Politico - 08 01 2020

Sense of foreboding darkens Democratic primary

Many early state Democrats are gripped by dread over recent headlines.

The candidates are making it worse.PAGE 9

Rep. Hunter’s resignation setCalifornia representive

will step down from Congress on Jan. 13.

PAGE 4

Congress’ health agenda barrels toward 2020 buzz saw

Efforts to deliver on high-profile issues are colliding with the broader

partisan battle over health care.PAGE 16

V O L . 1 3 • N O . 1 0 9 | W E D N E S D AY, J A N U A R Y 8 , 2 0 2 0 | P O L I T I C O . C O M

Matt Wuerker

The cartoonist’s daily take on the world of politics.

PAGE 18

IMPEACHMENT

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

Mitch McConnell’s exercise of raw power stings Democrats, who had pressured the GOP to allow witnesses and new evidence to be introduced but had little leverage because the GOP conference stuck together.

Trial to start with partisan power play

McConnell’s trial procedure win was months in the making

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is moving forward on a set of impeachment trial rules without Democratic support.

T he K ent uck y R ep ubl ic a n said Tuesday that he has locked down sufficient backing from his 53-member caucus to pass a blue-print for the trial that leaves the question of seeking witnesses and documents until after opening ar-guments are made.

That framework would mir-ror the contours of President Bill Clinton’s trial and ignore Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s demands for witnesses and new evidence at the outset.

“We have the votes once the im-peachment trial has begun to pass a resolution essentially the same — very similar — to the 100-to-nothing vote in the Clinton trial,”

McConnell told reporters. “All we’re doing here is saying, ‘We’re going to get started in exactly the same way that 100 senators agreed to 20 years ago.’”

The GOP leader added that the Senate will “get around to the dis-cussion of witnesses,” but not be-fore the Senate trial begins.

Schumer reiterated his pledge to force votes on witnesses and docu-ments and offered his own warning to Senate Republicans on Tuesday afternoon: “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

“Large numbers of Republicans have refused to say whether they are for witnesses and documents and that’s why Leader McConnell came up with this kick-the-can down the road theory,” Schumer said. “McConnell will never go for it but will four of his Republican colleagues?”

McConnell has the votes to ignore Schumer’s demands for witnesses and new evidence

New Ukraine revelations hang over impeachment

The House impeached President Donald Trump three weeks ago, but a gusher of evidence related to the case has continued to flow — threatening to intensify a scan-dal that has consumed the Trump presidency.

New witnesses are volunteering evidence that the House was un-able to obtain in its three-month investigation, which resulted in charges that Trump abused his power and obstructed Congress. And a series of lawsuits and dis-closures has yielded new docu-ments and emails that the Trump administration initially withheld.

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

The case against President Donald Trump has continued to evolve since the House impeached him.

Chuck Schumer demanded Tuesday morning that Senate Republicans allow witnesses to testify during President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. But Mitch McConnell already knew he had the votes to roll over his

adversary.It took just a few hours for Mc-

Connell and Senate GOP leaders to clinch a final whip count in support of moving forward with a trial framework that ignores Democratic requests. And all 53 Republicans — even moderates such as Susan Collins of Maine,

Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah — have agreed to the majority leader’s proposal, according to senators involved in the process.

McConnell had spent months cultivating his caucus to get to this point. And after McConnell

How the Senate majority leader kept his caucus in line at a crucial impeachment moment

President Donald Trump’s attack dogs in the House are unlikely to be unleashed in the Senate impeach-ment trial.

GOP lawmakers like Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and John Ratcliffe aren’t expected to serve on Trump’s official impeachment defense team, according to three

people familiar with the situa-tion, despite having played a key role defending the president during the House’s public impeachment hearings.

“They’re not needed,” said a friend of the president who spoke to him recently. And on a scale of 1 to 10, one GOP lawmaker pegged the likelihood of House allies join-ing the defense team at a 2.

Instead, Trump’s top defend-ers are more likely to help out in a public relations capacity — includ-ing the media appearances that the TV-obsessed president loves — though the White House has made no final decision as it waits for lawmakers to set the timing and parameters of the trial. Senate Ma-jority Leader Mitch McConnell said

Trump’s House warriors likely sidelined

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BY MELANIE ZANONAAND ANITA KUMAR

TRIAL on page 10

EVIDENCE on page 12

McCONNELL on page 11

DEFENDERS on page 13

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Defense secretary insists U.S. isn’t withdrawing from Iraq after PM calls for timetableThe U.S. military has made no decision to withdraw from Iraq, Defense Secretary Mark Esper insisted Tuesday, dismissing a letter Iraq’s prime minister says he received from the U.S. headquarters in Baghdad as merely “a draft ” that wasn’t intended for delivery.

The comments marked Esper’s second attempt to defuse the situation, fi rst when the draft letter surfaced on Monday and more recently aft er reports that Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi considers the letter an offi cial policy of the U.S. to withdraw.

“Our policy has not changed. We are not leaving Iraq, and a draft , unsigned letter does not constitute a policy change,” Esper said in a televised briefi ng at the Pentagon.

On Sunday, Iraq’s parliament passed a nonbinding measure calling for the U.S. military to be expelled from the country aft er last week’s lethal U.S. drone strike against Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.

On Monday, an unsigned copy of a letter to an Iraqi military command from the Marine brigadier general who heads the U.S. presence in Iraq surfaced on social media. It said U.S. forces were repositioning within Iraq in anticipation of “onward movement” out of the country in the wake of Sunday’s vote.

Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley scrambled to respond.

The letter was only a draft and “should not have been sent,” Milley told reporters Monday, adding that the general who sent it was merely coordinating the message with his Iraqi counterparts ahead of an offi cial notifi cation. On Tuesday, the prime minister said those comments didn’t matter and that he was expecting a timetable laying out the withdrawal.

“They said it’s a draft ,” Abdul-Mahdi said, according to The Washington Post. “OK, it’s a draft — but we received it. … If I don’t trust you and you don’t trust me, how are we supposed to proceed?”

But Esper said that aft er asking aides whether a signed copy of the letter had been delivered to the Iraqi government, he had been told no. “There is no signed letter as far as I know — I’ve asked the question,” he said.

And despite Sunday’s vote, the Pentagon hasn’t received any formal withdrawal request from Abdul-Mahdi, Esper said.

“I haven’t received any communication from him or the Iraqi government about the legislation or about a request to withdraw U.S. forces,” he said, adding that the parliamentary resolution was “nonbinding” and that “there’s a few procedural mechanisms — hurdles if you will — that the Iraqi government would need to go through, and we remain in constant contact with them on that.”

Esper spoke briefl y about the strike on Soleimani, saying attacks that the Iranian general

were preparing in collaboration with Iraqi Shiite militia allies were only “days” from being carried out.

“I think it’s more fair to say days,” he answered when asked whether the attacks were days or weeks away. “He was clearly on the battlefi eld. He was conducting, preparing, planning military operations. We reached the point where we had to act in self-defense.”

Esper wouldn’t describe the intelligence that led the Pentagon to that conclusion, though, saying only that it was “exquisite” and will be shared Tuesday aft ernoon with the congressional “Gang of Eight” — the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate and House, along with the chairs and ranking minority members of the intelligence committees — but won’t be included in broader briefi ng to lawmakers on Wednesday due to its classifi cation.

Esper also downplayed the importance of departures of some allied troops from Iraq, saying that in one case, an allied contingent was temporarily repositioned only because of the need “to move additional U.S. forces into a confi ned space” that the allied troops were occupying on an Iraqi base.

Germany and Canada on Tuesday announced that they are relocating some of their forces from Iraq, moves that

they described as temporary and related to security concerns over an anticipated Iranian response.

“We are doing some of that as well,” Esper said of the precautionary movements. “It does not mark or signal any withdrawal from Iraq.”

— Wesley Morgan

Pompeo says U.S. will abide by laws of war after Trump suggests targeting Iranian cultural sitesSecretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday insisted that any retaliatory measures by U.S. forces against Iran would abide by the laws of war, aft er President Donald Trump suggested he might target the Islamic Republic’s cultural sites — a move critics said could amount to a war crime.

“Every target that’s being reviewed, every eff ort that’s being made will always be conducted inside the international laws of war,” Pompeo told reporters during a news conference at the State Department. I’ve “seen it, I’ve worked on this project, and I’m very confi dent of that.”

Amid rapidly escalating tensions between Washington and Tehran aft er the killing of Iran’s top military commander last week in a U.S. drone strike, Trump tweeted Saturday that his administration had homed in on 52 Iranian sites — including some “important to … the Iranian culture” — in the event that

the Islamic Republic attacked American interests.

Congressional Democrats and international leaders ranging from Iran’s foreign minister to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson have warned that such an assault would represent a violation of international conventions of warfare and constitute a war crime by the U.S. government.

Trump defended his suggestion Sunday, telling reporters aboard Air Force One: “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”

Defense Secretary Mark Esper broke with the president over his proposal Monday, asserting that the Pentagon would “follow the laws of armed confl ict” in its response to Iran.

Asked Tuesday by NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell whether he would “also push back” against the targeting of culturally signifi cant sites, Pompeo replied indignantly.

“You’re not really wondering, Andrea. You’re not really wondering,” he said, adding that “every action we take will be consistent with the international rule of law, and the American people can rest assured that that’s the case.”

Pompeo went on to argue

that it was the regime of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, not the U.S., that has “done damage to the Persian culture,” which he described as “rich and steeped in history and intellect.”

“They’ve denied the capacity for that culture to continue,” Pompeo said, concluding: “The real risk to Persian culture does not come from the United States of America. There is no mistake about that.”

— Quint Forgey

O’Brien says Soleimani was conspiring to attack U.S. facilitiesNational security adviser Robert O’Brien on Tuesday defended the intelligence the administration used to justify its killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, claiming Tehran’s top military commander had been devising attacks on U.S. facilities that endangered the lives of American diplomats and service members.

“The president has always made it his fi rst priority to protect American citizens, and the intel that we had, the information we had — which we believe was very strong — shows that Soleimani and those he was plotting with were looking to kill American diplomats and soldiers in signifi cant numbers in the coming days,” O’Brien told “Fox & Friends.”

Administration offi cials have thus far off ered only vague details about the classifi ed evidence that precipitated President Donald Trump’s order last week to launch a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad’s international airport targeting Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite paramilitary Quds Force.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday that Soleimani “was actively plotting in the region to take actions — big action, as he described it — that would have put dozens if not hundreds of American lives at risk.” The intelligence community assessed that “the risk of doing nothing was enormous,” he added.

O’Brien reiterated the administration’s position Tuesday, insisting Soleimani “was in the midst of that plotting” at the time of his demise.

“That’s why he was traveling in the region to Damascus and Beirut and Baghdad: To conspire with people to attack American facilities that contained diplomats, soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, coast guardsmen,” O’Brien said.

Democratic lawmakers have expressed skepticism toward the intelligence behind the airstrike against Soleimani and the administration’s assertion that he posed an imminent threat to American interests.

The White House is working to schedule a briefi ng on the strike Wednesday for the so-called Gang of Eight congressional leaders and other members of Congress, who were largely kept in the dark regarding Trump’s decision to authorize the assault.

— Quint Forgey

SUSAN WALSH/AP

The repercussions of snowSnow falls at the White House on Tuesday. Th e Offi ce of Personnel Management closed federal agencies in the Washington metropolitan area at 1 p.m. Tuesday because of the anticipated snow in the forecast and many schools in the region also closed early. “A cheer for the snow — the drift ing snow! Smoother and purer than beauty’s brow!” — Eliza Cook.

A daily diary of the Trump presidency

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Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley said Tuesday that an im-peachment trial in the Senate could delay a vote on the new North American trade deal by a month.

He said he is still hopeful that a delay by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on sending over the articles of impeachment could give the up-

per chamber time to vote on the agreement.

“If I want to speculate, they don’t come over for another week or 10 days and then we’ve got time to get this done,” the Iowa Republican said before a committee markup of a bill that would implement the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The process could be further

complicated by a procedural move that would require the bill to be re-ferred for approval by a number of other committees that have juris-diction over issues included in the agreement.

“T hat’s something I wasn’t aware of until yesterday, and I think that’s going to be a problem,” Grassley said.

BY ADAM BEHSUDI

Grassley: Impeachment could delaySenate vote on USMCA by a month

President Donald Trump will be in New Jersey on Jan. 28 for a rally in the district represented by the newly minted Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew.

