden of wanting to defund the police. “Anarchy has recently beset some of our states and cities,” Trump wrote. “My administration will not allow federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones.”

The president is "orchestrating a far-reaching pressure campaign to persuade Republican officials in Michigan, Georgia and elsewhere to overturn the will of voters in what critics decried Thursday as an unprecedented subversion of democracy,” Philip Rucker, Amy Gardner and Josh Dawsey report. “After courts rejected the Trump campaign’s baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud, the president is now trying to remain in power with a wholesale assault on the integrity of the vote by spreading misinformation and trying to persuade loyal Republicans to manipulate the electoral system on his behalf. In an extraordinary news conference Thursday at the Republican National Committee headquarters, Trump’s attorneys claimed without evidence.

“The latest evolution in the Trump strategy came into view Thursday at RNC headquarters, where Giuliani and campaign attorneys Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell presented their argument for widespread fraud but provided no evidence. Powell argued that the voting systems used in many states, including those manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, use software ‘created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chávez to make sure he never lost an election.’ … There is no evidence to support this theory. … The company’s products are certified for use in states that Trump won, including Utah and Florida. In addition, Giuliani and Powell’s claims have been disproved in Georgia, where the state’s hand recount of nearly 5 million paper ballots affirmed that the Dominion scanners accurately counted the vote. … Trump was said to be enthused about the news conference and asked allies to watch it, a White House official said. The event seemed at times farcical, with streaks of what appeared to be black hair dye mixed with sweat dripping down the sides of Giuliani’s face as he spoke.” 

Giuliani’s post-election meltdown is starting to become literal. “About 100 journalists and hangers-on had crammed into this potential coronavirus incubator for a news conference on the perverse legal strategy of Trump’s failed reelection campaign, which Giuliani is trying to hustle toward a twist ending,” Dan Zak and Dawsey report. The black liquid running down his face “might have been perspiration liquefying his hair dye, or sluicing the black polymer off his eyeglasses. One Manhattan stylist told the New York Times that it might’ve been running mascara; perhaps Giuliani had applied it to touch up the color of his sideburns. One Trump campaign adviser texted a Washington Post journalist as the black streaks inched toward Rudy’s jowls: ‘Is he deteriorating in real time?’ If Rudy is deteriorating, then so is anyone who listens to him. For 90 minutes, an unmasked Rudy and four maskless colleagues … spun a confusing web of conspiracies that indicate Trump won the election that he lost. A revolution, they said, was at hand. ‘It is the 1775 of our generation,’ declared [Powell] … She continued: ‘Globalists, dictators, corporations, you name it — everybody’s against us except President Trump.’”

• “Trump told an ally that he knows he lost, but that he is delaying the transition process and is aggressively trying to sow doubt about the election results in order to get back at Democrats for questioning the legitimacy of his own election in 2016, especially with the Russia investigation,” CNN reports.

The goal of Trump’s team is not to make a coherent argument; they have lost 31 lawsuits so far, and have racked up only 2 quite minor wins that do not affect the outcome. They are simply creating a narrative to muddy the waters, apparently either to get legislatures to replace Democratic electors with Republican ones, or to delay the certification of ballots to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where they think Trump has a chance of winning. They are making no pretense that Trump is the choice of a majority of voters-- Biden is ahead by almost 6 million votes. Rather, they are trying to game the Electoral College.

This is a long shot that gets longer every day. 

The threat of criminal prosecution may be one reason Trump refuses to relinquish the presidency.

“Two separate New York State fraud investigations into Trump and his businesses, one criminal and one civil, have expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to Ivanka Trump,” the Times reports. “The inquiries — a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and a civil one by the state attorney general, Letitia James — are being conducted independently. But both offices issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization in recent weeks for records related to the fees." Ivanka Trump tweeted that both investigations into her dubious "consulting fees” are “100% motivated by politics, publicity and rage.”

In related news: Governments around the world are losing $427 billion each year to tax avoidance and evasion as companies and wealthy individuals shift their money to tax havens, according to a comprehensive new report from the Tax Justice Network, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and a trade-union group called Public Services International. (Jeanne Whalen)

The coronavirus

The CDC recommends against traveling or gathering for Thanksgiving.

