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A decision in favor of Tsarnev would put President Biden in a difficult position. The initial decision to seek the death penalty in Tsarnaev's case was made by Barack Obama's administration — during Biden's tenure as vice president. But Biden pledged during his presidential campaign to push for the elimination of the death penalty in the federal system.

The appeals panel said the judge who presided over Tsarnaev's trial, U.S. District Judge George A. O'Toole, had rejected the defense team's request for a more distant trial venue, one where prospective jurors might be less likely to be biased against Tsarnaev than in eastern Massachusetts, and the panel maintained the judge committed other important trial errors that barred adequate screening of prospective jurors.

Appeals Judge Juan Torruella, who died late last year, said that the district judge stopped Tsarnaev's counsel from asking prospective jurors questions such as what they knew about the case before coming to court or what stood out to them from the media coverage they had seen about the bombing and its aftermath.

Torruella wrote that the district judge had relied on "self-declarations of impartiality" by prospective jurors, some of whom admitted before the trial that they were convinced Tsarnaev was guilty.For example, Torruella noted that the woman who became the jury's foreperson withheld from the court dozens of relevant social media comments that mourned the death of an 8-year-old victim, praised law enforcement officers and called Tsarnaev "a piece of garbage."

The ruling from last July ordered the District Court to impanel a new jury to hold a sentencing retrial for the death penalty convictions. But the appeals panel noted that Tsarnaev, who told the courtroom on the day of his sentencing that he was "guilty of this attack," would remain in prison for the rest of his life regardless of whether the death sentence is imposed.

The Trump administration prioritized carrying out federal executions in its final year — resuming a practice that had been paused for nearly two decades and prompting pushback from activists and lawmakers.In the final six months of the administration, 13 people on death row in the federal system were executed, including three in the week before Biden took office.

In its final months, the administration executed 13 inmates, more than a fifth of the prisoners that the Bureau of Prisons considered to be on death row. The inauguration of Mr. Biden — who promised during the campaign to work to end federal capital punishment — almost certainly marked the end of that string of executions.

In 2000, the state executed a man who was 17 when he murdered his girlfriend’s parents. About five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the execution of those who were minors at the time of their crimes was unconstitutional. Additionally, a case out of Virginia prompted the Supreme Court in 2002 to abolish the death penalty for those with intellectual disabilities.

The bill, which the Virginia House and Senate passed last month, stipulates that the sentences of the remaining death row inmates be converted to life in prison without eligibility for parole. The inmates will also not qualify for good conduct allowance, sentence credits or conditional release. Where there were once dozens of prisoners on the state’s death row, now there will be none.

“People are going to be looking at them going, ‘What in the world were those people thinking doing that?’” he said. He compared Virginia’s historical use of the death penalty to the Trump administration’s spasm of executions in its final months.

If Virginia is any indication, Republican support for abolishing capital punishment at the federal level is unlikely.

“could metaphorically be heard at the grave sites of those five crime victims,” Mr. Bell said during the hearing. “We have five dead Virginians that are not, that this bill will make sure that their killers do not receive justice.”

“Ending the death penalty comes down to one fundamental question, one question: Is it fair?” said Gov. Ralph Northam, who signed the bill on Wednesday.

The bill’s signing comes as President Biden faces pressure from members of his own party to commute the sentences of the remaining inmates on federal death row.

On Wednesday, State Senator Scott Surovell, a Democrat, visited the execution chamber for the first time since the early 1990s, when he toured the facility as a governor’s fellow. The gurney was new, Mr. Surovell said, adding that the same wooden chair remained but that there were also at least two digital clocks on the white walls that he did not recall.

“It’s a long, bloody history, and it’s astonishing that a state like Virginia, a former Confederate state, a state that so enthusiastically embraced the death penalty, is abolishing it,” Mr. Peppers said. “I never thought I’d see this.”

"It depends on when we get the paper from the Senate," Pelosi said on Monday. "It has to be very precise, and it takes time to do that. It has some changes that they have to precisely write. It could be that we get it tomorrow afternoon and then it has to go to Rules. And we'd take it up Wednesday morning at the latest."

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Monday that the relief bill had not made its way back to the House yet. "I talked to Leader Schumer. He said as soon as they could get it ready, but it was complicated and they were working on it," Hoyer said when asked about the delay in sending the bill back to the House.

that a final vote on the bill could come Tuesday or Wednesday.

