Lanny Davis, Cohen’s legal adviser and spokesman, traveled to Capitol Hill in recent days to discuss security and other logistical issues surrounding his client Michael Cohen. | Joseph Kaczmarek/AP
A legal representative for Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen expressed concern to congressional investigators this week about his clients’ safety and urged Republicans to rein in the president’s attacks on his former fixer.
Lanny Davis, Cohen’s legal adviser and spokesman, traveled to Capitol Hill in recent days to discuss security and other logistical issues in meetings with House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Democratic committee aides. He said he pressed Republicans on Trump’s repeated tweets about Cohen’s family — particularly his client’s father-in-law — urging them to get their party leader to tone down his rhetoric about Cohen.
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“I’m very concerned about the president of the United States acting like a mobster,” Davis said in a short phone interview Friday, just before an MSNBC appearance. “It’d not be any difference if the ‘don’ called somebody telling the truth a ‘rat’ and attacked the family and sent the implicit message to beware.”
Minutes later, Davis went on MSNBC to reiterate that message: “Family is out of bounds. There is only one person in this country — one president in our history — that would threaten family as a tactic to make fear of somebody he calls a ‘rat’ by telling the truth. And that’s President Trump, and the Republicans should be holding him accountable.”
Oversight Democratic and Republicans aides declined to comment for this story. But Democratic sources and one lawmaker on the panel told POLITICO that Democratic investigators were thinking about ways to push back on Trump and ensure Cohen’s safety.
Davis’ meeting with Hill staff come amid reports that his client is getting cold feet about testifying before Congress on Feb. 7.
Last Saturday, Trump suggested on “Fox News” that Cohen’s father-in-law was in legal jeopardy, and that Cohen should flip on his dad to get a shorter prison sentence. (Cohen is going to jail on March 6 after he pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion and lying to Congress.)
“He should give information maybe on his father-in-law, because that’s the one that people want to look at,” Trump said.
Despite push back from Hill Democrats, who called Trump’s remarks a veiled threat on the family members of their new star witness, Trump doubled-down Friday morning, accusing Cohen on twitter of “lying to reduce his jail time! Watch father-in-law!”
The tweet comes a few weeks after Trump initially called Cohen, who’s cooperating with the FBI and special counsel Robert Muellers’ Russia probe, a “rat,” language traditionally used by Hollywood mafia bosses before execution of a strayed group member.
Cohen has implicated the president in hush payments made to women during the 2016 presidential campaign alleging they had affairs with Trump. He’s also reportedly told prosecutors that Trump’s business dealings with Russia were much stronger than he claimed during the 2016 campaign.
On Thursday night, BuzzFeed reported that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress about those Russia business ties. Mueller’s spokesman nearly 24 hours later issued a rare statement disputing several aspects of the media report. BuzzFeed responded to say it stood by its story. Davis said Cohen played no role in the BuzzFeed story and otherwise declined to comment on the article.
Davis also said Friday that no decision had been made yet on whether Cohen will indeed appear before Congress.
“I don’t know if we’re ready to cancel,” Davis said. “He’s very fearful.”
In the meantime, Davis is encouraging Congress to do something to rein in Trump’s attacks on his clients.
“The tweet today by Trump, something has to be done by both parties in Congress to say, ‘You’re out of bounds.’”
House Democrats plan to discuss their options for responding to Trump and protecting Cohen in the coming days. Rep. Gerry Connolly, a senior Oversight panel member, said his party should go back and review how Congress protected witnesses during a series of sensitive hearings they had in the 1960s on organized crime and the mafia.
“It’s not even a veiled attempt at intimidation of a witness and obstruction of the process of witnesses wanting to come forward to testify before the legislative branch of government,” the Virginia Democrat said Friday. “It’s a repugnant act on the part of the president who clearly is afraid of public testimony by Mr. Cohen under oath.”
Asked whether he thought his GOP counterparts on the committee might use their relationships with Trump to get him to back off—ranking Republican Jim Jordan and panel member Mark Meadows are close allies of the president—Connelly said no.
