(NEW YORK) — Former President Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani face no criminal charges but their names will figure into the trial that starts Tuesday in Manhattan of Soviet-born and Florida-based businessman Lev Parnas, who has been associated with Giuliani and now stands accused of making unlawful campaign donations.
Before they hear any evidence, prospective jurors are being asked about the former president and his personal attorney since federal prosecutors have said Parnas allegedly shared photos of himself with Trump and Giuliani to raise his profile.
When asked about the extent to which their names were going to come up by Judge Paul Oetken during a recent court hearing, assistant U.S. attorney Hagan Scotten replied, “They will come up really only peripherally.”
Parnas, 49, allegedly made unlawful donations totaling more than $350,000 to two pro-Trump super PACs and former Texas Congressman Pete Sessions in 2018. Another part of the case involves Parnas and co-defendant Andrey Kukushkin being charged with acting as straw donors for a wealthy Russian who wanted to enter the burgeoning marijuana market in the United States.
Parnas and Kukushkin have each pleaded not guilty to all charges. Prosecutors have said the recipients of the donations did not know the source of those donations to be the wealthy Russian.
The alleged illicit donations overlapped with Giuliani’s quest in Ukraine to unearth information that could damage then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, an effort in which Parnas allegedly positioned himself as a middleman.
During Trump’s first impeachment, a defense attorney for Parnas cast him as someone who could shed light on the ousting of ex-ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Prosecutors have since eliminated allegations involving Yovanovitch’s firing to “streamline” the case, as they put it to the judge.
In recent weeks, Parnas has claimed he can no longer afford to travel to New York. The U.S. Marshals were ordered to send a plane to bring him Florida and taxpayers will pay his hotel bill for the duration of the trial.
Alliance for Women in Media Foundation/Getty Images for Alliance for Women in Media Foundation
(NEW YORK) — The United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton said Monday on The View.
“That gives me absolutely no satisfaction in saying this, because I think we’re at a very dangerous, continuing high-level attack on the legitimacy of our government and the election of our president. Obviously, our former president is not only behind it, he incited it, he encouraged it and he continues to do so,” Clinton said in reference to the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Clinton recently said new and often restrictive voting legislation enacted in Republican-led states is “like the frog dropped into the water. It’s boiling.”
“People are still arguing about stuff that is important, but not as fundamental as whether or not our democracy will be broken and then taken over and minority rule will be what we live under,” she added onstage at the Atlantic Festival.
The narrow Democratic majority in the United States Senate has proven to be a difficulty for President Joe Biden, whose agenda hinges on unanimous support from those in his party. The filibuster is preventing Democrats from passing legislation with a simple majority vote, and the party isn’t in agreement on whether or not the Senate rule needs to be reformed.
Clinton said she would “absolutely” end the filibuster to allow intervention against some of the actions taken in the states, like transferring some of the power of election administration to state legislatures.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — While the Capitol was under attack on Jan. 6, former President Donald Trump remained out of sight from the public and watched TV in the White House private dining room, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl revealed on ABC’s This Week.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., called Trump to ask him to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol, Karl reports in his new book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.
McCarthy allegedly told Trump, “I just got evacuated from the Capitol! There were shots fired right off the House floor. You need to make this stop.”
A source familiar with the call between McCarthy and Trump said the former president pushed back, saying, “They are just more upset than you because they believe it more than you, Kevin,” referring to the lie that the election had been stolen.
The former president liked what he saw, boasted about the size of the crowd and argued with aides who wanted him to tell his supporters to stop rioting, according to Karl’s sources.
Two hours after the riot started, Trump finally acquiesced to recording a video statement. In the message posted to Twitter, he asked his supporters to go home but also praised them. “We love you. You are special,” Trump said in the video.
An aide present for the recording said, “Trump had to tape the message several times before they thought he got it right.”
In earlier versions he neglected to tell his supporters to leave the Capitol, according to Karl.
Last week, a Senate report documented alarming new details about the way Trump attempted to use the Justice Department to overturn the presidential election. Attorney General Bill Barr refused to go along, infuriating Trump when he said in early December there was no widespread fraud.
