‘They’ve pretty much struck out’ — how Congress punted on kids’ online safety

The CEOs of five top social media platforms, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X’s Linda Yaccarino, are being hauled in front of the Senate on Wednesday for a hearing to highlight the continuing risk of child sexual abuse material on their sites.

Pointing the finger at them will be members of Congress — who have spent years highlighting this issue without ever agreeing on a way to fix it.

Despite numerous bills, headline-grabbing hearings and a push from President Joe Biden in his last two State of the Union addresses, Congress has only passed one kids’ safety law in the last decade, a narrow measure dealing with online child sex trafficking. Since then, both the House and the Senate have been stymied by disagreement over specific security and privacy provisions, and by nearly unanimous opposition from the tech industry itself.

“I’ve had hope for the last decade that Congress would do something, but they’ve pretty much struck out,” Jim Steyer, CEO of the nation’s largest kids’ advocacy group Common Sense Media, told POLITICO.

Wednesday’s hearing will be Zuckerberg’s eighth time in the hot seat and will feature the return of TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, who endured a marathon grilling last year over his platform’s ties to China. It marks the Capitol Hill debuts of Yaccarino, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and Discord CEO Jason Citron, all of whom had to be subpoenaed to appear.

All five run platforms are widely used by teenagers. The goal is to build momentum for a package of bills supported by Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), which includes his STOP CSAM Act — that lifts tech companies’ legal protections to allow victims of child exploitation to sue them.

A former trial lawyer, Durbin said he still has hopes that a high-profile Senate hearing can make a difference. “I can tell you that there's nothing like the prospect of being called into court to testify about decisions you've made,” he said in an interview.

Despite the publicity, however, the legislative efforts tied to past tech hearings have consistently crashed and burned.

Some of the five bills in Durbin’s package were originally authored years ago. One of those, the EARN IT Act from ranking member Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), has floundered without a floor vote the past three Congresses. (Like Durbin’s bill, it would curtail companies’ liability shield if they host child sexual abuse material.) Another high-profile bill, the Kids Online Safety Act, has been introduced twice and moved out of the Senate Commerce Committee but has never gotten a floor vote. Co-sponsors Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) are expected to use Wednesday’s hearing to push that bill as well.

Since Wednesday’s hearing was announced in November, there have been some signs of a dam cracking in the industry’s staunch opposition.

One of the five companies in the hearing, Snap, just came out in support of KOSA, which aims to stop platforms from recommending harmful material — the first company to publicly support it. It will likely lead to lawmakers pressuring the other companies to line up behind it.

So far, none of the other platforms testifying has joined Snap in publicly supporting the bill. X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is in active conversations with staff on KOSA, according to a person familiar with those conversations, but has not endorsed it. X’s Yaccarino met with senators last week, including Blackburn, and they spoke about AI, copyright and KOSA, a Blackburn spokesperson said. Yaccarino is continuing to meet with Senate Judiciary members this week, the person said.

The hearing has already had one result, however: As the date approaches, several of the platforms have announced internal changes to create more protections around children.

Meta said earlier this month it plans to start blocking suicide and eating disorder content from appearing in the feeds of teens on Facebook and Instagram — changes that mimicked language in the KOSA bill text. The company also issued its own version of a legislative “framework” for kids' safety this month. (Its proposal would put the onus on app stores, not platforms, to obtain parental consent.)

Snap announced the expansion of in-app parental controls in mid-January, and X said this past weekend it’s launching a new trust and safety center in Austin with 100 content moderators focused on removing violative content, like child sexual abuse material.

But when it comes to new regulation, observers warn there’s still very little room in an election-year schedule to get any of the bills to a floor vote. And the industry’s main lobbying group, NetChoice, remains firmly opposed to the key bills under discussion: KOSA, EARN IT and the STOP CSAM Act.

Durbin acknowledged the headwinds, saying that the Senate would need to act before the end of July if it wants to pass the bills, which he wants to move as a package.

“I don’t want to say it’s a long shot,” Durbin said, “but it’ll take some good luck for us to push it forward in the hopes that the House will take it up too.”

A spokesperson for Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said children’s online safety is a priority, but he’s waiting for more backing for the bills before acting to move them to the floor.

“While we work to pass the supplemental and keep the government funded in the coming weeks, the sponsors on the online safety bills will work to lock in the necessary support,” the spokesperson said.

The most substantive kids’ safety legislation Congress passed was before any of these apps even existed. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 set online privacy protections for kids under age 13 but notably doesn’t provide protections for teens ages 13 through 18 — the youngest group allowed by platforms’ policies.

Another kids’ safety bill, known as COPPA 2.0, would extend these online privacy protections up to age 16. But despite versions of it being introduced three times and advancing out of the Senate Commerce Committee, it has also never seen a floor vote.

With Congress stuck, the momentum for regulating social media has largely shifted to states — and to Europe and the U.K., which have passed a suite of laws since 2019 governing online safety, with provisions for children. Another leader has been Australia, which in 2015 created a national digital safety regulator dedicated to addressing online harms for kids and adults.

“California has led the nation and Europe has led the world,” said Steyer, “because Congress has dithered.”

