<Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger took an unprecedented step on Monday, launching a program that would allow voters to cancel a voter registration — their own or someone else’s — through a few clicks on the secretary of state’s website.

Registration Cancellation Portal, was intended to help those registered in Georgia update their voter registration status if, for example, they move out of state and no longer qualify to vote in the Peach State. It would also allow family members to remove a deceased relative from the voter rolls.

The portal is nearly identical to the one Georgia residents can use to register to vote or check key election information, save for the words, “Please enter the information for the voter you are wanting to cancel,” on the right-hand side. By Wednesday, the instructions had been updated to include the caveat “if you are reporting the death of a loved one.”

According to Raffensperger, a Republican, the new program will “help keep Georgia’s voter registration database up-to-date without having to rely on postcards being sent and returned by an increasingly inefficient postal system.”

But some civil rights activists fear the new system could cause legitimate voters to be wrongly removed from the rolls.

Voter roll maintenance can be a slow process. Both federal and state election laws require mailed notifications to voters who appear to have moved to assess their eligibility to vote. If there is no response, a voter’s registration can be canceled if they don’t participate in the next two general elections.

However, conservative elections advocates have been pushing for a way to more readily remove voters who may have passed away or no longer be eligible, arguing that outdated voter rolls could leave Georgia’s elections vulnerable to fraud.

To submit a cancellation request, users just need a few identifying details: A first initial, last name, county, date of birth, and the driver’s license number or last four digits of the Social Security number for the voter whose registration they are seeking to cancel. The new system “will lead to fewer clerical errors and peace of mind for any user,” said a press release announcing the portal’s launch.

But almost immediately, a major error was apparent: On the first day the portal went live, a glitch in the system allowed anyone to view a voter’s date of birth, driver’s license number and last four digits of their Social Security number — the very information needed to request that a voter’s registration be canceled.

The Georgia secretary of state’s office said it quickly corrected the glitch, blaming a URL routing error.

“This URL routing error is believed to be the result of a scheduled software update and was quickly corrected,” Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for the secretary of state, said in a statement. “The error was detected and fixed within an hour.”

However, Democrats and voting rights advocates were quick to denounce the cancellation portal, arguing that the portal will allow voter challenge activists to further target and disenfranchise Georgia residents....>

<....“This portal is ripe for abuse,” the Democratic Party of Georgia’s Executive Director Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye said in a statement. “Coming right on the heels of S.B. 189, this page is yet another move in Georgia Republicans’ playbook to empower anti-democracy activists, and the Secretary of State must take it down immediately.”

In recent years, sweeping election law changes have given a small but dedicated group of election conspiracy theorists in Georgia greater power to challenge their fellow voters. SB 202, a 2021 election bill, codified the ability for any one person to challenge an unlimited number of voter registrations. SB 189, which was passed in March and took effect earlier this month, served as a critical counterpart, listing some criteria that local election boards may consider when receiving a challenge, such as knowledge that a voter had moved or passed away. However, it also failed to place any restrictions on what evidence activists may submit when questioning fellow voters, how many challenges one person can submit at once, or even mandate that they be residents of the state.

Until now, voter cancellations had mandated a hearing with a voter’s local county elections board, where a resident whose registration was challenged would be able to appear in person and address the challenge. A system that allows voter registrations to be canceled without a hearing or notice has some advocates worried.

“As MAGA ‘election integrity’ vigilantes are challenging thousands of Georgians’ freedom to vote across our state, the leak of Georgia voters’ private, personal information should be alarming to all who value free and fair elections,” Fair Fight CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo said in a statement. “Considering how the leak came while a new voter cancellation portal was launched is gravely concerning. Everyone who wants to exercise their freedom to vote this November should check their voter registration status and help spread the word to their friends, family, and community to ensure no one’s freedom to vote has been challenged or canceled.”>

<Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash.

Inside the state-run National Bank of Egypt, employees were soon busy placing bundles of $100 bills into two large bags, according to records from the bank. Four men arrived and carried away the bags, which U.S. officials later described in sealed court filings as weighing a combined 200 pounds and containing what was then a sizable share of Egypt’s reserve of U.S. currency.

Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign, a Washington Post investigation has found.

Since receiving the intelligence about Sisi, the Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump, potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds. Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money.

Those questions, at least in the view of several investigators on the case, would never be answered, The Post found.

Within months of learning of the withdrawal, prosecutors and FBI agents were blocked by top Justice Department officials from obtaining bank records they believed might hold critical evidence, according to interviews with people familiar with the case as well as documents and contemporaneous notes of the investigation. The case ground to a halt by the fall of 2019 as Trump’s then-attorney general, William P. Barr, raised doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to continue the probe of Trump.

The behind-the-scenes drama played out during an especially tense time for the Justice Department, with Trump accusing the agency of pursuing a politically biased “witch hunt” against him in its probe of Russian election interference, his appointees seeking to rein in investigators they saw as partisan, and some career supervisors growing wary of plunging the agency into yet another legal battle with the president.

Barr directed Jessie Liu, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in D.C., to personally examine the classified intelligence to evaluate if further investigation was warranted. Barr later instructed FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to impose “adult supervision” on FBI agents Barr described as “hell-bent” on pursuing Trump’s records, according to people familiar with the exchange. It is unclear what if any actions Wray, who was also appointed by Trump, took in response.

In June of 2020, the prosecutor Barr appointed to take over the office leading the case closed the probe, citing “a lack of sufficient evidence to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

That conclusion belied the months of internal disagreements over whether investigators had been allowed to go far enough in seeking that evidence.

“Every American should be concerned about how this case ended,” said one of the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal dissension. “The Justice Department is supposed to follow evidence wherever it leads — it does so all the time to determine if a crime occurred or not."

A spokesman for Trump’s presidential campaign did not answer a list of questions from The Post, instead referring to this story as “textbook Fake News.”

“The investigation referenced found no wrongdoing and was closed,” spokesman Steven Cheung said by email. “None of the allegations or insinuations being reported on have any basis in fact. The Washington Post is consistently played for suckers by Deep State Trump-haters and bad faith actors peddling hoaxes and shams.”

An Egyptian government spokesman declined to answer detailed questions sent by The Post. “It is inappropriate to comment or refer to rulings issued by the judiciary system or procedures and reports taken by Justice Departments” in other countries, wrote Ayman Walash, the director of the Egyptian government’s Foreign Press Center. In his email, Walash also emphasized that the Justice Department had closed the investigation without charges.

As he campaigns to return to the White House, Trump has cast himself as a victim of “deep state” plots that sought to undermine his presidency, often focusing his ire on the Russia probe that shadowed much of his time in office.....>

<....That investigation did not ultimately find that Trump or his campaign had conspired with Moscow. But it did conclude his team expected the campaign would benefit from Russian interference. Unbeknownst to the public, during the same period, Justice Department officials were investigating whether Trump had received help from the government of another foreign country — Egypt.

In the years since the Egypt case was closed, the Sisi regime’s ambitions to influence senior U.S. government officials have been laid bare by the bribery conviction of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Over the course of his presidency, Trump shifted U.S. policy in ways that benefited the Egyptian leader, a man he once called “my favorite dictator.” In 2018, Trump’s State Department released $195 million in military aid that the United States had been withholding over human rights abuses — a move that had been opposed by his first secretary of state — followed by the release of $1.2 billion more in such assistance.

The Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. declined to answer detailed questions for this report. The FBI declined to answer The Post’s questions or to make Wray available to comment. Barr also declined to answer detailed questions for this report, and Liu did not respond to a similar inquiry.

In an interview, Michael Sherwin, the then-acting U.S. attorney who closed the case and a veteran prosecutor of complicated national security cases, said he had previously closed some where sufficient evidence never materialized. “I made the same decision here and I stand by it,” Sherwin said.

This exclusive account of the Egypt investigation is based on a review of thousands of pages of government records, including sealed court filings and exhibits. The Post also interviewed more than two dozen people with knowledge of the investigation. The individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive probe that ended without criminal charges. Some showed The Post emails, texts and other documents corroborating their accounts.

The investigation was shrouded in secrecy for the entirety of the more than three years the case was open, from 2017 to 2020. It surfaced obliquely in that time only once, when senior judges closed a part of the federal courthouse in D.C. to hide the identities of the parties in a hearing then described as involving a state-owned foreign corporation that was resisting a subpoena. Many observers assumed the corporation was Russian.

In the final weeks of the 2020 presidential race, after the investigation had been closed, CNN revealed that the mysterious courthouse hearing involved an Egyptian bank. The network also reported that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had led the case, which centered on an informant’s tip that money had flowed through the bank to help fund Trump’s campaign. CNN also reported that, in the end stages of the probe, some prosecutors proposed subpoenaing Trump’s financial records, before “top officials” ultimately concluded that the case had reached a dead-end.

At the time, Trump spokesman Jason Miller rejected the allegation of money flowing to the campaign, saying: “President Trump has never received a penny from Egypt.”

The Post investigation reveals that investigators identified a cash withdrawal in Cairo of $9,998,000 — nearly identical to the amount described in the intelligence, as well as to the amount Trump had given his campaign weeks earlier. A key theory investigators pursued, based on intelligence and on international money transfers, was that Trump was willing to provide the funds to his campaign in October 2016 because he expected to be repaid by Sisi, according to people familiar with the probe.

In pursuing the Egyptian intelligence and other lines of investigation, Mueller’s team looked more deeply into Trump’s finances than has been previously reported. The Post found that investigators obtained bank records for some of the accounts Trump used most frequently when he was a candidate for office, and that debate inside the Justice Department centered on whether investigators could obtain additional records extending into the time Trump was president. Where some career investigators saw evidence that justified digging deeper, Barr and Liu expressed doubts.

Trump’s attorney general did not order the case closed, according to multiple people with knowledge of the events, but his instructions to Liu and, later, his selections to replace her, helped steer it to that end.

One official called it “jaw dropping.” In early 2017, Justice Department officials were briefed on initial reports from the Central Intelligence Agency that Sisi had sought to send money to Trump.....>

<....The intelligence had come partly from a confidential informant who had previously provided useful information, according to people familiar with the matter. Intelligence the CIA gathered in other operations corroborated parts of the individual’s account, The Post learned.

Justice officials sent the case to Mueller, who had been appointed in May to investigate alleged links between Trump’s campaign and Russia, based on the theory that the Egypt allegations dovetailed with possible foreign election interference. Federal election law bans foreign nationals and governments from making contributions or donations or providing any other direct or indirect financial support to candidates for political office in the United States.

Mueller organized his investigators into teams with intentionally bland code names, like Team R for Russia. The team investigating Egypt was dubbed Team 10, as in $10 million, people familiar with the investigation said.

By the early summer of 2017, prosecutors and FBI agents began sizing up the sensitive intelligence, taking stock of publicly available information and pursuing other leads.

They noticed that on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before Election Day, then-candidate Trump had met with Sisi on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. The campaign’s account of the closed-door meeting gave no indication that Trump had held the Egyptian leader at arm’s length, as U.S. officials typically had done since Sisi seized power in a military coup three years earlier and swept aside the country’s first democratically elected president. After the meeting, the campaign said Trump had told Sisi the United States would be a “loyal friend” to Egypt if he was elected president, and on Fox News, Trump praised him as a “fantastic guy.”

Investigators also viewed it as potentially meaningful that, after he assumed office, Trump quickly embraced Sisi, the people said. Breaking with U.S. policy under President Barack Obama, Trump invited the Egyptian leader to be one of his first guests at the White House and met with him again, among other Arab leaders, on his first trip abroad.

As the Mueller team got going, investigators focused on how at the time candidate Trump met with Sisi in 2016, Trump’s campaign had been running low on funds. They learned through interviews with the candidate’s closest advisers that they had pleaded with Trump to write a check to his campaign for a final blitz of television ads. Trump repeatedly declined — until Oct. 28, roughly five weeks after the meeting with Sisi, when he announced the $10 million infusion. In the context of the Egypt intelligence, investigators considered the amount a point of interest, people familiar with the probe said. Though the infusion was recorded in campaign finance reports as a contribution, Trump’s campaign finance chairman had structured the transaction as a loan that could be repaid to Trump to convince him to approve the deal, according to FBI interview notes of a key Trump adviser.

Team 10 began looking for signs of the alleged transfer of the same amount — searching for evidence of the money either leaving Egypt or arriving with Trump.

By early 2018, according to previously unreported documents reviewed by The Post, investigators had obtained records from a handful of Trump’s most heavily used bank accounts and analyzed large transfers between May and November of 2016 — from before the Trump-Sisi meeting in New York until after Trump wired money to his campaign.

It was a narrower window of time than investigators wanted to scrutinize, according to people familiar with internal discussions, but Mueller generally insisted on keeping the investigation as narrow as possible and not veering into Trump’s finances after he became president.

The bank records offered no evidence that Trump had taken money from Egypt, according to documents reviewed by The Post.

In analyzing the records, investigators focused on two real estate transactions that brought Trump large sums in the fall of 2016, the documents showed. One of those was the refinancing of a Las Vegas property, which the New York Times later pointed to as a possible source of the $10 million infusion to his campaign. Agents concluded both were irrelevant to the Egypt investigation, according to people briefed on the case.

Peter Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, declined to comment on behalf of the former special counsel’s office.....>

Yes, <coprophagic antichrist>, that's French in the open.

<....In July 2018, Mueller’s team subpoenaed the National Bank of Egypt. The government was searching for transactions of approximately $10 million, according to people familiar with the investigation. The demand sparked a secret court battle that would consume Team 10 for the remainder of the Mueller probe.

The attorneys who represented the bank in the subpoena fight did not respond to messages seeking comment. The bank did not respond to detailed questions. The Post pieced together the court fight using records that were later released with redactions, other documents that remain secret and interviews with people with knowledge of the case.

The legal fight, which led to the mysterious closing of part of the federal courthouse in D.C. in December of that year, wound its way to the Supreme Court as each side battled over whether the state-owned, foreign bank could be compelled to produce evidence for a domestic U.S. criminal probe. In its final plea to the high court to hear the case, the bank warned that if it had to turn over records, it would “wreak havoc on American foreign policy — possibly alienating U.S. allies, undermining diplomatic efforts and inviting reciprocal treatment.”

