Daily Political Briefing
July 13, 2021, 2:19 p.m. ETJust days after President Biden called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and demanded that he act to shut down ransomware groups that are attacking American targets, the biggest of them has gone off-line. The mystery is who made that happen.
The group, called REvil, short for “Ransomware evil,” is believed responsible for the attack that brought down one of America’s largest beef producers, JBS, and it took credit for a hack that affected thousands of businesses around the world over the July 4 holiday. On Friday, describing his ultimatum to the Russian president, Mr. Biden said “we expect them to act,” and when asked later if he would take down the group’s servers if Mr. Putin did not, the president simply said, “Yes.”
But that is only one possible explanation for what happened around 1 a.m. on Tuesday, when the group’s sites on the dark web suddenly disappeared. Gone was the publicly-available “happy blog’’ that the group maintained, listing its victims, and internet security groups said the custom-made sites where victims negotiate with REvil over how much they will pay to get their data unlocked were also missing.
While their disappearance was celebrated by many who see ransomware as a new scourge, one that Mr. Biden has called a critical national security threat, it left others in the lurch — unable to pay the ransom to get their data back, and their businesses back up and running.
“What’s the plan for the victims?” asked Kurtis Minder, the chief executive of Groupsense, a digital risk protection company that was negotiating with the extortionists on behalf of a regional law firm whose data was stolen.
There were three main theories floating around about why REvil, which seemed to revel in the publicity and reaped huge ransoms — including $11 million from JBS — suddenly disappeared.
One is that Mr. Biden ordered the United States Cyber Command, working with domestic law enforcement agencies, including the F.B.I., to bring it down. Cyber Command proved last year that it could do just that, paralyzing a ransomware group that it feared might turn its skills to freezing up voter registrations or other election data in the 2020 election.
The second theory is that Mr. Putin ordered the group taken down by Russia. If so, that would be a gesture toward heeding Mr. Biden’s warning, which he offered, in more general terms, when the two leaders met June 16 in Geneva.
And a third is that REvil decided that the heat was too intense, and took itself down to avoid becoming part of the crossfire between the American and Russian presidents. That is what another Russian-based group, Darkside, did after the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, the U.S. company that had to shut down the gasoline and jet fuel running up the East Coast in May.
But many experts think that Darkside’s going-out-of-business move was digital theater, and that all of the key ransomware talent would reassemble under a different name. If so, the same could happen with REvil.
Just a few months ago, ransomware was considered largely a criminal problem. But after the attack on Colonial Pipeline, Mr. Biden and his advisers began to declare that attacks which threaten critical infrastructure constitute a major national security threat.
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‘We Are Not Going to Buckle,’ Texas Democrats Say on Voting Rights
Democrats in the Texas legislature traveled to Washington in an effort to prevent the passage of a restrictive new voting law in their state. The legislature is G.O.P.-controlled, and Democrats hope the trip puts their cause in the national spotlight.
We’re not doing this for Democrats, we’re doing this for Republicans, we’re doing this for independents, we’re doing this for North Texans and South Texans and East and West Texans. We’re doing this for Catholics and Protestants. Anybody in the state of Texas who needs to exercise the right to vote should do so freely. And we are not going to buckle to the big lie in the state of Texas, the big lie that has resulted, that has resulted in anti-democratic legislation throughout the United States. We said no when the big lie came to the Capitol in Texas and darkened our door, we said no during the regular session. And we are saying no during the regular session. We are here in D.C., our nation’s capital, because we want to protect the civil right to vote for millions of Texans. We were quite literally forced to move and leave the state of Texas. We also know that we are living right now on borrowed time in Texas, and we can’t stay here indefinitely to run out the clock to stop Republican anti-voter bills. That’s why we need Congress to act now and pass the For the People Act.
President Biden will travel to Philadelphia on Tuesday to deliver a speech on voting rights as Republicans in state legislatures across the country are seeking to pass measures restricting voting access and as a Democratic effort to overhaul the system has faltered in Congress.
The trip to the birthplace of American democracy is meant to provide a powerful backdrop for Mr. Biden as he tries to revive an embattled centerpiece of his domestic agenda and address a rising feeling among Democrats and civil rights activists that the White House has not done enough to put the issue front and center.
In his speech, Mr. Biden is expected to outline all of the ways his administration is working to further voting access. He is expected to highlight the vice president’s efforts to support voter registration and education. He will likely reinforce the idea that the current crop of Republican statehouse efforts meant to restrict voting access were inspired by a lie that voter fraud upset the 2020 election.