U.S. state legislators passed 23 kids’ online safety laws in 2023. And more state legislation is coming this year. In a parallel wave of legal action, last fall more than 30 state attorneys general jointly filed a lawsuit against Meta, and several other attorneys general have filed similar suits against TikTok, claiming their products are addictive to kids.

But tech companies are fighting back. NetChoice, whose members include Meta, Snap, TikTok and X, has filed four lawsuits against state laws saying they violate the First Amendment. It has scored early wins in several of them — with a temporary block on a parental consent law in Arkansas, as well as an injunction against California’s age-appropriate design code.

In Washington, much of the legislation has gotten stuck on disagreements about specific provisions — fracturing party support for what can be highly technical laws.

The EARN IT Act, for example, has largely failed due to strong opposition by tech and privacy groups over concerns it will break encryption services on apps in order to give law enforcement access to review harmful content. A number of lawmakers from both parties, including Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), have also raised concerns about its cybersecurity and encryption provisions.

KOSA’s support among Democrats has been tempered by pushback from both tech and progressive LGBTQ+ groups — the latter concerned it gives too much power to conservative state attorneys general who could censor content for vulnerable youth.

Following the pushback, Blumenthal told POLITICO earlier in January that he’s open to removing state attorney general enforcement from KOSA. Separately, he and Blackburn said they’re “redoubling their efforts” to pass KOSA.

With those bills all stalled, advocates and politicians have come to put their hopes in the power of the bully pulpit — which in the past has led companies to change their practices unilaterally.

Though the companies have been responding, Meta raised concerns among child-safety advocates when it announced last December that it’s deploying end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger and has plans to encrypt Instagram messaging as well. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit where platforms like Meta are required to report child sexual abuse content, condemned the move because it will prevent the company from being able to proactively scan messages for violative material. (NCMEC has said that message encryption could cut the reporting of such material by 80 percent.)

One grim fact that the hearing is expected to highlight: The amount of child sexual abuse material reported by platforms continues to increase. NCMEC told POLITICO it received 36.2 million reports of child sexual and exploitative material in 2023 from platforms, a major jump from 21 million reports it received in 2020.

This is both due to a growth in the amount of such content on platforms, and companies deploying more systems to proactively search for it.

One of the few child-protection bills to pass either chamber in recent years is the REPORT Act, one of five Judiciary bills advanced last year to require companies to report instances of sextortion — a quickly growing crime where kids are financially extorted over illicit sexual images or videos. It passed the Senate in December, but has yet to move in the House.

Despite their different approaches, each of the CEOs will make the case that their voluntary measures to detect and remove child sexual abuse material are working. They’re all members of the Tech Coalition, an organization aimed at fighting child abuse online proactively search and report cyber tips to the NCMEC. However, companies face few ramifications if they fail to report.

Several of the companies represented at the hearing are starting to also work together to detect material that depicts sexual abuse of children, which is regularly spread from one platform to another. Meta, Snap and Discord helped form an industry group called Lantern last year that aims to share known hashtags and signals of exploitative content. A spokesperson for TikTok said it’s applied to join Lantern and an X spokesperson said it’s in the process of applying.

But Steyer stressed no matter what happens at the hearing, the industry is still likely to dominate the conversation until Congress “breaks through the walls of tech lobbyists.”

“The bottom line is clear — we need Congress to act. This issue is very popular on both sides of the aisle. It’s not that there isn't political will. What you have is extremely wealthy companies paying off Congress to do nothing,” he said.

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Progressives to Biden: Reverse Palestine relief funding pause

Progressive lawmakers and humanitarian aid groups are pressuring the Biden administration to resume funding for a United Nations aid group, which saw a dozen of its members accused of participating in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israeli soil.

Earlier this week, Israel accused a dozen U.N. Relief and Works Agency employees — which provides a wide range of aid and services to Palestinian families — of taking part in abductions and killings during the attack. Soon after, top donors including the U.S. and Germany halted funding for the group pending the outcome of an investigation.

The pause has alarmed progressives and those worried about humanitarian conditions in Gaza. Proponents of resuming aid say that a sustained pause could be catastrophic for millions of people who rely on the assistance provided by UNRWA. Washington has provided nearly $1 billion to the agency in the past three years, including $296 million in 2023 alone.

The latest to join the chorus of those calling on President Joe Biden to reconsider is Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who blasted the administration for pausing funding.

“Obviously, it’s not acceptable for any of the 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza to be involved with Hamas, and allegations against the 12 people charged must be investigated,” Sanders said in a statement. "However, we cannot allow millions to suffer because of the actions of 12 people. The U.S. and other countries must restore funding to stave off this humanitarian catastrophe.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress and the most outspoken lawmaker in support of Palestinians since Israel began its military operation in the Gaza Strip, echoed Sanders’ position.

“To take concerning allegations as fact without any investigation, especially in light of the Israeli government’s well-documented history of using torture and obtaining forced confessions, as a means to suspend life-saving aid demonstrates the emptiness of the Biden administration’s claims to care about Palestinian lives,” Tlaib told POLITICO in a statement.

In a tweet Monday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called cutting off support to UNWRA — which is the primary source of humanitarian aid to the 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip — “unacceptable.”

