THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

As government prosecutors examined the Reflecting Pool to build their case against a three-time Olympic canoeist accused of violently ripping the lining with his bare hands, everything fell apart. They found that damage was consistent all around the pool, even in the middle, “where a vandal would not likely attempt to peel the lining.” This evening, the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro asked to drop the case against David Hearn, whom she had excoriated after his indictment 29 days ago.In a striking 19-page legal document filed late this afternoon, her office undermined everything that President Trump has been saying about the damage to the Reflecting Pool for the past six weeks, including the claim that vandals had used a box cutter to slash the floor of the pool. “The damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” Pirro’s office wrote in a motion to dismiss the case.Taken as a whole, the court filing acknowledged what has been obvious to anyone who has spent time at the Reflecting Pool in recent weeks and watched the president’s $16.4 million project deteriorate in full view. Almost immediately after its reopening in June, the shallow pool filled with the green algae that the expensive renovation was supposed to have prevented. As park workers rushed to combat the algae, the pool’s sealant began to peel away in chunks. It was surprising to see outlined in legal language how Pirro’s office claims it felt duped. Rather than continue with evidence it acknowledged is not there, it is dropping the case.“The Trump administration’s case against Davey Hearn should have never been brought,” his legal team—Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann, and Steve Levin—said in a statement. “Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong. The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pirro’s office declined to comment beyond what was in the legal filing.[Read: The canoeist accused of destroying the Reflecting Pool ]The filing largely blamed Department of the Interior officials for supplying information that was used to present evidence to a grand jury and obtain an indictment. Only afterward did prosecutors realize that they had been misled, and that Interior officials “provided less than fulsome information.” A large amount of data and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In the summer of 1985, representatives from five Western European countries met aboard a riverboat in Schengen, a wine-making village in Luxembourg, to celebrate the removal of checkpoints at their borders. According to the treaty they approved, which became known as the Schengen Agreement, the signatory countries sought “solidarity between their peoples by removing obstacles to free movement,” forming a borderless zone that gave tangible expression to principles of liberal internationalism that were ascendant as the West glimpsed victory in the Cold War.   Schengen has succeeded spectacularly, at least by certain metrics. It has grown to include 29 countries, from Portugal to Poland, and more than 450 million people. Four decades on, it remains one of Europe’s most popular policies among people who benefit from it—those who work, study, shop, date, and live across borders, able to cross multiple European states in a matter of hours, without ever stopping their car. But as a mechanism to build European solidarity, Schengen has been a failure.The latest evidence of that came this week, when as many as 60,000 migrants from Morocco rushed into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, which sits on the North African coast of the Mediterranean. Ceuta has a population of only 83,000 and isn’t even on the European continent. But because it is part of Spain, entering Ceuta, in theory, affords access to 29 countries. The migrants swam or climbed over fences to reach the tiny territory. Several dozen have died.Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, decried the situation as an “attack” and a violation of his country’s territorial integrity, vowing that the migrants would be turned back; according to Spain’s interior ministry, more than half of them already have been. Sánchez blamed trafficking gangs, and others pointed a finger at Moroccan authorities for possibly instigating or enabling the huge number of crossings into the Schengen Area, dwarfing equivalent single-day figures from the European migration crisis in 2015. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain disputed such allegations.[Rogé Karma: The Spanish exception]The political blowback for Sánchez, a leftist whose pro-immigrant position has differentiated him in an era of resurgent nationalism, was predictable. Criticism came from his domestic opposition in Madrid, as well as from the White House, where President Trump saw an opportunity to paint Europe as lax on immigration and identify an edge for his party as the midterms approach. “That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Meeting your heroes can be demoralizing. Reading more than 1,000 pages of their personal diary can be worse. Or, alternatively, totally riveting, at least in that rubbernecking-at-a-car-crash kind of way—the car crash, in this case, being one of most storied careers in the history of American science.That’s been my takeaway after cringing my way through the pandemic-era musings of Dr. Anthony Fauci, which the former chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases inexplicably saved on a government server.Predictably, Fauci’s diaries made their way into the hands of one of mainstream science’s most notorious mean girls: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Also predictably, hundreds of pages of Fauci’s entries came to light—or were leaked to light—just in time to embarrass the embattled doctor before his appearance on Wednesday in front of Paul’s Senate committee that’s investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. In response to taunts and baiting questions from Senate Republicans, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.If only he’d shown the same discretion with his diary.A generous reading of the compilation is that Fauci, long seen as a paragon of selfless, nonpartisan government service, was attempting to catalog the mounting disbelief he felt during a surreal period in the nation’s history—and certainly in his own history. “Brewery in Georgia named a beer after me,” he wrote in one entry from April 2020. “Bobbleheads of me being made in massive quantities in China.” He refers to “stories of granmothers who have crushes” on him (the misspelling is Fauci’s) and to petitions to vote him “Sexiest Man Alive.”