Liberal groups raise 'grave concerns' about Biden judicial pick

Several liberal advocacy organizations are expressing serious doubts about President Joe Biden’s nominee to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, highlighting his handling of a school sexual assault case.

In a memo sent to Democrats on the Judiciary Committee and obtained by POLITICO, the National Women’s Law Center, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and People for the American Way expressed “grave concerns” about Michael Delaney’s nomination.

"A look at Delaney’s legal career includes an egregious lack of respect for the privacy, safety, and rights of survivors and an apparent endorsement of the practices schools so often use to intimidate survivors into silence,” the groups wrote. “We urge senators to further examine Delaney’s record and background and ensure they are not complicit in pushing survivors of sexual misconduct further into the shadows."

The controversy surrounding Delaney’s nomination is unusual for a Biden judicial pick, compounded with further concerns voiced by some Democratic members on the panel. The New Hampshire judicial nominee is under particular scrutiny for his representation of St. Paul’s School in a school sexual assault case. During that case, Delaney filed a motion that would have allowed the plaintiff, who was a minor, to remain anonymous only if she and her representatives agreed not to speak about the case publicly during the litigation.

The victim in the case, Chessy Prout, went public and a settlement was eventually reached in 2018. Prout recently wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe encouraging the White House to withdraw Delaney's nomination. During his confirmation hearing, Delaney said he was an "advocate" for St. Paul's, and that the school "felt that the request to restrict [Prout's] lawyers from trying the case in the media was compatible with her desire to proceed with privacy and anonymity.”

Delaney, a former New Hampshire attorney general, has strong support from his home state Democratic senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, as well as the White House. Hassan and Shaheen have made the case for his confirmation broadly to their colleagues, including at the caucus lunch this past week.

Delaney’s allies also highlight support from Susan Carbon, former President Barack Obama’s director of the office of violence against women, who wrote that he was "instrumental" in making changes designed "to improve the civil and criminal justice systems for victims of crime" in New Hampshire. Other endorsements include four former New Hampshire Supreme Court justices, appointed by both parties, and 29 past presidents of the New Hampshire Bar Association.

“The strong support for Michael Delaney from legal experts, survivor advocates and lawmakers spanning the political spectrum speaks to his qualifications, ethics and commitment to justice throughout his nearly thirty-year career,” said Sarah Weinstein, a Shaheen spokesperson. “Senator Shaheen believes that both his record and strong backing from individuals in the advocacy and legal sectors underscore his qualifications.”

Laura Epstein, a Hassan spokesperson added that "Delaney’s strong, bipartisan support from a wide cross-section of leaders ... underscores his deep commitment to justice and why he will make for an excellent First Circuit Judge."

White House spokesperson Seth Schuster said the White House "has the utmost respect for sexual assault and domestic violence survivors and expects senators to take Mr. Delaney's full record into account when considering his nomination — as the White House did before nominating Mr. Delaney to the First Circuit."

The Senate Judiciary Committee is slated to take up Delaney’s nomination next week, but that is likely to change depending on attendance. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has been out of the Senate recovering from shingles. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have made the school sexual assault case a key focus and are not expected to support his nomination. While no Democrats have come out publicly against Delaney, it's not clear he has the votes to get through committee.

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George Santos denies involvement in 2017 credit card scam

Rep. George Santos said he is “innocent” in response to questions about his alleged involvement in a 2017 credit card skimming operation, CNN reported on Friday.

Santos, who also goes by Anthony Devolder, told reporters on Capitol Hill he “never did anything of criminal activity” and that he had “no mastermind event,” CNN reports.

Santos’ comments come after POLITICO exclusively reported that his former roommate, Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha, claimed Santos oversaw the credit card operation. Trelha, who was convicted of the 2017 crime and was deported to Brazil, sent a sworn declaration to federal authorities on Wednesday detailing Santos' alleged role.

“I am coming forward today to declare that the person in charge of the crime of credit card fraud when I was arrested was George Santos / Anthony Devolder,” Trelha wrote in the declaration.