The high court denied the bank’s request, but still the bank did not comply. By mid-January 2019, the bank had begun accruing contempt fines of $50,000 a day imposed by Beryl Howell, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for failing to turn over the records.

By early February 2019, the bank relented and delivered almost 1,000 pages, including versions of bank documents in Arabic and English.

Those bank records contained one especially tantalizing item: A short handwritten letter dated Jan. 15, 2017, in which an organization called the Research and Studies Center asked that the bank “kindly withdraw a sum of US $9,998,000” from its Heliopolis branch, located about seven miles from Cairo International Airport. According to the bank records, employees assembled the money that same day, entirely in U.S. $100 bills, put it in two large bags and kept it in the bank manager’s office until two men associated with the account and two others came and took away the cash.

Mueller’s team gathered prosecutors and agents to brief them on the newly obtained documents. To people in the room, the withdrawal seemed to bolster the classified intelligence and validate the decision to have had Mueller’s team investigate, according to people familiar with the discussions.

“It wasn’t a smoking gun,” one of those people said, describing the thinking at the time. “But it was very clear that there was so much smoke and now more smoke — there must be a fire.”

Mueller, meanwhile, had been moving to close down his operation, having nearly completed his probe of alleged Russian interference. By early 2019, he had asked other federal prosecutors’ offices to take over his team’s unfinished investigations.

The U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., led by Liu, took on the Egypt probe.

Liu was well regarded among the lawyers in her office. She was a Republican who had risen through the ranks of the Justice and Treasury departments over a decade, but she later ran into headwinds with pro-Trump conservatives who would on two occasions successfully oppose her nomination for more senior positions in the government. Nearly two years into the job, Liu was being asked to oversee an investigation involving the president who had appointed her.

Liu’s office took an aggressive approach at first.

Her prosecutors partnered during the handoff with Mueller’s team in pressuring the National Bank of Egypt to release records — asking the judge to increase the contempt fine to $300,000 a day.

Her prosecutors also pushed the bank to disclose more about the Research and Studies Center. The center had virtually no public profile, and U.S. authorities suspected it was a front for the General Intelligence Service, Egypt’s equivalent of the CIA, according to people with knowledge of the case.

Prosecutors argued in court that the state-run Egyptian bank must be withholding details about the withdrawal. They said that the bank had not turned over a single email about the enormous same-day transaction and that the lack of any such internal communication was unthinkable.

“It strains credulity that the Bank kept such a stockpile of U.S. dollars on hand, let alone that it was able to gather it up all in less than 24 hours,” read a March 21, 2019, filing signed by Liu.

The bank argued that it had nothing else to produce. “The Government is beating a dead horse over and over,” wrote its U.S.-based attorneys.

The two sides also argued over whether the center’s address was fake. The bank had reported conducting a site visit of its client in Cairo and finding 55 people working at the address. The U.S. government produced pictures at that address showing an apartment building....>

<....In the back-and-forth arguments in court, the bank on April 4, 2019, filed a statement from a bank manager confirming the investigators’ suspicion that the Research and Studies Center had a “relationship with the Egyptian General Intelligence Agency,” according to an English translation of the statement. Further, he wrote, the intelligence agency was “another important customer of the Heliopolis Branch.”

Since seizing the presidency in 2013, Sisi has greatly expanded the powers of the GIS and increasingly relied on the spy agency to maintain his political stronghold at home as well as to press his agenda abroad. In 2018, his eldest son became the service’s deputy director.

Top leaders of the GIS figured prominently in the trial that led last month to the conviction of Menendez on charges of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and acting as an unregistered agent of the Egyptian government.

According to people with knowledge of the Trump probe, investigators believed that only Sisi or a government operative acting on his orders could have arranged for the $10 million cash withdrawal. They also saw hallmarks of an international money-laundering operation in the way funds moved into and through the Research and Studies Center accounts ahead of that cash withdrawal, indications of a potential crime that may or may not have been related to an effort to help Trump.

Investigators tried to connect the dots before the dramatic withdrawal involving bags of cash. They noticed that separate transactions in China and Egypt over a 14-month period suggested a possible path for the $10 million.

The Research and Studies Center opened an account at the bank’s Heliopolis branch in November 2015, the bank’s records showed. In August 2016, the center opened a second account, this time in the bank’s Shanghai branch. Five days after that, a company that investigators believed was tied to an Egyptian oligarch initiated a transfer of $10 million into the center’s Shanghai account, records showed.

The transfer was held up, then cleared for deposit in Shanghai in December, the records showed. The same amount was transferred from that account to the center’s account at the Heliopolis branch shortly before the cash withdrawal there on Jan. 15, 2017.

Three days later, the center closed its account in Shanghai. Within 90 days, its account in Heliopolis was closed, too.

The Post could not determine if the Research and Studies Center still exists. A corporate registration number listed in a 2019 bank record does not appear in searches of a government website or on a commercial database of Egyptian businesses.

For U.S. authorities, in the spring of 2019, that was where the money trail went cold. A new round of investigative steps would be necessary to see if the money ever appeared on Trump’s side of the ledger....>

<....In April 2019, the FBI agents and federal prosecutors proposed a plan to drill deeper, people familiar with the investigation said.

They eyed a range of investigative targets in Egypt, such as seeking additional bank records and witness interviews. But in the FBI agents’ view, the people said, there was little reason to take those steps unless they could act on the most important part of their plan: looking at a wider set of Trump’s banking records.

And that part of the plan proved the most contentious.

In a series of meetings beginning that April, FBI agents and supervisors told Liu they supported a proposal to subpoena Trump’s banking records, according to contemporaneous notes of the discussions. Liu had concerns about the scope, the notes say.

Investigators pressed their case with Liu. They argued that Mueller had not authorized his agents to obtain records later than November of that year. In light of the newly obtained cash withdrawal records from early 2017, the investigators argued that they needed to see what had landed in Trump’s accounts after that 2017 Cairo withdrawal, according to the notes and people familiar with the case.

Finally, in June, agents seemed to have a breakthrough in a meeting with Liu. According to the notes, senior officials from the FBI’s Washington field office told her that bureau leaders supported the effort: “Full FBI chain briefed up — fully supportive of an investigation — specifically bank subpoena Trump.”

Liu indicated she was open to a subpoena seeking a limited amount of additional Trump bank records, according to the notes and two of the people. The agents were pleased, the people said. As she was leaving, she told the group she would need to run the matter by Barr.

It was a logical step to take in the Justice Department’s standard practice of handling major, politically sensitive cases; the attorney general would have to be briefed on any probe even tangentially touching the sitting president. But investigators worried Barr might halt the effort in its tracks, two of the people said.

Just two months earlier, Barr had preempted Mueller’s investigative report of the Russia probe by issuing a summary declaring that it found insufficient evidence that Trump had engaged in any crime. Barr’s move allowed Trump to claim “total exoneration,” despite Mueller citing “substantial evidence” that Trump had attempted to block scrutiny of his conduct.

Sometime after her June meetings with the FBI, Liu met with Barr to discuss the Egypt case. He urged her to personally review the underlying information from the CIA that had prompted the opening of the criminal investigation two years earlier, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The case was sensitive, Barr told her, and she needed to reach her own conclusions about the merits of further investigative steps, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Liu reviewed the intelligence and visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., to discuss the basis for it, those people and others said. The CIA declined to respond to a detailed list of questions sent by The Post.

