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Asked Thursday during an appearance on CNBC whether he thought it was possible that the country could be open for business next month, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, said, “I do.

The White House cannot unilaterally reopen the country. Though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued federal guidance advising people to avoid social gatherings, work from home and use pickup and delivery options for food, it is state officials who have put the force of law behind those suggestions.

The CDC guidance is set to expire April 30, but the states are free to choose their own paths. Already, the state directives have varied in timing and in severity, and that is certain to continue as they are rolled back.

Among those pushing to reopen the economy, according to senior administration officials, is Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff and a top adviser to Trump. Short has argued there will be fewer deaths than the models show and that the country has already overreacted, according to people with knowledge of his comments.

Health experts say that ending the shutdown prematurely would be disastrous because the restrictions have barely had time to work, and because U.S. leaders have not built up the capacity for alternatives to stay-at-home orders — such as the mass testing, large-scale contact tracing and targeted quarantines that have been used in other countries to suppress the virus.

Even one of the most optimistic models, which has been used by the White House and governors, predicts a death toll of 60,400, but only if current drastic restrictions are kept in place until the end of May.

There have been nascent signs that the aggressive social-distancing measures imposed by state and city governments have slowed the spread of the infection, which has killed more than 16,000 Americans. Federal officials have noted that Washington state and California were among the first states to see cases of the virus but have not experienced the high levels of infection and death that others, such as New York and New Jersey, are enduring.

the growing recognition in the administration that the steps meant to stem the spread of coronavirus have inflicted economic pain that is likely to last for many months.

On Thursday — as the Labor Department tallied another 6.6 million Americans applying for unemployment benefits last week — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said the U.S. economy was deteriorating “with alarming speed” and called for a national discussion about what will be required to reopen it.

Trump is preparing to announce this week the creation of a second, smaller coronavirus task force aimed specifically at combating the economic ramifications of the virus, according to people familiar with the plans.

The task force is expected to be led by Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and include Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser, and Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, along with outside business leaders. Others expected to play a role are Kevin Hassett, who has been advising Trump on economic models in recent weeks, and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, administration officials say.

A 2007 study funded by the CDC examined the fate of several U.S. cities when they eased restrictions too soon during the 1918 flu pandemic. Those cities believed they were on the other side of the peak, and, like the United States today, had residents agitating about the economy and for relaxing restrictions.

Once they lifted the restrictions, however, the trajectory of those cities soon turned into a double-humped curve with two peaks instead of one. Two peaks means overwhelmed hospitals and many deaths, without the flattening benefit authorities were trying to achieve with arduous restrictions.

Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, notably did not advocate a May reopening, saying such steps were more likely after July. And even some close to Trump seemed wary of supporting an early date.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said an early reopening was “an aspirational goal.”“The real fear is that you do it too quickly and you create a spike in the disease, which is likely to come back in the fall,” Graham said. “It has to be a science-based assessment, and I don’t see a mass reopening of the economy coming anytime soon.”

“If restoring the economy means restoring transit systems back to full-throttle schedules, before covid-19 is defeated, it’s just going to expose more transit workers to harm’s way, and it’s something we would not be in favor of,” said John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union

what the administration should have been doing in January to prepare us for today.

She cites the delay on tests, without which “cases go undetected and people continue to circulate” as a leading issue along with other missed federal government responses—many of which are still not fully operational

The prescient recommendations from experts across disciplines in the period before COVID-19 reached American shores—about testing, equipment, and distancing—make clear that more than any single factor, it was Trump’s squandering of out lead-time which should have been used to prepare for the pandemic that has exacerbated this crisis.

What follows is an annotated timeline revealing the warning signs the administration received and showing how slow the administration was to act on these recommendations.

The Early Years: Warnings Ignored

2017: Trump administrations officials are briefed on an intelligence document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” That’s right. The administration literally had an actual playbook for what to do in the early stages of a pandemic

February 2018: The Washington Post writes “CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak.” The meat of the story is “Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.”

May 2018: At an event marking the 100 year anniversary of the 1918 pandemic, Borio says “pandemic flu” is the “number 1 health security issue” and that the U.S. is not ready to respond.

One day later her boss, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer is pushed out of the administration and the global health security team is disbanded

Beth Cameron, former senior director for global health security on the National Security Council adds: “It is unclear in his absence who at the White House would be in charge of a pandemic,” Cameron said, calling it “a situation that should be immediately rectified.” Note: It was not

January 2019: The director of National Intelligence issues the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of threats to national security. Among its findings:

A novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat, with pathogens such as H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”

Page 21: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”

September, 2019: The Trump Administration ended the pandemic early warning program, PREDICT, which trained scientists in China and other countries to identify viruses that had the potential to turn into pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, “field work ceased when funding ran out in September,” two months before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan Province, China.

2020: COVID-19 Arrives

anuary 3, 2020: The CDC is first alerted to a public health event in Wuhan, China

January 6, 2020: The CDC issues a travel notice for Wuhan due to the spreading coronavirus

Note: The Trump campaign claims that this marks the beginning of the federal government disease control experts becoming aware of the virus. It was 10 weeks from this point until the week of March 16 when Trump began to change his tone on the threat.