Santos, a freshman Republican congressman from New York, has faced backlash for lying about his ancestry, education and previous jobs while campaigning to represent the swing district. He now faces a House panel investigation, as well as state, federal and Brazilian law enforcement probes for a range of possible crimes. He's admitted to embellishing his resume but has denied any wrongdoing.

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White House sets its sights on cloud overhaul

Governments and businesses have spent two decades rushing to the cloud — trusting some of their most sensitive data to tech giants that promised near-limitless storage, powerful software and the knowhow to keep it safe.

Now the White House worries that the cloud is becoming a huge security vulnerability.

So it’s embarking on the nation’s first comprehensive plan to regulate the security practices of cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, whose servers provide data storage and computing power for customers ranging from mom-and-pop businesses to the Pentagon and CIA.

The cloud has “become essential to our daily lives,” Kemba Walden, the acting national cyber director, said in an interview. “If it's disrupted, it could create large potentially catastrophic disruptions to our economy and to our government.”

In essence, she said, the cloud is now “too big to fail.”

The fear: For all their security expertise, the cloud giants offer concentrated targets that hackers could use to compromise or disable a wide range of victims all at once. The collapse of a major cloud provider could cut hospitals off from accessing medical records; paralyze ports and railroads; corrupt the software that help financial markets hum; and wipe out databases across small businesses, public utilities and government agencies.

“A single cloud provider going down could take down the internet like a stack of dominos,” said Marc Rogers, chief security officer at hardware security firm Q-Net Security and former head of information security at the content delivery provider Cloudflare.

And cloud servers haven’t proved to be as secure as government officials had hoped. Hackers from nations such as Russia have used cloud servers from companies like Amazon and Microsoft as a springboard to launch attacks on other targets. Cybercriminal groups also regularly rent infrastructure from U.S. cloud providers to steal data or extort companies.

Among other steps, the Biden administration recently said it will require cloud providers to verify the identity of their users to prevent foreign hackers from renting space on U.S. cloud servers (implementing an idea first introduced in a Trump administration executive order). And last week the administration warned in its national cybersecurity strategy that more cloud regulations are coming — saying it plans to identify and close regulatory gaps over the industry.

In a series of interviews about this new, tougher approach, administration officials stressed that they aren’t giving up on the cloud. Instead, they’re trying to ensure that rapid growth doesn’t translate to new security risks.

Cloud services can “take a lot of the security burden off of end users” by relieving them of difficult and time-consuming security practices, like applying patches and software updates, said Walden. Many small businesses and other customers simply lack the expertise and resources to protect their own data from increasingly adept hackers.

The problems come when those cloud providers aren’t providing the level of security they could.

So far, cloud providers have haven’t done enough to prevent criminal and nation-state hackers from abusing their services to stage attacks within the U.S., officials argued, pointing in particular to the 2020 SolarWinds espionage campaign, in which Russian spooks avoided detection in part by renting servers from Amazon and GoDaddy. For months, they used those to slip unnoticed into at least nine federal agencies and 100 companies.

That risk is only growing, said Rob Knake, the deputy national cyber director for strategy and budget. Foreign hackers have become more adept at “spinning up and rapidly spinning down” new servers, he said — in effect, moving so quickly from one rented service to the next that new leads dry up for U.S. law enforcement faster than it can trace them down.

On top of that, U.S. officials express significant frustration that cloud providers often up-charge customers to add security protections — both taking advantage of the need for such measures and leaving a security hole when companies decide not to spend the extra money. That practice complicated the federal investigations into the SolarWinds attack, because the agencies that fell victim to the Russian hacking campaign had not paid extra for Microsoft’s enhanced data-logging features.

“The reality is that today cloud security is often separate from cloud,” Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, said last week during a roll-out event for the new cyber strategy. “We need to get to a place where cloud providers have security baked in with that.”

So the White House is planning to use whatever powers it can pull on to make that happen — limited as they are.

“In the United States, we don't have a national regulator for cloud. We don't have a Ministry of Communication. We don't have anybody who would step up and say, ‘It's our job to regulate cloud providers,’” said Knake, of the strategy and budget office. The cloud, he said, “needs to have a regulatory structure around it.”

