3CD DFL

New Trump pandemic adviser pushes controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy, worrying public health officials

One of President Trump’s top medical advisers is urging the White House to embrace a controversial “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.

The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing.

The approach’s chief proponent is Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, who joined the White House in August as a pandemic adviser. He has advocated that the United States adopt the model Sweden has used to respond to the virus outbreak, according to these officials, which relies on lifting restrictions so healthy people can build immunity to the disease rather than limiting social and business interactions to prevent the virus from spreading. Continue reading.

Rosenstein blocked FBI from probing Trump’s Russian ties — then ordered Mueller to ignore them as well

One of the many oddities of the now-terminated Robert Mueller probe into Russian election interference and its links to various members of the Trump campaign and family, and in fact of all known federal probes into Russia’s Trump-related actions, has been the seeming lack of any counterintelligence probe on Donald Trump’s myriad, longstanding financial connections to Russia—and what role those financial ties have played both in the Russian government’s actions on behalf of Trump and their possible leverage over the now-president.

A new story from The New York Times‘ Michael Schmidt reports that that’s because in the first months of the new Trump administration, former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein shuttered that investigation—then ordered special counsel Robert Mueller to steer clear of it himself. It’s not that the counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s known ties to Russian crime figures, to money laundering, and his family’s stated reliance on Russian cash has been kept closely-held: It never existed. And it still doesn’t.

The accusation being leveled by acting Federal Bureau of Investigation director Andrew McCabe against Rosenstein goes further, suggesting that Rosenstein intentionally misled him. Schmidt reports that McCabe launched a counterintelligence probe into Trump’s Russian ties immediately after Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey, a move that was widely publicly speculated to be a Trump move to quash investigations into Russian election actions and into numerous of Trump’s top advisers and allies. The fear within the intelligence community was that Trump’s behaviors could be impacted by unknown Russian pressures, representing an immediate national security threat. Continue reading.

In Trump, much of the world sees an act that’s wearing thin

Last week’s Republican National Convention saw a blizzard of misinformation. President Trump’s acceptance speech Thursday was itself “a tidal wave of tall tales, false claims and revisionist history,” according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, which cited more than two dozen significant falsehoods in that address.

Trump and his allies warned, with classic demagoguery, of the prospect of a Joe Biden presidency with defunded police departments and invasions of the suburbs. They also conjured a kind of alternate reality, wrote my colleague, Toluse Olorunippa, one where “the coronavirus has been conquered by presidential leadership, the economy is at its pre-pandemic levels, troops are returning home, and the president is an empathetic figure who supports immigration and would never stoke the nation’s racial grievances.”

That is not the America that actually exists. Critics can credibly claim that Trump has goaded hard-line supporters into taking violent action against protesters. All the while, the United States inches toward 200,000 coronavirus-related deaths, maintains the highest number of infection cases in the world and has seen its economy crash by a third of its GDP. But none of this may matter for a president who sees stoking the country’s polarization as a pathway to reelection. Continue reading.

Trump tries to dance around a devastating backdrop

Despite unemployment above 10 percent and millions of jobs vaporized, Trump is running on his economic record before the pandemic.

In the nine weeks left in the 2020 campaign, President Donald Trump has an especially daunting task: Convince a skeptical American public that the coronavirus-ravaged U.S. economy is actually roaring back and will soon return to the status he regularly calls the greatest in world history.

He faces serious obstacles. The U.S. economy pre-coronavirus was far from the greatest in history, leaving most Americans with little cushion for the latest plunge. Now Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and other senior White House officials risk sounding out of touch cheerleading a still-struggling economy with a jobless rate over 10 percent — above its peak during the Great Recession — and close to 30 million people getting some kind of unemployment assistance.

Republican speakers spent much of the GOP convention talking up recent gains — for women, for people of color, for other lower-wage workers — that have since evaporated. For millions of Americans, the rosy picture simply no longer exists while for others the numbers were technically accurate but skipped the context of the devastation that came before. Continue reading.

Biden accuses Trump of ‘recklessly encouraging violence’ in response to Portland shooting

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden condemned the violence in Portland, Ore., accusing President Trump of “fanning the flames of hate and division in our society” and “recklessly encouraging violence.”

“We must not become a country at war with ourselves,” Biden said in a statement. “But that is the America that President Trump wants us to be, the America he believes we are. … All of us are less safe because Donald Trump can’t do the job of the American president.”

His response came after Trump denounced Black Lives Matter protesters as “agitators and thugs” on Sunday morning, calling for a federal crackdown on demonstrations in cities such as Washington and Portland, where a man died after tensions between pro-Trump and liberal groups burst into violence. Continue reading.

Trump Embraces Fringe Theories on Protests and the Coronavirus

In a Twitter barrage, the president advanced conspiracy theories claiming that protests are an organized coup and that the virus death toll is inflated. He also reposted a call to imprison New York’s governor.

WASHINGTON — President Trump unleashed an especially intense barrage of Twitter messages over the weekend, embracing fringe conspiracy theories claiming that the coronavirus death toll has been exaggerated and that street protests are actually an organized coup d’état against him.

In a concentrated predawn burst, the president posted or reposted 89 messages between 5:49 a.m. and 8:04 a.m. on Sunday on top of 18 the night before, many of them inflammatory comments or assertions about violent clashes in Portland, Ore., where a man wearing the hat of a far-right, pro-Trump group was shot and killed Saturday after a large group of Mr. Trump’s supporters traveled through the streets. He resumed on Sunday night.

In the blast of social media messages, Mr. Trump also embraced a call to imprison Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, threatened to send federal forces against demonstrators outside the White House, attacked CNN and NPR, embraced a supporter charged with murder, mocked his challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and repeatedly assailed the mayor of Portland, even posting the mayor’s office telephone number so that supporters could call demanding his resignation. Continue reading.

Justice Dept. Never Fully Examined Trump’s Ties to Russia, Ex-Officials Say

The former deputy attorney general maneuvered to keep investigators from completing an inquiry into whether the president’s personal and financial links to Russia posed a national security threat.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia.

The special counsel who finished the investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, secured three dozen indictments and convictions of some top Trump advisers, and he produced a report that outlined Russia’s wide-ranging operations to help get Mr. Trump elected and the president’s efforts to impede the inquiry.

But law enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere. Continue reading.

Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips says Minnetonka campaign office burglarized

A Minnesota congressman says his Minnetonka campaign office was burglarized overnight.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips tweeted the news of the break-in on Sunday, along with a photo of a shattered glass door.

“To the thieves stealing campaign signs from my supporters’ lawns across the district and the criminals who broke into our Minnetonka campaign office overnight, the irony isn’t lost on me,” Phillips wrote. “Your disregard for law and stoking of fear and disorder, only increases my resolve.” Continue reading.

U.S. Coronavirus Cases Top 6 Million

The jump in infections comes as the daily rate continues to decline. New Delhi is reopening its subway, even as India sets global records for new cases.

Twenty-two days.

It took more than three months for the United States to reach one million coronavirus cases after reporting its first confirmed infection, but less than a third of that time to notch the latest million-case leap.

On Sunday, the United States hit yet another milestone, with six million reported cases, according to a New York Times database. Continue reading.

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