Politics

By Alexandra Alper

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to forgive a portion of student loan debt for many Americans is on a strong legal and fiscal footing, Bharat Ramamurti, director of the White House National Economic Council, said on Friday.

Biden said on Wednesday he would forgive $20,000 in student loan debt for borrowers who went to college on Pell Grants, and would forgive $10,000 for those who did not receive Pell Grants. The plan applies to those who earn less than $125,000 a year.

Ramamurti emphasized on Friday that this was a one-time measure.

The plan faced criticism from both Republicans and some Democrats over its potential price tag. And some questioned whether Biden had the legal authority to wipe away the debt unilaterally.

Ramamurti said Biden’s move is based on laws passed by Congress and that the White House is on “very strong legal ground.”

The White House initially dodged questions about the price tag of the measure but has now estimated that it would cost $24 billion a year for the next decade.

Ramamurti said the White House’s initial estimates assume 75% of those eligible for the relief apply for it and cautioned that a more thorough financial review will be undertaken by the Education Department.

(Reporting by Alexandra Alper and Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Frances Kerry)

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By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Justice Department on Friday released a redacted version https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwenmbqvw/Trump%20affidavit%20Mar%20a%20Lago.pdf of the legal document that allowed the FBI to seize classified government records from former President Donald Trump’s Florida home.

The affidavit revealed some new details about the classified documents Trump kept at his Mar-a-Lago home until January this year, from handwritten notes by the president to information about national intelligence sources.

It also showed efforts by Trump representatives to claim he had the authority to declassify documents.

Of the 32-page document, unsealed on Friday, 23 of its pages were largely blacked out, with the text on 11 pages of them redacted entirely.

The release also contained a letter from Trump’s defense attorney Evan Corcorcan, who wrote to the department on May 25 to complain about the Justice Department’s investigation.

“Any attempt to impose criminal liability on a President or former President that involves his actions with respect to documents marked classified would implicate grave constitutional separation-of-powers issues,” he wrote.

Beyond that, the primary criminal statute that governs the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material does not apply to the President,” he added.

An Aug. 8 search at Mar-a-Lago marked a significant escalation in one of the many federal and state investigations Trump is facing from his time in office and in private business. The Republican former president has suggested he might run for the White House again.

The FBI action was part of a federal probe into whether Trump illegally removed documents when he left office in January 2021 after losing the presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden, and whether he tried to obstruct the government’s investigation.

According to the document released on Friday, an unidentified FBI agent said that the U.S. National Archives had discovered scores of “documents bearing classification markings” containing “national defense information” when it recovered 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago in January.

The FBI agent said a preliminary review of the records the Archives received in the 15 boxes, which was conducted between May 16-18 ,found 184 “unique documents” labeled as classified. Of those, 67 were marked “confidential” while 92 were marked as “secret” and 25 marked as “top secret.”

Other defense-related records, meanwhile, contained references to things such as confidential human sources that help the U.S. with its intelligence-gathering.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; additional reporting by Jacqueline Thomsen, Mike Scarella, and Karen Freifeld; Editing by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)

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CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — The publisher of a weekly newspaper in New Hampshire is accusing the state attorney general’s office of government overreach after she was arrested on charges that she published advertisements for local races without properly marking them as political advertising.

The six misdemeanor charges allege that Debra Paul, publisher of The Londonderry Times, failed to identify the ads with “appropriate language” indicating that they were ads and saying who paid for them as required by state law, the New Hampshire attorney general’s office said in a news release, after reviewing cases that go back to 2019.

“This is clearly a case of a small business needing to defend itself against overreaching government,” Paul, 62, who’s also a member of the town council in Londonderry, responded in a statement.

“I would like to think the attorney generals office has more important matters to deal with than to send press releases out on misdemeanors such as this,” the statement said. “With multiple unsolved homicides over the past year, this seems a bit absurd.”

The attorney general’s office first issued Paul a letter pointing out the language omission in a political ad that ran in the weeks leading up to an election in March 2019, according to a police affidavit. The letter asked her to include the language going forward.

