A review by U.S. Senate Democrats of Donald Trump’s attempt to use the Justice Department to overturn his 2020 election defeat provided new details on Thursday about an official’s bid to push out the acting attorney general to advance Trump’s false claims.

The report by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats details how Jeffrey Bossert Clark, then a senior Justice Department official, met with Trump more than once in late 2020. The then-president was growing angry that acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen would not launch a public investigation into Trump’s false claim that his defeat to now-President Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud.

Rosen assumed his position in the final weeks of Trump’s presidency after William Barr resigned effective Dec. 23, 2020, rather than use the department to pursue Trump’s false claims, which were rejected by multiple courts, state election officials and his own administration.

“Today’s report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin said in a statement.

Rosen told the committee that Trump opened one meeting with him by saying, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.”

Trump also asked Clark if he would be willing to take over as acting attorney general, the report said, adding that Clark relayed this message to Rosen.

“Rosen recalled Clark indicating that he hadn’t yet decided whether he would accept Trump’s offer, wanted to conduct some ‘due diligence’ on certain election fraud claims, and might turn down the offer if he determined that Rosen and (Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue) were correct that there was no corruption,” the report said.

The report also found that Clark sought to attend a meeting with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to ask about a baseless conspiracy theory that a Dominion voting machine “accessed the Internet through a smart thermostat.”

Clark pushed for a letter to Georgia, urging a special legislative session to contest the election results, the report said. The request was refused.

Clark’s efforts ultimately failed, after all of the department’s remaining senior leadership threatened to resign in protest if Clark were installed.

Durbin said the committee has asked Clark to testify.

Thursday’s report also contains new details about how former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tried convince Rosen to launch “at least four categories of false election claims” in places such as Fulton County, Georgia and New Mexico.

Republicans on the committee issued their own report, which drew different conclusions.

“The available evidence shows that President Trump did what we’d expect a president to do on an issue of this importance: He listened to his senior advisers and followed their advice and recommendations,” Ranking Member Charles Grassley said.
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German Health Minister Jens Spahn said Thursday the nation has vaccinated millions more people than previously thought, thanks to some unreported vaccination numbers discovered by the Robert Koch Institute for Disease Control.

The institute says nearly 80% of adults in Germany are fully vaccinated, and about 84% have received at least one shot. Previous official reports were about 5% lower — meaning there are about 3.5 million more people vaccinated than had been reported. 

Speaking to reporters in Berlin, Spahn said the discrepancy was discovered in surveys conducted by the RKI that revealed additional vaccinations. He believes some big companies’ employee vaccination programs and mobile vaccination teams in nursing centers and elsewhere may account for those initially unreported.

The new RKI figures are based on surveys and do not include people under the age of 18, which is why the agency has yet to give a new overall number of vaccinated people in Germany.

Spahn said these new numbers are good news in terms of any new COVID-19 restrictions that might be contemplated in the coming months, barring any unforeseen new variants or surges of cases.  

“From today’s perspective, we will not need any further restrictions in autumn and winter to get through this time well without overburdening the health system,” he said.

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters.
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U.S. Senate leaders reached an agreement Thursday to extend the government’s borrowing authority through early December to avert what could have been the country’s first-ever default on its debts in less than two weeks.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced the pact on the Senate floor after negotiations with Republican leader Mitch McConnell. He proposed to Democrats on Wednesday an extension of the country’s current long-term $28.4 trillion debt total by an unspecified amount to cover government spending into December, by which time the issue would again have to be addressed.

Schumer said he hoped to win congressional approval for the debt ceiling extension later Thursday, but he gave no details on the debt level lawmakers had agreed to or any other conditions of the agreement. News outlets reported that the new borrowing authority would extend to December 3 and permit the government to borrow another $480 billion.

Congressional rancor over increasing the debt limit intensified in recent days, with the time counting down to October 18, the date Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the government would run out of enough money to pay all its bills because it chronically spends more than it collects in taxes.

Monthly pension payments to older Americans, paychecks to government workers and payments to government contractors could have been delayed. But the biggest fear was that a default would roil the U.S. economy, the world’s largest, and send shockwaves throughout the global economy. 

Republicans said they would not cast their votes to help Democrats raise the debt ceiling, in part to express their opposition to calls by President Joe Biden for more than $2 trillion in new spending to greatly expand the government’s social safety net programs. Democrats say the new spending would be fully paid for with higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals, which Republicans also oppose.

Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, welcomed McConnell’s move Wednesday to alleviate the debt ceiling stalemate. 