"We are very excited that this bill will pass imminently. If not today, it will be scheduled for a vote tomorrow," Clarke said

The Senate version of the bill largely mirrors the $1.9 trillion package first approved by the House and laid out by President Joe Biden in January.

The sweeping aid legislation originally passed the Democrat-controlled House at the end of February, but it needs to be taken up in the chamber again following changes made to the legislation in the Senate.

The nearly $2 trillion package includes a slate of Democratic priorities, including up to $1,400 stimulus checks to many Americans, and billions of dollars for states and municipalities, schools, small businesses and vaccine distribution. It also extends a 15% increase in food stamp benefits from June to September, helps low-income households cover rent, makes federal premium subsidies for Affordable Care Act policies more generous and gives $8.5 billion for struggling rural hospitals and health care providers.

Pelosi said she does not expect more Democrats to vote against the bill because of the changes that were made in the Senate, saying, "I think more will vote for it," and that she felt "sad" for Republicans who will vote against it

Asked about bipartisanship, Clark told Berman this is a "time of great divide" but said they'll find issues to work on together. She also said the lack of support by Republicans on certain measures was "stunning."

Progressive Democrats have expressed frustration over changes made to the legislation, but top progressives are not signaling that they will jeopardize its passage in the House.

"I don't think that the changes the Senate made were good policy or good politics," Jayapal said. "However, they were relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, with the exception of course in the $15 minimum wage."

An estimated 11.4 million workers will lose their unemployment benefits between mid-March and mid-April unless Congress passes its next coronavirus relief package quickly, a recent study by The Century Foundation found.

The rift between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence has dominated their final days in office — not least because the vice president has the power under the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office with support of the cabinet. The House voted on Tuesday demanding that Mr. Pence take such action or else it would impeach Mr. Trump.

The clash is the third time in 20 years that a departing president and vice president came to conflict in their last days.

Mr. Pence ultimately discovered that loyalty to Mr. Trump only matters until it does not. Tension between the two had grown in recent months as the president railed privately about Mr. Pence.

When Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results were rejected at every turn by state officials and judges, Mr. Trump was told, incorrectly, that the vice president could stop the final validation of the election of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. in his role as president of the Senate presiding over the Electoral College count.

On Thursday, the day after the siege, Mr. Pence stayed away from the White House, avoiding Mr. Trump. The next day, he went in, but spent most of the day at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door, where he held a farewell party for his staff.

Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence plans to attend Mr. Biden’s inauguration, then expects to divide time between Washington and Indiana, possibly starting a leadership political committee, writing a book and campaigning for congressional Republicans.

"It was a powerful moment because he did his own eulogy."

The following day, Ester and a number of King supporters, gathered at the Lorraine Motel, where the civil rights leader was staying.

"All of a sudden what sounded like a truck backfiring goes off and I can hear people saying, 'Get down, get down!' "

"I'm looking, still, at Dr. King being thrown back and I take off and I run up the steps. And when I get up to where he's laying, I notice this pool of blood around his head,"

In that moment, kneeling over his body, Ester said King's fateful words from the night before were echoing in her head: I may not get there with you. I may not get there with you.

hate "took over." It stemmed, she said, from "white America [who] don't want to see us with freedom, so you take out our leader, our king."

"Every time I want to believe that Dr. King's life changed everything — I've witnessed George Floyds and so many others that have lost their lives," Ester said, referring to the man fatally killed by Minneapolis police last May.

Still, in contemplating what King's legacy has meant after decades of violence against Black people, Clara said, "You think that's gonna destroy his dream? Y'all are wrong. I think children years and years to come will continue to have his dream."

About 75 percent of the public said Mr. Trump bore some responsibility for the violence and destruction of Jan. 6, which put the lives of the vice president and members of Congress at risk and resulted in five deaths, according to the survey.

encouraged supporters who do not view President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. as legitimate, and refused to concede — has cost Mr. Trump support even with those individuals who have loyally supported him up until now.

Mr. Biden, in contrast, has benefited from how he has handled the transition period. About 64 percent of voters said they had a positive opinion of his conduct since the November election. The majority of voters said they also approved of his cabinet selections.

Mr. Trump’s polling while in office has been surprisingly stagnant, despite regular eruptions from the president

About 34 percent of respondents said they believed Mr. Trump was “definitely” or “probably” the rightful election winner.

