Closing summary
The mystery of “Havana syndrome” continued, with US intelligence agencies concluding no foreign adversary was behind the debilitating attacks on its government officials overseas, but otherwise coming up with no answers for what so harmed their health. Meanwhile at the White House, Joe Biden introduced Julie Su, who he has nominated for a promotion to the labor department’s top post. If confirmed by the Senate, she would be the first Asian American cabinet secretary to serve since he took office two years ago.
Here’s what else happened today:
The Senate will consider legislation to revoke the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force against Iraq, its Democratic leader said.
FBI agents in Washington tried to slow down the investigation into Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Top Democrats want Fox News to stop promoting Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
Attorney general Merrick Garland got into it with rightwing senator Ted Cruz over security for supreme court justices.
The mute people in straitjackets wandering around the Capitol? Adam Kinzinger sent them.
Elsewhere in the Capitol, things have gotten a bit weird:
The House offices are filled with people silently walking the halls in straitjackets and light-up glasses.
— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) February 28, 2023
I asked if it’s a protest but they indicated they’re not allowed to speak. pic.twitter.com/Q6Lb7NQDh9
That was from yesterday. Today, the white-clad performers were back, this time displaying a QR code that Axios used to figure out who was behind them: Adam Kinzinger. The retired House lawmaker was one of two Republicans to serve on the January 6 committee, but ultimately decided not to run for another term and left Congress at the end of last year.
Now, he’s helming a campaign against political extremism, and told the website the performers’ uniforms and straitjackets were meant to send a message. “We call them ‘drones’ … They’re just kind of droning around, they really don’t have a purpose at the moment... because they just feel unrepresented. They feel like government is just kind of going along.” The whole point of their presence in the halls of the Capitol offices were to grab attention, he said, and satirize the “desperate need of every lawmaker and staffer there” to go viral on social media or appear on TV.
Thus far, Kinzinger has spent $250,000 on the campaign’s launch, which also includes advertising on billboards and television. “I’m sure it’ll end up probably building to be even more,” Kinzinger told Axios.
Top Senate Democrat says deal reached to repeal Iraq war authorization
The Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said a deal has been reached with the GOP to repeal the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force against Iraq, which provided the congressional authority for America’s strikes against Saddam Hussein’s government, and the invasion that ultimately toppled him from power.
In a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer said the foreign affairs committee would begin considering the measure next week.
“There’s support on both sides of the aisle for this proposal. Because both Democrats and Republicans have come to the same conclusion: we need to put the Iraq war squarely behind us once and for all. And doing that means we should extinguish the legal authority that initiated the war to begin with,” the New York lawmaker said.
Lawmakers from both parties have sought to repeal the authorizations for years, but never managed to do so. Punchbowl News reports that in the House, two of its most conservative Republican members are leading the charge to approve the repeals.
Updated
Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator whose hostility to aggressively fighting climate change and some social aid programs infuriated progressives, remains coy about whether he will stand for another term in 2024, Punchbowl News reports.
Try and decode this:
Asked if he’ll run for re-election, Manchin says “I will be involved.”
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) March 1, 2023
Love him or hate him, the truth is that Manchin’s presence has allowed Democrats to control the Senate since January 2021 – and few in the party believe that voters in red-state West Virginia would replace him with another Democrat if he does not run again.
As he testifies before the Senate judiciary committee, it’s become clear what Republicans are using as their attack line of the day against attorney general Merrick Garland.
GOP senators at the hearing are accusing him of ignoring the security concerns of conservative supreme court justices, who were the target of protests outside their homes, particularly around the time of their decision to overturn Roe v Wade. Case in point, here’s Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas’s exchange with Garland:
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) asks Attorney General Merrick Garland why the DoJ wouldn't arrest protesters outside Supreme Court justices’ houses when the department devoted time to prosecuting January 6th insurrectionists.
