In Brief: October 9, 2020

Trump says he’s ready for rallies; doctor says therapy done

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump insisted Thursday that he is ready to resume campaign rallies and feels “perfect” one week after his diagnosis with the coronavirus that has killed more than 210,000 Americans, as his doctor said the president had “completed his course of therapy” for the disease.

The president has not been seen in public — other than in White House-produced videos — since his Monday return from the military hospital where he received experimental treatments for the virus. On Thursday, his physician, Navy Cmdr. Sean Conley, said in a memo that Trump would be able to safely “return to public engagements” on Saturday, as the president tries to shift his focus to the election that’s less than four weeks away, with millions of Americans already casting ballots.

While Trump said he believes he’s no longer contagious, concerns about infection appeared to scuttle plans for next week’s presidential debate.

“I’m feeling good. Really good. I think perfect,” Trump said during a telephone interview with Fox Business, his first since he was released from a three-day hospital stay Monday. “I think I’m better to the point where I’d love to do a rally tonight,” Trump said. He added, “I don’t think I’m contagious at all.”

In a Fox News interview Thursday night, Trump said he wanted to hold a rally in Florida on Saturday “if we have enough time to put it together.” He said he might also hold a rally the following night in Pennsylvania. “I feel so good,” he told Fox’s Sean Hannity.

Trump, Barr at odds over slow pace of Durham investigation

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is increasingly at odds with Attorney General William Barr over the status of the Justice Department’s investigation into the origin of the Russia probe, with the president increasingly critical about a lack of arrests and Barr frustrated by Trump’s public pronouncements about the case, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump and his allies had high hopes for the investigation led by Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, betting it would expose what they see as wrongdoing when the FBI opened a case into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to sway the 2016 election. Trump has also pushed to tie prominent Obama administration officials to that effort as part of his campaign against Joe Biden, who was serving as vice president at the time.

But a year and a half into the investigation, and with less than one month until Election Day, there has been only one criminal case: a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering a government email about a former Trump campaign adviser who was a target of secret FBI surveillance.

With time running out for pre-election action on the case, Trump is increasingly airing his dissatisfaction in tweets and television appearances. Barr, meanwhile, has privately expressed frustration over the public comments, according to a person familiar with his thinking. It’s not dissimilar to a situation earlier this year, when Trump complained publicly that he believed ally Roger Stone was getting a raw deal in his prosecution, even as Barr had already moved to amend a sentencing position of the prosecutors in the case.

Despite Trump’s unhappiness, there’s no indication Barr’s job is at risk in the final weeks of the campaign. Still, the tensions between Trump and the attorney general over the fate of the probe underscore the extent to which the president is aggressively trying to use all of the levers of his power to gain ground in an election that has been moving away from him.

Next Trump-Biden debates uncertain, though Oct. 22 is likely

WASHINGTON — The campaign’s final debates between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden were thrown into uncertainty Thursday as the rival camps offered dueling proposals for the remaining faceoffs that have been upended by the president’s coronavirus infection.

The chair of the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates told The Associated Press that the final debate, scheduled for Oct. 22, was still slated to go on with both candidates present as planned. But next Thursday’s debate seemed to be gone, after the Trump team objected to the commission’s format change.

The whipsaw day began with an announcement from the commission that the town hall-style affair set for Oct. 15 in Miami would be held virtually. The commission cited health concerns following Trump’s infection as the reason for the change.

Trump, who is eager to return to the campaign trail despite uncertainty about his health, said he wouldn’t participate if the debate wasn’t in person. Biden’s campaign then suggested the event be delayed a week until Oct. 22, which is when the third and final debate was already scheduled.

Next, Trump countered again, agreeing to a debate on Oct. 22 — but only if face to face — and asking that a third contest be added on Oct. 29, just before the election. But Biden’s advisers rejected squaring off that late in the campaign.

From wire sources

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‘This is not a bad dream’: New hurricane menaces Louisiana

ABBEVILLE, La. — Louisiana residents confronting the menace of a new hurricane weeks after one battered parts of the state got stark warnings Thursday to brace for winds that could turn still-uncollected debris into dangerous missiles and again knock out power to thousands.

Forecasts showed Delta had strengthened back into a Category 3 hurricane as it bore down on the state carrying winds of up to 120 mph (195 kph) and the potential to deliver a storm surge of up to 11 feet (3.4 meters) when it arrives on Friday evening or Friday night.

The projected path included the southwest area of Louisiana where Category 4 Hurricane Laura made landfall less than two months ago. Laura has been blamed for more than 30 deaths.

The mayor of Lakes Charles, where thousands of residents remain without shelter following the earlier hurricane, told residents that even if their homes survived Laura, they shouldn’t assume that would be the case with Delta.

“This is not a bad dream. It’s not a test run. These are the cards that we have been dealt,” Nic Hunter said in a Facebook video. He added, “I know that we’ve been through a lot, and I know that we’re tired. But we have a job to do right now, and that job is to keep ourselves safe.”

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Some worried Democrats have 2nd thoughts on voting by mail

Ann Mintz and Clifford Wagner have been struggling with indecision about the election for weeks. Their angst isn’t over whom to vote for — the Philadelphia couple are Democrats who support Joe Biden. It’s about how, precisely, they should cast their ballots.

