President Trump talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a Cabinet meeting at the White House, on July 16, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified that “everybody was in the loop.”

“Everyone was in the loop,” US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland said to the House Intelligence Committee more than once on Wednesday in damning impeachment testimony.

Sondland, in so few words, implicated those at the highest level of the Trump administration — including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the president himself — in pressuring Ukraine to announce investigations into the 2016 elections and energy company Burisma, which former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, served on the board of.

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“Precisely because we did not think that we were engaging in improper behavior, we made every effort to ensure that the relevant decision-makers at the National Security Council and State Department knew the important details of our efforts,” Sondland testified on Wednesday.

He added: “The suggestion that we were engaged in some irregular or rogue diplomacy is absolutely false.”

Even though Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was also involved with Ukrainian policy, Sondland testified that far from pursuing a rogue operation, Sondland and others understood that if they “refused to work with Mr. Giuliani, we would lose a very important opportunity to cement relations between the United States and Ukraine.”

“So we followed the president’s orders,” Sondland said.

The extent to which Sondland’s testimony tied Trump himself to the scheme varied depending on which of the two quid pro quos was under discussion. But the bottom line was clear: US officials marshaled the power of the United States government to pursue the political whims of President Donald Trump.

Sondland says he knew what Trump wanted — and worked to make it happen

A key question in House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is whether Trump’s desire to have a public announcement of investigations (not necessarily actual investigations) — an announcement that would benefit him politically — effectively also became official United States policy.

And listening to Sondland’s testimony, it was. He said that he knew a White House meeting for the new Ukrainian president was conditioned on an announcement of those investigations, and he “later came to believe” that military aid was contingent on those announcements, too. In other words, he knew of a quid pro quo for a White House meeting, and he eventually understood that one existed for Ukrainian support, too.

Sondland knows the investigations mattered to the president because he spoke with him directly, including a call on July 26 that another State Department official overhead, in which Trump allegedly asked Sondland about whether Zelensky would pursue the investigations he wanted. (Sondland, for his part, didn’t deny the call took place but said Wednesday that he didn’t recall mentioning the Bidens and that he and Trump mostly talked about A$AP Rocky.)

Sondland did testify Wednesday that the president never told him directly that aid to Ukraine was being denied until Zelensky committed to the investigations. Instead, he said it’s something that he inferred over time — not least because he understood that Giuliani spoke for the president.

In an exchange with Democratic counsel Daniel Goldman, Sondland lays this out pretty explicitly:

Goldman: And you said President Trump had directed you to talk, you and the others to talk to Rudy Giuliani at the Oval Office on May 23, is that right?

Sondland: If we wanted to get anything done with Ukraine, it was apparent to us we needed to talk to Rudy.

Goldman: Right, you understood Mr. Giuliani spoke for the president, correct?

Sondland: That’s correct.

Sondland suggests that he and others acted on this understanding. Whatever their personal objections to this arrangement, officials like Sondland or former Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker (who testified Tuesday that he tried to “thread the needle” on Ukraine), didn’t stop pushing get Ukraine to commit to those investigations. Sondland has said he told the Ukrainians directly that he believed aid and the meeting were preconditioned on Ukraine following through on those inquiries.

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“I was acting in good faith,” Sondland said Wednesday. “As a presidential appointee, I followed the directions of the president. We worked with Mr. Giuliani because the president directed us to do so. We had no desire to set any conditions. We had no desire to set any conditions on the Ukrainians. Indeed, my own personal view, which I shared repeatedly with others, was that the White House [meeting] and security assistance should have proceeded without preconditions of any kind.”

“We were working to overcome the problems, given the facts as they existed,” Sondland said.

The facts, as they existed, were that Trump wanted those public inquiries. Sondland’s testimony indicates that the line between Trump’s interests and US interests in Ukraine became blurred, and then accepted. It wasn’t a secret. Everyone, as Sondland repeated, was in the loop.

Sondland name drops, big time

“The leadership at the State Department, the National Security Council, and the White House were all informed about the Ukraine efforts from May 23, 2019, until the security aid was released on September 11, 2019,” Sondland said in his opening testimony.