“Both of them have become such apologists for this president that I don’t think they would be impervious to those pleadings,” he said.
Davis said he’s spoken with Hill aides about the logistics of Cohen’s testimony, including keeping him protected that day.
“We’re certainly hoping to have security provided to him. Something will be done to help him get in and out,” Davis said.
But Cohen’s concerns aren’t limited to his appearance on Capitol Hill. Davis in his MSNBC appearance noted that there were Trump supporters all around as well as foreign actors who may want to do the bidding of the president, who have all but put a target on his client.
While it’s too early in the congressional oversight process for Democrats to bring Cohen in at the start of the new session, it makes sense logistically before the former Trump lawyer starts serving his sentence, said David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor in Miami.
“It’s easier to bring him in now when he’s a public person who’s free to move about the country with limitations than it is to bring him in with a U.S. Marshall escort, the Bureau of Prisons and shackles,” he said. “Now is the time to get him in and lock him into testimony.”
Davis said he didn’t know yet if Cohen would also be appearing before the Senate Intelligence committee.
Isaiah Thomas‘ rehab reportedly has progressed to a point where the two-time All-Star could make his season debut for the Denver Nuggets before the All-Star break.
If Thomas doesn’t make it back by then, the Nuggets have “strong confidence” will be suiting up for the first game after the All-Star break against the Dallas Mavericks on Feb. 22.
Wojnarowski noted the final step for Thomas will be playing in five-on-five scrimmages.
Thomas hasn’t played since last March with the Los Angeles Lakers. He was shut down for the final 11 games of the 2017-18 season afterundergoing arthroscopic hip surgery with an estimated recovery time of four months.
It was the same hip Thomas originally injured with the Boston Celtics during the 2017 playoffs. He finished last season averaging 15.2 points and shot a career-worst 37.3 percent in 32 games for the Lakers and Cleveland Cavaliers.
The NuggetssignedThomas to a one-year deal worth $2 million in July. The 29-year-old will add another scoring presence to a team that ranks second in the Western Conference with a 30-14 record.
Some people close to President Trump worried that he appeared more concerned with scoring political points than reopening the government. | Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
A week that opened with a fast food buffet at the White House ended with a president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a bitter feud, leaving little hope for a shutdown solution.
President Donald Trump met with a group of House lawmakers on Wednesday to talk about ending the month-long government shutdown. But he was more focused on the two people who weren’t in the room: Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
“I don’t see how we’re going to come to a deal” without them, Trump told the mostly junior lawmakers gathered in the White House Situation Room. By then it had already been more than a week since the president had spoken with Pelosi, the House speaker, and Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader.
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But Trump said he wasn’t in a hurry.
“I’ll wait them out,” he confided, according to a person present for the remarks.
Things looked bleak. And then they got even worse.
As the meeting unfolded, White House aides were still digesting a surprise letter from Pelosi requesting that Trump postpone the State of the Union address. After going over several options with his chief of staff in the presidential limousine en route to the Pentagon on Thursday afternoon, Trump retaliated by abruptly barring Pelosi and fellow Democrats from using military aircraft for a planned trip to Afghanistan. Stunned Democrats accused him of breaching protocol and even putting their safety at risk.
For all the drama, spectacle and public declarations, neither side budged from its negotiating position. Rather than pulling Trump and the Democrats closer to a resolution, the shutdown only seems to be pushing them farther apart.
“There’s a sense of the theater of the absurd,” said an exasperated Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia.
“We will most likely have a trade deal with China before this government reopens,” a former White House official said. “There is not an identified pathway forward and both sides are entrenched. The mood is not good.”
This account of the grim run-up to the shutdown’s one-month mark is based on interviews with more than a dozenWhite House officials, Trump allies, congressional aides and lawmakers. It shows how Trump’s ploy to excite his conservative base and keep his most sacred campaign promise — “build the wall” — has created a slow-motion crisis with no end in sight.
Meanwhile, some 800,000 federal workers will soon have gone a month without a paycheck. (Nine of 15 federal departments and dozens of agencies are shuttered.) Some are growing desperate, turning to part-time work and seeking financial help from friends and family.
