Dear Commons Community,

Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat who single-handedly held up her party’s longtime goal of raising taxes on wealthy investors, received nearly $1 million over the past year from private equity professionals, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists whose taxes would have increased under the plan.

For years, Democrats have promised to raise taxes on such investors, who pay a significantly lower rate on their earnings than ordinary workers. But just as they closed in on that goal last week, Sinema forced a series of changes to her party’s $740 billion election-year spending package, eliminating a proposed “carried interest” tax increase on private equity earnings while securing a $35 billion exemption that will spare much of the industry from a separate tax increase other huge corporations now have to pay.

The bill, with Sinema’s alterations intact, was given final approval by Congress yesterday and is expected to be signed by President Joe Biden next week.   As reported by the Associated Press.

“Sinema has long aligned herself with the interests of private equity, hedge funds and venture capital, helping her net at least $1.5 million in campaign contributions since she was elected to the House a decade ago. But the $983,000 she has collected since last summer more than doubled what the industry donated to her during all of her preceding years in Congress combined, according to an Associated Press review of campaign finances disclosures.

The donations, which make Sinema one of the industry’s top beneficiaries in Congress, serve a reminder of the way that high-power lobbying campaigns can have dramatic implications for the way legislation is crafted, particularly in the evenly divided Senate where there are no Democratic votes to spare. They also highlight a degree of political risk for Sinema, whose unapologetic defense of the industry’s favorable tax treatment is viewed by many in her party as indefensible.

“From their vantage point, it’s a million dollars very well spent,” said Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal-leaning think tank. “It’s pretty rare you see this direct of a return on your investment. So I guess I would congratulate them.”

Sinema’s office declined to make her available for an interview. Hannah Hurley, a Sinema spokesperson, acknowledged the senator shares some of the industry’s views on taxation, but rebuffed any suggestion that the donations influenced her thinking.

“Senator Sinema makes every decision based on one criteria: what’s best for Arizona,” Hurley said in a statement. “She has been clear and consistent for over a year that she will only support tax reforms and revenue options that support Arizona’s economic growth and competitiveness.”

The American Investment Council, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of private equity, also defended their push to defeat the tax provisions.

“Our team worked to ensure that members of Congress from both sides of the aisle understand how private equity directly employs workers and supports small businesses throughout their communities,” Drew Maloney, the organization’s CEO and president, said in a statement.

Sinema’s defense of the tax provisions offer a jarring contrast to her background as a Green Party activist and self-styled “Prada socialist” who once likened accepting campaign cash to “bribery” and later called for “big corporations & the rich to pay their fair share” shortly before launching her first campaign for Congress in 2012.

She’s been far more magnanimous since, praising private equity in 2016 from the House floor for providing “billions of dollars each year to Main Street businesses” and later interning at a private equity mogul’s boutique winery in northern California during the 2020 congressional recess.

The soaring contributions from the industry to Sinema trace back to last summer. That’s when she first made clear that she wouldn’t support a carried interest tax increase, as well as other corporate and business tax hikes, included in an earlier iteration of Biden’s agenda.

During a two-week period in September alone, Sinema collected $47,100 in contributions from 16 high-ranking officials from the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, records show. Employees and executives of KKR, another private equity behemoth, contributed $44,100 to Sinema during a two-month span in late 2021.

In some cases, the families of private equity managers joined in. David Belluck, a partner at the firm Riverside Partners, gave a $5,800 max-out contribution to Sinema one day in late June. So did three of his college-age kids, with the family collectively donating $23,200, records show.

“I generally support centrist Democrats and her seat is important to keep a Democratic Senate majority,” Belluck said, adding that his family has known Sinema since her election to Congress. “She and I have never discussed private equity taxation.”

The donations from the industry coincide with a $26 million lobbying effort spearheaded by the investment firm Blackstone that culminated on the Senate floor last weekend.

By the time the bill was up for debate during a marathon series of votes, Sinema had already forced Democrats to abandon their carried interest tax increase.

“Senator Sinema said she would not vote for the bill .. unless we took it out,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters last week. “We had no choice.”