Mr. Trump’s advisers have tried to play up that base of loyal support to him, noting that there are “welcome home” events planned for his arrival in Florida on Wednesday. They have also planned an upbeat send-off on the morning of Jan. 20 to commemorate his final departure from Washington as president, aboard Air Force One

Not only has he made history as the first president to be impeached twice. But he appears to be on track to leave office with the lowest approval rating of any modern-day president.

The federal death chamber, at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., likely will be mothballed after Mr. Higgs’s execution. No further executions currently are scheduled, and Mr. Biden, who has called for the legal abolition of capital punishment, is unlikely to approve any others. With Mr. Higgs’s execution, 50 inmates will remain on the federal death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which is critical of capital punishment.

Mr. Higgs delivered a final statement before he was put to death. “The tone of his voice when he said his final words was calm but in substance Higgs was defiant,” according to an Associated Press pool report. “‘I’d like to say I am an innocent man,’ he said, mentioning the three women by name. ‘I did not order the murders.’”

Following the execution, the prison released a statement addressed to Mr. Higgs from Ms. Jackson’s younger sister, whom it did not identify by name. “When the day is over, your death will not bring my sister and the other victims back. This is not closure, this is the consequence of your actions,” it said.

The government, arguing that litigating the issue would needlessly delay Mr. Higgs’s execution, asked the Supreme Court to overrule the lower courts. Friday’s order did just that, directing “the prompt designation of Indiana” as the state whose death penalty procedures should be followed. The majority provided no legal explanation for the decision, but in prior cases some conservative justices have complained that condemned inmates game the system by filing last-minute appeals to prolong their lives.

But Mr. Trump’s character flaws were apparent for all to see when he ran for President.

The related but separate question is whether impeachment or forced removal under the 25th Amendment now is in the country’s best interests.

After Wednesday he has promised to assist an “orderly transition” of power. A Cabinet cabal ousting him would smack of a Beltway coup and give Mr. Trump more cause to play the political victim.

The best case for impeachment is not to punish Mr. Trump. It is to send a message to future Presidents that Congress will protect itself from populists of all ideological stripes willing to stir up a mob and threaten the Capitol or its Members.

But impeachment so late in the term won’t be easy or without rancor. It would further enrage Mr. Trump’s supporters in a way that won’t help Mr. Biden govern, much less heal partisan divisions. It would pour political fuel on Wednesday’s dying embers.

and Mr. Trump would play it as such until his last breath. Mr. Biden could gain much goodwill if he called off the impeachers in the name of stepping back from annihilationist politics.

If Mr. Trump wants to avoid a second impeachment, his best path would be to take personal responsibility and resign. This would be the cleanest solution since it would immediately turn presidential duties over to Mr. Pence. And it would give Mr. Trump agency, a la Richard Nixon, over his own fate.

We know an act of grace by Mr. Trump isn’t likely. In any case this week has probably finished him as a serious political figure. He has cost Republicans the House, the White House, and now the Senate. Worse, he has betrayed his loyal supporters by lying to them about the election and the ability of Congress and Mr. Pence to overturn it. He has refused to accept the basic bargain of democracy, which is to accept the result, win or lose. It is best for everyone, himself included, if he goes away quietly.

The Journal/NBC News poll interviewed 1,000 registered voters nationally from Oct. 29-31. The margin of error for that sample is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

n the 12 state battlegrounds, for example, Mr. Trump leads by 21 points among white men, compared with a 12-point lead among that group nationally. Among seniors, Mr. Trump trails Mr. Biden by 11 points in battleground states, compared with the 23-point deficit nationally.

The president trails Mr. Biden by 20 percentage points among women in the new survey, 57% to 37%, while leading among men by one point, 48% to 47%.

President Trump has 37% support among women in his race against former Vice President Joe Biden, the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds. A prior version of the story said he had 35% support. (Nov. 1, 2020)

"We are now talking about this misinformation as a part of the same trajectory as a poll tax, as a literacy test," he said. "A sustained campaign targeted at Black Americans — and often brown Americans as well — to limit our political power, to limit our ability to shape the decisions tha

t are made in this country."

Their strategy, Banks said, was "masquerading as black Americans, drawing people into conversation and ultimately turning that conversation toward bad information and often toward a sort of deep cynicism that made people sort of less inspired to participate."

Groups tracking disinformation have also noted attacks on Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, such as false claims about her racial identity and her history as a prosecutor in California. "There's been rampant misinformation about her record, who she is, what she's about," the New Florida Majority's Bullard said.