They, along with Washington Democrats, will be watching to see what Trump says in an announcement he will make on Saturday afternoon “concerning the Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border, and the Shutdown,” as the president put it on Twitter.
The week began on a celebratory note for Trump, who hosted Clemson’s national champion football team for a Monday night dinner at the White House.
But even that ceremonial event was tangled in Washington’s political impasse.
Trump, an avowed fast-food lover, appeared delighted with himself. He beamed under a stoic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and repeatedly reminded reporters that he had paid for the spread of hamburgers, french fries and pizza out of his own pocket.
“The reason we did this is because of the shutdown,” Trump said.
The week ended on a much darker note. After Trump canceled Pelosi’s travel plans to Afghanistan — publicly revealing the previously secret trip — a top Pelosi lieutenant accused the Trump administration of leaking news that her delegation planned to salvage their trip by flying commercial. The Pelosi aide said the move threatened lawmakers’ security. The White House quickly punched back, calling the allegation a “flat out lie.”
All the while, federal workers weren’t getting a paycheck.
“It has not been a proud week for anybody,” a former senior White House official said.
Trump’s cancellation of Pelosi’s plane — announced in a White House letter seen by reporters before most Democrats — was all the more dramatic coming as it did after an unusual 24 hours of silence following her letter urging him to postpone the State of the Union.
The White House argued it canceled the trip to ensure that Pelosi and other top Democrats remained in Washington to negotiate a deal to end the shutdown. But the move doesn’t appear to have kept Pelosi in town. She was spotted boarding a plane to San Francisco on Friday afternoon, according to a person who saw her.
Conservatives cackled with glee when Trump nixed the Afghanistan trip. (“You’re Grounded,” blared the front page of the New York Post, over an image of Trump pointing at his Democratic nemesis.)
But some people close to the president worried that he appeared more concerned with scoring political points than reopening the government. They placed blame on acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who has endeared himself to the president by declining to check — and sometimes encouraging — his impulses.
“In the end, it looked childish and petty and stupid,” another former White House official said.
The White House declined to comment on the record for this story.
Mulvaney is among the advisers egging Trump on to keep up the fight for the border wall and he was among the handful of White House aides who laid plans for canceling Pelosi’s Afghanistan trip.
During Thursday’s presidential motorcade to the Pentagon, where Trump delivered a speech on missile defense, Mulvaney presented the president with several options for responding to Pelosi’s letter — including cancelling her congressional delegation’s overseas trip, according to a person familiar with the discussion.
Some people close to the president saw a missed opportunity: They argued that Trump could have claimed higher ground by allowing Pelosi and her colleagues to travel, then blasting them for leaving the country during the shutdown.
Others said that rather than send Pelosi a sarcastic personal letter saying she could fly to Afghanistan commercially, Trump might have allowed the Pentagon to release a more clinical statement, possibly avoiding the appearance that Trump was settling a personal score.
As the shutdown drags on, some White House aides are eager for a resolution and hope that Trump will compromise on his demand for more than $5 billion for the wall. Although some see hopeful signs in polling data, the overall picture it paints shows a president losing ground against Democrats.
Many of Trump’s outside advisers are counseling him against wavering, however, including some of the conservative talk radio hosts who visited Trump in the White House on Thursday. Among them was Sebastian Gorka, a bellicose former Trump White House adviser who was forced out in2017, and who told Fox News last month that Trump is “never going to give up.”
“The president’s brand is to fight — that’s his brand,” said Matt Schlapp, a Trump ally and chairman of the American Conservative Union.
In the fourth week of a shutdown that began on December 22, White House aides are feeling a personal toll from that fight. Top officials deemed “essential” report a growing sense of burnout, as they pick up slack from the roughly two-thirds of their colleagues who have been furloughed.
“They are operating on a shoestring, with a bunch of folks at home. The support is gone,” said one former administration official. “And the White House was already stretched staff-wise before the shutdown.”
In private, there are hints that Trump has doubts about his militant position. He has complained about negative press coverage in recent days, according to people who have spoken to him. And his 2020 campaign aides are growing alarmed about the effect the shutdown could have on his re-election campaign.