[Read: The unmaking of Anthony Fauci]But whatever Fauci’s intentions might have been, the document has become an instant classic in the genre of bubble-world anthropology that confirms everyone’s worst suspicions about Washington being a cesspool of pampered, preening, and panting self-regard. More than a decade ago, I wrote a book that tried to explain to readers, essentially, what Beltway people are really like when the cameras aren’t rolling and the talking points are tossed aside. If I were working on that book now, Fauci’s diary would be a godsend.His saucer-eyed romp behind the curtain renders a not-especially flattering impression of the people allegedly in charge of our country during a precarious time. Foremost, this includes the diarist himself, as Fauci becomes more and more high on his own supply of Washington adulation, at a time when COVID death rates… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Nic AntayaYou won’t find a much harsher critic of the Democratic Party than the progressive trying to secure its nomination for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. When I caught up with him last week in Ann Arbor, he was at a café holding an outdoor roundtable with young voters, many of them college students or recent graduates. The normally voluble El-Sayed, drinking matcha and dressed casually in his signature tight black T-shirt and jeans, listened as much as he talked, and he heard the students describe their disillusionment with politics—and especially with Democratic candidates.“Your generation has a great bullshit meter, because you’re fed bullshit online all day,” El-Sayed told the group. “And the Democratic Party brand right now is so bullshit.” It was not a statement with which any of the students seemed to disagree. “You tell it like it is, and that’s what we young people want,” Joe Garris, the president of the College Democrats at Eastern Michigan University, told El-Sayed. “We don’t want to hear corporate answers anymore. We just want the straight truth.”One of the few factors that could impede a Democratic wave in this year’s midterms is the party’s own unpopularity; polling suggests that plenty of voters outside college campuses might also nod along to El-Sayed’s denunciation of Democrats. Antipathy toward the party is fueling the rise of populist insurgents such as El-Sayed, who castigate Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer with nearly as much fervor as they criticize President Trump.Nowhere are the lines dividing Democrats more clearly drawn than in Michigan, a state that the party must win to have any real chance of retaking the Senate majority in November. Democrats have to flip four Republican-held seats without losing any of their own, and Michigan is the Democratic-held seat at the most risk of going red. (The incumbent, Senator Gary Peters, is retiring.) El-Sayed is battling Representative Haley Stevens in the August 4 primary, and the winner will face former Representative Mike Rogers, a formidable GOP candidate who came within roughly 20,000 votes of capturing Michigan’s other Senate seat two years ago.A 41-year-old doctor, Rhodes Scholar, and former county health director, El-Sayed is running as an unabashed critic of Israel and of corruption in both parties. He begins rallies with a call-and-response incantation of his campaign slogan: “Money out of … politics! Money in your … pocket! Medicare for … all!” I sat down… [TheTopNews] Read More.

President Trump has mused about being the most powerful man in history. He has started wars and remade his nation’s economic and strategic relationships with the world. He has demanded, and largely received, total obedience from his party. He has dominated the national discourse like no president has before, and he’s tried to recast his nation’s capital—and even its history—to his liking. He’s everywhere. He has said he believes that there are “no limits” to his power.But if that was ever truly the case, it certainly isn’t now. Recent months have delivered a reckoning for Trump, who has crashed hard against some real limits. The war in Iran, a conflict that he’d once thought would take only a few weeks, hit the five-month mark today. The U.S. casualty count is growing, weapons stockpiles are running low, and gas prices are again surging. Trump desperately wants the war to end. He is receiving conflicting guidance from his advisers—escalate, some urge, as others tell him to cut and run—and has become just the latest U.S. president to be humiliated by hard-liners in Tehran.Trump is also flailing domestically. His approval numbers have sunk, and Republicans are finally, in small doses, beginning to defy him. Trump has demanded that the Senate blow up the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which would make voting more difficult and require voters to provide proof of citizenship. But Republicans have refused. Although the legislation seems dead, Trump called yesterday for Republicans to stay in Washington to work on it, potentially saddling them with unpopular (and doomed) votes while also preventing them from returning home to campaign ahead of the midterms. Strategists from both parties predict that at least one chamber of Congress will flip to the Democrats, allowing the party to stall whatever is left of the president’s legislative agenda and open investigations into his administration and allies.Once the midterms are over, Trump could face his worst fear: irrelevance. He will be a lame duck, down to his final two years in office, and at some point will no longer be the nation’s top topic of conversation. As focus shifts to the presidential primaries, Trump risks disappearing from the headlines. Even some of his closest allies don’t know how he’ll react.Trump gathered a team of senior advisers at the White House on Friday to walk through the latest options in the war that he’d already declared won.… [TheTopNews] Read More.