According to the Trump cam-paign, the rally is scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Wildwoods Convention Center.

Van Drew is not mentioned on the invitation, but he has told local media outlets he expected Trump to come to the 2nd District.

Michael Glassner, chief operat-ing officer for the Trump campaign, said in a statement that “President Trump looks forward to returning to the Garden State to celebrate his message of ‘Promises Made, Prom-ises Kept.’”

Trump is the reason Van Drew, a longtime ally of the South Jersey Democratic machine, became a Republican. The freshman House member, who as a conservative Democrat served nearly two de-cades in the New Jersey Legislature before being elected to Congress in 2018, was one of only two Demo-cratic House members to oppose impeaching the president.

Va n Drew’s friend ly sta nce toward Trump caused support for him among Democrats in the South Jersey district to collapse, according to internal polling. Party leaders across the state also began abandoning him.

At a White House event with Trump to announce his switch to the GOP, Van Drew pledged his “undying support” to the president.

Van Drew has three Republican opponents in the June primary, but some GOP leaders in the district have signaled a willingness to back Van Drew after Trump endorsed him. The three GOP opponents —

David Richter, Brian Fitzherbert and Bob Patterson — have so far refused to drop out of the race.

Six Democratic candidates have either said they’re running or have filed paperwork to declare their candidacies. On Monday, Amy Kennedy — the wife of former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Is-land — became the latest Democrat to join the race.

The 2nd District, which spans all or parts of eight counties from the Delaware River to the Atlantic Ocean, includes Philadelphia sub-urbs, farmland, beaches and Atlan-tic City. It voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and for Trump in 2016. Moderate Republican Frank LoBiondo represented it for 24 years before retiring in 2019.

The district is also unique for New Jersey, where backlash to Trump’s style and policies helped fuel a Democratic wave in 2018 that flipped several congressional seats from Republican to Democratic control. Van Drew won his seat as part of that wave, defeating by a relatively narrow margin an un-derfunded pro-Trump Republican who posted white supremacist pro-paganda on social media.

BY MATT FRIEDMAN

Trump will attend rallyfor Van Drew on Jan. 28

EVAN VUCCI/AP

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, now a Republican, was one of two House Democrats who opposed impeaching the president.

Rep. Duncan Hunter will step down from Congress next week, more than a month after the Cali-fornia Republican pleaded guilty to conspiracy to misuse campaign funds.

Hunter had said he would leave Congress after the holidays. His resignation will take effect Jan. 13, according to a copy of a letter he sent to Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday.

“Perhaps the contribution I am most proud of is giving a voice to our men and women in uniform,” wrote Hunter, a Marine veteran. “It has been an honor to serve the people of California’s 50th district, and I greatly appreciate the trust they have put in me over these last 11 years.”

Hunter, 43, and his wife, Mar-garet, were indicted in August 2018 for diverting $250,000 in campaign funds for personal use, including to pay for lavish fam-ily vacations and their children’s school tuition. Prosecutors also accused Hunter of using campaign

cash to pursue extramarital af-fairs with lobbyists and congres-sional aides.

The Hunters, who have three children, face recommended prison sentences of 8 to 14 months in the agreements worked out by their lawyers and the Justice Depart-ment, although the court is not bound to abide by those plea deals. Hunter is set to be sentenced on March 17.

The legal cloud that has hung over Hunter has prompted other Republicans to seek his seat in the solidly conservative district in Southern California. Both former San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio and former Rep. Darrell Issa are running for the seat, and Issa said he jumped into the race under the assumption that Hunter would not be on the ballot in No-vember. Democrats are also heavily targeting the district.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom does not have to call a special elec-tion because the nomination period has closed and it’s an election year, raising the prospect that the seat

could remain vacant for the rest of 2020.

“The people of the 5oth Congres-sional District deserve their voice in Congress restored,” DeMaio said in a statement. “Leaving the 50th Congressional District vacant for a full year is wholly unacceptable, and I urge Gov. Gavin Newsom to call a Special Election as soon as possible.”

Hunter’s resignation represents the end of an era for his family, who have been a political dynasty in Southern California politics for decades. Hunter or his father, Dun-can Hunter Sr., have held that San Diego seat since 1980.

When he first came to Congress in 2009, the younger Hunter was seen as something as a young ris-ing star in the GOP. But he devel-oped a reputation on Capitol Hill for drinking heavily and carousing, and after his indictment, he was stripped of his committee assign-ments, essentially making him a pariah on Capitol Hill.

But despite being arrested for misusing campaign funds, Hunter — one of Trump’s earliest con-gressional supporters — went on to win reelection in the 2018 midterms.

BY MELANIE ZANONA

Rep. Duncan Hunter to resignfrom Congress on Jan. 13The California Republican had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to misuse campaign funds

SANDY HUFFAKER/GETTY IMAGES

The resignation of Rep. Duncan Hunter (center) is the end of an era for his family, a political dynasty in Southern California politics. Hunter or his dad have held the San Diego congressional seat since 1980.



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In recent days, one aide to Presi-dent Donald Trump has blitzed the media to talk about troop deploy-ments, deterrence and the likeli-hood of American bombs raining down on Iranian soil.

It’s not the man who leads the Pentagon.

Instead, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has seized the spotlight amid the escalating U.S. confronta-tion with Iran. While doing so, he’s come across to some observers as an unofficial secretary of Defense, overshadowing the actual Defense secretary.

Pompeo’s omnipresence illus-trates the extraordinary influence he wields in Trump’s inner circle three years into the Republican president’s tenure.

His prestige within the admin-istration has been enhanced by multiple leadership changes at the Pentagon and National Se-curity Council. It has continued despite questions about his role in the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s impeachment and amid questions about his political aspi-rations. And it has raised eyebrows at the Defense Department, which is led by Mark Esper, a former West Point classmate of Pompeo’s who has kept a relatively low profile in his six months on the job.

Pompeo is “first among equals in the national security team, and others defer to him,” said Tom Wright, a Brookings Institution scholar who has been tracking the Trump team’s dynamics. “He doesn’t have a competing center of power.”

Pompeo appeared on all the ma-jor talk shows on Sunday to field a slew of tough questions about the Trump administration’s decision to kill Qassem Soleimani, a power-ful Iranian general whom U.S. offi-cials blame for attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and terrorist opera-tions elsewhere around the world.

A longtime Iran hawk, Pompeo fiercely defended the strike, which took out Soleimani as he was visit-ing Baghdad, even as it has led to vows of Iranian revenge and calls from Iraqi politicians for U.S. forces to withdraw. Pompeo, who graduated first in the class of 1986 at West Point, sounded more like a swaggering military leader than America’s top diplomat.

“We took a bad guy off the battle-field. We made the right decision. There is less risk today to Ameri-can forces in the region as a result of that attack,” Pompeo said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“Previous administrations had allowed Shiite militias to take shots at us, and at best, we responded in theater, trying to challenge and at-tack everybody who was running around with an AK-47 or a piece of indirect artillery,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We’ve made a very different approach.”

Aides to Pompeo did not re-spond to a request for comment. But a Trump administration offi-cial defended Esper in comments offered after this story was first

published. The official noted that under his leadership, the Penta-gon “flawlessly” carried out the strike against the Iranian general and said the secretary’s low profile over the past several days has been intentional.

“The administration chose to put Secretary Pompeo, the chief dip-lomat, out to de-escalate tensions and make room for negotiations,“ the official said, speaking on condi-tion of anonymity. “Secretary Es-per has worked diligently to keep [the Department of Defense] out of politics. Your metric — Sunday show appearances — uses the most political media metric available to judge influence. It is the exact op-posite of what DOD does.“

The secretary of Defense did ap-pear in the media in the hours ahead of last week‘s strike on Soleimani. He told reporters on Thursday that the United States “will take pre-emptive action as well to protect American forces,” warning Iran that “the game has changed.”

And he popped up on Monday to clarify that U.S. troops were not planning to leave Iraq, despite an unsigned letter suggesting oth-erwise on the letterhead of a U.S. Marine Corps brigadier general.

But otherwise, Esper, who served in the 101st Airborne Division dur-ing the first Gulf War, has largely vanished from sight.

Given the dangerous situation in the Middle East, his absence has led to griping among some military reporters, who’ve also long com-plained about the dearth of news briefings at the Pentagon.

Former military officials and others who track the Defense De-partment say Esper appears to have made the calculation that it’s best to stay behind the scenes in an ad-ministration in which few people have Trump’s ear, and where any-thing you say could be easily un-

dermined by a presidential tweet moments later.

Plus, Esper, a former Capitol Hill staffer and lobbyist for de-fense contractor Raytheon, took over as Defense secretary with a thinner executive branch résumé than many of his predecessors. And while he can point to his time as an infantry officer and at West Point, some Pentagon watchers wonder whether even that is helping Pom-peo overshadow him.

Several people from the 1986 West Point class hold key admin-istration positions. Because he was first in that class, Pentagon observers say it’s possible that oth-ers from that class take a back seat to Pompeo.

“The worry at the Pentagon is that [Esper] defers to Pompeo,” said Mark Perry, author of “The Pentagon’s Wars: The Military’s Undeclared War Against America’s Presidents.” He said there were other reasons for that beyond the West Point dynamics, including that “Pompeo has the president’s ear and Esper doesn’t.”

Pompeo is one of the few Trump aides able to deal with tough me-dia questions without showing any personal differences with the president — even if that means his answers are sometimes mislead-ing. And Trump clearly trusts him.

“I argue with everyone,” Trump said in a 2018 account in New York magazine. “Except Pompeo. … I don’t think I’ve had an argument with Pompeo!”

A senior Trump administration official confirmed that it was the White House that requested Pom-peo appear on the Sunday shows. Because he is passionate about the issue of Iran — U.S. diplomats say he gets deep into the weeds on the topic — he requires little prep work.

But the latest Iran crisis isn’t the first time Pompeo’s actions have

startled Pentagon officials.On June 18, in an odd move for a

secretary of State, Pompeo traveled to Florida to meet with leaders of U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command. The meet-ings focused in part on Iran, which the U.S. was accusing of attacking international oil tankers.

But the visit also came the same day the president withdrew the nomination of acting Defense Sec-retary Patrick Shanahan to serve in the role on a permanent basis.

Shanahan’s nomination was shelved after some family troubles came to light. His withdrawal was another low point for the Penta-gon, which had already seen Jim Mattis quit as Defense secretary after the president in late 2018 ordered the withdrawal of troops from Syria.

Pompeo said the purpose of his Florida visit was to “make sure that the State Department and the De-partment of Defense were deeply coordinated across a whole broad range of issues.” But, according to Perry, the visit “still roils” some military officials.

A former senior Pentagon official called the visit to POLITICO “a very unusual way for a secretary of State to spend an entire day,” not least because he could have gotten simi-lar briefings at the Pentagon itself.

While he was in Florida, some in the Washington foreign policy establishment wondered whether he was auditioning to be the next secretary of Defense. (Pompeo’s first job with Trump was as CIA director.)

Even at the State Department, Pompeo, who served as an Army cavalry officer after West Point, of-ten takes a military-style approach. He refers to his diplomats’ having a “mission set” and tells his “team” to “keep crushing it.”

People who know him say his

military training appears to in-fluence his willingness to defend Trump in public and implement whatever the president — the com-mander in chief — wants.

In his first major address to his workforce after he became secre-tary of State in 2018, Pompeo raised the military concept of “com-mander’s intent” in pledging to craft a vision for what he wanted to achieve. The concept describes the end state a commander seeks so that his troops can do what they need to get there.

Some in the military world dow nplayed quest ions about whether, in staying below the ra-dar, Esper and the Pentagon were ceding anything to Pompeo.

Pentagon officials are busy deal-ing with the technicalities of ramp-ing up the U.S. troop presence in the Middle East amid threats of repri-sal from Iran. Esper needs to focus more on that than public relations, they argued.

“It goes more to the relation-ship between Pompeo and Trump than any sort of emasculation of the Pentagon,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired U.S. Army colonel. “The Pentagon leaders realize they need to stay under the radar and get on with their business.”

Another former Pentagon official pointed to critiques that over the past two decades — especially af-ter the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks – the Department of Defense has taken an outsize role in setting the U.S. foreign policy agenda.

He acknowledged that the State Department remains a weak insti-tution under Trump, who views it with suspicion as stronghold for Democrats. But the former official said it was refreshing to see the top U.S. diplomat out front on an issue of international relations.