But there is little sign of motion: As of Friday night there were no plans for new meetings between Trump and Democratic leaders, who aren’t very eager to talk to the president either. Democrats say they don’t trust Trump to stick to his word.
Some White House aides, worried that the negotiations have reached a stalemate, have already begun making preparations for the shutdown to stretch into February, for at least two more weeks beyond the State of the Union address, according to a senior administration official.
Inside the White House, some Trump officials are focused on what they call a potential turning point. It begins on Tuesday, when thousands of federal workers will miss another paycheck. White House aides believe that unions and labor groups will begin to crank up pressure on Democrats to make a deal, even if it means moving toward Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion to fund a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.
A former Trump adviser who remains close to the White House said Trump should target vulnerable Democrats by holding campaign rallies and urging voters to call members of Congress to push them to negotiate. “Any blue dogs or Democrats in states he won seem logical,” the person said.
Senior Trump officials believe such pressure could force some Democrats to distance themselves from Pelosi’s refusal to allocate a dollar for a border wall, which she calls “immoral.” Aides have compiled a list of potential targets, including centrist Democrats, those representing districts Trump won handily in 2016, and the 15 Democrats who voted against Pelosi as speaker.
It’s a longshot strategy, to say the least: So far, the White House’s efforts to woo moderates have failed. Democrats didn’t show up to a Tuesday meeting at the White House, and a similar meeting on Wednesday, which included Democratic members of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, failed to result in a breakthrough.
Democrats meanwhile, see a president only destined to get weaker: While much of Washington was focused on the shutdown theatrics, BuzzFeed News published an explosive story alleging that Trump directed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about discussions to build a Trump Tower in Moscow — a revelation that, if confirmed, could form the basis for his impeachment by House Democrats.
Trump’s desire to declare a national emergency has cooled in recent days within the West Wing. Some White House aides fear the move could set a poor precedent for future presidents including Democrats, who could use such a maneuver declare a national emergency for gun control or climate change.
“It’s like the Senate and the nuclear option. Once you do it, there is no turning back,” said one Republican close to the White House.
Trump himself has often seemedunmoved by stories of the plight of federal workers, many of whom he has dismissed publicly and privately as Democrats.
”All these people are talking about how federal employees aren’t being paid — well, most of them are Democrats,” he said during Wednesday’s meeting with House lawmakers, according to the person who there, though, paradoxically, he also later insisted, “A lot of the people who aren’t being paid, they support me.”
Eliana Johnson, Heather Caygle, Daniel Lippman and Anita Kumar contributed to this story.
Chicago Cubs third baseman Kris Bryant told reporters that free-agent right fielder Bryce Harper is not signing with the North Siders:
Jordan Bastian @MLBastian
Kris Bryant, on Bryce Harper: “He’s not signing here.” Said Cubs have a “killer team” even without any major additions. Added that he doesn’t talk about the FA process with Harper.
Bryant may have an inside scoop, as he and Harper are close. The two grew up in Las Vegas at the same time.
Harper and many other ballplayers are still on the free-agent market in a frigid hot-stove season. However, Bob Nightengale of USA Today reported Jan. 13 that the Philadelphia Phillies are the “clear-cut favorite” to land the 26-year-old, who had 34 home runs with 100 RBI and slashed .249/.393/.496 for the Washington Nationals in 2018.
The Phillies’ potential acquisition of Harper would help make Philadelphia an instant NL East contender, although the team likely has to do a bit more work to catch up with Senior Circuit heavyweights like the Cubs.
