The Morning Dispatch: Biden’s Nominee for ATF Director Hits a Snag

Happy Friday! Just like that, today is our interns’ last day. Where did the time go?

Price, Emma, Jonathan, and Tripp have done some phenomenal work these past few months, and we’re incredibly grateful that they decided to spend the summer with us. Give them a hearty TMD sendoff in the comments!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The National Security Agency released a warning on Wednesday encouraging all federal government employees to avoid using public Wi-Fi because it’s easily compromised by hackers. “Avoid connecting to public Wi-Fi, when possible,” the warning reads. “The risk is not merely theoretical; these malicious techniques are publicly known and in use.”

• Ebrahim Raisi was sworn in as the new president of Iran on Thursday amid an ongoing “shadow war” with Israel and tense negotiations with the United States over a potential revival of the Iran nuclear deal. Raisi is under U.S. sanctions for his many human rights abuses.

• Moderna announced the results of a study on Thursday showing that its COVID-19 vaccine remains 93 percent effective through six months, though the clinical trial data mostly precedes the spread of the Delta variant. The company is also testing several mRNA booster candidates that it says induce robust antibody responses against “variants of concern,” including Delta.

• Initial jobless claims decreased by 14,000 week-over-week to 385,000 last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is scheduled to release July’s jobs numbers later this morning.

• President Joe Biden signed an order on Thursday offering Hong Kong residents in the United States a reprieve from deportation for at least 18 months, as the Chinese territory continues to experience a crackdown on political freedom.

• The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Thursday issued its assessment of the bipartisan infrastructure deal that’s moving through the Senate, finding it would add $256 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years.

• Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, died unexpectedly of a heart attack on Thursday at the age of 72. The AFL-CIO is the largest federation of unions in the United States.

Biden’s ATF Director Nominee Hits a Snag

Amid a highly polarizing debate about gun rights in the United States, it was always going to be difficult to approve a new director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). But David Chipman, President Biden’s nominee, has proved to be an especially controversial figure—and his chances of confirmation are dwindling.

Chipman, who was nominated back in April, is facing opposition from Republicans for his history of aggressive gun control advocacy and allegations of racist comments made toward other ATF agents. Chipman worked at the ATF for 25 years, but left in 2012 to become a policy adviser for Giffords Law Center, a gun control advocacy organization led by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was injured in a shooting in Arizona in January 2011.

During his confirmation hearing in May, Chipman expressed support for previous positions he had taken as a gun control activist, including calls to restrict purchases of semi-automatic weapons.

“With respect to the AR-15, I support a ban,” Chipman said at the time. “Sen. Feinstein’s bill did not address those firearms that are currently in the possession of Americans. My view as an advocate, which would be quite different than someone actually enforcing the law on the books, was that those firearms could be treated under the NFA [National Firearms Act] and regulated that way, which would deal with those currently in the possession of Americans.”

Now, Chipman has faced criticism for newly reported allegations from several ATF sources that he denigrated black colleagues within the agency who were up for promotion.

“He made some comments that he was surprised by the number of African Americans who have made it onto a specific promotional list,” one agent told The Reload. “So, his insinuation was that they had to have cheated. Which is kind of despicable.”

In response to the allegations, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have called for a second hearing on Chipman’s nomination.

“The concerns raised by these former agents are serious and very relevant to the committee’s and the Senate’s consideration of Mr. Chipman’s nomination,” Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley said. “I stand by our request for another hearing and more information. Full transparency is what’s needed.”

Thus far, Sen. Dick Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the committee, has rejected those calls.

“Criticism on extreme anti-gun safety websites of Mr. Chipman’s ATF tenure appears to simply be another part of the orchestrated effort by the far right to oppose Mr. Chipman by any means necessary,” he wrote. “The committee will not hold a second hearing on Mr. Chipman’s nomination based on baseless allegations by anonymous sources published in venues with an obvious agenda.”

The “extreme anti-gun safety website” Durbin was referring to is The Reload, Stephen Gutowski’s sober-minded outlet focusing on gun policy in the United States. Gutowski told The Dispatch yesterday that, even by conventional standards for an ATF director nomination, Chipman is unique.

“The ATF is a regulatory agency. They’re not supposed to be run by political activists in an ideal setting, and I don’t believe there’s ever been an outright gun control lobbyist nominated to run the ATF before—or, for that matter, a gun rights activist,” he said. “Generally, you get career ATF people. Certainly, Chipman worked at the ATF for a significant amount of time, but he never rose to upper management, and he left and became somebody who effectively lobbies the organization from the outside.”