“The U.S. should restore aid immediately,” she wrote.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby on Monday urged an investigation into allegations that UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7 attacks to take place soon. He also said UNRWA shouldn’t be entirely blamed for the actions of a few even as he reaffirmed that U.S. contributions would be suspended pending the investigation's results.

"Let's not impugn the good work of a whole agency, because of the potential bad actions here by a small number,” he told reporters.

The National Security Council and the U.S. office to the U.N. did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment on the matter.

Humanitarian aid organizations have been sounding the alarm to the administration and lawmakers about the impact that the funding pause could have on the situation in Gaza, said Leslie Archambeault, managing director of humanitarian policy for Save the Children U.S.

Twenty groups signed a letter on Monday urging countries to reverse the funding suspensions, including Save the Children, ActionAid and Oxfam.

“Everyone recognizes the gravity of this situation and the real life impacts that this has on people in desperate need in Gaza,” Archambeault said.

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House GOP infighting threatens to derail vote on bipartisan tax package

Speaker Mike Johnson's plans to get a bipartisan tax deal through the House this week are teetering on the verge of collapse after an unlikely coalition of House Republicans aired last-minute concerns during a private GOP meeting on Tuesday.

According to members who attended the meeting, Republican leaders are staring down a messy litany of complaints from both incumbents in vulnerable districts demanding state and local tax relief and conservative Freedom Caucus members who are intent on bringing border politics into the tax debate.

Then there are the lawmakers with a third type of complaint: anger that Johnson is relying on Democratic votes to pass a major piece of tax legislation in an election year.

“It’s a problem that we continue to do things under suspension of the rules,” said House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good (R-Va.), referring to a House maneuver that allows Johnson to pass the tax deal with a two-thirds majority rather than steer it through the conservative-dominated Rules Committee.

“I’m not going to support something that expands the Child Tax Credit, which is expanding the welfare state massively," Good added. "And I’m not going to support tax credits, Child Tax Credits, going to illegals. I think that’s incentivizing this illegal invasion.”

Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), one of several blue-state Republicans adamantly opposed to any tax package that wouldn't boost the state and local tax deduction, told reporters that party leaders have not yet committed to a floor vote on the deal “in its current form." And leadership also indicated, according to LaLota, that the deal is still open to potential changes.

The state and local tax changes sought by LaLota and other so-called SALT Caucus Republicans are otherwise unpalatable to a wide swath of the Republican conference.

The grievances from those blue-state incumbents and Freedom Caucus members complicate Johnson's path to a floor vote. The speaker indicated on Monday that he wants to take up the bipartisan tax package on the floor under the expedited process that suspension of the House rules would afford him.

“I expect that [the vote] will be this week. I expect that it will be in the next couple days,” House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who brokered the deal with Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), said on NBC Tuesday morning.

But Johnson declined to commit to any concrete timing at a press conference later in the morning. One senior House Republican, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told POLITICO that a decision on when a tax vote would occur is truly up in the air.

“There’s no decision, so we’re going to wait and see right now,” the senior Republican said.

Despite the complaints from ultra-right conservatives and Republicans seeking SALT changes, plenty of moderates also praised Smith, who outlined the bill for members at the Tuesday meeting. The tax chief has shepherded the GOP through bipartisan talks that ended with an agreement to restore three popular business tax breaks, including those that would give larger research and development deductions.

“We can’t get anything that we consider perfect through this slim majority that we have and a Democrat-run Senate and a Biden White House, but it’s strong. It brings back the Trump tax cuts,” said Rep. Daniel Meuser (R-Pa.). “It’s very, very important for small business and families.”

“As far as I’m concerned, as a small business owner and chair of the Small Business Committee, we vote on it. Business needs it,” said Small Business Chair Roger Williams (R-Texas).

With Ways and Means Republicans unanimously behind Smith in their support of the tax package — plus nods of approval from both Johnson and powerful members, such as Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) — the bill could still sail through the House with Democratic backing. However, some of LaLota's allies in the SALT cause have suggested they might oppose their own leaders on unrelated rules for other legislation if they don’t get their way.

With the GOP’s slim majority, two Republicans (or less, in the event of absences) could effectively block a piece of legislation considered under a rule for debate by joining Democrats in voting against that rule.

Such a move would have been unthinkable as recently as last Congress, but conservatives have made it a more standard practice recently.

“I haven’t talked to the SALT caucus people, but I think there’s some merit to possibly raising the SALT limit,” Good said of LaLota's concerns. “And I would be willing to consider that in exchange for not expanding the Child Tax Credit, not making it eligible for illegals to receive.”

Rep. Mike Garcia, a California representative in the SALT Caucus who would like to see some form of tax relief included in the package, dismissed the notion of tanking unrelated rules to force changes to the tax deal: “I don’t personally like that tactic. I think that’s a tactic of the Freedom Caucus.”

“As a team we should be passing rules, letting things come to the floor for a vote,” Garcia said.

Undocumented immigrants with U.S.-born children have long been able to get the credit, but other members like Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) have joined Good in calling on Republicans to further restrict eligibility.