Biden argues that Trump's denial and neglect of a pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and is getting worse by the day should deny the President reelection.

Counting in midwestern battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin, where he is expecting to do well, could take longer and lead to the kind of disputed outcome that the President is threatening. Trump has already tried to discredit mail-in ballots, which take longer to count, while Republicans in Texas -- so far without success -- have been trying to invalidate ballots cast at drive-thru sites in the Houston area.

"We feel very confident about our pathways to victory," Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn told Jake Tapper on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.

Trump, while trailing Biden, also has a clear, if narrower, chance to get to 270 electoral votes that relies on him sweeping through a swath of battlegrounds he won four years ago with what his campaign promises will be a huge Election Day turnout.

At a rally in Florida on Sunday night, Trump's crowd started a chant of "Fire Fauci" when the President complained that everyone heard too much about the pandemic.

But an air of foreboding is hanging over one of the most surreal elections in modern US history. Reports of delays in the delivery of mail-in votes in several crucial battleground states deepened anxiety over the possibility of protracted legal duels between the campaigns in the event of a close election.

In Texas, the state Supreme Court denied a petition by a group of Republicans seeking to invalidate nearly 127,000 ballots cast at drive-thru facilities in Harris County, a heavily Democratic area that surrounds Houston. Republicans have also filed suit in federal court, which has an emergency hearing Monday morning in Houston.

"I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.

"I think it's a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing, and that's very bad. You know what that thing is. I think it's a very dangerous, terrible thing," Trump told reporters.

But Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on "State of the Union" that she was concerned that Trump could try to declare victory in her state if Election Day voting tallies showed him with a lead before early and mail-in votes were counted.

He took part in a "Souls to the Polls" get-out-the-vote event at a Baptist church in Philadelphia and then held a drive-in rally. He called out disparities in the impact of the virus on minorities and, in the cradle of the American experiment, he painted Trump as a threat to basic American freedoms.

"Let's not ever let anyone take our power from us. Let us not be sidelined, let us not be silent, there is too much at stake and the ancestors expect so much more from us than that," Harris said in North Carolina.

President Donald Trump is casting doubt on the integrity of vote counting and warning he will deploy squads of lawyers when polls close on Tuesday, as his latest attempts to tarnish the democratic process deepen a sense of national nervousness hours before Election Day.

The President's maneuvering, as he fights to the last moment to secure a second term, is taking place ahead of a court hearing in Texas Monday morning on a Republican request to throw out 127,000 drive-thru votes in a key county.

Fears are also growing that the President might try to declare victory before all the votes are counted as he and Democratic nominee Joe Biden launch a final-day swing through the battleground states that will decide one of the most crucial elections in modern US history.

Biden is leading in national polls and by a narrower margin in many key states and has multiple paths to victory.

Trump's route to the required 270 votes is thinner but still viable, meaning either candidate could win.

In an extraordinary departure from American political tradition, Trump has been arguing for months that the election is "rigged" against him, has made false claims that mail-in voting is corrupt and has refused to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power.

It is common for some states to take several days to finalize vote counts.

"I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.

Some of the most crucial battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, have warned it could be several days before a final result can be declared.

The election caps an extraordinary year that began with Trump’s impeachment, the near collapse of Biden’s candidacy during the crowded Democratic primary and then was fully reshaped by the coronavirus outbreak.

A record number of votes have already been cast, through early voting or mail-in ballots, which could lead to delays in their tabulation.

Trump on Sunday threatened litigation to stop the tabulation of ballots arriving after Election Day

“If 2020 is the most consequential election of our lifetime, heaven help us for 2024,” Stewart said. “I’m calling Noah and we'll start building the ark.”

the election will be the most important of the country’s collective lifetime because it “is about restoring the basic structure of a functioning, multiracial democracy that can be responsive to the will of its people.”

Short on campaign cash, Trump has been unable to compete with Biden over the airwaves and has relied on rallies to fire up his base.

Over the past four years, the Trump administration had constructed 371 miles of border barriers, as of Oct 16. And it is on pace to reach 400 miles next week. However, all but 16 miles of the new barriers replace or reinforce existing structures.

Alan Sanchez, 57, a defense contractor from Maricopa, Ariz., conceded that the president did not get it done. But he said he did what he could.