January 10, 2020: Former Trump Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert warns that we shouldn’t “jerk around with ego politics” because “we face a global health threat…Coordinate!”

January 18, 2020: After two weeks of attempts, HHS Secretary Alex Azar finally gets the chance to speak to Trump about the virus. The president redirects the conversation to vaping, according to the Washington Post. 

January 21, 2020: Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the CDC tells reporters, “We do expect additional cases in the United States.”

January 27, 2020: Top White House aides meet with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to encourage greater focus on the threat from the virus. Joe Grogan, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council warns that “dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.”

January 28, 2020: Two former Trump administration officials—Gottlieb and Borio—publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal imploring the president to “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic.” They advocate a 4-point plan to address the coming crisis:

(1) Expand testing to identify and isolate cases. Note: This did not happen for many weeks. The first time more than 2,000 tests were deployed in a single day was not until almost six weeks later, on March 11.

(3) Prepare hospital units for isolation with more gowns and masks. Note: There was no dramatic ramp-up in the production of critical supplies undertaken. As a result, many hospitals quickly experienced shortages of critical PPE materials. Federal agencies waited until Mid-March to begin bulk orders of N95 masks.

January 29, 2020: Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro circulates an internal memo warning that America is “defenseless” in the face of an outbreak which “elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

January 30, 2020: Dr. James Hamblin publishes another warning about critical PPE materials in the Atlantic, titled “We Don’t Have Enough Masks.”

January 29, 2020: Republican Senator Tom Cotton reaches out to President Trump in private to encourage him to take the virus seriously.

Late January, 2020:  HHS sends a letter asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.

Trump’s Chinese travel ban only banned “foreign nationals who had been in China in the last 14 days.” This wording did not—at all—stop people from arriving in America from China. In fact, for much of the crisis, flights from China landed in America almost daily filled with people who had been in China, but did not fit the category as Trump’s “travel ban” defined it.

January 31, 2020: On the same day Trump was enacting his fake travel ban, Foreign Policy reports that face masks and latex gloves are sold out on Amazon and at leading stores in New York City and suggests the surge in masks being sold to other countries needs “refereeing” in the face of the coming crisis.

February 4, 2020: Gottlieb and Borio take to the WSJ again, this time to warn the president that “a pandemic seems inevitable” and call on the administration to dramatically expand testing, expand the number of labs for reviewing tests, and change the rules to allow for tests of people even if they don’t have a clear known risk factor.

Note: Some of these recommendations were eventually implemented—25 days later.

February 5, 2020: HHS Secretary Alex Azar requests $2 billion to “buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment.” He is rebuffed by Trump and the White House OMB who eventually send Congress a $500 million request weeks later.

February 4 or 5, 2020: Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, and other intelligence officials brief the Senate Intelligence Committee that the virus poses a “serious” threat and that “Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives.”

February 5, 2020: Senator Chris Murphy tweets: Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.

February 9, 2020: The Washington Post reports that a group of governors participated in a jarring meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield that was much more alarmist than what they were hearing from Trump. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.

the administration lifted CDC restrictions on tests. This is a factually true statement. But it elides that fact that they did so on March 3—two critical weeks after the third Borio/Gottlieb op-ed on the topic, during which time the window for intervention had shrunk to a pinhole.

February 20, 2020: Borio and Gottlieb write in the Wall Street Journal that tests must be ramped up immediately “while we can intervene to stop spread.”

February 23, 2020: Harvard School of Public Health professor issues warning on lack of test capability: “As of today, the US remains extremely limited in#COVID19 testing. Only 3 of ~100 public health labs haveCDC test kits working and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.

February 24, 2020: The Trump administration sends a letter to Congress requesting a small dollar amount—between $1.8 billion and $2.5 billion—to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. This is, of course, a pittance

February 25, 2020: Messonier says she expects “community spread” of the virus in the United States and that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump is reportedly furious and Messonier’s warnings are curtailed in the ensuing weeks.

Trump mocks Congress in a White House briefing, saying “If Congress wants to give us the money so easy—it wasn’t very easy for the wall, but we got that one done. If they want to give us the money, we’ll take the money.”

February 26, 2020: Congress, recognizing the coming threat, offers to give the administration $6 billion more than Trump asked for in order to prepare for the virus.

February 27, 2020: In a leaked audio recording Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee and author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) and the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act (reauthorization of PAHPA), was telling people that COVID-19 “is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”

March 4, 2020: HHS says they only have 1 percent of respirator masks needed if the virus became a “full-blown pandemic.”

March 3, 2020: Vice President Pence is asked about legislation encouraging companies to produce more masks. He says the Trump administration is “looking at it.”

March 7, 2020: Fox News host Tucker Carlson, flies to Mar-a-Lago to implore Trump to take the virus seriously in private rather than embarrass him on TV. Even after the private meeting, Trump continued to downplay the crisis

March 9, 2020: Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser, publishes an op-ed saying it is “now or never” to act. He advocates for social distancing and school closures to slow the spread of the contagion.