Even if Johnson can placate his frustrated members, delay of the legislation is bound to make things more complicated for the IRS as it starts receiving tax returns for the 2024 filing season. Wyden had originally wanted to enact the tax package by Monday, which was the beginning of the filing season, but now lawmakers are aiming to pass something in the next few weeks.

The sense of urgency surrounding the tax package has grown particularly acute because low-income families tend to file their returns early. That increases the prospect that the agency itself will have to make changes to those returns so that parents can claim a second refund under an expanded version of the child credit.

Jordain Carney and Anthony Adragna contributed to this report.

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'We shall respond': Biden warns militants after 3 US troops killed in Jordan

Top U.S. leaders issued a warning on Sunday to Iran-backed militants, a day after a drone attack killed three U.S. troops in Jordan, dramatically escalating the situation in the Middle East.

“We had a tough day last night in the Middle East. We lost three brave souls in an attack on one of our bases," President Joe Biden said in South Carolina.

He then asked for a moment of silence and added: “And we shall respond.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he was "outraged and deeply saddened" by the deaths and vowed that the strike would not go unanswered.

"Iran-backed militias are responsible for these continued attacks on U.S. forces, and we will respond at a time and place of our choosing," he said in a statement. "The president and I will not tolerate attacks on American forces, and we will take all necessary actions to defend the United States, our troops, and our interests.”

Three U.S. service members were killed and 25 more were wounded Saturday night in the drone attack. The assault marks the first time American troops have been killed in months of drone and missile attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria, and now Jordan that began not long after Hamas militants killed 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7. The hit impacted the base's living quarters, according to a U.S. official, who like others was granted anonymity to speak about a developing situation.

A second U.S. official said the three service members were from the Army. Response options are being drawn up "as we speak," a third U.S. official said.

The base, known as Tower 22, is a small outpost attached to the Rukban refugee camp, near the Iraq-Syria border. U.S. special operations troops have used the location to cross into Syria to help fight the Islamic State. It's also just a few kilometers away from Syria's al-Tanf Garrison, which has been targeted dozens of times by Iran-backed proxies since October.

A White House official said the president was briefed Sunday morning on the attack by Austin, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer.

In a recorded interview posted Sunday morning on ABC’s “This Week,” Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown said the U.S. does not want the conflict in the Middle East to continue to broaden.

“The goal is to deter them and we don’t want to go down a path of greater escalation that drives to a much broader conflict within the region,” he said.

The attack "has to be responded to with significant force, more force than we have used to date," said Mick Mulroy, former Defense Department official, retired CIA paramilitary officer and Marine. "Not only should the group that launched this attack be targeted, but the Iranian IRGC Quds Force should as well."

Several prominent Republican senators on Sunday also called on the administration to strike inside Iran.

American and British warships have also been busy shooting down drones and ballistic missiles by Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen. Several commercial ships have been struck, disrupting global trade routes in the Red Sea.

Since October, Iran proxies have hit U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East 158 times, though so far they have caused only minor injuries and damage to infrastructure.

The Tower 22 base has seen action before. On Oct. 23, Iran-backed militants in Syria launched multiple one-way attack drones close to al-Tanf Garrison, POLITICO reported previously. Coalition forces at Tower 22 took down the drones, which fell on the Syrian side of the border.

Most U.S. troops in Syria are located in the northeast of the country, but a small number are stationed far south at al-Tanf Garrison. In addition to helping fight ISIS, those troops are also there to put pressure on Iran and the Syrian regime by disrupting transit along the Baghdad-Damascus highway.

Eugene Daniels and Alexander Ward contributed to this report.

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Trump tax return leaker sentenced to five years in prison

A former IRS consultant was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking former President Donald Trump’s tax returns as well as the filings of thousands of other wealthy people to the news media.

A district judge on Monday agreed with the Justice Department that Charles Littlejohn, 38, deserved the maximum statutory sentence for what she called “egregious” crimes.

Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden nominee to the bench, focused on Littlejohn's decision to release Trump's filings, which Reyes called "an attack on our constitutional democracy."

Noting that Trump was under no legal obligation to release his filings and likening the case to the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol, Reyes said: "It cannot be open season on our elected officials."

Littlejohn’s lawyers had asked for leniency in the form of a sentence of between 12 and 18 months, saying that, at the time, he believed the public had the right to know how much Trump and the others paid in taxes. He has since come to regret leaking the information, his representatives told the court.

Littlejohn gave Trump’s records to the New York Times, which published a blockbuster report in September 2020, shortly before the presidential election, showing that Trump had paid little or nothing in taxes. Littlejohn also gave tax data on thousands of wealthy people to ProPublica, which published a string of stories showing how some maneuver to erase their tax bills.

Among those who had their filings leaked was Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who, appearing at the two-hour sentencing hearing, asked the judge for the maximum sentence.

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Israel notes ‘significant gaps’ after cease-fire talks but calls them constructive.

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israel said “significant gaps” remain after cease-fire talks Sunday with the United States, Qatar and Egypt but called them constructive and said they would continue in the week ahead, a tentative sign of progress on a potential agreement that could see Israel pause military operations against Hamas in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages.

