Virginia’s vote-counters are ready for a tight race that could take days to resolve

Recent polls have the high-stakes Virginia governor’s race as a neck-and-neck contest between Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin — and that means it could take days to determine the winner.

The vast majority of Virginia’s votes are expected to be counted on Election Day, and the state has made improvements to election laws earlier this year that will likely expedite the election night process — including some changes made, at least partially, to prevent conspiracy theories about the count from taking hold. But exceedingly close elections can take longer to resolve, including recounts. And in this case, Virginia law allows mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive by Nov. 5, three days later.

Former President Donald Trump and some of his supporters have already begun warning of voter fraud and laying the groundwork to question the veracity of Virginia’s elections after undermining faith in the 2020 results with a series of baseless claims. “The Virginia governor’s election — you better watch it,” Trump said in an interview with John Fredericks, a popular conservative radio host in the state, in September. “You have a close race in Virginia, but it’s not close if they cheat.”

Other states soon took center stage after Election Day 2020, but Virginia’s vote-counting was another prime example of how bad actors can sow disinformation by taking advantage of the general public’s unfamiliarity with election procedures. The Associated Press called the state for President Joe Biden about a half-hour after polls closed. At the time only 10 percent of the vote was reported in, and Trump was still leading in the early raw vote count. That lead in the incomplete count persisted for hours, which conspiracy theorists used to claim the state was stolen from Trump.

In reality, Biden won the state by a huge margin. Trump’s fleeting lead was due to a combination of Republican-leaning areas reporting results earlier than Democratic-dominated counties, as the AP noted in its explainer of its call, and Democrats disproportionately voting via mail ballots, which were generally reported later in the evening.

Some new changes should make the process even smoother and more clear in Virginia. A law passed earlier this year requires that in-person early voting and mail ballots be reported separately, after previously being reported in one big tranche, which election officials say will improve the process.

“That separation allows for a couple of different things: It means that people will know where the votes came from,” said Brenda Cabrera, the director of elections for the city of Fairfax and the president of the Voter Registrars Association of Virginia. “Dividing it up also allows us to get those results in faster.”

The new law also requires jurisdictions to begin preprocessing mail ballots no later than a week before the election. A lack of preprocessing of mail ballots is what made the mail ballot count — which was heavily Democratic in 2020 after Trump’s attacks on mail voting — take so long in states like Pennsylvania last year.

Scott Konopasek, the new general registrar of Fairfax County, said “it’s going to look like a wildly different night” in his county this year than in years past. Fairfax County, which is separate from the city of Fairfax, is a Democratic bastion notorious among election observers for its late reporting.

“Right at seven o’clock, or right shortly after seven o’clock, I’ll be reporting the absentee portion,” Konopasek said, noting that those numbers have historically been one of the last things in the evening. He said he anticipates early in-person voting results to come in within an hour of polls closing, and numbers from Election Day precincts should start rolling in around 8 p.m.

“The big giant bite of ballots that has, in the past, mysteriously shown up at the end is going to start out at the kickoff this time,” Konopasek said. He noted it was a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction decision, and others will not have the same reporting timeframe that he does.

Loudoun County general registrar Judy Brown, for example, wrote in an email she anticipated that her jurisdiction would report “early voting numbers first followed by election day votes followed by mail ballots,” allowing for the possibility that mail ballots are reported in the same window as Election Day votes. She wrote that her expectation for when the county’s results are mostly reported would be no later than 9 p.m., two hours after polls close, “if all goes well.”

But if the election is extremely close, it could be a wait until Friday to find out the winner. The state allows ballots that are postmarked by the U.S. Postal Service no later than Election Day and received by noon on Friday to count.

Those late-arriving ballots “will be reported once the central absentee precinct meets again after the noon deadline on Friday” said Allison Robbins, the chief elections officer of Wise County, which is on the southwestern tip of the state.

That number was small in 2020, the first year where mail balloting was available to all Virginians, coming in at about 10,000 votes out of the nearly 4.5 million who cast a ballot last year.

Election officials are urging voters to have patience as results come in. Cabrera of Fairfax City noted that “anything reported on election night is unofficial,” and it has always been that way. She said that officials go through “a series of checks and balances” to make sure official results are accurate. Election officers noted that corrections to vote totals are routine. They all also expressed confidence in running a good election in a week.

“We’re not a top-down process in Virginia. It’s local officials in the 133 jurisdictions who manage and administer elections,” said Robbins, a former past president of the state’s local election officials association. “I’m very confident in Virginia’s processes and am extremely proud of the work that our local people do.”

A recount is also possible, if the margin between the two candidates is within 1 percentage point. A petition for a recount can be made by the trailing candidate within 10 days following statewide certification of the election, which is on Nov. 15. If the race is within half a point, the state picks up the cost, and if it is larger than that the trailing candidate pays for it.

Even still, there is a window of opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of the vote count, and parts of MAGA-world beyond Trump have already started to spread those conspiracy theories.

One America News Network, the far-right cable network favored by the former president, ran a segment over the weekend urging conservatives to volunteer in Virginia to guard against supposed fraud. “Are there enough Republican volunteers to make sure there’s no midnight ballot drop?” Christina Bobb, the OAN host who has been one of the chief proponents pushing for partisan election reviews across the country, said in the segment captured by the liberal watchdog Media Matters. “Are there enough volunteers bold enough to ask questions of suspicious people doing suspicious things?”

Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase, who proudly dubs herself “Trump in heels,” is on the vanguard of Republicans who falsely say the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Youngkin, the Republican nominee, has not repeated those sentiments. After winning the nomination, he has said he believes Biden was legitimately elected, something he did not say directly during the primary. Youngkin said during the first gubernatorial debate that Virginia would “have a clear, fair election,” and both he and McAuliffe pledged to accept the results.

Democrats charge Youngkin is trying to have it both ways, on everything from prioritizing “election integrity” efforts during the primary and calling for audits of election machines, to accepting Trump’s support and campaigning with Chase. Youngkin, in turn, has called on McAuliffe to apologize for claiming the 2000 election was “stolen” following the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, and for saying on the stump that Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams would be the governor of her state if not for voter disenfranchisement that “took the votes away.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/28/virginia-vote-count-governors-race-517401
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‘An outrage against democracy’: JFK’s nephews urge Biden to reveal assassination records

Two nephews of John F. Kennedy are calling on the Biden administration to release the final trove of secret documents on the 1963 assassination of the former president.

The records were scheduled to be made public Tuesday, but the White House announced late Friday night that it would delay their publication until at least Dec. 15 — and perhaps longer if President Joe Biden determines it’s in the nation’s best interest to keep them confidential.

“It’s an outrage. It’s an outrage against American democracy. We’re not supposed to have secret governments within the government,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told POLITICO. “How the hell is it 58 years later, and what in the world could justify not releasing these documents?”

His cousin, former Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy, said the records should be released not because of his family, but because American citizens have a right to know about “something that left such a scar in this nation’s soul that lost not only a president but a promise of a brighter future.”

“I think for the good of the country, everything has to be put out there so there’s greater understanding of our history,” Patrick Kennedy said.

The documents were set to be declassified in 2017, but President Donald Trump postponed the release for four years.

Biden’s decision to continue Trump’s policy of shielding the records came as a surprise to historians and experts on the assassination because he had served in the U.S. Senate when the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 passed unanimously in Congress. That act, passed in response to questions raised by the 1991 Oliver Stone film “JFK,” set up an independent review board to collect all government files that might have bearing on the assassination and make them public. Most records were released between 1994 and 1998. Only the most sensitive classified documents remain confidential.

Biden was first elected to the Senate nearly a decade after Kennedy’s assassination and campaigned with former Sen. Ted Kennedy, the late president’s brother and the father of Patrick Kennedy, as a youthful Irish-American kindred spirit to the political dynasty.

The White House declined to comment on the record, issuing a background statement saying that “the National Archives advised that their review of classified material was severely hampered by COVID-19 since classified material cannot be reviewed remotely and asked for more time.” The coronavirus first hit the U.S. in early 2020, more than 27 years after the JFK Records Act passed and more than 56 years after Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.

Pointing to the presidential memorandum it released late Friday, the White House promised in a written statement that the “public will have access to a tranche of previously withheld records and redacted information withheld in previously released records” and that the “Biden Administration is setting up a whole-of government effort to ensure the maximum possible disclosure of information by the end of 2022.” The president’s memo also directs the National Archives to come up with a plan to digitize the entire collection of documents, more than 300,000 records.

A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment about why he delayed the full release of the records in 2017 after indicating he intended to make them public.

Among other unanswered questions, the records could shed light on whether a Central Intelligence Agency operative named Bill Harvey mysteriously traveled from Rome to Dallas before the assassination as well as the agency’s role in plots to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, its surveillance techniques.

An overwhelming majority of the 15,000 records in question are from the CIA and, to a lesser extent, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Portions of them have been released with single words or entire pages blacked out, according to the National Archives.