They voted by mail without hesitation in the state’s June primary. But now there are new stresses. Will a slowdown at the U.S. Postal Service make ballots arrive too late? Will technical mishaps filling out ballots lead to the vote not getting counted? Or, in one even more complicated but possible scenario, would their mail votes be tallied later than in-person ballots, and will the in-person ballots be largely Republican, and will that allow Trump to prematurely declare victory on election night?

“The stakes are so high. We’re putting a lot of thought into it,” the 65-year-old Wagner said.

Many voters who decided early in the coronavirus pandemic to cast their votes by mail have been rethinking their options as Election Day approaches. Nervousness about whether and when their ballots will be counted is leading some voters to increasingly strategize and analyze a decision that was once a no-brainer. All the worry is spreading rapidly to election officials, who warn it might contribute to more chaos at the polls on Election Day.

If voters who requested absentee ballots change their minds and try to vote on Election Day, they may run afoul of a thicket of rules that vary from state to state. In many states, switching from absentee to in-person requires a series of steps to cancel the absentee ballot. Voters may be asked to cast provisional ballots that take longer to process. All these last-minute changes take more resources and more time and introduce the possibility for errors.

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Amid NYC protests, Orthodox Jews urge new virus-era dialogue

After months of grappling with a pandemic that has walloped New York’s Orthodox Jewish communities, prompting changes to holidays, mourning and prayers, new limits on worship and other activity in some areas are pushing tensions in some neighborhoods of Brooklyn to the boiling point.

New restrictions in places where coronavirus cases are rising, including several Orthodox areas, led to street protests Tuesday night. Videos posted on social media showed hundreds of Orthodox men gathered in the streets of Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood, in some cases setting bonfires by burning masks, and a crowd attacking a man who filmed the unrest. On Wednesday night, crowds of men returned to the streets as police watched.

As the protests made headlines, and the Orthodox group Agudath Israel led a Thursday federal court challenge seeking to halt the constraints, some Orthodox Jews in New York urged officials and fellow believers to find a way to communicate better.

“We need partnership. We need government and the community to work together” on an approach to fighting the virus that can “respect the culture” of the faith, said Rabbi Abe Friedman, an Orthodox leader and law enforcement chaplain in Brooklyn.

Friedman said he hoped the government would understand that Orthodox Jews are not “gathering careless of the pandemic,” but rather returning to cherished customs of communal prayer, celebration and mourning.

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Suspended officials sue agency that runs Voice of America

WASHINGTON — Suspended officials at the agency that runs the Voice of America news outlet filed suit against it Thursday, accusing its CEO and his top aides of trying to turn it into a vehicle to promote President Donald Trump’s agenda.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, says the actions of U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO Michael Pack and his senior advisers violate the “statutory firewall” intended to protect VOA from political interference.

National Public Radio, which first reported the lawsuit, said the five plaintiffs have all been suspended by Pack and are seeking reinstatement.

Lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. told NPR, “The lawsuit we filed today seeks to vindicate core First Amendment principles that protect the independence and credibility of this country’s publicly funded media organizations, like Voice of America, which are under siege by the current administration.”

Pack, a conservative filmmaker, Trump ally and one-time associate of former Trump political adviser Steve Bannon, took the helm of USAGM in June and has made no secret of his intent to shake the agency up. His moves, however, have been criticized by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers who control the agency’s budget.

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Prominent GOP fundraiser charged in covert lobbying effort

WASHINGTON — Elliott Broidy, a prominent fundraiser for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, has been charged in an illicit lobbying campaign aimed at getting the Trump administration to drop an investigation into the multibillion-dollar looting of a Malaysian state investment fund.

Broidy is the latest person accused by the Justice Department of participating in the covert lobbying effort, which also sought to arrange for the return of a Chinese dissident living in the U.S. A consultant, Nickie Lum Davis, pleaded guilty in August for her role in the scheme.

The case was filed this week in federal court in Washington, D.C., with Broidy facing a single conspiracy charge related to his failure to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires people lobbying in the U.S. on behalf of a foreign entity to disclose that work to the Justice Department.

A lawyer for Broidy declined to comment on Thursday. The allegations are contained in a charging document known as an information, which typically signals a defendant’s intent to plead guilty.

Prosecutors allege that Broidy worked with Davis and others to get the Justice Department to abandon its pursuit of billions of dollars that officials say were pilfered from 1MDB, a Malaysian wealth fund that was established more than a decade ago to accelerate the country’s economic development but that prosecutors say was actually treated as a piggy bank by associates of former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.

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Rapper Tory Lanez charged with shooting Megan Thee Stallion

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles prosecutors on Thursday charged rapper Tory Lanez with shooting artist Megan Thee Stallion during an argument earlier this year.

Lanez is accused of shooting at Megan Thee Stallion’s feet, hitting her, after she left a SUV during a fight in the Hollywood Hills on July 12, according to a release.

He faces two felony charges — assault with a semiautomatic firearm and carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle. The complaint states Lanez “inflicted great bodily injury” on Megan Thee Stallion.

A message sent to Lanez’s representative was not immediately returned.

Lanez, a 27-year-old Canadian rapper and singer whose legal name is Daystar Peterson, is due to be arraigned Tuesday in Los Angeles. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of roughly 23 years.