The U.S. announced its first military deaths in the region since the war began and blamed Iran-backed militants for the drone strike in Jordan, near the Syrian border, that killed three American service members amid concerns about a wider conflict.

The statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on the cease-fire talks did not say what the “significant gaps” were. There was no immediate statement from the other parties.

The war has killed more than 26,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, destroyed vast swaths of Gaza and displaced nearly 85% of the territory’s people. Israel says its air and ground offensive has killed more than 9,000 militants, without providing evidence. The Oct. 7 Hamas attack in southern Israel killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and militants took about 250 hostages.

With Gaza’s 2.3 million people in a deepening humanitarian crisis, the United Nations secretary-general called on the United States and others to resume funding the main agency providing aid to the besieged territory, after Israel accused a dozen employees of taking part in the Hamas attack that ignited the war.

Spokesperson Juliette Touma warned that the agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, would be forced to stop its support in Gaza by the end of February.

Sunday’s intelligence meeting included CIA Director Bill Burns, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency David Barnea, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, and Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel.

Ahead of the meeting, two senior Biden administration officials said U.S. negotiators were making progress on a potential agreement that would play out over two phases, with the remaining women, elderly and wounded hostages to be released in a first 30-day phase. It also would call for Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza. The officials requested anonymity to discuss the ongoing negotiations.

More than 100 hostages, mainly women and children, were released in November in exchange for a weeklong cease-fire and the release of 240 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, in comments to troops on Sunday, said that “these days we are conducting a negotiation process for the release of hostages” but vowed that as long as hostages remain in Gaza, “we will intensify the (military) pressure and continue our efforts — it’s already happening now.”

At least 17 Palestinians were killed in two Israeli airstrikes that hit apartment buildings in central Gaza, according to an Associated Press journalist who saw the bodies at a local hospital. One hit a building in Zawaida, killing 13 people, and the other an apartment block in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing four.

Also Sunday,10 Palestinians were killed in a strike that hit a residential building in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, said Dr. Moataz Harara, a physician at Shifa Hospital, where the dead were taken.

Israel’s military said troops were engaging in close combat with Hamas in neighborhoods of the southern city of Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest.

The three deaths announced by Biden were the first U.S. fatalities in months of strikes against American forces across the Middle East by Iranian-backed militias amid the war in Gaza. U.S. Central Command said 25 service members were injured.

U.S. officials were working to conclusively identify the group responsible for the attack, but assessed that one of several Iranian-backed groups was responsible. Jordanian state television quoted a government spokesperson as contending the attack happened across the border in Syria. U.S. officials insisted it took place in Jordan, which U.S. troops have long used as a basing point.

The U.S. in recent months has struck targets in Iraq, Syria and Yemen to respond to attacks on American forces and to deter Iranian-backed Houthi rebels from continuing to threaten commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

The war in Gaza has sparked concerns about a regional conflict. The United States, Israel’s closest ally, has increasingly called for restraint in Gaza and for more humanitarian aid to be allowed into the territory while supporting the offensive.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement that “the abhorrent alleged acts” of its staff members accused in the Oct. 7 attack “must have consequences,” but added that the agency should not be penalized by the withholding of funding, and “the dire needs of the desperate populations they serve must be met.”

The United States, the agency’s largest donor, cut funding over the weekend, followed by eight other countries including Britain and Germany. Together, they provided nearly 60% of UNRWA’s budget in 2022.

Guterres said that of the 12 employees accused, nine were immediately terminated, one was confirmed dead and two were still being identified. He said they would be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution.

UNRWA provides basic services for Palestinian families who fled or were driven out of what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding the country’s creation. The refugees and their descendants are the majority of Gaza’s population.

Since the war began, most of the territory’s 2.3 million people depend on the agency’s programs for “sheer survival,” including food and shelter, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said. That lifeline could “collapse any time now,” he said after funding was suspended.

A quarter of Gaza’s population is facing starvation as fighting and Israeli restrictions hinder the delivery of aid. Already, the amount of aid entering Gaza has been well below the daily average of 500 trucks before the war

In the past week, hostages’ family members and supporters have blocked aid trucks from entering at the Kerem Shalom crossing. Dozens of protesters again blocked the entry on Sunday, chanting “No aid will cross until the last hostages return.”

The military later declared the area around the crossing a closed military zone, which would prohibit protests there.

With Gaza’s future being debated, thousands, including far-right lawmakers in Netanyahu’s coalition, gathered in Jerusalem to call for renewing Jewish settlement in the territory. Jewish settlements in Gaza were evacuated in 2005 during a unilateral withdrawal of troops that bitterly divided Israel.

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Hunter Biden Snagged a Cushy Bank Job After Law School. He’s Been Trading on His Name Ever Since.

In the winter of 1995, Hunter Biden was broke but happy. He was 25, recently married and living in a run-down garden apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Kathleen, and their baby girl, Naomi. Hunter was deep in debt but on the cusp of graduating from Yale Law School, which would open him up to a world of lucrative opportunities. All he needed to do was pick the right next step.

In her 2022 book, If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction, and Healing, Kathleen writes that Hunter promised to eschew his East Coast roots and take a job in her hometown: Chicago. He’d secured well-paying internships at a couple firms in the Windy City, and a news report from the time suggests that one of them had made him an “attractive” full-time offer.