“Isn’t this more of a restoration of the way the system is supposed to work?” he asked.

Pompeo’s willingness to be so in public also might have to do with politics as much as policy.

The former Kansas congressman is believed to have ambitions to run for office again someday, though the latest indications are that he won’t make a run for the Senate this year. Republicans view him as a potential White House contender in 2024. Getting face time on national television helps, especially when he can sound tough on a country loathed by many in the GOP base.

Also unusual for a secretary of State, Pompeo often takes indirect partisan shots.

For instance, he has used his re-cent platform to blame the Obama administration for the challenges in dealing with Iran today. On Sun-day, he described it as the “Obama-Biden” administration, referring to former vice president Joe Biden, a leading contender against Trump in this year’s presidential race.

Pompeo also stressed the scope of his relationship with the president.

“I’ve been with President Trump through the entire strategic plan-ning process related to our entire campaign — diplomatic, economic and military,” he said on CNN, adding later: “The American peo-ple should know that we will not waiver.”

Wesley Morgan contributed to this report.

BY NAHAL TOOSI

Is Mike Pompeo acting as de facto Defense secretary?Secretary of State hasassumed an outsizerole on the president’snational security team

JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has taken a top role in the Iran confrontation, not just as the administration’s face on the Sunday shows but by meeting with leaders of Central Command and Special Operations Command.



CNN’s Jake Tapper says he thinks often of the Bush administration’s much-discredited admonition, “We can’t wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Washington Post editor Marty Baron says flatly, “Most of the press wasn’t aggressive enough in questioning the premise for the Iraq War.”

Joh n Wa lcott, t he onet i me Knight-Ridder bureau chief cred-ited for ordering skeptical coverage of U.S. claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs, says he believes the media has finally learned the lessons of 2003.

But even if memories of the run-up to the Iraq War have led to heightened vigilance in some news-rooms, it’s unclear whether the me-dia’s efforts to fact-check the Trump administration’s claim that an “im-minent threat” justified its decision to order the killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani are making an impact. A lot has changed since 2003. The government’s power to frame the public debate has been only strengthened by the advent of social media and the rise of ideologi-cal outlets, while the media’s abil-ity to control and sustain a narrative has diminished accordingly.

Officials’ claims are often ampli-fied in headlines and cable chyrons — “Pompeo: Soleimani Was Not In Baghdad On A Peace Mission,” read a Tuesday Fox News graphic — even if they are challenged later in greater detail. The president’s mes-sage was splashed across MSNBC hours later — “Trump: We Saved Lives By Killing Soleimani,” read a chryon — during a segment with an analyst expressing fears about the U.S. being led to war.

And Trump can also circumvent any questioning from the White House press corps, which hasn’t had a formal briefing with the press secretary in more than 300 days.

The president defended the killing to millions on Monday on Rush Lim-baugh’s radio show and has wielded his Twitter megaphone to his nearly 70 million followers to make addi-tional unchecked claims about Iran and further threats. “Without Twit-ter, I think we’d be lost,” Trump told Limbaugh. “We wouldn’t be able to get the truth out.”

The president’s ability to shape public opinion without offering any evidence of an “imminent threat” so angered New York Times colum-nist Paul Krugman that he urged the media to dismiss Trump’s claims entirely until he provides more facts.

“The media and the public are far less gullible now than they were [in 2003], but even now there’s a tendency to take administration claims at face value, or at least semi-seriously,” Krugman wrote in his newsletter. “Don’t do this. Lies don’t stop at the water’s edge. Administrations that are dishon-est about domestic policy tend to be dishonest about foreign policy too. And while the Bush administration lied a lot, Trump and company lie about everything.”

The fact that the administration has argued that it has intelligence to back up its assertions – but just hasn’t shared it with the public – is one clear parallel with 2003. That means that even if news organiza-tions are quick to point to the lack of evidence, they still feel obliged to give voice to the administration’s claims.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered confident assurances of the strength of Trump’s argument that the attack on Soleimani was defensive in nature — not an “as-sassination,” as some reporters and analysts argue — while appearing on six networks on Sunday, barely f linching under often-critical questioning. Both the Times and the Post have run stories quoting White House sources as suggest-ing the evidence of the threat posed

by Soleimani was, in the words of a tweet by the Times’ Rukmini Cal-limachi, “razor thin.”

But their reporters continue to quote the official line, as well.

In a quadruple-bylined story leading Sunday’s issue, the Times reported that “some officials voiced private skepticism about the ratio-nale for a strike on General Solei-mani, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops over the years.” One U.S. official told the newspaper that the Trump administration’s new intel-ligence was essentially “business as usual” for Soleimani and didn’t suggest an imminent threat.

That deeply reported follow-up story, however, appeared to receive less Facebook interactions than two

of the Times’ initial accounts on the killing, according to statistics pro-vided by social media monitoring service NewsWhip.

Several of the biggest stories on Facebook since the killing have fo-cused on troop deployments, while a story from British outlet The Mir-ror about an “unidentified eulogist” at Soleimani’s funeral putting an $80 million bounty on Trump’s head had the most interactions. (Fact-checking site Snopes notes that the bounty “is not yet known to have been authorized by, or repre-sent the official position of, Iranian authorities.”)

Despite the signs of faltering at-tention by readers, news leaders in-sist they will continue to pursue the truth about the alleged “imminent threat” and will not shift focus as events unfold, as they say happened

in 2003.“With a few rare exceptions,”

Tapper said ruefully in a POLITICO interview, “the media drank the Kool-Aid in the buildup to the war in Iraq and too many people didn’t do their jobs.”

In case anyone wondered wheth-er there were any red-rimmed Di-xie cups in the CNN newsroom this time around, the network high-lighted Pompeo’s lack of specifics Tuesday morning with a chyron: “Pompeo Defends Soleimani Kill-ing; Trump Admin Yet To Offer Evidence of ‘Imminent Threat.’”

Baron said in a statement to POLITICO that “Throughout the history of this country, there has been vigorous public debate about our foreign policy, especially our

involvement in wars. That’s what a democracy looks like … The high-est responsibility of the press is to report thoroughly, vigorously and probingly when this country’s leaders take actions that can put the lives of American troops and others at risk.”

And Walcott — whose former Knight Ridder team was lionized in the 2018 film “Shock and Awe” — believes he’s detected a shift in the right direction.

“I think that although that was nearly two decades ago, a lot of reporters at the Times, the Post and elsewhere now recognize that our job as reporters is not to ac-cept what the government says about matters of war and peace — or anything else — at face value,” he wrote in an email to POLITICO.

Indeed, governments of both

parties have misled the public dur-ing wartime, as the “Pentagon Pa-pers” revealed during the Vietnam War or as the “Afghanistan Papers” reiterated just last month. The Iran crisis presents a unique dilemma in terms of trusting information from the government as the president has made more than 15,000 false or misleading claims in office.

Since the killing of Soleimani, there has been a push in the news media “to find out if there’s any credible intelligence to support the Trump administration’s claim that another, larger attack on Americans in Iraq was ‘imminent,’” said Wal-cott, now a contributing editor at Time, “as well as the extensive ex-aminations of whether escalating tensions with Iran will make Amer-

icans and others safer or less safe.”In a quadruple-bylined story of

its own Sunday night, the Post re-ported that Pompeo urged Trump last summer to strike Iran, which the president opted not to do, and more specifically spoke to him about killing Soleimani several months ago. “Some defense of-ficials said Pompeo’s claims of an imminent and direct threat were overstated,” according to the Post, “and they would prefer that he make the case based on the killing of the American contractor and previous Iranian provocations.”

Pompeo did mention the killing of the contractor, which has been blamed on an Iranian-backed mi-litia, on the Sunday news shows, while asserting that Soleimani posed an imminent threat, a con-tention that hosts drilled down on.

“When will the American people know why President Trump de-cided to do what he did?” asked Margaret Brennan of “Face The Nation” on CBS.

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace asked, “Don’t the Ameri-can people have the right to some understanding of what it was, why it was so urgent to take out Solei-mani now?”

“When you say the attacks were imminent, how imminent were they?” Tapper asked Pompeo on “State of the Union.” “Are we talking about days? Are we talk-ing about weeks?”

Tapper acknowledged the next day that “it’s not fun when people insinuate you don’t love your coun-try because your job is to question our leaders, but that’s the job.”

While journalists are press-ing the government for answers, James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who notably clashed with his former editors at The New York Times in trying to get more skeptical pre-Iraq reporting in the paper, said he still worries that the Trump administration is setting the agenda.

“You can see it already when Trump and the people around him kept saying there was an imminent threat and that’s why they had to go after Soleimani,” Risen said in an interview. “That’s the kind of thing that they kept saying before the war in Iraq. It’s always difficult to fight back against that.”

Risen — who is currently a se-nior national correspondent at The Intercept, where he and others re-cently revealed secret files show-ing Iran’s strong influence in Iraq — said the broader issue for the me-dia to grapple with is why the U.S. government “is murdering a foreign government official at a time when there’s still an assassination ban on the books.”

Some news organizations, like The Associated Press, acknowl-edged mostly refraining from de-scribing the killing of Soleimani as an “assassination because it would require that the news service de-cide that the act was a murder, and because the term is politically freighted.”

Risen said avoiding that word is “cowardly” and likened it to news organizations using descriptions like “enhanced” or “harsh” inter-rogation when covering Bush-era torture techniques.

“It’s a silly debate,” Risen said. “It’s an assassination.”

BY MICHAEL CALDERONE

Can the news media manage the Iran narrative?Outlets vow to makeup for errors of 2003,but U.S. still controlstoo much information

ERFAN KOUCHARI/TASNIM NEWS AGENCY VIA AP

The president’s claims without offering evidence that Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani posed an “imminent threat” so angered columnist Paul Krugman that he urged the media to dismiss the claims until facts are provided.

“The media and the public are far less gullible now than they were [in 2003], but even now there’s a tendency to take administration claims at face value, or

at least semi-seriously. Don’t do this. Lies don’t stop at the water’s edge.”— New York Times columnist Paul Krugman



The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, said Tuesday it would reschedule next week’s presidential primary debate in Iowa if the televised event conflicts with President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate.

“Democrats a nd ou r sen a-tors can walk and chew gum,” Perez told MSNBC. “Obviously, if there’s a trial on the 14th, then we’ll move the debate. If there’s not, then we’re going to have the debate. At the moment, all systems are go, and so we’re going to move forward.”

Three of the five presidential candidates to have qualified thus far for the debate next Tuesday at Drake University in Des Moines, co-hosted by CNN and The Des Moines Register, are senators: Amy Klobu-char of Minnesota, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Also slated to participate are

former Vice President Joe Biden and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.

The potential for a forthcom-

ing impeachment trial has com-plicated the plans of the Demo-cratic senators competing for their party’s presidential nomi-

nation, who will act as Trump’s jurors and therefore be sidelined from their campaigns during the proceedings less than a month be-fore the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses.

But the Democratic candidates vying to challenge the president in November “are very agile, just as the American people are agile,” Perez said.

“You know, families across this country walk and chew gum every day,” he said. “They take care of their kids. They feed the family. They pay the bills. And they want to make sure that their Congress is doi ng the sa me th i ng, a nd our candidates will do the same thing.”

The remarks from the party chairman break with a less defini-tive statement from Xochitl Hino-josa, the DNC’s communications director, who previously said that if “a conflict with an impeachment trial is unavoidable, the DNC will evaluate its options and work with

all the candidates to accommodate them.”

The DNC had declined to com-ment when asked whether the qualification deadline on Friday would be pushed back if the de-bate were postponed because of the trial.

Although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has yet to send to the Sen-ate the articles of impeachment charging Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Con-gress, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has secured sufficient support from his GOP caucus to approve a framework of rules governing a trial in the chamber.

House Democrats had with-held the impeachment articles in an attempt to add leverage to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s negotiations with Mc-Connell over the trial’s rules and because of concerns about bias toward the White House among Senate Republicans.

BY QUINT FORGEY

DNC to reschedule debate if it conflicts with impeachment trial

M. SCOTT MAHASKEY/POLITICO

“Democrats and our senators can walk and chew gum,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez (center) said. “At the moment, all systems are go.”

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is planning to drop $10 million to advertise during the Super Bowl, the start of a mas-sive election-year spending spree that will intensify over the coming months, according to four people briefed on the plans.

