Month: October 2019

The door to Jeffrey Epstein’s Upper East Side residence stands closed last month in New York City. On Thursday, a federal judge closed the dead financier’s criminal case — but not before hearing from many of his alleged victims.

Less than three weeks after Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide in prison, a federal judge has formally closed the sex trafficking case against the wealthy financier. On Thursday, Judge Richard Berman of the Southern District of New York approved a request filed by prosecutors to dismiss the charges.

“Because Jeffrey Epstein, the defendant, died while this case was pending, and therefore before a final judgment was issued, the Indictment must be dismissed under rule of abatement,” Berman wrote, referring to the rule under which, if a defendant dies midway through a case, the indictment is wiped clean.

The decision brings an unsatisfying end to a criminal case that captured the attention of the country — but it does not close the door on future legal matters involving his estate or his associates. Several of Epstein’s accusers have filed major lawsuits against his estate since he was discovered unresponsive in his cell earlier this month, and federal authorities have repeatedly vowed to pursue the co-conspirators who supported his alleged operation.

Prosecutors and accusers say that from at least the early 2000s, Epstein and his network of friends recruited girls as young as 14 years old, misled them and forced them to have sex with him and other prominent men. Though suspicions long lingered around the financier, he eluded attempts to get him to stand trial — including in 2008, when he accepted a lenient plea deal that meant only about a year in jail for the sex crime he admitted.

The deal was so lenient, in fact, that after its details surfaced, the controversy led to the resignation of Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who negotiated the agreement back when he was a U.S. attorney in Florida.

This time around, Epstein’s accusers at least got the opportunity to tell their stories in an unusual hearing on Tuesday. At that hearing, more than a dozen women came forward to tell stories of how Epstein tricked, coerced and sexually assaulted them, often when they were still underage.

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Teala Davies, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers, looks on as her attorney Gloria Allred addresses a news conference after the hearing at Manhattan’s federal courthouse Tuesday.

“Jeffrey Epstein ruined me. His recruiter ruined me,” said one accuser, who signed her statement “Jane Doe” and released it through her attorney, Lisa Bloom. “The far reaching consequences of that day [that I was recruited] ruined my family’s lives.”

Another accuser, Teala Davies, succinctly summed up the hearing for reporters outside the Manhattan courthouse afterward: “All I’m going to say is today was a day of power and strength.”

It was also a day of disappointment. Many of the women in the courtroom expressed just how devastated they were to receive the news that he had taken his own life and once more avoided trial.

But it’s not over.

At the hearing Tuesday, prosecutors vowed that the dismissal of charges “in no way lessens the government’s resolve to stand up for the victims in this case.” The next day, the FBI released a new call for his alleged victims to contact the agency with their stories.

This image tweeted by President Trump is believed to have come from a highly classified U.S. reconnaissance satellite known as USA 224.

The first thing Melissa Hanham did when she saw President Trump’s tweet last week was take a screen grab.

“My reaction was to immediately save the image to my phone just in case it got taken down,” she says.

The wording on the tweet was cryptic: “The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir [space launch vehicle] Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran,” the president said. “I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One.”

But it was the photo that left Hanham, a satellite imagery expert, gobsmacked. The day before, on Aug. 29, a rocket had exploded at the Imam Khomeini Space Center in northern Iran. Trump’s tweet contained an incredibly sharp image of the aftermath. Visible were burned-out vehicles and lettering around the edge of the pad that couldn’t be seen clearly in commercial satellite photos.

Hanham, deputy director of the Open Nuclear Network in Vienna, says she has seen lots of images over the years but never anything like this. “It was so crystal clear and high-resolution that I did not believe it could have come from a satellite,” she says.

There are still few details about how the image made its way to Trump’s Twitter account. The president received his daily intelligence briefing at 11:30 a.m. ET, about two hours before the tweet.

CNBC reported that Trump was shown the photo during the briefing. A flash visible in the center of the image suggests Trump or someone else took a photo of the original image — which Hanham says might have been the intelligence briefing slide. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred questions about the image to the White House.

“We had a photo and I released it, which I have the absolute right to do,” Trump told reporters late Friday.

