Dispatches

CYBERCRIMINALS THREATEN EAST COAST FUEL SUPPLY.

A large portion of the East Coast’s fuel supply was shut down (5/8) when Colonial Pipeline was struck by a massive ransomware attack that forced the company to shut down parts of its pipeline operations, which carry gasoline, diesel fuel and natural gas 5,500 miles from Texas to New Jersey.

“Ransomware has one goal: to shut down the end user and demand money, often in the form of bitcoin, to pay for decryption codes,” Christopher Reeves wrote at DailyKos (5/10). “As cryptocurrency values rise and the ease of access to encryption tools grows on the dark web, ransomware has become a blight on American infrastructure.

“Americans can see problems with roads and bridges, and those provide visible signs that government investment is needed to preserve our future. When it comes to cybersecurity, however, it’s too easy to just blame a company or individual for their fate: ‘You were the one who followed that link, opened that email, downloaded that file.’ As ransomware explodes and the impact expands into major business and funds illegal activities, we become more aware that cybersecurity is modern national infrastructure.”

Colonial Pipeline, which accounts for 45% of the US East Coast’s fuel, was forced to shut down its operations due to a ransomware attack against its systems.

“This is the largest impact on the energy system in the United States we’ve seen from a cyberattack, full stop,” Rob Lee, CEO of the critical-infrastructure-focused security firm Dragos, told Andy Greenberg of Wired.com (5/8). Aside from the financial impact on Colonial Pipeline or the many providers and customers of the fuel it transports, Lee points out that around 40% of US electricity in 2020 was produced by burning natural gas, more than any other source. That means, he argues, that the threat of cyberattacks on a pipeline presents a significant threat to the civilian power grid. “You have a real ability to impact the electric system in a broad way by cutting the supply of natural gas. This is a big deal,” he adds. “I think Congress is going to have questions. A provider got hit with ransomware from a criminal act, this wasn’t even a state-sponsored attack, and it impacted the system in this way?”

The Colonial Pipeline shutdown comes in the midst of an escalating ransomware epidemic: Hackers have digitally crippled and extorted hospitals, hacked law enforcement databases and threatened to publicly out police informants, and paralyzed municipal systems in Baltimore and Atlanta.

In the case of Colonial, it was the work of Russian organized criminals.

The group, known as DarkSide, is relatively new, but it has a sophisticated approach to the business of extortion, the sources said.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said (5/9) that the White House was working to help Colonial Pipeline, the Georgia-based company that operates the pipeline, to restart its 5,500-mile network.

The good news is that despite Trump’s cozy attitude with nation states that engage in cyber crime, the Biden administration is moving ahead to help companies become more prepared, Reeves noted.

The Biden administration is escalating efforts to safeguard the US power grid from hackers, developing a plan to better coordinate with industry to counter threats and respond to cyber attacks, according to people familiar with the matter.

Donald Trump took the nation in the wrong direction on cybersecurity, according to a solid majority of experts polled by the Washington Post’s Cybersecurity 202.

During four years in office, Joseph Marks wrote for the Post (12/20/20), Trump failed to hold adversaries including Russia accountable for hacking US targets, removed experienced cyber-defenders from their posts for petty reasons and undermined much of the good work being done on cybersecurity within federal agencies, according to 71% of respondents to The Network, a panel of more than 100 cybersecurity experts who participate in our ongoing informal survey.

The survey concluded before news broke about probably the most significant breach of the Trump administration — a hack linked to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, that infected at least five federal agencies — the Commerce, Treasury, Homeland Security and State departments as well as the National Institutes of Health — and probably several others, as well as foreign governments and companies across the globe.

REPUBLICANS BLOCK INQUIRY INTO ALLEGED TRUMP CAMPAIGN VIOLATION. Republicans on the Federal Election Commission blocked an inquiry into whether Donald Trump violated campaign finance laws when his personal lawyer paid an adult-film actress $130,000 in the days leading up to the 2016 election, the Washington Post reported (5/6).

