The Morning Dispatch: Trump Grows Desperate With Legal Challenges Exhausted

Happy Monday! Quick programming note: You can count on Morning Dispatches from us every day this week except Friday. We hope you will understand.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• After months of back and forth, congressional negotiators came to an agreement on a coronavirus relief package over the weekend. The final text of the $900 billion legislation is still being written, but it will include a $300-per-week federal boost to state unemployment insurance for 11 weeks, $600 stimulus checks for Americans earning less than $75,000, hundreds of billions of dollars for businesses through a renewed Paycheck Protection Program, and tens of billions of dollars for schools and COVID-19 testing and vaccine distribution. Lawmakers could vote on the final package as early as today.

• The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine on Friday. The initial doses of the Moderna vaccine were shipped Sunday; distribution will begin today. Army Gen. Gustave Perna of Operation Warp Speed acknowledged on Saturday he overestimated the number of Pfizer vaccine doses that would be available this week, reducing the projection from 7.3 million to 4.3 million.

• The CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted Sunday to recommend states prioritize Americans over the age of 75 and essential frontline workers like teachers and grocery store employees for COVID-19 vaccination once health care workers and nursing home residents have had a chance to be inoculated. The CDC’s recommended third group includes people ages 65-74, ages 16-64 with co-morbidities, and non-frontline essential workers.

• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday Russia was “pretty clearly” behind the massive series of cyber attacks reported last week, reflecting classified intelligence analysis that reached the same conclusion. A day later, President Trump disputed Pompeo’s assertion, saying “everything is well under control” and that the attack “may” have been carried out by China.

• The United Kingdom instituted a series of stricter lockdowns over the weekend as scientists discovered a new coronavirus strain unique to the U.K. has contributed to a recent surge in new cases. Several European nations have imposed travel bans on the U.K. due to the mutation, which is supposedly 70 percent more transmissible than other strains of the virus. Adm. Brett Giroir—the Trump administration’s coronavirus testing czar—said yesterday the Department of Health and Human Services is monitoring the mutation, but added that there isn’t “any reason for alarm right now” over the U.K. strain. “We don’t know that it’s more dangerous and, very importantly, we have not seen a single mutation yet that would make it evade the vaccine,” he told ABC News.

• Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell all publicly received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Friday in an effort to reassure the American public of the vaccine’s safety and efficacy. President-elect Joe Biden is slated to do the same later today.

• The more than 300 Nigerian boys abducted from their school last week were reunited with their families on Friday after six days. Jihadist group Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for the mass kidnapping, but Nigerian officials did not confirm who was behind the undertaking.

• The United States confirmed 190,453 new cases of COVID-19 Sunday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 11 percent of the 1,729,656 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 1,520 deaths were attributed to the virus on Sunday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 317,667. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 113,663 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19.

The Kraken Is Coming From Inside the (White) House

Dylan Thomas died more than half a century ago, but the Welsh poet’s work has endured through the years: In anthologies, in classrooms, and—since November 3, 2020—in the White House.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Forty-eight days have come and gone since the election, dozens of lawsuits have been evaluated and swatted down or dismissed in court, Safe Harbor Day has passed, and members of the Electoral College have met and cast their ballots. President Trump has 30 days left in his term—no ifs, ands, or buts. But he is not going gentle into that good night.

Two of the best White House correspondents of the past four years—Maggie Haberman of the New York Times and Jonathan Swan of Axios—went back and forth over the weekend one-upping each other with new reporting about an explosive series of calls and meetings that took place at the White House in recent days.

From Haberman (and her colleague Zolan Kanno-Youngs):

President Trump on Friday discussed naming Sidney Powell, who as a lawyer for his campaign team unleashed conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States, to be a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud, according to two people briefed on the discussion.

…

Mr. Giuliani joined the discussion by phone initially, while Ms. Powell was at the White House for a meeting that became raucous and involved people shouting at each other at times, according to one of the people briefed on what took place.

Ms. Powell’s client, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser whom the president recently pardoned, was also there, two of the people briefed on the meeting said. Some senior administration officials drifted in and out of the meeting.

During an appearance on the conservative Newsmax channel this week, Mr. Flynn pushed for Mr. Trump to impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election. At one point in the meeting on Friday, Mr. Trump asked about that idea.

From Swan:

Rudy Giuliani called Ken Cuccinelli, second in command at the Department of Homeland Security, on Thursday night and asked him whether DHS could seize voting machines, a source familiar with the call confirmed to Axios. Cuccinelli responded that DHS does not have that authority, the source said.

Now, Haberman and Swan’s reporting went on to detail the vigorous pushback against both of these ideas from top Trump advisers—including Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff, and Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel. In a tweet sent at 12:06 am E.T. Saturday night, Trump seemed to dismiss speculation about one of those extreme measures: “Martial law = Fake News! Just more knowingly bad reporting.” And then last night, Powell was back in the White House, pitching her plans to for an executive order mandating the seizure of election machines.