Such a disclosure of classified information by anyone but the president would end in jail time, says Bruce Klingner, a former CIA officer now at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“Anyone else who revealed it would be sitting in Leavenworth prison, serving out a prison term,” Klingner says.

But in the world of classified secrets, the president of the United States has absolute power. “The classification system for national security information is not based in a law, it derives from the president’s own status as commander in chief of the armed forces,” says Steven Aftergood, who studies government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

The rules about classification are laid out in very detailed presidential orders as part of a system run by the executive branch, and Trump is the boss.

“He therefore has the authority to decide unilaterally what will be disclosed, what will be declassified and what will not,” Aftergood says.

Past presidents have used this power sparingly. President Bill Clinton authorized the release of some satellite images during the Balkans conflict in the 1990s. In 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell used satellite photos in his speech at the U.N. to build a case for war with Iraq.

But Aftergood thinks the images in those instances were deliberately blurred to hide what U.S. satellites could really do. There’s a good reason for that: “These satellites are in the billion-to-multibillion-dollar range; they are worth more than their weight in gold,” he says. The photos they produce are so good, they’re at the limits of the laws of physics — it’s the best picture you can possibly take from space. Aftergood thinks the president’s decision to tweet what looks like an unblurred photo of the Iranian accident was a bad idea.

“In chess terms, he has sacrificed a bishop for a pawn or less,” he says.

“What the president did is pretty sporty,” says Rebeccah Heinrichs with the conservative Hudson Institute. But she also thinks it was done deliberately. The text of the tweet was clearly written by or vetted by someone with an intelligence background, Heinrichs says, noting the use of abbreviations such as SLV for “space launch vehicle.” And she thinks the tweet sends a powerful message to Iran.

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“He is communicating that we are carefully watching and that we are using restraint, and that if we wanted to do more, we could,” she says.

At least some experts agree. “Nations are not suddenly going to say, ‘Oh no, we had no idea they could watch us this closely!’ ” says one senior satellite imaging expert who asked to remain anonymous because of the furor around Trump’s tweet. “Yes, there is clearly more detail, but not a whole lot of useful information beyond what the best commercial imagery provides.”

But Aftergood thinks Iran will be able to learn from the image. A group of independent satellite spotters says it has already determined which U.S. satellite took the picture. USA 224, one of America’s most advanced spy satellites, passed over the launch site shortly after the accident.

Now that the satellite has been pinpointed, Aftergood worries that Iran can evade it. For example, he says, in the runup to an Indian nuclear weapons test in 1998, India tracked U.S. satellites and made sure not to move any major equipment while they were overhead. The U.S. intelligence community was caught off guard by the test when it happened.

And Klingner, the former CIA officer, notes that Iran wasn’t the only one that saw the tweet.

“Our adversaries — Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria and others — will be looking at this, trying to figure out how good our capabilities are,” Klingner says. He worries they just might learn something.

Joe Biden raised more than one-third of his early campaign cash from donors who gave the maximum amount allowed, helping the former vice president rack up $22 million in the year’s second quarter but opening him to criticism in a Democratic primary that has placed a high premium on support from small-dollar contributors.

Biden raised money in $2,800 increments while making frequent stops to glad-hand at the homes of rich donors, some of whom have known him for decades. He brought in more money from "max-out" supporters than rival Pete Buttigieg, whose $24.8 million haul topped Biden’s and the rest of the Democratic field’s totals in the second quarter of the year. Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., took in $4.8 million in checks from donors giving the maximum contribution during the past three months.

Biden’s big money haul reflects his sway with some of the country’s most influential donors and fundraisers. It also shows a potential shortcoming for his campaign: He can’t return to donors who already gave his campaign the $2,800 maximum and ask for more, while opponents who are raising more checks in $10 and $20 increments can keep returning to small-dollar donors over the course of the primary.

Rivals such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, are using Biden’s frequent fundraising stops as part of an argument that Biden is out of touch with Democratic primary voters.

Since before he launched his campaign, Biden has been working to build out his network of small-dollar donors. His campaign raised $8.3 million in donations from people giving $200 or less in the second quarter, a significant sum — though less than Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who have focused on building out small-dollar fundraising bases in lieu of attending big fundraisers, brought in.