Everything seemed to be going to plan — until Hunter visited his hometown, Wilmington, Delaware, on a frigid day and, according to Kathleen’s book, “met with someone to get career advice.” After the meeting, the plan suddenly changed.

The book doesn’t say who counseled Hunter. But someone with knowledge of the meeting said Hunter met with Charles Cawley, the CEO and founder of MBNA bank and a close political ally of his father, Joe Biden.

Immediately following his conversation with Cawley, who died in 2015, Hunter returned to his dad’s Delaware home. According to Kathleen’s book, he looked dazed. “You won’t believe what just happened,” he told her in the kitchen. “I was offered a job at MBNA.” Hunter then produced a small piece of paper and slid it to his wife across the table. On it was written what she described as a “dollar amount greater than anything I’d ever imagined someone our age earning.”

Hunter lobbied hard for this new, well-paying opportunity. Kathleen, though, was opposed. “I don’t want to live in Delaware,” she explained to him. “I don’t belong there.” But for Hunter, Delaware was in his bones. It was the place where he was born and raised, but also where his mother and 1-year-old sister died in a terrible car crash that nearly killed Hunter and his older brother, Beau.

Hunter ultimately took the job with MBNA. In doing so, he settled into a pattern that would last the rest of his life, taking opportunities and putting himself in positions marked by good money and terrible political optics.

MBNA was then the largest independent credit card issuer in the world, and perhaps the most plum professional gig available in Delaware. Over the course of Joe Biden’s congressional career, MBNA executives showered him with more than $200,000 in campaign donations, the largest amount in his war chest tied to any one company. Sen. Biden was friendly with MBNA officials, including Cawley, and a reliable ally for their issues. (Which would later trouble him with the left when he ran for president.) After investigating these ties, in 1998 conservative journalist Byron York derided Biden in The American Spectator as “The Senator from MBNA,” in part detailing what he termed Hunter’s “mystery job.”

The move to MBNA thrust Hunter into a small, chummy world where it would prove impossible to escape his father’s shadow. He worked full-time at the bank for more than two years, entering its management training program in late 1996 and exiting as a senior vice president in 1998 for a job in Washington at the Commerce Department. In 2001, Hunter left government and co-founded a lobbying firm. That year, MBNA rehired him as a consultant and kept paying him until 2005. Over that same period, his father helped a big bankruptcy reform bill that had been aggressively championed by MBNA and other credit card companies become law. (Joe Crouse, who served as MBNA’s top D.C. lobbyist between 1999 and 2005, told me that Hunter had no role in the bank’s lobbying activities.)

While he had no first-hand knowledge of how or why Hunter was hired, Crouse said “nobody was really surprised” when he was brought onboard. “He was a Biden, and we were in Delaware,” Crouse explained.

Over the intervening years, Hunter’s last name has become both a blessing and a curse, elevating him professionally at the cost of increasingly knotty conflict-of-interest questions. All of this has culminated in a moment of unprecedented scrutiny for Hunter — personal scandals, mounting legal troubles, and congressional investigations over his business dealings that threaten to taint his father’s presidency and could prompt a House impeachment vote. After months of insisting he testify before Congress in public, Hunter recently agreed to sit for a private deposition with the House next month. (The White House and Hunter Biden’s representatives declined to comment for this story.)

Hunter’s stint at MBNA predates the examples of influence peddling that have received the most attention during the current maelstrom. His work there was, by all available accounts, perfectly legal. And yet his time working for the bank offers an illuminating origin story for Hunter.

In his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things, Hunter casts MBNA as an innocent but impactful move in a career — and a life — that spiraled out of control. “I kept climbing the escalator,” he explains, “and didn’t know how to get off.”

Others, including York, see more cynical motivations. “At the beginning of his career, Hunter Biden faced a choice: head out into the world to make it on his own or stay close to home and take advantage of his name and family connections,” York said in an email. “He chose the latter when the most powerful company in Delaware offered him a plum job, setting the course for a life of being in the Biden business.”

Of Hunter’s many highly publicized exploits, MBNA may offer the most concrete and credible example of political nepotism. It’s also the most conventional, a basic illustration of how political status is routinely leveraged by the sons and daughters of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Lawmakers have done little to meaningfully reel in this trend. In 2007, Congress passed the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which limited the ability of family members to lobby their relatives but declined to ban the practice outright. (Biden voted for the law.) Five years later, the Washington Post identified 56 relatives of lawmakers who were paid to influence Congress, often in ways that skirted the line of the 2007 regulations. Since then, a slew of additional lobbyists and corporate bigwigs with political bloodlines have emerged. In 2022, for instance, POLITICO found 17 members of Congress with children tied to Big Tech, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose two daughters were employed by Meta and Amazon, respectively. (They still appear to be in these roles, though neither Schumer’s office nor the two companies responded to requests seeking clarity on their employment.) One of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s daughters, meanwhile, directs policy at a left-leaning think tank near Dupont Circle.