If the records are ever released, they probably would not reveal the identity of other potential killers of Kennedy. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., brother of the president and namesake of the son who spoke with POLITICO, did not believe the official narrative of the assassination, said historian David Talbot, author of “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” and “The Devil’s Chessboard.”

“RFK was the first JFK ‘conspiracy theorist,’ the attorney general of the United States,” Talbot said. “Any serious journalist or historian who looks at this seriously comes to the same conclusion: that Lee Harvey Oswald was what he said he was, ‘a patsy,’ and that the Warren Commission was an effort to cover up the crime, not investigate the crime in an honest way.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. concurred with his father’s belief that his uncle was assassinated as part of a broader conspiracy. Kennedy, a controversial figure in his family because of his anti-vaccine advocacy, also said he did not believe that Sirhan Sirhan killed his father, putting him at odds with his siblings and other relatives.

Both he and Patrick Kennedy said their family had shied away from discussing the JFK assassination and related matters because it was too painful, even to this day.

Patrick Kennedy declined to comment on whether he believed the official story of the assassination. He said he wasn’t sure the documents would be released Dec. 15, but he ultimately hopes that Biden will do the right thing and make them public. He also described the president as someone “who loves my family, and this country, and has a heart that’s full of compassion and love.”

“We’re living in a time of a lot of conspiracy theories. There is a tendency to distrust government in general,” he said. “There’s a whole lot of bureaucratic obfuscation. Every agency needs to exercise their own right to redact certain portions [of the records] which you know is what fuels the whole conspiracy theory.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/24/jfk-nephews-biden-assassination-records-517049
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Trump files lawsuit to block release of Capitol attack records

Ex-president challenges Biden’s decision to waive executive privilege that protects White House communications

Donald Trump has sought to block the release of documents related to the Capitol attack on 6 January to a House committee investigating the incident, challenging Joe Biden’s initial decision to waive executive privilege.

In a federal lawsuit, the former president said the committee’s request in August was “almost limitless in scope” and sought many records that were not connected to the siege.

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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/19/trump-lawsuit-block-release-capitol-attack-records-biden
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Associated Press in Washington

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He Calls Himself the ‘American Sheriff.’ Whose Law Is He Following?

FLORENCE, Ariz. — The first thing to know about Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona, is that he just plain looks like a sheriff. It could be the Justin cowboy hat he wears pulled low over his eyes and his penchant for Western shirts and a tactical vest in lieu of a uniform. It could be his demeanor, at once confident and aw-shucks. It could be his size — he’s 6’3”, 240 pounds, or so he writes in his self-published book, American Sheriff: Traditional Values in a Modern World.

In public, Lamb commands attention. During a July interview at a local café here decked out in Old West paraphernalia, passersby interrupted to clasp hands heartily with him and chat. There was an older Latino man named Randy wearing a snap-pocket shirt who had recently retired from a wild horse-and-burro program at the nearby prison and asked Lamb if he knew any cowboys. There were middle-aged women with salon-styled hair hoping to take their picture with him. There was the waitress who told Lamb he needed to gain weight. They seemed unsurprised to see their sheriff talking to a reporter and flashing his TV-ready smile.

Lamb, 49, has jurisdiction over only Arizona’s third most populous county, a stretch of desert wedged between Phoenix and Tucson that’s home to about 500,000 people. Yet he styles himself as the “American Sheriff” — a moniker around which he has spent the past several years trying to build a national brand as a fervent defender of law enforcement.

Since taking office in 2017, Lamb has become the face of a new online streaming service called the American Sheriff Network and of a nonprofit coalition of sheriffs called Protect America Now; he also founded a charity, the American Sheriff Foundation. Lamb is a frequent talking head on Fox News and Newsmax, where he derides President Joe Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’ handling of immigration, and he has spoken at political events like a Turning Point Action summit a few months ago in Phoenix, where he quoted Shakespeare and Thomas Paine (“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered”) and promised, “The sheriffs are going to hold the line.”

With an action figure-style charisma and a growing media platform, Lamb sees it as his mission to educate the American public about the role of the sheriff, which he described to me as to protect people from “the bad guys, and I always say the sheriff is also there to protect the people from government overreach.” As much as he glorifies law enforcement, though, Lamb is selective about which laws he chooses to enforce. He takes a hardline approach on immigration, for example, but when it comes to the government telling people to get vaccinated — or declaring the 2020 election legitimate — he fashions himself as more of a vigilante resister, with a heavy dose of anti-government, sometimes militant rhetoric.

Lamb supported the “stop the steal” campaign in Arizona and has expressed sympathy for the Jan. 6 rioters. He has called vaccine mandates “garbage” and spoke at a recent anti-vaccine rally in Phoenix, where he told supporters, “We’re going to find out what kind of patriots you are. We’re going to find out who is willing to die for freedom.” He also makes direct appeals to citizens, an effort that looks more dangerous after former President Donald Trump riled up supporters on Jan. 6. For example, Lamb, an ardent defender of the Second Amendment, has spoken in support of the formation of private militias — “well within the Constitution,” he told a group of supporters in March — and emphasized the power of sheriffs in Arizona, an open-carry state, to call local civilians into service to “suppress all affrays, insurrections and riots that comes to the attention of the sheriff.” Last year, as Black Lives Matter protests swept across the country, he formed a local civilian “posse” to assist his office with law enforcement, even though there were no such protests in Pinal County.

Through Protect America Now, which was founded by a Republican strategist and two businesspeople working with Lamb and counterparts nationwide, he is marshalling dozens of other elected sheriffs and citizen supporters around these ideas — “building an army” as the group puts it. The message: Sheriffs are here to protect your freedom — including freedom from your own democratically elected government.

Lamb’s advocacy follows in the tradition of “constitutional sheriffs,” who for decades have propagated the idea — refuted by constitutional experts — that sheriffs are the supreme legal authority in America, above even the president and the Supreme Court, and that they can choose not to enforce any law they consider unconstitutional. Former sheriffs Joe Arpaio and David Clarke, along with an estimated 138 currently serving sheriffs, are self-declared adherents of the philosophy, which evolved out of the white nationalist, anti-Semitic movement known as “posse comitatus,” meaning the “power of the county.” Lamb, although he spoke at a convention for constitutional sheriffs last year and says he “appreciate[s] those guys standing up for the rule of law, the Constitution and freedom,” doesn’t call himself a constitutional sheriff. Instead, his pro-sheriff messaging — with media savvy and Trump-y politics thrown in the mix — seems designed for a wider audience.

There’s no question Lamb is a performer, but his calls to citizen action worry experts who see a segment of American law enforcement becoming a power base of its own — one that could further undermine trust in government authority. Devin Burghart, who runs the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which analyzes far-right social movements, says understanding sheriffs like Lamb is important in “the long-term fight for democracy.” Researcher Cloee Cooper said Lamb’s highly politicized approach to his job is “ultimately undermining a safe and just society.” Asked about how supporters might interpret his anti-government messaging, Lamb told me, “I’m a very pro-freedom person. I believe in letting people live the way that they feel like they need to live.”

To spend time with Lamb is to realize just how far a lawman can drift from the law itself — and how little people seem to care, as long as he says the right stuff on TV. In fact, Lamb’s constituents seem to love him: He was unopposed when he ran for reelection last fall and won another four-year term with 97 percent of the vote. Some locals here say he is focused more on playing a sheriff in the national spotlight than serving his constituents. But in a solidly conservative part of Arizona, Lamb so far has had plenty of leeway for more and more activities outside the county. He insists he doesn’t have political ambitions beyond the sheriff’s office, though. “You can actually effect change as the sheriff,” he says. “I’ve never had a desire to run for Senate or Congress,” Lamb told me at the café in Florence, before adding, “I’m a patriot at heart. I love America. And I will serve the people where I can.”

Another patron of the diner walked by. “Can we start calling you senator?” the man asked.

“No, no. Please don’t. Sheriff’s good with me,” Lamb said, looking abashed, like any good politician should.

We don’t go to a shooting range as much as an open, sandy field that Lamb says belongs to a friend of his. Pinal County is 5,400 square miles, roughly the size of Connecticut, and much of it is sand. Two weeks before, in mid-June, the temperature was a newsworthy 110-plus degrees. Today it’s closer to 100, and a faint whisp of cloud floats in the sky, daring itself to cover the blazing sun. Lamb loves it. He wears Wranglers, worn cowboy boots, a black shirt with rolled sleeves, a fully loaded tactical vest and a brown leather belt with “Sheriff Lamb” embossed across the back. He barely seems to sweat.

We’ve come to the range because shooting is Lamb’s favorite pastime. Pinal County Supervisor Jeff Serdy, who owns what he describes as a “very high-volume” gun shop in the area, told me, “You could not ask for a better advocate for the Second Amendment than Sheriff Lamb.” The back of Lamb’s black Chevy Silverado 2500 HD contains his workaday weaponry, including an AR-15 SBR. On his person, Lamb has a 9mm Glock pistol, plus a long knife, a taser, handcuffs and extra ammunition, including a magazine with a Punisher skull on it.