Democrats will need to present a united front if they want to advance Chipman’s nomination, but several moderates—Sens. Angus King, Jon Tester, and Joe Manchin—have thus far refrained from voicing support for him.

“As a proud gun owner, Senator Tester believes ATF needs a strong leader to support the agency’s law enforcement mission,” a spokesperson for Tester told The Hill. “Senator Tester will continue to review David Chipman’s record and testimony to ensure he would support our brave law enforcement officers and respect Montanans’ Second Amendment rights.”

A spokesperson for King offered a briefer comment, simply saying that Tester “continues to review the nomination.” Politicoreported earlier this week that King—an independent who caucuses with Democrats—has told colleagues and the White House he is unlikely to vote for Chipman.

Nevertheless, White House press secretary Jen Psaki laid the blame for Chipman’s stalled nomination on Republicans, whom she accused of “moving in lockstep” to prevent him from being approved. But it was the lack of support from Senate Democrats that threatened to derail Chipman’s confirmation. Yesterday,  CNN reported that administration officials were privately pessimistic about Chipman’s chances, with one of them admitting the path toward confirmation “certainly looks uphill.”

From the beginning, however, the Biden administration recognized the fight to confirm a new ATF director “wouldn’t be easy.” The agency has not had a confirmed director in six years, and the politics of approving a new director are so intense that even former President Donald Trump’s nominee was shot down by Senate Republicans in 2019.

Since 2006, the year Congress made ATF director a position requiring Senate approval, there has only been one confirmed director—Byron Todd Jones, an Obama appointee who was confirmed in 2013. Every other ATF head has been an acting director.

In 2020, Chipman himself argued any ATF director nominee would be “walking into a buzzsaw,” suggesting Senate Republicans would only support a nominee who had “a blind allegiance” to “not enforcing gun laws.” But the controversy surrounding his nomination has confounded even his own prediction—that a Democratic-controlled Senate would easily be able to confirm a Biden nominee.

“I’m absolutely certain that the naming of an ATF director would be a No. 1 priority and that the confirmation process, since Democrats would probably largely be agreed upon in advance about the type of person they’d like to see be a candidate, that that confirmation process would go differently,” he said at the time.

Gutowski told The Dispatch he believes Biden would have had much less trouble confirming a less controversial nominee.

“I do think that it would have been fairly easy for the Biden administration to have gotten a director through if they were less controversial than David Chipman,” he said. “Chipman has been very aggressively promoting gun control and gun control policies that are well to the left of what the vast majority of Democratic Senators support and frankly he’s been doing it in a way that’s pretty divisive.”

Raisi Sworn In as Iran’s President

Ebrahim Raisi—ultraconservative jurist, cleric, and politician—was sworn in as the Islamic Republic of Iran’s new president on Thursday. Your Morning Dispatcherscovered the election in July: Less than 49 percent of eligible voters showed up to vote—a record low, and even that was likely inflated by the government. Raisi’s opponents were largely disqualified or pressured to drop out of the race. But Ebrahim Raisi curried favor with Iran’s most influential voter—Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

Raisi replaced Hassan Rouhani, who served as president for eight years and was largely considered a moderate by Iranian standards. 

“Rouhani, by the narrow political spectrum definition inside Iran, is called a pragmatist,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Dispatch. The former president rarely changed Iranian policy, Taleblu added, but was “willing to engage with the international community to elicit concessions to make Iranian policy be accommodated.” 

There are no such illusions of Ebrahim Raisi, who represents the “far, ultra-hardline, right flank of Iranian politics,” Taleblu added. Given that Khamenei is  82 years-old, Raisi’s ascendance to the presidency is viewed by many as a means of guaranteeing an eventual transition to a similarly hardline supreme leader. 

Despite Iran’s obvious tensions with the West, the European Union sent an envoy to the inauguration ceremony in a show of support that garnered much criticism from Israel. Enrique Mora, deputy secretary-general of the European External Action Service (EEAS) attended the inauguration on behalf of Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat. “It is crucial to engage diplomatically with the new administration and to pass directly important messages,” EEAS spokeswoman Nabila Massrali argued.