Jordan Libowitz, the communications director at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, admitted that political nepotism has become so commonplace that his organization has sidestepped it entirely. “If we focused on children of politicians making money off their family name,” he said, “we’d never have time for anything else.”

Hunter Biden has become the figurehead of this phenomenon, in no small part due to his father’s rise to the pinnacle of American power. Other members of the Biden family have also faced questions about how they obtained jobs, including Hunter’s now-deceased brother, Beau, who has been canonized as everything that Hunter is not.

In 2020, after he died at 46 from a neuroblastoma, Beau was remembered for shunning opportunities to cash in on the family name. Most famously, in 2008, he turned down a political appointment to his father’s U.S. Senate seat, instead choosing to fulfill his duties in the Army National Guard.

And yet, a dozen years earlier, his entrance into the legal world spurred a backlash. In June 1996, after Beau was appointed to the Department of Justice, the Wilmington News Journal published a piece that weighed his credentials against his connections. At the time of the appointment, his father served as the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Justice Department. Among other things, Beau’s job involved implementing the Brady Gun bill and the Violence Against Women Act — two laws spearheaded by his father.

“I don’t see any conflict,” Sen. Biden insisted to the Journal. He and others pointed to Beau’s sterling credentials, including a clerkship for a federal judge in New Hampshire. That judge, Steven McAuliffe, endorsed Beau as “very hard-working, very dedicated,” and yet he was far from an objective observer. As the story noted, he had served as the New Hampshire co-chairman for Biden’s failed 1988 presidential run.

Beau, for his part, was clearly frustrated by the reporter’s insinuating questions, and counseled Hunter, who’d just graduated Yale, about the scrutiny to come. “I would tell my brother to do what he wants to do and to be honorable doing it,” he said, before asking the reporter a question. “Are you trying to say we both should have been doctors?”

Five months later, the Journal published a similar piece on Hunter’s new job at MBNA. His father seemingly disapproved of the MBNA appointment, telling the paper that he was “a little disappointed” his son hadn’t entered a conventional law firm. It wouldn’t be the last time Biden expressed muted concern over his son’s exploits teetering ever-so-close to his own. Decades later, after Hunter was appointed to the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma — another job that raised questions about his qualifications — then-Vice President Biden, whose foreign policy portfolio included Ukraine, told Hunter, “I hope you know what you are doing.”

Then, as now, Hunter was defiant. “Unfortunately, no matter where I went to work, some people would make an issue of it,” he told the Journal in 1996. He insisted that the move to MBNA was born from his interest in business law, but also for family reasons. “Ninety percent of the reason I took the job is that it’s close to home,” he told the paper.

Hunter later acknowledged in his memoir that money was also a factor. “Being a corporate lawyer was the antithesis of what I’d thought I’d be doing,” he wrote. “But I had $160,000 in student loans from college and law school, a burgeoning family, and no savings.” He noted, almost giddily, that, by the time he left MBNA, “I had more money in the bank than any Biden in six generations.”

In addition to his six-figure salary, Hunter also received a signing bonus. Such a generous package was not unusual at MBNA, which, according to Crouse, “paid extremely well.” Hunter used his newfound wealth to send his daughter Naomi to private school, to help pay off Beau’s student debt, and to buy a house. Kathleen wanted to be pragmatic with their new wealth and suggested they see a financial adviser, but Hunter was against it. They eventually met with someone, but only once, according to Kathleen’s book. The adviser suggested they purchase a home for no more than $170,000.

Weeks later, Hunter fell in love with a sprawling old estate and former frat house on Centre Road, in Wilmington’s poshest part of town. The estate had gorgeous trappings, like high hemlocks and marble mantelpieces, but also remnants from its college tenants, including a pool table and an old refrigerator with a hole cut in it to accommodate a beer keg. At $310,000, the house cost nearly twice as much as the family’s proposed budget, but Hunter was insistent, and Kathleen again relented. (In his memoir, Hunter contended that the family ultimately flipped the house for about twice what they originally paid.)

Hunter seemingly became intoxicated by his money, but also captive to it. He indicates in his memoir that once MBNA introduced him to upper-middle class life, “every decision I made after that was based on how to maintain what I had, and how to make more.”

Hunter seemingly delayed his start date at MBNA to fulfill a family promise: serving as co-chair for his dad’s 1996 reelection campaign. Beau, Kathleen and various other Bidens worked long days to assist this effort. Most nights, Hunter hosted them and other campaign staff on his back porch for drinks. (In her memoir, Kathleen notes that it wasn’t until the early 2000s, when Hunter became a lobbyist in D.C., that she “watched his drinking spiral from social to problematic.”)

Ahead of Election Day, MBNA signaled clear support for the veteran senator. When the Biden campaign held a swanky $1,000-a-head fundraiser at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, it was attended by Cawley, who per a bank spokesperson at time, “strongly supports the senator.” (Cawley later became a major backer of President George W. Bush, with Biden and Bush coming together in 2000 to honor Cawley and his wife for their record of social entrepreneurship.)

According to the Journal, MBNA’s chief counsel directed 150 executives on which of the state’s politicians to give to, and how much. During the 1996 campaign, a crew of MBNA executives showered Biden with more than ten thousand dollars in a little more than a week. “There wasn’t anybody watching you to make sure you did it, but you were encouraged to participate in local, state and federal politics by making contributions,” recalled Crouse, who gave to an array of politicians, including Biden, and to MBNA’s PAC.