But after private equity lobbyists discovered a provision in the bill that would have subjected many of them to a separate 15% corporate minimum tax, they urgently pressed Sinema and other centrist Democrats for changes, according to emails as well as four people with direct knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

“Given the breaking nature of this development we need as many offices as possible weighing in with concerns to Leader Schumer’s office,” Blackstone lobbyist Ryan McConaghy wrote in a Saturday afternoon email obtained by the AP, which included proposed language for modifying the bill. “Would you and your boss be willing to raise the alarm on this and express concerns with Schumer and team?”

McConaghy did not respond to a request for comment.

Sinema worked with Republicans on an amendment that stripped the corporate tax increase provisions from the bill, which a handful of vulnerable Democrats also voted for.

“Since she has been in Congress, Kyrsten has consistently supported pro-growth policies that encourage job creation across Arizona. Her tax policy positions and focus on growing Arizona’s economy and competitiveness are longstanding and well known,” Hurley, the Sinema spokesperson, said.

But many in her party disagree. They say the favorable treatment does little to boost the overall economy and argue there’s little compelling evidence to suggest the tax benefits are enjoyed beyond some of the wealthiest investors.

While we are elated that this bill has passed and is a big win for the Democrats and President Biden, Sinema’s loyalties have to be questioned!

Tony

Click on to enlarge.

Dear Commons Community,

The polio virus has been detected in New York City, health authorities said yesterday, a jarring discovery arriving three weeks after the long-defeated virus reemerged in Rockland County north of the city. The potentially deadly virus was detected in sewage samples collected in the city.

Before the Rockland County case, the U.S. had gone almost a decade without logging any polio cases. But the reported arrival of the paralyzing pathogen in New York City suggested local community spread.  As reported by the New York Daily News.

“This is something we’re monitoring closely,” Governor Hochul said at a Long Island news conference, adding that the state is working in tandem with the federal government. “This is a very, very serious disease.”

The governor said vaccinations represent New York’s best defense against the return of polio, and that the time has arrived to “sound the alarm” about the threat.

Though about 70% of people infected with the highly contagious polio virus do not display symptoms, around 25% suffer flulike symptoms, according to the federal government. In less than 1% of cases, the virus invades the spinal cord and causes paralysis.

“For every one case of paralytic polio identified, hundreds more may be undetected,” Dr. Mary Bassett, the state health commissioner, said in a statement. “The detection of poliovirus in wastewater samples in New York City is alarming, but not surprising.”

Polio was mostly driven out of the U.S. during the second half of the 20th century, after the introduction of vaccines for the virus in 1955. Complete vaccinations provide almost total protection against polio.

“The risk to New Yorkers is real but the defense is so simple — get vaccinated against polio,” Dr. Ashwin Vasan, the city health commissioner, said in a statement. “Polio is entirely preventable and its reappearance should be a call to action for all of us.”

Authorities said people who are unsure of their vaccination status should also receive shots.

School children in New York are required to be vaccinated against polio, according to state Health Department rules. But there is no federal mandate, and the state does not have requirements for homeschooled kids.

During the pandemic, polio vaccination rates have slumped in the city.

“The reason why this is an issue is exclusively related to the fact that vaccination rates are low,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “These are the consequences of the anti-vaccine movement making inroads into the population.

“This should only be thought of as self-inflicted,” he added.

About 14% of New York City children between ages 6 months and 5 years old have not been fully vaccinated against polio, according to authorities. A full inoculation involves at least three doses.

In Brooklyn ZIP codes sprawled over neighborhoods including Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg, the vaccination rate in the age group is under 60%, according to government data.

In a statement, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso said his “urge to all Brooklynites who may be unvaccinated is to talk to a medical professional about getting vaccinated.”

Areas of Staten Island and southern and eastern Queens have rates under 70%, according to the data. The city did not immediately specify on Friday where it had tracked the virus.

Statewide, about 80% of 2-year-old tots have full polio vaccination coverage, according to authorities. But in Rockland County, home to ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities wary of vaccines, the rate is around 60%, the state Health Department reported.