Lamb says he was always interested in guns but didn’t plan for a law enforcement career. Descended from a long line of Mormons and still an “unabashed member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” he grew up “all over the world,” he is fond of saying, including the Philippines, Panama and Argentina, where he did his Mormon mission. In his book, he describes spending much of his childhood in Hawaii, where, he told me, “I was a minority.”

Lamb went through a variety of jobs, including running a paintball business in Utah that ultimately failed. After filing for bankruptcy in 2003, Lamb decided to “start again” in Arizona, he writes in his book, where he moved with his five kids and his wife, Janel — who today has her own book, The Sheriff’s Wife, and often appears with her husband at public events. Initially, Lamb worked in pest control, with a focus on pigeons. One day, in the mid-2000s, he went on a ride-along with a neighbor who worked in law enforcement and, “armed with courage and a flashlight,” Lamb says, he found a suspect they were after hiding in a trailer. “That morning I came home, and I told my wife I was gonna be a cop,” he concluded. Compared with climbing on roofs all day to pick up bird poop, he says, law enforcement seemed safer. (Many job-safety rankings consider being a roofer more dangerous than being a police officer.)

Lamb’s first law enforcement job was with the Salt River Police Department in neighboring Maricopa County beginning in 2006. By 2016, he had moved to Pinal County and decided to seek the sheriff’s job, running as a Republican and, in his words, a “constitutional conservative”; he made a point of opposing abortion rights in his campaign, but he ran without the same cowboy image he has today. The sheriff at the time, Paul Babeu, had faced a series of scandals, including an affair with an undocumented man who alleged Babeu had threatened to deport him if he exposed their relationship. Babeu, who denied making threats and later came out as gay, ran for Congress in 2016. He lost, but the sheriff spot was left open for Lamb, who defeated Babeu’s anointed successor in the primary and took the general election.

Once elected, Lamb promised he would focus on building relationships within the county. “If it doesn’t benefit Pinal County, I don’t need to be on the news,” he said at the time. “If Fox calls, what are they going to do for me?” But it didn’t take long for him to begin leaning into national issues. Lamb won office the same year Sheriff Arpaio was defeated in Maricopa. (A federal judge later found Arpaio in criminal contempt of a court order to stop racially profiling Latino residents, but Trump later pardoned him.) Next door in Pinal County, Lamb embraced Arpaio’s anti-immigrant bent; before long he appeared, sure enough, on Fox News to talk about the “border crisis” (though Pinal County is not on the U.S.-Mexico border), and deployed officers and equipment to help federal authorities with immigration enforcement.

Since taking office, Lamb also has appeared with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group. (FAIR has dismissed the characterization, calling the SPLC a “partisan attack dog.”) Earlier this summer, Lamb gathered some two dozen other sheriffs for a Protect America Now rally along the border in Arizona, where he declared, “We are standing up for the Constitution, our oath and the rights of the people.”

Lamb, who oversees a medium-sized sheriff’s office with 650 employees and a $39 million annual budget, sums up his core beliefs, on everything from immigration to policing to guns, as supporting “the rule of law.” He repeated the phrase often during our conversations. But his interpretation of the phrase generally implies opposition to whatever rules or laws he deems overly intrusive. He opposes all limitations on the Second Amendment. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, he publicly resisted Arizona’s mask mandates and stay-at-home orders — before catching Covid himself last year, which he discovered when he was denied entry to the White House for a meeting with Trump.

The pandemic has given Lamb, like much of the GOP, a new pet cause. This summer, he made a short video saying he would not require, or ask, his staff to get vaccinated. (The spot got picked up on Fox.) One Instagram post from his account reads, “No vaccine, no mask…..I did test positive though for Americanitis!” underneath a photo of Lamb leaning back on a bench and smiling. I asked Lamb if he was vaccinated, and he told me, through his PR representative, Corey Vale, to print exactly this: “That’s nobody’s damn business.”

On Jan. 6, the day rioters stormed the Capitol in Washington, Lamb appeared at a rally in Phoenix to protest the presidential election results. About 1,000 Trump supporters had descended on the state Capitol; one group of them brought a guillotine. In a speech, Lamb talked about “issues with the vote” and blamed the state and federal governments. “I don’t know how loud we have to get before they start to listen to us and know that we will no longer tolerate them stripping our freedoms away,” he said. Later, rioters broke a window as they yelled out for Doug Ducey, the Republican governor who had certified Biden’s victory in Arizona.

Lamb insists he has never said Biden did not win the election. But on Nov. 12, he appeared on One American News Network and said the enthusiasm he saw for Trump in Arizona “does not compute” with the election results. And he still believes there was, as he put it to me, a “significant amount of concerning information” about the integrity of the election. (There is not, according to multiple courts; an audit in Arizona also reaffirmed Biden’s victory there.) He also argues the mob that overtook the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was more heavily policed than the Black Lives Matter movement. (In the two weeks after a police officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, some 10,000 protesters were arrested around the country, compared with about 600 Jan. 6 rioters so far.) “I don’t think that Black Lives Matter is productive for the Blacks,” Lamb also told me.

When I asked Lamb whether the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 was an example of people violating the very rule of law he professes to cherish, he replied, “Just because somebody was there doesn’t necessarily mean they’re guilty,” then added, “I guarantee you [the rioters] are very loving, Christian people. They just happen to support President Trump a lot.” When I asked about the roughly 140 law enforcement officers who had been injured or killed while on duty at the Capitol — doing a job Lamb also professes to cherish — he demurred, saying he hadn’t been there and couldn’t say what was or wasn’t true.

It was the month after the insurrection, with Joe Biden in the White House and Democrats in the majority in Congress, that Lamb announced the launch of Protect America Now, his new coalition of currently serving sheriffs — Lamb calls them “patriots” — with a stated mission of “educating Americans about how our Sheriffs and the law enforcement community are standing for our Constitution and law and order.” It’s mostly a messaging operation: The group runs ads and has written letters to the Biden administration. Protect America Now’s 69 member sheriffs, who come from states including California, New Mexico, Virginia and South Dakota, also appear on right-leaning media to advocate for smaller government in all areas except immigration. The group’s website lists seven additional sheriffs — at least five of whom have been accused of some form of misconduct — as advisory committee members. Lamb, too, is on the advisory committee, but he’s also the group’s most prominent public representative.

Robert Tsai, a constitutional law professor at Boston University, told me he sees Protect America Now as political in nature — an effort to “leverage sheriffs in mainstream Republican politics,” while also “branding [sheriffs] for future political careers.” Lamb says Protect America Now is not a political organization, but that its efforts are “viewed as political sometimes.” Yet Protect America Now, a 501(c)4, was founded in June 2020 by a group that includes Nathan Sproul, an Arizona-based Republican strategist. Sproul, who has a long history in GOP political consulting, was accused of voter fraud between 2004 and 2012, allegations he denied and for which he was not charged. More recently, he was a consultant on Kanye West’s quixotic 2020 presidential campaign. Lamb, too, is a client; his PR representative, Vale, is employed by Sproul’s strategy group.

Burghart, the researcher of far-right movements, sees Protect America Now and the coalition it is building as a dangerous force, arguing the group represents “the next step” for the constitutional sheriff movement and its elevation of the power of sheriffs. To date, the movement’s largest formal organization is the Constitutional Sheriffs and Police Officers Association, formed in 2011 by former sheriff Richard Mack, who told me the association has attracted more than 700 sheriffs to its events and trainings. The Anti-Defamation League recently released a report calling CSPOA an “anti-government extremist group” and citing public appearances Mack has made with white supremacist individuals or groups. (Asked about the report, Mack said CSPOA “denounce[s] all racism and violence.”)

Mack said Lamb is not an official CSPOA member, but he clearly sees Lamb as one of his own. In an email, he wrote that Lamb “is a Constitutional Sheriff and is one of the best sheriffs in America.” Lamb, for his part, says he respects Mack and has a “good relationship with CSPOA.” But he emphasized to me that Protect America Now and CSPOA are different groups, and said he also does not support any form of white supremacy. Burghart says the distinction between the two groups might be more about style — that Protect America Now is taking a “slicker, more palatable” approach, with “a much better sense of PR than Mack and his crowd.”

Lamb’s nose for PR is apparent, and it extends beyond Protect America Now. Building off his social media popularity — he has more than 300,000 Facebook followers, high for a sheriff — and his desire to elevate law enforcement, this past May he announced the launch of the American Sheriff Network, which for $4.99 month allows viewers to watch 10- to 20-minute segments showing sheriffs and their deputies as they respond to calls for service — a mix of sheriff propaganda and reality television.

