Barbara Lee makes Senate pitch before polls close in California primary
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Federal prosecutors in Manhattan on Tuesday indicted Sen. Bob Menendez once again, accusing the New Jersey lawmaker of having his former lawyer “make false and misleading statements” to investigators in a years-long corruption probe.
The latest indictment says that in December 2022, Menendez wrote checks to businesspeople to repay car and personal loans. Prosecutors said in court papers that the couple “wrote checks and letters falsely characterizing the return of bribe money…in an effort to interfere with an investigation.”
The latest charges against Menendez come a day after the judge overseeing his case denied his effort to have evidence against him, including cash and gold bars, suppressed.
The senior senator from New Jersey and his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, are accused of accepting bribes over several years. They have pleaded not guilty.
But one of the three businesspeople who were charged in the corruption scheme, Jose Uribe, reversed his plea last week and is cooperating with authorities.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced she will not run for reelection this year, setting up a race between Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake to succeed her.
The first-term senator, who left the Democratic Party to become an independent, said she believes in her approach to politics, “but it’s not what America wants right now.”
“Because I choose civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done. I will leave the Senate at the end of this year,” Sinema said in a video message posted to social media on Tuesday.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer met with a member of Israel’s war cabinet, Benny Gantz, on Tuesday at the Capitol as Congress pursues a path forward for additional aid.
Neither man took questions from assembled journalists as they shook hands. Schumer is the highest-ranking Jewish lawmaker in U.S. history.
Gantz is a top rival to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and made the trip in defiance of the longtime Israeli leader. He’s seen as a potential successor to Netanyahu and met with Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will also meet with the Israeli official on Tuesday.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is also expected to meet privately with Gantz on Tuesday, though his office did not immediately provide details of that visit. Gantz also huddled with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday.
The White House, along with law enforcement and labor groups, is pushing back against what they call “Islamophobic attacks” against a Biden administration nominee who would become the first Muslim American federal appellate judge if confirmed.
The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Adeel Mangi’s potentially historic nomination in January, after Republicans peppered him with questions on the Israel-Hamas war and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The AFL-CIO and Coalition of the Underrepresented Law Enforcement Associations wrote to Senate and Judiciary panel leadership to voice their support for Mangi in recent weeks.
“We were upset and disturbed by some of the questions he was subjected to during his committee hearing. Nominees should be evaluated based on their intellectual abilities and a review of their legal careers and not based upon their religion,” wrote the AFL-CIO’s William Samuel.
The law enforcement organization, based in Mangi’s home state of New Jersey, wrote: “As law enforcement professionals, it is our collective belief that Mr. Mangi will help ensure equity in the administration of justice in all communities.”
“The White House stands 100 percent behind Mr. Mangi and we call on the Senate to swiftly confirm him. Mr. Mangi has been subjected to uniquely hostile attacks, in a way other nominees have not — precisely because of his Muslim faith,” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told POLITICO.
“Mr. Mangi has forcefully and repeatedly condemned antisemitism, terrorism, and the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks,” said Bates, who also said that Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) “owe Mr. Mangi an apology.”
Prominent Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists to the American Jewish Committee, had previously voiced their support for Mangi’s nomination.
Mangi is a partner at the law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler and served from 2019 to 2023 as an advisory board member at Rutgers University’s Center for Security, Race and Rights. Last month Senate Judiciary Republicans launched an investigation into the Rutgers center, accusing the program of platforming “terrorist sympathizers” and making Mangi’s affiliation a centerpiece of their opposition to his nomination.
Mangi told lawmakers in a December hearing that the center’s advisory board met just once a year and that he wasn’t familiar with the events highlighted in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
Democrats are about to enter a volatile stretch of Senate primaries — including three in blue states where infighting could hand Republicans momentum or force Democrats to burn money on internecine conflicts.
Even as they mock Republicans’ primary disarray in key battleground states, Democrats are facing their own drama in Maryland, New Jersey and California. That’s on top of senior Democrats’ push to dispatch long-shot challengers to their preferred Senate candidates in Texas and Michigan.