In 2018 and 2019, Rockland County had an unprecedented outbreak of measles, another virus preventable through vaccination. That outbreak spurred New York lawmakers to erase vaccination exemptions based on religious beliefs.

Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious disease at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., expressed concerns about areas where vaccination resistance is high, but suggested that the lagging vaccination rate in New York City partly stems from COVID-era delays in pediatric visits.

“I would hope that every parent and every doc is trying to catch their children up,” Schaffner said. “Polio vaccination in particular is just extraordinarily successful in preventing this paralytic disease which can leave you with a disability for the rest of your life.”

I was genuinely surprised at the low polio vaccination rates in parts of the city.

Tony

The FBI recovered “top secret” and  sensitive documents from former Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to court papers released yesterday.

A property receipt unsealed by the court (above) shows FBI agents took 11 sets of classified records from the estate during a search on Monday.

The seized records include some marked not only top secret but also “sensitive compartmented information,” a special category meant to protect the nation’s most important secrets that if revealed publicly could cause “exceptionally grave” damage to U.S. interests. The court records did not provide specific details about information the documents might contain.

The warrant says federal agents were investigating potential violations of three different federal laws, including one that governs gathering, transmitting or losing defense information under the Espionage Act. The other statutes address the concealment, mutilation or removal of records and the destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations.

The property receipt also shows federal agents collected other potential presidential records, including the order pardoning Trump ally Roger Stone, a “leatherbound box of documents,” and information about the “President of France.” A binder of photos, a handwritten note, “miscellaneous secret documents” and “miscellaneous confidential documents” were also seized in the search.

This gets worse and worse for Trump!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last night, Brian Kilmeade of Fox News showed a clearly photoshopped image (above) of Judge Bruce Reinhart, who signed off on the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort that took place on Monday.

The image took a 2017 post from Judge Reinhart while he was waiting out a hurricane hoping to watch the New York Giants, and put his image over that of deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein getting his foot rubbed by his now-imprisoned cohort Ghislaine Maxwell (below).

Even though the image Fox showed was credited to the Twitter handle @whatimemetosay, Kilmeade tried passing it off as real.

“Also, a picture of Bruce Reinhart,” Kilmeade said while bringing up the image. “This is the judge in charge of the… of the uh… of the, um… as you know, of the warrant, and we’ll see if he’s gonna release it next. He likes Oreos and whiskey.”

This isn’t the first time Fox has been caught trying to pass off fake images as real. They did the same thing in June of 2020 during the George Floyd protests when they showed a fiery image of Minneapolis and claimed it was Seattle.

No wonder why misled people are going round with guns looking to shoot FBI agents.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the FBI reportedly sought classified documents related to nuclear weapons when the bureau searched former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, earlier this week,

The newspaper, citing people familiar with the search, said the revelation reflects the concern government officials had about the sensitive nature of information Trump and his team took to the resort after he left the White House.

It’s unclear what type of documents the FBI sought or if they pertained to nuclear weapons belonging to the United States or other countries.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday he personally approved the decision for the FBI to seek a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, adding he had moved for the Department of Justice to make the warrant public. Officials had reportedly been searching for any potentially sensitive classified documents that had been improperly taken to the resort.

Garland declined to provide details about the investigation and would not say what the FBI retrieved.

“The public’s clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred under these circumstances weighs heavily in favor of unsealing,” meaning a motion to unseal the search warrant, the Thursday filing read. “That said, the former President should have an opportunity to respond to this Motion and lodge objections, including with regards to any ‘legitimate privacy interests’ or the potential for other ‘injury’ if these materials are made public.”

Trump denounced the FBI’s search on Monday evening, declaring: “These are dark times for our Nation.”

“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before,” he said in a statement. “Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before.”

The government’s concern over the documents came after the National Archives earlier this year retrieved 15 boxes of records Trump took with him when he left office. The agency said in February those boxes contained classified information and other materials subject to the Presidential Records Act, which requires such items be turned over to the federal government.

But officials grew concerned in recent months that the president hadn’t turned over all of the documents he had.

The New York Times reported yesterday that the Justice Department sent Trump a subpoena seeking any additional classified material last spring.