— The Recount (@therecount) March 1, 2023
Garland: “Our priority is violence and threats of violence.” pic.twitter.com/Oqksj0TbaQ
Last year, Congress agreed to pay for more security for supreme court justices and their families in a measure approved by bipartisan votes.
Our world affairs editor, Julian Borger, considers the state of US-China relations, and views about US-China relations from both sides of the aisle in DC, a day after the first hearing of the House China committee…
The Biden administration has settled on the ambiguous phrase “pacing challenge” to characterise Beijing’s place in its global outlook, but the newly formulated House China committee expressed impatience with such delicacy at its first hearing on Tuesday.
“We may call this a ‘strategic competition’,” said Mike Gallagher, the committee’s Republican chairman. “But this is not a polite tennis match. This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century, and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”
The ranking Democrat, Raja Krishnamoorthi, said both Republican and Democratic administrations had underestimated the threat posed by China and called for a policy built around deterrence.
“We do not want a war with the PRC [People’s Republic of China], not a cold war, not a hot war, we don’t want a ‘clash of civilizations’. But, we seek a durable peace. And that is why we have to deter aggression,” Krishnamoorthi said.
Here’s Lauren Gambino’s report on that first committee hearing:
Updated
Speaking of Trump’s election subversion and the events of January 6, Politico is first to report a new move by Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican and member of GOP royalty who stood up to Trump, vice-chaired the House January 6 committee and lost her seat in Congress to a Trump loyalist as a result.
Cheney is joining the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia as a professor of practice, Politico reports, a move due to be announced today. The daughter of the former congressman, defense secretary and vice-president Dick Cheney will “offer guest lectures in classes and public events as well as participate in research”.
Liz Cheney said: “There are many threats facing our system of government and I hope my work with the Center for Politics and the broader community at the University of Virginia will contribute to finding lasting solutions that not only preserve but strengthen our democracy.”
The other Republican who sat on the January 6 committee, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, retired from Congress rather than face losing his seat to a Trumper.
Politico now reports that he is launching “a nationwide campaign urging voters to reject extreme candidates on both sides of the aisle ahead of the 2024 election”.
The centerpiece of the campaign is a nearly six-minute-long video titled Break Free, inspired by Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad about escaping the conformity of non-Apple computers. In the political ad’s twist, people are forced to wear blue- and red-tinted goggles showing them divisive images and broadcasts from a Big Brother-type character until they take them off and escape. A monologue from Kinzinger urges Americans to reject political extremes.”
Here’s more about the 1984 Apple ad:
And here’s an interesting nugget about Cheney: her defiance of Trump was in part informed and inspired by her reading of Lincoln on the Verge, a 2020 book by the historian and sometime Guardian contributor Ted Widmer which you should definitely read. Here’s some lunchtime reading on that:
Donald Trump has responded to news of Rupert Murdoch’s extraordinary deposition in Dominion Voter Systems’ billion-dollar defamation suit against Fox News.
The deposition concerns the repetition by Fox News hosts of the lie spread by Trump and his advisers and allies that Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was the result of voter fraud, specifically voter fraud supposedly carried out using Dominion machines in extraordinarily outlandish ways.
The Trump response is, predictably, furious and filled with a characteristic disregard for the truth:
If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged & Stolen, then he & his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding & abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS. Certain BRAVE & PATRIOTIC Fox News Hosts, who he scorns and ridicules, got it right. He got it wrong. THEY SHOULD BE ADMIRED & PRAISED, NOT REBUKED & FORSAKEN!!!
That was delivered, of course, via Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform which he set up after being booted off Twitter for inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.