Just prior to the July election, Charlotte offered readers a piercing look into Raisi’s rise to power, and how he earned his nickname the “Butcher of Tehran.”

During his two years at the helm of Iran’s judiciary, Raisi has expanded the scope of the death penalty, wielding the sentence as a tool of repression against dissenting political voices and ethnic and religious minorities.  According to Amnesty International, Iran is now second only to China in absolute number of executions. In a high-profile case from last year, authorities executed Navid Afkari—a well-known Iranian wrestler and participant in the 2018 anti-government protests—for confessions obtained under sustained torture.

But Raisi staked his claim to notoriety long before he became involved in national politics. As prosecutor of Hamedan, he led his province in the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners in the 1980s. Between July and December 1988, the state carried out the systematic killings of dissidents, activists, militants, mothers, and children imprisoned across Iran. Hussein-Ali Montazeri, deputy supreme leader-turned-dissident, named Raisi as one of the four officials intimately involved.

Estimates vary, but reports indicate that more than 30,000 prisoners were extrajudicially killed over the course of only five months, the majority of whom belonged or had ties to the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (often abbreviated as “MEK,” borrowing from the Farsi transliteration). 

Raisi assumes the presidency amid numerous crises. COVID-19 has hit Iran particularly hard, and the situation likely isn’t getting better anytime soon: Khamenei in January banned “untrustworthy” COVID-19 vaccines from the United State and United Kingdom. The country is currently in the midst of its third—and most intense—wave. Further complicating matters for Raisi is an extreme drought that has led to water shortages and, in turn, massive protests.

Then there are the nuclear talks. Iranian officials have been in indirect negotiations with the Biden administration for months now, without coming to an agreement. Raisi’s ascension may complicate those talks—he is on the United States’ sanctions list—but the new president has expressed some support for the deal. 

“We support the negotiations that guarantee our national interests,” Raisi said in June. ”America should immediately return to the deal and fulfill its obligations under the deal.” But as with most things in Iran, any decision on the JCPOA will ultimately come down to Khamenei. 

“What I would say is that the ultimate decision for whether or not to go back into the deal lies with Iran’s supreme leader,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said earlier this summer. “And he was the same person before this election as he is after the election.” 

Khamenei, Taleblu said, “has had a multi-decade-long project of even purging loyalists from Iran’s already narrow political system,” squeezing reformers out of the picture. 

“Ultra-hardliners now dominate every political institution of relevance in Iran,” he continued. “A Raisi presidency will likely represent the coarsening that takes place before the crack-up in Iran’s reform-resistant revolutionary system.”

Worth Your Time

• In the Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg decries the “Cuomosexual” fandom that enthralled some liberals early in the pandemic and urges Americans to be wary of cults of personality around politicians, whether on the left or the right. “Across the political spectrum, it’s long past time for Americans to rediscover some self-respect and to adjust the terms of our relationships with public figures,” she writes. “Andrew Cuomo isn’t a hottie. Even if he was, it wouldn’t matter more than the thousands of dead New York nursing home residents or 11 women he allegedly harassed. Your mileage on whether Trump puts on a great show almost definitely varies. And no spectacle is a substitute for basic competence and dignity. … Fandom has its place and its pleasures. But do your job as a citizen, too.”

Presented Without Comment

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Toeing the Company Line

• Jonah was joined on Thursday’s Remnant by Nathan Allebach, the guy who runs Steak-umm’s Twitter account. We could try to summarize the conversation, but just listen to it. Trust us.

• On the latest episode of Advisory Opinions, Sarah and David discuss the eviction moratorium kerfuffle and the legal trouble Andrew Cuomo has gotten himself into by sexually harassing women. Plus: vaccine mandates and antitrust law.

• In Thursday’s French Press (🔒), David argues that the New Right’s infatuation with Hungary puts the culture war over the common good. “If you’ve been a conservative for any length of time, you’ve likely had what I like to call the ‘Sweden conversation,’ or perhaps the ‘Denmark debate,’” he writes. “Well, Hungary is the New Right’s Denmark. Except that Hungary is a much worse place to live than Denmark.”

Let Us Know

Saying goodbye to the interns has us feeling wistful about how quickly time’s going by. What’s been the highlight of your summer thus far?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), Tripp Grebe (@tripper_grebe), Emma Rogers (@emw_96), Price St. Clair (@PriceStClair1), Jonathan Chew (@JonathanChew19), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).