The Morning Dispatch: House Democrats Grill Bill Barr

Happy Wednesday! How is it already Wednesday?

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The United States confirmed 61,312 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday, with 8.4 percent of the 733,243 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 1,226 deaths were attributed to the virus on Tuesday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 149,235.

• A growing number of Republican senators are signaling opposition to the Senate GOP’s $1 trillion coronavirus relief bill, announced by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday. “It’s a mess,” Sen. Josh Hawley said. “I can’t figure out what this bill’s about.” McConnell said the HEALS Act is “just the starting point” for negotiations with Democrats and the Trump administration.

• A month after the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from ending the DACA program, the Department of Homeland Security announced it will not accept new applications to the program and will reduce the length of renewal for current DACA recipients from two years to one.

• Joe Biden confirmed Tuesday that he will announce his vice presidential pick next week. He also unveiled a new economic plan specifically focused on narrowing the racial wealth gap. The plan would provide more capital to minority-owned businesses and build on Sen. Tim Scott’s Opportunity Zone legislation, but it stopped short of embracing proposals from the left-most flank of the Democratic Party like reparations or baby bonds.

• The European Union imposed sanctions on China over its new national security law relating to Hong Kong, and New Zealand suspended its extradition treaty with Hong Kong for the same reason.

• Agriculture officials in at least 28 states have issued warnings to residents about receiving unsolicited seed packets in the mail from China. The USDA said it does not yet have any evidence of malicious intent, but the Montana Department of Agriculture said Monday the seeds “could be invasive, meaning they may have the potential to introduce diseases to local plants, or could be harmful to livestock.”

House Judiciary Barr & Grill

It’s been a while since we had a good high-profile congressional hearing (which has largely been fine by your Morning Dispatchers, who got about as many as they could handle during the president’s impeachment trial). Yesterday, Attorney General William Barr appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, where Democrats grilled him on a host of concerns related to DoJ prosecutions and the federal government’s ongoing response to protests and unrest around the nation. The hearing was dominated by the kinds of performative outrage — self-aggrandizing speeches, made-for-cable tirades, side-show clashes — that helps explain the basement-level approval ratings for Congress. The substance-to-theater ratio was disappointing, if not unexpected. Here are a few of the highlights.

Barr defended the actions of federal law enforcement in recent days and disputed the notion that America’s police have a problem with systemic racism.

In his prepared opening statement, Barr acknowledged “it is understandable that, among black Americans, there is at least some ambivalence, and often distrust, toward the police.”

Events like the death of George Floyd “strike a deep chord in the black community because they are perceived as manifestation of the deeper, lingering concern that, in encounters with police, blacks will not be treated even-handedly,” he said. “I think these concerns are legitimate.”

But he argued systemic prejudice was not at the root of these concerns: “I think it would be an oversimplification to treat the problem as rooted in some deep-seated racism generally infecting our police departments.” Rather, Barr said, police forces should work to reduce instances of inappropriate behavior through measures like increased training on appropriate use of force.

Barr insisted that federal agents deployed in D.C. last month and to Portland in recent days have been part of a necessary response to local governments refusing to quell protest-related unrest with local law enforcement.

Earlier this month, President Trump deployed federal law enforcement to Portland, Oregon, ostensibly in order to prevent further violent demonstrations and protect federal buildings from damage. Those agents, who report to the Department of Homeland Security, have become a flashpoint of controversy in recent weeks after video circulated on social media of them arresting people and whisking them into unmarked vans, with some people who were detained claiming the agents making the arrests never identified themselves.

Barr defended the officers’ conduct in Portland during questioning from committee chair Jerry Nadler. “I just reject the idea that the department has flooded anywhere and attempted to suppress demonstrators,” he said. “The fact of the matter is, if you take Portland, the courthouse is under attack. The federal resources are inside the perimeter around the courthouse defending it from almost two months of daily attacks … We’re on the defense. We’re not out looking for trouble. And if the state and the city would provide the law enforcement services that other jurisdictions do, we would have no need to have additional marshals in the courthouse.”

A U.S. attorney told reporters Monday that federal law enforcement officers* will remain in Portland until nightly attacks on the courthouse cease.

Barr reasserted his independence from the White House as attorney general and testified that he considered the prosecution of Roger Stone to be a “righteous prosecution.”

Since before he was even confirmed as attorney general last year, Barr has weathered accusations that Trump wanted him as attorney general because, unlike Sessions, he would be a fighter in Trump’s corner against such irritations as the Mueller investigation. Those accusations have intensified thanks to Barr’s handling of the end of that investigation and of its aftermath—including his decisions to drop the prosecution of one Trump associate, his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and to overrule his prosecutors to recommend a more lenient sentence for another, Roger Stone.

But Barr strongly rejected the characterization that he had allowed a perp’s proximity to the president to shape his prosecutorial decisions. “The president has not attempted to interfere in these decisions,” he said Tuesday. “On the contrary, he has told me from the start that he expects me to exercise my independent judgment to make whatever call I think is right, and that is precisely what I have done.”