“He will redouble his commitment to using every tool at his disposal to continue to fight to protect the fundamental right of Americans to vote,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday. Ms. Psaki also said that Mr. Biden was prepared to “decry efforts to strip the right to vote as authoritarian,” a distinction he has usually reserved for hostile foreign governments.
But absent from the outline detailed by Ms. Psaki is any plan to address growing demand from activists that he call for Democrats to unite behind a change in filibuster rules. Rolling back the filibuster would allow two pieces of ambitious voting rights legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority vote.
In an interview on Monday, the Rev. Al Sharpton said that he and several other civil rights leaders pushed Mr. Biden to add such an entreaty to Democrats in his speech.
“We encouraged him to make a real appeal to all of the Democrats to get in line,” Mr. Sharpton said, recalling a meeting he and several other civil rights leaders had at the White House with Mr. Biden late last week. “I think he heard us, but I don’t know.”
Mr. Biden’s speech in Philadelphia comes as Democrats see a worrying increase in efforts to restrict voting, along with court rulings that would make it harder to fight back against those efforts. A Supreme Court ruling this month weakened the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court invalidated its major provision in 2013. Mr. Biden said a year ago that strengthening the act would be one of his first priorities upon taking office.
While they wait for federal action that may not come, Democrats in states that are passing restrictive laws are resorting to dramatic action to draw national attention to what they feel is an assault on American democracy.
On Monday, a bevy of Texas Democrats flew on chartered planes to Washington to prevent Republicans in their state from attaining a quorum, a temporary way to delay the Texas Legislature from taking up the restrictive voting measures introduced in the State Senate and State House.
Both measures would ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; prohibit election officials from proactively sending out absentee ballot applications to voters who have not requested them; add new voter identification requirements for voting by mail; limit third-party ballot collection; increase the criminal penalties for election workers who run afoul of regulations; limit what assistance can be provided to voters; and greatly expand the authority and autonomy of partisan poll watchers.
The restrictions mirror key provisions of a restrictive law passed in Georgia earlier this year, which went even further to assert Republican control over the State Election Board and empower the G.O.P. to suspend county election officials. In June, the Department of Justice sued Georgia over the law, the first significant move of the Biden administration to challenge voter restrictions at the state level.
Activists say Mr. Biden’s speech on Thursday will show them just how willing he is to spend political capital on the issue at a time when his other agenda items, including an infrastructure package, are subject to delicate negotiations in Congress.
“I think people are looking for his actions to match his rhetoric on this,” Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for the anti-filibuster group Fix Our Senate, said in an interview. “No amount of turnout operations or D.O.J. actions can make up for failure to pass legislation.”
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The Morning newsletter broke down the major themes in the restrictive state voting measures that Republicans are passing in state legislatures around the country.
Increase partisan control
So far, at least 14 states have enacted laws that give partisan officials more control over election oversight — potentially allowing those politicians to overturn an election result, as Donald J. Trump urged state-level Republicans to do last year after he lost his bid for re-election.
In Georgia, a Republican-controlled commission now has the power to remove local election officials, and has already removed some. Arkansas has empowered a state board to “take over and conduct elections” in a county if the G.O.P.-dominated legislature deems it is necessary. Arizona Republicans took away the Democratic secretary of state’s authority over election lawsuits and gave it to the Republican attorney general.
It’s not hard to imagine how Republican legislators could use some of these new rules to disqualify enough ballots to flip the result of a very close election — like, say, last year’s presidential election in Arizona or Georgia. The election-administration provisions, The Times’s Nate Cohn has written, are “the most insidious and serious threat to democracy” in the new bills.
Making voting harder
Many Republican politicians believe that they are less likely to win elections when voter turnout is high and have passed laws that generally make voting more difficult.
Some of the new laws restrict early voting: Iowa, for example, has shortened the early-voting period to 20 days from 29 and reduced poll hours on Election Day. Other states have made it harder to vote by mail: Florida has reduced the hours for ballot drop-off boxes and will also require voters to request a new mail ballot for each election.
Notably, some of the provisions are targeted at areas and groups that lean Democratic — like Black, Latino and younger voters. Georgia has lowered the number of drop boxes allowed for the metropolitan Atlanta area to an estimated 23 from 94 — while increasing drop boxes in some other parts of the state. Texas Republicans hope to ban drive-through voting and other measures that Harris County, a Democratic stronghold, adopted last year. Montana has ruled that student IDs are no longer a sufficient form of voter identification.
And the impact?
That’s not so easy to figure out. The laws certainly have the potential to accomplish their goal of reducing Democratic turnout more than Republican turnout. In closely divided states like Arizona, Florida or Georgia — or in a swing congressional district — even a small effect could determine an election.