“In the agency’s first news briefing in months, officials said they were alarmed to see 1 million new cases reported across the United States within the past week. As the nation’s death toll since the start of the pandemic reached 250,000, officials spoke of the risks in stark terms, warning that as friends and relatives get together over the holidays, they could inadvertently bring the coronavirus with them,” Brittany Shammas reports. “For those still planning to travel, the guidelines offer tips specific to overnight stays. … Hosts should improve ventilation by opening windows or doors or putting central air and heating on continuous circulation. People should spend time together outdoors, taking a walk or sitting six feet apart for interpersonal interaction. Singing and shouting should be avoided, especially inside. Pets should be treated like human family members and kept from interacting with people outside the household.”

The seven-day average of new cases hovers at more than 160,000, according to Washington Post tracking. On Wednesday, nearly 1,900 deaths were reported, marking the deadliest day since mid-September. Biden said Trump will be remembered by history as one of the nation's most reckless leaders for delaying cooperation on the pandemic after losing reelection, and the president-elect added that an untold number of Americans are going to die as a direct consequence. Meanwhile, Vice President Pence touted encouraging news on the efficacy of vaccines and promised millions of doses could be distributed almost immediately upon approval by the FDA. “They urged the country to continue mitigation measures such as wearing masks and social distancing — even as Pence did not wear a face covering at the White House podium,” Anne Gearan and Seung Min Kim report.

The number of new unemployment claims spiked last week to 742,000, an increase of 31,000 from the previous week. An additional 320,000 claims were processed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the program for gig and self-employed workers. “About 20.3 million people are still claiming some form of unemployment insurance,” Eli Rosenberg reports. “The number of new claims has fallen from peaks in the spring but remains historically high. Claims have remained above the pre-pandemic record of 695,000, from 1982, for 35 weeks. … There are other warning signs for the economy. Credit card spending is on the decline. Reservations at restaurants, as measured by OpenTable data, have trended down in year-over-year comparisons in recent weeks. … 

“An estimated 12 million people could lose unemployment payments on Dec. 26, potentially pushing many over the brink, if Congress is unable to pass a new stimulus bill before then. Economists worry about the catastrophic effects of this expiration: households with little in the way of support or savings finding themselves in increasingly dire financial straits as the national eviction moratorium expires. Meanwhile, a contraction in household spending could threaten the economy at large. Analyst Andrew Stettner estimates that 4.4 million people have already been pushed off the unemployment rolls.”

Trump Sought Options for Attacking Iran to Stop Its Growing Nuclear Program

The president was dissuaded from moving ahead with a strike by advisers who warned that it could escalate into a broader conflict in his last weeks in office.

NY TIMES

President Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former U.S. officials said on Monday.

A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike. The advisers — including Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary; and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — warned that a strike against Iran’s facilities could easily escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

Any strike — whether by missile or cyber — would almost certainly be focused on Natanz, where the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Wednesday that Iran’s uranium stockpile was now 12 times larger than permitted under the nuclear accord that Mr. Trump abandoned in 2018. The agency also noted that Iran had not allowed it access to another suspected site where there was evidence of past nuclear activity.

Mr. Trump asked his top national security aides what options were available and how to respond, officials said.

After Mr. Pompeo and General Milley described the potential risks of military escalation, officials left the meeting believing a missile attack inside Iran was off the table, according to administration officials with knowledge of the meeting.

Mr. Trump might still be looking at ways to strike Iranian assets and allies, including militias in Iraq, officials said. A smaller group of national security aides had met late Wednesday to discuss Iran, the day before the meeting with the president.

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment.

The episode underscored how Mr. Trump still faces an array of global threats in his final weeks in office. A strike on Iran may not play well to his base, which is largely opposed to a deeper American conflict in the Middle East, but it could poison relations with Tehran so that it would be much harder for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, as he has promised to do.

Since Mr. Trump dismissed Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other top Pentagon aides last week, Defense Department and other national security officials have privately expressed worries that the president might initiate operations, whether overt or secret, against Iran or other adversaries at the end of his term.

WASHINGTON POST DAILY 202

One of the threats Biden will inherit is a nuclear North Korea.