The Republicans “have finally done the right thing and at least we now have another couple months in order to get a permanent solution,” Sanders said.

 

McConnell had said Democrats, who control the Senate, should use the reconciliation process to address the debt limit.  

Reconciliation is a parliamentary maneuver that allows certain budget-related legislation to pass with a simple majority, not 60 votes, in the Senate. Under reconciliation, the Democrats would not need any Republican votes.

“This will moot Democrats’ excuses about the time crunch they created and give the unified Democratic government more than enough time to pass standalone debt limit legislation through reconciliation,” McConnell said. “Alternatively, if Democrats abandon their efforts to ram through another historically reckless taxing and spending spree that will hurt families and help China, a more traditional bipartisan governing conversation could be possible.”  

Schumer has called reconciliation a “drawn-out, convoluted and risky process.”  

Republicans have been saying since July they would not vote to raise the debt limit.  

Biden met Wednesday with some of America’s top business leaders and banking executives to make the case that Congress must increase the government’s borrowing authority.  

A default would risk millions of jobs and throw the United States into recession, “causing lasting harm to America’s economic strength by threatening the dollar’s status as the currency the world relies on and downgrading the U.S.’s credit rating,” the White House said.  

Biden said raising the debt limit “is paying our old debts” and is not linked to his administration’s proposals for spending on infrastructure and social programs.

Democrats are hoping to suspend the debt limit into December 2022, a month after congressional elections when the current Democratic edge in both the Senate and House is at stake.

The U.S. is virtually alone among world governments in imposing a government borrowing limit, which it has increased numerous times over recent decades, either to a specific amount or suspended it for a year or two.
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A popular Russian newspaper has shut down its branch in Belarus after one of its local staff was arrested in the wake of a shootout that left an opposition supporter and a security officer dead.

Komsomolskaya Pravda announced the decision to close its Belarusian subsidiary on Tuesday night, citing “the events of the past year and especially the past week.” 

Last Wednesday, the Belarusian Ministry of Information blocked access to the newspaper’s Belarusian website, visited by some 20,000 users daily, and two days later human rights advocates reported that one of its Belarusian journalists, Hienadz Mazheyka, was detained.

Komsomolskaya Pravda in Belarus came under pressure after it ran a story about a shootout in an apartment in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, during which two people — an opposition supporter and an officer of the KGB, Belarus’ state security service — were killed. The news outlet published a comment from a friend of the opposition supporter, who described him in a positive light. Mazheyka, 39, was the journalist who wrote the story. 

Belarusian authorities reported the shootout last Tuesday, alleging that “an especially dangerous criminal” opened fire on security officers after they showed up at his apartment looking for “individuals involved in terrorist activities.” Authorities said one of the KGB officers was killed and the perpetrator was killed by return fire. 

Belarus’ authorities often referred to protesters at anti-government demonstrations last year as “extremists” and “terrorists.” The huge protests came after election officials gave authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko a sixth term in the August 2020 presidential election that the opposition and the West have denounced as a sham.

Lukashenko’s government responded to the protests with a violent crackdown, arresting more than 35,000 people and badly beating thousands of them. 

Mass arrests followed the shootout too: the authorities targeted social media users that posted comments about the incident, challenging the official narrative. Some 120 people have been arrested, according to Viasna, a prominent human rights group in Belarus. 

Viasna said that Mazheyka was detained in Moscow. The Kremlin wouldn’t confirm the allegation, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying that authorities don’t have the information about where Mazheyka was detained. 

Belarus’ Interior Ministry on Monday confirmed Mazheyka’s arrest on the charges of inciting social enmity and insulting a government official. If convicted, the journalist faces up to 12 years in prison — and so do those detained over social media posts. 

Peskov on Wednesday said the Kremlin regrets that Komsomolskaya Pravda ceased its operation in Belarus and expressed hope that Mazheyka’s detention “isn’t linked to his work as a journalist.” 

The Kremlin spokesman said Moscow would continue its dialogue with authorities in Belarus “to relay our position,” but added that Russia can’t help the journalist as he is not a Russian citizen. 

After the disputed presidential election last year, authorities in Belarus shut down the biggest independent media outlets, blocked access to popular news sites and targeted journalists with raids and detentions. A total of 28 journalists in Belarus, including Mazheyka, are currently behind bars, either already convicted and sentenced or awaiting trial.
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Nearly one month after announcing a sweeping plan to require millions of Americans to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, U.S. President Joe Biden travels to Chicago Thursday to discuss the progress of his initiative.