David Leonhardt and
A Labor Department report on Tuesday that showed prices rising at their fastest monthly pace since 2008 in June presents a new political challenge for President Biden’s economic team, which has quietly concluded that rising prices could linger in the economy slightly longer than administration officials initially expected.
Mr. Biden’s aides continue to say that the current rate of inflation — a 5.4 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index from a year ago, according to the data released on Tuesday — is temporary and largely a product of special circumstances from the pandemic. They point to snarled supply chains in areas like automobile manufacturing, where a shortage of semiconductor chips is slowing production and contributing to a rapid rise in used car and truck prices. Used vehicles accounted for one third of June’s price increases, the Labor Department said.
Administration officials did not appear to be expecting that magnitude of a surge for June. But they continued to insist on Tuesday that the pressures were not going to lead to 1970s-style calamity.
“Headline inflation is up but we need to look under the hood to understand what’s really going on,” Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “Used cares, new cars, auto parts, and car rentals accounted for 60% of month-over-month price increases.”
The Biden team sees early signs that the used-car market is beginning to cool off and that other supply pressures, like a jump in lumber prices earlier this year, were also starting to ease, an official said Monday on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the inflation report publicly.
Officials were also hopeful that consumers were beginning to shift more of their spending from goods that have been affected by the supply chain disruptions, like lumber and cars, toward services like dining and tourism.
The official repeated the administration’s long-running view that the sharp uptick in prices this spring and summer was the product of those supply constraints, and that it will prove temporary and not the start of a sustained cycle of wage and price increases like the 1970s.
The administration also continues to view the price increases as being inflated by data quirks given that prices fell substantially last year during the depths of the recession, making their rebound this year look larger than it actually is. Those “base effects,” as they are known, are still affecting the inflation data, though they began to moderate in June.
Still, administration officials have subtly shifted their views on how long the so-called transitory price effects will linger in the economy, according to two administration officials, even before this month’s report was released.
In Mr. Biden’s official budget request, released this spring, officials forecast an inflation rate that stayed near historical averages for 2021 and never rose past 2.3 percent per year over the course of a decade. But internally and publicly, administration officials have now begun to acknowledge the possibility that higher inflation could stay with the economy for a year or more.
A recent post from Mr. Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, titled “Historical Parallels to Today’s Inflationary Episode,” concludes that the past period of inflation most comparable to today’s economy in the United States came immediately after World War II, when supply disruptions drove up prices. That period, the post notes, lasted about two years.
Democrats in Iowa have been increasingly locked out of power, and with major offices on the ballot next year, the party’s bench is thin. On Tuesday, one of the state’s best known Democrats, J.D. Scholten, took himself out of the running for governor or U.S. Senate in 2022, instead saying he will work for a progressive group that seeks rural votes in battleground states.
Mr. Scholten nearly defeated former Representative Steve King in 2018, setting up Mr. King’s eventual demise as the House’s most outspoken white nationalist. Mr. Scholten considered running for statewide office in 2020, but also passed that year.
Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, is expected to seek a second term in 2022. Senator Charles E. Grassley, also a Republican, has said he would announce in the fall whether he will run for an eighth term next year, when he would be 89 on Election Day.
The lone Democrat in Iowa’s congressional delegation, Representative Cindy Axne, who survived major losses for her party last year, is Democrats’ top choice for a statewide run. She has said she is considering challenging for either Mr. Grassley’s or Ms. Reynolds’s seat, but has made no public decision. Other Democrats eyeing statewide runs are State Representative Ras Smith, who has declared his candidacy for governor, and Rob Sands, the state auditor.
Winning either seat will be a tough slog for the party, which in 2020 lost two congressional seats in Iowa and a U.S. Senate race.
Mr. Scholten came within three percentage points of defeating the divisive Mr. King in a deep red district in 2018. The Republican establishment in Washington and Des Moines, fearing for the loss of the seat in 2020, backed a more conventional candidate in that year’s primary, who ousted Mr. King and easily cruised to victory in the general election against Mr. Scholten.
Now, Mr. Scholten, 41, a former professional baseball player, will become executive director of RuralVote.org, a super PAC that aims to “improve the Democratic brand in rural communities” and counter what it calls Republican “misinformation.’’ In 2020, the group’s first election cycle, it raised $313,000 and says it placed 42,500 yard signs in rural areas. For the midterms, it is targeting 39 counties in battleground states.
“Democrats need to stop ignoring rural voters,” Mr. Scholten said in a statement. “One of the reasons why we continue to lose statehouses across the country is because we’re ceding rural America to Republicans. If we want to win over hearts and minds for progressive policies everywhere, we need to up our game in rural America big time.”