Last month, Kim Jong Un rolled out a massive new road-mobile ICBM during a parade in Pyongyang. This is a larger version of the nuclear-capable North Korean missiles that can already reach the United States. Fortunately, we are making some progress in being able to defend against such threats. “The U.S. military has shot down an intercontinental ballistic missile in a test that demonstrated for the first time that the United States can intercept ICBMs from a warship at sea,” Paul Sonne reports. “The Missile Defense Agency announced the success of the test Tuesday, saying the USS John Finn had struck and destroyed a ‘threat representative’ ICBM using a Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor in the Pacific Ocean northeast of Hawaii. …

 

Trump purges a top DHS official who led the agency's efforts to secure the election.

“In a tweet, Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at DHS and led successful efforts to help state and local election offices protect their systems and to rebut misinformation,” Ellen Nakashima and Nick Miroff report. “Earlier Tuesday, Krebs in a tweet refuted allegations that election systems were manipulated, saying that ‘59 election security experts all agree, ‘in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.’’ Krebs’s statement amounted to a debunking of Trump’s central claim that the November election was stolen. [Trump] said on Twitter: ‘The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud … Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated.' … Following Trump’s tweet, acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf called Krebs’s deputy, Matthew Travis, to inform him that the White House had overruled CISA’s succession plan that named him acting director, essentially forcing him to resign, Travis said. … 

"Krebs’s dismissal was not unexpected, as he told associates last week that he was expecting to be fired. His latest tweet about the security of the election, which followed similar earlier assessments by his agency, including on its Rumor Control Web page, angered the president … Krebs’s agency has asserted its independence in recent days … After his firing, Krebs responded from his personal Twitter account: 'Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow. #Protect2020.'

"The news disturbed many current and former officials and cybersecurity professionals who said that under Krebs, DHS significantly boosted the agency’s capabilities to help the private sector, as well as those managing election infrastructure, better defending themselves against foreign and domestic threats. …

"The Trump campaign has faced a string of failures in its beleaguered effort to overturn the result of the election through the courts. In the latest defeat on Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the campaign’s claim that GOP observers did not have sufficient access to the vote count, underscoring how the president’s claims of voting irregularities have repeatedly run aground before judges. Meanwhile, in Nevada, the campaign filed a challenge to the state’s election results, asking a state court in Carson City to declare Trump the winner of Nevada’s six presidential electors or to annul the election entirely … 

"Even as the president’s allies frantically raced to roll out more allegations around the country, multiple people close to the campaign acknowledged there was little evidence to support the assertions and bemoaned the ascension of Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has sidelined other legal advisers. Giuliani, who speaks with Trump several times a day, has convinced him his odds are better than other campaign officials believe … There is a grim sense ‘that this is going to end quickly and badly,’ one official said. During an appearance in federal court in Pennsylvania on Tuesday afternoon, Giuliani made broad unsubstantiated allegations about ‘widespread nationwide voter fraud,’ yet conceded that Trump’s team was not alleging fraud as a matter of law. … Two campaign officials said Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, attorney Justin Clark and others were barely involved anymore in the legal fight, with it all being ‘Rudy all the time,’ in the words of one.

“Over the weekend, Giuliani and his own team of lawyers, which also includes Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, attempted what was described [by insiders] as an internal campaign ‘coup,'" ABC News reports. "Giuliani’s team has taken over office space in the Trump campaign’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters … Ellis told the remaining campaign staff that they should only follow orders from people named ‘Rudy or Jenna’ … The attempted power grab hit a boiling point on Saturday when [Jason] Miller, who’s been the campaign's chief strategist for months, and Ellis got into what sources said was a ‘screaming match’ in front of other staffers.”

Pfizer completes its vaccine trial.

“The coronavirus vaccine being developed by Pfizer and German biotechnology firm BioNTech is 95 percent effective at preventing disease, according to an analysis after the trial reached its endpoint. The vaccine trial also reached a safety milestone, with two months of follow-up on half of the participants, and Pfizer will submit an application for emergency authorization ‘within days,’” Carolyn Johnson reports. “In the trial, half the nearly 44,000 participants received the experimental vaccine and half received a placebo. As those people went about their normal lives, they were exposed to the virus in the community, and physicians tracked all cases with symptoms to see if the vaccine had a protective effect. The data have not yet been published or peer reviewed, but will be closely scrutinized by the FDA and an independent advisory committee that makes recommendations to the agency. … Among people older than 65, a group at high risk of severe illness, the vaccine was 94 percent effective. … U.S. government officials anticipate having 40 million doses of both vaccines by the end of the year, enough to vaccinate 20 million people.” 