The former president and his allies have begun spreading a conspiracy theory that any damaging documents found during the search were planted there by the FBI. The agency’s current director, Christopher Wray, was appointed by Trump in 2017 after Trump fired James Comey.

The search has widened the ideological chasm over the former president and his continuing influence over American politics. Republicans have denounced the FBI — with some frothing for the agency to be defunded — and Trump supporters have rushed to defend him.

FBI agents were engaged in a standoff with a gunman in Ohio yesterday who allegedly tried to force his way into the bureau’s Cincinnati office. The man, who was killed by authorities, had made previous threats against the agency.

Trump is correct in stating “These are dark times for our Nation.  Nothing like this [search of his residence] has ever happened to a President of the United States before.”  However, the nation has never had a president lie, scam and push for insurrection like Trump has!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Speaking at a summit focused on college completion, US Department of Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona called college rankings “a joke,” and took aim at selective colleges’ obsession with them, as he made a broader push yesterday for closing stubborn equity gaps in the nation’s college-graduation rates.

“Many institutions spend enormous time and money chasing rankings they feel carry prestige, but in truth do little more than Xerox privilege,” Cardona said.

There’s a “whole science behind climbing up the rankings” that leads to misplaced priorities, Cardona said. The best-resourced colleges are playing a prestige game instead of centering “measures that truly count,” he said. “That system of ranking is a joke.”

Cardona specifically criticized the use of standardized-test scores, peer-assessment surveys, and alumni donations as key metrics, as is the case in the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

“You compete for the most affluent students by luring them with generous aid, because the most well-prepared students have the best SAT scores and graduate on time. You seek favor from your peers, from other elite schools, with expensive dinners and lavish events because their opinions carry clout in surveys,” he said. “And then you invest in the most amazing campus experiences that money can buy because the more graduates who become donors, the more points you score.”

As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Cardona called for a “culture change” in higher ed so that institutions would value inclusivity, use data to help students before they dropped out, and create more-accessible pathways for adult learners, rural students, and first-generation students.

“Let’s confer prestige on colleges’ breaking cycles of poverty. Let’s raise the profiles of institutions delivering real upward mobility, like all of you,” Cardona told attendees, echoing an essay he wrote for The Chronicle. “Let’s turn the universities that walk the walk on equity into household names.”

The secretary spoke at the summit, where officials from the California Community College system, Arizona State University, Davidson College, and some 40 other institutions discussed how to increase attainment rates and what students from marginalized backgrounds need to succeed.

The Biden administration deemed college completion a priority last year, with the president calling for a $62-billion investment in increasing higher-education attainment over 10 years. A proposal introduced last year in the U.S. House of Representatives called for spending $9 billion over seven years. The money would create a “college-completion fund,” with institutions competing for grants to support programs and efforts to increase student success.

Ultimately, just $5 million was allocated to the college-completion fund in the 2022 fiscal-year budget. The Education Department yesterday invited HBCUs, tribal colleges, and minority-serving institutions to apply for grants from that pot of money. Spending bills for the 2023 fiscal year announced last month by the Senate Appropriations Committee included a proposed $75 million for the fund.

Here are three other themes Cardona highlighted during the event:

Colleges must move urgently to better serve underrepresented students.

As college leaders head into the fall semester, Cardona said, they need to “maintain the level of urgency” from the last two pandemic-disrupted years to “change what we know needs changing.”

“My fear is that we go backwards with regards to our urgency, that we go back to the systems that serve some students better than others,” Cardona said. “The system was disrupted for us. Let’s not build it back the way it was that didn’t work.”

While race and diversity have become divisive topics in some states, campus leaders shouldn’t back down.

For some colleges, even having conversations about change — especially when race and diversity are involved — has become a challenge. Cardona told college leaders to rely on data to tell the story.

“If we look at the data, and we see that some children are achieving more than other children, it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that all children can achieve,” Cardona said. “The issue of helping children succeed — that doesn’t have party lines.”

To help students with basic needs, colleges should continue to embrace partnerships.