While the Cubs suffered disappointing losses in the NL Central tiebreaker and NL Wild Card Game last year, the team still won 95 regular-season games. Bryant’s comments about the Cubs’ being a “killer team” in 2019 may prove true, as Chicago currently has the second-highest over-under win total in the National League:
Todd Fuhrman @ToddFuhrman
MLB Win totals (via @CaesarsEnt )
HOU 97.5
NYY 96.5
BOS 95.5
LAD 95
CLE 91.5
CHC 89
STL 88.5
WAS 88.5
TB 85.5
ATL 84
MIN 84
MIL 83.5
LAA 83.5
NYM 83.5
OAK 83
PHI 83
COL 82
PIT 78.5
SD 77.5
AZ 77
CIN 77
TOR 76.5
SEA 74.5
CWS 74.5
SFG 73
TEX 70.5
KC 69
DET 67
MIA 65.5
BAL 59
The Cubs return one of MLB’s best lineups with 2016 NL MVP Bryant, 2018 NL MVP runner-up Javy Baez and slugger Anthony Rizzo to lead the way. Chicago’s bullpenERAalso ranked second in the league.
Still, any team could use a player like Harper, who can swat 400-foot home runs with ease and won the 2015 NL MVP award. Entering his age-26 season, the seven-year veteran has already made six All-Star teams.
Tecun Uman, Guatemala – Zulma Rodriguez sat in the shade of a tree outside the Guatemalan immigration office, waiting on some paperwork before she can cross the bridge into Mexico with her kids. They are the reason she fled El Salvador.
“I was forced to leave,” she told Al Jazeera, surrounded by young children, including her six-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son.
Rodriguez’s son was in fifth grade in Ilopango, just a few miles east of the capital, San Salvador. Rodriguez worked in a textile factory to support her kids, but could not protect them at school.
Gang members recruit children to sell drugs to their peers, Rodriguez said. Cannabis and cocaine are circulating even in grade school, she added.
“And amphetamines,” her son chimed in.
Rodriguez’s son loves school and was getting good grades, but gang members were pressuring him to join. Saying no is only an option for so long.
“If you refuse [to join], they say they will kill you,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez is one of the several thousand Central Americans now crossing into Mexico following the departure earlier this week of migrant and refugee caravans from Honduras and El Salvador.
In dispersed groups large and small, they quickly crossed Guatemala with a mix of bus rides, walking and hitchhiking. The vast majority of people participating in the current collective Central American exodus are Honduran, but there are many Salvadorans, and some Guatemalans and Nicaraguans have joined along the way.
Humanitarian visas
Mexico is offering humanitarian visas to this wave of Central Americans fleeing violence, poverty, unemployment and persecution in their respective countries. Valid for one year with a possibility of renewal, the visas will allow people to live, work and travel anywhere in Mexico.
As of Thursday night, 969 Central Americans had registered with Mexican immigration officials, who say the visa processing period will only take up to five days. Hundreds more people were already lined up on the bridge Friday morning, receiving temporary wristbands for identification during processing, and waiting as the lines slowly advanced towards the Mexican immigration office.
The temporary policy for this wave of Central American migrants and refugees of the administration of Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took office last month, stands in stark contrast with that of his predecessor.
Thousands of Central Americans fled in a mass exodus in October and November, when more than 10,000 migrants and refugees made it into Mexico despite a much more closed door policy. Some 3,000 registered with officials for refugee status consideration, but the majority entered without processing following tense stand-offs at the border, where on one occasion Mexican federal police deployed tear gas and anti-barrier projectiles, killing one Honduran.
A group of asylum seekers follow a Mexican immigration official [Jeff Abbott/Al Jazeera]
More than 6,000 Central Americans made it to Tijuana at the US border late last year, and some remain, while others have returned home or crossed into the US to request asylum both at and between official points of entry.
Rodriguez left El Salvador as part of last year’s exodus, but she did not make it up to Mexico. Early into the journey, she and her kids met a Honduran mother also travelling with young children and they decided to stay in Guatemala as a group and try to start a life there, but soon ran into difficulties.
“In Guatemala we could not register our kids for school,” Rodriguez said.
The school year had already begun and they were told there was no more room. Rodriguez and her new Honduran friend said they faced discrimination and lower pay. They found some work handing out flyers for a private medical laboratory, but were never paid, so they had to head back home.
Mid-January caravans were planned in advance from both El Salvador and Honduras, and the two mothers both fled their home countries once again, with plans to meet up in Guatemala and continue north into Mexico.
For now, the families have no plans to go to the US. They hope to find work in Mexico and enroll their kids in school.
