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By Selim Algar and Josh Christenson

May 19, 2023 | 5:19pm

Critics bashed an online profile Friday of the wife of expected presidential contender and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, calling the piece misogynistic and vicious.

The Politico article, The Casey DeSantis Problem: His Greatest Asset and His Greatest Liability, quoted anonymous former DeSantis staffers, alleged insiders and Democratic strategists who accused the first lady of Florida of being blindly ambitious in an effort to help her husband become the next US president.

Gov. DeSantis is expected to announce his bid for the presidency next week.

The story labeled the 42-year-old former Jacksonville TV anchor, breast-cancer survivor and mom of three paranoid and vindictive while quoting a male DeSantis supporter who said she needed to take a more traditional role and a Trump operative who called her similar to Lady MacBeth.

If youre a Democrat and a woman, youre fierce or an unapologetic or whatever, a senior DeSantis adviser raged to The Post. If youre a Republican or a conservative, you turn into a cartoon villainess.

The double standard is shameful. And the people who do this are always the most outspoken feminists on Twitter.

The Politico piece cited a months-old quote from longtime Trump loyalist Roger Stone on his Telegram account that read, Have you ever noticed how much Ron DeSantis wife Casey is like Lady Macbeth?

Nate Hochman, a speechwriter for DeSantis, responded while referring to a Politico article last year that covered how gender roles can still be weaponized in political attacks against women such as former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, first lady Jill Biden and Gisele Fetterman, the wife of Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.).

Politico, November 2022: Comparing women in politics to Lady Macbeth is a sexist trope, Hochman tweeted.

New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat referred to the Friday articles inclusion of a quote from ex-Republican strategist Rick Wilson, who said, Never cross Casey.

The fascinating arc of history in which the founder of a NeverTrump organization is touting a piece about Casey DeSantis organized around a Lady MacBeth analogy thats based on a quote from, um, Roger Stone, Douthat wrote.

A disgusted Twitter user added, I just started seeing these attacks on Mrs. Desantis, and WOW.

These people have no shame from behind their keyboards, sad sad time we live in.. you dont have to like or support her husband, but you also should be a decent human being!

DeSantis staffers disputed all the characterizations in the article.

When activist media like @politico et al have no real access but want to push their narrative anyways about @GovRonDeSantis or @CaseyDeSantis, they quote liberal activists and pretend theyre insiders, the governors press secretary, Bryan Griffin, seethed on Twitter.

Christina Pushaw, a former press secretary for Ron DeSantis, responded in support of Griffin,Fact check: TRUE.

Casey DeSantis recently accompanied her husband on a four-leg world tour, with visits to Japan, South Korea, Israel and the UK to tout Floridas economic strength.

The couple met in 2006 while the Florida governor, a Harvard Law School grad, was stationed as a Navy officer in Jacksonville and were married three years later at Disney World.

On Friday, he traveled to New Hampshire to talk about his record as the twice-elected governor of the Sunshine State ahead of his anticipated campaign launch next week.

He was photographed at a roundtable in Bedford, NH, kissing babies and slamming diversity, equity and inclusion consultants for raking in cash while hectoring people about how capitalism is racist.

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Critics rip scathing Politico profile of 'Lady Macbeth' Casey DeSantis as sexist, shameful - New York Post

The bipartisan political group No Labels is stepping up a well-funded effort to field a unity ticket for the 2024 presidential race, prompting fierce resistance from even some of its closest allies who fear handing the White House back to Donald J. Trump.

At the top of the list of potential candidates is Senator Joe Manchin III, the conservative West Virginia Democrat who has been a headache to his party and could bleed support from President Biden in areas crucial to his re-election.

The centrist groups leadership was in New York this week raising part of the money around $70 million that it says it needs to help with nationwide ballot access efforts.

The determination to nominate a ticket will be made shortly after the primaries next year on what is known as Super Tuesday, March 5, said Nancy Jacobson, the co-founder and leader of No Labels. A national convention has been set for April 14-15 in Dallas, where a Democrat-Republican ticket would be set to take on the two major-party nominees. (Mr. Biden is facing two long-shot challengers, and Mr. Trump is the Republican front-runner.)