The yearslong Republican campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act came to a head unsuccessfully and dramatically in the first year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, when Senator John McCain of Arizona cast the decisive vote against the effort.

His campaign boasts that he has flipped the balance of three federal appeals courts and shifted nine appeals courts to the right. His nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the weeks before the election could reshape abortion rights, immigration law and the government’s regulatory power. Confirming a Supreme Court justice so close to an election was unprecedented, and Democrats framed it as an illegitimate power grab by Republicans.

The Department of Homeland Security has argued that the new barriers have reduced the personnel needed to staff certain sectors, and reduced unauthorized immigration. In Mr. Trump’s first year in office, illegal border crossings did decline to the lowest point since the 1970s, but then increased to the highest point in a decade in the 2019 fiscal year before decreasing again this year during the pandemic.

The 2017 tax cuts are one of the biggest legislative achievements of Mr. Trump’s first term in office, and one celebrated by his supporters.

Some critics, however, have noted that the final tax cut that Mr. Trump signed into law was far smaller than what he promised as a candidate. The Tax Policy Center, run by the Brookings Institution, estimated that it was only one-quarter the size of the plan Mr. Trump campaigned on four years ago

Mr. Trump said he would cut the top corporate income tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent, for example. His final bill brought it down to 21 percent.Those nuances, however, have been left out of his rallies, where Mr. Trump has been telling his supporters (falsely) that he succeeded in passing the “biggest tax cut in history.”

While most Americans got a tax cut, high earners received 60 percent of the total tax savings.

He vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement or withdraw from it entirely, pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and raise tariffs.He has delivered on those promises.

Though some experts are skeptical that Mr. Trump’s trade policies have been economically beneficial — with the conservative Tax Foundation estimating that the tariffs have brought in revenue, but reduced wages, gross domestic product and job growth — supporters have been delighted.

Physical shocks, however, can only be remedied by understanding and addressing the underlying physical causes. Our recent collective experience, whether in the public or the private sector, has been more often shaped by financial shocks, not physical ones. The current pandemic provides us perhaps with a foretaste of what a full-fledged climate crisis could entail

Pandemics and climate risk also share many of the same attributes. Both are systemic, in that their direct manifestations and their knock-on effects propagate fast across an interconnected world.

They are both nonstationary, in that past probabilities and distributions of occurrences are rapidly shifting and proving to be inadequate or insufficient for future projections.

Both are nonlinear, in that their socioeconomic impact grows disproportionally and even catastrophically once certain thresholds are breached

They are both risk multipliers, in that they highlight and exacerbate hitherto untested vulnerabilities inherent in the financial and healthcare systems and the real economy

Both are regressive, in that they affect disproportionally the most vulnerable populations and subpopulations of the world.

Finally, neither can be considered as a “black swan,” insofar as experts have consistently warned against both over the years

They also require a present action for a future reward that has in the past appeared too uncertain and too small given the implicit “discount rate.” This is what former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has called the “tragedy of the horizon.”

addressing pandemics and climate risk requires the same fundamental shift, from optimizing largely for the shorter-term performance of systems to ensuring equally their longer-term resiliency

The coronavirus pandemic and the responses that are being implemented (to the tune of several trillion dollars of government stimulus as of this writing) illustrate how expensive the failure to build resiliency can ultimately prove

In climate change as in pandemics, the costs of a global crisis are bound to vastly exceed those of its prevention.

both reflect “tragedy of the commons” problems, in that individual actions can run counter to the collective good and deplete a precious, common resource.

Neither pandemics nor climate hazards can be confronted without true global coordination and cooperation

there are also some notable differences between pandemics and climate hazards.

A global public-health crisis presents imminent, discrete, and directly discernable dangers, which we have been conditioned to respond to for our survival.

The risks from climate change, by contrast, are gradual, cumulative, and often distributed dangers that manifest themselves in degrees and over time.

What lessons can be learned from the current pandemic for climate change? What implications—positive or negative—could our pandemic responses hold for climate action?

the timescales of both the occurrence and the resolution of pandemics and climate hazards are different.

What this means is that a global climate crisis, if and when ushered in, could prove far lengthier and far more disruptive than what we currently see with the coronavirus (if that can be imagined).

Finally, pandemics are a case of contagion risk, while climate hazards present a case of accumulation risk.