To close equity gaps, colleges should focus on fulfilling students’ basic needs, Cardona said. Many students face housing and food insecurity as well as mental-health challenges. “If you think college completion doesn’t involve that, you’re missing the point,” Cardona said.

Partnerships across institutions and within communities became the norm during the pandemic. That approach should continue, Cardona said. “You don’t have to do it all. You don’t have to be the mental-health expert,” he said. “Collaborate with the village around you.”

Colleges can’t just assign “technical Band-Aids to adaptive problems,” Cardona said. Instead, higher ed needs to shift its mind-set to one where “we’re looking out for the whole child,” Cardona said. “We’re meeting them where they are.”

Cardona had a lot of important things to say yesterday!

Tony

Illustration by The Chronicle of Higher Education

Dear Commons Community,

The University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC) announced last week it would take over management of its online education programs from Zovio Inc. — the same company that two years earlier transferred its for-profit college holdings to the University of Arizona in what was touted then as a “transformational” agreement.

The news marks a precipitous end for the original deal, Arizona acquired Zovio’s Ashford University in 2020 and created the University of Arizona Global Campus, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the traditional public university. The new online mega-university was intended to extend the flagship university’s reach, particularly into the market of working adults. And both parties anticipated that Zovio would furnish UAGC with online program management (OPM) services for much of the next decade.  As reported  by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Despite the lucrative terms of that 2020 sale — including an upfront cash payment of $37.5 million by Zovio and a promise that UAGC’s academic expenses would be covered with tuition and fee revenue — both Zovio and UAGC struggled in the wake of the deal to generate profitable returns. UAGC reported an $11.2-million loss in its most recent filing to the Internal Revenue Service, for the seven-month period covering December 2020 to June 2021. The institution also temporarily lost the ability in April 2022 to offer military education benefits provided by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Meanwhile, Zovio struggled to distance itself from the reputational and legal fallout associated with its time running Ashford University, a for-profit institution. Despite a rebrand, potential investors and university partners remained wary. In February, UAGC’s accreditor recommended the university routinely undertake assessments of any risks resulting from its contractual relationship with Zovio. A month later, a California judge imposed a $22-million fine against the publicly traded company after determining Ashford had misled students, a penalty Zovio promised to appeal. And in May, Zovio announced a strategic review of its operations to “turnaround the company” — an analysis resulting in the $55-million sale of Zovio’s TutorMe business. That review continues.

Compounding the challenges for Zovio? Fewer than expected military-affiliated students recruited or retained in the second quarter of 2022 by the company and UAGC, Randy Hendricks, Zovio’s chief executive, said in an earnings report last week. All told, OPM-generated revenues for the first six months of 2022 were down 27 percent relative to the same period in 2021 — a $36-million drop.

“As we looked at the time and capital it would take to get to a profitable contract, that wasn’t something that we were in a position to do,” Hendricks said.

The acknowledgement by Hendricks represents a significant departure from the statements made by Zovio two years ago when it announced plans to transfer Ashford to the University of Arizona. Zovio also anticipated the deal in 2020 would allow the company to pursue “diversified growth as a provider of technology and services to other institutions, corporations, and learners.” In the same news release, Robert C. Robbins, Arizona’s president, promised “the accessibility and innovative approach of the University of Arizona Global Campus will help a new generation of Wildcats find success.”

But come February 2022, Robbins would raise the prospect of Zovio’s no longer being a party to the OPM contract that the university and the company had worked out two years earlier. At the same time those remarks were given, the university also announced plans to eventually absorb the online-education operations held and controlled by UAGC into its own publicly held apparatus.

As part of the deal announced last week handing over management of online programs from Zovio to UAGC, UAGC assumed all of the obligations associated with that business. The university also took over the lease of Zovio’s location in Chandler, Ariz. In connection with the sale, Zovio also paid $10.5 million to UAGC to settle its remaining liabilities to the university. All told, Zovio booked $35.9-million in expenses as a result of the deal.

In exchange, Zovio is now released from “from all remaining obligations under the previous agreements, including from all indemnification obligations under the Original Asset Purchase Agreement and all minimum payment guarantees under the UAGC Services Agreements.”