Jeffrey Zients, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, told reporters Wednesday that President Biden will touch on the impact of the plan, which calls for companies with more than 100 employees to mandate their workers to either be vaccinated or undergo weekly COVID-19 tests. The president’s order affects more than 100 million American workers, or about two-thirds of the workforce.

The midwestern city of Chicago is home to United Airlines, one of the first carriers to comply with Biden’s order when it imposed mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations on its entire 67,000 U.S.-based workforce. United’s rivals, including American, Southwest, Jet Blue and Alaska, have followed through with their own vaccination requirements.

Biden’s mandatory vaccination plan includes all federal employees and contractors who do business with the government, along with workers at any hospital that accepts Medicare or Medicaid payments.

Zients also announced Wednesday that the Biden administration will spend $1 billion to produce rapid at-home tests. He said the investment will increase the number of those kits to 200 million units by December, an amount that quadruples the current number of available tests. He said the United States should have half a billion COVID-19 tests available per month by December, split evenly between at-home self-tests and those given at a pharmacy, clinic or doctor’s office.

Zients also announced that the administration will expand the number of pharmacies in the federal government’s free coronavirus testing program to 20,000.

A new study published in the British Journal of Dermatology says the skin condition called “COVID toes” may be a side effect of the body’s immune system responding to the presence of the infection.

“COVID toes” have been described as painful lesions and rashes resembling frostbite on the feet and hands of infected patients that cause swelling accompanied by burning or itching sensations. Researchers in France analyzed blood and skin biopsies from 50 patients who were treated for the condition in April 2020 at the start of the pandemic, while testing negative for COVID-19 on PCR tests.

The samples revealed high levels of Type 1 interferon, a molecule that activates the body’s immune system to fight off viruses, as well as antibodies that are mistakenly attacking the body’s own cells as well as the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Some information for this report comes from AP and Reuters.
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NATO is expelling eight Russian diplomats and plans to halve the size of Russia’s observer mission to the Western alliance in response to alleged malign Russian espionage activities in Europe, which have included killings, attempted assassinations and explosions, say European officials.

The diplomats have been told to leave Brussels by the end of this month. Two other Russian diplomatic slots currently vacant at NATO headquarters will not be allowed to be filled, NATO officials told VOA.

 

The stripping of the accreditations of the eight Russian diplomats, first reported by Britain’s Sky News, was denounced swiftly by Russian lawmakers. The lawmakers said the Kremlin would retaliate, although not necessarily with a tit-for-tat round of expulsions of Western diplomats based in Moscow, setting the stage for a further deterioration of relations between Western countries and Russia, reminiscent of the Cold War.

A NATO official said Wednesday, “We have reduced the number of positions which the Russian Federation can accredit to NATO to 10,” down from 20 previously. The official described the diplomats targeted as “undeclared Russian intelligence officers.”

“We have strengthened our deterrence and defense in response to Russia’s aggressive actions, while at the same time we remain open for a meaningful dialogue,” he added.

NATO’s action Wednesday, came a day after Democratic and Republican senators in Washington urged US President Joe Biden to expel 300 Russian diplomats from the United States if Moscow refuses to issue more visas for Americans to represent the US in Russia. There are only about 100 American diplomats stationed in Russia, compared with 400 Russian diplomats based across the United States, the senators said.

“This disproportionality in diplomatic representation is unacceptable. Accordingly, Russia must issue enough visas to approach parity between the number of American diplomats serving in Russia and the number of Russian diplomats serving in the United States,” the senators wrote in a letter to Biden.

Troubled history

All 30 NATO member countries approved the decision to halve Russia’s observer mission, which was established two decades ago to help promote dialogue and cooperation in common security areas. The Russian diplomats based in Brussels are meant to meet with their Western counterparts in a forum known as the NATO-Russia Council, although there have been no formal proceedings for months.

This is not the first time NATO has expelled Russian diplomats based at the alliance’s headquarters. Seven Russian diplomats were expelled in 2018 after the poisoning in England of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who defected to Britain, and his daughter. The Kremlin denied any involvement in the attempted assassination but Britain has identified Russian intelligence officers it says were behind the poisoning.

 

Last month, Britain’s Metropolitan Police charged a third suspect, Denis Sergeev, an officer for Russia’s military intelligence agency, GRU, over the poisoning.