It all starts playing out on Super Tuesday, when voters go to the polls in California and Texas.
In the Lone Star State, Rep. Colin Allred is trying to avoid a May 28 runoff against state senator Roland Gutierrez, which would allow Allred to hammer GOP Sen. Ted Cruz for eight uninterrupted months until the general election. In California, Rep. Adam Schiff and his allies would prefer Republican Steve Garvey to advance to the general election for Senate, but other Democrats don’t mind months more of heavy spending among House members seeking the seat if it means no GOP name on the ballot in November.
Maryland, meanwhile, is already shaping up as perhaps Democrats’ most important Senate primary when it comes to holding a blue seat. The surprise candidacy of former GOP Gov. Larry Hogan has significantly raised the stakes for the May 14 contest between Rep. David Trone (D-Md.) and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks. The national Democratic Party is staying neutral for now in a race that pits the wealthy Total Wine and More owner against Alsobrooks, who could be the state’s first Black woman senator and one of a handful to ever serve in the chamber.
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Gary Peters (D-Mich.) professes that he’s not worried about Maryland or any of the other Democratic primaries, but both the California and New Jersey primaries hold the real risk of hurting Democrats more broadly in November. In New Jersey, Rep. Andy Kim and the state’s first lady, Tammy Murphy, are warring over the seat held by indicted Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) — who hasn’t said if he’ll run again — and Kim is openly warning that efforts to tip the scale for Murphy could hand the seat to the GOP.
“We have such a razor-thin majority right now and a lot of defense to be played in 2024,” said Kim, who cited Murphy’s lack of electoral experience in an interview. “We should not do anything that puts a seat in jeopardy.”
Still, Republicans face more battleground contests than Democrats, even after National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines (R-Mont.) labored to land Hogan and avoid tough primaries in Montana and Pennsylvania.
The GOP is navigating challenging primaries in several races, including Ohio and Michigan as well as potentially Wisconsin and Nevada, which Democrats see as more crucial to the balance of power in the Senate.
Last cycle, Senate Democrats stayed out of primaries in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania with mixed results, losing the Badger State but electing John Fetterman (D-Pa.) to the Senate as all their incumbents held on.
“I admire their desire to win. And that I think dominates every decision,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former NRSC chair, said of Democrats. “We have Republicans who like to fight other Republicans rather than Democrats.”
In a break from past chairs — and from Daines’ aggressive primary interventions across the map — Peters is declining to intervene in any primaries for the second straight cycle. He added that his approach could change, but he sees little reason to switch things up at the moment.
Republicans haven’t won a Senate race in New Jersey since 1972 and in Maryland since 1980. Peters called both Trone and Alsobrooks “strong” and said Maryland is “not really a state in play that I worry about.”
Others are fretting, though. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who supports Alsobrooks, said in an interview that he understood the DSCC’s position but questioned why the rest of the party is on the sidelines, or even backing Trone.
“It’s very frustrating to me. We have an enormously qualified African American woman running in Maryland, and I wish more people would rally around the cause. Because it would be historic for her to win,” Booker said.
Retiring Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) is neutral in the race to succeed him and said the Democratic turnout boost that comes with a presidential race would make it difficult for Hogan to win; the Republican won both his gubernatorial terms in midterm election years.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), whom some Democrats had tried to draft into the race, said he is currently staying out of the primary and keeping his “eyes on the prize” of ensuring the seat stays blue. He and Trone faced off in 2016 for the House seat Raskin now holds.
In New Jersey, it’s hard to fathom a competitive general election as long as Menendez doesn’t win the nomination. But the intrigue surrounding the race is growing.
Kim would be the first Asian American to represent his state in the Senate. But he’s also betting that voters will be looking for a break from the party’s machine politics; Murphy, well versed in the Garden State’s inside game of county Democratic politics, may still have an advantage as a result of it.
Fetterman, who supports Kim, said New Jersey Democrats have an opportunity to break with “the same kind of diseased establishment” that protected Menendez after his indictment on bribery-related charges.