The case stems from allegations that Trump ordered his personal lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen, to make a hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her from disclosing an affair less than two weeks before Election Day.

Cohen has served time in prison for lying to Congress, breaking campaign finance laws and tax evasion, but Trump has not faced any consequences in the incident.

The bipartisan commission evenly split on the matter, with the two Democrats who voted to continue the investigation questioning how their Republican colleagues could drop the case.

“To conclude that a payment, made 13 days before Election Day to hush up a suddenly newsworthy 10-year-old story, was not campaign-related, without so much as conducting an investigation, defies reality,” Chair Shana Broussard and Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub said in a statement Thursday. “But putting that aside, Cohen testified under oath that he made the payment for the principal purpose of influencing the election. This more than satisfies the Commission’s ‘reason to believe’ standard to authorize an investigation.”

The two Republican commissioners, Sean Cooksey and Trey Trainor, said they voted to dismiss the case because it was “statute-of-limitations imperiled” and that pursuing it further would be a poor use of agency resources. They argued that because there had been other federal inquiries into the incident — namely the Justice Department probe that led to Cohen’s prosecution — an FEC case would be redundant.

“The Commission regularly dismisses matters where other government agencies have already adequately enforced and vindicated the Commission’s interests,” they said in a statement.

Without a majority voting to move forward, the case was dropped. One Republican member, Allen Dickerson, recused himself, and an independent member, Steven Walther, did not vote, CNN reported (5/7).

The FEC first launched its inquiry in 2018 after the government watchdog group Common Cause filed a complaint against the Trump campaign.

Paul S. Ryan, Common Cause’s vice president for policy and litigation, said the decision to drop the case showcased how the federal agency is “broken.”

“The FEC’s nonpartisan career staff attorneys recommended that the Commission find reason to believe that Trump, his campaign committee, and the Trump Organization committed the violations alleged in Common Cause’s complaints,” Ryan said in a statement. “Today’s announcement that the FEC will not be holding Trump accountable for his campaign finance violations is just the latest display of dysfunction at the FEC.”

Ryan encouraged the Justice Department to pursue an investigation of Trump’s role in the scheme before the statute of limitations expires in October.

Trump denied ordering Cohen to make the payment for nearly two years, until he acknowledged reimbursing his lawyer in May 2018. Even then, Trump denied that the payment had any connection to his campaign, despite its proximity to Election Day and the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, which sparked one of the biggest controversies of his first presidential candidacy just days before Cohen paid Clifford.

Cohen blasted the FEC’s decision to drop its case without pursuing consequences for the former president.

“The hush money payment was done at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump,” Cohen said in a statement after the decision. “Like me, Trump should have been found guilty. How the FEC committee could rule any other way is confounding.”

MOST DON’T GET TO BE ‘DISINGENUOUS’ UNDER OATH THE WAY BILL BARR WAS. Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson has a lot of patience, Charles Pierce noted at Esquire.com (5/5), but on May 4, just as the working day was ending, Her Honor took every polite legal euphemism for the phrase, “lying your a** off” and she hung them all around the neck of former Attorney General William Barr, whose career as a White House legal henchman is now so firmly established that he fits neatly into a list of corrupt AGs with John Mitchell and Harry Daugherty (Warren G. Harding’s AG during the Teapot Dome scandal).

Officially, Judge Jackson was ruling on a lawsuit brought by a Washington watchdog outfit that sought documents related to how the former president* ducked indictments arising out of Robert Mueller’s investigation. Jackson ordered the release of the documents, but she also took advantage of the opportunity to filet Barr before god and all the world.

To review: in March of 2019, Mueller delivered his final report into the involvement of Russian ratf***ers with the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Barr was the only one who had it. The AG almost immediately dispatched a letter to Congress. Judge Berman reminds us about what happened next.