Beyond those terms and conditions, the deal also grants UAGC greater flexibility over the operations that will determine whether the mega-university succeeds or fails, said Phil Hill, a partner at the ed-tech consultancy MindWires. And Hill speculated that UAGC would eventually need to secure significant financing — perhaps via a bond issuance or from the University of Arizona directly — in order to give the venture the best chance for success.

The University of Arizona is one of several public institutions that have moved to drastically scale up their online-education operations. Last fall, the University of North Carolina won $97 million in state appropriations to finance an ed-tech startup focused on educating adult learners. Around the same time, the University of Arkansas acquired the holdings of the for-profit Grantham University. Arkansas planned to join Grantham’s business with its own in-house online-education operation. And after acquiring Brandman University, the University of Massachusetts announced the launch of UMass Global in September 2021.

The fits and starts associated with the now-defunct Arizona-Zovio arrangement are likely to deter future mega-university aspirants from using its particular nonprofit conversion/residential OPM model to achieve desired enrollment gains, Hill said. The lack of a clean break between UAGC and Zovio after 2020 created a plethora of managerial and reputational challenges for the university as it sought to stand up its online-education operations, Hill said. And those challenges would have grown only more unwieldy for the University of Arizona had Zovio found any other buyer besides UAGC to take over its OPM responsibilities.

Alternatively, the contractual protections that UAGC secured from Zovio in 2020 most likely complicated any efforts by the already reputationally damaged company to find a buyer for itself or its OPM business as Zovio’s finances deteriorated.

“Nobody else wanted this. This was a business that was going away. It was a question of ‘how does it go away?’ So I’m not surprised that no financial buyers or competitor-OPMs were interested in buying it,” Hill said.

Indeed, after selling its Ashford business to UAGC in 2020, Zovio’s stock price would eventually crest at $6.58 a share in February 2021. But since the start of the year, the company’s share price has never exceeded $1.50. And at the closing bell last Monday, an investor could buy a single share of Zovio’s stock for 67 cents.

Now, Hill says, it’s all on the University of Arizona and UAGC to make its mega-university aspirations a reality. “You can’t blame Zovio anymore,” Hill said.

“In the short term, it’s bad.” Hill said. But in the long term, it’s up to Arizona to “turn this around.”

I thought the original deal between the two was problematic given Zovio’s association with Ashford University.

Tony

Christopher Wray

Dear Commons Community,

The director of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray, had strong words yesterday for supporters of former President Donald Trump who have been using violent rhetoric in the wake of his agency’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.

Wray, who was appointed as the agency’s director in 2017 by Trump, called threats circulating online against federal agents and the Justice Department “deplorable and dangerous.”

“I’m always concerned about threats to law enforcement,” Wray said. “Violence against law enforcement is not the answer, no matter who you’re upset with.”  AS reported by the Associated Press.

Wray made the remarks following a news conference during a long-planned visit to the agency’s field office in Omaha, Nebraska, where he discussed the F.B.I.’s focus on cybersecurity. He declined to answer questions about the hours-long search Monday by F.B.I. agents of Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida resort.

It has been easy to find the threats and a call to arms in those corners of the internet favored by right-wing extremists since Trump himself announced the search of his Florida home. Reactions included the ubiquitous “Lock and load” and calls for federal agents and even U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to be assassinated.

On Gab — a social media site popular with white supremacists and antisemites — one poster going by the name of Stephen said he was awaiting “the call” to mount an armed revolution.

“All it takes is one call. And millions will arm up and take back this country. It will be over in less than 2 weeks,” the post said.

Another Gab poster implored others: “Lets get this started! This unelected, illegitimate regime crossed the line with their GESTAPO raid! It is long past time the lib socialist filth were cleansed from American society!”

The search of Trump’s residence Monday is part of an investigation into whether Trump took classified records from the White House to his Florida residence, according to people familiar with the matter. The Justice Department has been investigating the potential mishandling of classified information since the National Archives and Records Administration said it had received from Mar-a-Lago 15 boxes of White House records, including documents containing classified information, earlier this year.