Contagion can produce perfectly correlated events on a global scale (even as we now witness), which can tax the entire system at once; accumulation gives rise to an increased likelihood of severe, contemporaneous but not directly correlated events that can reinforce one another.

Climate change—a potent risk multiplier—can actually contribute to pandemics

For example, rising temperatures can create favorable conditions for the spread of certain infectious, mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever, while disappearing habitats may force various animal species to migrate, increasing the chances of spillover pathogens between them.

Third, investors may delay their capital allocation to new lower-carbon solutions due to decreased wealth.

Factors that could support and accelerate climate action

For starters, certain temporary adjustments, such as teleworking and greater reliance on digital channels, may endure long after the lockdowns have ended, reducing transportation demand and emissions

Second, supply chains may be repatriated, reducing some Scope 3 emissions (those in a company’s value chain but not associated with its direct emissions or the generation of energy it purchases)

Third, markets may better price in risks (and, in particular, climate risk) as the result of a greater appreciation for physical and systemic dislocations.

There may, additionally, be an increased public appreciation for scientific expertise in addressing systemic issues.

there may also be a greater appetite for the preventive and coordinating role of governments in tackling such risks

Moreover, lower interest rates may accelerate the deployment of new sustainable infrastructure

lastly, the need for global cooperation may become more visible and be embraced more universally.

Factors that may hamper and delay climate action

Simultaneously, though, very low prices for high-carbon emitters could increase their use and further delay energy transition

A second crosscurrent is that governments and citizens may struggle to integrate climate priorities with pressing economic needs in a recovery

he environmental impact of some of the measures taken to counter the coronavirus pandemic have been seen by some as a full-scale illustration of what drastic action can produce in a short amount of time.

Finally, national rivalries may be exacerbated if a zero-sum-game mentality prevails in the wake of the crisis.

For governments, we believe four sets of actions will be important

First, build the capability to model climate risk and to assess the economics of climate change.

Second, devote a portion of the vast resources deployed for economic recovery to climate-change resiliency and mitigation

Third, seize the opportunity to reconsider existing subsidy regimes that accelerate climate change

Fourth, reinforce national and international alignment and collaboration on sustainability, for inward-looking, piecemeal responses are by nature incapable of solving systemic and global problems.

For companies, we see two priorities. First, seize the moment to decarbonize, in particular by prioritizing the retirement of economically marginal, carbon-intensive assets

Second, take a systematic and through-the-cycle approach to building resilience.

For all—individuals, companies, governments, and civil society—we see two additional priorities. First, use this moment to raise awareness of the impact of a climate crisis, which could ultimately create disruptions of great magnitude and duration.

That includes awareness of the fact that physical shocks can have massive nonlinear impacts on financial and economic systems and thus prove extremely costly.

Second, build upon the mindset and behavioral shifts that are likely to persist after the crisis (such as working from home) to reduce the demands we place on our environment—or, more precisely, to shift them toward more sustainable sources.

Moving toward a lower-carbon economy presents a daunting challenge, and, if we choose to ignore the issue for a year or two, the math becomes even more daunting.

it is also critical that we begin now to integrate the thinking and planning required to build a much greater economic and environmental resiliency as part of the recovery ahead.

Biden and Trump are heading into their final planned showdown of the 2020 campaign, with 12 days to go until Election Day. And their respective teams are studying the first debate, which delved into chaos as Trump continually interrupted Biden.

Kellyanne Conway, who was part of the team that helped prepare the President for the first debate inside the White House map room, says she warned him not to interrupt too much.

Conway and other Trump advisers are renewing their argument to him ahead of the last debate that the more Trump let's Biden speak, the worse it is for Biden.

"Biden gets flummoxed fairly easily when he's trying to remember a contrived or practiced phrase or soundbite and let him do that. Let him have the airtime all to himself so people can really see what happens with Joe Biden when he's left just with them, the audience at home and Joe Biden's thoughts," Conway said.

"People who don't like hearing about plans and who want to see a food fight may end up being disappointed, but that's what Joe Biden wants to talk about is the specifics related to what he's going to do for people," said former Democratic Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who helped prepare Biden for debates against Sarah Palin and Elizabeth Warren and is also a CNN contributor.

Bauer is playing the role of Donald Trump during mock debate prep -- often embodying the President as he behaved during the first debate in order to prepare Biden stay on message in the event that Trump blows through new measures put in place by the Commission on Presidential Debates to prevent interruptions.