Other potential No Labels candidates being floated include Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent, and former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, who has said he would not run for the G.O.P. nomination and is the national co-chairman of the group. But Mr. Manchin has received most notice recently after speaking on a conference call last month with donors.

Were not looking to pick the ticket right now, former Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican and longtime associate of the group, cautioned in an interview on Wednesday as he prepared to meet with donors and leaders in New York. Our focus is getting on the ballot.

The drive has already secured ballot spots in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Oregon and is now targeting Florida, Nevada and North Carolina. But gaining ballot access nationwide is a challenging and expensive effort, and the group still has a long way to go.

Ms. Jacobson called the project an insurance policy in the event both major parties put forth presidential candidates the vast majority of Americans dont support.

Were well aware any independent ticket faces a steep climb and if our rigorously gathered data and polling suggests an independent unity ticket cant win, we will not nominate a ticket, she said.

Caveats aside, the effort is causing deep tensions with the groups ideological allies, congressional partners and Democratic Party officials who are scrambling to stop it. Third-party candidates siphoned enough votes to arguably cost Democrats elections in 2000 (Al Gore) and 2016 (Hillary Clinton). Republicans say the same thing about Ross Perots role in blocking George H.W. Bushs re-election in 1992.

If No Labels runs a Joe Manchin against Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I think it will be a historic disaster, said Representative Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat and, until now, a strong supporter of the organization. And I speak for just about every moderate Democrat and frankly most of my moderate Republican friends.

People close to Mr. Manchin have their doubts he would join a No Labels ticket. He must decide by January whether to run for re-election in his firmly Republican state. But he does see an avenue to return to the Senate.

The states popular Democrat-turned-Republican governor, Jim Justice, is running for the Republican nomination to challenge Mr. Manchin, but so is West Virginias most Trump-aligned House member, Alex Mooney, who has the backing of the deep-pocketed political action committee Club for Growth.

If Mr. Mooney can knock out Mr. Justice, or damage him badly by bringing up the governors centrist record and days as a Democrat, Mr. Manchin sees a path to re-election, and no real prospect of actually winning the presidency on the No Labels ticket.

But he is keeping his options open, at least as he raises money under the No Labels auspices.

Lets try to make people come back together for the sake of the country, not just for the sake of the party, Mr. Manchin told the groups donors on a recent conference call leaked to the news site Puck this month.

Opponents are mobilizing to stop No Labels. Maines secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, sent a cease-and-desist letter this month to the groups director of ballot access, accusing the organization of misrepresenting its intentions as it presses for signatures to get on the states presidential ballot.

The Arizona Democratic Party sued this spring to get No Labels off the states ballot, accusing it of engaging in a shadowy strategy to gain ballot access when in reality they are not a political party.

One of No Labels founders, William Galston, a former policy aide to President Bill Clinton, publicly resigned from his own organization over the push. In an interview, he pointed to polling saying that voters who dislike both Mr. Trump and President Biden double haters say overwhelmingly they would vote for Mr. Biden in the end. Given an alternative, that might not be the case.

And Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a centrist coalition aligned with No Labels that actually does No Labels legislative work, are in open revolt.

I can think of nothing worse than another Trump presidency and no better way of helping him than running a third-party candidate, said Representative Brad Schneider, Democrat of Illinois.

No Labels has long had its detractors, variously accused of ineffectuality, fronting for Republicans and existing mainly to raise large amounts of money from wealthy corporate donors, many of whom give primarily to Republicans.

But the grumbling criticism took on a more urgent tone when Puck posted a partial transcript of a leaked conference call that No Labels held with its funders. On it, Ryan Clancy, the groups chief strategist, said ballot organizers were at 600,000 signatures and counting, and nearing slots on the ballot in roughly 20 states, with their eyes on all 50.

Mr. Manchin joined the call as the closer: The hope is to keep the country that we have, and you cannot do that by forcing the extreme sides on both parties, he said.

Mr. Manchins political appeal beyond West Virginia is questionable. The loudest discontent among Democrats with Mr. Biden has come from young voters, many of whom are animated by the issue of climate change, and they are not aligned with the coal-state Democrat on that.

Mr. Manchin is not a climate denier in the traditional sense. He has repeatedly referred to the climate crisis caused by human activities.

