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Schumer acknowledged he was rushing to lock in the project before the 2024 elections. With this money in hand, Schumer said, even if Democrats lose control of the Senate and Donald Trump or another Republican hostile to the project becomes president, the money cannot easily be taken back and the $17 billion tunnel project will survive. To rescind federal grant money would require a supermajority in Congress, something that Schumer said will not happen.

During the Trump administration, the president suggested he might support the project if Schumer would help him build a wall across the Mexican border an obvious no-go for Democrats at the time. Now, though, there are some signs that Republicans have moved on from trying to kill the project and instead are focused on containing its costs. Still, supporters of the tunnels on both sides of the Hudson are breathing a sigh of relief after months of anxiety about when the money would come.

Already, there are some cost overruns, though Schumer and others have blamed them on delays during Trumps time in office.

New York and New Jersey may have to pony up several billion dollars apiece to build the project, though officials are trying to get more federal money to lower each states share of the projects total costs. Construction on the tunnels themselves will begin next summer, though some needed construction along the shores of the Hudson River is happening this year.

Schumer has nurtured the project for years, along with some New Jersey officials like Sen. Bob Menendez, a fellow Democrat. Together, they brought the tunnel project back to life after New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie killed off a prior version of it a decade ago.

President Joe Biden, widely known for his love and use of trains, is a major supporter of the Gateway suite of projects and money for the tunnels comes from a bipartisan infrastructure law.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called Schumer on Thursday to congratulate him about the money. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who also supports the project, said in a statement that the money marked a pivotal benchmark.

According to the bi-state Gateway Development Commission, which is overseeing the project, the $6.88 billion will come in the form of Federal Transit Administration capital investment grants. The commission also expects to receive about $4 billion from other federal grants.

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$7 billion for Hudson River tunnels locks in project beyond ... - POLITICO

The U.S. attorney in Delaware denied retaliating against an I.R.S. official who had disclosed details of the Hunter Biden investigation, and denied being blocked from pursuing serious charges against Mr. Biden, the presidents son, in Los Angeles and Washington.

David C. Weiss, an appointee of former President Donald J. Trump held over by the Biden administration, defended the integrity of his investigation in a two-page letter sent to House Republicans late Friday, in which he provided the most detailed explanation yet of the five-year probe that culminated in a plea agreement last month that would rule out prison time for Mr. Biden, who was facing misdemeanor tax charges and a separate gun charge.

The Department of Justice did not retaliate against Gary Shapley, who claims Mr. Weiss helped block a promotion he had sought after reaching out to congressional investigators, Mr. Weiss wrote in the letter to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Weiss went on to address, in hypothetical terms, the core of Mr. Shapleys allegations: that Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in California and Washington had blocked Mr. Weiss from prosecuting Hunter Biden on felony tax charges during a period when the presidents youngest son was earning millions representing foreign-controlled businesses.

Mr. Shapley, testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee in May under what Republicans said were whistle-blower protections, also said he and other investigators had witnessed Mr. Weiss saying last year that he would not be the deciding official regarding whether to prosecute Mr. Biden, and that Mr. Weiss had been turned down when he sought special counsel status after being told by local prosecutors that he could not bring charges. House Republicans released the testimony last month.

While Mr. Weiss did not deny that those offices had turned down his request to bring the more serious charges, he backed up Attorney General Merrick B. Garlands public statement that he had been given full authority in the case, and that he had the option of overruling prosecutors by simply reaching out to Mr. Garland or his top aides.

As the U.S. attorney in Delaware, my charging authority is geographically limited to my home district, wrote Mr. Weiss.

If venue for a case lies elsewhere, common departmental practice is to contact the United States Attorneys Office for the district in question and determine whether it wants to partner on the case, he added. If not, I may request special attorney status.

Deputizing a federal prosecutor as a special attorney is distinct from making them a special counsel. The special attorney provision is, in essence, a workaround that allows an outsider to intervene in cases that span multiple jurisdictions or have special conditions. The special counsel regulations, by contrast, contain internal Justice Department reporting requirements and congressional oversight provisions.

Mr. Garland has said Mr. Weiss never asked him to be named special counsel.

Mr. Weiss did not address those issues explicitly in the letter he sent to Mr. Jordan on Friday. But he said that if he wanted to bring charges against Mr. Biden in California or Washington, he would do so without concern about being blocked by the departments leadership.