“The letter asserted that the Special Counsel ‘did not draw a conclusion – one way or the other – as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction,’ and it went on to announce the Attorney General’s own opinion that ‘the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.’ The President then declared himself to have been fully exonerated …

“On April 18, 2019, the Attorney General appeared before Congress to deliver the report. He asserted that he and the Deputy Attorney General reached the conclusion he had announced in the March 24 letter ‘in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other Department lawyers.’”

Judge Berman was having none of this. She ordered the release of the documents on the implied grounds that William Barr is not to be trusted as far as she can throw the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse. She ruled that a vital memo should be released because it was not what Barr and the government claimed it was.

“What the Court can say without revealing the content of the redacted material is that there were two sections to this memorandum. Section I offers strategic, as opposed to legal advice, about whether the Attorney General should take a particular course of action, and it made recommendations with respect to that determination, a subject that the agency omitted entirely from its description of the document or the justification for its withholding. This is a problem because Section I is what places Section II and the only topic the agency does identify – that is, whether the evidence gathered by the Special Counsel would amount to obstruction of justice – into its proper context.”

“Moreover, the redacted portions of Section I reveal that both the authors and the recipient of the memorandum had a shared understanding concerning whether prosecuting the President was a matter to be considered at all. In other words, the review of the document reveals that the Attorney General was not then engaged in making a decision about whether the President should be charged with obstruction of justice; the fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given.”

Pierce concluded, “The memo did not lay out legal options available to the DOJ. It was a blueprint for a spin strategy by which the Congress and the country would be misled about what Mueller really found on the matter of whether or not the former president* obstructed justice. It was part of a PR campaign, another burst of smoke and mirrors of the kind that has obscured the essential corruption of the former president*’s entire public career. William Barr was merely the latest incarnation of John Barron.

“Of course, the flossy language employed in the decision is frustrating. The average American doesn’t get to be “disingenuous” under oath the way Barr was before Congress. (You may recall how then-Senator Kamala Harris put him on the spit and rotated him slowly over a low flame.) And it’s true that Mueller’s absurd interpretation of his whole mandate gave Barr plenty of running room for his campaign of disinformation and distraction. But there is something to be said for a judge whose patience is at an end. It can be … clarifying.”

GQP LEADERS BURY INTERNAL DATA SHOWING TRUMP’S DRAG ON HOUSE DISTRICTS. As House Republicans line up to purge their ranks of any potential truth tellers about Donald Trump’s 2020 loss, new reporting from the Washington Post suggests they are living a level of denial that exceeds mere strategic choice about how to retake the majority next year.

Not only are House Republican leaders ousting their No. 3, Rep. Liz of Cheney of Wyoming, for refusing to peddle Trump’s Big Lie about rampant voter fraud, they are attempting to deprive their own members of the extent to which Trump could sink them in critical districts. During the caucus’ April retreat, the Post reports (5/8), staffers from the National Republican Congressional Committee refused to disclose key elements of their own internal polling on Trump. 

“Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results, which were later obtained by The Washington Post. Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one,” writes the Post.

Even when one GOP member posed direct questions about Trump’s support, the staffers conducting the briefing refused to come clean, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (5/10.

In short, they are not only living Trump’s lie about the last election, they’re also spinning their own lie about the next election. 

Eleveld wrote, “it’s impossible to imagine the GOP hard-core embracing the political fringes of Trump’s base without it somehow disrupting its relationship with high-propensity college-educated voters. It’s a group that already has continued to move away from the party in the past two election cycles. And yes, I’m assuming that ‘core districts’ likely refers to swingy suburban districts.”

In Georgia, for instance, Biden’s win was largely powered by the shift among voters in the suburbs, college graduates, and high-income earners, according to turnout data from the New York Times. Here’s how they moved from 2016 to 2020:

• High-income earners: +7 points more Democratic;

• Majority college graduates: +6 points more Democratic;

• Suburban: +6 points more Democratic.

Another metric that seems to support the Post’s report is Trump’s rating nationally among independent college graduates, which is roughly 17 points underwater (39% favorable, 56% unfavorable).