None of this is likely to happen, of course. And that fact alone would typically keep us from including any of this in TMD.

But it’s worth noting how bizarre this is. The president, acting on crackpot theories from widely discredited conspiracists, is entertaining extreme measures to remain in office and seeking to overturn a legitimate election. The good news is that there are folks around him, including some of his most loyal aides, who recognize the insanity of what the president would like to do. The bad news, aside from his neglect of the rather significant issues that could use presidential leadership — an average of nearly 3,000 deaths being attributed to the coronavirus every day, nearly 1 million Americans applying for unemployment insurance last week, and the federal government about to commit to more than $2 trillion in spending—is that his continuing refusal to accept defeat is further radicalizing his hard core supporters.

“I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while,” Swan said after publishing his story. “I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. … What is different is these are NOT the Never Trumper types. These are people who have fully thrown their lot in with Trump but are legitimately worried about his receptivity to Flynn and Powell’s ideas and conspiracy theories.”

Powell, of course, worked alongside the president’s campaign team last month in their failed efforts to overturn the results in several key swing states—but the campaign unceremoniously cut all formal ties with her after her conspiracies began to outpace their own conspiracies. “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity,” Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said on November 22.

But with Trump’s legal options officially exhausted and his party begrudgingly moving on, Powell has found her way back into the president’s good graces—if not the good graces of the president’s staff. “There is literally not one motherf—r in the president’s entire orbit — his staunchest group of supporters and allies — who doesn’t think that Sidney Powell should be on that first rocket to Mars,” a White House source told Swan. “The obvious exception, of course, is the president of the United States.”

Congress Looks to Crack Down on Exploitation in Porn Industry

Support for new restrictions on porn companies is growing in Congress after a recent New York Times report from Nicholas Kristof which revealed sexual videos and photos are frequently uploaded to websites like Pornhub without consent from the people appearing in them, including instances of child abuse and rape. 

Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, announced legislation on Friday alongside Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, to impose rules seeking to eradicate non-consensual content and empower victims of sexual exploitation.

“Human dignity matters. A decent society has an obligation to fight sexual exploitation and human trafficking,” Sasse said in a statement. “For years, Pornhub and its parent company Mindgeek monetized rape, abuse, and child exploitation. While these suit-wearing traffickers got rich, their victims have lived with the pain and fear. That has to end now. Our bill is aimed squarely at the monsters who profit from rape.”

Merkley noted that posting sexual photographs and videos without consent is “a massive invasion of privacy that drives shame, humiliation, and potentially suicide.”

“While some online platforms have recently announced steps to change some practices, much more needs to be done. We must ensure that not another single life of a child, man, or woman is destroyed by these sites,” he said.

Kristof’s reporting was deeply disturbing. He found that Pornhub is “infested with rape videos.”

“It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bag,” he wrote. Kristof also spoke to underage victims who have had videos and photographs of themselves posted to Pornhub repeatedly without their consent.

After his story was published, Visa and Mastercard both announced they would ban customers from using their credit cards to make purchases on Pornhub. 

Pornhub has since instituted some new practices: Blocking unverified users from uploading content, banning downloads, and purging millions of videos from its site—upwards of two-thirds of the content it previously hosted. Still, it’s unclear how effective these changes will be, and other porn companies have not taken steps to address the issue. 

Sasse’s and Merkley’s “Stop Internet Sexual Exploitation Act” would force porn platforms to verify the identities of users who upload content, as well as require signed consent forms from every person appearing in a given video.

Platforms would also have to create an expedited process by which victims of sexual exploitation can get violating content removed. The bill requires deletion of such content within two hours of a request being received. The legislation mandates that porn platforms operate 24-hour hotlines people can call to request deletion of content. 

The Federal Trade Commission would enforce violations. Under the bill, the Justice Department would also be involved, creating a database of people who have said they do not consent to the posting of pornographic content in which they appear. Porn platforms would be required to ensure none of the individuals in the DoJ database appear in videos or photos before they are allowed to be uploaded—or otherwise face fines.  

Bipartisan support to take action on the issue could grow in the new year. Lawmakers have proposed other measures in recent days, including one from GOP Sens. Josh Hawley, Joni Ernst, and Thom Tillis, along with Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan.

The Survivors of Human Trafficking Fight Back Act would criminalize the knowing, non-consensual distribution of images and videos of sex acts and other privacy-invading images. It would require websites hosting porn to create procedures to ensure victims can promptly have their images removed from the platform.

“We shouldn’t have to pass a law to keep companies from profiting by sharing, without consent, intimate images. But we do,” Hassan said in a statement. “The harm that these companies cause is extraordinary, lasts a lifetime, and should be unthinkable. This bipartisan bill helps give more power to those whose privacy and dignity have been violated by making it easier to take down images that have been non-consensually shared, and providing recourse for individuals to hold companies accountable for their wrongdoing.”