Afterward, and after conferring with Barr again, Liu expressed hesitancy to FBI agents and her deputies about the proposal to subpoena Trump’s bank records, according to people familiar with the case. It felt to some that she had made a 180-degree turn, these people said.

Liu was concerned, according to two people familiar with her thinking, that the investigators’ push for additional Trump bank records could come off as a fishing expedition. She was not won over by the new records of the 2017 withdrawal, according to the people. Egypt’s intelligence agency might make enormous cash withdrawals for any number of reasons, she cautioned, not necessarily to donate to an American president.

Liu also expressed concern that Mueller’s Egypt investigators had obtained and scrutinized numerous Trump bank records for 2016 without finding anything, and now they were asking to look for even more records from 2017.

Frustrated investigators argued to Liu that in any other case — even with far less compelling evidence — they would have been able to obtain additional bank records “in a heartbeat,” according to one person who spoke to The Post.>

<fredthebore>, you have no need to be here.

<....Privately, Liu told some supervisors in her office that with Trump having announced his bid for a second term, the focus on a sitting president’s finances made this case different, people with knowledge of the matter said. Although investigators argued that pursuing bank records would be entirely covert, Liu said she worried the Justice Department could be accused — once again — of interfering in a presidential election.

Some career supervisors briefed on the developments sympathized with the challenge Liu faced. She was being asked to take the monumental step of probing the sitting president’s financial records in the wake of his claims that the Russia investigation had been based on a “hoax.”

CIA officials had also relayed to Liu concerns that apart from Trump’s bank records, other steps investigators also wanted to take could jeopardize their operations, according to people familiar with the discussions.

As the summer wore on, Barr also met with Wray and some of their top deputies to discuss the Egypt case. Two people with knowledge of the meeting described it to The Post.

Barr told Wray he had a problem: Liu seemed uncomfortable making key decisions in the case. Barr said she doubted that some investigative moves were justified but felt pressured by the agents. Barr said Liu worried that blocking some investigative steps might be perceived by the team as quashing a politically explosive investigation, the two people said.

Barr also told Wray he was suspicious of FBI agents on the case, as some had worked on the Mueller investigation, which he had criticized as largely unwarranted. Barr said that he wanted to be sure the director was aware of the situation and that he was applying some “adult supervision” to his FBI agents.

Barr stressed to Wray that the matter would come under intense scrutiny no matter what happened with the case, the people said. He warned that given the controversy surrounding the Russia investigation, and given that this new case also centered on the sitting president, they could not risk short-circuiting or rushing any investigative decisions. He said investigators needed to ensure that an appropriate legal basis, or predicate, existed before proceeding, they said.

Sometime around September 2019, FBI agents and a supervisor from the field office presented what they considered an ultimatum to Liu: authorize getting Trump’s 2017 bank records or it wasn’t worth continuing to investigate, according to people later briefed on the exchange. Liu listened but turned them down; she said she wasn’t closing the case and was open to subpoenaing Trump’s records later on if agents turned up more compelling evidence to justify doing so, these people said.

By late 2019, Liu’s office was poised to make sentencing recommendations for high-profile senior Trump advisers it had prosecuted, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone — cases that could tarnish Trump and his campaign. That December, the White House nominated Liu to be an assistant secretary of the Treasury Department.

Barr seized the moment to make a change. Breaking with the tradition of allowing White House nominees to remain in their current posts until confirmed for new ones, he ordered Liu in early January 2020 to step down by the end of the month, people with knowledge of the matter said. The White House later withdrew Liu’s nomination.

Barr installed a longtime ally, Timothy Shea, who was then serving as a counselor to Barr and had previously worked with him in the George H.W. Bush administration. At one of Shea’s first meetings, the office’s senior leadership briefed him on major pending cases and outlined the Egypt probe and their proposed subpoenas for Trump bank and foreign bank records. Shea told them he was putting a hold on any investigative steps while he got up to speed, people with knowledge of Shea’s instruction said....>

<....After the meeting, investigators discussed their feeling that Shea’s reaction to the Egypt case was so negative that it spelled the end of any forward movement, the people said; they did not return to press Shea for those subpoenas.

Shea declined to answer detailed questions from The Post. Shea told associates that he had not conferred with Barr about the case, according to two people familiar with Shea’s description of events.

Barr, however, grew disappointed with his handpicked chief prosecutor for a separate reason, according to people familiar with Barr’s thinking. Shea allowed attorneys in his office to recommend a lengthy prison sentence for Stone, who had been convicted of multiple felonies.

Less than four months after appointing him, Barr replaced Shea with Sherwin, a former Navy intelligence officer who spent a decade prosecuting counterintelligence and terrorism cases before becoming an adviser to Barr.

In a meeting the first week of June, senior leadership once again reviewed major pending cases with the new acting U.S. attorney, people familiar with the case said. Sherwin listened to the status update on the Egypt probe. Prosecutors had not been able to gather any new information for months, but they argued to Sherwin that there were still steps in the case they could pursue.

Sherwin told the team the lack of evidence meant that the case should be shut down. With some resigned to that outcome, no one spoke up to object, people familiar with the discussion told The Post.

On June 7, he sent an email to the head of the FBI’s Washington field office. The subject line of the email, which was reviewed by The Post, read: “Egypt Investigation.”

“Based upon review of this investigation,” Sherwin began, his office would be “closing the above matter” because neither an indictment nor a conviction was likely.

In an interview with The Post, Sherwin said Biden administration appointees, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, who took over the department months later, could have relaunched the probe if they disagreed. “The case was closed without prejudice,” he said. “Anyone could have reopened the case the second I left that office.”

The case was not reopened.

Incoming Biden administration Justice Department leaders and prosecutors in the D.C. office were immediately consumed with cases from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the largest investigation in the department’s history.

Garland, senior members of his team, and Biden’s new U.S. attorney in D.C. were never briefed on the Egypt investigation in their first year in office, one former and one current government official told The Post.

The Justice Department did not make Garland available for comment.

On Jan. 15, 2022, five years after the money left the bank in Cairo, the deadline for bringing charges under the federal statute of limitations for illegal campaign contributions expired.>

<Donald Trump has two settings: “racist” and “off.”

That he has swiftly launched racial attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris, his presumptive presidential election opponent, should come as no surprise. That he did so Wednesday in front of a room full of Black journalists at a Chicago convention was on brand. And that he followed it up by doubling down on his scurrilous lie that she “happened to turn Black” was as predictable as the tides.

By Thursday, he was sharing a conspiracy theorist’s social media post that alleged to show Harris’ birth certificate and falsely claimed “Kamala Harris is NOT black and never has been.”

It’s all ludicrous garbage, a reminder that Trump exists in the political realm only because he bolstered the insidious “birther” movement during Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, leaning full racist into dopey theories that Obama was somehow not an American.

It was stupid, ignorant, fearmongering back then. Now, 16 years later, with what feels like a lifetime of Trump’s ceaseless racism under our belts, it’s just boring. And repetitive. And, dare I say, weird.