BIDEN’S SUCCESS ON COVID DRIVES HIS APPROVAL AS PRESIDENT. New polling from AP-NORC continues to show that President Biden’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic is key to his presidency. And so far, Americans continue to really like what they see, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (5/10). The poll found 71% of respondents approve of Biden’s pandemic handling, including 47% of Republicans.

Biden’s overall approval rating in the poll is 63%—an inflated outlier from the nearly mid-50s range around which Biden has been hovering for the past few weeks in FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate.

The survey also found that 54% of respondents think the country is on the right track—the highest overall sense of optimism in any AP-NORC poll conducted since 2017. That optimism also seems inherently linked to Americans’ fears about the pandemic, which are also at their lowest levels since the US outbreak began in February 2020. “About half of Americans say they are at least somewhat worried that they or a relative could be infected with the virus, down from about 7 in 10 just a month earlier,” writes the AP.

Civiqs data on the US government response to the pandemic has also steadily improved since Biden took office, with 61% now saying they are completely/mostly satisfied with the response and 35% indicating they are not satisfied. It’s almost a 180-degree turnaround from the day Biden was sworn in, when 63% said they weren’t satisfied with government efforts and just 33% said they were.

Coronavirus news in the US continues to be positive. Although the rate of vaccinations is slowing as the effort contends with people who are vaccine hesitant, several models now predict that COVID-19 cases will dip sharply by midsummer. That’s a particularly striking finding as the nation watches horrors that have taken hold in other parts of the world—India, in particular. In fact, in many ways, the world has gone from marveling at America’s flailing response and soaring death/infection rates under Donald Trump to envying the pace of vaccination rates and improved health of the population under the Biden administration.

This phase of Biden’s presidency is likely to get much tougher, as indicated by the unexpectedly weak jobs report that dropped 5/7. But Americans hired Biden to stem the outbreak of the pandemic here in the US, and they will likely give the president some leeway to deal with other vexing problems if his administration continues to make steady progress on stamping out the pandemic. That progress will include convincing more people who have shown hesitancy to get vaccinated along with increasingly opening up vaccinations to younger people, a prospect that is very much on the horizon for the Pfizer vaccine, in particular.

BIDEN TURNS WEAK JOBS REPORT INTO RALLYING CRY FOR MORE STIMULUS. No American president likes to see a weak jobs report, but the White House in concert with Democrats on Capitol Hill quickly turned disappointing April numbers into a rallying cry for taking decisive action to shore up the economy.

Speaking from the White House (5/7), President Joe Biden said the meager addition of 266,000 jobs in April meant “more help is needed,” not less, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (5/7).

“Thank goodness we passed the American Rescue Plan,” Biden noted. “But we can’t let up, this jobs report makes that clear.”

Biden said the recovery would be a marathon, not a sprint. The rescue plan, he explained, was intended as just that: a rescue plan. “But it’s not nearly enough. We have to build back better,” Biden added, urging the need for his American Jobs Plan.

The president also use the data to beat back concerns conservatives have raised about trillion-dollar investments causing inflation. “For those who worried the economy would overheat, this shows that economy still needs help,” Biden argued.

The Republican National Committee was quick to criticize the jobs report even as GOP lawmakers continue to downplay the need for Biden’s jobs and families plans. In a tweet, the RNC listed three bullet points for April:

• Unemployment INCREASED

• 18,000 manufacturing jobs were lost

• Economy added only 266,000 jobs, far below expectations.

When a reporter asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki about her message to Republicans who reject the need for more stimulus funding, Psaki responded, “That’s hard to square if they are suggesting that it is not a report that meets expectations while also saying that they don’t think we should work together to do something to help put people back to work.”

GQP TRIES TO BULLY ANOTHER REPUBLICAN TRUMP CRITIC OUT OF CONGRESS. As House Republicans lined up to oust Rep. Liz Cheney from her role as House Republican Conference chair for her criticism of Trump, Ohio Republicans are urging Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH), who also voted to impeach Trump, to quit the House, Zachary Petrizzo noted at Salon (5/10).