For some further and rather more temperate reading, here’s Charles Kaiser’s look at why the Dominion suit is such a serious problem for Murdoch and Fox News:
And here’s Ed Pilkington’s look at the Murdoch deposition … and why it is such a serious problem too:
The day so far
The mystery of “Havana syndrome” continues, with US intelligence agencies concluding no foreign adversary was behind the debilitating attacks on its government officials overseas, but otherwise coming up with no answers for what so harmed their health. Meanwhile at the White House, Joe Biden introduced Julie Su, who he nominated for a promotion to lead the labor department. If confirmed by the Senate, she would be the first Asian American cabinet secretary to serve since he took office two years ago.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
FBI agents in Washington tried to slow down the investigation into Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Top Democrats want Fox News to stop promoting Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
Attorney general Merrick Garland got into it with rightwing senator Ted Cruz over security for supreme court justices.
Joe Biden is cheering news that drugmaker Eli Lilly will drop the price of insulin:
Huge news.
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 1, 2023
Last year, we capped insulin prices for seniors on Medicare, but there was more work to do.
I called on Congress – and manufacturers – to lower insulin prices for everyone else.
Today, Eli Lilly is heeding my call. Others should follow. https://t.co/Kv57KFATe9
As is Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee:
Thanks to the leadership of President Joe Biden, Americans across the country will no longer be forced to pay astronomical prices for the life-saving insulin they need. Make no mistake: Eli Lilly’s decision to cap its insulin prices at $35 a month is a direct result of President Biden calling on drug manufacturers to lower insulin prices for everyone else, after Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act to cap insulin costs for seniors on Medicare, which every single Republican in Congress voted against. While Democrats’ fight to bring down costs for American families, MAGA Republicans have threatened to try and repeal the Inflation Reduction Act and raise drug prices for millions of Americans.”
Attorney general Merrick Garland usually presents a placid facade in public, but in today’s Senate judiciary committee oversight hearing, Republican Ted Cruz managed to get the top prosecutor’s back up.
The Texas lawmaker hammered Garland about why US Marshals did not stop protesters outside the homes of supreme court justices who voted last year to overturn Roe v Wade. Republicans have used the arrest of California man who allegedly plotted to murder conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh to argue that the demonstrators presented a threat to justices, and that the Biden administration did little to stop it.
Here’s the exchange:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and AG Garland go back and forth over protesters outside SCOTUS justices’ homes.
— The Recount (@therecount) March 1, 2023
Cruz: “How did you choose not to enforce this statute?”
Garland: “The marshals on scene …”
Cruz: “Marshals don’t make that decision.”
Garland: “They do make the decision!” pic.twitter.com/FlPLy8etU3
Intelligence agencies find no foreign adversary behind 'Havana syndrome': report
A review by US intelligence agencies could not conclude that a foreign adversary was behind “Havana syndrome,” a mysterious health ailment that affected US government workers overseas, the Washington Post reports.
The determination in a report authored by seven intelligence agencies clashes with a conclusion reached by a panel of expert scientists last year, which found pulsed electromagnetic energy and ultrasound could be behind the mysterious symptoms that include headaches, nausea and ringing in the ears – which in some cases has grown debilitating for those affected.
Here’s more on the latest report, from the Post:
Seven intelligence agencies participated in the review of approximately 1,000 cases of “anomalous health incidents,” the term the government uses to describe a constellation of physical symptoms including ringing in the ears followed by pressure in the head and nausea, headaches and acute discomfort.
Five of those agencies determined it was “very unlikely” that a foreign adversary was responsible for the symptoms, either as the result of purposeful actions — such as a directed energy weapon — or as the byproduct of some other activity, including electronic surveillance that unintentionally could have made people sick, the officials said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the findings of the assessment, which had not yet been made public.
One agency, which the officials did not name, determined that it was “unlikely” that a foreign actor was at fault, a slightly less emphatic finding that did not appreciably change the consensus. One agency abstained in its conclusion regarding a foreign actor. But when asked, no agency dissented from the conclusion that a foreign actor did not cause the symptoms, one of the intelligence officials said.
The symptoms were first reported at the U.S. Embassy in Havana in 2016.