Trump says that developments are “good for the consumer” and compares COVID-19 favorably to the common flu.

March 17, 2020: Facing continued shortages of the PPE equipment needed to prevent healthcare providers from succumbing to the virus, Oregon Senators Jeff Merkeley and Ron Wyden call on Trump to use the Defense Production Act to expand supply of medical equipment

March 18, 2020: Trump signs the executive order to activate the Defense Production Act, but declines to use it

At the White House briefing he is asked about Senator Chuck Schumer’s call to urgently produce medical supplies and ventilators. Trump responds: “Well we’re going to know whether or not it’s urgent.” Note: At this point 118 Americans had died from COVID-19.

March 20, 2020: At an April 2nd White House Press Conference, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was made ad hoc point man for the coronavirus response said that on this date he began working with Rear Admiral John Polowczyk to “build a team” that would handle the logistics and supply chain for providing medical supplies to the states. This suggestion was first made by former Trump Administration officials January 28th

March 22, 2020: Six days after calling for a 15-day period of distancing, Trump tweets that this approach “may be worse than the problem itself.”

March 24, 2020: Trump tells Fox News that he wants the country opened up by Easter Sunday (April 12)

As Trump was speaking to Fox, there were 52,145 confirmed cases in the United States and the doubling time for daily new cases was roughly four days.

Murdoch and Trump have known each other for years on the New York scene, but what started out as a reportedly slightly chilly relationship has warmed considerably in recent years. As recently as April, the two were said to be talking “almost every day” (the White House has denied this). Murdoch’s Fox News played a crucial cheerleading role in Trump’s election and before that, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were known to go on double-dates with Murdoch and his ex-wife Wendi Deng, the two women remaining close even after Murdoch split with Deng. Throughout the campaign, Ivanka was a trustee of the $300m fortune allocated to Murdoch’s daughters with Deng, stepping down only after the financial connection became public.

the full transcript revealed a number of lines embarrassing for Trump that the paper had ignored, from Trump’s inquiry about Scottish independence – “What would they do with the British Open if they ever got out? They’d no longer have the British Open” – to his claim that the head of the Boy Scouts had called him to say he had delivered “the greatest speech that was ever made to them” the day before. (The Boy Scouts denied that.)

By the time of the February town hall meeting in the WSJ newsroom, tensions were running high between Baker and his staff.

And they came to a head again this summer when Politico published a leaked transcript of an Oval Office interview Baker had carried out with Trump, after the Journal had printed a news piece and a partial transcript.

In early January 2017, Baker upped the ante, publicly expressing reluctance to accuse Trump of “lying” amid a bout of national media soul-searching over how to cover the incoming president’s false statements, and lashing out at critics in a column mocking a “fit of Trump-induced pearl-clutching among the journalistic elite”. “If we are to use the term ‘lie’ in our reporting, then we have to be confident about the subject’s state of knowledge and his moral intent,” Baker explained of his approach.

The full transcript also showed that the Journal’s White House reporters were sidelined during the interview by Baker, who dominated the questioning, speaking familiarly with Ivanka Trump about their children and a party they had both attended in the Hamptons in New York.

Last month, another series of emails were leaked, to the Journal’s top competitor, the New York Times. In them, Baker again chastised his staff for the language they used to describe Trump, in this case in coverage of the president’s erratic rally in Phoenix, Arizona, at the height of controversy over his remarks equating neo-Nazis with protesters opposing them. “Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting,” Baker wrote in a late-night email to staff about the draft story. “Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?

On Wednesday night last week, a staffer contacted the Guardian about the latest obfuscating clause included in a Journal story on the debt ceiling that day. In it, Trump was described as having “condemned white supremacists in Charlottesville”, obscuring the fact that his last word on the subject was rather the opposite. “I almost threw up,” the staffer told the Guardian of reading the story.

By adhering to the conservative worldview – newly supercharged by Trump – that all media skews liberal, Baker just may have helped the Journal straddle the divide between readers who want their information from a trustworthy outlet and those typically skeptical of journalism as an institution.

But many staffers aren’t satisfied to be the best media voice in the Trump echo chamber, given the Journal’s history as one of the top papers in the country, with 16 newsroom Pulitzer prizes under pre-Murdoch editor Paul Steiger between 1991 and 2007 (only one more has been added in the Murdoch era).

One staffer added: “Words have consequences and Gerry’s terrible handling of things like why we don’t call lies ‘lies’ had a chilling effect.”

“It really came to a head after the election,” a recent Journal departee told the Guardian. “The election was on Tuesday and it wasn’t until Monday or Tuesday of the next week that the Journal wrote a single story about the legitimate anxiety that Trump’s win had provoked within large sections of the population.”

the Journal is not competing with the Post and the Times for scoops and talent the way they have in earlier eras.

In November, Poynter reported that 48 Journal employees had accepted buyouts – a trend seen across the media industry. In the months that followed, more staffers opted for the door. The departures include two top White House reporters, well-respected political and policy reporters, veteran foreign correspondents, and virtually the entire national security team, some of whom were poached by the Washington Post.