It’s even weirder for young voters who were kids in the Obama years and now see this kind of “other-izing” behavior for what it is: cruel and pathetically dated.

Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican man and an Indian American woman, and she has, as The New York Times put it, “consistently identified as Black in public life and long before she entered the national stage.”

She has spoken proudly of her Indian heritage as well. She’s biracial, something Trump and other MAGA supporters seem to be struggling with. It’s like imagining cavemen circling an iPhone and poking it with a stick.

Trump is still a racist: Trump's racism at NABJ was revolting. It was all calculated for his MAGA fan base.

Trump said of Harris on Wednesday: “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

Lord have mercy, is this really what we’re going to be doing for the next few months? Listening to an ignorant old white man maliciously pretend he doesn’t understand what it means to be of mixed race? Heck, Trump is half-jerk, half-bigot; you’d think he’d be able to figure it out.

But sure enough, by the time he arrived at a Pennsylvania rally after launching his racial attack on Harris, there was a screen in the arena showing a Business Insider headline that read: “California’s Kamala Harris becomes first Indian American U.S. senator.”

And off we go, driven into the depths by Trump’s worst instincts. He believes he represents a white America that was once pure and perfect and has now been ruined by “others.” He uses the word “diversity” as a slur.

He even started using similar tactics on a fellow Republican, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, during the GOP primary. Haley is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and her given first name is Nimarata. Trump started referring to her as "Nimbra" and "Nimrada," an obnoxious attempt to allege she was different (wink, wink) from real (wink, wink) Americans.

These tired-old-racist tricks are despicable, but also profoundly boring. And for as hard as people pushed against it during the 2016 election when Trump won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, the voters of 2024 – more diverse, younger and more accepting of multiculturalism – will push back harder.

Harris’ poll numbers have surged since she rose to the top of the Democratic ticket. Many voters like her, and people who might find her heritage “strange” or “confusing” are far fewer than Trump seems to suspect.

There are plenty of racists out there in America, but racism will not earn Trump a single vote. He already has them in the bag.

Rekindling birther-esque conspiracies and hammering away at Harris’ biracial background will do only one thing. It will show decent voters, young and old, exactly what Trump is: unconscionably cruel and boring as hell.>

<Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is encouraging Judge Juan Merchan to deny Donald Trump's recusal request because of "fatal defects" in the former president's legal argument.

On Wednesday, Trump asked Merchan to recuse himself because of his daughter's work with Democratic candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris. It was the third time Trump has tried to get Merchan to recuse himself, but he argues this time it's different because Harris is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. If Merchan denies Trump's request, the former president will be sentenced September 18.

In a letter to Merchan, Bragg called Trump's latest court filing "vexatious and frivolous." Bragg reminded Merchan that the judge has already ruled on Trump's claims and found that Trump's legal team did not establish a clear "right to recusal."

"No amount of overheated, hyperbolic rhetoric can cure the fatal defects in defendant's ongoing effort to impugn the fairness of these proceedings and the impartiality of this court," Bragg wrote.

Trump's efforts to get Merchan's recusal come in the wake of his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush money payment made during the 2016 presidential campaign. The payments were intended to silence allegations of a sexual encounter with adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Trump's legal team is now seeking to overturn the verdict, citing alleged judicial bias and a recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.

Trump's latest recusal motion, filed earlier this week, claims that Merchan's impartiality is compromised because his daughter works as a consultant for Democratic campaigns, including the vice president's. Bragg's office argues that it is an attempt to relitigate issues already settled by the court.

Merchan previously asserted that his impartiality cannot reasonably be questioned based on his daughter's professional activities. He has cited guidance from a state judicial ethics advisory committee in his decision to remain on the case.

"There is no agenda here," Merchan said on the first day of jury selection.

Critics of Trump's recusal efforts argue that the motions are part of a broader strategy to undermine the judicial process. Trump's supporters, however, contend that the judge's familial connections to prominent Democrats raise legitimate concerns about bias.

Merchan's family members came under so much scrutiny from Trump that the judge imposed a gag order to stop the former president from attacking them. Trump violated the gag order 10 times and was forced to pay $10,000 in fines.

Trump's lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, wrote in a letter to the judge that the gag order is restricting Trump's ability to respond to Harris' attacks during the campaign.

"Decisions by Your Honor on the pending Presidential immunity motion and at any sentencing would benefit not only Harris but also the professional aspirations and financial status of Your Honor's daughter," the lawyers wrote.

Bragg wrote in his own letter that Trump hasn't identified any "new facts or changes" that warrant a ruling that is different from the previous ones.

Merchan is expected to rule on Trump's bid to toss out his conviction on September 6. If he dismisses that motion, the judge is expected to sentence him on September 18. While Trump faces up to four years in jail, it's possible he could avoid jail time.>

<1. Chair marches

This simple exercise mimics walking, but does so without the added weight and pressure on your joints.

Sit comfortably in a chair with your back straight. Lift one knee as high as you can, then lower it. Repeat with the other knee, marching in place. Continue marching for 2-3 minutes.

2. Seated jumping jacks

When you're ready for a challenge, this vigorous exercise offers more advanced cardiac conditioning.

Sit in a chair with your back straight. Extend your arms out to the sides and legs out to the sides simultaneously. Bring them back to the starting position. Repeat for 1-2 minutes.

Chair exercises for strength and balance

1. Knee extensions

This chair exercise strengthens your legs and core to support you with every step.

Sit comfortably in a chair with your hips as far back as possible. Keep your core tight and chest out. Extend one leg in front of you until fully extended. Slowly lower your leg back to the starting position. Repeat for both legs. Perform 2-3 sets of 8-12 reps.

2. Seated bicep curls

Bolster your arm strength with a pair of lightweight dumbbells, water bottles or soup cans.

Grab a pair of dumbbells or a resistance band. If using a resistance band, slide it under the seat, or sit on it, until it's at an equal length on either side of the body. Sit comfortably in a chair with your hips as far back as possible. Keep your core tight and chest out. Keep both arms to the sides of you body, let them hang naturally with both palms facing forward and elbows tucked at the sides of your body. Move both forearms in a curling motion from the sides of the body to the front of the shoulders (you don't have to touch your hands to your shoulders for full range of motion). While keeping tension, slowly lower both forearms back to the starting position.

3. Seated calf raises

The calf muscles are easy to overlook in traditional exercises, but this chair routine keeps them strong.

Sit comfortably in a chair with your hips as far back as possible. Keep your core tight and chest out. Place both hands at the sides of your chair and grip the seat to keep stable. Keep both legs at a 90-degree angle with the chair. Both feet should be flat on the floor. Slowly, extend the heels of your feet upward, pushing the toes on the ground and lifting the heels in the air. Place both feet back to the starting position. Repeat this movement for 20 or more reps to create a "burning" feeling in the calves.

Chair exercise for core strength

Tummy twists

This well-rounded exercise targets the entire core and can aid in stretching the spine.

Sit comfortably in a chair with your hips back as far as possible. Keep your core tight and chest out. Hold a medicine ball (or similar object) in front of you. Rotate your upper body to the right, keeping the ball in front of you as you turn. Rotate back to the center, then to the left, and back to the center. Perform 2-3 sets of 8-10 reps.