I have been assured that, if necessary after the above process, I would be granted 515 Authority in the District of Columbia, the Central District of California, or any other district where charges could be brought in this matter, he wrote, referring to the section of federal law that defines the role of a special attorney.

The letter follows a June 7 missive he sent to committee Republicans making many of the same points in less specific terms.

Mr. Weiss has been deeply frustrated by what he believes to be unwarranted attacks on his character and motives, and was eager to air his response to Mr. Shapleys allegations before the July 4 break, according to two people familiar with the situation.

An email sent to Mr. Weisss spokeswoman was not answered immediately.

Mr. Jordan, along with Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, who leads the Oversight Committee, and Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, who heads the Ways and Means Committee, sent letters on Thursday to Mr. Weiss and other officials involved in the Hunter Biden investigation requesting their testimony on the matter.

Mr. Weiss said the Justice Departments legislative affairs office was reaching out to Mr. Jordans staff to discuss appropriate timeline and scope for his public testimony once it was appropriate to do so.

In his statement announcing Mr. Bidens plea agreement, Mr. Weiss said the investigation was ongoing, which legally precludes him from testifying about the details.

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U.S. Attorney in Hunter Biden Case Defends Investigation to House ... - The New York Times

Illustration: Jack Darrow; Photos: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Republican Party has been in desperate need of a pragmatic leader who can gauge public opinion, shrewdly husband political capital, and advance the partys agenda in sustainable ways. That leader has materialized in the form of John Roberts. The chief justice of the United States is attempting to navigate the disjuncture between voters, who on the whole are sharply divided but have slightly favored Democrats, and the power Republicans have accumulated through the Supreme Court, which is quasi-permanent and unbounded by any other political branch.

In theory, Republicans could use their hammerlock on the high court to settle a long series of social and economic disputes in their partys favor. This is the course many conservatives hoped, and liberals feared, the conservative Court would take, especially after Donald Trump was able to seat three justices and pad its right-wing majority. Instead, Roberts has pursued a more cautious strategy, and the question is if this will be enough to shore up the Courts falling popularity and disarm Democratic threats to overhaul it.

While he has given conservatives high-profile victories on long-standing social divisions like abortion rights and affirmative action, he has also given victories to liberals. In the term that ended in late June, the Roberts Court definitively repudiated the independent state legislature theory, which Trumps supporters had pushed as his vehicle to attempt to overturn the 2020 election and with which other Republicans hoped to enable gerrymandered legislatures to entrench their power. Liberals, having fretted the case was a ticking time bomb for the Republic, exhaled in relief. Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig called the decision the single most important constitutional case for American Democracy since the Nations Founding almost 250 years ago. More surprisingly, the Court, which under Roberts in 2013 undid a crucial pillar of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, issued an expansive voting-rights ruling that will create more Black-majority legislative districts in southern states, which had previously been free to marginalize Black voters. Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh voted with the Courts three liberals in these recent cases, joined by Amy Coney Barrett in the independent state legislature case.

If you were to ask Roberts to explain this pattern, he would no doubt insist he is merely interpreting the law as written. As a nominee in 2005, he famously likened his role to an umpire calling balls and strikes, a conceit he has clung to even as the Courts reputation for above-the-fray independence has dwindled. We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges, he said in 2018 after Trump lashed out at a federal judge over an immigration ruling.

But very few people actually believe him. A decade ago, Roberts reportedly reversed himself in deliberations about a lawsuit to overturn the Affordable Care Act, ultimately crafting a compromise that left in place parts of the law. Last year, reporting indicated he was lobbying Kavanaugh to pull back from a full-scale repeal of Roe v. Wade. The Wall Street Journal ran an extraordinary editorial hinting at the Courts divisions and urging its conservatives to stand firm. (Shortly afterward, Politico obtained the preliminary draft of the courts Roe repeal, a leak that conservatives employed as an argument for forging ahead.) The chief justice may not be taking polls and holding focus groups, but he is acting like a man who is well aware that the popular legitimacy of the institution he leads is in danger.

The historical shadow looming over Robertss calculations is the confrontation between Franklin Roosevelt and the Supreme Court some 90 years ago. Roosevelt had found his economic reforms repeatedly overturned by a right-wing Supreme Court. After winning a landslide election, Roosevelt sought to take control of the Court by adding seats and appointing new and more liberal justices, only for the Courts majority to reverse itself in 1937 and cede economic policy to Congress and the president.