The officials said that as analysts examined clusters of reported cases, including at U.S. embassies, they found no pattern or common set of conditions that could link individual cases. They also found no evidence, including forensic information or geolocation data, that would suggest an adversary had used a form of directed energy such as radio waves or ultrasonic beams. In some cases, there was no “direct line of sight” to affected personnel working at U.S. facilities, further casting doubt on the possibility that a hypothetical energy weapon could have been the culprit, one of the officials said.
One of the officials said that even in geographic locations where U.S. intelligence effectively had total ability to monitor the environment for signs of malicious interference, analysts found no evidence of an adversary targeting personnel.
“There was nothing,” the official said. This person added that there was no intelligence that foreign leaders, including in Russia, had any knowledge of or had authorized an attack on U.S. personnel that could explain the symptoms.
The second official, who described a frustrating “mystery” as to why longtime colleagues had become ill, said analysts spent months churning data, looking for patterns and inventing new analytic methodologies, only to come up with no plausible explanation.
Democrats are cheering after a major drugmaker announced it would cut prices for insulin today, and calling on other companies to follow suit. Here’s more from Reuters:
Eli Lilly will cut list prices by 70% for its most commonly prescribed forms of insulin, Humalog and Humulin, beginning from the fourth quarter of this year, the drugmaker said on Wednesday.
The move comes amid criticism of healthcare companies by US lawmakers over rising costs of insulin, with Joe Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act including a $35 cap on insulin for those enrolled in Medicare health insurance plans.
“While we could wait for Congress to act or the healthcare system in general to apply that standard, we’re just applying it ourselves,” the company’s chief executive, Dave Ricks, told CNN in an interview.
Here’s more from the House’s top Democrat Hakeem Jeffries on the letter he and Chuck Schumer sent to Fox News’s Rupert Murdoch, demanding an end to its hosts’ spreading of election disinformation:
.@RepJeffries on letter to Fox News: "Donald Trump perpetuated a big lie to the American people...Perhaps it's time for America to be able to move past that big lie, and an important step would be those who know it was a big lie, to publicly repudiate it." pic.twitter.com/Rq7VjsZ716
— CSPAN (@cspan) March 1, 2023
Top Democrats demand Rupert Murdoch stop Fox News hosts from spreading 2020 election lies
The top Democrats in the House and Senate have written to Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, demanding he stop the network from perpetuating Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“As noted in your deposition released yesterday, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and other Fox News personalities knowingly, repeatedly, and dangerously endorsed and promoted the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. Though you have acknowledged your regret in allowing this grave propaganda to take place, your network hosts continue to promote, spew, and perpetuate election conspiracy theories to this day,” reads the letter from Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries.
They’re referring to testimony released earlier this week showing Murdoch knew some Fox News hosts “endorsed” the misinformation about the 2020 vote, in which Joe Biden was elected to the White House.
“We demand that you direct Tucker Carlson and other hosts on your network to stop spreading false election narratives and admit on the air that they were wrong to engage in such negligent behavior,” Jeffries and Schumer write, referring to the conservative network’s most popular commentator who was recently given more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage of the January 6 attack by Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy.
“As evidenced by the January 6 insurrection, spreading this false propaganda could not only embolden supporters of the Big Lie to engage in further acts of political violence, but also deeply and broadly weakens faith in our democracy and hurts our country in countless other ways.”
You can read the full letter here.
Turning our focus for a moment from the president to people who would like to be president, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports on the latest crack in the rift between supporters of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis:
Ron DeSantis is a “tyrant”, the far-right activist Laura Loomer said, after she and other Trump supporters were barred from a book signing staged by the Florida governor.
“They told me to say anybody wearing Trump has to go right now,” a uniformed officer said in video posted online by Loomer, a failed congressional candidate, conspiracy theorist, Islamophobe and rightwing political gadfly.
“DeSantis people are in there telling me to come out to tell you guys not to be here while he’s here,” the officer said.