Chair exercise for posture and flexibility

Staff pose (aka dandasana)

Sit at the front edge of a stable chair. Place your hands on the sides of the chair seat for support. Extend your legs out in front of you, and - if you feel comfortable and balanced - raise your arms upward or out to your side. Sit up tall, lengthening your spine and lifting your chest. Hold for 10 seconds, then return your arms to your side and your feet to the floor. Repeat 2-3 times.>

<House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan is seeking documents from dozens of major companies in the U.S. over activities related to a probe over alleged corporate collusion to defund news outlets and social media platforms.

The lawmaker sent on Thursday a letter to over 40 companies, including Adidas, McDonalds, Goldman Sachs and Redbull, saying it has learned that "collusive activity is occurring within the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), of which your company is a member."

The letter goes on to say that GARM and its member companies have engaged in "coordinated action" including "boycotts of disfavored social media platforms, podcasts and news outlets."

It names The Joe Rogan Experience, The Daily Wire, Breitbard [sic] News, Fox News "or other conservative media" as examples of outlets that were targeted by these "coordinated actions," and asks the companies whether they were aware of and support them.

Moreover, the document says that since it has reasons to believe the companies were in fact aware of this, it requests a series of documents and communications related to GARM.

"This letter serves as a formal request to preserve all existing and future records and materials relating to the topics addressed in this letter. You should construe this preservation notice as an instruction to take all reasonable steps to prevent the destruction or alteration, whether intentionally or negligently, of all documents, communications, and other information, including electronic information and metadata, that are or may be responsive to this congressional inquiry," the document says.

According to the New York Post, GARM "exerts control of some 90% of global marketing spending" and has been directing the funding for political purposes. GARM "has deviated far from its original intent, and has collectively used its immense market power to demonetize voices and viewpoints the group disagrees with," the committee's letter said.

The body claims to have obtained documents showing GARM members were told not to run ads on X after Elon Musk purchased the platform (then known as Twitter) in 2022.

A spokesperson for the World Federation Alliance, Will Gilroy called the committee's allegations "unfounded," saying GARM is "not involved in operational steps relative to monetization eligibility, content ratings, platform assessments or media investment decisions," Gilroy said.>

<Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate JD Vance is falsely claiming as President in 2017, Trump did not make his infamous “very fine people on both sides” remarks after the deadly Charlottesville “Unite the Right” white supremacist neo-Nazi rally. Senator Vance is also blaming the media for, he says, wrongly informing his views, which once included wondering if Trump could be “America’s Hitler.”

On August 15, 2017 President Donald Trump held a press conference at his Trump Tower in Manhattan, just days after the “Unite the Right” rally which took place August 11 through August 12. (Full press conference transcript via Politico.)

During his lengthy remarks, Trump said, “I do think there is blame – yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either.” When a reporter told him, “The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville,” Trump appeared to reject that statement.

“Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

Trump went on to denounce removing statutes of Civil War-era traitors, and defend the Founders who owned slaves, before stating, “You know what? It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.”

In an appearance on the right wing Full Send podcast (full video) this week that posted Friday, Senator Vance said, “I don’t know if you guys remember this. But there was this thing that happened in Charlottesville where a white supremacist killed this girl and, very tragic situation. And the media said Trump stood up for the white supremacist, and there was a time in my life where I would have believed the media, what they said about it, and then you go and read what the transcript of what he actually said. It’s like, wait a second, he actually condemned the white supremacist.”

(Vance’s suggestion that Trump never condemned white supremacists is erroneous. During that press conference a reporter asked him specifically, “Why did you wait so long to denounce neo-Nazis?” which kicked off the “both sides” remarks. Trump on August 12 did not specifically condemn white supremacists, on August 14, after nationwide outrage, he did.)

“He never said that there were ‘very good people on both sides.’ What he said is that some of the protesters were good people, not like the white supremacist who murdered this girl. And you realize so much of what the media says about this guy is totally dishonest. I think once you accept that frame of mind, you start to think for yourself a little bit and when I started doing that, I started realizing one, he’s a good president, but two, he’s just not the guy. He’s not the scary person the media makes him out to be.”>

<Donald Trump has realized something that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago: A Black woman can beat him in a presidential election.

Trump’s decision to speak at the annual National Association of Black Journalists Convention and Career Fair in Chicago on Wednesday signals a recognition that he’s got to do something to turn down the heat that Kamala Harris has generated by taking over for Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Trump wouldn’t be making this play if he didn’t see Harris as a real threat, a development that has surprised me more than Trump’s rise in 2016 surprised the rest of the mainstream media.

From my vantage point as a Black man who has covered politics in one form or another for the last 20 years, I didn’t have any confidence that voters would give Harris a fair chance.

I’ve seen the struggles Black women have had in all areas of American society and figured the silent racism that creeps up in health care and employment would become deafening in a presidential election, giving Trump a clear path to the White House.

I’ve also heard whispers from Black voters who look at her ancestry, the daughter of a Jamaican American father and an Indian American mother, and question whether she’s truly connected to the African American experience enough to represent their interests.

And I remember hearing from older Black voters during Barack Obama’s rise, that they would vote against him to protect him. These voters had lived through the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and were convinced that history would grimly repeat with a serious Black presidential contender.

What I didn’t factor was how organized and ready Black women were to support Harris.

For them, Harris’ experience at the historically Black Howard University and her membership in the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, coupled with the reality that she has had to overcome all the same obstacles they’ve faced, more than proves her bona fides as a Black woman.

I also didn’t recognize how many Black men would step up to match the energy of their sisters in backing Harris.

And I certainly didn’t see how much that would charge up white liberals, eager to prove that their nation has moved beyond the stereotypes that have defined race relations since its founding.

I was being too pessimistic, too pragmatic, too skeptical and, frankly, too old school in my thinking and went so far as to say that Harris should bow out with Biden to make room for Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona to take the Democratic nomination.

I can’t say this clearly or directly enough: I was wrong.

Harris is more than a viable contender. Harris can win this election.

Ironically, it’s because of the support that I’ve been saying for years is the key to the White House: Excited Black voters create the margins needed for Democrats to win elections up and down any given ballot, and it’s especially true in presidential races as the most recent elections have proved.

Harris has halted and reversed the momentum Trump gained with the one-two punch of his debate against Biden and the Republican National Convention.

And his move to accept an invitation to answer questions from Black journalists at the NABJ convention shows that he recognizes Harris as a real threat.

It’s something that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago.>

<Despite Vice President Kamala Harris’ education, her years as a prosecutor, her having served as California attorney general and a U.S. senator, Republicans such as Reps. Harriet Hageman, of Wyoming, and Tim Burchett, of Tennessee, are among many who have referred to her as a “DEI hire.”

Hageman said: “I think she’s one of the weakest candidates I’ve ever seen in the history of our country. I mean intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel. ... I think that she was a DEI hire.” Burchett referred to her as “our DEI vice president.”....>

Harriet Hag only has a congressional seat cos of her Far Right pals, not due to anything she has ever accomplished.

<....Attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion are attempts to maintain the status quo.