"On (5/7), the party's governing board called on Gonzalez, R-Rocky River, to resign in a divided vote. They also voted to censure Gonzalez and nine other members of Congress for ‘their votes to support the unconstitutional, politically motivated impeachment proceeding against President Donald J. Trump,’ according to the resolution," The Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

While Ohio has long been considered a swing state, home to more moderate Republicans such as Senator Rob Portman and former Speaker of the House John Boehner, the modern-day Ohio GOP has taken steps to align themselves with the party of Trump, made ever so clear by the move to oust "RINO's" (Republicans only in name) such as Gonzalez.
Ohio state Sen. Shannon Burns, a member of the state's central committee, has called for Gonzalez to resign, stating that he "betrayed his constituents" and "demonstrated a hidden vendetta against" the former president. Burns went onto claim that Gonzalez "relied on his emotions rather than the will of his constituents and any credible facts" when considering the Trump impeachment charges.

In January, following his vote to impeach Trump, Gonzalez said in a statement that he took the measure to impeach over the president's role to "incite a mob that attacked the United States Congress." Gonzalez further argued that Trump "abandoned his post while many members asked for help, thus further endangering all present.”

Gonzalez's primary challenger, Max Miller, who has been endorsed by Trump, also seized on the move to censure, tweeting, "The Ohio GOP has voted to hold Anthony Gonzalez accountable for abandoning his constituents, his promises, and the Republican Party. Regardless if he resigns or not, we are going to continue spreading our strong, pro-Trump, America First message to every corner of this district."

LAWYER FOR CAPITOL RIOT SUSPECT BLAMES FOX NEWS, TRUMP. A Capitol riot suspect was persuaded to storm the building on Jan. 6 after spending too many hours watching Fox News and listening to former President Donald Trump’s election fraud lies, his lawyer said.

Anthony Antonio, 27, of Delaware, was arrested in April on five federal charges including knowingly entering or remaining on restricted grounds without lawful authority; violent entry and disorderly conduct; impeding law enforcement during civil disorder; disrupting Congress; and damaging government property.

Joseph Hurley, a Delaware-based lawyer, blamed Antonio’s behavior on him watching Fox News too much when he was laid off because of the pandemic last year, HuffPost reported (5/6). “He became hooked with what I call ‘Foxitus’ or ‘Foxmania’ and became interested in the political aspect and started believing what was being fed to him,” Hurley said during a virtual hearing on Zoom.

Another Capitol riot defendant on the Zoom hearing, Landon Copeland, interrupted Hurley and objected to him disparaging the former president. (Copeland continued interrupting the proceeding over the next several hours, and the judge eventually ordered a competency hearing).

The lawyer told the judge he’s in no rush to move forward with the case because he wanted prosecutors to take care of “bad” Capitol defendants before his client’s case was resolved.

In several videos, Antonio was seen among the mob at the Lower West Terrace Entrance of the Capitol building, which “saw a tremendous amount of violent criminal activity” that day, according to an FBI affidavit.

In one video captured on a police body-worn camera, Antonio shouted at officers, “You want war? We got war. 1776 all over again.”

He wore a black tactical bulletproof vest adorned with a far-right “Three Percenter” patch, a camouflage shirt, and had a tattoo of the words “Carpe Diem” on his right wrist, the affidavit said.

Antonio is accused of climbing the scaffolding outside the Capitol, entering the building through a broken window, obtaining a riot shield and gas mask, threatening police and squirting water at Michael Fanone, the police officer who was dragged down a set of stairs by rioters and repeatedly tased and beaten.

Multiple men have been arrested in connection with that assault, including Thomas Sibick, Kyle Young, Albuquerque C. Head and Daniel Rodriguez, who was charged after a HuffPost investigation identified him as the rioter who electroshocked Fanone.

ARIZONA REPUBLICAN ADMITS GQP ‘AUDIT’ OF TRUMP ELECTION LOSS ‘MAKES US LOOK LIKE IDIOTS.’ A Republican state senator in Arizona called the state’s recount of Maricopa County ballots “ridiculous” in a New York Times interview (5/9).