Loomer said: “Governor DeSantis, he always talks about how he’s in favour of free speech. So do we have a first amendment right to be here, to rally in support of President Trump?”
“Right you do,” said the officer. “But not now.”
Loomer asked: “DeSantis’s people told you that we have to leave?”
The officer said: “Yes.”
Later, Loomer told the Daily Beast: “Police showed up and they told us that we were going to be cited and arrested for trespassing if we didn’t leave because DeSantis didn’t want us inside. It shows that he’s a tyrant.”
Biden announces 'American dream' Julie Su as labor nominee
Calling her “the American dream,” Joe Biden introduced his nominee to lead the labor department Julie Su, who could become the first Asian American to serve as a cabinet secretary in his administration.
“Julie is the American dream,” the president said in a White House ceremony. He noted how both of her parents immigrated to the United States from China, with her mother holding a union job and her father owning a small business. “I think even more importantly, she’s committed to making sure that dream is within reach of every American.”
In her address to a crowd of lawmakers and officials, Su remarked that, “60 years ago, my mom came to the United States on a cargo ship because she couldn’t afford a passenger ticket. Recently, she got a call from the President of the United States telling her that her daughter was going to be nominated to be US labor secretary.”
“I believe in the transformative power of America, and I know the transformative power of a good job,” Su said.
Lawmakers had pressured Biden for not having any cabinet secretaries of Asian American or Pacific Islander descent, though US Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s parents were immigrants from Taiwan, and vice president Kamala Harris’s mother was Indian. In a nod to that pressure, Biden opened the ceremony by remarking, “If in fact, you were not picked to be the next secretary of labor, I would be run out of town.”
Su, who currently serves as deputy labor secretary, will take over from Marty Walsh, who is departing as the head of the labor department to lead the National Hockey League player’s union. Her nomination will have to be confirmed by the Senate, which is controlled by Biden’s Democratic allies.
Updated
Arizona has become a focal point of rightwing efforts to disrupt elections, and the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang spoke with its new attorney general about how she plans to keep poll workers safe:
In less than two months on the job, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, reassigned a unit tasked with investigating election fraud to instead focus on protecting voting rights. She then publicly took former attorney general Mark Brnovich, a Republican, to task for hiding documents that showed the 2020 election was free from widespread fraud.
“Obviously, there are clear differences between me and my predecessor on these issues,” Mayes said.
In Arizona, where a Democratic governor and Republican-controlled legislature are unlikely to agree on any major alterations to election law, the biggest changes for democracy could instead come from the attorney general’s office. As the state’s top prosecutor, Mayes has the power to investigate voting crimes and bring charges against those who break election laws.
Before winning the attorney general’s office, Mayes was a reporter and an attorney and a member of former Democratic governor Janet Napolitano’s administration. A Republican until 2019, Mayes said she switched parties because the GOP’s embrace of Trumpism left her and other moderate Republicans behind.
Her perspective on elections differs greatly from her predecessor. In his last two years in office, Brnovich tried to play both sides of election issues, seeking to appease the far-right flank of his party in pursuit of a US Senate seat while not filing charges for widespread fraud. At first, he defended Joe Biden’s victory in the state, but over time, cast doubt on Maricopa county’s elections.
Mayes also contrasted strongly with her Republican challenger in the 2022 race, Abe Hamadeh, who she narrowly beat. Hamadeh embraced the falsehood that Trump won the 2020 election and was one of several election deniers who lost their statewide races in the increasingly purple state.
Here’s a subject you can expect to hear about when senators question Merrick Garland this morning. Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray revealed that the bureau believes Covid-19 started in a Chinese lab, the Guardian’s Lois Beckett reports:
Christopher Wray, the FBI director, has weighed in on the debate over the origins of the Covid-19 virus, using an appearance on Fox News to endorse the theory that the virus potentially originated from a leak in a Chinese laboratory.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray told Fox News’ Brett Baier, adding that the assessment was based on research the agency’s analysts, including scientists, had conducted and that “our work related to this continues”.