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A federal judge in Michigan held a nearly six-hour hearing on Monday seeking to determine whether nine pro-Trump lawyers — including Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood — should face sanctions for making unverified arguments in a lawsuit that sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The judge, Linda V. Parker, repeatedly pressed the lawyers about how — and even whether — they had verified the statements of several witnesses who took part in the suit by filing sworn statements making claims of widespread fraud and tampering with voting machines. Several times, Judge Parker expressed astonishment at the lawyers’ answers, telling them they had a responsibility to perform “minimal due diligence” and calling some the lawsuit’s claims “fantastical.”
After the election, Ms. Powell, a Dallas-based lawyer, led an effort to attack President Biden’s victory by filing several suits in courts across the country claiming that tabulation machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were tampered with by a bizarre set of characters — from the financier George Soros to Venezuelan intelligence agents — in what she baselessly described as a covert plot to flip votes from President Donald J. Trump to Mr. Biden.
Dominion subsequently filed a defamation suit against Ms. Powell and others, including Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, accusing them of launching “a viral disinformation campaign” about the election and seeking damages of more than $1 billion.
Judge Parker, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, is considering a separate motion, filed by the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit, on whether to levy punishments against Ms. Powell, Mr. Wood and the other lawyers that could include disbarment. A ruling is not expected on the motion until later this summer.
President Biden took office with bold warnings for Russia and China about human rights as he pressed democracies around the world to stand up against autocracy. But this week, he is facing a string of similar challenges in America’s neighborhood.
On Monday, a day after huge protests across Cuba, Mr. Biden accused officials there of “enriching themselves” instead of protecting people from the coronavirus pandemic, repression and economic suffering.
An hour later, the State Department announced it was revoking visas that had allowed 100 Nicaraguan politicians, judges and their family members to travel to the United States, as punishment for undermining democracy, suppressing peaceful protests or abusing human rights.
By early afternoon, Mr. Biden refocused on Haiti, urging its political leaders to “come together for the good of their country,” less than a week after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bed.
“The United States stands ready to continue to provide assistance,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House. He promised more details on Haiti and Cuba later: “Stay tuned,” he said.
The turmoil presents a potential crisis closer to home, with a possible exodus of Haitians as the Biden administration contends with a surge of migrants at the southwestern border. It is also forcing the White House to focus on the region more broadly after years of indifference — or limited attention — from previous Republican and Democratic administrations.
But U.S. influence began waning in the region over the past decade, as it turned toward fighting terrorism in the Middle East and as Russia and especially China moved in to finance projects and offer political support and other incentives.
Ryan C. Berg, a senior fellow and scholar in the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that China was now the top trading partner for at least eight Latin American nations, and that 19 countries in the region were participating in Beijing’s extensive infrastructure and investment project, known as the Belt and Road Initiative.
If all goes as planned, the Treasury Department will begin making a series of monthly payments in coming days to families with children, setting a milestone in social policy and intensifying a debate over whether to make the subsidies a permanent part of the American safety net.
With all but the most affluent families eligible to receive up to $300 a month per child, the United States will join many other rich countries that provide a guaranteed income for children, a goal that has long animated progressives. Experts estimate the payments will cut child poverty by nearly half, an achievement with no precedent.
But the program, created as part of the stimulus bill that Democrats passed over unified Republican opposition in March, expires in a year, and the rollout could help or hinder President Biden’s pledge to extend it.
While the government has increased many aid programs during the coronavirus pandemic, supporters say the payments from an expanded Child Tax Credit, at a one-year cost of about $105 billion, are unique in their potential to stabilize both poor and middle-class families.
“America is dramatically behind its industrial peers in investing in our children,” said Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey.
Among America’s 74 million children, nearly nine in 10 will qualify for the new monthly payments — up to $250 a child, or $300 for children under six — which are scheduled to start on Thursday. Those payments, most of which will be sent to bank accounts through direct deposit, will be half of the year’s subsidy. The rest will come as a tax refund next year.
Mr. Biden has proposed a four-year extension in a broader package, called the American Families Plan, but the program’s fate may depend on whether Democrats can unite and advance it through the evenly divided Senate.
The unconditional payments — what critics call “welfare” — break with a quarter century of policy. Since President Bill Clinton signed a 1996 bill to “end welfare,” aid has gone almost entirely to parents who work.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, recently wrote that the new payments, with “no work required,” would resurrect a “failed welfare system,” and provide “free money” for criminals and addicts.
A few conservatives, however, support subsidies for children, on the theory they might boost falling birthrates and allow more parents to raise children full-time. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, has proposed a larger child benefit, though he would finance it by cutting other programs.
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