They could have attacked Harris’ record without referring to DEI, but instead they chose to say “DEI hire” and “DEI vice president” to perpetuate a narrative that people of color and women can only be in positions of power or authority because of quotas, preferential treatment and unfair advantage given to them based on their social identities. That is: not because of their education, qualifications, training or experience. These false racist and sexist attacks seek to reinforce beliefs that the best, and potentially only, people qualified to lead America are white men. Attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion are attempts to maintain the status quo.

Attacking the credibility of people of color, women, people with disabilities and others from historically marginalized groups is nothing new in America. The only thing new is the collective misrepresentation of the term diversity, equity, and inclusion to do it. The acronym DEI has been weaponized by people who feel threatened by the racial diversification of America and its leadership; the success of women in corporate and public sector jobs; the mere presence of people with disabilities in the workplace and in society; as well as the increased visibility of LGBTQ+ people and their families. They perceive that reality as an existential crisis.

In addition to elected officials, there have been numerous recent examples of highly visible powerbrokers and pundits denigrating people of color, specifically Black people, claiming they are unqualified for the positions they hold, and that they were hired based on their race, not merit.

In January, not long after a panel blew off an Alaska Airlines plane in flight, Elon Musk took to his social media platform X to criticize efforts by United Airlines and Boeing to diversify their pilots and factory workers. “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” he wrote, misspelling the acronym.

He was responding to an X user who speculated about the IQs of pilots who attended historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. The next day, Musk said, “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening.” His lie that the airline’s DEI policies had endangered the public was shared with millions of X users....>

<....Again, this is not new. First, powerful opponents of progress sought to discredit and gut affirmative action policies. Now they have their sights set on anything they choose to label DEI. This strategy to characterize Black people as unqualified, framed within the context of “DEI hires,” is a targeted effort to attack policies and practices that have created pathways to leadership and power for people of color, women, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and others. Because while “DEI hire” has been most frequently used to discredit women and people of color, it is also used to devalue the contributions of people with disabilities and other marginalized and oppressed identities.

The weaponization of the term DEI cuts across sectors and disciplines, including in health care and medicine, where I have had health care executives tell me that DEI efforts in hospitals or medical schools lower standards and thereby jeopardize the quality of care provided to patients. One health care executive went so far as to say that “a diverse hire,” another way to say DEI hire, would underperform because they trained at an HBCU. Although factually inaccurate, these beliefs about DEI have taken hold in our national narrative.

Diversity, equity and inclusion supports full participation of all people; promotes fair treatment through the intentional use of power, policies and practices; and values individuals within the context of their identities, not in spite of them. It is a response to glaring inequities throughout society, particularly those in education and employment. Recent reversals of public and institutional policies that advance DEI are most often the result of orchestrated resistance by people who believe that DEI will disenfranchise and disempower white people, especially white men. Frankly, the data does not support those claims. After decades of policies and practices to support DEI, inequities in opportunities and pay continue to plague women and people of color.

'Among STEM majors, to get the same rating as a white male with a 3.75 GPA, a minority or female candidate needed a 4.0.'

A 2021 study by Judd Kessler and Corinne Low found that “firms hiring in STEM fields rated minority and female candidates significantly lower than white males. Among STEM majors, to get the same rating as a white male with a 3.75 GPA, a minority or female candidate needed a 4.0.” Even with DEI policies in place, Black women make 66 cents on the dollar compared with their white male counterparts, when doing the same jobs with comparable qualifications.

These statistics and examples indicate the necessity of DEI. They also point to how dangerous the misappropriation and weaponization of DEI is to decades of slow and fragile social progress and policy change.

The truth about DEI is that it promotes American values that are necessary for a healthy, functional and thriving democracy. It is consistent with ideals such as liberty and justice for all people. That is not a zero-sum game where one group’s gain is another’s loss. Instead, it is America making good on its promise to create a society where everyone can flourish and contribute their talents and skills to the collective good while having a fair chance to succeed. These ideals are woven into the complex fabric of who we are as a nation, and we cannot afford to regress to darker times.>

<On the campaign trail, Wisconsin GOP Senate candidate Eric Hovde has repeatedly attacked electric vehicle subsidies, describing them as part of a broader green energy “tax scheme” and “corporate welfare.”

Yet when it came to investing his own vast wealth, Hovde has bet on EV manufacturers like Rivian, Lucid Motors and Nikola Corp. In the last year alone, he raked in as much as $5.26 million in capital gains from investments in EVs, including in companies that have received massive government subsidies and tax breaks, according to financial disclosures reviewed by HuffPost.

Hovde, a multimillionaire bank executive who ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2012, is challenging incumbent Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin. He is carrying out a run-of-the-mill MAGA campaign that has included grumbling about electric vehicles and the Biden administration’s green energy agenda.

In radio and podcast interviews since announcing his campaign in February, Hovde has condemned EV and green energy initiatives as “just corporate welfare for a lot of people making a ton of money off of it.” He’s dismissed so-called EV “mandates” as products of a “liberal fantasy land” that will “be a bloodbath for the automaker.”

In an April interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Hovde painted EVs and wind turbines as not economically viable, and called tax credits to support these technologies “tax games” and “tax schemes.”

Shortly before his official campaign announcement, Hovde told the Vicki McKenna Show that “EVs aren’t even that environmentally friendly” and railed against their reduced efficiency in cold weather.

“It’s all a charade,” he said of EVs. “They’re great at gaslighting.”

EVs have become a favorite target of the GOP. But Hovde’s posture is complicated by the fact that the EV “charade,” as he called it, has been a boon for his own bank account.

“Eric made smart investments because the stocks were trading below cash value, but he doesn’t believe in government picking winners and losers and he opposes the Biden-Harris EV incentives,” Ben Voelkel, a spokesperson for Hovde, said in an email response.

Over the last year, Hovde reported capital gains earnings of between $202,501 and $2,005,000 from his holdings in California-based EV manufacturer Rivian, according to his Senate campaign financial disclosure, which reports assets in broad ranges rather than specific figures. Certain Rivian models qualify for $3,750 in federal tax credits, and the company has received nearly $2.4 billion in state and local subsidies, according to the Good Jobs First subsidy tracker.

Hovde earned another $202,503 to $2,005,000 in capital gains from stock in Lucid Motors, a California-based luxury EV manufacturer that has received state and local subsidies valued at $113 million. That includes the more than $54 million in incentives, tax credits and grants it secured in 2016 to build an EV factory outside Phoenix, Arizona....>

<....Hovde also raked in between $151,002 and $1,102,501 from stock in Nikola. The Arizona-headquartered company manufactures both battery-powered electric and hydrogen fuel cell-powered electric commercial trucks. On its website, Nikola advertises a $40,000 per vehicle federal tax credit, as well as several state incentives, and has reportedly received more than $14 million in federal, state and local subsidies.

Finally, Hovde last year pocketed between $65,201 and $151,000 from his holdings in Faraday Future, a California-based EV startup. The company received but later forfeited large tax incentive packages in Nevada and California.

The EV investments were made through Financial Institution Partners III, L.P., an investment management company. On a form that Hovde filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in late 2022, he noted that he is “the managing member of Hovde Capital Ltd., the general partner to Financial Institution Partners III LP.” Hovde also has significant investments in fossil fuel giants, including as much as $6 million worth of stock in both ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips.