Liberals have long feared that once the new generation of conservatives had gained control of the Supreme Court, it would revert to something like its pre-37 stance. Perhaps the new right-wing jurisprudence would be less overbearing on economic policy, and more aggressive on social policy, than the version of a century ago, but the overall contours of the scenario that kept progressive legal analysts up at night was an unshackled Supreme Court throwing around its weight without fear of backlash.

Why would Roberts hesitate to seize the full range of power at his disposal to the extent that he appears to be going against his own predilections? One reason is that the Courts Republican majority is a historical accident. Unlike the Court that bedeviled FDR, which was the product of decades of Republican dominance that preceded him, the Roberts Court did not earn its majority as the result of Republicans winning a bunch of presidential elections. Democrats have won five of the last eight presidential elections and seven of the last eight popular votes.

The GOP majority on the Court is a combination of better actuarial luck and more selfless partisan teamwork by Republican justices and some ruthlessness by Senator Mitch McConnell. An aging Thurgood Marshall did not stay on the Court long enough for a Democrat to succeed him; McConnell used his Senate majority to prevent Obama from installing Antonin Scalias replacement; Ruth Bader Ginsburg simply refused to step down despite her cancer diagnoses, even while Democrats held the presidency and the Senate; then Anthony Kennedy, despite being a swing justice, stepped down under Trump. Those four events created the current right-wing majority. It is perfectly legal, but it hardly derives from anything like a mandate to reshape American law.

The rules of the Constitution make this result legitimate, too. But the Constitution also allows Democrats to either pack the Court or to reform it fundamentally in ways that would eliminate its Republican majority. They held off using this power when they controlled Congress and the presidency during Bidens first two years. But if the Court exerts its authority in an abusive or too nakedly partisan fashion, the next Democratic Partycontrolled government might decide it has to act. In the aftermath of the affirmative-action decision, President Biden ruled out packing the Court, though he told reporters, This is not a normal Court. This is the exact equilibrium Roberts wants: bad for Democrats, but not existentially bad.

The legitimacy of the conservative Court has been the thematic crux of its burgeoning ethics scandals. The conservative movement has rallied around Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito even as they accepted undisclosed patronage from billionaires, branding reporters uncovering these financial relationships as activists seeking to discredit its prized majority. Roberts took a more conciliatory line, conceding ethics was an issue of concern inside the Court. The respective styles of Roberts and the Courts right wing on ethics mirror their contrasting approach to jurisprudence: He seeks to conserve power by modulating it, and the right-wing justices seek to perpetuate their power by flaunting it.

Robertss strategy appears to be giving Democrats enough trust in the fairness of the Courts decisions, and hope that they can win some future cases, to keep them from flipping over the game board. By the same token, the threat of a Democratic Court-reforming response is a helpful one to keep the Republican judicial majority in check. It remains to be seen whether Roberts and his colleagues will take that bargain or continue a run of precedent smashing that causes Democrats to see the Republican Court as an existential threat.

The myth that judges make rulings completely abstracted from any earthly considerations is the foundation of judicial legitimacy. Roberts, ironically, recognizes that maintaining that legitimacy means acting like a politician while pretending hes just calling balls and strikes.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the July 3, 2023, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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John Roberts Is the Last Republican - New York Magazine

Republicans’ favorite word these days is “weaponization.” The “Biden regime’s weaponization of our system of justice is straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show,” former president Donald Trump declared. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement,” according to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, “represents a mortal threat to a free society.” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has promised to “hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”

House Republicans have created a judiciary subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), on “the weaponization of the federal government.” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, has asserted that “the weaponization of the federal government against President Biden’s political rivals cannot go unchecked.”

In a reprise of their false claims about fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Republicans have kept Democratic “weaponization” on page one of their playbook, even though they have uncovered virtually no evidence of it. Moreover, in a classic example of the psychological concept of projection — attributing one’s own illicit motivations onto an opponent — Republicans turn out to be weaponization wannabes.

In May, Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate possible wrongdoing by FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials in their probe of alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, released his long-awaited report. After acknowledging that the FBI’s preliminary investigation was appropriate, Durham sharply criticized the agency for “confirmation bias” and a “lack of analytical rigor” in authorizing a full-scale probe.