Trump sources say they really hope he avoids hitting his new favorite target, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is one of the most popular figures in America right now. One source told CNN this week that Trump was told in private conversations that hitting Fauci as he has been doing is "the dumbest thing in the history of politics."

"Definitely more levity, even though there's gravity right now in our country," is what Conway recommends for the President.

Ronald Reagan famously took concerns that he was too old for a second term head on, by saying "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience," he said, speaking of Walter Mondale, who even broke into laughter.

"'You know Joe, I'll promise in my second term I'll tweet less, but you have to tax less. Are you willing to make that?'" said Conway, pretending to be the President at the debate.

Also, if Trump brings up Hunter Biden's business dealings in China, advisers are hoping that Biden pivots to a New York Times report this week that revealed the President has a Chinese bank account and may even pay taxes to the government there.

"We know that he continues to do business with China because he has a secret Chinese bank account. How is that possible?" asked the former president.

"I should have said this is a clownish undertaking instead of calling him a clown," Biden said.

Aides say they believe Biden's direct to camera approach worked well for him during the first debate, and are hoping he can do more of that, saying it helped him to not just tune out Trump, but more importantly to connect with voters.

Over all, the data show Mr. Trump’s TV ad spending has shrunk by $23 million since Sept. 20. In that same time period, Mr. Biden has expanded his reservations by $99 million.

Perhaps nothing underscores how acute and unexpected the budget situation is for Mr. Trump as much as his television ad budget. His cash on hand entering October was $40 million less than the $104.4 million he had previously reserved in television ads for the final five weeks, according to Advertising Analytics data

Mr. Trump’s campaign is not broke. The $63.1 million he had on hand entering October is nearly what Mrs. Clinton had four years ago. The campaign said no loans or deferrals had occurred this time. The problem is that his campaign initially presumed it would have far more money, and Bill Stepien, who replaced Brad Parscale as campaign manager over the summer, has spent recent months imposing cost-control measures to prevent a bigger shortfall.

In Florida, for instance, where seniors make up around 30% of voters, Biden's winning with voters 65 and older. Last time around, Clinton lost those voters by nearly 10 points in the final preelection polls

No Democrat has really come close to winning with voters 65 and older. The last time the network exit polls had any Democrat winning with seniors was in 2000, with Al Gore. Even then, it was just by 4 points, and most other data sets did not have Gore triumphant with this group.

As I pointed out previously, Biden's been doing better with seniors than Clinton since before the pandemic hit earlier this year. A year ago, he was up 11 points over Trump in a CNN poll.

Whatever the root cause, losing seniors is one big reason that Trump is a significant underdog at this point. They're about 25% of the electorate. When you're doing 15 points or more worse with a quarter of voters, you'll likely be in big trouble. And so it is for Trump.

It's not clear that investigators ever had concrete evidence of a relevant bank transfer from the Egyptian bank. But multiple sources said there was sufficient information to justify the subpoena and keep the criminal campaign finance investigation open after the Mueller probe ended.

Justice Department confirmed that when the special counsel's office shut down in 2019, Mueller transferred an ongoing foreign campaign contribution investigation to prosecutors in Washington. Some of CNN's sources have confirmed that the case, which Mueller cryptically called a "foreign campaign contribution" probe, was in fact the Egypt investigation.

The probe was confirmed this week by a Justice Department senior official who responded to CNN's queries: "The case was first looked at by the Special Counsel investigators who failed to bring a case, and then it was looked at by the US attorney's office, and career prosecutors in the national security section, who also were unable to bring a case. Based upon the recommendations of both the FBI and those career prosecutors, Michael Sherwin, the acting US attorney, formally closed the case in July."

there could have been money from an Egyptian bank that ended up backing Trump's last-minute injection of $10 million into his 2016 campaign, according to two of the sources.

Yet neither the special counsel's office, nor prosecutors who carried on the case after Mueller, got a complete picture of the President's financial entanglements. Prosecutors in Washington even proposed subpoenaing financial records tied to Trump, before top officials finally concluded this summer they had reached a dead end, the sources said.

Mueller's primary task was to investigate Russian government attempts to interfere in the 2016 election, which had consumed the political and investigative conversations in the early days of Trump's presidency. But Mueller's mandate also allowed him to take on related criminal investigations, which in this case included another probe of potential foreign influence connected to the campaign.