Trump supporters are like their leader given to inciting violence but who down deep are bullying cowards!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The news media exploded yesterday with news that Donald Trump’s residence in Florida was searched by a team of F.B.I. agents looking for classified documents.  The Republicans especially were outraged that the former president’s home should be subject to such a search and labelled it as “weaponizing” the Justice Department.  It should be mentioned that the search was approved by Trump-appointed F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray.   The New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Michael Shear, has an excellent piece this morning analyzing this move on the part of the F.B.I. in an article entitled,  “Never Before in American History: The F.B.I. Searches a Former President’s Home.” 

His conclusion is that the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is a high-risk gamble by the Justice Department, but Mr. Trump faces risks of his own.

The entire article is below.

Tony

————————————

The New York Times

Never Before in American History: The F.B.I. Searches a Former President’s Home

By Michael D. Shear

Aug. 9, 2022

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

WASHINGTON — The fight between former President Donald J. Trump and the National Archives that burst into the open when F.B.I. agents searched Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach estate has no precedent in American presidential history.

It was also a high-risk gamble by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland that the law enforcement operation at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s sprawling home in Florida, will stand up to accusations that the Justice Department is pursuing a political vendetta against President Biden’s opponent in 2020 — and a likely rival in 2024.

Mr. Trump’s demonization of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department during his four years in office, designed to undermine the legitimacy of the country’s law enforcement institutions even as they pursued charges against him, has made it even more difficult for Mr. Garland to investigate Mr. Trump without a backlash from the former president’s supporters.

The decision to order Monday’s search put the Justice Department’s credibility on the line months before congressional elections this fall and as the country remains deeply polarized. For Mr. Garland, the pressure to justify the F.B.I.’s actions will be intense. And if the search for classified documents does not end up producing significant evidence of a crime, the event could be relegated by history to serve as another example of a move against Mr. Trump that backfired.

Mr. Trump faces risks of his own in rushing to criticize Mr. Garland and the F.B.I., as he did during the search on Monday, when he called the operation “an assault that could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries.” Mr. Trump no longer has the protections provided by the presidency, and he would be far more vulnerable if he were found to have mishandled highly classified information that threatens the nation’s national security.

A number of historians said that the search, though extraordinary, seemed appropriate for a president who flagrantly flouted the law, refuses to concede defeat and helped orchestrate an effort to overturn the 2020 election.

“In an atmosphere like this, you have to assume that the attorney general did not do this casually,” said Michael Beschloss, a veteran presidential historian. “And therefore the criminal suspicions — we don’t know yet exactly what they are — they have to be fairly serious.”

In Mr. Trump’s case, archivists at the National Archives discovered earlier this year that the former president had taken classified documents from the White House after his defeat, leading federal authorities to begin an investigation. They eventually sought a search warrant from a judge to determine what remained in the former president’s custody.

Key details remain secret, including what the F.B.I. was looking for and why the authorities felt the need to conduct a surprise search after months of legal wrangling between the government and lawyers for Mr. Trump.

The search happened as angry voices on the far-right fringe of American politics are talking about another Civil War, and as more mainstream Republicans are threatening retribution if they take power in Congress in the fall. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader in the House, warned Mr. Garland to preserve documents and clear his calendar.

“This puts our political culture on a kind of emergency alert mode,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “It’s like turning over the apple cart of American politics.”

Critics of Mr. Trump said it was no surprise that a president who shattered legal and procedural norms while he was in the Oval Office would now find himself at the center of a classified documents dispute.

For nearly 35 years, the tug of war over presidential records — and who controls them — has been a largely bureaucratic one waged in the halls of the National Archives and debated among lawyers in courtrooms.

Former President Richard M. Nixon spent nearly four years after Watergate fighting for control over millions of pages of presidential records and hundreds of hours of the audiotapes that helped force his resignation. Mr. Beschloss said that Nixon initially reached a deal with President Gerald R. Ford that would have given him control over his papers as well as the ability to destroy them. But an act passed by Congress after Nixon left office in August 1974 forced him to take his fight to court. He eventually lost in the Supreme Court, in a 7-to-2 decision.