Sanders raised $12.5 million in small-dollar donations last quarter, while Warren raised $12.7 million in small-dollar donations.

Among the big-name Democratic donors who gave to Biden’s campaign were investor Ron Conway, Newsweb Corporation Chairman Fred Eychaner, and Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and his wife, Marilyn, all of whom gave the maximum donation. So did several people tied to the Obama administration, such as former White House press secretary Jay Carney, former U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley and former U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Denise Bauer, who is also helping fundraise for Biden’s campaign.

The wealthy network of one of Biden’s supporters, Florida-based attorney John Morgan, also helped kick in significant money: Attorneys working for Morgan’s law firm, Morgan & Morgan, gave $398,000 to the Biden campaign since it launched.

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Police shoot pepper spray as they try to detain protesters inside a train at Prince Edward station in Hong Kong Saturday.

Updated at 11:09 a.m. ET Sunday

Defying a government ban, thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators returned to the streets of Hong Kong on Saturday and clashed with police throughout the night in one of the most dramatic and violent days of unrest since June, when the protests began.

The worst violence occurred at around 10 p.m. as riot police rushed into a metro station and arrested 40 people.

Riot police wielding batons pepper-sprayed bystanders and protesters inside Hong Kong’s Prince Edward metro station before detaining incapacitated protesters. Video from inside the station showed metro passengers kneeling and begging for mercy as they were sprayed.

On Sunday, protestors blocked all roads, buses and metro lines to Hong Kong’s airport but did not manage to shut it down. Riot police arrived early in the afternoon, causing hundreds of protestors and travelers to flee the airport, with many walking for hours to return to the city. Tung Chung, a metro station close to the airport, was temporarily suspended as riot police checked identification documents of passengers.

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Events first took a violent turn on Saturday afternoon, when police fired tear gas and used water cannons laced with blue dye in their attempts to disperse protesters who were throwing objects and gasoline bombs at the main government headquarters.

One of the most striking images from Saturday’s protests was that of a large fire, blazing across a street in a major shopping district. Protesters created a barricade of stadium chairs stretching across Hong Kong’s Hennessy Road, close to police headquarters, and set it ablaze in the early evening.

A protester uses a shield to cover himself as he faces police in Hong Kong on Saturday.

A reporter heard at least three explosions as protesters threw Molotov cocktails at the blaze. Protesters also tore up patches of sidewalks for bricks to hurl at police headquarters. Masked demonstrators waving color-coded flags warned onlookers to stay a safe distance from the blaze, and firefighters were at the scene in minutes.

Riot police moved in quickly, causing protesters to move steadily eastward. Police began arresting protesters in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district shortly after, as jeering passersby and restaurant-goers shouted insults at law enforcement.

The day began peacefully with a “religious rally” — an attempt to evade the police restrictions around protests, though police still considered the event an illegal gathering.

Throughout the afternoon, protesters alternated between chanting for democratic elections and also singing religious songs. They said they were praying for peace — and also for “sinners.” Marches then swelled into the tens of thousands throughout the afternoon as crowds moved peacefully west toward Beijing’s government offices on Hong Kong island, which police began barricading that morning.

Saturday’s demonstrations came on the fifth anniversary of Beijing’s decision to continue vetting all candidates for Hong Kong’s chief executive position. That decision sparked the 2014 “Umbrella Revolution,” which consisted of months of mass pro-democracy protests but ultimately failed to secure direct elections for Hong Kong.

The past three months of protests in Hong Kong were triggered by legislation that would have allowed Hong Kong’s government to extradite people to China for certain crimes — a proposal that critics feared could be used to target outspoken critics of China.

Though Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, responded to protests by suspending the bill in mid-June, protesters continued to demonstrate because the bill has yet to be formally withdrawn. The activists have since expanded their list of demands to include calls for Lam’s resignation, direct elections, an inquiry into police tactics and the unconditional release of all arrested protesters.

Lam has refused or ignored the demands. On Tuesday, Lam said the government was looking into all “legal means to stop violence and chaos” in Hong Kong. This past week, China sent additional troops to Hong Kong.

In a news conference Friday, Hong Kong police commander Kwok Pak Chung said unauthorized demonstrators could face jail sentences of up to five years.