Knake’s office is racing to find new ways to police the industry using a ‘hodgepodge’ of existing tools, such as security requirements for specific sectors — like banking — and a program called FedRAMP that establishes baseline controls cloud providers must meet to sell to the federal government.

Part of what makes that difficult is that neither the government nor companies using cloud providers fully know what security protections cloud providers have in place. In a study last month on the U.S. financial sector’s use of cloud services, the Treasury Department found that cloud companies provided “insufficient transparency to support due diligence and monitoring” and U.S. banks could not “fully understand the risks associated with cloud services.”

But government officials say they see signs that the cloud providers’ attitude is changing, especially given that the companies increasingly see the public sector as a source for new revenue.

“Ten years ago, they would have been like, ‘No way,’” said Knake. But the major cloud providers “have now realized that if they want the growth that they want to have, if they want to be within critical sectors, they actually not only need to not stand in the way, but they need to provide tools and mechanisms to make it easy to prove compliance regulations,” he said.

The push for more regulations isn’t getting immediate objections from the cloud industry.

“I think that that's highly appropriate,” said Phil Venables, Google’s chief information security officer.

But at the same time, Venables argued that cloud providers are subject to plenty of regulation already, pointing to FedRAMP and the requirements cloud providers must satisfy in order to work with regulated entities such as banks, defense industrial base companies and federal agencies — the very tools Knake described as “hodgepodge.”

The White House outlined a more aggressive regulatory regime in its new cyber strategy. It proposed holding software makers liable for insecure code and imposing stronger security mandates on critical infrastructure companies, like the cloud providers.

“The market has not provided for all the measures necessary to ensure that it’s not being inappropriately used, that it’s resilient, and that it’s being good caretakers of the small and medium-sized business under its umbrella,” said John Costello, the recently departed chief of staff in the Office of the National Cyber Director.

Cloud computing companies are “eager” to work with the White House on a “harmonized approach to security requirements across sectors,” said Ross Nodurft, executive director of the Alliance for Digital Innovation, a tech trade group whose members include cloud giants Palo Alto Networks, VMWare, Google Cloud and AWS — the cloud computing arm of Amazon. He also said that companies already comply with existing “extensive security requirements” for specific industries.

A spokesperson for Microsoft, which is not a member of ADI, referred POLITICO to a Thursday blog post from a Microsoft executive making similar assertions that the company looks forward to working with agencies on crafting appropriate regulations. Amazon said in a statement that it prioritizes security but did not address the question of whether it supports additional regulation. Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.

If the government fails to find a way to ensure the resilience of the cloud, it fears the fallout could be devastating. Cloud providers have effectively become “three or four single points of failure” for the U.S. economy, Knake said.

According to a 2017 study from the insurance giant Lloyds, an outage at one of the top three cloud providers lasting between three and six days could cause $15 billion in damages.

Such a collapse could be triggered by a cyberattack on a major cloud provider, a natural or human-caused disaster that disrupts or cuts power to a major data center, or simply a failure in the design and maintenance of a core cloud service.

If the White House can’t get the results it wants through using existing regulations and cajoling companies into improving practices voluntarily, it will have to hit up Congress. And that could be its biggest hurdle.

Some Republicans have already criticized the White House’s national cybersecurity strategy for its heavy emphasis on regulation.

“We must clarify federal cybersecurity roles and responsibilities, not create additional burdens, to minimize confusion and redundancies across the government,” Rep. Mark Green (R.-Tenn.), the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), head of its cyber and infrastructure protection subcommittee, said in a statement last week.

As gatekeepers of the House Homeland Security Committee, Garbarino and Green wield de facto veto power over any major cybersecurity legislation that the White House might send Congress.

In the short term, that eliminates the possibility of the more ambitious cloud policy proposals outlined or hinted at in White House’s new strategy

That could mean that the administration will have to increase pressure on the companies to do more on their own.

Trey Herr, a former senior security strategist who worked in cloud computing at Microsoft, said cybersecurity agencies could, for example, require the heads of the major cloud providers to appear before top government cyber brass on a semi-regular basis and prove that they’re taking adequate steps to manage the risk within their systems.

The major cloud providers “have plenty of ways to talk about the security of one product, but few to manage the risk of all those products tied together,” said Herr, who is now the director of the Atlantic Council’s cyber statecraft initiative.