Baker’s influence is often not direct, current and former employees say. Instead, his preferences are internalized by reporters who avoid pitching stories they expect he won’t like or who tone down language in their copy before turning it in.

“The main way he influenced the coverage in a political way was not by saying you can’t write about X subject,” one former staffer said. “It was more that there were certain stories that could get into the paper very easily and other stories you knew would be a fight.”

Others said reporters, in the DC bureau especially, have had to fight to get their harder-hitting Trump stories published, if they get published at all. “Almost everyone in the newsroom has a story about their story or a story of a colleague’s getting killed,” said a reporter. “That happens in all newspapers, but the killings run in one direction.

Murdoch appeared to recognise there was an opportunity for a major publication outside of the coastal media bubble, just as he saw the opportunity for a right-leaning cable channel when he launched Fox News in the 1990s.

But the difficulty for the Journal is its owner’s close relationship with the president. This year Murdoch, long adept at cultivating relationships with powerful conservatives, has become closer than ever to the White House, according to some accounts, speaking almost every day.

Carr noted that Baker, as early as 2010, when he was deputy managing editor, was already seen as pushing the WSJ into “adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the [Obama] administration”.

And Martin Peers, who was head of the Journal’s media and marketing bureau from 2011 until 2014, recalls being pressured to go soft when covering Murdoch’s company and tough on rivals. “It was really striking how any time we were writing something about News Corp they would go over it very carefully,” he told the Guardian. “With the New York Times they’d say we weren’t being hard enough on them.”

And as repeated leaks from the newsroom have made clear, top editors have continued to pull reporters back from writing which was too critical of Trump – and there’s hardly an infraction too minor. Recently, a reporter in the Washington bureau was chided by an editor for a tweet regarding Trump’s effects on the stock market, which was deemed to be too sharp on Trump, according to a colleague.

“The whole culture of the Journal for decades has been to be fair and accurate but also convey analysis and perspective and meaning,” another ex-Journal person said. “Gerry’s saying ‘just report the facts’, but there’s a difference between journalism and stenography.”

To the extent they had information concerning the fitness, character or qualifications of a presidential candidate,

Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, also attended by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, campaign chairman Paul Manafort

After perfunctory greetings, the lawyer began telling the group very generally something about individuals connected to Russia supporting or funding Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee

Trump Jr. sai

Democrats have pointed to the Trump Tower meeting to argue collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election

a persistent theme is that Donald Trump not only sometimes breaks the law but has no familiarity or experience following it. The idea of limits is simply alien to him.

Tony Soprano and Vito Corleone aren’t against the law. It’s just something like the weather that you deal with and work around and maybe even use sometimes but all and only in the service of personal and family power and wealth. The key theme of all mob drama – and presumably to some degree the reality of mob culture – is that the law is for chumps, a crutch for those who aren’t man enough, powerful enough to get what they want without it.

This sounds very much like the mindset of Donald Trump and his family. Who would be a fool enough to become President of the United States and not use the power for legal invulnerability?

We see this repeated pattern of aides scurrying around, plotting amongst themselves, all trying to prevent him from doing things that are not only clearly illegal or even unconstitutional but wildly self-destructive. The months’ long effort by even the most transgressive and aggressive aides – folks like Steve Bannon, for example – to stop Trump from firing James Comey is the most vivid and high-octane example.

Very notably, the biggest advocates for firing Comey were not Trump’s wildest advisors but members of his family – Jared Kushner and, now it seems, Ivanka Trump too. It’s the immediate family members and the lickspittles and retainers he brought with him from his private sector fiefdom, The Trump Organization – Dan Scavino, Hope Hicks, et al. It’s a Family in every sense. They have no experience following the law, all reared in a culture of inter-generational criminality.

As his top advisors and aides seem to realize as clearly as anyone, Trump is wholly unable to follow the law. He needs to be monitored closely to prevent him from breaking the law. And don’t get me wrong. Many of these folks are not at all the best people. They’ll break the law. But they’re also acculturated into law-abiding society. So they have a sense of how to do it sparingly or at least discreetly so as to at least avoid getting caught. Trump seems to have no such experience.

As CNN's KFile reported, in the years before taking office, many of the administration's top officials harshly criticized President Donald Trump's lack of action against Saudi Arabia and bin Salman.

Sanctioning the crown prince, known as MBS, would have been "too complicated," according to two administration officials, and could have jeopardized US military interests in the kingdom.

One central reason: MBS has near complete control over all the country's levers of power. He is not only the crown prince, he is the deputy prime minister, defense minister, chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, chairman of the Council of Political and Security Affairs and the head of Aramco, the state-owned oil and natural gas company.

The White House has stood its ground over the last few days, defending its decision to spare MBS, though struggling at times to explain its rationale.

Psaki added that as President, Biden's role "is to act in the national interest of the United States. And that's exactly what he's doing."

"We are working to put the US Saudi relationship on the right footing," Price told reporters on Monday.