Demonstrators showed up despite that warning — furious at what they see as police brutality, and further galvanized by a wave of arrests of prominent activists and politicians.

On Thursday and Friday, police arrested three prominent activists — most notably, 22-year-old Joshua Wong, who leads the youth activist group Demosisto. Wong was released on bail and attended Saturday’s protests. Three pro-democracy lawmakers were also arrested on Friday, according multiple media reports.

Police in Hong Kong have made over 900 arrests associated with this summer’s protests, but some see these targeted detentions as a shift in strategy. Man-kei Tam, director of Amnesty International Hong Kong, called the latest arrests and the ban on Saturday’s rally “scare tactics straight out of Beijing’s playbook.”

Though police have targeted high-profile activists and pro-democracy thinkers, the protest movement in Hong Kong remains a leaderless movement.

On Sunday, protesters plan to shut down transportation lines into the Hong Kong International Airport for the third time in three months. On Monday, a general strike is set to begin across universities and many other sectors.

“I think when the government go hard, we go hard,” said Isaac Cheng, a vice chairman of Demosisto. “We ask the government, please respond to the five demands as soon as possible. Otherwise, the people may be using some more radical ways or more hard ways to respond to the response of the government.”

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Tensions over the future of the GOP’s grassroots fundraising are reaching a breaking point, with the national party turning to strong-arm tactics to get Republicans behind its new, Donald Trump-endorsed platform for small donors.

The Republican National Committee is threatening to withhold support from party candidates who refuse to use WinRed, the party’s newly established online fundraising tool. And the RNC, along with the party’s Senate and gubernatorial campaign arms, are threatening legal action against a rival donation vehicle.

The moves illustrate how Republican leaders are waging a determined campaign to make WinRed the sole provider of its small donor infrastructure — and to torpedo any competitors.

On Monday, the RNC sent an eight-page cease-and-desist letter to Paul Dietzel, a Republican digital strategist who earlier this month launched Give.GOP, a fundraising platform that includes a directory through which donors can give to party candidates and organizations. In the letter, RNC chief counsel Justin Riemer writes that while Give.GOP has a page inviting donors to give to the RNC, the committee hasn’t yet received any funds from the platform or received any outreach from it. Riemer also accuses Dietzel of using the committee’s trademark and logo without its permission.

Riemer asks Give.GOP to cease using its trademark and to detail how it will process donations to the committee, adding that failure “to comply with the demands and requests described above in a timely fashion may force the RNC to consider a legal remedy.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee and Republican Governors Association, who are also included in Give.GOP’s directory, have separately sent Dietzel similar cease-and-desist letters, according to four party officials familiar with the matter.

Dietzel struck back at the RNC in a statement, claiming his platform was superior to WinRed.

“We will review the letter from the RNC in a timely manner and respond as appropriate,” Dietzel said. “Give.GOP empowers grassroots donors and has no competition in the market. Nothing like it exists. Why are people who are supposed to be helping the president fighting so hard to prevent him from saving millions of dollars through innovation?”

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On Tuesday evening, the RNC’s elephant logo appeared to be erased from the Give.GOP website.

As the RNC puts pressure on Give.GOP, it is also telling Republican candidates that they will be cut off from valuable party resources if they don’t use WinRed.

“Over the past several years, the RNC has spent millions of dollars building a top-notch data apparatus for state parties and candidates to utilize for free,” said RNC chief of staff Richard Walters. “Consistent with RNC policy of using technology to support the Republican Party as a whole, we will only invest in federal candidates and state parties that use RNC data and the WinRed platform.”

The offensive comes at a pivotal moment for the GOP, which last month unveiled the long-awaited and much-delayed WinRed. The new platform has been billed as the party’s answer to ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising behemoth that helped candidates and groups rake in over $1.6 billion during the midterm election. Republicans made the creation of a small donor machine a post-election priority, with Trump, congressional leaders and a host of senior GOP officials taking part in a series of behind-the-scenes deliberations.

The WinRed launch represented a major moment for the party. GOP strategists had for years hoped to consolidate around a singular fundraising platform that could rival ActBlue, but a factionalized system of vendors who warred over contracts, dollars, and attention prevented any single service from gaining traction or overwhelming market share.