“How is her campaign about anything other than 50 percent nepotism, and 50 percent ballot positioning?” Fetterman said of Murphy. Kim, the Pennsylvanian added, is “not married to somebody who can force people to endorse him. He just did it all himself.”
Murphy spokesperson Alex Altman defended her as “the only candidate in this race that New Jersey can trust to fight for their progressive values” and knocked Kim for “refusing to stand up to Donald Trump.”
Michigan and Texas are likely to be competitive in the general election, but it would be an absolute shock if Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) or Allred struggle to win their respective primaries. Polling shows a close race in Texas between Allred and Cruz, even though Democrats haven’t won a Senate race there since 1988.
Notably, Schumer quietly maneuvered on behalf of both favored candidates even as Peters remained neutral. He donated from his leadership PAC to Allred, Slotkin and former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in Florida. He declined to comment for this story.
Hill Harper, who’s been mounting an underdog campaign against Slotkin to succeed retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), chafed at the establishment support for his Democratic rival: “The establishment in both parties, of which my opponent is part of, is complicit in this because they don’t want it to change.”
California’s Senate seat, of course, is nearly guaranteed to stay blue next year. But the ramifications of this week’s primary could be wide-ranging: If Republican Garvey can make the top two thanks to the divided Democratic field of Schiff, Rep. Barbara Lee and Rep. Katie Porter, GOP turnout on his behalf could benefit the party’s candidates in the state’s battleground House races.
“We obviously want as many Democrats to come out as possible for both March and November. That’s the goal,” said Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), who said that the knock-on effect of the Senate primary is tough to pin down. “So hopefully Democrats will come out in March.”
JC Whittington contributed to this report.
Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso will pass on a bid for GOP leader in the next Congress, instead pursuing the No. 2 job of party whip.
Barrasso, who is currently the No. 3 Senate Republican, is informing colleagues of his plans, according to a person familiar with his interactions who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. Barrasso’s office declined to comment.
His decision narrows the GOP leadership race down to Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) — for now, at least. Thune is the current whip and Cornyn previously served for six years as whip , but both are term-limited out of the job.
That opens the door for Barrasso to more easily win the post, which is central to the daily floor action of the Senate. It also comes with a security detail and prime office space in the Capitol building.
Barrasso had been in the mix for the leader job, but Republicans can only pursue one position in the party leadership at a time, making it more risky to for him to try and succeed departing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and comparatively less challenging to become whip.
Barrasso is also term-limited out of the conference chair job, and his bid for whip opens up the No. 3 position. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) confirmed to Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday that he’s pursuing the position. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who currently occupies the No. 4 spot of Republican Policy Committee chair, has not made a decision on whether she will stay put or pursue another leadership office.
Punchbowl News first reported Barrasso’s official decision. POLITICO reported on Friday that Barrasso and Cotton were respectively eyeing the No. 2 and No. 3 jobs.
Monday’s Supreme Court decision had impacts beyond the race for the White House. One key example: Central Pennsylvania voters will most likely see Scott Perry on their ballots this November.
The ruling that individual states can’t disqualify former President Donald Trump from the ballot extends to other federal offices, too. And that should clear Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, of litigation attempting to have him thrown off the ballot for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.
“There’s no basis on which that suit can survive in light of this opinion,” Joshua Voss, Perry’s lead lawyer in the case, said after the Supreme Court ruling. “This should be the final word.”
Monday’s ruling effectively ended efforts that bubbled up in dozens of states to have Trump disqualified from the presidency for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Those efforts relied on an interpretation of the “insurrection clause” of the 14th Amendment that says people who engaged in insurrection after taking an oath to support the Constitution are barred from future office.
The Colorado Supreme Court had agreed with that argument, saying Trump was ineligible for the presidency; the Maine secretary of state and a state judge in Illinois followed suit.
But Trump was not the only elected official involved in the events of Jan. 6, and attention soon turned to members of Congress. In January, Gene Stilp, a Democratic activist, sued Perry and Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, saying Perry is ineligible for office and should be removed from the ballot.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that states don’t have the power to make that decision for federal offices.
“We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office,” the court’s unsigned majority opinion reads. “But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce [the insurrection clause] with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.”