Yet Mr. Manchin, whose state produces some of the highest levels of coal and natural gas nationally and who has earned millions from his familys coal business, has long fought policies that would punish companies for not shifting more quickly to clean energy and has accused Mr. Biden of promoting a radical climate agenda.

But Democrats worry. The southwestern suburbs of Pittsburgh abut West Virginia, and it would not take many Democrats bolting to Mr. Manchin to hand Pennsylvania to Mr. Trump, they warn.

Ms. Jacobson, on the leaked conference call, said No Labels had been Pearl Harbored by a March memo from the Democratic centrist group Third Way. The memo was bluntly titled: A Plan That Will Re-elect Trump.

It wasnt exactly a sneak attack, Third Ways longtime leader, Matt Bennett, countered in an interview. We are enormously alarmed.

Lisa Friedman contributed reporting from Washington.

Originally posted here:
No Labels Eyes a Third-Party Run Against Biden and Trump. Is Joe ... - The New York Times

Updated May 19, 2023, 03:40pm EDT

The FBI misused a digital foreign surveillance tool nearly 300,000 times on U.S. citizens, including January 6 insurrection suspects and protestors in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, according to a heavily-redacted court report obtained by multiple outlets Friday, as the FBI comes under increased pressure over its policies.

The report, from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, found a series of abuses of the FBIs querying procedures between 2020 and 2021 that were persistent and widespread, and could require potential changes to the number of FBI personnel with access to a database intended to gather foreign intelligence called Section 702.

According to the report, the FBI failed to present a foreign intelligence purpose to use the database and instead used it to collect information on U.S. citizens, potentially shooting itself in the foot as the Biden Administration hopes to renew the federal act that created Section 702, which is set to lapse at the end of the year.

Among the findings in the report is a list of 133 identifiers of people used in searches in connection with civil unrest and protests during a three-week period in June 2020, the same time as the Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

The FBI also searched in more than 23,000 queries on people believed to be involved in the January 6 Capitol riot, as well as a batch of queries into more than 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, according to the report.

The FBI introduced corrective measures to resolve the issue in the summer of 2021, causing the use of the database to drop dramatically, according to a report released in March and obtained by the New York Times.

278,000. Thats how many times the FBI used Section 702 between 2020 and early 2021, according to the report.

The report comes as the FBI wrangles with increased scrutiny from the right, following the release of a report this week from Special Counsel John Durham, which found the FBI should not have launched its investigation into allegations then-candidate Donald Trump had sought information from Russia on his opponent Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. In January, House Republicans launched a new committeecalled the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Governmentand tasked its members with investigating the FBI and the Department of Justice, which launched probes into former President Donald Trump and his role in the January 6 riot as well as his alleged mishandling of classified White House documents discovered at his Mar-A-Lago resort during an FBI raid. Trump has repeatedly dubbed the investigations a witch hunt, a criticism echoed by his allies in Congress who argue Trump has been unfairly attacked during and after his time in the Oval Office.

Special Counsel John Durham: FBI Should Not Have Launched Trump-Russia Probe (Forbes)

I am a Boston-based reporter. Before joining Forbes, I covered the environment, local government and the arts for a small-town newspaper on Nantucket. My previous work includes NPR, WBUR, WCAI and Nantucket Today. I am a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with a degree in political science. Email me at bbushard@forbes.com

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FBI Misused Foreign Spy Database To Target Jan. 6 Suspects And BLM Protesters - Forbes

When I saw a WIRED piece on my Twitter feed this week emblazoned with the title Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang, I assumed that only one of two things could possibly be happening. Either this was a piece of vintage Butti-ganda from circa 2019 that was remaking the rounds, or I had inadvertently bitten into an accursed Proustian madeleine and been swept back in time. But the interview/adulatory write-up on Americas secretary of transportation is indeed, somehow, from the Year of Our Lord 2023.

To call it hagiographic would be something of an undersell. The piece incidentally penned by someone who in 2016 described Hillary Clinton as an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself opens with two stanzas that similarly make the former mayor of Indianas fourth-largest city sound like a fusion of Jesus Christ and Aristotle:

The curious mind of Pete Buttigieg holds much of its functionality in reserve. Even as he discusses railroads and airlines, down to the pointillist data that is his current stock-in-trade, the US secretary of transportation comes off like a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubiks Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404, along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritan historiography, and Knausgaards Spring though not in the original Norwegian (slacker). Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity intelligible to me.