In their rush to prove Democratic weaponization, Republicans went well beyond his actual findings and results in court. Durham did obtain a guilty plea from an FBI lawyer who altered a document used in a request for renewal of a wiretap, but he was only sentenced to 12 months’ probation by a judge who concluded his action was not politically motivated. Durham’s only other two prosecutions, of a Clinton campaign attorney and a Russian analyst, for making false statements to the FBI, resulted in acquittals.

Durham did not allege a “Deep State” conspiracy to defeat Donald Trump. He found that Hillary Clinton committed “no provable criminal offense.” He did not charge any high-level FBI or intelligence agent with a crime or propose major changes in DOJ policies. The flaws in the FBI investigation highlighted by Durham, it’s also worth noting, had already been identified by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Most important, Durham confirmed that Attorney General Merrick Garland played no role in his investigation and “never asked me not to indict anyone.”

None of this deterred Judiciary Committee Chairman Jordan from proclaiming, “Seven years of attacking Trump is scary enough. But what’s more frightening is any one of us could be next.”

Last month, David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney for Delaware, who had been appointed by Attorney General Barr to conduct an investigation of Hunter Biden, negotiated a guilty plea to two misdemeanor charges of willfully evading federal income taxes and settled a felony charge of lying on an application for a gun license. Since the case has not yet been fully resolved, Weiss declined to testify to the House Judiciary Committee, but affirmed in a letter that he had been “granted ultimate authority over the matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution.”

Nonetheless, Gov. DeSantis opined that “if Hunter were a Republican, he’d have been in jail years ago.” Speaker McCarthy shrugged off the multi-year probe conducted by a Trump-appointed prosecutor and made the GOP talking points comparison of the disposition of the Biden and Trump cases. Chairman Comer asserted that the plea deal came despite “growing evidence … that the Bidens engaged in a pattern of corruption, influence peddling, and possibly bribery.” Comer added that investigations of their “shady business dealings … that risk our national security” will continue.

Thus far, it should be noted, Comer’s committee has found no evidence of corrupt behavior by President Biden, any involvement by Biden in his son’s business ventures or any new and credible information about Hunter Biden. Nor has Comer expressed any interest in investigating Trump family members who allegedly monetized their access to the former president.

Trump has left no doubt that if he returns to the White House he will weaponize the Department of Justice and every other branch of government. His former chief of staff John Kelly recalls that Trump “was always telling me we need to use the FBI and IRS to go after people.” White House Counsel Don McGahn deflected Trump’s requests to order the DOJ to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey. And in late 2020, Trump wanted Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to send a letter to officials in swing states alleging election fraud, requesting they delay certification of the results and “leave the rest to me & the R. Congressmen.”

So no one should be surprised that this month, as House Republicans introduced a resolution to impeach President Biden and censured Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.),Trump, who had earlier announced a ten-point plan to “dismantle the ‘Deep State,’” promised that if reelected, he would appoint a special prosecutor “to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, and the entire Biden crime family.”

If they succeed in dismantling our democratic institutions and sidelining or silencing their critics, these weaponized autocrats will not make America great, good or better.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”

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Republicans are weaponization wannabes - The Hill

An intensive drive by right-wing Republicans in Congress to vilify the F.B.I. with charges of political bias has imperiled a program allowing spy agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign targets, sapping support for a premier intelligence tool and amplifying demands for stricter limits.

The once-secret program created after the 9/11 attacks and described by intelligence officials as crucial to stoppingoverseas hackers, spy services and terrorists has long faced resistance by Democrats concerned that it could trample on Americans civil liberties. But the law authorizing it isset to expire in December, andopposition among Republicans, who have historically championed it, has grown as the G.O.P. has stepped up its attacks on the F.B.I., taking a page from former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters.

Theres no way were going to be for reauthorizing that in its current form no possible way, said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, a key ally of Mr. Trumps who is leading a special House investigation into the weaponization of government against conservatives. Were concerned about surveillance, period.

At issue is a program that allows the government to collect on domestic soil and without a warrant the communications of targeted foreigners abroad, including when those people are interacting with Americans. Leaders of both parties have warned the Biden administration that Congress will not renew the law that legalized it, known as Section 702, without changes to prevent federal agents from freely searching the email, phone and other electronic records of Americans in touch with surveilled foreigners.