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), 87, tests positive.

“Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate, which makes him the third in line of succession to the presidency, revealed Tuesday that he has contracted the coronavirus,” Colby Itkowitz and Mike DeBonis report. “‘I’m feeling good + will keep up on my work for the ppl of Iowa from home.

You're not someone's crazy uncle!': Donald Trump spars with NBC's Savannah Guthrie, saying he CAN'T REMEMBER when he tested negative for COVID

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN 

Tonight was supposed to be the night of a televised town hall meeting featuring both President Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. But, after Trump tested positive for coronavirus, the organizers of the event turned it into a virtual meeting. Trump refused to participate. So Biden arranged an event of an hour and a half on ABC. Then Trump arranged his own, separate hour-long town hall on NBC.

NBC faced deep criticism for giving Trump a platform when he had ditched the official plan. But the network made up for that criticism by giving the position of moderator to journalist Savannah Guthrie, who has a J.D. from Georgetown Law School and worked as a litigator. Although the setting of the NBC event was oddly partisan—the backdrop consisted of masked women nodding along with the president’s answers—Guthrie repeatedly pressed Trump on his evasive answers to questioners, and his frustration was palpable.

Before the event, Trump had denigrated it. “They asked me if I’d do it, I figured, ‘What the hell? We get a free hour on television,’” he said.

But the questioning did him no favors. 

Trump defended spreading a preposterous conspiracy theory about the death of Osama bin Laden saying he had merely been passing along a supporter’s view.

“That was an opinion of somebody and that was a retweet. I’ll put it out there. People can decide for themselves,” he said, when questioned by NBC’s Savannah Guthrie about his passing along a theory that the killing of bin Laden by Navy SEAL Team 6 had been staged, and that members of the unit had been killed to cover it up.

“I don’t get that. You’re the president,” Guthrie said. “You’re not like someone’s crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever.”

@SavannahGuthrie

: “I don’t get that. You’re the president. You’re not, like, someone’s crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever.” #TrumpTownHall

Mary L Trump

@MaryLTrump

·

5h

Actually . . .

Quote Tweet

Philippe Reines

@PhilippeReines

· 5h

Need to take issue with @SavannahGuthrie for saying to trump “it’s not like you’re someone’s crazy uncle.” @MaryLTrump rebuttal

“Well, back to the debate, because the debate commission’s rules, it was the honor system, would be that you would come with a negative test. You’re saying you don’t know if you got a test on the day of the debate?”

“I had no problem, again, the doctors do it, I don’t ask them. I test all the time—”

“Did you take a test though the day of the debate?”

“You ask the doctors, they’ll give you a perfect answer.”

Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley, has repeatedly refused to answer when Trump last tested negative for COVID-19.

Following more discussion of COVID-19 and an argument about whether the U.S. has been “a winner” by the metric of excess mortality, Guthrie pressed the president on why it seemed he had trouble denouncing white supremacy.

“You were asked point blank to denounce white supremacy. In the moment you didn’t. You asked some follow-up questions: Who specifically? A couple of days later on a different show you denounced white supremacy—”

As Guthrie formulated her question, Trump grew irritated.

“I denounced white supremacy, OK?” he shot back. “I denounced white supremacy for years, but you always do it, you always start off with the question. You didn’t ask Joe Biden whether or not he denounces antifa,” Trump said, adding, “Are you listening, I denounce white supremacy.”

Guthrie continued, “It feels sometimes like you’re hesitant to do so—”

“Here we go again,” Trump interrupted. “Every time, in fact, when people came, ‘I’m sure they’ll ask you the white supremacy question.’ I denounce white supremacy, and frankly, you want to know something, I denounce antifa and I denounce these people on the left that are burning down our cities that are run by the Democrats who don’t—”

After more crosstalk about antifa, Guthrie broke through by noting that “Republican Senator Ben Sasse said, ‘QAnon is nuts and real leaders call out conspiracy theories.’ Why not just say it’s crazy and not true?”

“He may be right, I just don’t know about QAnon,” Trump said.

“You do know,” Guthrie insisted.

“I don’t know, no, I don’t know,” Trump said, adding, “What I do hear about it is they are very strongly against pedophilia and I agree with that. I mean I do agree with that.”

“But there’s not a Satanic pedophile cult—”

“I don’t know that. I know nothing about that,” Trump insisted.