Following the absurd suggestion that the likes of Buttigieg and President Joe Biden may represent a nascent renaissance of the religious left (Buttigieg is an Episcopalian and Biden is a Catholic) we get to the interview itself. To give Buttigieg his due, he is better at sounding profound than your average liberal politician. Like Barack Obama, still the undisputed virtuoso of the shtick, he has a knack for communicating bland centrist orthodoxies with a superficial sheen of depth. He is capable of speaking about politics at some level of abstraction. He makes references to history. He refers to concepts like modernity and occasionally borrows words from other languages.

Throughout the conversation, most of what Buttigieg actually says is pretty conventional. He has the views and opinions on current events that one would reasonably expect an educated person of his background and class location to hold: liberal democratic capitalism is good; the utopian possibilities of 1990s globalization have failed to realize themselves; the invasion of Ukraine has been disruptive to the world order; traditional conceptions of masculinity are retrograde and conservative. The relevant issue here isnt whether you agree or disagree, because the substance of the views themselves is almost beside the point. What matters is that Buttigieg exudes the right aura of sophistication and wonkish intelligence.

His act fares a bit less well in the second half of the interview, which is mostly taken up by a discussion of the role of faith in public policy. A few of the exchanges like this one, in which Buttigieg swings dizzyingly from a reference to Paul the Apostle to a slogan you might associate with a sleazy evangelical salesman trying to hawk a used car almost defy belief:

Q: Running [the Department of Transportation] seems to suit you. Are there more ways the challenges of transportation speak to your spiritual side?

A: Theres just a lot in the scriptural tradition around journeys, around roads, right? The conversion of Saint Paul happens on the road. I think we are all nearer to our spiritual potential when were on the move.

The closest we actually get to a description of how Christian faith informs Buttigiegs political decision-making comes in the form of cookie-cutter compassion: When youre making public policy, youre often asking yourself, How does this choice help people who would have the least going for them? So thats part of it.

Its unclear how the likes of stranded passengers forced to pay larcenous fares by under-regulated corporate airlines or underpaid railworkers being forced back to their jobs without sick pay fits into this pristine moral equation, but it ultimately doesnt matter. When politics are reduced to pure fan culture, the affectations of intelligence or compassion take on a greater salience than their application in the real world. Politics become something you have rather than something you do. And over the past decade or so, Buttigieg has had as many different political identities as he has fawning profiles referencing his tastes in literature and his socks.

Hes been both a declared champion of quality public services and a corporate consultant pushing for their privatization. Hes unequivocally backed universal health care but also been its fierce opponent. Hes liberalisms golden boy du jour but courted the Tea Party during his first run for elected office in 2010. A profile or interview that was even remotely interested in interrogating Buttigieg beyond the level of gesture and affect might have thought to probe these shifts at least a little bit.

But again, doing so would ultimately be beside the point. The political and media culture that produces and celebrates figures like Pete Buttigieg isnt remotely concerned with ideological consistency. Its devotees are not looking for champions of a particular program, legislative agenda, or belief system, but rather mascots who bear the right credentials and cultural signifiers.

What really lies inside the cathedral mind of Americas Secretary of Transportation? As mere mortals, its not for us to know. He comes off like a Mensa black card holder who reads Knausgaard or might cite a random day of the week from 1404 and, evidently, thats all that really matters.

Read more here:
WIRED's Gushing Pete Buttigieg Profile Is an Embarrassment to ... - Jacobin magazine

Yet Afghanistan is a far trickier oversight for the Republican Party than the base-pleasing topics of border security or the Biden family. Thats because, as even some GOP lawmakers acknowledge, its not clear whether the 2021 pullout still resonates with voters.

Americans want their pizzas in 30 minutes, and thats about our attention span, said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. The average American, theyve moved on.

The trouble with this bunch up here, in both parties, Burchett added, is that it takes them too dadgum long to get to issues.

Indeed, the Afghanistan withdrawal is rarely acknowledged by the conservative media. Its a stark difference from the 2012 attacks on U.S. officials in Libya that metastasized into a GOP-fueled investigation into then-presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

And even as McCaul pledged to hold State Department chief Antony Blinken in contempt over the withholding of an internal dissent cable a document that details concerns from officials who objected to the withdrawal some of his GOP colleagues are openly skeptical that his work will change any minds.