“My goal is for my children to study. That is my top priority as a mother,” Rodriguez said.
For years, Mexico has cooperated with the US in stopping the northbound advance of migrants and refugees. Mexico deports more Central Americans than the US. Between that long-standing practice and Mexico’s crackdown on last year’s caravans at the border, Central Americans have reason to be wary.
The uncertainty and doubts were palpable on Thursday evening at an impromptu assembly in the Tecun Uman central park. Mexican and Guatemalan officials were explaining the situation and the details of the humanitarian visa process, but many people were not buying it.
Some Central Americans were convinced it was a trap, even as others returned with wristbands after signing up for the visa process. Most people remained uncertain, discussing their options in small groups scattered around the park, where nearly everyone spent the night.
Before dawn Friday, hundreds of migrants and refugees decided to not wait around. They crossed the bridge without processing and entered Mexico on foot, walking up to Tapachula, where they began to arrive Friday afternoon. Police escorted the group and are expected to stop their advance unless they are processed for entry.
‘The crisis is greater than ever’
Cesar Medina has no reason to mistrust the Mexican government’s promises of humanitarian visas. The 21-year-old has been through the process before, when he took part early last year in a Honduran migrant and refugee caravan whose participants received the visas.
“I was working in Tijuana. I had my Mexican papers,” he told Al Jazeera.
Late last year, though, one of Medina’s relatives was dying, and he had to return home to Roatan, an island off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. But due to violence and a lack of employment opportunities, Medina fled the country again this week.
“The crisis is greater than ever,” he said.
Douglas Iritano left for similar reasons, but home for Iritano is in Mixco, just west of Guatemala City. The 43-year-old worked for years painting houses, but gang violence and corruption in Guatemala pushed him to leave. He tried to leave years ago, but was sent back.
“I’m returning to Mexico to take advantage of the humanitarian visa that will allow us to travel throughout Mexico,” he told Al Jazeera, waiting in line to begin the visa application process while a nearby Mexican immigration official hands out sandwiches.
A group of men listen to instructions from a Mexican immigration official as they begin the process of obtaining their humanitarian visas [Jeff Abbott/Al Jazeera]
US congresswoman Norma Torres of California has pointed out that the administration of Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales has done little to resolve the causes of migration.
“Guatemala faces many pressing challenges including gang violence, drug trafficking, and nutrition. The current government has done nothing to fix these problems because they have been so focused on protecting themselves and their cronies from criminal prosecution,” Representative Torres said in a statement to Al Jazeera in late December.
“Sadly, many Guatemalans are giving up hope that conditions will ever improve,” Torres said.
Iritano agreed. “All our presidents are thieves,” Iritano said. “Added to that, there are no opportunities for the youth, so they become criminals and gang members. It is better for us to leave in order to support our families.”
Iritano sees migrating as the means of supporting his mother, wife, children, and grandchildren. He migrated to the United States, but was deported in 2006. Following the recent caravans, he attempted to head north again, but was deported.
“The previous president, Enrique Pena Nieto, treated migrants like animals. We are humans,” he said. “Thank god that the new President of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is concerned for migrants.”
Iritano arrived to apply for the humanitarian visa Friday morning. But the long wait does not bother him, even if he has to sleep outside and only eat once a day for a while.
“It is worth it,” he said. “I can travel throughout Mexico without having to hide from immigration officials.”
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said she changed her views on gun rights when she became a senator and met with the Brooklyn family of a slain teenager. | Juana Summers/AP Photo
Expressions of regret for past positions out of step with today’s Democratic Party have become an early staple of the presidential race.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand regrets that, as a conservative-leaning Democratic congresswoman, she backed gun rights and held “callous” views on immigration.
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is sorry for past “offensive and hurtful statements” about the LGBTQ community.
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Bernie Sanders is sorry, too — he’s repeatedly apologized the women who were revealed to be sexually mistreated while working on his last campaign for president, before the #MeToo movement.
Even before the 2020 Democratic presidential primary kicks into gear — and ahead of Sanders’ own decision about whether he’ll run again — the contours of the race are being shaped by an apology tour of sorts.