Since the program was last extended in 2018, the G.O.P.s approach to law enforcement and data collection has undergone a dramatic transformation. Disdain for the agencies that benefit from the warrantless surveillance program has moved into the party mainstream, particularly in the House, where Republicans assert that the F.B.I.s investigations of Mr. Trump were biased and complain of a broader plot by the government to persecute conservatives including some of those charged for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 for their political beliefs. They argue that federal law enforcement agencies cannot be trusted with Americans records, and should be prevented from accessing them.

You couldnt waterboard me into voting to reauthorize 702, said Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, who backed the program in 2018. These 702 authorities were abused against people in Washington on January 6 and they were abused against people who were affiliated with the B.L.M. movement, and Im equally aggrieved by both of those things.

Congress created Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008, and has renewed the program twice since, largely thanks to the overwhelming support of Republican lawmakers. But significant turnover on Capitol Hill has brought a new generation of Republicans less protective of Washingtons post-9/11 counterterrorism powers, and about half of House Republicans have never cast a vote on it.

This will be a first impression for many of them, said Representative Darin LaHood, Republican of Illinois, a supporter of the program who is part of the Intelligence Committees six-member working group trying to determine how Congress can restrict the program without hamstringing it. The thought that 702 and FISA just focused on terrorism I think that narrative has to be changed. We need to focus on China, we need to focus on Russia, we need to focus on Iran and North Korea.

The Biden administration has been making a similar case to lawmakers, appealing to them to renew the Section 702 program, which Jake Sullivan, the presidents national security adviser, has called crucial to heading off national security threats from China, Russia, cyberattacks and terrorist groups.

But far-right lawmakers have embarked on a louder and more politically loaded effort to fight the measure. They have seized on official determinations that federal agents botched a wiretap on a Trump campaign adviser and more recent disclosures that F.B.I. analysts improperly used Section 702 to search for information about hundreds of Americans who came under scrutiny in connection with the Jan. 6 attack and the Black Lives Matterprotests after the 2020 murder of George Floydby a police officer.

Justice Department and F.B.I. officials have attempted to defend themselves from lawmakers outrage over those revelations, pointing to steps they have taken to restrain the opportunities agents are permitted to examine the communications of Americans collected under Section 702. They credit those changes with reducing the number of such queries from about 3 million in 2021 to about 120,000 last year.

But their opening salvos have not swayed skeptical Democrats whose support the Biden administration is expected to need for an extension of the spying program.

In recent years, Capitol Hill has welcomed several new Democrats with backgrounds in national security who favor extending the program. But convincing others is a challenge, as most members of the party including Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader have voted against extensions. Even President Biden voted against the law to legalize the program in 2008, when he was a senator.

Democratic supporters have been adamant that any reauthorization will have to include significant limitations on how and when agents may comb their databases for information on Americans, in the hopes that those safeguards will allay lawmakers longstanding concerns about the potential for abuses.

Weve been very clear with the administration that there is not going to be a clean reauthorization theres no path to that, said Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, who is also part of the Intelligence Committees Section 702 working group.

He suggested that the restrictions would include limits on when agents could query their databases for information about Americans, and requirements that warrants be obtained in some circumstances.

Representative Chris Stewart, Republican of Utah, who is a member of the Intelligence Committees working group and the weaponization panel, said some members of his party might be persuaded to reauthorize the program with deep reforms.

But therell still be a number who are just never going to authorize this, Mr. Stewart added. Being on the weaponization committee, Ive seen insights into some of their thinking and there are a number of them who just wont ever come on board.

The administration has signaled it is open to discussing other changes in theory. But officials from the F.B.I. and Justice Department pushed back this month on specific proposals during their first public appearance on Capitol Hill to discuss the matter, rankling lawmakers.

I dont have any doubt about the foreign intelligence value of this, but the U.S. person aspect of this is really concerning to the Congress, Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, told the officials during a hearing of the Judiciary Committee. I dont think youve effectively made the case that there shouldnt be a warrant requirement.

The committee chairman, Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, did not find the changes to be sufficient. If the reforms that youve mentioned in 2021 and 2022 are the only reforms that youre bringing to this committee as we discuss the future of Section 702, Ive got to see more, he told agency officials.

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G.O.P. Threatens Spy Agencies' Surveillance Tool - The New York Times