It issued a second letter in March 2021 after receiving a complaint about another political ad that didn’t receive the required “paid for” language, and that an investigator from the office followed up with with a phone call to her, the affidavit said.

The office sent another letter to her in September saying another ad “failed to contain” name and address information, and did not mark it as “political advertising.” She was notified that this was her “second and final warning” and if the law was violated again, the attorney general’s office “may pursue appropriate enforcement action.”

After the attorney general’s office received more complaints this year, the February and March issues of the paper were reviewed, the affidavit said. Two political ads leading up to a local election in March did not contain the “paid for” language and a third had no “political advertisement” designation, it said.

Two candidates who had placed ads during that time told the investigator that they had worked with Paul on them. They said they were not aware of language requirements and that any omissions were unintentional.

Paul, who along with her husband are the only two employees at the paper, was contacted by the investigator in May and said she originally believed the state’s complaint involved advertising rates, the affidavit said. She said she was trying to review the ads and believed that the “paid for by” address information was only required on political signage, not ads, the affidavit said.

The affidavit said altogether, nearly 60 violations in the Times and a related publication were counted between 2020 and this year.

“My understanding is that I’m accused by someone of neglecting to use the phrase, “Political Advertisements,” when it was an obvious political ad,” Paul said in her statement.

The charges carry a maximum penalty of up to a year in jail. Paul, who is not in custody, is scheduled to be arraigned Oct. 19.

“The Londonderry Times is among the dwindling numbers of small newspapers in New Hampshire, as well as around the country,” her lawyer, Tony Naro, said in a statement Friday. “The Londonderry Times does their absolute best to put out a quality publication with limited staff and a limited budget. Ms. Paul acted with no criminal intent, denies the allegations, and is presumed innocent.”

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said the office could not comment on the case further but said its election law unit receives hundreds of calls or complaints about political advertising each election cycle, and that the overwhelming majority of them are resolved without opening a matter for formal investigation.

As an example of another matter the office investigated, the spokesperson provided a letter dated Aug. 8 and sent to the publisher of a periodical who is running for office regarding a complaint it received about the publisher’s own campaign ad. The letter said the candidate was not complying with campaign finance obligations and didn’t mark ads as political advertising.

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(Reuters) – The following are quotes from and reactions to the release on Friday under court order of a U.S. Department of Justice partially redacted affidavit that investigators used to justify the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida:

AFFIDAVIT:

“The government is conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records,” the 38-page document began.

DEMOCRATIC SENATOR MARK WARNER:

“It appears, based on the affidavit unsealed this morning, that among the improperly handled documents at Mar-a-Lago were some of our most sensitive intelligence – which is one reason the Senate Intelligence Committee has requested, on a bipartisan basis, a damage assessment of any national security threat posed by the mishandling of this information. The Department of Justice investigation must be allowed to proceed without interference.” Warner chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.

REPUBLICAN REP. DAN BISHOP:

“So much for transparency,” Bishop tweeted alongside a photo of redacted sections of the affidavit. Bishop is a member of the House of Representatives Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

The Department of Justice requested redactions, which were approved by a judge, in order to protect its law enforcement agents, sources and sensitive material related to the investigation.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton in Vancouver; editing by Richard Cowan and Grant McCool)

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — When Democratic U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan spoke out against President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan this week, it marked a departure from both his past statements on the issue and some of his votes.

The decision to go against a same-party president comes as Ryan tries to parlay his hometown credentials in Ohio’s working-class Mahoning Valley into the support he needs from Republicans and independents to defeat Republican JD Vance in this fall’s closely watched race for U.S. Senate.

Ryan on Wednesday joined Republicans and a handful of fellow Democrats in criticizing the president’s executive order to erase federal student loan debt for certain borrowers as unnecessary for some people and unfair to others. The plan forgives $10,000 in federal student loan debt for those with incomes below $125,000 a year, or households that earn less than $250,000, and cancels an additional $10,000 for those who received federal Pell Grants to attend college.