The political points have all been scored, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in an interview. All you had to do was turn on the television. The American people know it was a debacle, but I think theyd like to understand the decision-making process leading up to it.

Look at any of the polls. You dont even see it, Rep. Gregory Meeks said of the Afghanistan exit in an interview.|Mariam Zuhaib/AP Photo

McCaul said in an interview that he views his Afghanistan oversight as a federal prosecutor might, vowing that Im not trying to score political points here. His Democratic counterpart atop the committee, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), countered that the investigation is part of a broader strategy by Speaker Kevin McCarthy to make Afghanistan matter in the 2024 elections.

And Meeks predicted that it would end in disappointment for the GOP.

Look at any of the polls. You dont even see it, Meeks said of the Afghanistan exit in an interview. Its a blip on the screen. Its not even there. This is just something that I think that the Republicans are doing.

Democrats on both sides of the Capitol agree, saying its unlikely Republicans will be able to use their investigations to unearth new and significant enough information about withdrawal of troops, arguing that the facts of what happened are already well-established.

It is not a type of situation where things are not known, said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), a senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee. We know what happened. Can we do things better? Did we learn from the experience? Absolutely. It was a chaotic ending. We know that. But the cards were dealt by previous administrations, not by this administration.

California Rep. Ted Lieu, a member of House Democratic leadership, all but shrugged at the Afghanistan probe describing himself as certainly fine with evaluating the withdrawal but noting that foreign policy issues rarely affect the national political landscape.

The election next year will be won by Democrats and its not going to be very complicated. There will be one issue: abortion, he said.

Public polling has been limited since the U.S. withdrawal. An August 2021 poll from Pew Research found a solid majority of respondents approved of the decision to remove troops from Afghanistan, even as they critiqued Bidens handling of the situation. That survey found 69 percent of Americans believe the U.S. failed in achieving its goals in Afghanistan.

An October 2022 poll ahead of the midterms by Pew found foreign policy listed as the 12th most important issue to voters, behind topics such as the economy, violent crime and abortion. It found 54 percent of people considered the broader topic of foreign policy very important to their midterm vote.

That may be part of whats driving the sense among even some Republicans that, while many in the party see investigations as important, theyre unlikely to fundamentally alter how voters already view the issues at hand.

Im not convinced that really youve got the American public fixated on any of these investigations, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). Nobody back home is asking me about any of these.

Other rank-and-file Republicans say the emotional toll of the chaotic withdrawal continues to arise regularly when theyre at home, predicting that any new revelations through their investigations would resonate with Americans broadly.

Its still a question I get not just from veterans. Not just from Gold Star families, but I get it frequently from people all the time, Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), who suffered severe injuries while serving in Afghanistan, said. Theres so many different ways that people come about that conversation.

Its a conversation continuing in real time in the halls of Congress. McCaul worked for months to view the State Department dissent cable, subpoenaing Blinken for it in March. Efforts to get hands on the cable began in August 2021, when Meeks still chaired the foreign affairs panel.

The State Department relented on Wednesday and offered to let McCaul and Meeks view the document at its headquarters and with personal information redacted.

McCaul responded in a Thursday letter that he would pause efforts to enforce the subpoena and accepted an offer to view the documents as soon as possible, but said he would insist on the Department allowing other Members to review the dissent cable and response.

He, along with House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), also sent a letter Thursday to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley seeking information about the 2021 terrorist attack outside Kabul airport that resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and approximately 170 Afghan civilians.

And McCaul isnt alone in conducting oversight on the Afghan withdrawal. A House Oversight Committee spokesperson described a recent hearing with inspectors general as the first in a series of hearings the committee will have to examine President Bidens botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Chairman [James] Comer has made it clear that he will continue to work to hold this Administration accountable for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, safeguard taxpayer dollars from waste, fraud, and abuse, and provide the American people answers, the panel spokesperson added.

But as far as McCauls concerned, hes in the drivers seat. The Oversight panel knows that were kind of taking the lead moving forward with this, he said. Its understood.

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GOP mulls how to make its Afghanistan oversight matter - POLITICO