Analysis | The Daily 202: Bill Barr was in favor of baseless election fraud claims before he was against them

“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr said. 

He was making them himself. 

What’s happening now

Lunchtime reads from The Post

• “As Portland, Ore., copes with unprecedented heat, illnesses spike and roads buckle,” by Sarah Kaplan and Alexandra Baumhardt: “For now, not even nighttime brings relief. Temperatures linger in the high 90s well after sunset. This is also characteristic of human-caused climate change, which is heating up even faster than days. It also poses some of the greatest risks to human health: hot nights give the body no chance to recover from extreme temperatures, pushing people into heatstroke. … A spokesman for Oregon Health & Science University, the largest hospital in Portland, said the emergency department had seen a small uptick in heat-related illness this weekend.”
• “The land was worth millions. A Big Ag corporation sold it to Sonny Perdue’s company for $250,000,” by Desmond Butler: “The timing of the sale just as Perdue was about to become the most powerful man in U.S. agriculture raises legal and ethics concerns, from the narrow question of whether the secretary followed federal financial disclosure requirements to whether the transaction could have been an attempt to influence an incoming government official, in violation of bribery statutes, ethics lawyers say.” 

… and beyond

• “Californians are fueling Austin’s housing frenzy: ‘We’ve never seen migration like this,’ ” by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Roland Li: “Last month, Josh and Jessi Rubbicco and their two kids joined the flood, moving out of the East Bay after seven years. They found a fast-growing neighborhood in southwest Austin called Belterra. … The weather is warm and similar to the East Bay, said Rubbicco. … Texas Hill Country’s offerings are reminiscent of Napa, thanks to an array of wineries and distilleries. … There are some downsides: intense storms, more bugs and humidity. But for the Rubbiccos, like many Californians before them, the math behind the move was irresistible.”

The Biden agenda

Biden is heading to Wisconsin today to pitch the $1 trillion infrastructure deal. 

• “Behind the scenes, aides to the president are working to resolve differences between liberals and moderates in his party about whether to pass the bipartisan bill in tandem with a more sweeping bill focused on other Democratic priorities,” John Wagner reports.
• “Biden aides have made it clear they are counting on the package to give his presidency a shot of momentum and validate his insistence that bipartisanship is still possible. Republicans are eager to show they can help govern, although some would prefer to deny Biden a bipartisan achievement,” Seung Min Kim and Sean Sullivan report. “Continuing its aggressive promotion, the White House on Monday released a memo touting the economic activity the agreement would ostensibly generate — from repairing dilapidated bridges and roads to aiding farmers and ranchers in preparing for potential droughts.”
• Biden himself wrote an op-ed for Yahoo News in which he said the bipartisan agreement is a “signal to ourselves, and to the world, that American democracy can work and deliver for the people.”
• After initially saying he wouldn’t sign the bipartisan deal unless it was accompanied by a more sweeping liberal bill, Biden is now backtracking and appears to have righted himself with centrist senators, Kim and Sullivan write. But by assuaging one critical group he may have alienated another. “Although liberals said Monday that they still had faith in Biden to deliver on the party’s sweeping campaign promises, they warned that unless both bills are brought up at the same time, the bipartisan bill would not get enough Democratic votes to make it to his desk.”

Questions are emerging over how the deal will be paid for.

• “To pay for their proposed infrastructure package, the White House and a bipartisan group of senators agreed to reduce federal spending on unemployment benefits by about $70 billion. The administration says the changes will not reduce benefits for jobless Americans and that their proposal will only cut fraud and waste by improving ‘program integrity,’” Jeff Stein reports. “But nonpartisan analysts estimate that fraud and overpayments are likely to only amount to closer to $35 billion in unemployment spending over the next decade. Budget experts do not believe it is credible that lawmakers could cut unemployment spending by as much as 20 percent, as the plan suggests, with no impact on beneficiaries.”
• “The provision was endorsed in negotiations by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), a centrist Democrat, according to two people familiar with the matter,” Stein writes. “‘The idea there’s any large-scale fraud is nonsense — they’re clearly not going to get $70 billion from cutting people who are getting benefits improperly,’ said Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The fuzzy math on unemployment benefits is just one of the debatable assumptions the Senate and White House dealmakers made.”
• “The resulting compromise consists of a hodgepodge of measures that are unlikely to create actual revenue that pays for the spending plan, according to a half-dozen experts interviewed by The Post. Instead, a number of the proposals take advantage of budget maneuvers to mostly satisfy budget scorekeepers.”