If elected, Hovde would be one of the richest people in Congress, with a net worth of between $195.4 million and $564.5 million, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. As the chairman and CEO of Sunwest Bank, he was paid a salary of more than $1 million last year, his financial disclosure shows.

While Hovde has been out in public slamming an EV industry that he’s personally profited from, allied political action committees and right-wing organizations have been working to paint Baldwin, his opponent, as an unwavering supporter of the Biden administration’s “radical agenda” on climate.

Earlier this year, Restoration PAC, a super PAC funded largely by GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein, ran an ad that accused Baldwin of voting to “cut Medicare funding and use that money to subsidize electric vehicles,” the Journal Sentinel reported. The attack ad was referring to Baldwin’s vote in support of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included policies to reduce Medicare costs but did not cut benefits.

As the Journal Sentinel reported, attorneys for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee accused Restoration PAC of blatantly lying about Baldwin’s record and demanded the ad be pulled from TV. The ad was ultimately replaced with a similar one claiming Baldwin voted “to use Medicare money for electric vehicle subsidies, instead of seniors” — a change that a spokesperson for Baldwin called “just as false” as the original.>

<Donald Trump addressed a fully-packed venue in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, with thousands of people waiting in the Georgia heat outside to enter, or to protest his appearance in a city he has condemned repeatedly.

His remarks were consistent with the tenor and comportment of restraint and probity Atlantans are used to hearing at this point.

“She happens to be a really low IQ individual. We don’t need a low IQ individual,” Trump said of the vice-president Kamala Harris. “They love dealing with low IQ individuals … She’s Bernie Sanders but not as smart.”

Trump highlighted a handful of recent murders in the city, saying “Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor should get off his ass and do something about it.”

Trump rattled off a set of crime statistics in Atlanta that bear no resemblance to the actual change in crime over the last two years. Crime spiked in Atlanta in the last year of Trump’s term and peaked in 2022. It has subsequently fallen back to 2019 levels.

But crime – and particularly crime involving immigrants – has been central to his appeal to Republican voters. Trump invoked the murder of Laken Riley, a college student murdered on the campus of the University of Georgia. Police have charged an undocumented immigrant with her murder.

“Laken’s blood is on Kamala Harris’s hands,” Trump said, “as though she was [sic] standing there watching it herself.” Trump is trying to tie this to Harris’s role as “border czar” early in the Biden administration. “Harris should not be asking for your votes. She should be begging Laken Riley’s family for forgiveness.”

Trump made a point of highlighting the work of three Republican appointees to Georgia’s board of elections, who have been entertaining changes to election rules that critics say are setting the stage for a legal contest in case of a Trump loss in November.

Of President Joe Biden and the debate that led to his withdrawal from the race, Trump said “He was choking like a dog! He was choking. And that was the end of him … they did a coup, but he doesn’t know it.”

Trump said, without any evidence, that “40 or 50 million illegal aliens” will enter the United States if Harris wins, he said, claiming that suburbs will be overrun with “savage foreign gangs”. He also claimed, falsely, that Harris wants to replace all gas cars with electric cars, to ban meat, to increase taxes by 70 to 80% and more claims that can only be taken as hyperbole because they are so far divorced from fact. He also reiterated claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Trump repeatedly called Harris a “lunatic”.

Trump’s appearance in Atlanta is at the same venue Harris filled on Tuesday in her first Georgia rally since Biden’s dramatic withdrawal from the race and her ascension as the presumptive Democratic nominee....>

<....The contrast between Trump and Harris in the space was stark. Harris’s multiracial crowd Tuesday was peppered with the pink and green of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters. Red Maga hats and Trump mug shots – or the now-iconic shot of his fist in the air after the assassination attempt – dominated the mostly white sea of support for Trump.

Trump opened up his appearance in Atlanta lying about the Harris event in the same place, falsely claiming that people left the event early and that there were empty seats. Both events packed the room.

Notably, the upper stands began to empty out about an hour into Trump’s comments.

The refrain, repeated by speaker after speaker at the rally, was that Trump took a bullet for Republican voters, and they should return the favor with powerful turnout in Georgia.

“He took a bullet for you, and in that moment, we found out who Donald Trump is,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, a representative, in a speech before 10,000 Trump supporters at the Georgia State Convocation Center. “He stood up, put his fist in the air and said ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ And that’s what we will do.”

JD Vance, Republican vice-presidential nominee, took note of the emerging Democratic labeling of Republicans as “weird” as he warmed up the crowd.

Weird is how “Kamala Harris comes to Atlanta and speaks with a fake southern accent even though she grew up in Canada”, Vance said. “Go watch the clips; she sounds like a southern belle.”

Vance also linked the people who tried to “bankrupt” and “impeach” Trump to the attempted assassination.

“America is never going to elect a San Francisco liberal who is so far out of the mainstream,” Vance said.

Despite this assertion, polls increasingly suggest that Harris may be ahead of Trump today, with the Democratic national convention coming in two weeks. Before Biden’s withdrawal, Trump had been consistently ahead of Biden, so much so that political discussion here had been about whether the Biden campaign would capitulate in Georgia in order to focus its resources on Rust Belt races.

Too few polls measuring Harris and Trump in Georgia have been conducted to read the race here, but both campaigns have begun treating Georgia as a battleground state once again.

“The road to the White House runs through Georgia,” Greene said, almost word for word what Rev Raphael Warnock, a Georgia senator, told Harris supporters five days earlier.

In long, rambling comments, Trump lambasted Brian Kemp, the governor, and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, for disloyalty: “In my opinion, they want us to lose. If we lose Georgia, we lose the whole thing and our country goes to hell.”>

<....An analysis by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump found that his top five insults were “fake,” “failed,” “dishonest,” “weak” and “liar.”....>

Curious, is it not how one poster at Rogoff has long been enamoured of four of the five listed.

'Low IQ' when used by Hump in this context is, in my mind, just another racist term, and one motivated by fear--of displaying the weakness which is one of the foundation stones of his character.

In the Anton Myrer work <Once an Eagle>, there is a passage in which the protagonist is involved in a discussion with at least one Southern officer during the 1950s.

That subordinate was holding forth over the inferiority of black servicemen as the general tried to discuss the matter, while opining that blacks would be more inclined to look after their own needs if they were treated as equals.

The Southerner then broke in: 'The (racial epithet) can't be treated like an equal for the simple reason that he <isn't> one. He never was and never will be'. His comments closed with 'This has nothing whatsoever to with soldiering. This is something else entirely. If you can't understand it I can't explain it to you'.

The general then spoke of matters being settled within the service by training officers to respect principle over person and rank above failings.

It has long fascinated and repelled me how so very many people gravitate towards Hump, despite the obvious weaknesses in his character. I see an enormous reserve of anger, which he began to tap into and was, in no small way, responsible for his improbable rise in 2016. J6 was a calling card, a harbinger of what may well await if the vote goes against the GOP, three months on.

I have seen the Democratic Party styled as being representative of grievance politics; I'm here to tell you, they have nothing on their opposite number with Hump at the helm.

Living simultaneously as superhero and victim would appear to place extraordinary demands on the strongest character, and I for one wonder how long <the criminal> can carry on with those factions constantly at war within his psyche.