The campaign has purchased 60 seconds of commercial time dur-ing the Feb. 2 Super Bowl, which is likely to be the most-watched television event of the year. The ad or ads — it’s unclear whether there will be a single 60-second spot or a pair of 30-second commercials — are expected to run early in the game, when viewership is likely to be at its highest.

With the investment, the Trump campaign is dipping into a deep war chest it has amassed over the past year. The reelection effort and the Republican National Committee announced last week that they raised a combined $463 million in 2019 and had nearly $200 million on hand.

The Super Bowl advertising, coming a day before the Iowa Democratic caucuses, is part of a broader spending effort. Starting this month, campaign aides say, the campaign intends to increase its TV, radio and digital advertising.

It also has plans to spend millions of dollars to reach key voting blocs, including women, evangelicals, La-tinos and African Americans. The Trump campaign recently launched an aggressive effort to woo black voters, taking out ads on African American-owned radio stations and newspapers.

“The president’s decision to stay aggressive and keep the campaign open after his first election gave us a huge head start on his reelec-tion,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement,

referring to the president’s an-nouncement within days of his 2017 inauguration that he would seek re-election. “Now, 300 days out, we are throttling up. The president has built an awesome, high-per-formance, omnichannel machine and it’s time to give it some gas.”

This won’t be the first time the

campaign advertises during a ma-jor sporting event. The reelection campaign ran commercials during last year’s World Series declaring that Trump is “no Mr. Nice Guy, but sometimes it takes a Donald Trump to change Washington.”

Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg has also purchased $10

million in Super Bowl advertising time, an aide to the billionaire Democratic candidate said. The spots are expected to go after the president’s. The New York Times first reported Bloomberg’s plans.

Trump aides said they’re still de-termining the content of the Super Bowl advertising. They are plan-

ning on rolling out the ad via text message to supporters in the days before the game, with the hopes of building their supporter list.

The Trump campaign has been in talks with Fox, which is airing the game, since the fall and reserved the advertising time in December. It will be paying for it this month.

BY ALEX ISENSTADT

Trump kicks off 2020 with $10M Super Bowl ad buyThe president and theRNC raised $493M in2019 and are readyto put it to use in 2020

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

President Donald Trump’s Super Bowl ad or ads — it’s unclear whether he will have a single 60-second spot or a pair of 30-second commercials — are expected to run early in the game, when viewership is likely to be at its highest. Mike Bloomberg also has purchased $10 million in Super Bowl ad time.



DAVENPORT, IOWA — The new year is taking the presidential primary to a dark place in the nation’s first caucus state.

President Donald Trump’s im-pending impeachment trial and fear of war with Iran — as well as the Australia wildfires and their implications for climate change — quickly cast a pall over a con-test in which Democrats are al-ready wracked with uncertainty about which candidate has the best chance of defeating Trump.

All across Iowa hangs an air of heightened distress, which the candidates are readily leaning into.

“I tell you all these things not to get you nervous, but to get you depressed,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, speaking about climate change, said at a town hall meeting in Grundy Center, Iowa, over the weekend.

Hours later in Des Moines, it was Joe Biden describing the state of Trump’s presidency more broadly as “extremely, extremely worri-some.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren ad-monished supporters in Davenport that “this is a time of crisis in this country.”

Democrats have fretted for more than a year about how to choose a nominee. And for those who loathe

Trump, the imperative to remove him from office has remained high since the minute he won election in 2016.

But many Democrats did not suspect a year ago that the final stage of the campaign would begin with open conversations about the prospect of World War III. Or an impeached president.

Standing in the photo line at a raucous Warren event Sunday, a high school senior said he worried about his friends being deployed to the Middle East. The Iowa Starting Line news site reported that during a single day campaigning with Sen. Amy Klobuchar recently, attendees at three separate events had “com-pared Trump to Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany.”

At a Biden event at the minor league baseball stadium in Daven-port, a man asked, “Can America survive Trump in office for another year?”

A collection of answers rang out from around the room: “No.” And before Biden addressed the crowd, Scott County Supervisor Ken Cro-ken cast the weight of the upcoming caucuses in equally somber terms.

“It’s my experience that people act for one of two reasons,” he said. “One, something good will happen if they do, or two, something ter-

rible will happen if they don’t. This year, in the 2020 election, we actu-ally have both.”

He said, “I fear that our democ-racy will not survive four more years of the imperial Trump presi-dency with his lack of understand-ing and respect for the Constitu-tion.” He said he feared the planet might not survive, either.

The turn of the calendar — and the abrupt reminder of what Cro-

ken called Iowa’s “truly awesome responsibility” of caucusing — has done little to improve the state’s mood. In fact, impeachment and the developments in Iran appear to have exacerbated voters’ anxiety about their indecisiveness on an alternative to Trump.

Sanders, Biden and Pete Butti-gieg are locked in a three-way tie in Iowa, each with 23 percent support,

followed by Warren at 16 percent, according to the most recent CBS News poll.

In addition, Iowans still aren’t sure — after more than a year watching candidates here — that any of them can beat Trump. Asked to describe the candidates’ chances of defeating the Republican presi-dent, pluralities of Democrats said Sanders, Biden, Warren and But-tigieg can “maybe” win the gen-eral election, according to the poll. Fewer than 40 percent of Demo-crats say any of those candidates “probably would win.”

“I think [Trump] has an excel-lent chance of being reelected, no matter what,” said Tracy Freese, Democratic Party chairwoman in Grundy County, where she intro-duced Sanders at a town hall over the weekend. “There are plenty of Democrats who are realistic.”

The darkening mood has not changed enthusiasm for the elec-tion itself — even if it is tinged with anguish. Crowds in recent days were still jamming into cof-fee shops, community centers and high school gymnasiums to cheer their candidates.

But even energetic caucusgo-ers can have frayed nerves. Some Democrats worry an escalating conflict with Iran could help Trump politically. And despite projections for record caucus turnout, some party officials remain unsure what to expect.

“Are we too wide of a field still that people are turned off by that?” Freese asked. “Or are we so fired up because of things like impeachment and Iran, now … are we so fired up that we will turn out even harder to caucus? I have no idea.”

At least some of the electorate’s shifting mood can be attributed to the calendar. Iowans become more serious about the caucuses as they draw closer every election cycle, said Roxanne Conlin, a former United States attorney and former candidate for governor and Senate in Iowa. And the “mortal danger” posed by Trump, she said, has long been on Democrats’ minds.

Still, said Conlin, a Klobuchar supporter: “The Iran decision, if you can call it that — oh, my God.”

Biden frequently warns audi-ences that eight years of Trump will “fundamentally change the char-acter of the nation.” In the audi-ence at one of his recent events, the man who asked whether the United States could survive a second term of Trump’s presidency suggested that recognizing the urgency of re-placing him isn’t the problem — and never has been.

“People sense that urgency, but they don’t know the solution,” said Bruce Peterson, a canoe builder.

He said he didn’t know the solu-tion, either. But more than ever be-fore during Trump’s presidency, he said, “These last two months make me apprehensive.”

BY DAVID SIDERS

Sense of foreboding darkens Democratic primaryRecent headlines inspire dread in early state Dems. The candidates are making it worse

STEPHEN MATUREN/GETTY IMAGES

Decorative balloons forming “SOS” at a Bernie Sanders rally in Des Moines exemplify the downbeat message Iowa voters are hearing from Sanders and other Democratic candidates a month before the state’s caucuses. Voters still jam coffee shops and other venues to hear the candidates, but their sense of urgency is now tinged with anguish.

“I fear that our democracy will not survive four more

years of the imperial Trump presidency.”

— Ken CrokenScott County, Iowa, supervisor



The move is the latest exercise of blunt political power by McCon-nell, who since becoming major-ity leader has found myriad ways to sideline Democrats and move his agenda with narrow majori-ties. And the partisan impeachment road isn’t without risk: Republicans are doing little to distance them-selves from the president even on process questions, let alone the ultimate decision of whether to remove Trump from office.

Yet Republicans say Democrats offered them little alternative: Most scoffed at the idea that Schumer could determine what evidence is heard in the Senate. And McCon-nell’s strategy has key backing from the handful of Republican swing votes heading into the trial, though many senators, like Lisa Murkows-ki of Alaska, had hoped Schumer and McConnell could come to an agreement.

“We’ve gotten so snarled up with debate over witnesses that the two leaders haven’t been able to come to terms on this first phase, so it looks like we’ll go forward with a Repub-lican [package],” said Murkowski, who said she would support Mc-Connell’s proposal.

“I’d like to hear from John Bolton and other witnesses to provide in-formation. That process will ac-commodate that. The Clinton pro-cess allows for a vote on witnesses

to occur after opening arguments,” said Utah Sen. Mitt Romney.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has with-held the articles of impeachment since the House voted in Decem-ber to charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Con-gress, in part to push Republicans to agree to fair rules for the trial. The GOP used the delay from the House to get ready to start the clock on the impeachment trial as soon as possible.

“What we’re aspiring to do is to get this process moving forward and indicate to the Democrats that as soon as they send those articles over here, we’re ready to go. Quit stalling,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.).

Fol low i ng McCon nel l’s a n-nouncement, the Senate is in a position to quickly begin the trial — even if it requires steamrolling the 47-member minority. Democrats immediately criticized McConnell

for moving forward without them and without making any promise to hear from witnesses.

“That’s not how you run a coun-try. That’s not how you run the United States Senate,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.).

“That’s regrettable. If I thought McConnell’s offer to bring wit-nesses … was in good faith, I could probably vote to proceed with im-peachment inquiry. I don’t believe that,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-

Conn.). “I don’t think he’s going to bring witnesses. I think this is all a whitewash.”

McConnell and Schumer have been unable to reach a deal on how to run the impeachment trial. And their efforts at negotiations were anemic, boiling down to a 20-min-ute conversation on December that got them no closer to a bipartisan result.

That impasse squashes hopes of repeating the 100-0 vote that

kicked off Clinton’s trial. Those circumstances were in some ways different: The Senate had much more information about Clinton’s impeachment inquiry than it has on Trump given this administra-tion’s all-out effort to block witness testimony and documents from the House.

But McConnell needs only a bare majority to ignore Democrats’ de-mands to subpoena witnesses and documents and instead kick that

decision until later in the trial.Schumer has sought to put pres-

sure on McConnell’s vulnerable senators by raising the question of witnesses and pointing to new emails that have been released showing the president’s involve-ment in the Ukraine scandal. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton said Monday that he would testify before the Senate if subpoenaed. But mod-erate Republicans like Murkowski

and Susan Collins of Maine said they are comfortable with follow-ing the Clinton model and deciding whether to call witnesses later.

Schumer and Democrats will still have opportunities to try to shape the trial. They can force votes on their preferred trial structure, which they believe will put vul-nerable Republicans in a bind. And they could in theory succeed if more senators like Romney decide they need to hear new evidence.

“I know that I’ll want to hear from witnesses,” Romney said.

Pelosi could deliver the articles of impeachment as soon as this week. While she did not secure any con-cessions from McConnell — who said Democrats were grasping onto “mythical leverage” — the party did briefly win new scrutiny on GOP vows to coordinate closely with the White House.

Now after the long holiday break and still no additional response from Pelosi, Republicans are eager to get moving.

The House “wasn’t pushing for the witnesses like they should. So why the heck did they expect we’re going to jump all over it now?” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is up for reelection. Pelosi is playing a political game right now and she’s losing.”

John Bresnahan contributed to this report.

McConnell pushes to set impeachment trial rulesTRIAL from page 1

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reiterated his pledge to force votes on witnesses and documents ahead of the upcoming impeachment trial, but his demands so far have been spurned by Mitch McConnell. The majority leader says the Senate will “get around to the discussion of witnesses,” but not before the Senate trial begins.

“If I thought McConnell’s offer to bring witnesses … was in good faith, I could probably vote to proceed with impeachment inquiry.

I don’t believe that. … I think this is all a whitewash.”— Sen. Chris Murphy



told his colleagues of his plans at the GOP’s weekly lunch, he went out and told a media horde the same.

“We have the votes,” McConnell declared, meaning Republicans can start the Trump trial with no Dem-ocratic input once Speaker Nancy Pelosi sends over the articles of impeachment.

Under the tentative rules pack-age, which is the same as those used in President Bill Clinton’s 1999 Senate trial, the House will be al-lowed to present its case against Trump and then the president’s defense team will respond. At that point, McConnell or any GOP sena-tor could move to end the trial and call for a final vote on the charges against Trump. Or Democrats could try to seek witness testimony or the introduction of new docu-mentary evidence. It will be up to a majority of the Senate to decide.