After Barr left office in mid-December, the report said Trump pressured Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to help steal the election but he too refused.
Rosen told senators he informed Trump that the Justice Department “can’t and won’t just flip a switch and change the election.”
In response, Trump asked that the DOJ “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the [Republican] congressmen.”
In late December, Trump turned to Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer with no experience in election law, but who promised to declare without evidence that there was widespread voter fraud and to pressure contested states to reverse President Biden’s victory.
Clark also brought a new conspiracy theory to the cocktail of falsehoods. Two sources familiar with Clark’s actions said Trump “believed that wireless thermostats made in China for Google by a company called Nest Labs might have been used to manipulate voting machines in Georgia. The idea was nuts, but it intrigued Trump, who asked Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to look into it.”
At a dramatic, three-hour Oval Office meeting on Jan. 3, Trump said he wanted to make Clark acting attorney general, according to Karl.
“One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election, Trump said, according to Rosen’s congressional testimony.
Trump was then told every senior DOJ official would resign if he went through with his plan, as well as White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who said Trump’s plan amounted to “murder-suicide pact,” according to Karl.
Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show will become available Nov. 16.
(WASHINGTON) — While national Democrats, including President Joe Biden, struggle with Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s positions in an evenly-divided Senate, progressives at home are launching campaigns to pressure the state’s senior senator, threatening a primary challenger in 2024.
But Arizona is far from a blue state, and some argue that Sinema’s opposition to parts of the Biden agenda are in line with what she campaigned on being: an independent, moderate voice to represent the often-quirky political leanings of Arizonans.
The former Green Party activist, who once criticized a presidential candidate for attempting to get Republican support, is now a moderate thorn in the president’s side.
Progressives are expressing frustration with Sinema, who they say is working against an already moderate president and making Democratic priorities more difficult to enact. And activists are ramping up the pressure on her with crowdfunding campaigns and protests, even following her into a bathroom while she was home in Arizona last week, an action widely condemned by leaders on both sides of the aisle.
Sinema also faced protesters at the airport last weekend, asking her why she is opposing Biden’s agenda in the Senate. On her flight, she was approached by a DACA recipient, who asked for a commitment from her to support a pathway to citizenship. Protestors say they have a difficult time getting meetings with Sinema, so they are turning to the airwaves and larger fundraising campaigns to up the pressure.
Common Defense, an organization run by progressive veterans, is placing a seven-figure ad buy to target Sinema and pressure her to help pass Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda.
“I do feel like she’s failing to deliver with us when part of her campaign was about lowering prescription drug costs, and that’s something that the Build Back Better Act does. And she has come out against it, and again, no real good reason why,” Naveed Shah of Common Defense told ABC News.
The opposition to Sinema did not begin with infrastructure. At least two new political action committees have launched in response to Sinema’s positions since Biden came into office, both seeking to bankroll a primary challenger if Sinema doesn’t change her mind on the filibuster.
Kai Newkirk, a progressive organizer who helped elect Sinema in 2018, is a part of the effort to pressure Sinema to fall in line with Biden’s agenda in the Senate by using one of the new political action committees to send a clear message: Move out of the way so Biden’s agenda can pass, or else Democrats will look elsewhere for a 2024 Senate nominee. He and other activists started a conditional crowd-sourcing campaign to fund a primary challenger to Sinema, which raised $100,000 in a week.
Arizona Democrats recently threatened a vote of no confidence if Sinema continued to stand in the way of filibuster reform that would help ensure passage of Biden’s agenda, an issue they single out as the biggest blockade to Democratic success in Washington.
“We are at a point where we need federal action and there is nothing happening there,” state Sen. Martín Quezada told a progressive news outlet. “I was expecting the Kyrsten Sinema that I had seen in the legislature. I was always impressed by her intelligence, her aggressiveness and her commitment to values that we supported. That’s what I was hoping we would get, but she hasn’t done that. She’s been the exact opposite of what we thought we were electing.”