Wray’s high-profile public comment highlights the divide within the US intelligence community about the origins of the pandemic, with some federal agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Energy, concluding that the Covid-19 virus probably originated from a lab leak in China, while others have concluded that it first spread from infected animals to humans.
Washington-based FBI agents tried to slow Mar-a-Lago investigation: report
As justice department lawyers pressed the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago for classified materials they believed Donald Trump was keeping there, they encountered resistance from agents in the Washington field office, the Washington Post reports.
Two top agents in the office that would be in charge of leading the search rejected getting a warrant for the ex-president’s south Florida resort, instead advocating to seek permission from Trump’s lawyer before showing up at the property. The Post reports that agents so trusted statements from Trump’s lawyers that all the classified materials they were looking for had been turned over that in June, they advocated closing the inquiry altogether.
The Post reports that the dispute culminated in a tense meeting in late July, in which the justice department’s lawyers prevailed: FBI agents obtained a search warrant and showed up unannounced at Mar-a-Lago days later, finding more secret documents that the former president had been keeping from the government.
The story paints a picture of FBI agents that seemed credulous of the former president’s, up to the point of trying to stall the investigation, which has since the August search emerged as one of the biggest legal threats facing Trump.
Here’s more from the Post’s report:
Some FBI field agents then argued to prosecutors that they were inclined to believe Trump and his team had delivered everything the government sought to protect and said the bureau should close down its criminal investigation, according to some people familiar with the discussions.
But they said national security prosecutors pushed back and instead urged FBI agents to gather more evidence by conducting follow-up interviews with witnesses and obtaining Mar-a-Lago surveillance video from the Trump Organization.
The government sought surveillance video footage by subpoena in late June. It showed someone moving boxes from the area where records had been stored, not long after Trump was put on notice to return all such records, according to people familiar with the probe. That evidence suggested it was likely more classified records remained at Mar-a-Lago, the people said, despite the claim of Trump’s lawyers. It also painted for both sides a far more worrisome picture — one that would soon build the legal justification for the August raid.
By mid-July, the prosecutors were eager for the FBI to scour the premises of Mar-a-Lago. They argued that the probable cause for a search warrant was more than solid, and the likelihood of finding classified records and evidence of obstruction was high, according to the four people.
But the prosecutors learned FBI agents were still loath to conduct a surprise search. They also heard from top FBI officials that some agents were simply afraid: They worried taking aggressive steps investigating Trump could blemish or even end their careers, according to some people with knowledge of the discussions. One official dubbed it “the hangover of Crossfire Hurricane,” a reference to the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible connections to the Trump campaign, the people said. As president, Trump repeatedly targeted some FBI officials involved in the Russia case.
Merrick Garland to face senators after report of tensions with FBI over Mar-a-Lago search
Good morning, US politics blog readers. The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has been at the center of some of the biggest stories in American politics over the past year, including the appointment of special counsels to investigate Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents (not to mention the former president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election), the intelligence community’s inquiry into the origins of Covid-19 and the GOP’s efforts to investigate the Biden administration. This morning at 10am eastern time, he’ll be before the Senate judiciary committee for a regular oversight hearing, where lawmakers from both parties will no doubt press him for answers on all those topics and more. Garland is tight-lipped and unlikely to say anything unguarded, but don’t be surprised if he’s also asked about a Washington Post report from this morning that revealed top FBI officials were hesitant to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last August, despite pressure from justice department lawyers.
Here’s what else we can expect today:
Biden will at 93.0am introduce Julie Su during a White House event. She is his nominee to head the labor department, and would also be his first Asian American cabinet secretary.
House Democrats are holding a behind-closed-doors retreat in Baltimore, which Biden will address later today.
The House will consider a Republican bill to make the White House report on the inflationary impacts of every executive order. Democrats do not appear to be whipping against this, at least not yet.