Lamb says the network takes its inspiration from “Live PD,” an A&E show that ran from 2016 until 2020, when it was canceled after deputies in Williamson County, Texas, were caught on camera tasing a man named Javier Ambler, and ultimately killing him. (In response to the incident, Texas passed a state law that forbids law enforcement agencies from partnering with reality television shows.) Before its cancellation, “Live PD” was immensely popular, capturing more viewers than any other cable program on Friday and Saturday nights. Lamb was a fixture on the show, as well as a host of a spinoff, “Live PD: Wanted,” which focused on catching fugitives.

The trailer for the new network features lots of shots of Lamb, his profile against a desert sunset as the camera pans slowly over the shadows of cacti. He flashes a Hollywood smile as he talks about “the shine on the badge.” Many of the episodes are filmed in a low-budget style and feature Lamb as a guide, introducing viewers to other sheriffs in Nevada and Arizona. Lamb says the new network is important because “we just felt like it was important to give [sheriffs] their voice back.” When I asked if Lamb was concerned about a repeat of what happened in Texas, Vale dismissed it saying that “lots of things are out of [the sheriffs’] control.” One episode features deputies tasing new recruits as part of their training, and watching as they scream pain.

All of Lamb’s activities outside Pinal County raise the question of whether he is making money off this work. Protect America Now is new enough that its tax filings have not yet been made public, but Vale told me Lamb does not get paid by the group, outside reimbursements for expenses. (State records show, and Vale confirmed, that Lamb’s 2020 campaign provided a $10,000 loan to the group in August of last year.) When I asked Vale whether Lamb made a salary from the American Sheriff Network, he said Lamb was a partner of a Virginia LLC that produces the content but declined to give any other details. Vale declined to say anything else about the company or provide any details about funding, revenue or viewership. He told me Lamb does make some money from occasional appearances at gun shows and other events but likewise would not disclose the amount.

Sheriffs in almost every state operate independently with limited oversight, giving them the freedom to engage in political advocacy and appear in the media. The National Sheriffs’ Association, of which Lamb is a member, has a model code of ethics for sheriffs that prohibits using the office for “private gain,” among other things. I asked Sean Kennedy, a professor at Loyola Law School who is on the oversight commission for the Los Angeles County sheriff, about Lamb’s involvement with Protect America Now and other outside activities, and he said he believes Lamb’s behavior violates the NSA’s code. Kennedy pointed to the provision about private gain, as well as one requiring equal protection of all citizens, without allowing “personal opinion, party affiliations, or consideration of the status of others to alter or lessen this standard of treatment.”

Asked to respond, Vale said Lamb keeps a strict division between his work as the Pinal County sheriff and his image as the “American Sheriff.” Vale added, “All of his activities, both as sheriff and in his private time, are vetted through the [Pinal] County attorney.” The attorney, Kent Volkmer, told me Lamb has consulted with him, including on Protect America Now and the American Sheriff Network, but said he does not review every single appearance Lamb makes outside his capacity as sheriff. A spokesperson for the NSA told me that, while the code of ethics is the “basis of an organizational creed,” sheriffs generally rely on their state laws for legal guidance. The spokesperson also took time to praise Lamb’s messaging skills, calling him a “unicorn.”

Local activist Roberto Reveles, who through the ACLU of Arizona has organized against racial profiling and other anti-immigrant policies in the state, has known Lamb since his earliest days as sheriff. Reveles hoped Lamb would not turn out to be another Arpaio or Babeu. But now Reveles is among those Pinal County residents who say Lamb’s involvement in politics and entertainment has gone too far, distracting him from the job he was elected to do and perhaps even influencing how he does it. “He clearly has politicized law enforcement, and that covers a lot of territory,” Reveles says, calling Lamb a “self-centered, extremist, anti-immigrant individual.” Some Pinal County residents have called for an audit of the sheriff office’s finances.

While Lamb has gotten more and more scrutiny in Arizona, he has mostly brushed it off. The Arizona Republic investigated his charity, which aims to “bridge the gap” between law enforcement and communities, and found the group had misreported $18,000 in spending — in fact, the charity didn’t report any spending in 2018. Lamb chalked that up to an accountant’s error. The state ethics committee investigated Lamb for intervening to stop the seizure of a Republican lobbyist’s land, for which the lobbyist was behind on paying property taxes, but the investigation was dropped after accusations of impartiality. A local newspaper also accused him of having an affair with a woman who died over the summer in a car accident, but Lamb denies that he has been involved with any women outside his marriage.

Ultimately, many residents of Pinal County, which voted 58 percent for Trump in 2020, align politically with Lamb. The county also enjoys relatively low levels of crime. Out of five Pinal County supervisors, only one, Serdy, a Republican, would comment on the record about Lamb, telling me over the phone, “As long as the job is being done, then we support [his other work].” Lamb argues his outside activities help him bring in new recruits.

Because sheriffs are not usually term-limited, Lamb can stay in office as long as he gets reelected, or until he decides to run for another office, as many other sheriffs have — though Lamb says he is happy where he is. While he is gaining national attention, it’s not clear yet whether Lamb will become the law enforcement equivalent of, say, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) or Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), but it’s plain that he has a similar commitment to Trumpism and desire for the spotlight, in Arizona and increasingly elsewhere.

Lamb has appeared multiple times with Trump at the White House and other political events. This month, he also was a featured speaker — alongside Clarke, the former Milwaukee sheriff, and others — at the American Priority Conference, a far-right convening held at Trump’s resort in Miami. Lately, Lamb has been supporting the campaign of Kari Lake, a Trump-endorsed former Fox anchor running for Arizona’s open governor’s seat in 2022. (According to Vale, however, Lamb has not officially endorsed Lake or any other candidate in the race.)

As we left the gun range during my visit to Pinal County and stopped by a gas station to hydrate, we again ran into more fans of Lamb’s. A man with tattoos and well-groomed blond facial hair wearing a “Proud American” T-shirt (a design sold by the right-wing shock jocks the Hodgetwins) ran across the parking lot for a photo with the sheriff. A group of kids gathered around Lamb’s truck for sheriff-branded stickers. Another man walking by said, “The sheriff is a good dude.” Everyone gathered for a picture, just one more.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/15/mark-lamb-arizona-constitutional-sheriff-elections-republicans-514781
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Jessica Pishko

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Jan. 6 investigators move to hold Bannon in contempt

The head of the House panel investigating Jan. 6 announced Thursday that he has scheduled a vote to hold former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress.

On Tuesday, the select committee will vote on a report making the case that Bannon is in criminal contempt of Congress, according to Chair Bennie Thompson. That document will include language of a contempt resolution that could come to the House floor.

“The Select Committee will use every tool at its disposal to get the information it seeks, and witnesses who try to stonewall the Select Committee will not succeed,” Thompson said in a statement.

It will also detail the committee’s efforts to secure Bannon’s cooperation with its subpoena and his refusal to cooperate with the probe.

Investigators announced subpoenas of Bannon and three other former Trump administration aides on Sept. 23. Trump last week told all four men to stiff-arm the committee, as POLITICO first reported, but the committee has said two of those ex-aides, Kash Patel and Mark Meadows, are engaging with investigators. Bannon’s lawyer, however, has told the committee he will not comply with the subpoena.

Forcing him to comply will be a major test for the committee, signaling to numerous other witnesses just how much pressure investigators will exert to secure cooperation.

The outcome of the committee’s vote on holding Bannon in contempt is all but a foregone conclusion, as members have indicated for weeks that they would likely deploy criminal contempt against recalcitrant witnesses. If the panel approves holding him in contempt, the committee would send the resolution to the House floor for another vote.

If the full House, slated to reconvene next week, votes to hold Bannon in contempt — which is also all but certain, as Democrats have a slim majority — then the matter will be referred to the U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. for criminal prosecution.

It’s unclear whether the Justice Department would move quickly following House action. Attorney General Merrick Garland has not indicated how he will handle such referrals, though he’s slated to testify to the House Judiciary Committee next week and is likely to be pressed on the matter.

The acting U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C., Channing Phillips, is a career official who has overseen the Capitol investigation for months. Biden has nominated a permanent successor for the role, Matthew Graves, but the Senate has not yet confirmed him.

If the Justice Department prosecutes Bannon and secures his conviction, he would face up to a year in prison and up to $100,000 in fines. He has the option to appeal, and the courts would determine whether to delay penalties during the appeals process.

Despite the tricky and unpredictable process, committee members say they hope the threat of criminal charges pressures witnesses to cooperate, rather than go through a costly and onerous legal process. Those threats have worked to compel cooperation in previous congressional inquiries, and witnesses rarely attempt to see the entire criminal proceedings through.

But the Jan 6 committee also faces a tight deadline, as it seeks to compile a full report on the attack by the spring.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/14/jan-6-committee-hold-bannon-in-contempt-516017
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Betsy Woodruff Swan and Kyle Cheney

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‘If He Makes a Successful Return in 2024, Democracy’s Done’

Fiona Hill was introduced to most Americans through her testimony in President Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings in late 2019. A former National Security Council official, that day she delivered a personal story of growing up in a working-class mining town in northeastern England and emigrating to the United States, all delivered in an accent that many Americans couldn’t quite place but would have marked her for class discrimination in her native country.