“It’s one thing to do a good job building a helipad on the top of your house,” he said. But “no one is asking if the house is built to handle that helipad in the first place.”

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Judge okays use of Access Hollywood tape in Trump defamation trial

NEW YORK — The longtime magazine columnist who accused former President Donald Trump of raping her in the 1990s can use the 'Access Hollywood' tape as evidence at trial in her defamation case, a federal judge ruled Friday.

The Manhattan judge also rejected Trump’s effort to block the columnist, E. Jean Carroll, from using the testimony of two other women who previously accused him of sexual assault.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that “a jury reasonably could find, even from the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape alone, that Mr. Trump admitted in the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape that he in fact has had contact with women’s genitalia in the past without their consent, or that he has attempted to do so.”

In the tape, a recording from 2005 that was widely scrutinized during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump boasts, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” adding: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Though Carroll’s 2019 lawsuit alleges only defamation, not sexual assault itself, Judge Kaplan found that “in order to prevail on her libel claim, Ms. Carroll must prove that Mr. Trump sexually assaulted her.”

Without proving the underlying claim of sexual assault, the judge wrote, “she cannot establish that Mr. Trump’s charge that her story was a lie and a hoax was false.”

In November, Carroll also filed a second lawsuit in New York alleging defamation and battery under a new state law. The 2019 lawsuit is set to go to trial in April. A judge hasn’t ruled whether the two cases will be combined.

Trump has denied defaming or assaulting Carroll. “We maintain the utmost confidence that our client will be vindicated at the upcoming trial,” a lawyer for Trump, Alina Habba, said in a statement Friday.

The judge’s ruling Friday will also permit Carroll to use the testimony of Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, two women who alleged Trump assaulted them in the years before he ran for office. Leeds alleged Trump groped her while they flew on an airplane together. Stoynoff alleged he sexually assaulted her while she was reporting a story for People Magazine.

Trump has denied both of their accounts.

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Republicans are winning more Latino votes. But rising turnout still benefits Dems.

The red wave never came to pass in 2022 — but there was a noticeable shift among Latino voters in the midterms, who still tilted toward Democrats overall but reached higher levels of Republican support, too.

Yet a new analysis from Voto Latino, a political organization focused on Latino turnout, shows how Hispanic voters helped Democrats maintain the Senate majority, how larger Latino turnout was a key ingredient for Democrats in several races with razor-thin margins — and why expanding that base of voters in 2024 is still key for Democrats as they also compete to win a growing cohort of Latino swing voters.

The group analyzed precinct data from the past decade up until the 2022 midterms across Arizona and Nevada, two increasingly important battleground states where Latinos have made up more than 15 percent of the electorate for almost a decade. Their findings show that, even amid broader Republican gains, Democratic performance increased in areas with high proportions of Latino voters — regions of both states that are only growing their Hispanic vote share.

Despite having a Latina candidate in the race in Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Democrats’ Senate overall vote share in Nevada fell to 62 percent among Latinos, compared to fellow Sen. Jacky Rosen’s 67 percent among the demographic in 2018, according to exit polls.

And in Arizona, the ratio for Democratic Senate hopefuls fell even more dramatically. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema enjoyed a 70 percent victory over her Republican opponent in 2018 among Latinos, while incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly fought for his 58 percent from the same demographic. Biden won about 61 percent of the Latino vote in 2020 in both states.

Yet Latino voters still boosted Cortez Masto, Kelly and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs enough to victory over their Republican counterparts, who took larger shares of white voters who make up the voting majority — bridging gaps as high as the 18-point deficit between Cortez Masto and Adam Laxalt among white voters.

Voto Latino conducted the analysis because of the large impact the two states had in the midterms. By analyzing precinct data, the organization’s projections show even modest increases of Latino turnout by 2.5 or 5 percentage points would net a fraction of a percentage for Democrats in a two-way race — boosting someone like Cortez Masto’s vote shares that much more, in a race that ultimately saw her and Republican Adam Laxalt separated by less than 1 point.

Voto Latino president María Teresa Kumar said she was unsurprised by the results, adding that even a little more investment would have avoided such a “close contest.”