“As someone who’s paying off my own family’s student loans, I know the costs of higher education are too high,” Ryan said in a statement released by his campaign. “And while there’s no doubt that a college education should be about opening opportunities, waiving debt for those already on a trajectory to financial security sends the wrong message to the millions of Ohioans without a degree working just as hard to make ends meet.”

Instead of forgiving loans “for six-figure earners,” Ryan said, the government should be pursuing more broadly beneficial policies, including an across-the-board tax cut for working- and middle-class families, medical debt cancellation and targeted forgiveness for essential workers. For student borrowers, he said he supports additional loan refinancing opportunities, apprenticeship investments and universal community college and workforce development and training “so all Americans — not just college grads — have a shot at success.”

But only a few years ago, Ryan was speaking out in favor of reducing debt accumulated during college.

“Student debt is out of control,” he tweeted in October 2018. “If we can bail out the banks who did everything wrong, we can help out the students who did everything right.”

Earlier that same year, Ryan called on Congress to “do more to help bring this debt down and make college more affordable,” lamenting that “44 million Americans owe a total of $1.5 trillion in student debt. This prevents them from investing in their communities, our economy, and their futures.”

And Ryan has backed up those stances with votes.

He cast a yes vote on the HEROES Act in May 2020, which included plans to cancel up to $10,000 in student loan debt for some 20 million “economically distressed” borrowers. That July, Ryan also supported an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that required the federal government to provide $10,000 in immediate assistance to an estimated 4.5 million private student loan holders.

Ryan campaign spokesperson Izzi Levy said his position on the Biden loan forgiveness plan isn’t an about-face.

“Tim believes using executive action to wipe away six-figure earners’ debt goes too far without actually addressing the skyrocketing costs of higher education that have caused this crisis,” she said in a statement. “Meanwhile, inflation remains high for all Ohioans, regardless of education level. Tim supports more targeted relief, as well as a host of proposals to rein in up-front educational costs, and believes the Administration would have been better served by prioritizing across-the-board economic relief that benefits all working- and middle-class Ohioans, whether or not they attended college.”

The Donald Trump-endorsed Vance, an author and venture capitalist, also is reaching across the aisle for Democratic and independent votes in a contest set to test the onetime bellwether state’s recent tack to the right.

Vance characterized Biden’s plan as “a $300 billion giveaway to college graduates — paid for by single moms in the form of higher food prices, by trade workers in the form of higher taxes, and by the next generation of students in the form of higher tuition.”

He, too, noted that some recipients of loan forgiveness under Biden’s plan have “six-figure incomes.” He said forcing universities like Harvard and Yale to liquidate their multibillion-dollar endowments would be a better way to reduce student debt without “juicing inflation.” Vance graduated from Yale Law School.

“Instead of holding administrators accountable for skyrocketing tuition, bloated bureaucratic budgets, and growing armies of ‘diversity’ consultants, Joe Biden has decided to bail out the group of people least in need – individuals with six-figure incomes, and couples making nearly a quarter million dollars per year,” his statement said.

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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics.

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PHOENIX (AP) — A federal judge refused Friday to require that Arizona officials count ballots by hand in November, dismissing a lawsuit filed by the Republican nominees for governor and secretary of state based on false claims of problems with vote-counting machines.

Kari Lake, who is running for governor, and Mark Finchem, a secretary of state candidate, won their GOP primaries after aggressively promoting the narrative that the 2020 election was marred by fraud or widespread irregularities.

Their lawsuit repeated unfounded allegations about the security of machines that count votes. They relied in part on testimony from Donald Trump supporters who led a discredited review of the election in Maricopa County, including Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, who oversaw the effort described by supporters as a “forensic audit.”

U.S. District Judge John Tuchi ruled that Lake and Finchem failed to show any realistic likelihood of harm and that their lawsuit must be brought in state, not federal, court. He also ruled that it is too close to the election to upend the process.

“The 2022 Midterm Elections are set to take place on November 8,” Tuchi wrote. “In the meantime, Plaintiffs request a complete overhaul of Arizona’s election procedures.”

