Attorneys fret shutdown will derail long-awaited Trump deposition

The impending government shutdown might inadvertently derail a deposition of Donald Trump that has been years in the making, attorneys in a long-running civil lawsuit warned Thursday.

Lawyers for former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — who are suing the Justice Department claiming their departures from the bureau were improperly influenced by Trump — say they’ve scheduled a two-hour Oct. 17 session with the former president.

However, they noted that the Justice Department typically seeks to delay all civil matters during government shutdowns and might seek to do so in the Strzok-Page case as well.

“Considering the lengthy effort that scheduling Mr. Trump’s deposition required and that a stay might result in substantial delay of the conclusion of this action, Plaintiffs will oppose any stay and expect to promptly request relief from any default stay that is imposed,” Strzok and Page’s attorneys wrote.

The two former FBI employees were involved in Trump-related investigations in 2016 and 2017 before the public release of their private text messages by Justice Department officials revealed hostility and disgust with Trump. They’ve sued over the handling of those messages and claimed that Trump’s public attacks on them contributed to the FBI’s decision to fire Strzok and Page’s resignation.

Deposing Trump is the last step in the process of evidence gathering connected to the lawsuit, which has also resulted in depositions of FBI Director Christopher Wray and other senior FBI and DOJ officials.

The effort to depose Trump has been laborious. An earlier scheduled deposition in the spring was postponed after the Justice Department sought to block it altogether, claiming that Strzok and Page had failed to present evidence that Trump’s conduct had any bearing on their departures from the bureau. But Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered a narrow and limited deposition of Trump despite DOJ’s efforts.

The Justice Department sought intervention from an appellate court to block Trump’s deposition, but an appeals court panel rejected the effort over the summer, putting Trump’s deposition back on track.

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DeSantis slams Trump and Biden after Republican debate

Fresh off the second Republican presidential debate, Ron DeSantis is going into attack mode.

The morning after the debate, the Florida governor took issue with President Joe Biden's new campaign ad that spliced together snippets of DeSantis' debate performance in which he called out former President Donald Trump for his absence on the debate stages. It ends with Biden saying he approves this message.

DeSantis clapped back on X, formerly known as Twitter: “When I'm the nominee, I'll make you climb out of your basement, accept responsibility, and defend your failed record, @JoeBiden.”

DeSantis also had his sights on Trump, digging even further into Trump’s absence on the debate stage by saying in a Fox News interview that Trump should “defend why is he running on the same program in 2016 that he did not actually implement.”

“He has had a lot to say about me on social media since 2022 — right before the midterm election, he started attacking me when we were supposed to be united to a red wave,” DeSantis said. “[It's] one thing to do it behind the keyboard. Do it to my face. I'm ready for it. You used to say I'm a great governor. Now you say the opposite. Let's have the discussion. We can do it one-on-one.”

The digs come after DeSantis failed to create a viral, memorable moment at Wednesday night’s debate — or even one at the August debate. Instead, DeSantis appeared only to be going off rehearsed riffs.

DeSantis was seen as Trump’s top potential Republican challenger when he first announced his presidential run in May, but his poll numbers have only fallen since then — both nationally and in early-voting states. DeSantis ranked fifth place in a CNN/University of New Hampshire poll released this month. A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed Trump’s lead over DeSantis has nearly doubled since April.

“Polls don’t elect presidents, voters elect presidents,” DeSantis said Wednesday night.

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GOP senators rough up Pentagon nominee over Afghanistan evacuation

Republican senators on Thursday tore into President Joe Biden’s nominee to be the Pentagon’s policy chief over the role he played in the Afghanistan evacuation when he was a State Department official.

During Derek Chollet’s confirmation hearing to be the undersecretary of Defense for policy before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) called out what he characterized as the State Department’s failure to evacuate American citizens during and after the withdrawal.

He accused the administration of hindering his efforts to evacuate a group of Americans, including a 3-year-old girl with a leg infection, a mother and her three children, to the Kabul airport. At the time, Chollet was serving as counselor of the State Department, a role he still fills.

“All night of the 29th, you guys are taking me from gate, to gate, to gate, to gate, to gate, to gate, to gate trying to get these individuals in HKIA,” Mullin said, referring to the Hamid Karzai International Airport. “The State Department was stopping us every step of the way.”