Some of the dissatisfaction with Sinema comes from a lack of clarity on what exactly she wants. She initially ran for the state House in the 2000s as an independent and pushed for progressive agendas. As her political career developed and she gained larger constituencies, she’s continued to move to the center. Now, in the Senate majority for the first time, she’s been in and out of meetings with the White House and, along with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, is one of two Democrats blocking movement on Biden’s infrastructure package.
Even her colleagues are unclear on what exactly she and Manchin are angling for.
“Now it’s time, I would say for both senators, make your mark and close the deal,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois said last week. “What is it that you want? What is your final goal? It’s time to stop talking around it and speak directly to it.”
Aside from her lack of support on some aspects of Biden’s agenda, some Democrats argue her actions could harm freshman Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat, when he is up for reelection next year.
“I think the risk is that it’s going to be harder to reelect Kelly, for Democrats to keep their majorities in general, because we haven’t been able to deliver on what we were elected to do, if Sinema keeps doing what she is now,” Newkirk said. “You have to keep your promises, and make a difference in voters’ lives for them to put you back in office.
Groups that organized for her argue it is difficult to get a meeting with her or her office, and that when they do, they’re often met with nonanswers.
“She’s not explaining what she’s doing or where she really stands to her constituents. And it’s absurd and insulting….feeling that she doesn’t even have to explain to the people who elected her — that she’s there to represent — where she stands on these specific issues,” Newkirk said.
But all of that may not matter. While Arizona opted for Democrats at the top of their ballot in 2020 — in both the presidential and Senate races — only former President Bill Clinton and President Joe Biden have broken Arizona’s tendency to vote red for its presidential nominees. Biden only won the state by .3%, a reminder that some Democrats’ fantasy of a deep-blue Arizona could still be far off.
Samara Klar, an associate professor at the University of Arizona’s school of government and public policy, said that despite the fact that many Democrats are angry with Sinema, Arizona voters historically love a candidate who is willing to stick with their convictions, even if they aren’t popular within their own party at the time.
“Sinema and Mark Kelly both ran and won on this centrism thing. That’s who they are, they’re not going to be typical partisan politicians,” she said.
“Even among the Democrats, we tend to see a little more right-leaning issue positions and preferences for centrism and moderate candidates than what we tend to see nationally. In fact, I would say Kyrsten Sinema largely was elected thanks to that,” she added.
Sinema, who only won her 2018 election by just under three points, would still, however, need to win a Democratic primary, Newkirk argues.
“If she runs as an independent, she’s not some institution like John McCain. The votes are not there. She has to win the Democratic primary, and if she continues on this path, she’s not going to be able to, but she continues to dig in her heels,” Newkirk said.
Sinema has often said she sees Sen. John McCain as an inspiration, and is sometimes branded as a politician cut from the same cloth. But Chuck Coughlin, a GOP strategist in Arizona who has watched Sinema’s rise into national politics, told ABC News that those comparisons fall short.
“People knew who John McCain was — it’s not something that needed to be defined by anybody else,” Coughlin said. “And she does not have those types of depth of roots in the public consciousness. She’s being defined right now. This is a moment in her life that will define her going forward.”
(NEW YORK) — Snapchat is looking to help America’s youth become potential Washington, D.C., power players with its latest feature, Run for Office Mini.
The new, in-app feature helps Snapchat users navigate which offices they can run for in their local areas based on which issues they are most passionate about, Snap, the company behind Snapchat, said in a blog post announcing the feature.
Snapchat reaches 90% of 13- to 24-year-olds in the United States, according to the company.
Run for Office Mini uses data from BallotReady, which is described as providing “personalized, nonpartisan information to voters in all 50 states” on its website.
Narissa Ayoub, a 24-year-old law student at the University of Detroit Mercy and a legal intern with dreams to run for office one day, said she appreciates how the feature makes the process of looking into running for office more accessible.
“Having all the information there, in one place, and for it to be so easy and accessible, I think it will create a huge difference,” Ayoub said. “I think people don’t know exactly what [they] can run for, so it doesn’t have to be these big deal offices like mayor or state legislature or governor. There are things in your hometown that are open like precinct delegate, or city clerk or school board.”