Her new book, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21^st Century, only briefly touches on her White House experience and mostly focuses on the personal story that so many found compelling in her testimony. (Representative Jackie Speier asked Hill to confirm a story from her childhood during the question-and-answer portion: that a classmate had set her pigtails on fire when she was 11 during school, and Hill had extinguished the blaze and completed a test. It was true.) Still, there is enough space for a few revealing West Wing anecdotes, such as when the former president mistook her for a secretary and then-chief of staff Reince Priebus referred to her as “the Russia bitch.” In response to the book, Trump emailed an angry statement to supporters this week calling her “a Deep State stiff with a nice accent.”

Ultimately, the book goes beyond a memoir. Hill uses the story of her hometown and her journey to the White House to show not just that success was difficult for her, but that it should have been impossible. The more she describes her native mining town, the more it looks like deindustrialized centers in the American Midwest and coal towns in Appalachia. That’s the point: Hill is particularly interested in how a lack of opportunity, not just in the UK but also in the U.S. and Russia, creates the ideal circumstances for a dangerous brand of populist politics to thrive.

While some parts of the book sound like a policy paper, there are also parts that sound like snippets from a frank conversation between two very close friends, such as when she writes about her struggles with wage discrimination in Washington or stuffing her bra with tissue and pantyhose at one of her first jobs at a medieval-themed banquet hall. I called to ask her what she’s most worried about when it comes to Trump’s next act, and if even now, even after everyone in Washington knows her name, she thinks she could play salary hardball like some of her male colleagues.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Katelyn Fossett: What do you make of Trump’s recent comments about the Jan. 6 rioters? He said in a statement in September they were being unfairly persecuted by the Biden administration.

Fiona Hill: Well, this is also part of this myth-making, as we’re well aware: the perpetration of the Big Lie, and the turning of the people of Jan. 6 into martyrs and also trying to rewrite the historical record in real time. He is mulling again a return to what he sees more as a crown than the presidency in 2024.

I feel like we’re at a really critical and very dangerous inflection point in our society, and if Trump — this is not on an ideological basis, this is just purely on an observational basis based on the larger international historical context — if he makes a successful return to the presidency in 2024, democracy’s done. Because it will be on the back of a lie. A fiction. And I think we have to bear that in mind. And I was hoping that with the book, I might be able to reach out, because I’m not a partisan person, to people who care very much about the United States and about its democracy to really think about this long and hard.

I find it deeply disturbing that the number one identity that people put forward in polls now is whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican rather than an American or someone from a particular region. Even religious or ethnic/racial identifiers seem to be subsumed in this in some of the polling. And so, you know, those of us who are independent in mind and practice but politically engaged, where do we fit into all of this? We used to fit into America. I have a lot of friends who are immigrants like myself who have been here for a long time, who come from many, many different places — not all from Europe. And they say, “This is not the America I came to. This is not the America we chose to come to.” And they were deeply disturbed by this. But many people fled these kinds of authoritarian or autocratic regimes, which are highly personalized, deny social mobility and where you have kleptocratic cliques of cronies who are really trying to take charge of policy, and that’s what this [deep polarization] is about. This is not about ideology. It is a manipulation of particular social issues — abortion, immigration, all kinds of issues.

This America is looking dangerously like Russia — based on the divisions of Russia in the 1990s and then the Putin system that came out of that. China, Hungary, Venezuela — many of the countries that are expelling immigrants from the region. This is what we’re dealing with. In all of these places, all of these issues are being manipulated and people’s grievances are being whipped up.

Fossett: Given your past concerns about the Trump administration’s friendly posture toward Russia, do you think that the Biden administration has been an improvement in that respect?

Hill: Well, you know, there’s a similar kind of problem. With both Trump and Biden, the first thing is that they both wanted to get rid of Russia as a problem. Trump obviously wanted to win over Putin. He had this kind of strongman envy; he thought Putin was the ultimate badass. But really, Trump himself wanted to focus on other things. China, Iran and other issues were much more pertinent to his goals, and he was trying to sort of win Russia over through Putin to just get them on our side, as he saw it. Biden similarly wants to focus on China — not Iran, obviously — but he wants to park Russia somewhere, as a colleague has described it. But the Russians really don’t like this. And so the more that you try to marginalize them, or deprioritize them, the more likely they are to fight back, or drive out of that parking lot.

Russia is confounding for most people. Why are we still in a Cold War situation with Russia? When the National Security Strategy came out under Trump — obviously Trump didn’t really like it — when Russia was given more prominence along with China, there was a lot of head-scratching. But it’s of course because of the election subversion and the actions Russia has taken to influence our elections, all of these operations to hack into all of our systems, ransomware … I mean, Russia is a massive problem. But we’re not in the kind of confrontation that we were with Russia in the Cold War. This is really kind of more Russia’s confrontation of choice than it is ours.

We have a really hard time getting the Russians off our back. So just like Trump thought that he could woo Putin, Biden would just like to say, “Yeah, please go away,” so he can move on with everything else.

But we need to always keep coming to Russia in our sights. And we’ve got to be a bit more sophisticated and nuanced in managing that relationship.

Fossett: What do you think more sophistication and nuance would look like?

Hill: Well, first of all, we know that they’ve been interfering in our political systems and they continue to do so. They’ve been doing it across the board with our European allies as well. We do need to work with [those allies] on this and get back to a concerted action. Domestic renewal is a critical part of this as well because the Russians are exploiting all of our internal divisions. Russian operatives masquerade on the internet, pressing issues on abortion, race, religion and partisan divisions. The more that we can do to overcome those and have a sensible national conversation about them, give more empathy and remember we’re Americans, the better off we will be.

We also have to keep on with education efforts to make sure that people are more aware of posting personal and political information online. They might also be dealing with someone in their social media circles who might be working for the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, as opposed to St. Petersburg, Florida.

And we also have to recognize that some of our politicians behave in the same way. I probably shouldn’t say this, but some of our members of Congress look more like some of the crazy members of the Russian Duma [parliament], like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who were influence operations for Russian domestic purposes. They’re out there being agent-provocateurs and stirring things up for domestic purposes, but they’re exactly the kinds of people that can be pointed to and manipulated by Russians on the outside. So when people say, for example, that Trump was a Russian asset, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he was on the books, or that we’ll find some file. Is just means that his actions, and his embrace of the Big Lie, and all of his vulnerabilities could be unbelievably easily exploited. Some of our members of Congress and senators are exactly the same.

But the problem for us is that we’re doing that domestically. Our political system has changed since Citizens United, with the creation of Super PACs and political action committees. I would hope that the Supreme Court would start thinking about reversing that. It’s a bit pie in the sky, but we need to ask how we can take all of this money out of our politics. Because that’s how the Russians can create shells, and they can influence other people with lots of money who can play in our system.

Fossett: I thought your book was similar to J.D. Vance’s book. Both are personal stories about people who made it out of socioeconomic disadvantage against all odds, and what those stories explain about people who feel resentful or dispossessed. Have you read that book?

Hill: I did, and, actually in a way, my book’s a little bit of a reaction to his. I thought his book was so grim, and he seems to sort of blame, in some respects, his family and people from his background for their predicament. And I thought, “Well, that’s not fair,” because in my experience, all of it has to do with circumstances. And I didn’t grow up in a family with substance abuse problems and other issues but certainly in the community there was plenty of that.

Fossett: Now he’s running for Senate in the mold of a Trump populist. And I want to ask about that transformation, because it seems so relevant to your arguments about how these populist-nationalist ideas take root in areas that are dealing with the kinds of problems both you and he discuss.

Hill: He should be running as his own person, not trying to emulate someone else. He’s the real deal. I mean, Trump was never the real deal. There are sections in Hillbilly Elegy about how celebrities like Trump can talk the talk and they never walk the walk.

There ought to be more empathy for the people and place where he came from, not trying to use them as a kind of slogan or a kind of a banner. Because the big problem of populism is people can’t see themselves reflected in the people at the top, and so they become prey to the celebrity-politicians and others who say, “I will be your champion; just give me your vote.” And those politicians don’t care that much about them.

Vance’s book along with many of the other, more conventional sociological books of the period — like The Unwinding, Strangers in Their Own Land, We’re Still Here, Janesville — these are the books that should be helping us to understand how we got to all of this. And these books should be coming up with some concrete solutions, not just serving as a kind of platform and springboard for exploitation, for a certain small number of people to get into political office.

I’m not saying that every politician seeks office for personal gain or professional advancement, but certainly a lot of people do. I mean, Trump thinks of himself as a king and wants to create a new dynasty. I saw that firsthand.

Fossett: I really thought the gender component was interesting to include in the book, because it’s essentially about lack of opportunity, and there are specific hurdles for women.