“The reason we did this analysis was, had there been some investment based on historical participation of the Latino community of the last several years, wiser decisions would have been made,” Kumar said.

Latinos have become a growing voting contingent that both Republicans and Democrats have sought in the past two cycles, from releasing more ads in Spanish to boosting congressional surrogates to turn out votership.

Outside of the close contests in Arizona, where Democrats lost their overall Congressional majority, candidates in majority-Latino districts were reelected — including Reps. Raúl Grijalva and Ruben Gallego, who has now announced his candidacy for Senate.

“What Nevada and Arizona really give you a very crisp picture of is how important every voter is when you're looking at [increasingly] razor thin margins in many elections,” said Clarissa Martinez De Castro, vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS. “Latinos are increasingly a factor in the winning equation in more places than people have traditionally thought, like… California, Texas, Florida. The reality is that the numbers are growing all over.”

Latinos are the nation’s youngest demographic, with a median age under 30 and a growing young adult voter base, millions of whom will newly be eligible to vote by 2024. Experts say they could be convinced to turn out to vote, and for Democratic candidates — if the party continues to adapt their playbook outside the “white soccer mom” mentality.

This is why the turnout factor has to include data-driven analysis, Kumar added. Among Latinos, many young people may not yet see voting as the first option to secure rights for their community, she said. But that doesn’t mean they are automatically and permanently low-propensity.

“The majority of Latino voters are under the age of 33,” Kumar said. “By default, they’re low-propensity. It doesn’t mean they’re detached — they’re just flowing into the process. They should be taken seriously because they have the ear of their family in a way no party does.”

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German police: Fatalities in shooting inside Jehovah’s Witness hall

BERLIN — Shots were fired inside a building used by Jehovah’s Witnesses in the northern German city of Hamburg on Thursday evening, and an unspecified number of people were killed or wounded, police said.

The shooting took place in the Gross Borstel district, a few miles north of the downtown area of Germany’s second-biggest city.

Police said on Twitter that “several people were seriously wounded, some of them fatally,” but didn’t give a precise figure.

German news agency dpa reported seeing rescue services taking people out of a building used by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Police said they were alerted to the shooting about 9:15 p.m. and were on the scene quickly. They said that after officers arrived, they heard a shot from an upper floor.

The police statement said there was no immediate indication that a shooter was on the run and that it appeared likely that the perpetrator or perpetrators were either in the building or among the dead.

Police had no information on the event that was under way in the building when the shooting took place. They also had no immediate information on a possible motive.

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Biden to visit Canada on March 23

OTTAWA — President Joe Biden is heading to Ottawa on March 23 and will address Parliament during his two-day stay.

The White House confirmed the dates of the president’s much-anticipated visit to the Canadian capital, Biden’s first in-person trip north as president.

Russia’s war in Ukraine will cast a long shadow over the bilat with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, focusing discussions on defense, decarbonization and supply chains.

Haiti, clean energy, supply chains, climate change and “modernizing the North American Aerospace Defense Command” will be priority topics of discussion between the two leaders, according to a White House release. Trudeau’s office issued its own statement, adding that critical minerals will be a top agenda item, which wasn’t specifically highlighted in the White House release.

The spectre of Beijing’s alleged interference in Canada’s elections will also loom over the talks. It will also be the leaders’ first in-person meeting since high-altitude objects, and one confirmed balloon from China, were shot down over North America.

The dramatic takedowns alarmed politicians and military on both sides of the border, stoking discussions on continental defense, setting it up as a discussion point for bilateral talks.

Biden last visited Ottawa as vice president in December 2016 in the twilight of the Obama administration.

During an A-list dinner thrown in his honor, Biden touted North America as a region “better positioned than any time since the end of World War II” to lead the hemisphere and world in promoting liberal values.

“Viva la Canada because we need you very, very badly,” he said in a toast.

Beyond friendly photo-ops, the two G-7 leaders are expected to clarify joint action on the development of critical minerals.

Pressure will be on the leaders to announce progress on the Joint Action Plan on Critical Minerals that was finalized in 2020 during the final days of the Trump administration.

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