In April, Czech officials said two of the Russian agents allegedly involved in the Skripal poisoning were behind a fatal blast at a Czech ammunition depot in 2014, which left two dead. Czech officials told local media that Russia orchestrated the blast to stop arms deliveries to Ukraine via Bulgaria. The Czech government subsequently expelled 18 Russian diplomats and the Kremlin responded by ordering 20 Czech diplomats to leave Russia.

The Czechs since then have been urging NATO to downsize the Russian mission in Brussels, a British official told VOA.

The NATO-Russia Council has hardly been operating in recent years, largely because of increasing disputes and rising tensions between Western powers and the Kremlin, fueled initially by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and the support given to pro-Moscow separatists in the eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko,  accused NATO Thursday of being responsible for the deterioration of relations.

“The leaders of NATO yesterday spoke of the importance of de-escalating relations with Russia and spoke out in favor of a resumption in dialogue in the framework of the Russia-NATO Council,” he told Russia’s Kommersant daily newspaper.

“If anyone believed in the sincerity of those statements then today they don’t. Their real worth is clear to all. After the dramatic end of the Afghan era, how can they get by without the bogeyman of the ‘Russian threat.’ They can’t,” Grushko added.

Leonid Slutsky, a Russian lawmaker and chair of the Duma’s international affairs committee, told the Interfax news agency NATO’s move would damage dialogue between Moscow and the West and said he expected the Kremlin to respond with “asymmetric” measures. “The collective West is continuing its policy of diplomatic confrontation with Russia,” he said.

Some information from Reuters was used for this report
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is shifting his focus to security talks with Mexico after working to soothe relations with ally France.

After a stop Thursday in the U.S. state of California, Blinken is joining U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland in Mexico City for what the State Department is calling a high-level dialogue on security issues.

Representing the Mexican side will be Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard and Cabinet secretaries from defense and security agencies.

Ebrard said earlier this week he wants to see the United States extradite suspects to Mexico more quickly, to stem the flow of guns from the U.S. into Mexico and to improve efforts to trace the flow of money used by criminal organizations.

The U.S. side is expected to seek actions to combat the trafficking of illicit drugs such as fentanyl.

Paris relations

Blinken said Wednesday that his talks this week with top French officials were “very productive” and could lead to new collaboration between Washington and Paris to contain China’s military ventures in the Indo-Pacific region.

“It is vitally important to the U.S. that Europe in general, France in particular, be a strong and engaged partner in the Indo-Pacific,” Blinken said at a news conference in the French capital. He concluded his trip to Europe after talks with other foreign ministers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Blinken suggested the United States and France also could work together on joint concerns in the Sahel region of Africa and on U.S.-European security.

While in Paris, Blinken met with French President Emmanuel Macron and Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian for talks aimed at continuing to patch up strained ties between the long-time allies following a dispute about a security partnership among the United States, Britain and Australia. Macron and U.S. President Joe Biden could announce joint projects when they talk later this month in Rome on the sidelines of a meeting of Group of 20 leaders.

The Biden administration last month announced the new security pact with Australia and Britain that angered Paris. Under the deal, Australia will get at least eight nuclear-powered submarines to be built domestically using American technology. The agreement came as Australia pulled out of an earlier deal with France for diesel-electric submarines.

The top U.S. diplomat said Biden told him to “take what is one of the most important relationships in the world and make it even better, make it even stronger.” Biden and Macron talked by phone after French anger at the submarine deal became apparent last month.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.

 
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After bringing the United States to within two weeks of a potential debt default, Congress late Wednesday was on the verge of a deal that would avert the crisis through November by passing a small increase of the limit on how much the federal government is allowed to borrow.

The measure would do nothing to bridge the serious divide between Democrats and Republicans over how to avoid a default on the country’s debts over the longer term. It would also make it likely that by mid-November lawmakers will be dug in on the same battle lines.

That means that the Biden administration and its Democratic congressional allies will be back in crisis mode, looking for ways to avoid a catastrophic default on the country’s financial obligations.

When that happens, one unconventional option that has gained support in recent weeks is likely to be back in the mix: minting a $1 trillion platinum coin to provide the Treasury with the funds it needs to pay the country’s bills in the coming months.

The plan

The plan, according to its proponents, is simple. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen would order the U.S. Mint to create a single coin in the denomination of $1 trillion. The platinum coin would then be transported to the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, and placed on deposit in the Treasury Department’s account there. Then, when necessary, the Treasury would draw funds from the account to pay the nation’s bills.

The controversial move relies on the statutory power of the Treasury Secretary to authorize the minting of platinum coins “in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.”