Hill: At one point my editor was a bit leery about me weaving the gender issue into it because I started off writing the book thematically. I wasn’t really going to do the whole biography in the way that it is in there now. Once we started to do it, when I started to write and draft it, it was a little overwhelming for the uninitiated reader. So we decided to do the biographical through-line.

And that’s when the women’s issues component seemed to become a question mark for the editor. But I did a little bit of focus grouping with my colleagues, and they said I should really insist on trying to keep this in. Some of them said, “Well, maybe this isn’t completely related to the theme of opportunity or some of the national security themes that you’re mentioning,” and I said, “But it is!” I mean, as any woman will tell you, this is very important. It does feed into social grievance and helps to explain why many women are also attracted to populism.

Fossett: It’s so important because we rarely discuss gender in the context of economic mobility. A lot of the gender issues we talk about are either issues for women at the top of the income distribution or the bottom. But women face unique issues moving from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Hill: Yes, because you get Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book about not having it all, which is very much for an elite audience. And then you got the less well-off women at the very bottom, for instance the single mothers who are looking for jobs and opportunities. You don’t see it the whole way through.

Fossett: So often when you hear about the narrative of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or the self-made person, that narrative often sounds designed around a man.

Hill: Even the word bootstraps, right?

Fossett: What do you think our conversation about economic mobility misses when it comes to women in particular?

Hill: Well, I do think gender is an obstacle to getting ahead at different phases of one’s career.

But many of the barriers are subtle. I mean, the #MeToo movement brought those out in a very unsubtle way — the barriers that are posed by sexual harassment and rape. But it’s also that kind of constant feeling that you are not the same as everyone else. I was told throughout my career that I was a risk because of being a woman. I’ve had all of these questions asked — when I was planning on having children — all of these things that are completely inappropriate.

But women are also often divided against each other. People never really know about salaries, because people don’t want to talk about it. I wanted to use a few more stories that people told me for the book and they didn’t want to let me use them because they were embarrassed. Older women in particular didn’t want people to know that they were underpaid vis-a-vis their male colleagues in these senior positions, because it was them somehow saying, “Well, I’m second class. I’m not worthy of this.” Because money is the marker.

Then there are physical security issues that are tied to opportunity. If you’re a girl considering job opportunities, you do have to think about going home on a bus or metro late at night. Some of the stories that got taken out were about attacks on the metro and getting stalked in the streets. My teenage years were when the Yorkshire Ripper was at large in the UK. It was a huge constraint on my teens and late teens because girls from all kinds of backgrounds were being killed. They weren’t all prostitutes, and a lot of the people who were had been driven into prostitution because of the extreme economic circumstances. And in the whole of the north of England, we were having all kinds of Take-Back-the-Night demonstrations because women couldn’t go to work and come back for fear of being brutally murdered. I was flashed at probably 100,000 bloody times from being a small child all the way through to an adult woman. And it would make me think twice about walking on my own or going anywhere on my own. So opportunities were constrained. These are not fully understood, but they do become constraints on economic mobility because women don’t have the same choices as men or boys do in terms of being able to take advantage of job offers or internships or other things as well.

And then the big issue is of single women with children, and their constraints on earning power get passed on to their children.

Fossett: The other thing I noticed in your book was how frankly you talked about what might be called wage discrimination. You describe two instances, at the Brookings Institution and in the White House, where the person who was in your position before you made a lot more money. In both cases, your predecessor was a man. They got more money because they had threatened to leave if they didn’t. And I have to ask, even in your position, as someone who is very well respected in her field and who has worked directly with the president, do you think that if you had tried to play hardball in the same way, it would have worked?

Hill: I almost think that it wouldn’t. It would be a backfire. And there was one incident where my husband had actually coached me beforehand. He said, “Men do this all the time, and you need to ask for this. And here, this is how to do it.” The hiring manager pretty much laughed at me when I tried it. And this is the kind of thing that a guy does all the time. And then I just thought, “Wow.” I remember hearing about successful women who had taken a lawyer to their salary negotiation, and I was like, “What?” And then I thought, “Well, yeah, I see why.” Because they’re going to get ripped off just as a matter of course.

But there is always this pervasive sense that I’ve experienced myself all the time that if you push too much, they’ll say, “Well, we won’t hire you. Because you are a risk and we’re taking a risk on you.” And then your salary history from these early jobs … The places I’ve worked, like Brookings and Harvard, have really worked on this, particularly in the last 10 years since the Lilly Ledbetter Act, and more women have moved up and started to push for wage equality.

But you can’t reverse 20-odd years of wage inequality. I tallied up at one point $500,000 of pay that I will never have. And I’m not going to complain from my vantage point, because I’m married to somebody who works in the private sector. But, yeah, it just annoys me that I’m paid and have been successively paid a hell of a lot less than men. So it’s like … so what am I? I’ve worked incredibly hard. I’ve been working since I was 11. And I’ll never make the same as a man from my kind of cohort.

And so what about the single mother? The younger person who is looking across at the guy next to her and thinks, “They’re making more than me here.” And then the hiring managers, will literally say, “Well, what’s your husband making?” or “Well good for you that you made that in your last job but you’re not going to get that here because we’re taking a risk on you in this promotion.” I spoke to a lot of women — around my age and in the media — who had exactly these discussions, and I want them to come out and talk about them. Because I want to make sure that young women don’t have to do that. People think you are the B-word when you start to push. Or they think you’re greedy and grasping. Women aren’t allowed to be angry, and women aren’t allowed to ask for the same things that men are allowed to ask for.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/08/fiona-hill-book-donald-trump-515660
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Biden Restores Protections for Bears Ears National Monument

The Biden administration is using its executive powers to restore environmental protections to Bears Ears National Monument, an expansive, sacred landscape in Utah. The move comes four years after former President Donald Trump stripped protections away from Bears Ears, cutting back its area by 82%.

Read more…

Source: https://gizmodo.com/biden-restores-protections-for-bears-ears-national-monu-1847825324
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US discloses size of nuclear stockpile for first time since 2018

The Biden administration on Tuesday disclosed the U.S. nuclear stockpile for the first time since 2018, the Trump administration having refused to disclose the information for the past two years.According to the …

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/575483-us-discloses-size-of-nuclear-stockpile-for-first-time-since-2018
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Voters in 36 states will elect a governor next year. Here’s a cheat sheet.

The country found out just how important governors are over the past 20 months. Next year, the vast majority of Americans will decide whether those leaders should keep their jobs after the once-in-a-generation pandemic.

While the midterms have often been cast as a referendum on which party should control Washington, voters in 36 states will also elect governors in 2022, ranging from the nation’s largest state — California, fresh off a gubernatorial recall election — to the least populated state of Wyoming. And if the last year-and-a-half has shown anything, these governors’ races shouldn’t be playing second fiddle to Congress, either for voters’ attention or donors’ dollars.

“I think the pandemic, over the last year and a half, has been a really good time for people to realize how important their governors are,” said Marshall Cohen, the political director of the Democratic Governors Association. “These governors races are not national the way that federal races are, and each state is its own unique set of circumstances.”

POLITICO spoke with two dozen operatives deeply involved in the nation’s gubernatorial landscape — ranging from party leaders in Washington, D.C., to state party chairs and top aides to candidates in some of the most competitive states on the map — to define the 2022 map with a year to go.

The broad national environment still plays a role: Republicans are confident that, with the wind at their backs, they can flip governors’ mansions in battleground states. But gubernatorial races are also fought with more state-specific motivations in mind — on everything from the pandemic to education to local taxes — that allow for scenarios like Democrats defending a seat in the traditionally deep red Kansas, and for Republicans holding and fighting for several seats in the blue Northeast.

Both parties have pickup opportunities next year, though there are only a handful of open seats, with just three right now — Arizona, Maryland and Pennsylvania — expected to be battlegrounds. Incumbents on both sides of the aisle have spent the last few years building sizable political operations and deep war chests, allowing the parties to spend on a more core battleground of states.

“I think the good thing for us is — if you look at our map — I don’t expect the vast majority of our incumbents are going to need our engagement next year,” said Dave Rexrode, the executive director of the Republican Governors Association, which is confident about defending sitting governors in large, pricey states like Texas and Ohio.

That means dumping tens of millions of dollars into just a handful of states instead of the 28 states Republicans were worried about in 2018. Democrats find themselves in the same situation.

“I think one of the things that puts us in a stronger position going into an incumbent cycle is that we’ve had such a long runway,” DGA executive director Noam Lee said. “These are teams we’re familiar with. These are operations we’ve helped build.”

The two parties largely agree on the scope of the core battlefield. Democrats’ top defensive targets will likely be the usual presidential battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, along with Kansas, where Gov. Laura Kelly is the only Democrat seeking reelection in a state then-President Donald Trump carried last year.

Republicans, meanwhile, are on defense in Arizona and Georgia, with big question marks in a quartet of traditionally blue states that have nevertheless elected and reelected Republican governors recently.

“What are the top three states for them? Kansas, Wisconsin and Michigan,” Rexrode said. “What are our big three states? Kansas, Wisconsin and Michigan.”