That's all done little to appease angry lawmakers, including many Democrats, who have lashed out at the Biden team's decision not to sanction MBS. Despite the Biden administration's tough talk, the full recalibration that they promised "did not happen," said a Democratic aide on Capitol Hill.

The Biden administration also failed to keep Congress informed in the run-up to the actions they planned to take, two congressional aides said.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers immediately announced last week that more needed to be done to hold MBS accountable, and some are working up legislation.

"I don't think he does go far enough, although you have to give him credit because he's actually increased sanctions and he's increased the travel bans on those individuals who were directly responsible," Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week."

"I don't think anybody thinks that the crown prince was not responsible, in other words, that he knew about it and that he approved of it," Portman added. "So, I do think there ought to be something additional that focuses on him."

"There's obviously a difficult balance that the Biden administration is trying to strike here," she added. "The administration is doing a really good balancing act where Biden is saying they are not going to condone the transactional approach or Whatsapp diplomacy."

"There's no question he and other top advisors view Saudi Arabia as far too important to justify" MBS sanctions, the former administration official said.

After Mr. Trump’s impeachment for inciting his supporters before the deadly riot at the Capitol, and with Republican leaders turning on him, the pardon power remains one of the last and most likely outlets for quick unilateral action by an increasingly isolated, erratic president.

He has also discussed issuing pre-emptive pardons to his children, his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and Mr. Giuliani.

He has paid Mr. Tolman at least $10,000 since late last year to lobby the White House and Congress for a pardon for his son Jeremy Hutchinson, a former Arkansas state lawmaker who pleaded guilty in 2019 to accepting bribes and tax fraud, according to a lobbying disclosure filed this month.

That system favors pardon seekers who have connections to Mr. Trump or his team, or who pay someone who does, said pardon lawyers who have worked for years through the Justice Department system.

“This kind of off-books influence peddling, special-privilege system denies consideration to the hundreds of ordinary people who have obediently lined up as required by Justice Department rules, and is a basic violation of the longstanding effort to make this process at least look fair,” said Margaret Love, who ran the Justice Department’s clemency process from 1990 until 1997 as the United States pardon attorney.

“The criminal justice system is badly broken, badly flawed,” said the former senator, Tim Hutchinson, a Republican who served in Congress from 1993 to 2003.

. Any explicit offers of payment to the president in return could be investigated as possible violations of bribery laws; no evidence has emerged that Mr. Trump was offered money in exchange for a pardon.

A filing this month revealed that Mr. Tolman was paid $22,500 by an Arizona man named Brian Anderson who had retained him in September to seek clemency for Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road founder. Mr. Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise and distributing narcotics on the internet.

The former Trump campaign adviser, Karen Giorno, also had access to people around the president, having run Mr. Trump’s campaign in Florida during the 2016 primary and remaining on board as a senior political adviser during the general election.

Though the name was never publicly disclosed, Mr. Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison. In the meeting, at the Washington office of his lawyer, Mr. Kiriakou said he had been wronged by the government and was seeking a pardon so he could carry a handgun and receive his pension.

In July 2018, Ms. Giorno signed an agreement with Mr. Kiriakou, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, “to seek a full pardon from President Donald Trump of his conviction” for $50,000 and promised another $50,000 as a bonus if she secured a pardon.

Mr. Broidy was charged in federal court in Washington, D.C., in October and accused of failing to report work for which he was paid at least $6 million by the man accused of masterminding the alleged fraud, Jho Low, to try to influence the Justice Department investigation into the scandal.

In 2001, President Bill Clinton pardoned fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a major donor to the Democratic Party and Mr. Clinton’s presidential library, on his last day in office. President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, convicted on charges related to passing classified documents to WikiLeaks, just days before leaving the White House.

The two men met on Sunday, and the former New York mayor isn’t currently expected to be part of the president’s team, another person familiar with the plan said, though the person cautioned: “Never say never.”

"That's simply not true. As I point out, the idea that any one senator, even me — even Mitch McConnell — is not going to convince other senators to reach a different conclusion than they would reach on their own," said Romney in the interview.

Schwarzman has also contributed to Romney's various political campaigns over the years. Since 1993, Schwarzman, along with his wife Christine, have contributed around $94,200 to Romney's federal campaigns or Romney linked groups, according to Center for Responsive Politics. Most recently, the couple each donated the maximum to Romney's Senate bid in 2018.

Schwarzman reportedly visited the White House this summer at Kushner's request, who convened a dinner to discuss his father-in-law's campaign fundraising strategy.

As news broke that the US struck and killed the commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Trump was dining at his Mar-a-Lago club, surrounded by old friends and more recent ones, such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Several of his children were also on the property, along with son-in-law Jared Kushner, on the last few days of Trump's extended holiday

In photographs posted by McCarthy following the strike, Trump is seen on his dining patio across from Dan Scavino, his social media director, who helped Trump post his early response to the strike: a low-res image of the American flag.