Finchem and a spokesman for Lake, Ross Trumble, said in text messages that they hadn’t seen the ruling and weren’t prepared to comment.

The lawsuit was filed against Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor, and the elected supervisors of Maricopa and Pima counties, who oversee elections in the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas.

Lawyers for Lake and Finchem said hand counts are the most efficient method for totaling election results. They said the lawsuit wasn’t about undoing the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona, but rather about the upcoming election.

Election administrators testified that hand counting dozens of races on millions of ballots would require an extraordinary amount of time, space and manpower, and would be less accurate. They said extensive reviews have confirmed that vote-counting machines in Maricopa County are not connected to the internet and haven’t been hacked.

Federal and state election officials and Trump’s own attorney general have said there is no credible evidence the 2020 election was tainted. Trump’s allegations of fraud were also roundly rejected by courts, including by judges he appointed. A hand recount led by Cyber Ninjas in Maricopa County found no proof of a stolen election and concluded Joe Biden’s margin of victory was larger than the official count.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which is controlled 4-1 by Republicans, asked the court to sanction attorneys for Lake and Finchem and force them to pay the county’s legal fees. The attorneys should have known their complaint was based on frivolous information, wrote Emily Craiger, a lawyer for the county.

Lake, Finchem and their lawyers used the court “to further a disinformation campaign and false narrative concerning the integrity of the election process,” she wrote.

The lawyers for Lake and Finchem responded that their claims are “legally sound and supported by strong evidence.” Their brief was signed by attorneys Andrew Parker of Minneapolis, Kurt Olsen of Washington and Alan Dershowitz, a well-known former Harvard Law School professor.

The judge did not rule on the request for sanctions.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday unveiled new details about its investigation into government papers that former President Donald Trump removed from the White House, including 184 classified documents, some of which were labeled as “top secret” and contained sensitive information about government informants and intelligence-gathering.

A heavily redacted affidavit about documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate that was released on Friday did not itself unveil any major new revelations. But the details in the affidavit could help explain why the Justice Department sought court approval for an Aug. 8 search at the Florida resort.

Much of the 32-page affidavit remains under seal.

In a separate filing made public Friday, the Justice Department said that information must remain confidential to protect a “significant number of civilian witnesses,” as well as law enforcement and the integrity of the investigation itself. Much of that court filing was also redacted.

The search by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago marked a significant escalation in one of the many federal and state investigations Trump is facing from his time in office and in private business. The Republican former president has suggested he might run for the White House again. He has described the search as politically motivated.

The FBI action was part of a federal probe into whether Trump illegally removed documents when he left office in January 2021 after losing the presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden, and whether he tried to obstruct the government’s investigation.

According to the document released on Friday, an unidentified FBI agent said that the U.S. National Archives had discovered scores of “documents bearing classification markings” containing “national defense information” when it recovered 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago in January.

The agent who drafted the affidavit said that after the FBI had reviewed the initial batch of records, it believed there was probable cause to believe more documents were still inside Mar-a-Lago.

“There is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at the premises,” the agent added.

The records unsealed on Friday also showed how Trump’s attorneys tried to convince the Justice Department not to pursue a criminal investigation, arguing Trump had the authority to declassify documents.

“Any attempt to impose criminal liability on a President or former President that involves his actions with respect to documents marked classified would implicate grave constitutional separation-of-powers issues,” Trump’s attorney Evan Corcoran wrote in a May 25 letter to the Justice Department’s head of counterintelligence.

“Beyond that, the primary criminal statute that governs the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material does not apply to the President,” he added.

The FBI agent said a preliminary review of the records the Archives received in the 15 boxes, which was conducted between May 16-18, found 184 “unique documents” labeled as classified. Of those, 67 were marked “confidential” while 92 were marked as “secret” and 25 marked as “top secret.”

Other defense-related records, meanwhile, contained references to things such as confidential human sources that help the United States with its intelligence-gathering.

The agent added that there was probable cause to search a number of rooms inside Mar-a-Lago, including a storage room and Trump’s residential suit as well as “Pine Hall” and the “45 Office.”