The dispute led to the passage in 1978 of the Presidential Records Act, which for the first time made it clear that White House records are the property of the federal government, not the president who created them. Since then, presidents from both parties have haggled over how and when the archives may release those documents to the public.

Presidents and their aides have also been subjected to other laws concerning the handling of classified information. Over the years, a handful of top federal officials have been charged with illegally handling classified information.

David H. Petraeus, the Army general who served as C.I.A. director under former President Barack Obama, admitted in 2015 that he provided his highly classified journals to his lover, pleading guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, a misdemeanor.

Sandy Berger, who was national security adviser for former President Bill Clinton, paid a $50,000 fine after pleading guilty to removing classified documents from the National Archives in 2003 to prepare for his testimony to the 9/11 Commission.

But there has never been a clash between a former president and the government like the one that culminated in Monday’s search, said Lee White, the executive director of the National Coalition for History.

Mr. White, who has met frequently over the years with officials at the National Archives, said they usually work hard to resolve disagreements about documents with former presidents and their advisers.

“They tend to be deferential to the White House,” Mr. White said of the lawyers at the National Archives. “You know, these questions come up about presidential records and they are like, ‘Look, our job is to advise the White House.’ But they are not, by nature, an aggressive group of attorneys.”

Mr. Beschloss and Mr. Brinkley both said the search of Mr. Trump’s house had the potential to become a flash point in the struggle between those investigating the former president’s actions and the forces who supported Mr. Trump’s frantic efforts to stay in office.

But they said there were also risks for Mr. Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill, who on Monday rushed to attack Mr. Garland and the F.B.I. in the hours after the search.

“You now have Kevin McCarthy — something else we’ve never seen before in history — making ugly threats to an attorney general, obviously trying to intimidate him,” Mr. Beschloss said.

Mr. Trump’s defenders did not wait to find out what evidence the F.B.I. found or even sought before using the search to ratchet up longstanding grievances that the former president stoked throughout his time in office. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, quickly distributed a short video on Twitter accusing the Biden administration of acting like the regime of a dictator in a third-world country.

“This is what happens in places like Nicaragua,” Mr. Rubio said in the video. “Where last year every single person that ran against Daniel Ortega for president, every single person that put their name on the ballot, was arrested and is still in jail.”

“You can try to diminish it, but that’s exactly what happened tonight,” Mr. Rubio said.

The historians said the events are a test of the resilience of American democracy when it is under assault.

“We are in the middle of a neo-civil war in this country,” Mr. Brinkley said. “This is a starkly unprecedented moment in U.S. history.”

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, Eric Fredericksen, had an article in the The Evolllution yesterday entitled, “The Future of U.S. Higher Education with Online Learning—Two Steps Forward or One Step Back?”  In it he reviews several of the key findings of the recently released (CHLOE 7 Report—The Changing Landscape of Online Education).  Here is an excerpt.

“The CHLOE 7 report notes that Chief Online Officers (COOs) showed that student interest in online learning has grown substantially in the past two years, and the majority predicts it will continue. One could believe that virtually every college student’s experience with online learning exposed them to the variety of benefits online students have valued in the past: convenience, schedule adaptability, family responsibilities and work obligations, and effective instruction that could empower every student to have a voice. This newfound appreciation potentially contributes to more demand.

But beyond this positive enrollment forecast was our online learning leaders’ bold prediction about prevailing modes of learning at their institutions by 2025. COOs believe that very few students will be studying exclusively on campus or online by 2025. While there are modestly different views based on undergraduate versus graduate-level students, respondents foresee the vast majority of students at all levels combining on-campus and online courses into a blended academic experience. Given this potential seismic shift from the approximately 37% of students who took some or all their courses online, as reported in IPEDS in 2019, to the overwhelming majority predicted by 2025, what do higher education leaders need to consider to prepare their institutions for this evolution toward a more permanently hybrid campus? While many factors can influence institutional success, I would offer three to focus on.”

Fredericksen goes on to discuss institutional readiness, faculty development and support, and student support.

I agree completely with his analysis especially that American higher education is moving to a “blended university model.”  The entire article and the Chloe Report are well worth a read!

Congratulations Eric!

Tony