Worth Your Time

• After a 17-year moratorium on federal executions, the Justice Department resumed the practice this summer. Last week, New York Times opinion columnist Elizabeth Bruenig sat with two public defenders—Shawn Nolan and Victor Abreu—in Terre Haute, Indiana, as they made their last ditch effort to save Alfred Bourgeois’ life. Reflecting on the experience, Bruenig traces the history of Bourgeois’ offense and wrestles with the gravity of capital punishment after witnessing his execution with her own eyes. “So much time and effort goes into making executions seem like exercises of justice, not just power; extreme measures are taken at each juncture to convince the public, and perhaps the executioners themselves, that the process is a fair, dispassionate, rational one,” Bruenig writes. “It isn’t. There was no sense in it, and I can’t make any out of it. Nothing was restored, nothing was gained. There isn’t any justice in it, nor satisfaction, nor reason: There was nothing, nothing there.”

• It hasn’t garnered much attention, but Mariannette Miller-Meeks—the Republican candidate for Congress in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District—won her seat last month by an incredibly tight six-vote margin. The state certified the results, but Miller-Meeks’ Democratic challenger Rita Hart has not stopped challenging the outcome—and is pleading her case directly before the House of Representatives hoping to overturn her loss. In a piece for National Review, John McCormack outlines why Hart is unlikely to be successful. “Democrats will have to decide whether they want to open up this can of worms on January 3, when the next Congress is seated,” he writes. “That’s just three days before Congress counts the Electoral College votes, when at least a handful of House Republicans intend to launch baseless challenges to the Electoral College returns. … Refusing to seat Miller-Meeks on January 3 would somewhat undermine the Democrats’ messaging against Republicans on January 6.”

• Convincing the general public of the efficacy and safety of vaccines has never been easy. According to Renée DiResta—a technical researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Atlantic contributor, and recent Dispatch Podcast guest—vaccine disinformation is about to increase exponentially as the FDA approval process moves forward. “The misleading claims Americans will soon hear about the newly released COVID-19 vaccines are nearly identical to claims made about smallpox immunizations 120 years ago,” she writes. “The ingredients are toxic and unnatural; the vaccines are insufficiently tested; the scientists who produce them are quacks and profiteers; the cell cultures involved in some shots are an affront to the religious; the authorities working to protect public health are guilty of tyrannical overreach. … Today’s anti-vaccine activists, however, enjoy a speed, scale, and reach far greater than those” at the turn of the 19th century.

• In the Wall Street Journal, Rep. Mike Gallagher writes that—although he voted to grant Gen. Jim Mattis a waiver to serve as secretary of defense in the Trump administration—he won’t do the same for Gen. Lloyd Austin now, having come to believe his vote four years ago was a mistake. “I admire Gen. Austin for his lifetime of honorable service,” Gallagher writes. “But that service doesn’t make him the best fit for defense secretary during a moment of profound geopolitical change and challenges.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• In his latest G-File, Jonah once again revisits the fall of Jeffrey Toobin, this time as a bellwether for our society’s ever-changing and often hypocritical application of moral norms. “If the right’s professional moralists really cared about character, they should have been the most appalled by Donald Trump,” Jonah writes. “And, just to put a bow on it, if the publications that have worked most assiduously in the last few years—positively and negatively—to purge the workplace of inappropriate sexual conduct really believed what they’ve claimed to believe, they wouldn’t see Toobin’s firing as a conspiracy out of The Da Vinci Code, but as the logical consequence of the regime they set up themselves.”

• In Sunday’s French Press, David strikes at the heart of what he calls the “growing cultural divide between white Evangelical America and much of the rest of the nation that has nothing to do with Christian faithfulness.” What has inspired the secular culture’s unrelenting hatred of theological conservative Christians? David cites a recent University of Virginia study that tries to get to the answer. “In short, contrary to popular conservative Christian belief, Evangelicals are not just facing resistance for their righteousness,” he writes. “They are also reaping what they’ve sown with their own commitment to partisan politics and to sometimes unjust and even malicious policies that have no grounding in biblical ethics.”

• House Democrats are heading into next year with the slimmest majority either party has seen in two decades. Dispatch newcomer Haley Byrd Wilt joined Sarah and Steve on Friday’s episode of the Dispatch Podcast to discuss her recent piece about these shifting dynamics as we approach the 117th Congress. Stick around for a breakdown of the latest drama in the House Republican conference and Donald Trump’s NDAA veto threat

• In Friday’s edition of the Sweep (🔒), Sarah interviewed Alice Stewart, a CNN political commentator, NPR contributor, and fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics who spent years in the trenches of presidential campaigns. The two have an interesting conversation about making the transition from campaigns to media, and the expectations therein.

  Let Us Know

  Pew Research Center conducted an incredibly interesting survey in the wake of the election, asking Trump and Biden voters what they want their political opponents to know about them to understand them better. It’s worth taking some time to read through the many responses they collected, but let’s repeat the exercise—with our own Dispatch spin.

  What would you tell someone on the other “side” to explain why you believe the things you believe? Do you have conversations like these in the real world?

  Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).