“It makes us look like idiots,” said state Sen. Paul Boyer, a Republican from Phoenix who originally supported the audit. “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”

Last month, the Republican-dominated Senate ordered an audit of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County – a county won by President Joe Biden – which they have baselessly speculated was riddled with fraud at the ballots, Jon Skolnik noted at Salon (5/10).

President Biden won the state of Arizona by just over 11,000 votes. Following his defeat, then-President Trump repeatedly claimed that fraud in Arizona contributed to his loss in the election.

The recount is being conducted by Florida-based tech company Cyber Ninjas, which has no apparent experience in election auditing. According to *Politico*, virtually no one in the Arizona state legislature had heard of the company prior to April. Furthermore, Cyber Ninjas’ owner, Doug Logan, is a known QAnon conspiracy theorist and an ardent proponent of the “Stop the Steal” movement.

According to the *Times*, election officials have exhumed 2.1 million votes, but only 250,000 have been counted by hand. Officials initially projected that the audit would be completed by May 14, but given its current pace, the date was pushed back to August.

The Department of Justice has issued a formal warning to the Republican-led Arizona Senate, suggesting that the recount could be in violation of federal voting and civil rights laws, according to CNN. “We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss,” the department wrote.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs aired concerns that her office found several “troubling” practices being carried out by Cyber Ninjas contractors, specifically pointing to the fact that ballots and computers were being left unattended, according to *The Hill*. “Though conspiracy theorists are undoubtedly cheering on these types of inspections — and perhaps providing financial support because of their use,” Hobbs wrote (5/5), “they do little other than further marginalize the professionalism and intent of this ‘audit.’”

John Brakey, a progressive Democrat from Tucson who is a deputy audit liaison, told 12News in Phoenix a “forensic analysis” was being done to detect the potential existence of bamboo fibers in paper ballots. ”There are accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown into Arizona and it was stuffed into the box,” Brakey said. ”And it came from the southeast part of the world, Asia. And what they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper.”

NO LONGER SEEKING ACCESS, PRESS ADMITS TRUMP LIES. With a quick succession of headlines in early May, the New York Times quietly unveiled a new chapter in its Trump coverage — the paper was suddenly calling out his lies, Eric Boehlert noted in his Press Run newsletter (5/10).

“In Turning on Liz Cheney, G.O.P. Bows to Trump’s Election Lies,” a Times headline read (5/5). The next day, the Times published, “Cheney’s Replacement Repeats Trumps Lies as Party Looks Ahead.” (In a nostalgic twist, the online headline for that article referred to “False Claims.”) And the following day, a print subhead for a front-page Times article read, “Party Is Banking On Pushing Elections Lies.”

The good news: Beltway journalists no longer seeking access to the Trump White House are now detailing his “lies” in news coverage:

• “The 15 Most Notable Lies of Donald Trump’s Presidency” (CNN)

• “Legacy of Lies — How Trump Weaponized Mistruths During His Presidency” (ABC News)

The Associated Press reported (5/9), “Allegiance to a lie has become a test of loyalty to Donald Trump and a means of self-preservation for Republicans.”

The bad news: The press should have been doing this for the last four years. Instead, they played purposeful semantics games. Burning through the thesaurus, journalists opted for watered-down phrases such as “falsehoods,” “false claims,” “inaccurate claims,” “alternative facts,” “alternative reality,” “unsupported claim,” and “erroneous description,” Boehlert wrote,

“It was a deliberate decision to turn away from the truth —and from accurate language — while covering the most dangerous president in American history. Afraid that calling Trump a ‘liar’ in straight news reports would spark cries of ‘liberal media bias,’ the press capitulated,” Boehlert wrote. “In the process, Trump used his avalanche of untruths to chip away at our democratic institutions.”