Asked about the Stone prosecution, Barr responded that he thought Stone had been correctly charged—but that prosecutors were seeking an unjust sentence following his conviction. “I said all along I thought that was a righteous prosecution, I thought he should go to jail, and I thought the judge’s sentence was correct,” he said.

(Stone’s sentence is moot now, of course—President Trump commuted it earlier this month, announcing that his associate “was targeted by an illegal Witch Hunt that never should have taken place” and that “it is the other side that are criminals, including Biden and Obama.”)

Several Democrats dug into Barr about the Stone case. Rep. Eric Swalwell asked Barr whether he had ever overruled the decision of line prosecutors about a sentencing request “other than to help the president’s friend get a reduced prison sentence.” Barr said he had not.

Swalwell also brought up Barr’s previous testimony from his confirmation hearing: “You were asked, could a president issue a pardon in exchange for a recipient’s promise to not incriminate him. And you responded, ‘No, that would be a crime.’ … When you said that, that a president swapping a pardon to silence a witness would be a crime, you were promising the American people that if you saw that, you would do something about it.”

“Mr. Stone was convicted by a jury on seven counts of lying in the Russia investigation,” Swalwell continued. “He bragged that he lied to save Trump’s butt. But why would he lie? Your prosecutors, Mr. Barr, told a jury that Stone lied because the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.” Swalwell also mentioned Trump’s praise of Stone’s “guts” for not testifying against him, and Stone’s comments from this month that “Trump knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably.”

“We require a reliable predicate before we open a criminal investigation,” Barr replied, adding he considered Swalwell’s theory that Trump was rewarding Stone with a pardon for not testifying against him to be “a very Rube Goldberg theory that you have.” 

A U.S.-China Tit for Tat

Last Tuesday, the Trump administration ordered the closure of a Chinese consulate in Houston, citing concerns over a series of spying operations linked to visa fraud and economic espionage. Beijing immediately ordered a retaliatory closure of a U.S. consulate in Chengdu amid escalating tensions between two of the world’s biggest economic superpowers. 

After the U.S. government issued its order on Tuesday demanding that the Chinese consulate permanently cease operations within 72 hours, Chinese intelligence officials were seen burning what appeared to be classified documents in metal barrels outside the building just hours later. On Friday, U.S. officials entered the Chinese consulate compound, flanked by a cadre of black SUVs and locksmiths. 

The Houston consulate closure was ordered after the U.S. government discovered that several Chinese nationals lied about their affiliation with the People’s Liberation Army on their student visa applications. On July 20, the FBI interviewed one such “researcher” at the University of California at Davis named Tang Juan, who quickly admitted her affiliation with the Chinese military. After the FBI issued a warrant for her arrest on visa fraud charges, she quickly sought sanctuary at the San Francisco consulate. She surrendered to U.S. authorities on Thursday where she remains in custody.

During a briefing with senior government officials on Friday, a senior Justice Department official said that the individuals implicated in this visa scandal are simply a “microcosm” of “a broader network of individuals in more than 25 cities.” The Houston consulate was also “implicated in an investigation of grant fraud at a Texas research institution,” the senior Justice Department official said, in which consulate officials “were directly involved in communications with researchers and guided them on what information to collect.” 

A seven-page FBI document obtained by the New York Times details several other ongoing investigations linked to the Houston consulate, including attempts by Chinese intelligence officials to engage in intellectual property theft in neighboring research institutions as well as recruit researchers and academics into handing over classified information. The report also suggests that the consulate was a smokescreen for Fox Hunt teams to coerce dissidents—Chinese citizens who are considered wanted fugitives by the PRC—into returning to mainland China.

“The activity we are concerned with, while illegal, is not necessarily amenable to criminal charges, among other reasons, because of the diplomatic immunity that consulate officials enjoy,” the senior Justice Department official told reporters on Friday. “So you’re not necessarily going to see many prosecutions tied specifically to the Houston consulate as a means of disrupting that activity.” 

But the U.S. government is using legal means to crack down on China’s shadow warfare whenever it can. The Houston consulate closure came just days after the U.S. government accused two Chinese hackers of engaging in cyberattacks against American coronavirus vaccine research centers on behalf of the Chinese government. According to a senior intelligence official in last Friday’s briefing, “We have about 2,000 active counterintelligence investigations” related to China, “and we open a new case about every 10 hours.” This breaks down to a “1,300 percent increase in cases related to economic espionage and China over the last 10 years,” the official said.

The U.S. may have shuttered just one Chinese consulate for now. But four other Chinese consulates remain on American soil in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. “San Francisco is the real gem but the U.S. won’t close it,” a former U.S. intelligence official told Axios on Tuesday. Yan Bennett, the assistant director for the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China, told The Dispatch she agreed the San Francisco consulate “would have been the next logical move.” But “[Tang Juan] gave herself up for arrest and now she’s in custody, so that probably obviated any further escalation of the closures.”

Bennett added that she doesn’t think China wants to escalate this any further. “They closed the Chengdu consulate,” she said. “That’s probably the extent of the tit for tat right now.” That very well may be the case, but with this series of retaliatory actions the Trump administration is increasing its confrontational measures against Beijing.