After driving the three-year-old girl across the border to Tajikistan, the U.S. ambassador there told Mullin “I was told by Washington, D.C., not to assist you in any way,” the senator said during the hearing. The girl ultimately died, Mullin said, noting that he sent State Department officials pictures of her from his phone.

“For you to sit there and say that every American who wanted to get out got out, you're absolutely lying. And you know that to be factual and you say it with a straight face,” he said.

Chollet has been nominated to replace Colin Kahl as the top official advising the Pentagon chief on all matters related to policymaking. Kahl was one of Biden’s most controversial nominees, and only barely scraped through confirmation after facing sharp questions over his harsh criticism of Republicans on social media and support for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Republicans have said they want to reset relations with the policy chief after having a rocky relationship with Kahl, and Chollet is considered likely to be approved by the committee. But that didn’t stop some of them from asking tough questions about the Afghanistan withdrawal and other Biden-era decisions.

During Thursday’s hearing, Mullin hounded Chollet for an answer on whether anyone in the Biden administration has been held accountable for the “disastrous withdrawal.”

“Has anybody been held accountable?” said Mullin, who made repeated requests of the U.S. government to travel to Kabul during the evacuation to rescue American citizens. He’s since become an outspoken critic of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

“Senator, accountability is critically important–”

“No, I’m saying has anybody been held accountable?” Mullin interrupted. “That's a simple one. It's a yes or no.”

Other Republicans also went after Chollet for the Afghanistan evacuation. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the committee’s ranking member, said Chollet’s comments suggesting the decision to leave Afghanistan was “strategically sound” caused him concern.

During his questioning, Wicker referenced Biden’s interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos pledging to get all Americans out of the country.

“When did you realize that the president was not going to do this?” Wicker asked.

Chollet acknowledged his role in the withdrawal and touted the administration's evacuation of 120,000 people in August 2021, and 15,000 since then.

Chollet also took heat from Republicans for his defense of former President Barack Obama’s time in office, his comments to The Associated Press in 2018 that the notion of a security threat at the southern border was “preposterous,” and remarks to The New York Times in 2020 that “The Army in particular is a pretty bubba-oriented system.”

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) asked Chollet repeatedly what was more important to the Navy: warfighting and shipbuilding, or climate change. After Chollet refused to bite, Sullivan said the nominee’s answer was “extremely disappointing.”

“The biggest concern so many of us have is the civilians at the Pentagon are shoving down a system of values that don't relate to warfighting, don't work relate to lethality,” Sullivan said.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked Chollet to say what he thought of the Biden administration’s timeframe for sending military equipment to Ukraine.

“In retrospect, do you agree there's any weapon system that the Biden administration should have sent earlier than it finally ended up sending them, or do you think it's pitched a perfect game on every decision?” Cotton asked.

Chollet acknowledged that the administration’s approach to Ukraine has not been “perfect,” but said he’s “satisfied” with the amount of assistance the U.S. has given to Kyiv.

"I don't think anyone presumes there's been a perfect game pitch, for sure,” Chollet said.

If the committee decides to approve Chollet's nomination, full Senate confirmation is still unlikely due to Sen. Tommy Tuberville's (R-Ala.) hold on all Pentagon nominees in protest of the agency's abortion travel policy.

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San Francisco’s mayor wants drug testing for welfare recipients

SAN FRANCISCO — Recipients of public assistance — in a city once known for its embrace of counterculture drugs — would have to submit to tests for substance use under a proposal announced Tuesday by Mayor London Breed as she faces mounting pressure to address San Francisco’s fentanyl epidemic.

Breed, who is running for reelection in 2024, outlined the plan the same day that an heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune launched his own mayoral bid, arguing that his incumbent opponent had let the drug and homelessness crises fester under her watch.

Her proposal — which progressive critics immediately compared to Republican-style welfare mandates — would require all recipients of locally-funded cash assistance participate in a substance abuse treatment program if screening showed drug use.

“No more handouts without accountability,” Breed said at a City Hall news conference. “People are not accepting help. Now, it’s time to make sure that we are cutting off resources that continue to allow this behavior.”

The proposal from the Democratic mayor of this ultra-liberal city reflects the depth of frustration with a fentanyl crisis that has led to record overdoses, turned parts of downtown into open-air drug markets and is correlated with an increase in car break-ins and other property crime.

It follows similar moves by leaders of other blue cities like New York and Portland, who are pushing forced treatment for mentally ill residents and sweeps of homelessness encampments that were once anathema to the Democratic Party. Breed, and her big city counterparts, are taking more drastic measures around the intertwined problems of drug use, homelessness and mental health to show voters they’re serious about public safety concerns.