The day WinRed went live, Trump took to Twitter to give it his endorsement — a move aimed at rallying Republicans around the system and heading off any rivals who could derail it.

“This new platform will allow my campaign and other Republicans to compete with the Democrats money machine,” Trump wrote. “This has been a priority of mine and I’m pleased to share that it is up and running!”

But last week Dietzel announced the founding of Give.GOP, a site that promises to give donors the “ability to contribute directly to the conservative candidates and political committees of their choosing.”

Dietzel has derided the party’s efforts to consolidate around a single platform as tantamount to socialism. And he has directly emailed rank-and-file RNC members to try to get them on board with his platform — a move that has rankled party officials.

Within GOP circles, Dietzel’s decision to launch Give.GOP was regarded as a survival tactic. The arrival of WinRed has posed a mortal threat to Anedot, a payment processor Dietzel founded in 2010 that has been widely used by Republican candidates and political groups.

Yet senior Republicans are deeply bothered by the creation of Give.GOP, arguing that the party needs to fully unify around WinRed for it to be successful — much as Democrats have almost universally embraced ActBlue. Republican officials contend that party givers will be confused about which platform to use now that Give.GOP is on the scene.

Republicans have launched an aggressive effort to ensure that party candidates and organizations are signing up to use WinRed. While the RNC has adopted a hardball approach, the House GOP campaign arm has offered incentives for lawmakers to use the new platform, giving them credit toward meeting their party dues payments — the amounts they are supposed to raise or donate to help fund the campaign committee.

Antonio Basco hugs a boy at the memorial service for his wife, Margie Reckard, at La Paz Faith Memorial and Spiritual Center in El Paso, Texas. Basco, who doesn’t have many local friends and family, invited the public to attend.

Earlier this month, Margie Reckard, 63, was gunned down along with 21 others in the El Paso, Texas, massacre that authorities believe was driven by racial hatred. Two weeks later, strangers amassed by the hundreds to honor Reckard and surround her widower, Antonio Basco.

“Never had so much love in my life,” Basco said on Friday as he beheld the crowds, many who waited in triple-digit heat to attend Reckard’s memorial service and support a man they had never met.

When Reckard was killed, she left behind Basco, her partner of 22 years, who considered her his only close family. The couple had moved to El Paso a few years earlier and didn’t have many local relatives and friends.

Basco was greeted with applause from the hundreds of attendees at the service for his wife, who was among the 22 people killed in the El Paso mass shooting earlier this month.

Powerful images of a solitary Basco crouching and weeping in front of Reckard’s makeshift memorial had spread on social media.

The funeral home where Reckard’s service had been planned put out a call on Facebook on Tuesday, issuing an open invitation. “Mr. Antonio Basco was Married for 22yrs to his wife Margie Reckard, He had no other family,” the post read. “He welcomes anyone to attend his Wife’s services.”

The response was overwhelming.

Harrison Johnson, funeral director at Perches Funeral Homes, told NPR that he quickly learned attendance would exceed its 250-person capacity. So he helped make arrangements to move the service to the larger La Paz Faith Memorial and Spiritual Center in El Paso.

“I think it was a way of the community to mourn the whole situation,” Salvador Perches, owner of Perches Funeral Home, said of the crowds at Margie Reckard’s memorial service.

It was there that people from across the country descended on Friday to wrap Basco in a communal embrace.

Jordan Ballard flew in from Los Angeles for a simple reason. “His story moved me,” she told The Associated Press.

Other attendees were local, like El Paso resident Raquel Henderson. For her, the Aug. 3 mass shooting at Walmart was personal.

“It’s like somebody came in and just violated my home,” she said.

Antonio Basco hugs a mourner. People came from across the country and waited in 100-degree heat to attend his wife’s service.

As Basco made his way through the attendees, they snapped pictures, wrapped him in hugs and issued well wishes in both English and Spanish.

“I love y’all, man,” Basco said, as he received the embraces, one after another.

People passed through the chapel, pausing to pay their respects, then moving along to make way for those waiting behind them.

For hours, the line stretched outside for several blocks.