While it may sound fantastical, the fact that the trillion-dollar coin is part of the conversation in Washington reflects just how fraught the fight over the debt limit, a cap on how much the Treasury can borrow, has become.

Deadline approaching

There is no debate over whether or not the debt limit should be raised. Leaders of both parties insist that the government must be allowed to borrow the money it needs to pay its bills. The fight is over how it ought to be done.

Republicans are demanding that Democrats use a complicated procedure known as “budget reconciliation” to vote on the debt limit. Democratic leaders have rejected that proposal, saying that it is too time consuming and could bring the country dangerously close to the point of default.

Concern that the country might inadvertently lurch into default because of an accident of timing has made the trillion-dollar coin idea more appealing to some because, by all accounts, it could be executed very quickly.

Legal loophole

This week, Philip Diehl, the former director of the U.S. Mint, explained to the news website Axios that it would be possible to design and mint a trillion-dollar coin in a matter of hours. The Mint has an ample supply of platinum “blank” coins, and could easily reconfigure the mold used to produce an existing platinum commemorative $1 coin.

The legal statute that gives the Treasury Secretary the authority to mint a trillion-dollar coin was tucked into a 750-page appropriations bill in 1996, and was never meant to be used to avert a fiscal catastrophe.

The reason why the law specified that the Treasury Secretary’s authority to issue new types of coin was limited to those made of platinum, is because rules already existed limiting the ability to strike coins from metals historically used for money: gold, silver, and copper.

The platinum coins issued by the Treasury are typically commemorative in nature, and are purchased by collectors. However, because the law was not written in a way that specifically bars the Treasury Secretary from minting platinum currency, advocates of the idea say it remains an available option in an emergency.

Idea not new

This is not the first time there have been proposals to use a trillion-dollar coin to get around the debt limit. During the 2011 debt ceiling crisis the idea surfaced among some academics and political commentators, though it didn’t receive broad acceptance.

The idea picked up more momentum in 2012, when it was endorsed by Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Lawmakers took the idea seriously enough that there was a brief effort to pass legislation banning the creation of such a coin in 2013, although it failed.

There has been much speculation about what a trillion-dollar coin might look like, but in the end, that wouldn’t matter much, because virtually nobody would ever see it. The coin would go from the Mint to the Fed — likely to the vaults at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — and would remain there in perpetuity.

Yellen opposed

The biggest impediment to the plan, at the moment, appears to be Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen herself. Last week, she dismissed the idea during testimony before the House Financial Services Committee.

On Tuesday, she made her opposition to the plan more emphatic in an interview with CNBC.

“I’m opposed to it, and I don’t believe that we should consider it seriously,” she said. “It’s really a gimmick.”

She continued, “What’s necessary is for Congress to show that the world can count on America paying its debts. The platinum coin is equivalent to asking the Federal Reserve to print money to cover deficits that Congress is unwilling to cover by issuing debt. It compromises the independence of the Fed, conflating monetary and fiscal policy. And instead of showing that Congress and the administration can be trusted to pay the country’s bills, it really does the opposite.”

Legal quandary

Supporters of the plan will note one thing that Yellen did not say: That minting the coin would be illegal or illegitimate.

Some argue that if Congress fails to act, the Treasury Secretary might, in fact, be obligated to use her authority to mint new currency to pay the country’s bills.

While the debt ceiling places a real, legal limit on the amount of money the government can borrow, spending bills passed by Congress also legally obligate the administration to spend funds as Congress has specified. Additionally, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution specifies that “The validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned,” which some legal scholars have interpreted as meaning that allowing a debt default would be unconstitutional.

Rohan Grey, a professor of law at Willamette University, said that Yellen’s belief that the trillion-dollar coin is a “gimmick” would be no defense if minting the coin were the only thing standing between the United States and default.

“You can’t say, I find this silly or uncomfortable, therefore, I’m going to intentionally violate the Constitution,” he told VOA. “Their obligation is to honor the debts under the 14th Amendment and to honor Congress’s spending directives.”

Lesser of two evils

While minting a trillion-dollar coin might avoid a technical default on the nation’s debts, some experts worry about the effect such a radical proposal would have on public perceptions.

The idea is so “wacky,” said Kenneth Kuttner, Williams College professor of economics, that it might undermine the faith that ordinary people, and even sophisticated financial markets participants, have in the U.S. government.

“They’re managing things so poorly that they’re having to resort to these gimmicks to obviate [raising] the debt ceiling?” he told VOA. “That may look bad for regular people and for the financial markets.” 

 
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