An early test of the landscape is just a month away in Virginia. The state has long been considered a political bellwether ahead of midterm elections, where the off-year race has almost always historically swung against the party in power across the Potomac River.

But with more than a year to go until the midterms, these races aren’t completely set. More candidates are expected to jump into marquee races during the last quarter of this year and in early 2022, and some incumbent governors still need to decide if they will seek reelection.

The open seats

Arizona will likely be the most competitive open seat race in the nation next November, with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey term-limited. Trump recently endorsed Kari Lake, a former local TV anchor. But thus far, that endorsement has not been a field clearer for Republicans. Former Rep. Matt Salmon remains in the race with the backing of Club for Growth, the anti-tax group that has typically aligned itself with Trump in primaries.

Other GOP candidates include state Board of Regents member Karrin Taylor Robson, who is expected to be able to bring significant resources to bear for the race; state Treasurer Kimberly Yee; Steve Gaynor, the party’s 2018 nominee for secretary of state; and Daniel McCarthy, who now-former Sen. Martha McSally handily beat in a 2020 primary.

Looming over the race: the enduring, Trump-driven effort to reverse Republicans’ 2020 election losses in the state. That’s reinforced by the leading Democratic candidate, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, whose opposition to a flawed GOP-led review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County has boosted her national profile.

Democrats’ best pick-up opportunity is likely in Maryland, where Republican Gov. Larry Hogan is barred from running again. Before the general election, the GOP will signal the direction it is going in the blue state: Kelly Schulz, who serves as Hogan’s commerce secretary, and state Del. Daniel Cox, who has recently modeled himself as a Trump-style Republican and said he attended the rally that preceded the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, are both running. Other Republicans may soon get in — including Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor and Republican National Committee chair who has ardently opposed Trump.

The Democratic primary is expected to be a crowded one, with many candidates already in the race. The field includes two former Obama cabinet secretaries: Tom Perez, who was labor secretary and a former Democratic National Committee chair, and former Education Secretary John King. Other candidates include longtime state Comptroller Peter Franchot, former Prince George’s County executive Rushern Baker, former state attorney general Doug Gansler and well-known author Wes Moore.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats are waiting for the all-but-certain announcement from state Attorney General Josh Shapiro that he’s running to replace term-limited Gov. Tom Wolf. Shapiro’s entrance is expected imminently, and he will be backed by a wave of institutional support.

A messy and uncertain primary awaits the GOP, one that could leave any potential nominee bruised up against an unscathed Shapiro. The already-crowded field includes former Rep. Lou Barletta, Montgomery County commissioner Joe Gale, former U.S. Attorney William McSwain, former Chester County Chamber official Guy Ciarrocchi, activist Charlie Gerow and others. Some have formed exploratory committees, including state Sens. Scott Martin and Dan Laughlin, who is looking to run as a post-Trump moderate in a field that has largely embraced the former president.

And Republicans — including state Sen. Doug Mastriano, state Senate President Jake Corman and members of Congress like Rep. Mike Kelly — have all publicly toyed with the idea of running, meaning the field could get more crowded still.

The major battlegrounds

One party in Georgia is trying to keep itself together. The other is waiting for one woman’s decision.

Gov. Brian Kemp is besieged on both sides. Trump’s enmity for the first-term GOP governor is so strong that he told rallygoers in Georgia last month he’d rather have Kemp’s 2018 Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, in charge in Atlanta. But Trump has not gone so far as to back the campaign of Democrat-turned-Republican Vernon Jones, a former state representative, despite some members of his orbit backing Jones. Instead, Trump’s operation has tried to nudge former Sen. David Perdue into the race, and Kemp has been working to get the rank-and-file back into his corner even as the former president continues to attack him for not assisting him in overturning the 2020 election.

Abrams has been widely expected to run after her narrow loss to Kemp in 2018. She has yet to announce a decision, while she has kicked off a nationwide tour that does not visit her home state. No other Democrat in the state has dared to float a run while everyone awaits Abrams’ decision.

Republicans see Kansas as their best pick-up opportunity anywhere on the map. Nevertheless, Democrats are expected to fight hard for Gov. Laura Kelly, and outside groups like EMILY’s List have already signaled that they will be in her corner for the election, circulating early internal polling that has her above water in the state.

Republicans are largely united around state Attorney General Derek Schmidt. The party will likely avoid a competitive, drawn out primary after former Gov. Jeff Colyer abruptly announced he was ending his campaign to seek treatment for a cancer diagnosis.

One issue to watch in Kansas is abortion. During the August 2022 primary, Kansans will vote for an amendment to the state constitution that would add that it “does not create or secure a right to abortion,” after the state Supreme Court found as much in 2019. This could supercharge the issue during a summer where the Supreme Court in Washington is already expected to revisit Roe v. Wade.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is among Republicans’ top targets in 2022, but the first-term governor has built a national profile since her election and has a formidable fundraising operation.

The Republican field to challenge her is already crowded. James Craig, who retired as head of the Detroit Police Department to challenge Whitmer, is seen as an early leader for the nomination, but not a field clearer. Other candidates include Tudor Dixon, a conservative media personality; Garrett Soldano, a chiropractor who led early protests opposing coronavirus measures from Whitmer; and Kevin Rinke, a businessman who launched an “exploratory committee” and has the capacity to self-fund. Some Republicans would like to see John James, who lost Senate races in 2018 and 2020, take a shot at Whitmer, too.

Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak’s battle for reelection in Nevada will likely fall into the top tier of competitive races in November, but first Republicans will need to pick their nominee. Former Sen. Dean Heller recently launched his campaign, which could resurface his sometimes contentious relationship with Trump. He is joining a field that includes Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo; the party-switching North Vegas Mayor John Lee; Joey Gilbert, a former boxer and an attorney who was at the Jan. 6 insurrection, and others. A recent poll from the Nevada Independent found Heller and Lombardo in the top two spots, but neither has the nomination locked down. And the field might yet grow: GOP Rep. Mark Amodei recently said he was “torn” about running for governor or sticking around for the potential of serving in the House majority in 2022.

It is also worth watching for any intraparty squabbles among Democrats in the state. Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) won control of the state party, widening a fissure between progressives and the remnants of the Reid Machine, which former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid corralled to make one of the most effective operations in the country. A splinter coordinated campaign is now being run out of Washoe County with the blessing of both Sisolak and Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto —who also has a hyper-competitive election next year — while the state party has sprouted its own.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers will have one of the most contested reelection fights in the nation, but the Democrat has already posted strong fundraising numbers in the off year and does not have any primary challengers standing in his way.

On the Republican side, the field remains unsettled: Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch is considered a strong candidate, but GOP Sen. Ron Johnson’s public indecision on whether he’ll seek reelection has left the field murky. Johnson at one point flirted with a gubernatorial run before ruling it out, but his indecision has frozen other could-be candidates including Kevin Nicholson, a businessman who finished second in the 2018 Senate primary. Should Johnson run for reelection, Nicholson would likely jump into the gubernatorial race.

The big four

The nation’s four largest states are less competitive — and possibly prohibitively expensive for the challenging party to try to compete.

In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom could face many of the same names he just vanquished in the state’s recall election last month. Some of the Republican candidates, including former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and right-wing radio host Larry Elder, are either already running or are considering bids — but the GOP has admitted that its potential statewide in the Golden State is basically non-existent for the foreseeable future.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has built a campaign machine that functionally never turns off, with tens-of-millions in the bank and Trump’s endorsement locked up. Even still, he has drawn primary challengers from former state party chair Allen West (who was a member of Congress representing Florida) and former state Sen. Don Huffines, among others. His allies expect him to easily blow by the primary field, but Democrats hope that the primary’s existence — and Trump needling the governor about the 2020 election — could expose Abbott.

On the Democratic side, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke is widely expected to get into the race. Democrats view him as their best chance to take on Abbott during the cycle, citing his narrow loss to Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 and a fundraising apparatus that could rival Abbott’s. But Republicans welcome his challenge, arguing that O’Rourke’s failed presidential bid damaged his brand, and that Abbott is not nearly as vulnerable as Cruz was in a Democratic wave year. Actor Matthew McConaughey has also said he’s weighing a run. He’s made calls to influential people in Texas politics, including some moderate Republicans.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is widely believed to be positioning himself for a potential 2024 presidential run. But first, he’ll need to win reelection. Republicans argue that he is well positioned, despite drawing widespread attention for his handling of the pandemic — which includes withering criticism from many public health experts and Democrats. He has not formally announced his bid, but already has more than $50 million in the bank, with aspirations to raise scores of millions more for his campaign.

The Democratic race is a faceoff between state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and Rep. Charlie Crist, who last won the governorship over a decade-and-a-half ago as a Republican before leaving the party for a failed Senate bid and a losing 2014 gubernatorial bid as a Democrat. Republicans hope that the late-August primary will leave the eventual nominee damaged and cash-poor — making it an even tougher proposition to go against DeSantis without outside help, which could pull resources from elsewhere on the map.

Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul took over the reins in New York after now-former Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned amid a myriad of allegations of inappropriate behavior — but some very prominent Democrats are considering challenging her for the nomination, in what could be an immensely expensive primary contest in the Empire State. That list is long, but it includes potential candidates like state Attorney General Tish James, outgoing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Rep. Tom Suozzi, state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi and many more.

Republicans, too, will have a crowded field: Rep. Lee Zeldin has worked to coalesce support among Republicans in the state. Andrew Giuliani — the son of the now-controversial former mayor — and former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino are also in the mix. But with a Cuomo-less election on the horizon in 2022, the state is favored to remain in Democratic hands.

Don’t sleep on these

There is considerable uncertainty in Alaska, where Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy is seeking a second term, because of the state’s new elections system. All candidates will run in the same primary, and the top four will advance to a ranked-choice November election. Already in the race is former Republican-turned-independent Gov. Bill Walker, whom Dunleavy ousted in 2018. Former Democratic state Rep. Les Gara is also running, and other would-be candidates are considering bids, including Al Gross, an independent who unsuccessfully challenged GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan in 2020 with the blessing of Democrats.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has not yet declared he’ll seek another term, but the Democrat is expected to do so. Republicans haven’t totally written off the state, despite its general blue lean, after Lamont only won by 3 points in 2018. The GOP does not have a candidate yet, but Bob Stefanowski, whom Lamont defeated last time, and former state House Minority Leader Themis Klarides are both considering runs. Complicating any bid to oust Lamont is that most of Connecticut’s voters live in the incredibly expensive New York media market.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker is a favorite to win reelection in the state and has already started deploying his considerable fortune on early internet ads to kickstart his reelection bid. Even still, Republicans could turn this into an expensive and competitive race. Businessperson Jesse Sullivan recently entered the race with $10 million in the bank, and a new congressional map from Democrats that’s expected to try to gerrymander some of the Republicans in the delegation out of office could nudge someone like Reps. Rodney Davis or Adam Kinzinger into the gubernatorial race. And Chicago billionaire Ken Griffin’s potential support of a Republican candidate — Pritzker’s self-funding has nullified the state’s contribution limits for other candidates — could also make it difficult for Pritzker to coast to victory.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds is likely in a stronger position to win reelection than in 2018 — when she squeaked out a narrow victory — as the often swingy Iowa has moved further to Republicans over the last several years. The Democratic primary could still be competitive, and the state isn’t a lock depending on the nominee: State Rep. Ras Smith and Deidre DeJear — who was the party’s 2018 secretary of state nominee — are already in the race, and prominent Iowans including state Auditor Rob Sand, Rep. Cindy Axne and state Sen. Pam Jochum have publicly floated bids.

It will likely be a battle of known commodities in Maine: Democratic Gov. Janet Mills is primed to square up against former Republican Gov. Paul LePage, who has a clear shot to his party’s nomination. Mills won her first term in 2018 — when LePage was term-limited — by a fairly comfortable margin, but the role of a third-party candidate will be a big question. Even in Mills’ 2018 win, an independent candidate drew 6 percent of the vote — and LePage first won the office in 2010 with just 38 percent of the vote. The state’s recent shift to ranked choice voting does not apply to the gubernatorial general election.

In Massachusetts, everything rides on whether Gov. Charlie Baker will run for a third term. Baker won reelection in a landslide in 2018 after a close 2014 victory (and a narrow 2010 loss). If he were to be the nominee again, Republicans would be in strong position to hold the state, even as some Democrats are hopeful his support has softened over the last four years. But he is also facing a primary challenge from former state Rep. Geoff Diehl, whom Trump endorsed this week. Should Baker not run, state Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito could be a leading candidate.

Democrats already have three candidates in the race — state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, former state Sen. Benjamin Downing and Harvard professor Danielle Allen — and others could be waiting for a clearer sign for what Baker will do. State Attorney General Maura Healey has been publicly mulling a run for governor herself, also freezing the field.

Minnesota has voted for Democrats reliably over the last decade, but it is one that Democrats argue they can’t sleep on, given the sometimes sneaky competitiveness of the state in some recent races. Republicans have attracted several candidates thus far to face Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — including state Sens. Michelle Benson and Paul Gazelka and former state Sen. Scott Jensen. Jennifer Carnahan, who recently resigned as GOP state party chair over her ties to a top donor charged with sex crimes (she denies any knowledge) and allegations of a hostile work environment, has floated a run.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu has not yet announced if he will seek another term or run against Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan, freezing much of the field on both sides for now in the perennial swing state. Should Sununu not run for his current job, Republicans consider former Sen. Kelly Ayotte a strong potential candidate.

Republicans are bullish about their chances in New Mexico against Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Mark Ronchetti, a TV weatherman who unsuccessfully ran for the state’s open Senate seat last year, is considering another statewide run for governor. If he runs, he’d join a GOP field that includes some local Republican candidates, including state Rep. Rebecca Dow and Jay Block, a Sandoval County commissioner.

Ohio has become decidedly less competitive since former President Barack Obama left office, with Republicans dominating most recent statewide elections. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is running for reelection. Trump has shown he is no fan of the Ohio incumbent, and former Rep. Jim Renacci — the only Republican to lose a statewide race since 2016 — is already primarying him. But DeWine has amassed a significant war chest that his backers believe will leave him in a strong position, in both the primary and general election.

Democrats will have a tall task in front of them to recapture their past success in this Rust Belt state. Battling to try to do so is a pair of mayors: Nan Whaley from Dayton and John Cranley from Cincinnati.

Now-former Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo was already term-limited, so her departure for Washington, D.C., to be Biden’s commerce secretary only sped up what is going to be a competitive Democratic primary in the state. Gov. Dan McKee is running for a full term after taking over the office from Raimondo, but he is not a field-clearer. Already in the race is state Treasurer Seth Magaziner, current state Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea and former state Secretary of State Matt Brown, with others waiting in the wings. (Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza recently ruled out a run.)

Republicans are not totally writing the state off, but it’s not among their top targets. Former Cranston Mayor Allan Fung — who narrowly lost in 2014 to Raimondo when a third party candidate got 20 percent of the vote and was blown out of the water by her in 2018 — recently took a job with the McKee administration, likely closing the door on another bid for the governor’s mansion.

No prominent candidate has gotten in the race on either side of the ticket in Vermont. Republicans are hopeful that Gov. Phil Scott will run again, as he has won comfortably every two years since 2016 and would likely take this otherwise blue state almost entirely off the map.

Primary problems

In safer states, the real action is in the primaries. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey could face a stiff intraparty challenge in her bid for a second full term. Lynda Blanchard, who was the American ambassador to Slovenia during the Trump administration, is currently running for the state’s open Senate seat — but has been spinning her wheels since Trump endorsed Rep. Mo Brooks in that primary. And state Auditor Jim Zeigler has been critical of Ivey and has said he is exploring a run.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary and the daughter of former Gov. Mike Huckabee, is thought to be the favorite in Arkansas to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson. Trump endorsed his former spokesperson, which drove some potential candidates away from the race — though not state Attorney General Leslie Rutledge.

Once-purple Colorado has turned an increasingly darker shade of blue, with Democratic Gov. Jared Polis in a very strong position to win reelection next year. Even so, Heidi Ganahl, a member of the state board of regents and the only elected Republican serving statewide, recently launched a bid to challenge Polis in a crowded field.

Democrats are expected to retain the governorship in Hawaii, even with current Gov. David Ige term-limited. A busy primary could pop up on the islands, with candidates including Lt. Gov. Josh Green, former first lady Vicky Cayetano and former Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell in the race.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little has not declared his reelection bid in the dark red state, but has been fundraising and is expected to do so. But he may have to navigate through a tricky primary from the right that would include his own lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, and a regional GOP chair, Ed Humphreys.

The primary to replace term-limited Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts could turn into a dragdown fight between two megadoners: Charles Herbster, who allied himself with the former president and has drawn attacks from Ricketts’ team, and board of regents member Jim Pillen.

Republicans believe that Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt is on a glide path to another term, even as he faces what could be nominal primary challengers in a state with a low barrier to get on the ballot.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is term-limited, and already, several high-profile Democrats have gotten in the race, including state House Speaker Tina Kotek and state Treasurer Tobias Read. Other big candidates could still be around the corner, including state Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster is favored to win another term in office, and the Republican faces no serious primary challengers. But Democrats could have a competitive primary nevertheless, with former Rep. Joe Cunningham and state Sen. Mia McLeod both running for what will be an uphill general election.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has a clear path to reelection, as she eyes a potential launching pad to even higher office.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is the odds-on favorite to win another term in a state Democrats have struggled mightily in since former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen last held the governor’s mansion a decade ago.

Wyoming is the nation’s most Republican state — and if GOP Gov. Mark Gordon seeks a second term, it’s his for the taking.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/06/the-fifty-governors-2022-515211
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