“Since he opened it to the public, I think it was a way of the community to mourn the whole situation,” said Salvador Perches, owner of Perches Funeral Home, which handled Reckard’s burial for free.

When Basco entered the sanctuary, those in the pews rose and applauded. He doffed his hat and at times cried into a blue handkerchief.

When he bowed to kiss his wife’s casket, it was adorned by flower arrangements sent in from across the world.

“We lost count after 500,” Perches said.

“All I can say is that she was a really nice person,” said Estrella Duran, close friend of Reckard. “A lovely person.”

Duran said Reckard recently had surgery to treat her Parkinson’s disease and had been thrilled about the apparently successful outcome.

Tyler Reckard cries while attending the funeral service for his grandmother, Margie Reckard, Friday in El Paso.

Reckard had children from an earlier marriage. They attended the service Friday. Her son Dean told The New York Times she was a loving mother. “She would have been overwhelmed to see all the love El Paso showed her.”

Basco said he continues to visit Reckard’s makeshift memorial when he wants to feel closer to his wife.

Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Jonathan Levinson contributed to this report.

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Foreign adversaries are likely already planning to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election, the nation’s top intelligence official warned on Tuesday.

In a worldwide threat assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats wrote that competitors such as Russia, China and Iran “probably already are looking to the 2020 U.S. elections as an opportunity to advance their interests.”

In his statement, he predicted that these countries "will use online influence operations to try to weaken democratic institutions, undermine U.S. alliances and partnerships and shape policy outcomes in the United States and elsewhere."

Furthermore, he said, they’ll "refine their capabilities and add new tactics as they learn from each other’s experiences, suggesting the threat landscape could look very different in 2020 and future elections."

The prognosis comes roughly a month after Coats revealed Moscow attempted to interfere in last year’s midterm elections, but failed to compromise the country’s election systems. Tuesday’s assessment notes that “unidentified actors” attacked election infrastructure in 2018.

The emphasis on the topic also shows that the clandestine community remains keenly aware of the threat following the massive, Kremlin-backed assault on the 2016 presidential election.

The assessment offered by Coats, based on input from the entire U.S. intelligence community, predicts Russian social media campaigns will focus on "aggravating" social and racial tensions and striking back at anti-Kremlin politicians. Moscow may also seek to spread disinformation, launch cyberattacks and manipulate data.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a 2020 presidential contender, pressed Coats on whether the intelligence community had a written strategy for tackling social media influence campaigns

Coats repeatedly said the overall effort to counter such campaigns is a “fluid situation” and that he was not exactly sure if a written plan “would give us anything more,” predicting such a document would need to be “modified daily.”

A recurring theme during the hearing centered on how American adversaries, whether Russia, China or Iran, could more effectively use digital influence campaigns to advance their interests.

In his written assessment, Coats warned about countries creating convincing fake audio and video — known as "deepfakes," for instance. They may also use cyber means to "directly manipulate or disrupt election systems — such as by tampering with voter registration or disrupting the vote tallying process — either to alter data or to call into question our voting process."

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Testifying before the committee, Coats, himself a former panel member, said election security remains a “top priority for the intelligence community” and that it is busy “incorporating lessons learned” ahead of the 2020 elections.

However, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) asked him on why committee members haven’t seen the intelligence community’s assessment on interference in the midterms, noting lawmakers had only received an oral briefing on the examination.

Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) quickly interjected that he and Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the panel’s top Democrat, had seen the assessment and would request it to be shown to their colleagues. "We will make every effort to open the aperture,” he said.

Appearing alongside Coats, FBI Director Chris Wray agreed that Russia would continue to use social media to sow discontent in U.S., adding the Kremlin is adapting its model and other countries are “taking a very interested eye.”

Wray said that social media influence campaigns are a “particularly vexing and challenging problem" for the bureau. Yet, he said, the FBI continues to work with government partners and tech companies to counter online disinformation and fake accounts.

Coats, likewise, pointed to “significant progress” with the private sector on the issue and is “encouraged” after visits to some of the tech firms.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) asked NSA Director Army Gen. Paul Nakasone if anything had changed since last year when he said nations such as Russia and China had not paid a price for nefarious digital activities.