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; additional reporting by Jacqueline Thomsen, Mike Scarcella, and Karen Freifeld; Editing by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt will cost the government about $24 billion a year over the next 10 years, Bharat Ramamurti, director of the White House National Economic Council, said on Friday.

(Reporting By Alexandra Alper and Jarrett Renshaw; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

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By Costas Pitas

(Reuters) – A U.S. plan announced this week to forgive $10,000 in student loans for millions of debt-saddled former college students will cost roughly $24 billion a year assuming that three quarters of those eligible take up the offer, the White House said.

The move, announced by President Joe Biden on Wednesday, kept a pledge he made in the 2020 campaign for the White House and could boost support for his fellow Democrats in the November congressional elections.

Some economists said it may fuel inflation and Republicans mostly oppose student loan forgiveness, calling it unfair because it will disproportionately help people earning higher incomes.

On Wednesday, the White House said it had yet to determine the price tag for the package but on Thursday, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told CNN:

“Assuming that 75% of folks take us on on the President’s student loan cancellation plan, and you look at the average cash flow on that, it’s going to be about $24 billion per year.”

American university tuition fees are substantially higher than in most other rich countries, and U.S. consumers carry $1.75 trillion in student loan debt, most of it held by the federal government.

(Reporting by Costas Pitas in Los Angeles; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Jacqueline Wong)

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TAIPEI (Reuters) -A U.S. lawmaker on the Senate Commerce and Armed Services committees arrived in Taiwan on Thursday on the third visit by a U.S. dignitary this month, defying pressure from Beijing to halt the trips.

Senator Marsha Blackburn arrived in Taiwan’s capital Taipei on board a U.S. military aircraft, live television footage from the downtown Songshan Airport showed. She was welcomed on the airport tarmac by Douglas Hsu, director general of Taiwan’s foreign affairs ministry, Blackburn’s office said.

“Taiwan is our strongest partner in the Indo-Pacific Region. Regular high-level visits to Taipei are long-standing U.S. policy,” Blackburn said in a statement. “I will not be bullied by Communist China into turning my back on the island.”

China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory against the strong objections of the democratically elected government in Taipei, launched military drills near the island after U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited in early August.

Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry said Blackburn was due to meet President Tsai Ing-wen during her trip, which ends on Saturday, as well as top security official Wellington Koo and Foreign Minister Joseph Wu.

“The two sides will exchange views extensively on issues such as Taiwan-U.S. security and economic and trade relations,” the ministry added in a brief statement.

Taiwan’s presidential office said Tsai will meet Blackburn on Friday morning.

Spokesman for China’s Embassy in Washington Liu Pengyu vowed that Beijing would take unspecified “resolute countermeasures” in response to what he called the U.S. “provocations.”

“The relevant visit once again proves that the U.S. does not want to see stability across the Taiwan Strait and has spared no effort to stir up confrontation between the two sides and interfere in China’s internal affairs,” Liu said in a statement.

Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, earlier voiced support for the trip by Pelosi, a member of U.S. President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party.

Pelosi’s visit infuriated China, which responded with test launches of ballistic missiles over Taipei for the first time, and by cutting some lines of dialogue with Washington.

Pelosi was followed around a week later by a group of five other U.S. lawmakers, with China’s military responding by carrying out more exercises near Taiwan.

The Biden administration has sought to keep tensions between Washington and Beijing, inflamed by the visits, from boiling over into a conflict, reiterating that such congressional trips are routine.

“Members of Congress and elected officials have gone to Taiwan for decades and will continue to do so, and this is in line with our longstanding One China policy,” a White House National Security Council spokesperson said in response to a question about Blackburn’s visit.

The United States has no formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan but is bound by law to provide the island with the means to defend itself.

China has never ruled out using force to bring Taiwan under its control.

Taiwan’s government says the People’s Republic of China has never ruled the island and so has no right to claim it, and that only its 23 million people can decide their future.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard in Taipei and Michael Martina and Susan Heavey in Washington; Editing by Howard Goller, Alistair Bell and Sandra Maler)

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