Yet for McConnell and Trump, the victory is securing a path to get-ting the trial started. For both the Senate majority leader, whose con-ference is endangered, and a presi-dent facing reelection in nearly 10 months, the overwhelming concern is kicking off the proceeding so they can hurry up and acquit Trump.

McConnell’s raw exercise of power was a lso a setback for Schumer, who has pressured Re-publicans for weeks to allow wit-nesses and new evidence to be in-troduced but ultimately had little leverage if McConnell could keep his caucus together. The minority leader warned that the decision would come back to haunt Re-publicans, especially those who go before voters in November with Trump at the top of the ballot.

“Make no mistake: On the ques-tion of witnesses and documents, Republicans may run, but they can’t hide,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “There will be votes at the beginning [of the trial] on whether to call the four witnesses we’ve pro-posed and subpoena the documents we’ve identified. America, and the eyes of history, will be watching what my Republican colleagues do.”

As with much of what McConnell does, he laid the groundwork for Tuesday’s maneuver over several months. Using a series of presenta-tions starting in the fall, McConnell began gently guiding his members toward the Clinton impeachment rules, with special attention given to his members up for reelection this cycle.

Collins wouldn’t delve into the details, but she said she’d had several conversations with Mc-Connell. And while she had hoped Schumer and McConnell could reach an agreement to establish trial parameters like past Senate leaders, “it doesn’t appear that’s going to happen.”

While Schumer may get the last laugh if McConnell’s impeachment strategy costs the GOP the Senate, in the short term, his unceasing demand to hear from key admin-istration witnesses and subpoena administration documents appears to have annoyed Collins and helped drive the Republican Conference together.

“I don’t think Chuck Schumer is very interested in my opinion since he’s just launched a website in Maine and just committed an

additional $700,000 in addition-al negative advertising from the Majority Forward PAC,” Collins groused about Democrats’ drive to deny her a fifth term in Novem-ber. “I don’t think he’s really very interested in doing anything but trying to defeat me by telling lies to the people of Maine. And you can quote me on that.”

For her part, Murkowski had gone radio silent over the holiday break to spend time with her family. On Monday evening, she met privately

with McConnell to discuss im-peachment and the potential U.S. military conflict with Iran.

“It was not an effort to ‘get my vote.’ The leader and I had ex-changed phone calls over the Christmas holiday and I know this is going to shock you, but I took family time. I did!” Murkowski said in an interview. On Monday “he was checking in with me and I needed to check in with him too. … I was able to share with him some of my views.”

W i n n i n g over Col l i n s a nd Murkowski is particularly no-table because both senators had expressed their discomfort with McConnell’s vows to coordinate closely with the White House on

the impeachment trial.Romney also hadn’t talked to

McConnell since December — but the Utah Republican had already studied the Clinton impeachment trial with his staff and come to the conclusion it showed the best way forward.

However, unlike other Republi-cans, Romney is open to support-ing motions to hear from witnesses, including former national security adviser John Bolton, indicating Mc-Connell still has work to do to keep

Trump’s acquittal on the fast track.“There’s been no lobbying to-

wards me in that regard. The Clin-ton process — I met with my team and gave it consideration,” Rom-ney said. It “allows for a vote to determine whether or not we have witnesses after we have opening ar-guments. And that pathway will be available to us.”

Throughout his tenure running the Senate — which began two years before Trump’s presidency — Mc-Connell has operated with a razor-thin majority and overwhelming Democratic opposition to every-thing he’s tried to do. So McCon-nell appeals only to Republicans on most issues, figuring that getting 51 votes, rather than 60, is his goal.

McConnell’s attempts to over-turn Obamacare failed by the nar-rowest of margins in 2017, yet he was able to push through Trump’s tax cut in 2017 using parliamentary procedures that allowed the Senate to approve the measure on a party-line vote.

McConnell used the “nuclear option” to allow Republicans to unilaterally change Senate rules on nominations so Trump could put Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court that year as well. And that

was followed by the intensely bit-ter struggle over Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the high court in 2018, a battle that remains seared in the minds of senators from both parties, especially those like Col-lins up for reelection this year.

Democrats claim Pelosi’s deci-sion to withhold the impeachment articles for several weeks increased scrutiny on the question of whether the Senate would conduct a fair tri-al on charges that Trump abused his power and obstructed Congress in the Ukraine saga.

But it also appeared to backfire with Republicans. With Trump and McConnell both repeatedly bashing Pelosi and Schumer for the tactic, Republicans said it made it easier to

persuade their vulnerable members to unify and endorse the Clinton impeachment trial rules.

“I think as the last few weeks have developed, it made the im-peachment process from the House look more and more partisan all the time,” said Sen. Roy Blunt of Mis-souri, the No. 4 Senate Republican.

“We have a lot of people who weren’t here in ’99,” Senate Ma-jority Whip John Thune added. “Making sure it’s an open and fair process is what’s important to our folks. A lot of our members just don’t want to get the label that the House members had about it being a rigged sham partisan process.”

Trump and White House officials were pleased by McConnell’s an-nouncement Tuesday.

“We are heartened that we have a process now in place that allows us to begin as quickly as possible that allows us to make a full explanation of the facts against the false charges from the House” said Eric Ueland, White House legislative affairs director, who sat in on the Senate Republican Conference meeting.

Democrats decried McConnell’s decision to move ahead without re-ally seeking a bipartisan deal, ac-cusing him of hurting the Senate as an institution over the long run to achieve short-term political goals.

“That’s what he’s done his whole career. He’s been an opportun-ist,” Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio fumed. “I’m not surprised he says anything. I’m not surprised he acts this way.”

Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

White House ‘heartened’ by McConnell’s successMcCONNELL from page 1


Throughout his tenure running the Senate, Mitch McConnell has operated with a razor-thin majority and overwhelming Democratic opposition to everything he’s tried to do. So McConnell appeals only to Republicans on most issues, figuring that getting 51 votes, rather than 60, is his goal.

“Make no mistake: On the question of witnesses and documents, Republicans may run, but they can’t hide.”

— Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer



Even more releases are likely in the coming weeks, complicating an im-minent Senate trial to determine whether Trump should be removed from office.

Democrats have said their im-peachment case against Trump was overwhelming, but they also acknowledged their investigation was incomplete. The goal, they said, was to balance thoroughness with an urgent need to confront an ongoing threat to the 2020 elec-tion: Trump’s alleged solicitation of Ukraine’s assistance to damage his political rivals.

As a result, the case has contin-ued to evolve even weeks after the House’s impeachment proceedings formally concluded.

Former national security adviser John Bolton’s surprise offer Monday to testify at Trump’s impeachment trial — after refusing the House’s request to appear late last year — was the exclamation point. But it was only the latest in a string of revelations and promises of new information.

Last week, a federal judge autho-rized Lev Parnas, the indicted as-sociate of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to share documents and contents of a seized iPhone with House investigators. In recent days, documents emerged shedding

new light on Trump’s order to tem-porarily withhold military aid from Ukraine.

And last month, House Demo-crats revealed that an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, Jennifer Williams, had submitted a clas-sified supplement to her deposi-tion, which the House Intelligence Committee is seeking permission to release publicly. Williams had previously called Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals “unusual and inappropriate.”

T he new revelations i n the Ukraine scandal present precari-ous political questions as House Democrats and Senate Republi-cans jockey for a strategic edge in the upcoming trial. But it also underscores that the case itself is evolving — and will likely continue to evolve — regardless of what hap-pens in the Senate trial. That reality presents risks as new and poten-tially crucial evidence is layered on top of the House’s findings.

In a nod to that uncertainty, Sen-ate Democrats have demanded that the trial include relevant testimony from witnesses — including Bolton and current senior White House officials — in addition to the pro-duction of documents that the State Department, Pentagon and White House budget office have refused

to provide.“What are you hiding, Presi-

dent Trump? What are you afraid of, President Trump? If you think that you’ve done nothing wrong, you wouldn’t mind having wit-nesses,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said this week.

But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is brushing aside such comments. The Kentucky Re-publican said Tuesday he has the necessary GOP votes to move for-ward with a trial governed by the parameters of the 1999 proceed-ings against Bill Clinton, in which the decisions about whether to call witnesses or procure documents were deferred until after opening arguments. McConnell and his allies have swiped at Democrats, contending their demand for new evidence is an indication that the House failed to build a persuasive argument for impeaching Trump.

“This just shows how desper-ate the Democrats are, and how poorly a job they did in the House in establishing a credible case,” Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a member of Senate GOP leadership, said in response to questions about whether Bolton should be called to testify. “They should have put the case together in the House. They had an opportunity to do it. And

they didn’t.”Indeed, the House impeached

Trump without any of this evi-dence, arguing that the case was too urgent, and irrefutable, to wait. Trump, Democrats said, was threatening the integrity of the 2020 election, and the evidence they had already obtained was overwhelming. The House voted on Dec. 18 to impeach Trump, almost entirely along party lines.

The potential flood of new evi-dence has led some Senate Republi-cans to argue that the upper cham-ber should simply ignore it and only consider the House’s work product during the trial, whether the new evidence is damning or exculpa-tory. Republicans say Democrats’ self-imposed deadline to impeach Trump was arbitrary and that it is not the Senate’s job to plug holes in the House’s investigation.

“They could have taken any of these subpoenas to court. They could have spent the time, as they have in the past, to bring the wit-nesses forward,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said. “That’s the way the process works. That’s the way it needs to work.”

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) did not rule out the possibility of subpoe-naing Bolton on Tuesday, but said the Senate trial was the most ap-

propriate venue for his testimony.“But McConnell is making it

very plain he’s not interested in the country learning the full extent of the president’s misconduct,” Schiff lamented to reporters shortly af-ter it became clear that the Senate Republican leader had the votes to move forward without Democratic support.

Through his lawyer, Bolton has teased new information that could affect the trajectory of the case against Trump. But the former national security adviser is also writing a book, and some lawmak-ers have speculated Bolton is just trying to boost his sales.

Several witnesses who testified before House investigators por-trayed Bolton as a key figure in the Ukraine saga, including his push for Trump to release critical mili-tary aid to Kyiv. Trump ordered a freeze of the security assistance last summer, prompting a chaotic scramble among senior government officials who were uncomfortable with — and left in the dark about — the hold.

Bolton was also present for cru-cial White House meetings that were described in detail during the House’s investigative phase last year. He allegedly referred to efforts to pressure Ukraine’s leaders to in-vestigate Trump’s political rivals as a “drug deal,” and dubbed Giuliani a “hand grenade.” The former New York mayor had urged Ukrainian officials to announce investigations targeting former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Meanwhile, the national security publication Just Security released emails last week revealing that senior Trump administration of-ficials were concerned that the hold on military aid could be ille-gal. Democrats have asserted that Trump withheld the security as-sistance in order to further pressure Ukraine’s government to back his demands for investigations target-ing the Bidens.

House impeachment witnesses described Parnas as a shady op-erative who helped smear former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as part of a Giuliani-led effort to persuade Ukrainian leaders to pursue those investi-gations. Parnas and his co-defen-dant, Igor Fruman, were indicted in October as part of a complex campaign finance scheme, and law enforcement officials seized Parnas’ iPhone and reams of per-sonal documents.

But Parnas’ lawyer Joseph Bondy has sought to cooperate with House investigators, and last week won the blessing of a judge to obtain the seized files and provide them to the House. Bondy confirmed Monday that he has begun the process of reviewing and sharing those files with lawmakers.

And Williams, who listened in on Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, provided lawmakers with details about a Sept. 18 call between Pence and Zelensky. But those details, which she delivered after her closed-door deposi-tion in November, are classified, Democrats said, and so far Pence’s office has declined to declassify Williams’ supplemental testi-mony, disputing its relevance to the investigation.

New evidence in Ukraine aid case continues to pile upEVIDENCE from page 1

STEPHANIE KEITH/GETTY IMAGES

The attorney for Lev Parnas, an associate of President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, has obtained a judge’s permission to share contents of his client’s cellphone that are relevant to the Ukraine scandal with House investigators. Parnas was indicted last month in a campaign finance scheme.



Tuesday he’s ready to move ahead with the trial rules without Demo-cratic support, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi could transmit the impeach-ment articles as early as this week.