Through the feature, Snapchat users can type in their ZIP code and select the issues that mean the most to them, such as education, civil rights and more. The app then narrow down the political offices that overlap with those issues and provides users with information about those offices, including who currently holds that seat, their background, age requirement to run for that seat and the upcoming election date for the position.
Snapchat users can sign up for a training session with several organizations it has partnered with including Run for Something, Run GenZ, LGBTQ Victory, New American Leaders and more, Snap said.
“Being the candidate yourself is something that’s super intimidating,” Ayoub said. “I think that this new Snapchat feature … to give people those tools that they need to run for office is absolutely invaluable.”
Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits and supports young candidates running for office, tweeted that the organization saw a record number of young people sign up for their training program to run for office.
This isn’t the first time the social media giant has worked to help youth get involved in the political process. With support from Turbovote and Ballot Ready, Snap helped more than 1.2 million Snapchat users register to vote; more than half were first-time voters, according to Snap.
(WASHINGTON) — The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot will “swiftly consider” holding one-time Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, and potentially others, in contempt of Congress for ignoring committee subpoenas, committee chairman Bennie Thompson vice-chair Liz Cheney said Friday.
The move came after Bannon formally advised the committee that he would be unable to comply with their requests, citing former President Donald Trump’s intention to invoke executive privilege. In a letter obtained by ABC News, Bannon’s lawyers said that until the matter is settled in court, they will not comply with the committee’s subpoena.
The committee last month issued subpoenas to Bannon and other top Trump aides Mark Meadows, Kash Patel and Dan Scavino, as part of its probe into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. An additional 11 subpoenas were issued last week to organizers of the pro-Trump rally that preceded the attack.
Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, and Patel, an ex-Pentagon official, are “engaging” with the committee, officials said. The committee had no update on the status of Scavino.
“While Mr. Meadows and Mr. Patel are, so far, engaging with the Select Committee, Mr. Bannon has indicated that he will try to hide behind vague references to privileges of the former President,” Thompson and Cheney said in a joint statement. “The Select Committee fully expects all of these witnesses to comply with our demands for both documents and deposition testimony.”
Sources confirm to ABC News that Trump’s lawyer sent a letter to several of those subpoenaed informing them that the former president wants the subpoenas ignored and that he plans to claim executive privilege. In the letter, Trump suggested he would be willing to take the matter to court to block their cooperation.
However in an interview earlier this week with right-wing commentator John Solomon, Trump suggested that he would have no problem with his confidants participating in the probe.
“I’m mixed, because we did nothing wrong,” Trump said. “So I’m sort of saying, ‘Why are we hiring lawyers to do this?’ I’d like to just have everybody go in and say what you have to say. We did nothing wrong.”
Committee officials said that those who ignore the subpoenas could be held in contempt.
“Though the Select Committee welcomes good-faith engagement with witnesses seeking to cooperate with our investigation, we will not allow any witness to defy a lawful subpoena or attempt to run out the clock, and we will swiftly consider advancing a criminal contempt of Congress referral,” the statement said.
Any motion of contempt would be passed along for the full House to consider. If passed, the matter would then be referred to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.
Democrats considered holding Bannon in contempt of a House Intelligence Committee subpoena in 2018, but ultimately declined to do so. The full House voted to hold former Attorney General Bill Barr and former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress in 2019 for ignoring House Oversight Committee subpoenas for records related to the 2020 census, but the Trump Justice Department ignored the requests.
Trump is also seeking to block the Jan. 6 committee from accessing selected documents held by the National Archives, which maintains control of White House records, including West Wing communications and visitor logs. On Friday he sent a letter to the agency asserting executive privilege over a tranche of documents that he said contain privileged presidential communications.
White House counsel Dara Remus said in an earlier letter to the agency that the White House “has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States,” but that they would “respond accordingly” if Trump asserts executive privilege over only a subset of the documents.
As of Friday, the committee has issued a total of 17 subpoenas, with most going to Trump associates and individuals linked to the rallies in Washington on the day of the Capitol riot.
The committee plans to schedule in-person depositions with cooperating witnesses in the coming weeks.