Zainab Ahmad, a former international terrorism prosecutor, and Brandon Van Grack, a national security and counterintelligence specialist, co-led it, according to sources. Public records also show they focused on cases separate from other trial attorneys in the special counsel's office and had senior titles equivalent to other Mueller team leaders.

Mueller's team tried to understand both the $10 million contribution Trump gave to his campaign 11 days before the 2016 election and the Trump campaign's ties to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, according to sources and redacted interview records released from the Mueller investigation.

One official familiar with the work said some investigators believed the Egypt inquiry presented a more direct avenue for Mueller's team to examine Trump's finances, in part because it did not have an obvious tie to Russia.

Needing a final push before Election Day as the polls tightened in 2016, the Trump campaign was running low on cash. Trump's top campaign officials scrambled to convince Trump to inject money, according to memos of witness interviews from the investigation and contemporaneous news reports. Trump lagged well behind a pledge he made to spend $100 million of his own money on his campaign. Less than two weeks before Election Day, Trump wrote his campaign a $10 million check, publicly calling it a loan. Campaign finance records showed it as his single largest political contribution, by far, and not one the campaign would reimburse him for.

Mueller's office pressed witnesses to explain how the Trump-Sisi meeting in late 2016 came about. Ahmad, whose aims on the investigation were cloaked in secrecy, was repeatedly present in interviews touching on both Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign and the campaign's ties to Egypt.

In a session months later, Bannon was asked about Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign, according to another recent release of Mueller's interview memos.

Mueller asked the President, "Did any person or entity inform you during the campaign that any foreign government or foreign leader, other than Russia or Vladimir Putin, had provided, wished to provide, or offered to provide tangible support to your campaign?" Trump wrote back in his written answers that he had "no recollection of being told during the campaign" of support from a foreign government.

Soon enough, the bank was arguing it shouldn't have to give Mueller records because it was interchangeable with the foreign government that owned it. The US courts disagreed repeatedly, saying the company couldn't be immune from the Mueller team subpoena.  

When the federal appeals court in Washington, DC, heard arguments in the case in December 2018, security cleared journalists from an entire floor of the federal courthouse, allowing attorneys involved in the case to enter and exit the building and the courtroom without being seen.

The case even landed before the Supreme Court in early 2019. The high court ultimately declined the company's bid to block Mueller's subpoena in March 2019.  Even then, however, the standoff between US prosecutors and the Egyptian bank ended in a stalemate. 

In the end, it was the bank's word against the investigators. The court proceedings ended with prosecutors getting nothing more than what the bank was willing to turn over, and the bank was excused from hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines that had accrued for defying the subpoena. It appeared to be a dead end -- and not justification enough for Mueller to keep his office open to finish this case alone.

In late March 2019, shortly after Mueller's investigation concluded, Howell, overseeing final court proceedings in the Egyptian bank's subpoena case,  asked a prosecutor point-blank if the investigation was over. "No, it's continuing. I can say it's continuing robustly," David Goodhand of the DC US attorney's office told the court.

Liu told prosecutors she didn't believe they had met the standard needed to seek the records. The investigation stagnated, but Liu didn't close the case. She declined to comment for this story.

It's unclear how much activity occurred after Liu rejected the subpoena request. Prosecutors who disagreed with her decision believed it was now impossible to resolve questions about Trump's 2016 campaign contribution. Liu told people in her office that if the investigation had produced enough evidence, Mueller would have made the decision to take additional steps, according to sources.

On paper, Mueller described the investigation with only three vague words: "Foreign campaign contribution."

A week before Election Day, Trump stumped for votes Tuesday in Michigan, with stops also planned in Wisconsin and Omaha, Nebraska, where one of the state's five electoral votes could be in play in Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District.

Trump's sprint through the Midwest underscores the challenges he faces in the final week of the campaign -- trailing in the polls, outgunned financially by his Democratic challenger and facing an advertising onslaught by outside interests

As it marshals its resources, the Trump campaign has cut its own advertising reservations by a net total of about $14 million and replaced them with new coordinated buys from the campaign and the Republican National Committee totaling about $12 million.

In all, Biden and the Democratic National Committee are set to outspend Trump and the RNC by about $39 million to $24 million over the final week of the campaign

"Biden's decision to put all of his resources on TV and not invest in the ground game was a huge advantage for this campaign," Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller said this week.

"Getting a voter who is used to voting at the polls on Election Day to vote via absentee, as the Democrats are trying to do, is really hard,"