Breed has increasingly leaned into tough-on-crime rhetoric in recent months as she faces political headwinds and a growing field of challengers. On Tuesday, she defended her welfare proposal with a Clinton-esque commentary about the need for incentives that make subsidies contingent on personal responsibility.

But she faces a tough road getting the progressive-leaning Board of Supervisors to go along with her proposal. Several were swift to call her plan inhumane and politically-motivated. About a dozen states, mostly deep-red, require drug testing for welfare recipients.

Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, a progressive and potential rival in the mayoral race, said Breed is deflecting because she has failed to work with the police department to effectively close open-air markets for drugs and stolen goods.

“These are serious times in San Francisco — and we need serious ideas, not politicians desperately grasping for a political lifeline,” he said.

Breed announced her proposal on the same morning that Daniel Lurie, a longtime nonprofit executive and Levi Strauss heir, formally announced he will challenge her in next year’s election.

Lurie told a crowd of hundreds of supporters that he would seek to dramatically increase San Francisco’s police presence to respond to the crises that have roiled its streets.

“My administration will finally slam the door shut on the era of open-air drug markets and end the perception that lawlessness is an acceptable part of life in San Francisco,” he said during a rally at a community center in Potrero Hill.

Several details of Breed’s drug testing proposal are unclear, including which specific drugs would be tested for. Her office said she would unveil the text of the legislation in the coming weeks.

Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a recovering addict and former spokesperson for the police department, is carrying the measure with Breed. He said more coercive incentives are needed to get people into treatment, especially amid the “unprecedented loss of life in San Francisco” due to drug overdoses.

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Obernolte: House is still choosing priorities on AI law

Rep. Jay Obernolte said Wednesday his near-term priority as vice chair of the Congressional Artificial Intelligence Caucus is picking a lane on how to legislate the emerging technology.

“Are we going to do a broad-based approach with a new agency? Potentially like the EU has done? Or are we going to adopt a sectoral approach, where we empower our existing sectoral regulators to regulate AI within their sectoral spaces?” Obernolte (R-Calif.) said at POLITICO’s AI & Tech Summit.

Obernolte’s basic questions reflected a Congress still in the early phases of regulation. In the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer this month convened an “AI Insight Forum” of tech leaders, not long after he laid out a framework in June for Congress to get on a path toward comprehensive regulation. But some lawmakers have urged for more efficiency in the legislative process to match the breakneck pace of innovation.

Michael Kratsios, former U.S. chief technology officer and now managing director of the San Francisco-based Scale AI, said at the summit that the release of ChatGPT “fundamentally changed the dynamic in Washington” and made the conversation around AI more urgent and concrete.

“It is something that everyday Americans can touch, feel and play with personally,” he said. “Before it was just sort of this, you know, 'Terminator' dream in the movies or something that was happening, maybe in some factory somewhere through a robot.”

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Abbott visited New York City. He didn't take pity on its migrant surge.

NEW YORK — Everything’s bigger in Texas — including the humanitarian crisis of helping migrants.

That was the message from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as he spoke Wednesday in Manhattan, where leaders have blasted his continued efforts to ship migrants from the southern border to blue states, particularly the biggest of them all: New York City.

Abbott both defended his program bussing migrants from the border to sanctuary cities like New York and trivialized Mayor Eric Adams’ complaints about the strain it has put on the city's resources.

“What's going on in New York right now might not be the common circumstance or what you were looking for,” Abbott said at a breakfast hosted by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “But what is going on in New York is calm and organized compared to the real chaos of what we see on the border — not every day, but every hour of every day.”

The Adams administration says nearly 120,000 migrants have come to the city since last summer, many of them without shelter, jobs and support systems. More than 60,000 are currently in the city’s care through a network of shelters in hotels, tents and office buildings.

Adams has blamed Abbott as a catalyst for the recent increase in asylum-seekers coming to the city. Earlier this month, the mayor called him “a madman.” So City Hall saw Abbott’s first visit to the city in years as an insult.

“New Yorkers deserve better than being trapped between a vicious game of political hot potato,” a spokesperson for Adams said. “When thousands of asylum-seekers arrived at Governor Abbott's doorstep in pursuit of the American Dream, he chose to use them as political pawns.”