Biden said he acted with constitutional authority to order airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. 

• “I directed last night’s airstrikes, targeting sites used by the Iranian-backed militia group responsible for recent attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq, and I have that authority under Article II — and even those up on the Hill who are reluctant to acknowledge that have acknowledged that is the case,” Biden said, Anne Gearan reports.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the number of ISIS fighters and family members being held at detention camps in Syria is “untenable.”

• “More than two years after they last met in person, top diplomats representing the 78-nation coalition to defeat the Islamic State gathered here Monday to assess what has happened in the interim and position themselves for the future. The news, in many respects, was not good,” Karen DeYoung reports.

The Biden administration will review thousands of deportations, permitting some immigrants back into the U.S. 

• “Jason Rochester tried everything he could to persuade the Trump administration to allow his wife Cecilia, who is Mexican, to come back to their home in the United States,” Politico’s Julia Preston reports. “A truck driver from Georgia, Rochester wanted to fix his wife’s undocumented immigration status and put her on track to become an American citizen, like him and their son Ashton, now 8. They even agreed that she would leave for Mexico voluntarily in 2018, expecting she would soon be permitted to re-enter the country with legal papers. They were wrong. Even when Ashton went through a year of treatment for kidney cancer, Trump administration officials did not relent, finding no compelling reason to let his mother in. Rochester stopped pleading.”
• “Now, based on encouraging moves by Biden in a handful of deportations, Rochester is preparing a new application to try again. That’s because the Biden administration, with little public fanfare, is working on plans for an organized review of thousands of cases of people who say they were unjustly deported in recent years, senior officials in charge of immigration said.”

The Florida condo collapse

The president of the Champlain South Towers condo association told residents in April their building was in desperate disrepair. 

• Jean Wodnicki, the condo board president, urged residents to pay the $15 million in assessments needed to fix structural problems, according to a letter reviewed by the Wall Street Journal’s Deborah Acosta.
• “Wodnicki wrote that the concrete damage to the building would ‘multiply exponentially over the years, and indeed the observable damage such as in the garage has gotten significantly worse over the years.’ ”
• “The purpose of the letter, dated April 9, 2021, was to explain to residents the worthiness of the construction projects for the 40-year-old building ahead of the following week’s meeting about a proposed special assessment of $15 million to be paid by residents.”
• “Ms. Wodnicki explained in the letter that an engineer, Frank Morabito, was hired in 2018 to do an inspection of the building and provide an estimate of what would be required for the 40-year inspection, which was due later this year. … An attorney for the condo association, Donna DiMaggio Berger, told the Journal Sunday that the 2018 engineer’s report was fairly routine and didn’t raise alarms.”

Biden and the first lady will visit the site of the collapse on Thursday. 

• “The president has been receiving updates on the tragedy from Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell, who visited the site Sunday,” Colby Itkowitz reports. “Criswell testified at a congressional hearing on FEMA’s readiness Tuesday morning and told lawmakers in her opening remarks that the community’s devastation was ‘difficult to put into words.’”

A “frantic effort” to find survivors continues, even as hope dwindles.

• “For a fifth day, the perilous work again yielded little reason for hope: Two more bodies were recovered amid the still-smoking rubble, bringing the number of confirmed dead to 11; 150 people remained missing,” Rebecca Tan, Silvia Foster-Frau, Dan Lamothe and Griff Witte report.
• “With the grim reality setting in, loved ones of those who have not been accounted for were shuttled to the oceanfront debris pile that was once Champlain Towers South to stand vigil, pay respects and see for themselves what is being done to locate signs of life. While there, they have witnessed harrowing scenes: One rescuer tumbled 25 feet. The firefighter declined medical help, an official said, and continued to work.”