The likely decision to exclude House members, which may dis-appoint conservative hard-liners, signals the White House and top Republicans want orderly and se-rious proceedings in the Senate, where the president is expected to be acquitted.

Officials have wrestled with the idea of adding some of Trump’s fiercest congressional defenders to the president’s legal defense team as the White House finalizes its de-fense strategy. They even had law-yers analyze whether such a move is allowed, and came away with the impression that there’s no prohibi-tion against it.

Trump has talked for weeks about possibly enlisting House members, but White House coun-sel Pat Cipollone, some Senate Re-publicans and other Trump allies both inside and outside the White House oppose the idea, several people familiar with the delib-erations said. They are reluctant to elevate Trump’s partisan war-riors to such a high-profile role in the trial, which they worry could take away from the solemn nature of the proceedings and serve as a

distraction.An outside adviser who speaks

to the president said there’s a fear House members would “grand-stand” and turn it into a “clown show” as they tried to grab the spotlight.

During the trial, only Trump’s defense team and the House Demo-crats’ impeachment managers will be allowed to substantively debate on the floor. Senators will be lim-ited in what they can say during the proceedings.

But a White House aide famil-iar with the latest thinking said House Republicans could aggres-sively defend Trump on television, leaving Senate Republicans to stick to trial business as impartial jurors and avoid criticism they’re going on the airwaves.

Cipollone, who has w ritten several searing letters to Demo-crats critical of their efforts, will take the lead during the trial with assistance from two of his three top deputies, Michael Purpura and Patrick Philbin. Jay Sekulow, Trump’s longest-serving personal attorney, also is expected to have a presence on the Senate floor dur-ing the trial, though it’s still un-clear whether he’ll deliver public remarks.

Those who spoke to Trump in recent days or over his two-week vacation, which he spent at his

Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida, said he talked about impeachment strategy but dropped any mention of House members’ role.

But some in the president’s or-bit continue to argue that Trump’s congressional allies would provide a strong counterweight to the House Democratic impeachment managers — a coterie of lawmak-ers who will be hand-picked by Pe-losi to prosecute the case against Trump on the floor.

Some of Trump’s most vocal supporters continued to make a case for themselves over the re-cess holiday break. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) touted some of his colleagues late last week while appearing on the podcast “War Room: Impeachment,” arguing that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) would be a strong addition to the impeach-ment team.

“He had one of the greatest per-formances in the Judiciary, and I say performances because he brought the truth,” Meadows said. “Listen, everybody wants to have their day in the sunshine. This is not a time to play politics, this is a time to put your best team on there and I think Matt Gaetz would be one of them.”

Other names that had been in the mix to represent Trump include Meadows, Trump’s confidant on Capitol Hill; Rep. Doug Collins of

Georgia, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee; Rat-cliffe of Texas, a former prosecutor; and Jordan of Ohio, who had a star-ring role in the public impeachment hearings. All of those lawmakers had participated in the hearings or closed-door depositions with impeachment witnesses.

Even if they don’t secure a spot on the defense team, however, they are still expected to play informal public messaging and behind-the-scenes strategizing roles.

Trump had been fuming both privately and publicly for weeks before the House’s public impeach-ment hearings began that Republi-cans weren’t doing enough to de-fend him. But that changed after the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees hearings got underway, according to several people familiar with the situation.

“These are individuals I would actua l ly pu l l i n at the W h ite House,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on Fox News last month, name-check-ing Collins, Jordan and Ratcliffe. “You want people that have been through this, understand it, been in the hearings, even when they were in the basement.”

Meridith McGraw and Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.

DEFENDERS from page 1

Trump team for Senate trial is nearly set

Welcome to PI. Tips: [email protected]. Follow me on Twitter: @theodoricmeyer.

Boxer heads to MercuryFormer Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who left office in 2017, is joining Mercury as a co-chairwoman. She’ll advise Mercury clients on transportation, infrastructure, health care and municipal issues but doesn’t plan to register to lobby. “In an interview, Boxer said she’d been recruited to the firm by two fellow California Democrats now at Mercury: Antonio Villaraigosa, a former Los Angeles mayor, and Fabian Núñez, a former California State Assembly speaker. … She’s the latest addition to Mercury’s stable of former lawmakers, which also includes former Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) and former Reps. Joe Garcia (D-Fla.), Vin Weber (R-Minn.) and Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.).”

It’s not “Boxer’s first step into the private sector since leaving the Senate. In August, while working as a paid consultant to Lyft, she published an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle urging state lawmakers not to pass a bill that would mandate gig-economy companies treat contract workers as employees. The bill passed and was signed into law in September over the objections of Lyft and other companies. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) criticized Boxer at the time. ‘Fmr officials should not become corporate lobbyists, in letter or spirit,’ she tweeted. ‘It’s an abuse of power + a stain on public service.’”

“Asked to respond on Monday, Boxer said she hadn’t heard Ocasio-Cortez’s remark but didn’t agree with her. She wrote the op-ed after talking to Lyft drivers, most of whom told her they didn’t favor the bill’s provisions, and urged lawmakers to reach a compromise, she said. ‘How do you abuse power when you’re out of power?’ Boxer asked. But Boxer said she wasn’t troubled by Ocasio-Cortez’s comments. ‘She has a total right to say whatever she wants,’ Boxer said.”

ROKK adds Barrasso aideJeff Grappone is leaving the Hill to join ROKK Solutions as a senior vice president. Grappone was previously deputy staff director for the Senate Republican Conference, where he served as the top communications aide to Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), and before that worked as the Labor Department’s assistant secretary for public affairs.

Jobs report USTelecom has hired Paul

Raak as vice president of government affairs. He was previously vice president of legislative affairs for ITTA and before that worked for former Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.).

K&L Gates has tapped Karishma Shah Page as co-leader of the firm’s public policy practice, replacing Michael Scanlon. Darrell Conner, a longtime K&L Gates lobbyist, is the practice’s other co-leader.

— Theodoric Meyer

POLITICO INFLUENCE

PATRICK SEMANSKY/AP

From left, Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and John Ratcliffe of Texas, two of Donald Trump’s most vocal backers, aren’t expected to serve on the president’s official impeachment defense team. Instead, Trump’s top defenders are more likely to help out in a public relations capacity.



Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to make it easier for Americans to file for bankruptcy protection, unveil-ing a plan Tuesday that she cast as a way to reverse the damage wrought by a 2005 law championed by her presidential rival Joe Biden.

That law, which imposed new requirements on filing for per-sonal bankruptcy protection and limited the kinds of debts that can be forgiven, “made the 2008 finan-cial crisis significantly worse,” the Massachusetts Democrat wrote in a

Medium post announcing her plan.T he plan would eliminate a

means test included in the 15-year-old law that required people earn-ing more than their state’s median income to go through Chapter 13 bankruptcy, a longer and costlier process than Chapter 7.

Warren would replace the two chapters, giving distressed he in-dividuals a chance to either sur-render their property to have their debt discharged, along the lines of Chapter 7, or choose from a “menu of options” to restructure specific

debts while continuing to pay down others outside bankruptcy.

Student loan debts would be d ischa rgeable; u nder cu rrent law, those loans are forgiven only in cases where they are found to cause “undue hardship” for the borrower.

Filers who select a prepayment plan, meanwhile, would be able to set aside more money to cover normal costs under Warren’s pro-posal, which would also allow bor-rowers to modify their mortgages in bankruptcy. And the plan would

eliminate the 2005 requirement that borrowers get prefiling credit counseling.

Warren and Biden have long been at odds in their views on bankrupt-cy law. As a U.S. senator from Dela-ware, Biden was one of the marquee Democrats to support the 2005 Re-publican legislation meant to crack down on soaring bankruptcy rates.

Warren, then a Harvard law pro-fessor who made her name in bank-ruptcy law, had lobbied against the bill for years, arguing that lend-ers were at fault and borrowers

shouldn’t be punished.“I lost that fight in 2005, and

working families paid the price,” Warren wrote Tuesday.

“There are still serious prob-lems with our bankruptcy laws today, thanks in large part to that bad 2005 bill,” she added. “That’s why I’m announcing my plan to re-peal the harmful provisions in the 2005 bankruptcy bill and overhaul consumer bankruptcy rules in this country to give Americans a bet-ter chance of getting back on their feet.”

BY KATY O’DONNELL

Warren takes a shot at Biden with bankruptcy reform plan

TALLAHASSEE, FLA. — First came the ads. Then came the staff.

Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has spent weeks flooding Florida media markets with ads touting his business acu-men and jabbing President Donald Trump, but his operation now is ex-panding in a state that could make or break the billionaire media mo-gul’s presidential aspirations.

Bloomberg has made a round of key state staff hires. He’s plowing millions of dollars each week into television ads. And over the next two weeks, 50 organizers will be-gin work at more than 20 regional campaign offices across the state.

The blitz is part of Bloomberg’s unconventional, skip-the-early-states strategy, which puts its focus — and the candidate’s ample supply of cash — on delegate-rich March primary states, including Florida and its 219 delegates.

“Florida is a critical March state and key battleground state for beating Donald Trump this fall,” Bloomberg states director Dan Kanninen told POLITICO. “While other Democrats focus on the early states, Trump is spending time in key states and we are the only campaign building a truly national campaign that can compete every-where, including Florida.”

Florida’s March 17 primary has pushed the state out of the na-tional spotlight, but an extended primary could make Florida a con-test kingmaker.

Bloomberg’s unprecedented level of early ad spending has been grow-ing at a clip of $2 million a week in Florida over the past month.

As of Dec. 3, his campaign had spent $6.4 million on Florida buys, a number that has more than dou-bled to at least $14.3 million just a month later. His Florida ad splurge is surpassed only by his spending in California ($20 million) and Texas ($15.9 million), both of which have primaries ahead of Florida.

And Bloomberg is the only cam-paign to make noteworthy, Florida-specific buys. The only other Dem-ocratic candidate to shell out for Florida airtime is Tulsi Gabbard. The Hawaii lawmaker’s campaign had spent $16,000 as of Jan. 6.

“If he has any chance to pull this off, Florida will absolutely be criti-

cal to the plan,” unaffiliated Demo-cratic consultant Dan Newman said, “which is why he’s already on TV so heavily here.”

Bloomberg also is building a bat-talion of Florida staff.

Along with Brandon Davis, an alumnus of Andrew Gillum’s cam-paign and the Democratic National Committee, Bloomberg has hired Scott Kosanovich, who most re-cently was campaign director for Florida House Victory, which co-ordinates Florida Democratic state house races, to serve as his Florida state director.

Tim Wagner, who ran campaigns for Democratic state Sen. Janet Cruz of Tampa and Tampa Mayor Jane Castor, will serve as Bloom-berg’s deputy state director. Jessica Montgomery, the campaign’s orga-nizing director, previously worked on Kamala Harris’ (D-Calif.) presi-

dential campaign.T he h i r i ng spree comes as

Bloomberg’s staff in Super Tuesday states, which vote two weeks before Florida, balloons to more than 800.

Justin Day, a Democratic fun-draiser previously with the now-shuttered presidential campaign of Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, said that with Davis running the show, there likely will be overlap between Bloomberg’s campaign and Gil-lum’s 2018 failed gubernatorial bid

“He is well-organized and should bring some Gillum relationships to the table,” said Day, who is not cur-rently aligned with a presidential campaign. “Anytime a candidate has a bottomless pile of money to be spent on media and organiz-ing, they are going to disrupt the process.”

Bloomberg could use Florida to kneecap the campaigns of other

candidates perceived to be in the moderate lane of the Democratic primary, such as Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, Day said. Supporters of Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won’t be swayed.

“Not sure if the question is, ‘Will Bloomberg win Florida?’ as much as, ‘Which campaign will he hurt more?’” Day said. “Probably Biden and Mayor Pete. Not sure there are a lot of Warren or Sanders voters possibly switching to Bloomberg.”

Biden hasn’t opened a single of-fice in the state, but his supporters say he holds a structural advantage that includes dozens of early en-dorsements from Democrats in the Florida state Legislature.

Biden has “two very real advan-tages,” said Steve Schale, a Florida Democratic consultant running a pro-Biden super PAC. His coali-

tion of support is diverse, and he has strong relationships through-out the state from his years as vice president.

Schale also questioned Bloom-berg’s choice to ignore early pri-mary states and the Iowa caucuses.

“While Bloomberg’s ability to spend is unprecedented, there’s never been a candidate in the mod-ern era who has won the nomina-tion without competing in the first four states,” he said. “On the GOP side, there are plenty of failed ex-amples of former candidates who built their nomination on Florida.”