Prior to the strike, White House lawyers -- in consultation with national security officials -- put together a "strong rationale" claiming that the strike against Soleimani would not lead to war and that the President, as commander in chief, had the authority to not ask for congressional authorization over a matter of self defense, an administration official said.

But his initial impulse to jettison politics altogether soon gave way to the gravitational pull of the game: In a conversation a few weeks later, he had changed his mind. He was starting Nucleus.

The story of how Mr. Parscale came to work for Mr. Trump is serendipity, plus a little of Mr. Parscale’s opportunistic savvy. He was already a successful marketing executive, well known in the business circles of San Antonio, when about ten years ago one of his clients was on a flight next to someone who was about to take a job working for the Trump family. The client jotted contact info on an airplane napkin, and soon Mr. Parscale was looped in to bid on some digital work for the family. He cut his rate to make sure he would get the job.

“Americana worked,” he said. “Just Americana. ‘Bring back that America pride’ worked. Pictures of a space shuttle. Half my ads just look like a Fourth of July party with a Vietnam vet. I wasn’t some mad genius.”

He saw himself as a campaign manager but also something more: a partner to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who was overseeing the campaign from the White House, and he enjoyed the limelight enough that he would take the stage at Trump rallies and throw red MAGA caps into the crowd.

While friends advised Mr. Parscale to make a clean break from the campaign, he chose instead to accept a smaller role. For the Republican National Convention, Mr. Parscale was in charge of video supplements to the program. Working mostly from his Florida home, he became frustrated.

he treats voter support as a mystical, rather than a mathematical, proposition.

That is not quite true: Though many state polls proved very wrong in 2016, the national polls that projected Hillary Clinton narrowly winning the most votes were close to the mark, and many polling outfits did make modifications, weighting, for instance, for educational backgrounds.

Robert Blizzard, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies, said that incumbents usually ended up “on Election Day with a ballot share that is within a point or two of their October job approval score.”

The Trump campaign has spent years and presumably millions of dollars engaging white voters without college educations who are eligible to vote but did not vote in 2016. There are almost 1.5 million such potential voters in Michigan and more than two million in Pennsylvania.

Beyond the polling, the fundamentals shaping the electorate, like the economy and the record-breaking coronavirus surge, are “increasingly ominous” for Mr. Trump, said Liam Donovan, a veteran Republican strategist.

One of the murkiest issues is modeling for which voters will turn out during a pandemic and an economic downturn.

Mr. Kushner has held up Mr. Oczkowski’s analyses, which cut against public polling and suggest votes will break Mr. Trump’s way in the final days of the campaign, people who have heard the comments said.

Mr. Parscale, who had worked fairly closely with the R.N.C., had envisioned continuous robust television ad spending through the year. Since he stepped aside, the Trump campaign, which has far less money than advisers had once anticipated, has slashed its television spending

The R.N.C. turnout models vary by state, but in some scenarios, it shows Mr. Trump performing worse than he does in the campaign’s own polls, two people briefed on the numbers said.

Despite his campaign spending $10 million over the past two years on some of the most sophisticated data available, the president prefers to use what he sees on the news.

This week, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, gave his own view of how polling works to Fox News, trumpeting “big data modeling” over old-fashioned phone calling.

“I do believe that polling with phones to people is an obsolete method, especially in the era of cancel culture. You’ve got a lot of snake oil salesmen who have kind of been in the business for a long time and they do this.”

Complaining that polls are “skewed” against Republicans has been a vocal pastime of Republican candidates for several election cycles, reaching a high pitch in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the party’s presidential nominee.

The Trump campaign has spent years and presumably millions of dollars engaging white voters without college educations who are eligible to vote but did not vote in 2016. There are almost 1.5 million such potential voters in Michigan and more than two million in Pennsylvania.

Beyond the polling, the fundamentals shaping the electorate, like the economy and the record-breaking coronavirus surge, are “increasingly ominous” for Mr. Trump, said Liam Donovan, a veteran Republican strategist.“Ironically, the polls may be the best thing the Trump campaign has going for it at this point,” he said.

Mr. McCleary’s estimates of Mr. Trump’s poll standing are less “negative” than some other Trump pollsters, according to people close to the campaign.

It was only in July, when case counts began soaring in a trio of populous, Republican-leaning states — Arizona, Florida and Texas — and polls showed a majority of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, that the president and his top aides renewed their public activity related to the virus.

Trump and many of his top aides talk about the virus not as a contagion that must be controlled through social behavior but rather as a plague that eventually will dissipate on its own. Aides view the coronavirus task force — which includes Fauci, Birx and relevant agency heads — as a burden that has to be managed, officials said.

. An internal model by Trump’s Council on Economic Advisers predicts a looming disaster, with the number of infections projected to rise later in August and into September and October in the Midwest and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the data.

As the nation confronts a once­in-a-century health crisis that has killed at least 158,000 people, infected nearly 5 million and devastated the economy, the atmosphere in the White House is as chaotic as at any other time in Trump’s presidency — “an unmitigated disaster,” in the words of a second former senior administration official.