(WASHINGTON) — The Senate narrowly averted fiscal calamity Thursday evening in a late-evening vote to raise the federal borrowing limit, but the short-term solution has set the stage for a fierce political showdown in December.
While no Republicans voted to raise the debt ceiling, 11 Republicans voted with Democrats to break a Republican filibuster so that the measure could advance.
The kicked-can deal comes a little more than a week before Oct. 18 — the date Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pegged as when the U.S. may no longer be able to cover its debts.
But the short-term solution is still not yet totally secured. The House is expected to return to Washington from its recess on Tuesday to approve the measure, where it is expected to pass on party lines before heading to President Joe Biden’s desk.
When the $480 billion debt hike is exhausted, the political gamesmanship from both parties that made a short-term solution difficult to achieve will likely be on heightened display, as lawmakers aim to deal with the lapse of their short-term extension of federal government funding at the same time.
In the weeks leading up to Thursday’s vote, Senate leadership was locked in a political staring contest over which party ought to bear responsibility for raising the limit.
Republicans for months said that Democrats would need to act on their own to raise the debt limit because they have total control of Washington and are planning to pass a multi-trillion social and economic package with zero input from Republicans. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said repeatedly that Democrats should have to hike the debt limit because of the high cost of Biden’s proposed agenda.
But Democrats have argued raising the debt limit is a bipartisan responsibility, in part because it covers spending that already took place under the Trump administration with unified GOP support.
Republicans blocked an earlier effort by Democrats to suspend the limit partially because they want Democrats to be forced to raise the limit by a specific dollar amount using a fast-track budget process budget tool called reconciliation. It would allow the majority to break a filibuster to pass certain legislation, but use of this arcane process is cumbersome, could take weeks and opens up Democrats to a series of potentially politically painful votes.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected the reconciliation option, arguing it would take too much time.
The stalemate was temporarily broken on Thursday when 11 Republicans, including McConnell, joined all Senate Democrats in casting a procedural vote to break a filibuster on the debt limit. Ten GOP votes were necessary to clear the way for a second, simple majority vote to raise the debt limit by $480 billion. No Republicans voted with Democrats in a subsequent vote on the debt hike.
McConnell offered the deal to allow Democrats additional time to use reconciliation to pass a more permanent debt limit fix without GOP support.
“This will moot Democrats’ excuses about the time crunch they created and give the unified Democratic government more than enough time to pass standalone debt limit legislation through reconciliation,” McConnell said in a statement Wednesday.
But Democrats have said they’re no more prepared to use reconciliation in December than they were this month.
“There’s not going to be reconciliation,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told reporters emphatically on Wednesday.
Following Thursday’s vote, Schumer took to the floor to lambast Republicans for holding the debt limit hostage, further committing that Democrats would not budge on reconciliation.
“Let me say that again. Today’s vote is proof positive that the debt limit can be addressed without going through the reconciliation process, just as Democrats have been saying for months,” Schumer said on the floor. “The solution is for Republicans to either join us in raising the debt limit or stay out of the way and let Democrats address the debt limit ourselves.”
Some Republicans, and a visibly frustrated Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., were miffed by Schumer’s victory lap.
“I was not in the chamber when he spoke, so I didn’t hear it first hand,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said Thursday evening. “But I heard from others there was a fair amount of frustration.”
Republican Whip Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said he told Schumer personally he was frustrated with his tone, calling it “out of line” and an “incredibly partisan speech after we had just helped him solve a problem.”
Many rank-and-file Republicans were also frustrated with McConnell for even offering Democrats a way to kick the can down the road on dealing with the debt limit.
“I believe it was a mistake to offer this deal. Two days ago Republicans were unified, we were all on the same page, we were all standing together and making clear that Democrats had complete authority to raise the debt ceiling, and to take responsibility for the trillions of debt that they are irresponsibly adding to this country,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said. “We were winning that fight and Schumer was on the verge of surrender. And unfortunately, the deal that was put on the table was a lifeline for Schumer. And I disagree with that decision.”
Discontent with the deal was on full display Thursday, as McConnell stood on the floor and counted his Republican “yes” votes to ensure the necessary 10 votes to proceed would be cast.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., gave a dramatic thumbs down at his turn — just steps away from McConnell.