“You know nothing about that,” Guthrie responded, incredulously.

Meanwhile, over at his own town hall, Biden put to rest Trump’s accusations that he is senile or “sleepy.” Biden answered questions from voters ranging from what he would do about racial inequality to our standing in foreign affairs. He showed deep knowledge of the issues, citing history and statistics, as well as providing detailed plans for what he would do to address the nation's problems. He was empathetic and human—the word people keep using is “decent”—and seemed energetic and eager to get underway with his plans for getting America back on track.

In one of the more striking moments of the evening, moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Biden “If you lose, what will that say to you about where America is today?” Rather than giving the obvious answer for a presidential candidate-- “I won’t lose”—Biden demonstrated that he is willing to accept responsibility for his actions, something that has been perilously thin on the ground for the past four years, and demonstrated his confidence in his fellow Americans. “It could say that I’m a lousy candidate and I didn’t do a good job,” he told Stephanopoulos. “But… I hope that it doesn’t say that we are as racially, ethnically, and religiously at odds with one another as it appears the president wants us to be…. Because we have the greatest opportunity than any country in the world to own the 21st century and we can’t do it divided.” [sic]

Trump's administration seems to have turned into a revenge operation. Today, Trump appeared to celebrate last month’s killing of murder suspect Michael Reinoehl by law enforcement officers who had been deputized as U.S. Marshals. Reinoehl was a suspect in the killing of a right-wing agitator in Portland, Oregon, when the officers shot him. “They knew who he was; they didn't want to arrest him, and in 15 minutes that ended," Trump told an audience at a campaign rally in North Carolina, seeming to gloat over an extrajudicial killing. Trump also continued to attack Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, just a week after the FBI arrested 8 men for plotting to kidnap her.

We also learned today that intelligence officers had warned White House officials, including the president, that Russians were using Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to feed disinformation to Trump. A former intelligence official told Washington Post reporters: “The message was, “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine.” This makes the willingness of Republicans to push yesterday’s “revelation” of an incriminating laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden even more astonishing. NBC News reports that intelligence officers are investigating that story to see if it is a foreign intelligence operation.

Today the administration rejected a request from California Governor Gavin Newsom for a disaster declaration to free up money to help the state after six wildfires have burned hundreds of thousands of acres across the state. California is a reliably Democratic state that will likely give its electoral votes to Biden.

Meanwhile, in the absence of a coronavirus relief bill, poverty is growing. Depending on the scale they use, researchers say 6 to 8 million Americans have slipped below the poverty line. 

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/15/us/fact-checking-town-halls

https://www.chicagotribune.com/election-2020/ct-nw-trump-biden-dueling-town-halls-abc-nbc-20201015-uhdu4aiasjeurbgyulxhr46coi-story.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-calls-nbc-the-worst-mocks-savannah-guthrie-hours-before-town-hall-event

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/15/us/trump-biden-town-halls

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/14/donald-trump-coronavirus-farmer-bailouts-359932

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/politics/trump-california-fire-disaster-assistance/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/us/politics/federal-aid-poverty-levels.html

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/politics/trump-fugitive-shooting/index.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-biden-ukraine-russian-disinformation/2020/10/15/43158900-0ef5-11eb-b1e8-16b59b92b36d_story.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/feds-examining-if-alleged-hunter-biden-emails-are-linked-foreign-n1243620

Kristol:

Bill Kristol @BillKristol

A friend who has served at very high levels of government, a true public servant and a serious conservative, emailed me earlier: "The Republican Party has become the party of facilitating Russian agitprop and voter suppression. Not what I signed up for."

October 16th 2020

5,576 Retweets22,563 Likes

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-attack-whitmer-dictator-fox-business

ABC News @ABC

.@GStephanopoulos: “If you lose, what will that say to you about where America is today?” “It could say that I’m a lousy candidate,” says Joe Biden, adding that he hopes it "doesn’t say" the U.S. is as divided “as it appears the president wants us to be.” abcn.ws/bidentownhall

October 16th 2020

185 Retweets826 Likes

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/15/924155813/michigan-charges-8th-man-in-alleged-domestic-terrorism-plot-to-kidnap-gov-whitme

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/3-reasons-pelosi-should-take-trumps-deal-on-stimulus-checks.html

ps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/