Boehlert noted that this word-choice debate isn’t just about Trump. “Today, we’re seeing journalists maneuver to avoid being honest about today’s radical GOP — most notably how the press is tiptoeing around the right-wing’s open and drastic voter suppression movement, politely referring to it as ‘voter restrictions,’ an effort to ‘limit voting,’ or the GOP having concerns about ‘election security.’ A straight line exists that connects the media refusing to call Trump a liar, and the media now refusing to call the Republican strategy of ‘voter suppression’ for what it is.

“The recent, belated embrace of ‘lies’ simply confirms that news outlets could have, and should have, been doing this for years. There was never a coherent reason not to. Recall that as he prepared his retirement from the *Washington Post* as editor this winter, Marty Baron conceded the daily should have called out Trump’s lies. His reasons for why the paper failed to do so were entirely unconvincing, though. It seems clear the Post just didn’t want to fight that fight while Trump was in office.

“And yes, access was likely a driving factor for the purposeful, four-year obfuscation. Do you think the Times’ Maggie Haberman would have received privileged access to Trump if each day her employer had been publishing ‘Trump Lies’ headlines?”

DEMS WILL RETAIN SLIM HOUSE MAJORITY IN SPECIAL ELECTIONS. Democrats lead the House 218-212 with five vacancies, after three Democrats quit to take posts in the Biden administration and two members died — Ron Wright (R-TX) and Alcee Hastings (D-FL). The Democratic margin will go up to 7 when Troy Carter (D-LA), a state senator who won a 4/24 runoff to succeed Cedric Richmond, who left to become a senior adviser to Joe Biden. A 5/1 special election put two Republicans in a runoff for Wright’s seat, so the Dem majority will return to 6. If Dems can hold three seats vacated by Dems, the span will return to 222-213.

In New Mexico, a 6/1 election will determine the successor to Deb Haaland (D), who resigned on 3/16 to become secretary of the interior in a district that voted 60.2% for Biden.

In Ohio, an 8/3 special election will replace Marcia Fudge, who resigned on 3/10 to become secretary of housing and urban development, in a strongly Democratic district.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) set an 11/2 special election and an 1/11/22 runoff to choose the successor to late Rep. Alcee Hastings (D) who died 4/6, so residents of the Black majority district in South Florida will have to wait at least eight months for representation in Congress.

REPORT EXPOSES HIGH COST OF INTERNET ACCESS DURING TRUMP ERA. “Americans pay too much for the internet,” said S. Derek Turner, Free Press research director who wrote “Price Too High and Rising,” a comprehensive look at the skyrocketing cost of internet access in the US. This damaging trend is felt most acutely by low-income communities and others who need lower-cost service offerings.

“Policymakers must understand the basic facts of broadband pricing and competition as they contemplate how to address the nation’s affordability gap.”

Internet-industry defenders use various ways to measure prices to obfuscate the costly reality faced by internet users, Turner noted. The study analyzes government and industry data, noting the strengths and weaknesses in each form, and highlights how broadband lobbyists working for companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon cherry-pick data to mislead lawmakers, the media and the public.

Among the report’s key findings:

• The nominal increase in broadband bills was more than four times the rate of inflation during the first three years of the Trump administration (2020 numbers are still being reported).

• U.S.-based broadband providers grew their profits to record levels before and during the COVID-19 pandemic by increasing their prices during an unprecedented economic downturn.

• Low-priced entry-level options for high-speed internet service are disappearing, raising the adoption barrier for low-income families.

Turner made the following statement:

“The pandemic has laid bare the consequences of ignoring the competition and affordability issues that have always existed in the U.S. broadband market. This global emergency should have taught those trapped in the Beltway bubble that our nation cannot prosper in the long run if we continue to ignore equity.

“Yet inequity is plain to see in the broadband market. By the start of 2020, nearly 80 million people still did not have adequate internet at home. Black, Latinx and Indigenous people comprise a disproportionate number of those who are disconnected. The steep price of a high-speed connection is the primary barrier — a hard truth that flies in the face of the wild claims broadband-industry lobbyists make about prices getting better for internet users.” Learn more at FreePress.net.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2021

Populist.com