“It’s extraordinary that a country that helped eradicate smallpox, promoted HIV/AIDS treatment worldwide and suppressed Ebola — we were the world’s leader in public health and medicine, and now we can’t even protect our own people from the most devastating epidemic in decades.”

Asked who was to blame for the pandemic’s dark summer turn, Pelosi said, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”“The delay, the denial . . . the hoax that it’s going to go away magically, a miracle is going to happen, we’ll be in church together by Easter, caused death,” Pelosi added.

In Trump’s White House, there is little process that guides decision-making on the pandemic. The president has been focused first and foremost on his reelection chances and reacting to the daily or hourly news cycle as opposed to making long-term strategy, with Meadows and other senior aides indulging his impulses rather than striving to impose discipline.

“He sits in the Oval Office and says, ‘Do this,’ or, ‘Do that,’ and there was always a domino blocker. It was John Bolton or H.R. McMaster on national security or John Kelly. Now there are no domino blockers.”

What’s more, with polls showing Trump’s popularity on the decline and widespread disapproval of his management of the viral outbreak, staffers have concocted a positive feedback loop for the boss. They present him with fawning media commentary and craft charts with statistics that back up the president’s claim that the administration has done a great — even historically excellent — job fighting the virus.

“Everyone is busy trying to create a Potemkin village for him every day. You’re not supposed to see this behavior in liberal democracies that are founded on principles of rule of law. Everyone bends over backwards to create this Potemkin village for him and for his inner circle.”

Although Fauci, Birx and other medical professionals sit on the coronavirus task force, many of the more pressing decisions lately have been made by the smaller group that huddles in the morning and mostly prioritizes politics. The cadre includes Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner and strategic communications director Alyssa Farah.

The policy process has fallen apart around Meadows, according to four White House officials, with the chief of staff fixated on preventing leaks and therefore unwilling to expand meetings to include experts or to share documents with senior staffers who had been excluded from discussions.

Luciana Borio, a director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council during the first two years of the Trump administration, decried “a response in disarray hampered by a lack of clear, consistent public health-oriented guidance to the public.

“It’s very difficult to know who to trust,” Borio said. “To expect the public to sort out the facts in a time of tremendous stress leads to inconsistent and disparate actions, and that really hurts our collective effort to fight the virus.”

What also has frustrated a number of the president’s allies and former aides is that he simply seems uninterested in asserting full leadership over the crisis, instead deferring to state leaders to make the more difficult decisions while using his presidential bully pulpit to critique their performances.

“A suppression-level effort to shrink and not just mitigate the spread of covid requires a national strategy that includes standards and significant federal funding. Such a strategy is lacking right now.”

The Trump administration has resisted devising a national testing program and instead ceded the task to state governments, even as cases of infection average more than 60,000 a day and some people wait 10 days or longer for test results, delays that render the results essentially useless.

While some states have been able to largely meet the needs of their populations, the federal government is the only entity with the power to coordinate testing across state lines, push and enable manufacturers to increase production of test kits and supplies, surge those supplies as needed and ensure fair payment.

Without federal coordination, states, businesses, hospitals — and soon schools and universities — find themselves competing with each other for limited supplies, often overpaying as a result.

Despite repeated calls to invoke the Defense Production Act to help resolve testing-supply shortages, the administration has resisted doing so. Trump and several White House aides have instead continued to think that it is politically advantageous to cede the issue to the states to avoid taking ownership or blame for the issue, even though testing shortages are largely seen as a federal failure.

“Other countries have taken this virus seriously, trusted their public health officials and scientists, and now they’ve flattened the curve,” he said. “Meanwhile, our situation gets worse and worse every day and some Americans think, ‘Oh, that’s just the way it is.’ But that isn’t how it has to be.

He’s just not oriented towards things that even in the short term look like they’re involving something that’s hard or negative or that involves sacrifice or pain,” a former senior administration official explained. “He is always anxious to get to a place of touting achievements and being the messenger for good news.”

About 82 percent of the Zillionaire Giveaway goes to those earning more than $1 million a year, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. Of those beneficiaries earning more than $1 million annually, the average benefit is $1.6 million.

In other words, a single mom juggling two jobs gets a maximum $1,200 stimulus check — and then pays taxes so that a real estate mogul can receive $1.6 million.

polls suggest that they don’t appreciate the degree to which Trump and Congress also bungled the economic response — or manipulated it to benefit those who least need help.

The United States simply accepted that the pandemic would cause vast numbers of workers to be laid off — and then it provided unemployment benefits. But Germany, France, Britain, Denmark and other countries took the smarter path of paying companies to keep workers on their payrolls, thus preventing layoffs in the first place

So the unemployment rate in Germany and Denmark is forecast to reach about 5 percent while in the United States it may already be about 20 percent, depending on how you count it.

The United States did a little bit of this, but far less than Europe — yet the United States in some cases spent a larger share of G.D.P. on the bailout than Europe did.

t’s not fair to viruses to blame our unemployment crisis simply on the pandemic. It’s also our national choice.

At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that money intended to rescue small businesses has often gone not to those with the greatest need but rather to those with the most shameless lawyers.