While White House aspirants have long sought to dispense with unflattering elements of their records, the velocity of the party’s leftward shift has Democratic hopefuls scrambling to catch up — making remorse an early staple of the campaign. The grueling, eight-minute segment Gillibrand endured on Rachel Maddow’s show Wednesday night on her ideological transformation was probably only a taste of what’s in store.
“People want answers to the questions [about candidates’ records] right now,” said Jerry Skurnik, a Democratic consultant in New York. “But there’s also no question that a large proportion of the Democratic Party’s likely voters has moved further to the left.”
The number of candidates seeking repentance is expected to grow. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who served for decades in the Senate, will be forced to relive his push for the crime bill of 1994, which paid for more police patrols, prisons and border security, and his earlier efforts to establish mandatory minimums for drug crimes. Biden, former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has yet to apologize to Anita Hill for his handling of the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas.
“The longer you have been in public life, and the longer voting record you have, the more you’ll have to answer to things you did,” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic strategist and veteran of presidential campaigns. “The quality of your candidacy will be your ability to answer to it.”
Sen. Kamala Harris, who may enter the presidential race in the coming days, is already seeing her record dissected as a career line prosecutor, district attorney and then state attorney general. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren, now exploring a run of her own, has faced questions about being a member of the Republican Party until her switch in 1996.
Gabbard issued her apology this week in a video after the past remarks resurfaced with her presidential ambitions. CNN published statements and reports from earlier in her career, including a 2002 quote in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin where she spoke about working against same-sex marriage with her father’s anti-LGBT organization. Also included was a Gabbard quote from her time as a state legislator, when she advocated that “as Democrats, we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.”
“In my past, I said and believed things that were wrong, and worse, they were very hurtful to the people in the LGBTQ community and to their loved ones,” Gabbard said in the apology video.
Sanders’ apologies — first on cable TV, and later at the Capitol — came after POLITICO and others reported on allegations of sexual harassment and violence during his 2016 campaign. On Wednesday, the Vermont senator met with a group of staffers who aired their concerns, ahead of his trip to South Carolina to mark Martin Luther King Day.
Carol Fowler, a longtime party activist in South Carolina, said the revised positions and walk-backs have not dampened her enthusiasm about meeting the Democrats and hearing more about them.
“Most of these candidates are unknown to many of us and we would like to get to know them better before we say, ‘Oh, that’s not a real Democrat,’” Fowler told POLITICO. “Whatever a candidate did years ago, Democrats will look at their work since then. We would like to see if they actually have a record since that time which is more in line with Democratic thinking.”
For Gillibrand, who announced her plans to seek the White House Tuesday on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the questions she now faces trace back to her political rise in 2006. That year, she won an underdog challenge to Republican then-Rep. John Sweeney in a GOP-heavy, overwhelmingly white New York district.
In the House, Gillibrand earned an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association; opposed driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; and, according to a CNN report, opposed “amnesty for illegal immigrants” and voted to increase funding for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to work with local law enforcement on deportations. Those and other past Gillibrand positions, including wanting to make English the official language of the U.S., were recounted in painstaking detail by Maddow.
The liberal host didn’t hold back in her introduction, referring to Gillibrand’s political “transformation.”
“She has been on her own party’s right,” the popular MSNBC host said. “She has been on her own party’s left.”
Gillibrand, for her part, said she came to realize the errors of her ways when she became a senator and met with the Brooklyn family of a slain teenager — a story she often cites to explain her shift on gun control. “And now, I’ve been a leader on these issues,” the senator added, noting her support for universal background checks and bans on assault rifles and large magazines.
Later, Maddow said she was struck to hear Gillibrand tell CBS’ “60 Minutes” that she was essentially embarrassed by her previous positions on immigrants.
“Well, I don’t think it was driven from my heart. I was callous to the suffering of families who want to be with their loved ones, people who want to be reunited with their families,” Gillibrand said.
Looking back, she added, “I really regretted that I didn’t look beyond my district and talk about why this is an important part of the United States story, and why it’s an important part of our strength.”
Daily Trends Hunter 