McConnell had arrived on the floor moments after the vote began — a rare, early appearance for the leader who usually waits until later in the vote series to cast his. But this time clearly wanted his presence known. Rather than giving a thumbs up on his vote, he gave a bellowing and affirmative “aye” and stood in the well with other “yes” voters as they amassed, leaning over the center table as votes rolled in.
Rankling in the lower ranks of the GOP all but assures there won’t be a similar compromise coming in December when the parties will almost certainly find themselves in a similar stare down.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the Senate’s action Thursday “welcome steps forward” on the debt limit but reiterated the Democratic view that it should be a “shared responsibility” to raise the limit in December.
“We cannot allow partisan politics to hold our economy hostage, and we can’t allow the routine process of paying our bills to turn into a confidence-shaking political showdown every two years or every two months,” Psaki said.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden has restored the original boundaries of three U.S. national monuments that had their size drastically reduced by former President Donald Trump, saying Friday that Americans must protect the country together.
“These protections provide a bridge to our past, but they also build a bridge to a safer, more sustainable future,” he said.
The White House said Biden’s move “is fulfilling a key promise and upholding the longstanding principle that America’s national parks, monuments, and other protected areas are to be protected for all time and for all people.”
The orders Biden signed on Friday, alongside Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, restore Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments in Utah to their original boundaries and will restore protections to the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine Monument in Rhode Island. Biden joked that making the changes “might be the easiest thing I’ve ever done so far as president.”
Haaland, the first Native American to ever serve as a Cabinet secretary, played a leading role in encouraging the restoration of the original boundaries.
“Thank you Mr. president, for the profound action you are taking today to permanently protect the homelands of our ancestors. Our songs, our languages, and our cultures are strong, and many people from many Indian tribes have sung and spoken in unison to protect this sacred place,” she said.
The monuments were created by former President Barack Obama using the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to create national monuments. Trump was the first president to use that law to reduce protections for a monument.
Trump drastically reduced the size of the two Utah monuments in 2017, calling it an overreach of power to put so much land and resources under the control of the federal government. Native American tribes, conservation groups and scientists opposed the decision, saying the area needed protections to preserve the historic sites and sensitive ecosystems.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, confirmed reports about Biden’s move in a statement on Thursday, saying he’s disappointed about the decision.
Biden said he spoke to both Utah senators — Republicans Mitt Romney and Mike Lee — about the decision.
“The protection of public lands… must not become, I should say, a pendulum that swings back and forth depending on who’s in public office. It’s not a partisan issue,” Biden said in remarks Friday.
Conservation groups applauded Biden’s decision to restore the original boundaries of the monuments, saying it will preserve the important natural, historical and cultural resources in the area and shows respect to Native American tribes who first called for the creation of Bears Ears National Monument.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that provides financial assistance and better health care to victims of “Havana syndrome,” the mysterious health incidents affecting dozens of U.S. personnel first identified in Cuba and now including several countries.
After a closed-door signing ceremony, Biden said in a statement that his administration is marshalling the U.S. government’s “full resources” to care for victims and “to get to the bottom of these incidents, including to determine the cause and who is responsible” — a mystery that has confounded U.S. officials for nearly five years now.
The HAVANA Act authorizes the CIA director and the secretary of state to provide affected employees with financial support for brain injuries under detailed criteria. It also requires both agencies to report to Congress on how those payments are being made and whether additional action is needed to aid victims.
Several affected personnel have complained privately, and in some cases publicly, that they have not been able to access proper medical care — in some cases questioning whether the U.S. government believes they are injured.
“For far too long, U.S. public servants and their loved ones who’ve suffered from directed energy attacks have been denied the care they need and deserve. That’s unacceptable,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., one of the law’s co-authors who has advocated for victims for years. Its enactment will help “by removing barriers to critical medical attention and paving the way for personnel with brain injuries to recover,” she added.