Abbott, a Republican, put the blame on President Joe Biden, saying that Texas has bussed just 15,800 migrants to New York. That’s a fraction of the migrants who have come to the city through either private transportation or supported by nonprofit organizations. Abbott added that the buses were necessary to relieve overwhelmed small border towns.

The Adams administration has also bussed migrants to hotels in other parts of New York and has lobbied Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul to help the city with more money and resources, along with policies to allow the city more flexibility on where to house them.

In fact, Abbott never directly attacked Adams during the nearly one-hour program, and he was eager at times to note their points of agreement — something that Republicans have done regularly with Adams, who has sparred with the White House over the issue.

“This is something that's unsustainable. I think those are the words of your mayor. Those are the words of the mayor of Chicago and LA. Those are the words of the governor of Texas,” he said.

Abbott echoed New York leaders in saying that the federal government should pay Texas and New York for serving migrants and teased that “you may be able to expect some litigation” on that issue coming soon.

Asked what advice he’d give Adams and Hochul, he said it’s something they’re already beginning to follow: blaming Biden for not limiting migration to the country.

“They must prevail upon their president for more than just money. They need a change in policy,” he said. “They need to demand what all Americans expect and that is the Biden administration will follow the rule of law and stop illegal immigration into the United States.”

The White House has put the onus on Congress to change immigration laws, and it points to the help it has given New York and other states.

Hochul, meanwhile, was unswayed by Abbott’s visit to New York.

“Let me be clear. I will not be taking advice from Greg Abbott,” she told reporters at an unrelated press conference Wednesday.

“This is just pure politics what he is talking about. And if he’s genuine about solving the problem, don’t come to New York and grandstand. Go to Washington and meet with Speaker (Kevin) McCarthy and say you have the key in your hands to solving this problem.”

Abbott isn’t expected to meet with either Hochul or Adams while in New York. He appeared in studio on Fox News Wednesday morning — where he also encouraged New York to “blame Joe Biden” — and met with billionaire donor John Catsimatidis, taping a prerecorded segment for Catsimatidis' radio show.

Abbott adviser Dave Carney said Abbott would be in New York until Friday, including visits to the New York Stock Exchange and attending a celebration for an exchange traded fund of Texas companies.

Where Abbott spoke was also notable. It was at the Yale Club in Midtown Manhattan, which is next door to the Roosevelt Hotel that the city has turned into its main migrant intake center.

The governor didn’t appear to visit and drove away after the event. But one Adams’ deputy mayor leading the migrant response, Anne Wiliams-Isom, suggested Abbott could learn from the way the city has provided shelter and services.

“I hope that when he’s here, he can get a glimpse of what it really looks like to deal with a humanitarian crisis in a humane way,” she said.

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Trudeau apologizes for tribute to vet who fought in WWII Nazi unit

OTTAWA, Ont. — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he is offering “Parliament’s unreserved apologies” to the world, several days following scandalous revelations that lawmakers mistakenly praised a man who fought in a Nazi division in WWII.

“This is a mistake that deeply embarrassed Parliament and Canada,” Trudeau said Wednesday in a televised address ahead of his apology in the House of Commons.

He acknowledged the incident during President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Ottawa visit struck a blow to Ukraine’s public relations efforts as it tries to rally support for its fight against Russia as Moscow uses the debacle to its advantage.

“All of us who were in this House on Friday regret deeply having stood and clapped, even though we did so unaware of the context,” he said.

“It was a horrendous violation of the memory of the millions of people who died in the Holocaust and it was deeply, deeply painful for Jewish people. It also hurt Polish people, Roma people, to LGBTQI+ people, disabled people, racialized people and the many millions who were targeted by the Nazi genocide.”

Trudeau did not take questions from reporters and pointed blame at the House of Commons speaker.

This follows the delayed resignation on Wednesday of the speaker, Anthony Rota, who has assumed responsibility for inviting Yaroslav Hunka, 98, to Parliament and publicly praising him as a Ukrainian and Canadian “hero,” netting Hunka a standing ovation from Canadian politicians and Zelenskyy.

Rota apologized for the incident after it came out that Hunka served in the First Ukrainian Division, also known as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS under the Nazis.

Trudeau’s Liberals have squarely blamed Rota for causing the incident. But the opposition Conservatives blame Trudeau.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who is surging ahead of Trudeau in the polls, said it has left Canada’s image in tatters.

“This is by far the biggest hit Canada’s diplomatic reputation has ever taken in its history,” he told reporters Tuesday.

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