Nakasone said he believes the U.S. showed "effectiveness" at keeping Russia from meddling in the November midterms. However, he said, “whether or not that spawns long-term behavior change, I think that’s still to be determined."

On the heels of a new Iowa Poll, presidential contender Bernie Sanders said Sunday he doesn’t see any candidate, including himself, getting more that 50 percent in February’s Iowa caucuses because of the large field of nearly two dozen Democratic candidates.

“Four years ago, there were only two of us in the race, and we split the vote about 50 percent each,” Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “This time, we’ve got a whole lot of candidates. … We’re not going to get 50 percent of the vote in Iowa. I don’t think anybody will.”

The Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll, published Saturday, shows former Vice President Joe Biden in first place with 24 percent support, an 8-percentage-point lead over Sanders.

The race for second was closer: 16 percent of respondents backed Sanders, 15 percent backed Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and 14 percent supported South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Conducted June 2-5 by the Iowa-based polling firm Selzer & Co., the survey of 600 likely Democratic caucusgoers has an overall margin of error of 4 percentage points.

Speaking in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Sanders plans to march with McDonald’s workers, the Vermont senator expressed confidence that his campaign would win the state and New Hampshire.

“I think we have a very strong chance of being the candidate who will defeat the worst president in the modern history of this country, Donald Trump,” Sanders said.

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Joe Biden’s all-too-friendly touching of women in the MeToo era was supposed to be toxic to his presidential campaign. Critics thought his flip flop on subsidized abortions would show how deeply out of touch he was with the modern Democratic Party.

The latest controversy buffeting his campaign — his statements about his working relationships with Dixiecrat segregationists when they served in the U.S. Senate together more than 40 years ago — has chewed through news cycles for the past week.

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Yet none of it seems to have damaged his standing in the race.

Biden remains the front-runner in national polls and in the four early states. And according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll taken several days after his comments about the racist lawmakers made headlines, his most recent flap isn’t hurting his chances in a significant way.

After hearing about Biden’s comments on working with multiple segregationists, 41 percent of likely primary voters said it would make no difference to them and 29 percent said they would be more likely to vote for him. Just 18 percent said they would be less likely to vote for him. The numbers were about the same for black voters: 30 percent said they would be more likely to vote for Biden, 20 percent said less likely and 27 percent said it made no difference.

Morning Consult’s weekly tracking poll of the Democratic primary, conducted last Monday through Sunday, shows Biden leading the field with 38 percent support, identical to his share of the vote the week prior.

It’s the latest data point suggesting that Biden’s candidacy might be more durable than presumed — and that his campaign might have a more accurate feel for the mood and composition of the Democratic electorate than many of his rivals and critics.

“Every time there’s been what would be considered a bad week for Biden — or the issue that’s going to kill him — it hasn’t happened,” said John Anzalone, Biden’s chief pollster. “What the press thinks is a big deal or a death knell just isn’t to voters.”

Much of the conventional wisdom has so far been wrong about Biden — that his best day in polls would be his first as a candidate, that he wouldn’t be able to raise enough money to compete, that he was too moderate, too old or too white for the modern Democratic Party.

After entering the primary exactly two months ago as the front-runner with a 2-to-1 lead over his next-closest rival, Biden is essentially in the same position today.

That would appear to validate the campaign’s theory that the Democratic base isn’t nearly as liberal or youthful as everyone thinks, and that the media is mistaking the disproportionately progressive Democratic voices on Twitter for the sentiments of the wider Democratic electorate.

Anzalone said elite opinion-makers and the chorus of progressive voices, notably New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, don’t reflect the party.

“Sometimes the media narrative is that this is an AOC convention. It’s not,” the Democratic pollster said. “Just like the narrative that the Democratic primary is some ultra-liberal incubator. It isn’t.”

Anzalone contends that Biden’s “stability” shows that another tenet of conventional wisdom is probably wrong — the idea that the former vice president’s support is built on mere name identification.

“We’re beyond ‘oh, this is name ID.’ This is attachment,” Anzalone said. “Voters know this guy.”