American diplomats, spies and other officials have reported strange experiences and debilitating symptoms in several countries now. Symptoms include headaches, dizziness, cognitive difficulties, tinnitus, vertigo and trouble with seeing, hearing, or balancing. Many officials have suffered symptoms years after reporting an incident while some have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.
In some cases, especially those first reported in Cuba in late 2016 and throughout 2017, U.S. officials described intense feelings of pressure or vibration and, at times, a screeching or chirping sound.
It’s unclear how many U.S. officials have confirmed medical symptoms, but new cases have been allegedly reported in several more countries in recent weeks, including India, Serbia and Germany. One reported incident in Vietnam delayed Vice President Kamala Harris’s trip there in August. Beyond more than 40 affected staffers in Cuba, the U.S. government has officially acknowledged reported incidents in China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Austria and the United States, although the White House said the vast majority have been reported overseas.
“Addressing these incidents has been a top priority for my Administration. We are bringing to bear the full resources of the U.S. Government to make available first-class medical care to those affected and to get to the bottom of these incidents, including to determine the cause and who is responsible,” Biden said in his statement Friday.
His National Security Council is leading a government-wide probe, while both the CIA and the State Department have their own internal task forces to coordinate their responses, too.
Many victims of “Havana syndrome,” which the U.S. government now refers to as “anomalous health incidents,” have struggled for years to get the health care they seek. Many others, including State Department officials who haven’t been affected, have been frustrated by the Trump and Biden administrations’ lack of information about reported cases — instead often learning about reported incidents in the press.
In his first note to all staff about the issue in August, Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged the administration “can and will do a better job keeping you informed of our efforts to get answers, support those affected, and protect our people,” according to the note, obtained first by ABC News.
But the lack of information stems in part from how little the U.S. government knows about what was once referred to as “health attacks,” including what is causing them.
Last December, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a report that concluded that “directed, pulsed radio frequency energy appears to be the most plausible mechanism in explaining these cases, especially in individuals with the distinct early symptoms.”
CIA Director Bill Burns, who has met with his agency’s affected personnel and escalated efforts to solve this mystery, has boosted that finding as well — telling NPR in July there’s “certainly a very strong possibility” that some actor is behind the incidents.
But last week, the State Department declassified a secret 2018 report that cast doubt on that theory in some corners. Conducted by JASON, an independent scientific advisory group created during the Cold War to consult the U.S. government on defense science and technology, it concluded that radio or microwave energy could not produce the sound recorded by some U.S. diplomats in Cuba and their reported medical symptoms.
Instead, it said, the sounds were “mechanical or biological in origin, rather than electronic. The most likely source is the Indies short-tailed cricket, Anurogryllis celerinictus.”
But a senior administration official told BuzzFeed News, which filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the JASON report and first reported on it, that its findings are “not aligned with the Biden-Harris administration’s understanding of AHI (anomalous health incidents) and it has not informed our response.”
Either way, the report — written before incidents were reported in several other countries — determined that the sounds themselves were not injuring diplomats and could instead have been “introduced by an adversary as deception so as to mask an entirely unrelated mode of causing illness in diplomatic personnel.”
ABC News’s Molly Nagle contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden will restore the original boundaries of monuments that had their size drastically reduced by former President Donald Trump, with the White House saying he “is fulfilling a key promise and upholding the longstanding principle that America’s national parks, monuments, and other protected areas are to be protected for all time and for all people.”
Biden will restore Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments in Utah to their original boundaries and will restore protections to the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine monument in Rhode Island. The monuments were created by former President Barack Obama using the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to create national monuments. Trump was the first president to use that law to reduce protections for a monument.
Trump drastically reduced the size of the two Utah monuments in 2017, calling it an overreach of power to put so much land and resources under the control of the federal government. Native American tribes, conservation groups and scientists opposed the decision, saying the area needed protections to preserve the historic sites and sensitive ecosystems.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox confirmed reports about Biden’s move in a statement on Thursday, saying he’s disappointed about the decision.
Conservation groups applauded Biden’s decision to restore the original boundaries of the monuments, saying it will preserve the important natural, historical and cultural resources in the area and shows respect to Native American tribes who first called for the creation of Bears Ears National Monument.