In an address last Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made clear the Trump administration’s emphasis on reciprocity when it comes to our relationship with China. “We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come, that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done,” he said. “We must not continue it and we must not return to it.”

The State Department has gradually begun the process of bringing U.S. diplomats and their families currently stationed in China back home—beginning with the U.S. consulate in Wuhan in January—mainly over coronavirus concerns. But moving forward, the Houston consulate closure serves as a warning to China that other retaliatory measures are in store if China continues its espionage operations at such an aggressive pace.

Russia, Russia, Russia

In an interview excerpt released Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump tells Jonathan Swan from Axios that he did not raise the anti-American bounties Russia offered the Taliban in his recent conversation with Vladimir Putin—or in several previous conversations they’ve had since the intelligence first surfaced last winter. In a swirl of contradictions, Trump tells Swan that the intelligence community thought the information was “fake” (the IC did not), that it never made it to his desk (it was in his presidential daily brief), and that if it had, he would have acted on it (suggesting it wasn’t fake). “That was a phone call to discuss other things,” Trump said, “and frankly that’s an issue that many people said was fake news. … I have never discussed it with him.”

While different U.S. intelligence agencies assessed the Russia bounty intelligence with varying degrees of confidence, those differences were explained largely by which agencies had access to the original intelligence. If the Defense Intelligence Agency, for instance, couldn’t independently confirm intelligence collected by the CIA, that doesn’t mean the intelligence is “fake,” it simply means one intelligence agency couldn’t corroborate information surfaced by another. Sources familiar with the intelligence reporting on the Russia bounties tell The Dispatch that the information is “solid,” pointing to its inclusion in the presidential daily briefing.

Swan asked Trump about statements from Gen. John Nicholson, former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, that Russia had long been supplying arms to the Taliban in their fight against U.S. and coalition forces, an issue Trump also might have raised with Putin. Trump responded: “Well, we supplied weapons when they were fighting Russia, too.”

Worth Your Time

• We pointed you to Mike Balsamo and Gillian Flaccus’ piece on the Portland protests yesterday, lamenting the lack of balanced, on-the-ground reporting in the city. For more terrific reporting, read this series on Portland from Reason’s Nancy Rommelmann. Check out parts one, two, three, and four for an exhaustive look at the many facets of this story. Her accounts detail the various players involved—from rioters setting fires, to peaceful protesters pleading with them to stop, to curious onlookers trying to comprehend the historic events unfolding in their city—and the orderly chaos that inevitably ensues. “‘Why are you doing this?!’ a young woman implores whoever will listen. ‘You’re giving them a reason to shoot at us!’” Rommelmann recounts. “‘When they start the fires, we come and try to stop them,’ the young man says. He both puts out the fires himself and explains to the crowd why the tactic is only going to make things worse.”

• We don’t make the rules. When Tim Alberta publishes a piece, we read it. His latest for Politico Magazine is no different. Writing from Scranton, Pennsylvania, Alberta makes the point that Trump will have to do even better with working-class white voters in 2020 than he did in 2016 if he hopes to still be in the White House come February 2021. And based on Alberta’s reporting (albeit anecdotal), that isn’t looking likely. Take Kathy Manuel, for example. A Democrat-turned-Independent, she voted for Trump in 2016. But four years later, she wishes she hadn’t. “He’s not taking the virus serious enough. He keeps saying it’ll go away, and that’s not true,” Kathy told Alberta. “We need someone to fix this country right now, because it’s a mess. I don’t really like Biden, either. I don’t like how extreme the Democrats are with abortion nowadays. But he’s been around a long time, he seems to know the system, so maybe he can get things back on track. I don’t know. This country is out of whack, and Trump doesn’t seem to care. I’m getting sick of him, you know?”

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• American Enterprise Institute economist Michael Strain returns to The Remnant to engage in an extended wonkfest with Jonah: The national debt, movie theater closings, lockdown economics, and more!

• Yesterday’s French Press(🔒) addressed the (overwhelmingly negative) response to last Thursday’s French Press (🔒), in which David called for sparing the Republican majority in the Senate despite wanting Trump gone. Judge Republican senators on a case-by-case basis, he argues, and have compassion for the ones who acted in good faith and on behalf of their constituents. “The likely result of an intentional act of voting against a person simply because an (R) is by his or her name isn’t a destroyed GOP, but one that’s likely diminished back into its most strident, most Trumpist base,” he writes. David also covers a recent Supreme Court decision denying a Nevada church exemption from coronavirus restrictions.

Let Us Know

Lawmakers from both parties spent a lot of time during the Barr hearing yesterday grandstanding, playing videos, and cutting Barr off before he could answer their questions. We Morning Dispatchers wouldn’t dare tell members of Congress how they should spend their question time, but a whole lot of it seemed like a pretty big waste. If you had William Barr (or any other elected official, for that matter) under oath in a congressional hearing, what would you ask him or her?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Nate Hochman (@njhochman), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Clarification, July 29, 2020: An earlier version of this newsletter referred to the federal forces in Portland, Oregon as “troops.” It has been updated to better describe the nature of the officers deployed to the city.