Public polling shows Biden ahead in Florida, but the early surveys were made before the state Demo-cratic primary was drawing atten-tion. Biden and Warren are the only campaigns with any real Florida footprint.

Democrats at all levels in Florida hope that Bloomberg’s personal wealth can benefit down-ticket candidates. T he theory: T hat his and other Democratic money will flood the state to take aim at Trump, boosting local party can-didates in tight races. There’s also hope that presidential candidate money will trickle down to local candidates.

“The Bloomberg presence in Florida will certainly bring more boots on the ground,” Cruz said. “That investment will help Dem-ocrats cross the finish line with victories.”

State Rep. Evan Jenne, a Broward County Democrat and one of two incoming House minority leaders, hopes Bloomberg money makes its way directly to state House races, but said Bloomberg’s attack ads already are helping in a year when even local candidates will be taking Trump’s name in vain.

“It depends on how Mayor Bloomberg spends his money, but I think no matter what, it can help us with no-party-affiliation voters,” said Jenne, who helps coordinate House Democratic campaigns. “I don’t think it will be some com-plete game changer, but I definitely thinks it helps us.”

Rob Diamond, Bloomberg’s east region director, said the campaign is still finessing its strategy, but can help down-ticket races.

“We know that our building an operation this early that covers the entire state will benefit candidates up and down the ticket, which is fundamentally part of the strat-egy,” he said. “We will continue to flush out more detailed aspects where we can increasingly be more effective.”

BY MATT DIXON

Mike Bloomberg bets early — and big — on FloridaBillionaire launchesad blitz in state thatcould make or breakunconventional bid

MELISSA SUE GERRITS/GETTY IMAGES

Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s early ad spending in Florida has totaled about $2 million a week over the past month. Democrats at all levels in Florida hope his personal wealth can benefit down-ticket candidates.



Federal prosecutors on Tuesday called for up to six months of prison time for Michael Flynn, arguing the former Trump national security adviser’s shift to a more combat-ive defense strategy shows he’s no longer exhibiting the remorse he did in 2017.

The change in the Justice Depart-ment’s stance comes after it said it was open to a sentence of proba-tion as Flynn’s punishment when he was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s sprawling investigation of ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.

More than two years ago, Flynn became the only member of the Trump administration to plead guilty in the Mueller probe. But af-ter providing the government with significant help — participating in 19 interviews with the Mueller team and other DOJ prosecutors — he reversed course by hiring a new team of lawyers that has tried with-out success to get the initial case dismissed.

“Far from accepting the conse-quences of his unlawful actions, he has sought to blame almost every other person and entity involved in his case, including his former counsel. Most blatantly, the defen-dant now professes his innocence,” federal prosecutors wrote in a 33-page memo to the judge overseeing Flynn’s case.

Prosecutors seemed particu-larly aggrieved by Flynn’s actions in connection with a criminal case brought against his former partner in a lobbying and consulting firm, Bijan Rafiekian. By shifting his tes-timony just prior to the trial last summer, Flynn undermined the case, which the government won in front of a jury but later had thrown out by a judge, prosecutors argued.

“Given the serious nature of the defendant’s offense, his apparent failure to accept responsibility, his failure to complete his cooperation in — and his affirmative efforts to undermine — the prosecution of Bijan Rafiekian, and the need to promote respect for the law and adequately deter such criminal conduct, the government recom-mends that the court sentence the defendant within the applicable Guidelines range of 0 to 6 months of incarceration,” they wrote.

The tougher line toward Flynn comes after what appeared to be protracted behind-the-scenes de-liberations at the Justice Depart-ment about whether to abandon the lenient stance Mueller’s office took over a year ago when prosecutors agreed that probation — and no prison time — would be a reason-able sentence for Flynn in light of his extensive cooperation.

The prosecution, handed to Jessie Liu, the U.S. Attorney for the Dis-trict of Columbia, after the closure of Mueller’s office last May, was supposed to reveal its final posi-tion on Flynn’s sentence in a filing Dec. 30.

However, shortly before the deadline, prosecutors said they

needed an extra week to clear the Flynn submission with “multiple individuals and entities” who need-ed to review it. The prosecution also explicitly raised the prospect that the government might change the position it took in December 2018 when it credited Flynn with “sub-stantial assistance” to investiga-tors and called the 19 interviews he did with prosecutors and FBI agents “particularly valuable.”

On Saturday, prosecutors told District Judge Emmet Sullivan they’d be unable to complete the re-quired consultations by the revised

deadline — noon on Monday — and needed another 24-hour extension.

Sullivan granted the govern-ment’s request for more time but has kept the sentencing hearing set for Jan. 28, despite the recent delays.

Any prison sentence Sullivan imposes could wind up being lit-tle more than a formality because Flynn’s family is already publicly urging Trump to grant Flynn a par-don that would spare him any time behind bars.

Trump has been publicly non-committal about a pardon but has repeatedly expressed sympathy for Flynn. Indeed, one of the conversa-tions that helped fuel the firing of FBI Director James Comey and set

in motion Mueller’s appointment was the February 2017 exchange in which Comey claims Trump praised Flynn and urged investi-gators to go easy on him. Trump denied ever telling Comey to shut down the probe of Flynn. Personal Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani went further, denying the president ever talked to Comey about Flynn.

Flynn was fired just 23 days into his tenure as national security ad-viser and began cooperating with Mueller’s investigation several months later. Trump said he fired Flynn because he had given Vice

President Mike Pence inaccurate information about Flynn’s dealings with Russia during the transition, prompting Pence to issue false de-nials on the point.

Flynn pleaded guilty in Decem-ber 2017 to a charge of making false statements to the FBI, but he ad-mitted — or appeared to admit to — several acts of deceit, including lying to FBI agents about his con-versations with the Russian ambas-sador on the issue of U.S. sanctions and with various diplomats about a United Nations resolution con-demning Israeli settlement activity.

Flynn also acknowledged sub-mitting false and misleading infor-mation to the Justice Department about his advocacy for Turkish in-

terests during the 2016 presidential campaign.

However, under a deal Flynn’s attorneys at the time — Robert Kelner and Stephen Anthony — hammered out with prosecutors, Flynn pleaded guilty to just a single count of false statements. Prosecu-tors agreed not to file other charges if Flynn fully cooperated with the Mueller probe and other ongoing investigations.

The deal contemplated a sentence of between zero and six months for Flynn, leaving open the possibility he might escape prison time alto-gether. However, his sentence is in the hands of the judge and making false statements to the FBI carries a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

At the initial sentencing hear-ing in December 2018, Sullivan, a Clinton appointee, took a stri-dent tone with Flynn, prompting speculation that Flynn might face a prison sentence and not the one year of probation his lawyers were recommending.

“Arguably, you sold your country out,” the judge declared, drawing gasps and head shakes from Flynn’s family.

Sullivan even asked Mueller prosecutor Brandon Van Grack a couple of times whether the spe-cial counsel considered charging Flynn with treason.

“That was not something that we were considering, in terms of charging the defendant,” Van Grack replied.

After a recess, Sullivan seemed to say he’d overstepped in suggesting Flynn’s behavior was treasonous. “I wasn’t suggesting he’s committed treason,” the judge said.

But the judge’s unforgiving tone prompted Flynn’s lawyers to take Sullivan up on an offer to postpone the sentencing until Flynn could cooperate further with prosecutors

by testifying at a planned trial of Rafiekian.

Prosecutors dropped plans to call Flynn as a witness in that case af-ter Flynn parted ways with Kelner and Anthony and signed a new le-gal team, headed by Texas lawyer Sidney Powell — a prominent critic of Mueller’s operation. Trump pub-licly hailed Flynn’s change of attor-neys, but the relationship between his defense and prosecutors quickly soured.

Powell told government lawyers that if Flynn testified, he planned to say he did not deliberately lie about the Turkish lobbying proj-ect but was guilty only of failing to adequately read the relevant filings before signing them. Pros-ecutors said the claim was a retreat from admissions Flynn made when pleading guilty and reaffirmed a year later.

Powell also mounted a more di-rect attack on the Flynn prosecu-tion, demanding nearly 50 catego-ries of records she said would help make the case that the retired Army general was railroaded into a guilty plea by corrupt FBI agents and prosecutors working with Flynn’s former lawyers. Powell said she planned to use the information to prepare a legal motion claiming the case against Flynn should be dis-missed on grounds of outrageous government conduct.

Last month, Sullivan turned down every one of Powell’s discov-ery requests, saying the informa-tion wasn’t helpful to Flynn or was already in his possession. Flynn’s defense has yet to file the dismissal motion it advertised.

Justice Department spokes-woman Kerri Kupec declined to comment on what role Attorney General William Barr or Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen played in discussions about what stance to take on Flynn’s sentence.

BY JOSH GERSTEINAND DARREN SAMUELSOHN

DOJ recommends Flynn be jailed for up to six monthsIt’s a dramatic shift instance for prosecutorswho once said heshouldn’t do time

MANUEL BALCE CENETA/AP

More than two years ago, Michael Flynn became the only member of the Trump administration to plead guilty in the Mueller probe. But after providing the government with significant help, he reversed course, hiring a new team of lawyers that has tried without success to get the case dismissed.

“Given the serious nature of the defendant’s offense, his apparent failure to accept responsibility,

his failure to complete his cooperation … the government recommends that the court sentence

the defendant … [to] 0 to 6 months.”— Federal prosecutors



Republicans and Democrats have a narrow opening to cut big deals on drug pricing and surprise medical bills and address two key concerns of voters — just in time for 2020 electoral politics to drive them apart.

Congressional leaders are feeling renewed urgency to do something about the high-profile issues, but they fear impeachment and es-calating tensions with Iran could swamp the legislative agenda. And on drug pricing, both sides are re-luctant to let the other claim victory on a pocketbook issue that recent polling shows ranks high among voter concerns.

The efforts to deliver on these priorities are also colliding with the broader partisan battle over health care that could hold the key to the presidency.

“If we couldn’t come to a con-sensus in 2019, it’s hard to imag-ine for 2020,” said Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), a freshman who flipped her district blue for the first time in nearly two decades.

The first test is likely to come within weeks, when a bipartisan group of House members will meet to try to break a lengthy impasse and finalize plans for protecting patients from being charged thou-sands of dollars if they get out-of-network care. The effort enjoys widespread support but stalled last year amid fierce battles among in-surers, employers and well-funded providers over who would pay for a fix.

“The agreement is that some-thing should be done about each of those issues, but there is great debate about what it is,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who chairs the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee. “[2020] is probably more campaign speeches than serious bipartisan policymaking.”

That would be fine with some well-financed interest groups still eager to influence the debate. Doc-tor Patient Unity — a dark money group largely funded by two private equity-backed physician staffing companies — was the most promi-nent of the outside groups to spend heavily to influence the surprise billing debate, dropping more than $53 million on ads over the last half of 2019 to attack a leading surprise billing fix, according to Advertising Analytics.

Congressional leaders blocked an effort to revive the legislation as part of a year-end spending pack-age, instead setting a May dead-line for lawmakers to work out an agreement.

“A lot of concerns were ex-pressed” by health care interests since the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee ap-proved a surprise billing fix in June, said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “You hold the patient harmless, but then you allocate the responsibility to providers and insurers. And maybe the allocation was a little more OK with the insurers than the provid-

ers. Now we’re back to work to see if we can calibrate it to hit the right balance in the allocation of responsibility.”

The new May deadline — tied to the expiration of funding for sev-eral health programs — should give House and Senate negotiators time to iron out the details of legislation that can speed through Congress and retain White House support, lawmakers involved said.

Yet it will also invite a fresh round of high-pressure lobbying that could test vulnerable lawmak-ers in the House and give skeptics nearly five months to build a case against a compromise.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her end-of-year open letter to the House Democratic Caucus said a top 2020 priority is “ending the financial unfairness of surprise billing.” A senior House Democratic aide told POLITICO the letter was a message to the Energy and Commerce and the Ways and Means committees — whose jurisdictional battle over the issue helped derail any potential action in 2019 — to “figure it out and get this done.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, has not yet said whether he’d bring up surprise billing legislation for a vote, even if House and Senate negotiators reach a deal. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York re-mains hesitant as well, amid in-tense pressure from his powerful home state hospital lobby.