As Surfside community members wait for news, they are inundated by hundreds of acts of kindness.

• “The crisis among the living, as is so often the case, is being tended with food and drink, clothes and toiletries, creature comforts aimed to soothe and distract. And money. So much money. Financial donations have poured in,” Laura Reiley and Meryl Kornfield report. “The Chesed Fund, which will be administered by the Shul of Bal Harbour synagogue, had raised $1,091,319 by Monday morning. The Miami Heat basketball team and several local organizations have created a hardship fund for the victims called Support Surfside.”
• “Still, what members of the Surfside community marvel at, even as they grieve, are the hundreds of similar acts of kindness that have filled the hours since Thursday. Some are tiny — a young boy doling out candy to first responders — and some have required monumental, coordinated efforts from strangers halfway around the world.”

The future of the GOP

Arizona’s Maricopa County will replace its voting equipment, fearful that the GOP-backed election review has compromised security. 

• “Officials from Maricopa, the state’s largest county and home to Phoenix, provided no estimates of the costs involved but have previously said that the machines cost millions to acquire,” Rosalind Helderman reports. “The announcement probably reflects an added cost to taxpayers for a controversial review that has been embraced by supporters of Trump, who has falsely claimed that the 2020 election was rigged in Arizona and other battlegrounds that he lost.”

Some Proud Boys are moving to local politics as the scrutiny of the far-right group ramps up. 

• “With the law enforcement spotlight on the group, Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio envisions his organization focusing on local political races rather than national ones,” NPR’s Tim Mak reports. “Tarrio will be going local himself. Following a year in which he admits his organization has ‘been through the wringer,’ he told NPR he plans to step down as national chairman in September to focus on his chapter in Florida.”
• “Tarrio dismissed signs of turmoil within his organization, claiming that hundreds of Proud Boys recently met in Georgia. He added that he has met with chapters that threatened to splinter off, to assuage their concerns, and that ‘we’re all on the same page.’ The Proud Boys has a national membership of some 30,000, he claimed, though he could not provide any evidence, as there is no central repository of membership.”

Quote of the day

“What we saw was my successor, the former president, violate that core tenet that you count the votes and then declare a winner — and fabricate and make up a whole bunch of hooey,” former president Barack Obama said, blaming Trump for spreading “a big lie” that has been embraced by many of his supporters.

The pandemic

Europe risks “chaos” at airports without a coordinated vaccine certificate rollout, travel groups are warning. 

• “The certificate, designed to show a traveler’s vaccination or infection status, will be available for all E.U. member states beginning July 1. But a ‘worrying patchwork of approaches’ by various governments threatens to cause long delays during the peak summer months, according to a joint letter sent by industry groups and seen by the Reuters news agency,” Erin Cunningham reports.

Three in 10 Americans think the pandemic is over in the U.S.

• “Although a record-high 89% of Americans now say the coronavirus situation is improving, most are not yet ready to declare the pandemic over in the U.S. More than twice as many think the pandemic is not yet over (71%) than think it is over (29%),” a new Gallup poll found. “Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say the pandemic is over, but significant differences also exist by gender, age and region of the country.”

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health urged everyone to wear masks indoors as the Delta variant spreads. 

• “Monday’s announcement is one of the clearest signals yet of just how seriously health officials are taking the strain, and the danger it poses, particularly to those who have yet to be inoculated,” the Los Angeles Times’s Luke Money reports. “Officials have said the available vaccines appear to offer strong protection. But there’s significant concern that those who have yet to receive all their required shots, or any doses at all, remain vulnerable to the Delta variant — which may be twice as transmissible as the conventional coronavirus strains.”

Nearly all Wisconsinites who recently died of covid-19 were unvaccinated or not fully vaccinated. 

Hot on the left

Hot on the right

U.S. Postal service delays, visualized

Today in Washington

In closing

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