Only Congress has that power, the court said, effectively shutting down not only the challenges to Trump’s eligibility but challenges against others as well, which election law experts said should apply to Perry.
“If it’s a federal office, like member of Congress, then no role for state courts,” said Ned Foley, an Ohio State University constitutional law professor.
The lawsuit against Perry was brought in state court. Schmidt, a Republican working in the administration of Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, had opposed the suit, saying he did not have the power to remove Perry.
Perry hasn’t been charged with any crime regarding the Jan. 6 attack or other 2020 efforts, and Voss welcomed Monday’s ruling as clearing the path for Perry to be on the ballot as he runs for reelection.
“We are hopeful that it’ll be withdrawn soon,” he said of the lawsuit. “And if not, we will certainly move to make that happen.”
A leading Democratic super PAC is up with a $2 million ad buy attempting to paint newly declared Wisconsin Senate GOP candidate Eric Hovde as an out-of-state California banker.
“Multi-millionaire California banker Eric Hovde: On Wisconsin’s side?” the ad, shared exclusively with POLITICO and airing statewide in Wisconsin, asks. “Don’t bank on it.”
The campaign, run by Senate Majority PAC, comes just days after Hovde officially announced his bid to unseat two-term Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) in a critical race for control of the upper chamber.
“No matter how many bizarre videos he posts online, Wisconsin voters will see Hovde for the out of touch carpetbagger that he really is,” said Senate Majority PAC President JB Poersch in a statement.
Baldwin last won reelection in 2018 by an 11-point margin over Republican Leah Vukmir, even as President Joe Biden bested former President Donald Trump by less than a point in Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential race.
Republicans took notice of the unusually early ad buy from the Democratic-aligned group.
“How bad are @TammyBaldwin and @SenSchumer panicking about @EricHovde?” asked Mike Berg, spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Schumer just laid down a TV buy starting tomorrow.”
Ally Mutnick contributed to this report.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are launching an investigation into the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw its support for a trio of World Trade Organization e-commerce proposals that previous administrations had backed.
In a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai obtained by POLITICO, Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) complained of a “lack of adequate” consultations with Congress prior to the decision.
And he requested a lengthy list of correspondence, memos, meeting notes and other documents related to USTR’s policy discussions with left-leaning outside groups, members of Congress and other government agencies in the lead up to its October 2023 announcement that it was reversing the U.S. government’s past positions in support of the free flow of data across borders.
“The Committee seeks to understand interactions that may lead to necessary reforms, including legislation Congress could pursue setting new transparency requirements for USTR in forming negotiating positions,” Comer said in the letter.
The letter references a January report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which argued that documentation obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests indicate that progressive trade and civil society groups share a “privileged relationship” with the U.S. trade office. Comer said the documents released by the Chamber “shed light” on the “cozy” relationship between those groups and Tai’s office.
“Disturbingly, the pattern of these shady engagements suggest they influenced your controversial decision to abandon longstanding U.S. commitments in promoting digital freedom and U.S. competitiveness in digital markets,” the committee letter said.
One step back: A group of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and industry stakeholders have assailed the Biden administration’s decision to pivot away from his predecessors’ positions on cross-border data flows, data localization requirements and source code, which they suggest has been unduly influenced by progressive groups.
Among other things, the House oversight committee is asking for documentation and other information related to USTR’s communication with Lori Wallach, director of the Rethink Trade program at American Economic Liberties Project, a left-leaning group that is critical of existing free trade agreements, and USTR’s recently departed chief of staff Heather Hurlburt, including their chats via Signal, an audio and video messaging mobile application that uses end-to-end encryption, according to the letter.
“Discussion over Signal chat about either trade policy or consultation opportunities would be a federal record, and USTR should have taken steps to preserve such a record from a non-official communications channel. However, no such record appears to have been disclosed,” Comer wrote.
FWIW: The progressive trade and civil society groups have consistently argued that accusations from Chamber and other parties are hypocritical, and that it is typical for industry groups to advocate for their preferred policy positions.
Comer gave USTR a March 18 deadline to provide the requested documents and information.