“I’m going to do everything I can to keep surprise medical billing on the front burner between now and May,” said Senate HELP Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who has made resolving the issue a top

goal before he retires this year. “It’s a bill almost everyone wants passed, except a handful of people and the private equity firms that benefit from it.”

Congress faces an even big-ger partisan gulf on drug pricing as Democrats and Republicans feature the issue prominently in their 2020 health care agendas. A bipartisan proposal negotiated between Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the chairman and ranking member of the Finance Committee, has gained little traction despite backing from Trump administration officials, with party leaders more intent on accusing each other of inaction as they fight for control of the Senate in 2021.

Senate Republicans led by McCo-nnell balk at a provision in Grassley and Wyden’s bill that would fine drugmakers that hike prices beyond the rate of inflation, deriding it as a path to price controls.

Leadership’s opposition to hold-ing a vote has turned up the acri-mony, with Grassley frequently taking to Twitter to try to enlist President Donald Trump’s help and Wyden repeatedly accusing McConnell of shielding the phar-maceutical industry.

Pelosi and top House Democrats, meanwhile, are insisting that any major drug price deal authorize the government to directly negotiate drug prices — a longtime liberal priority that’s a nonstarter with Republicans.

“My view is that if we don’t have negotiated prices, we’re not accomplishing much,” said House Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.).

Though some centrist lawmakers have sought to pass narrower bi-partisan measures addressing drug pricing that could boost their own congressional campaigns, House Democratic leaders are signaling they’ll spend much of the year tout-ing their ambitious drug pricing overhaul passed last year — and pressuring Senate Republicans to get on board.

Aside from action on those is-sues, lawmakers say a pile of un-finished health care business and a slew of investigations several com-mittees launched last year will fill out the health care agenda.

Democratic aides expect the results of an inquiry into whether companies are deceptively market-ing short-term health insurance policies promoted by the Trump administration — which critics de-ride as “junk plans” because of the skimpy coverage — to be released within weeks, including data from the open enrollment period that recently ended. Lawmakers also plan to keep investigating Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma’s use of private contractors, how states are spending the billions of dollars of funding Congress gave them to address the opioid epidemic and the Trump administration’s treatment of thousands of separated migrant children.

“We want to know what HHS knew and when they knew it,” a senior Democratic staffer told POLITICO.

Trump’s Health and Human Ser-vices Department has maintained that all of its decisions were prop-er and in line with long-standing practices.

House committees are also wait-ing on responses from pharmaceu-tical companies about why they raised their prices so much over the past few years, from e-cigarette manufacturers about their market-ing practices and internal research on the public health impact of vap-ing, and from private equity firms about their involvement in the campaign to squash surprise bill-ing reforms.

The Trump administration’s recent walk-back of past promises to ban all favored e-cigarettes also has Democratic lawmakers in both chambers seeking further legisla-tive action.

But there’s little confidence much will make it through the GOP-controlled Senate, especially as the presidential campaign heats up.

Trump has already made health care a key element of his rallies, boasting about gutting parts of Obamacare while deriding the “socialist” push for a single-payer system. At the same time, Demo-crats are confident that a combi-nation of touting their policies to expand coverage and lower drug prices with sustained attacks on Republicans’ moves in court and Congress to roll back the Afford-able Care Act will yield the kind of results that flipped control of the House in 2018.

“It’s so polarizing,” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.). “I think peo-ple, because it’s so polarizing, are scared to do anything. And they don’t have to right now. There’s no pressure up here.”

Rachel Roubein and Sarah Owermohle contributed to this report.

BY ADAM CANCRYNAND ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN

Congress’ health agenda barrels toward a buzz sawEfforts to deliver on high-profile issues are colliding with the broader partisan battle


Speaker Nancy Pelosi said a top 2020 priority is “ending the financial unfairness of surprise billing.” Pelosi and top Democrats are also insisting that any major drug price deal authorize the government to directly negotiate drug prices — a longtime liberal priority that’s a nonstarter with Republicans.


OPINION


E veryone knows the primary process is broken. As critics reliably tell

us every four years, it assigns far too much power to the very white, very small, very unrepresentative early states of Iowa and New Hampshire; it deprives bigger, more diverse states of their proper role in choosing a party’s candidate. As a result, we have a woefully underqualified celebrity in the White House and a lackluster field of challengers to take him on. New York Times columnist David Leonhardt is just the latest to excoriate the system: “No wonder,” he wrote, “the current president is a reality-television star, not to mention the most unfit occupant of the office in our country’s history.” It’s the kind of argument that has been made with regularity every four years, as newspaper headlines, news magazine covers and social media outlets ask: “Is this any way to pick a president?”

There’s just one problem with what everyone knows: It’s wrong.

If you look at how the primaries have really turned out — beginning in 1972 when they started to become the main way parties picked their candidates—it turns out that as often as not, big, diverse states have played a major role in picking the nominee. And when it comes to candidate fitness, the primary process has almost always ended with the selection of fully credentialed candidates. Even the obvious outlier now in residence on Pennsylvania Avenue may demonstrate the vitality of the system, in his own way: It gave voters a chance to reject the standard credentials when disaffection with politics as usual reached critical mass.

The critiques of the primary system focus on both process and outcome; on both counts, the system is nowhere near as weak, or as predictably flawed, as the critics would have it. Turn to process first. The sins of the Iowa caucuses are many; I’ve made a quadrennial habit of denouncing them, as I did here four years ago. But their actual influence over the campaign is hugely overstated. Some years it has been significant; others, irrelevant.

Jimmy Carter turned the Iowa caucuses into a key staging ground by coming in first among candidates in 1976 (he finished behind “uncommitted”) after an effort that drew the attention of New York Times correspondent R.W. Apple Jr. in the fall of 1975. Since then two Democrats—John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008—gained significant power by winning the caucuses. (There’s an irony to Obama’s win: Iowa is roundly denounced—most recently by Julián Castro—as a

megaunrepresentative ultrawhite state, but Obama’s win there totally reshaped the battle for African American votes; what had been a close contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton became an overwhelming, decisive advantage for Obama when he proved he could win there.)

In other races, however, Iowa has meant nothing to the Democratic battle. Walter Mondale won in a landslide in 1984, but eight days later, Gary Hart beat him in New Hampshire, altering the state of the race. Michael Dukakis finished third in Iowa in 1988 before going on to capture the nomination; Bill Clinton and other Democrats ceded the caucuses to native son Tom Harkin in 1992; Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders effectively tied there in 2016.

For Republicans, Iowa has meant even less: Except for 2008, when Mike Huckabee’s win derailed Mitt Romney’s attempt to wrap up the nomination earlky, Iowa has had almost no impact on the outcome. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, John McCain and Donald Trump all lost Iowa on their way to the nomination.

The importance of New Hampshire—technically, the nation’s first primary—is equally erratic. A few decades ago, a popular political axiom had it that “the road to the White House runs through Manchester.” That was before three presidents in a row won the White House after losing New Hampshire. (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama.) In these and other cases, what happened in New Hampshire triggered a lengthy nominating contest in which later, bigger, more diverse states were crucial.

In 1972, George McGovern lost New Hampshire, but Ed Muskie’s win wasn’t big

enough to carry him to the Democratic nomination; when he faltered, the battle extended all through the primary calendar. McGovern’s victory in winner-take-all California—a win that had to survive a convention rules challenge—was the key. In the next election cycle, on the Republican side, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford effectively tied in New Hampshire—amounting to a defeat for the favored Reagan. His campaign was a step away from extinction, but a win in North Carolina led to victories in later states, and to the last genuinely contested convention battle.

In 1980, Jimmy Carter’s decisive New Hampshire win and a string of subsequent victories had challenger Sen. Edward Kennedy on the brink of ending his campaign. But Kennedy’s surprising landslide win in New York turned the contest competitive enough to produce a deeply divided (if not fully contested) nomination fight at the Democratic convention. In 1992, Bill Clinton’s nomination was secured not by the early states, but by primary victories in Illinois, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania.

In 2008, John McCain’s financially strapped campaign got critical energy from a New Hampshire win, but it was a string of victories in South Carolina, Florida, California, and New York—many of which were

winner-take-all primaries—that secured his victory. That same year, Obama and Hillary Clinton also competed all the way to the end of the primary calendar. Though Clinton won most of the big state primaries, the delegate allocation rules gave her a relatively modest advantage; Obama’s lopsided wins in smaller states wound up giving him the edge.

If you’re looking for a pattern here, good luck. For every wire-to-wire leader, there’s a fight to the finish. For every frontrunner who wins unscathed, there’s another frontrunner who suffers serious setbacks before prevailing, and a third whose campaign ends in early defeat (Ed Muskie, Rudy Giuliani, Scoop Jackson).

For every campaign where one of the early states wields disproportionate clout, there are others—many others—where the bigger states are the ones that carry the decisive weight.

Now what about the quality of the candidates delivered by the primary process? Critics will point to the weighty presidents produced by the “smoke-filled rooms” and “back room deals”—FDR, Truman, Eisenhower. (Not so often cited is the fact that those rooms also gave us presidents like Warren Harding, or even lesser nominees like Alton B. Parker and John W. Davis.)

And the primaries? Over the past 48 years, the primaries have crowned a string of highly credentialed candidates: two sitting vice presidents, a three-term senator and decorated veteran, a successful businessman-turned-successful governor, a former secretary of State, and a two-term governor of the most populous state in the nation.

As candidates, and as presidents, these nominees reflect a wide range of success

and failure. But in the most basic sense, these successful navigators of the primary process were, in every case, fully credentialed candidates. The party insiders might have preferred others, but none of them would have been disqualified by a more “insider” process as unfit for the job of president.

That leaves us, of course, with the current occupant of the White House, who snatched the Republican nomination by almost running against the party itself, jetting from rally to rally, waging Twitter war on his rivals, appalling pundits and insiders but then cleaning up with the party’s actual voters. It’s a fair judgment that in the case of Trump, the Republican Party failed in the one task left to a party apparatus in a time when rank-and-file voters are the principal deciders, and that is the “in-case-of-emergency-break-glass” role of determining that a candidate is simply unacceptable as a potential president. As today’s headlines make clear, we are still living with the consequence of that failure.

But even here, there is a case to be made that the primary offered a voice to millions of voters—14 million of them—who were sufficiently fed up with traditional political choices to reach far outside the political system for a nominee. (It’s also the case that if the Republican Party had adopted the Democratic Party’s rules—no winner-take-all contests, proportional allocation of votes at the state and congressional district levels—a determined party establishment might have denied Trump the nomination.) More fundamentally, the election of Trump does not demonstrate that the process itself is fatally flawed, any more than a single plane crash undermines the safety of air travel.

Does this mean there’s no room for improvement? Of course there is: Iowa and New Hampshire need to be removed from their privileged positions on the simple ground of parity. It’s time for other (less frigid? more diverse?) places to receive the attention, the pandering and the economic benefits of an overhyped contest.

But the saving grace of the system we have is that there really is no way to chart how the contest will take shape. Sure, it could be over by New Hampshire, but it could just be beginning on Super Tuesday. Maybe it’s fatal for a candidate to skip the early dates; maybe a big name with $50 billion to spend can override that. Maybe four or five candidates with ample war chests will produce that contested, multiballot convention that two generations of political junkies have dreamed of. The point is, the current process can and has led to all sorts of contests; and that may be its principal virtue.

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

BY JEFF GREENFIELD

Are the primaries a failed idea?That’s the smart take we often hear. Here’swhy the messy systemactually kinda works.

JOSHUA LOTT/GETTY IMAGES

Presidential candidates traditionally attach great importance to the Iowa caucuses, but, the author writes, the events aren’t uniformly significant: History shows that later primaries in larger states are often decisive.

When it comes to candidate fitness, the primary process has almost always ended

with the selection of fully credentialed

candidates.



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At U.S. Customs and Border Protection, we are relentless in our

mission to safeguard our borders and the privacy of our citizens. But

a job of such great signifi cance can’t be done alone. Which is why we

have built strong relationships with our travel industry and technology

partners to implement Biometric Facial Comparison technology to

create a more seamless, more secure travel experience. Our facial

comparison service is closely monitored and tested for optimal

performance. To date, Biometric Facial Comparison has been

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positive response. Because our policies are completely transparent

and we adhere to all privacy laws and regulations, CBP is uniquely

suited to oversee this essential process and collaborate with industry

and technology partners to implement groundbreaking technology.

SECURING OUR NATION WHILE PROTECTING YOUR PRIVACY.

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