For-profit colleges, which are better known for exploiting students than educating them, have raked in $1.1 billion.

AutoNation, a Fortune 500 company, received $77 million in small business funds

One provision in the rescue package provides a tax break that benefits only companies with more than $25 million in gross receipts

A new study determined that in the two months since March 18, roughly the start of the economic crisis, America’s billionaires saw their wealth collectively grow by 15 percent. And another 16 Americans became billionaires in that period.

As aides debate how and whether to confront the situation, Trump's back-and-forth between violent rhetoric and a more measured tone has weighed in the deliberations, one official said. Some advisers wonder whether a presidential address calling for calm would be quickly erased by Trump's own penchant for escalation and instigation.

Trump has been hesitant to hold another Oval address after his last one regarding the coronavirus was widely panned. Within minutes, Trump made several inaccurate claims that his administration was later forced to clarify. Since January, the coronavirus pandemic has taken the lives of more than 103,000 Americans, according to the latest tally by Johns Hopkins University.

For dissidents living outside the Kingdom, the American election has personal as well as political implications. On one side is an incumbent who has boasted he “saved [Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s] ass”

On the other is Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who last year said he would make Saudi Arabia a “pariah,” singled out the kingdom for “murdering children” in Yemen, and said there’s “very little social redeeming value in the present Saudi leadership.”

Saudi Arabia was the destination for Trump’s first trip overseas in May 2017, a visit that set the tone for the strong alliance that has persisted ever since.

“but what I’m sure of is that a Biden Administration would not be as compliant and affectionate with Saudi Arabia as Trump has been.”

Al-Odah is one of hundreds detained or imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for activism of criticism of the government. He was arrested only hours after he tweeted a message to his 14 million followers calling on Saudi Arabia to end its blockade of the tiny Gulf Emirate of Qatar, Alaoudh says.

Court documents list al-Odah’s charges as including spreading corruption by calling for a constitutional monarchy, stirring public discord, alleged membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, and “mocking the government’s achievements.”

For some, like Alaoudh, those words offer a glimmer of hope that relatives detained in the kingdom might have improved prospects of release should Biden win in November

ranging from 450,000 to “a million,” (the actual total is between 20,000 to 40,000, according to May report by the Center for International Policy.)

But subsequent behind-the-scenes meetings between Trump’s special advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s and King Salman’s son Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS) proved at least as significant as the President’s headline announcements.

the historic ties between the U.S. and the Al Saud that date back to 1943, or business interests in the region is unclear, says Stephen McInerney, Executive Director at the non-partisan Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED). What is clear, he says, is that “Trump and his family—and in particular Jared Kushner—have close personal ties to Mohammed Bin Salman.”

That closeness has translated into a reluctance to confront Saudi Arabia over its human rights abuses.

“at times there has been real bipartisan frustration or even outrage with him.”

Trump publicly mulled the possibility he was killed by a “rogue actor” — in line with what would become the Saudi narrative as outrage grew.

“I have no doubt that Donald Trump did protect and save whatever part of MBS’s body,”

Callamard says she would expect a Biden administration, “at a minimum, not to undermine the U.S.’s own democratic processes,” as Trump did in vetoing bipartisan bills pertaining to the Khashoggi murder and the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia that were used in the Yemen war.

President Biden to not “justify violations by others or suggest that the U.S. doesn’t care about violations because of its economic interests.”

“end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.” The statement adds that Biden will “defend the right of activists, political dissidents, and journalists around the world to speak their minds freely without fear of persecution and violence.”

“I think there would be some international debate between those who want a very assertive change in the U.S.–Saudi relationship and those who would be more cautious,” says McInerney. “The more cautious approach would be in line with historical precedent.”

Saudi authorities tortured and sexually abused al Hathloul while she was in prison, her family says. On Oct 27, Hathloul began a new hunger strike in protest at authorities’ refusal to grant her a family visit in two months.

The only thing that allows them to ignore all the international pressure is that the White House has not talked about it, and has not given a clear message to the Saudis telling them that they don’t agree with this,” Hathloul says.

If Trump is re-elected, then experts see little chance of him changing tack—in fact, says Callamard, it would pose “a real test” for the resilience of the democratic institutions committed to upholding the rules-based order.

“Just the fact that we are filing the lawsuit here in Washington D.C. is a sign that we still have faith that there are other ways to pressure the Saudi government,”

Administration officials have insisted that the arms sale — particularly the transfer of the coveted F-35 fighter jets — is not a direct reward for the Emirates’ recognition of Israel. But they have acknowledged that it is linked to the broader diplomatic initiative, and Mr. Kushner briefed Senate Republicans on Tuesday on his work with the Emiratis, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

Democrats had accused Trump administration officials of rushing the sales through in the final months of Mr. Trump’s term, and pointed to reports indicating the Emirates had previously misused American-made weapons.

Congressional efforts to block arms sales are rarely successful. After the administration last year circumvented Capitol Hill to allow the sale of billions of dollars of munitions to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, lawmakers tried to derail the deal but were unable to override the president’s veto.