Just as Hunter felt the allure of money, Sen. Biden seemed intoxicated by status, hobnobbing at the hotel fundraiser not only with MBNA executives, but also officials from the University of Delaware, the DuPont company and Bell Atlantic. “Joe’s always loved being a part of the ‘Chateau Country’ scene,” explained a long-time journalist, invoking Delaware’s rural, aristocratic region. (They were granted anonymity to speak freely about the most powerful family in the state where they still reside.)

Cawley told the Journal in 2008 that Biden is an “absolutely straightforward man” and that “nothing inappropriate ever happened or could happen” between him and the bank. “It’s not in Joe’s DNA.”

Perhaps a more accurate depiction of Biden’s political relationship in the bank came from John Stapleford, at the time a Moody’s economist based in Delaware, who in the same article, said that when people like Cawley spoke, politicians like Biden listened. He claimed Delaware politicians are routinely “giving deference to the major players” in business, adding, “it’s like insider trading in that there’s a small group of people who really know what decisions are being made and why.”

Two weeks after Biden’s 1996 win, Hunter showed up at MBNA headquarters for his first day of corporate training. At the time, the bank held a whopping 7 percent of the nation’s outstanding credit card debt. Its total consolidated assets topped $13 billion and it employed 7,700 people in Delaware, making it the state’s largest private employer. The bank boasted seven in-state locations, including its 1 million square-foot headquarters in Wilmington.

As he settled in, Hunter traversed the Wilmington complex to meet with top executives, including Crouse, then MBNA’s head of government affairs. He came to that meeting with a memo on internet privacy laws, which the two discussed briefly. Crouse recalled that it was difficult “to get a read on [Hunter’s] qualifications,” but said that he seemed competent enough, and had impressive academic credentials.

Hunter ultimately ended up working chiefly on internet privacy and e-commerce issues, per archival news clips, as well as what he described as management duties over an “investigative unit of the consumer fraud division.” Bank officials repeatedly strained to note that he never dealt directly with his father.

Hunter has said little about his day-to-day work at the bank, other than to express indignation toward its gung-ho corporate culture, where employees were expected to work 12-hour days. “If you forgot to wear your MBNA lapel pin, someone would stop you in the halls,” he told The New Yorker in 2019.

His father seemed a far more energetic booster of company principles. When MBNA was having trouble retaining talent in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Crouse recalled personally inviting Biden to come speak to a batch of recently recruited bankers and pitch Delaware as a great place to live and work. (“It’s not exactly the Paris of the East Coast,” Crouse half-joked.)

Crouse said Biden and his staff would routinely pop into company headquarters, and often showed up at events for the Delaware Bankers Association. In 1997, MBNA also flew Biden and his wife Jill to their corporate retreat in Maine, where the senator delivered remarks.

Between roughly 1999 and 2005, Crouse and other MBNA lobbyists frequently met in D.C. with Biden’s staff to craft a controversial bankruptcy reform bill that ultimately made it harder for working class families to have their credit card debts forgiven.

Crouse insisted that Biden was “no pushover” on the bill and said his team “gave me a pretty hard time” during its drafting process. Over this period, Hunter was serving as an MBNA consultant on privacy issues, with a $100,000-a-year retainer. That agreement ended in 2005, the same year that the bankruptcy bill passed. A few months later, in January 2006, MBNA was officially acquired by Bank of America for about $35 billion.

Two years after that, aides to then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told the New York Times that the ties between MBNA and the Bidens was “one of the most sensitive issues they examined while vetting [Biden] for a spot on the ticket.” Once Biden was picked as Obama’s running mate, Tom Brokaw asked him about Hunter’s MBNA connections on Meet the Press. “He came home to work for a bank,” Biden said flippantly. “Surprise, surprise.”

Even as it brought political baggage, MBNA armed Hunter with the credentials to move into new roles. In 2006, he pointed to his experience at the bank as he was being considered for a position on the Amtrak Board. (He got the role.) That same year, he used his newfound wealth to co-purchase a hedge fund with his uncle Jimmy, work that enabled new ventures and a series of escalating deals in Iraq, China and Ukraine that are now the subject of heated investigations on Capitol Hill and in the media.

Hunter has publicly denied any wrongdoing, but he has privately reflected that his career was fueled by nepotism more than anything else, an honest indication of an internal sense of inadequacy. “It has nothing to do with me,” he wrote in a 2011 email to his then-business partner, Devon Archer, “and everything to do with my last name.” In his memoir, Hunter is more defensive, writing “there’s no question that my last name has opened doors, but my qualifications and accomplishments speak for themselves.”

There were, of course, a slew of factors that led to Hunter’s controversial ventures — ambition, addiction, privilege — though Crouse estimates that MBNA provided an important professional patina early on. “For [Hunter] to have some experience with banks, particularly MBNA, would have been a good thing for his career,” he reasoned. “I know I was glad to have it on my résumé.”

CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to clarify the employment status of a journalist quoted.

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