Still, while polls show Biden with a strong lead over nearly two dozen Democratic rivals, roughly two-thirds of Democrats aren’t sold on his candidacy. Primary voters are also telling pollsters they’re not completely committed to one candidate, they haven’t fully tuned in and that they don’t know as much about many of the others in the race.

So the cumulative weight of Biden’s troubles could ultimately be too much for him to bear as voters pay more attention. On Thursday, voters will get their first chance to measure him and nine of his opponents together on stage at the Democrats’ first presidential debate in Miami.

Biden will be literally center stage in his most-unscripted setting yet for a prolonged period of time. The moment will carry some risk since he will invariably be targeted by some of his rivals. And it will take him out of the protective cocoon his campaign has effectively wrapped him in.

In two months as a candidate, Biden has avoided nearly every major candidate cattle-call event hosted by Democratic and liberal groups, even at the expense of leaving some of them steamed. He has had just three sit-down interviews with national media outlets and 12 with local outlets. On the campaign trail, Biden seldom engages in question-and-answer gaggles with reporters, though they are permitted access to cover his speeches at fundraisers (which are usually closed to the press).

The first sustained contact with his rivals at Thursday’s debate — where the segregationist flap and Biden’s positions on abortion are likely to be revisited — could test his resilience.

Former Nevada Assemblywoman and lieutenant governor candidate Lucy Flores, who sparked the controversy over Biden’s physical touching earlier this year by going public with her account of an inappropriate encounter in 2014, said Biden’s status in the polls doesn’t mean much this early in the campaign — seven months before the caucuses for first-in-the-nation Iowa.

“[It’s] a disservice to continue to talk about polls when we have clearly seen how unreliable polls have become, and we should continue to focus on each candidate and the issues,” said Flores. “The election is about vetting and getting to know them better. That’s happening and only time will tell if what their campaign is selling is actually what a diverse electorate actually wants.”

Kamala Harris said police shootings and cases of alleged brutality by law enforcement officials should be handed off to independent investigators, breaking with her long-held resistance to taking prosecutorial discretion away from locally elected district attorneys.

Harris, a former career prosecutor and California attorney general, had long advocated in favor of preserving prosecutorial discretion, taking heat from civil rights activists and African American leaders in her state. While running for Senate in 2016, she was criticized for withholding her support for state legislation requiring the Attorney General’s office to independently probe fatal police shootings. Now, campaigning for president, Harris was asked about her stance amid calls for more scrutiny over the investigative process.

“I believe the best approach is to have independent investigations,” Harris said in a Monday interview on MSNBC.

When Harris addressed the question head-on in 2014, she took the opposite approach. Harris said she didn’t think it good public policy to take the discretion from elected district attorneys. “I don’t think there’s an inherent conflict. … Where there are abuses, we have designed the system to address them,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Harris never took over an officer-involved fatality investigation while serving as attorney general. But late in the 2016 Senate run, a spokeswoman for Harris told the Chronicle that the then-attorney general did advocate to the governor and Democratic legislative leaders for money in the state budget to create three new teams within her office to conduct criminal investigations of officer-involved shootings. The goal, which was never fulfilled because the budget request was denied, was to deploy state attorneys in deaths resulting from these cases, a Harris aide told POLITICO.

Harris’ remarks on the subject Monday appear to be the first time she’s advocated for a blanket approach to independent probes. Pressed on her evolution on the subject, Harris pointed to a seminal case from early in her elected career. As district attorney of San Francisco, she recalled how she refused to seek the death penalty against a gang member who fatally shot a city police officer in 2004, sparking criticism from both sides. Harris noted there were calls at the time for the marquee case to be taken away from her.

“I had a very real, personal experience where I had to fight to keep my case — and my argument was, ‘I was elected to exercise my discretion, and no one’s going to take my case from me,’” Harris said in the MSNBC interview. “It was that personal experience that informed my principle, which is that these cases shouldn’t be taken from the person who was elected to exercise their discretion.”

But Harris said it’s now clear to her that there needs to be an independent entity brought in to probe the recurring shootings and brutality by police officers from the beginning. Such probes are needed, Harris said, “from the first moments of the incident so that we can be certain and sure that there has been a thorough investigation that is not informed by bias, and so that there will be justice for all of the people concerned.”

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