These dates are important. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was inaugurated on May 20, and Sondland attended, along with Volker and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. On May 23, that delegation returned to brief Trump about their meeting with the new president. Trump instructed those present to “talk to Rudy” instead.

September 11 is the date US military aid to Ukraine was finally released, just two days after Congress was informed about a whistleblower complaint.

A lot happened in this time period: multiple meetings with Ukrainian officials where the need for investigations were discussed, Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky. But Sondland is saying, throughout it all, the top officials in the US government knew what was going on, and that has to include efforts to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations into Burisma (which meant the Bidens, as Sondland said he learned later) and the 2016 election.

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And he brought receipts: Sondland on Wednesday presented one email, sent on July 19, to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and other top officials in the Trump administration that basically informs them all that he’s encouraging Zelensky to pursue those investigations that Trump wants:

I Talked to Zelensky just now… He is prepared to receive POTUS’ call. Will assure him that he intends to run a fully transparent investigation and will ‘turn over every stone’. He would greatly appreciate a call prior to Sunday so that he can put out some media about a ‘friendly and productive call’ (no details) prior to Ukraine election on Sunday.

Mulvaney responded that he “asked the NSC to set it up for tomorrow,” according to Sondland’s testimony.

“Everyone was in the loop,” Sondland said. “It was no secret. Everyone was informed via email on July 19, days before the presidential call.”

Much has been made throughout this impeachment investigation into how officials interacted with Ukraine. There were the official, formal diplomatic channels and then what looked like an “irregular” channel, led by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Those two channels overlapped, which became clear in text messages Volker provided to the House Intelligence Committee that showed top US diplomats interacting with Giuliani. And Trump, on his July 25 call with Zelensky, told the Ukrainian president: “Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great.”

But Sondland’s testimony indicated that this wasn’t just overlap; the irregular channel subsumed the official one.

“I don’t know how someone could characterize something as an irregular channel when you’re talking to the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the national security adviser, the chief of staff of the White House, the secretary of energy,” Sondland testified Wednesday.

“I don’t know how that’s irregular,” he continued. “If a bunch of folks that are not in that channel are aggrieved for some reason for not being included, I don’t know how they can consider us to be the irregular channel and they to be the regular channel, when it’s the leadership that makes the decisions.”

Sondland said everyone was in the loop, and it shows exactly why House Democrats want to hear from these top-level officials (and why they might consider it obstruction if the officials do not testify.) But beyond this Ukraine scheme, the seeming involvement of so many top levels officials raises troubling questions about how — and for whom — US policy is being conducted.

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President Trump with Vice President Mike Pence at the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York City, New York, on September 23, 2019. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Pence firmly distanced himself from Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s testimony in a House impeachment hearing on Wednesday.

Vice President Mike Pence firmly distanced himself from US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland’s testimony in a House impeachment hearing on Wednesday after Sondland testified that he discussed with Pence President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rivals.

Sondland told lawmakers he spoke with Pence on September 1, ahead of a meeting the vice president had scheduled with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Poland.

“I mentioned to Vice President Pence before the meetings with the Ukrainians that I had concerns that the delay in [US military aid to Ukraine] had become tied to the issue of investigations,” Sondland said. “I recall mentioning that before the Zelensky meeting.”

Ukrainians were also growing concerned that the aid — $391 million that Congress had approved for its fight with Russia — was being delayed, and Sondland has testified he outlined the steps they would need to take to unlock the funds on the same date he spoke with Pence.

An aide to Pence responded with a strongly worded statement denying any involvement in the scheme. “Ambassador Gordon Sondland was never alone with Vice President Pence on the September 1 trip to Poland,” the statement reads. “This alleged discussion recalled by Ambassador Sondland never happened.”

The statement goes on to argue that multiple witnesses testified that Pence did not have any discussions mentioning “Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe Biden, Crowdstrike, Burisma, or investigations” with Zelensky or any Ukrainians “before, during, or after the September 1 meeting.”

Pence has largely stayed out of the impeachment inquiry

Though Trump has directly engaged with the impeachment inquiry on an almost daily basis, Pence has largely avoided becoming involved with it. Sondland’s testimony on Wednesday could change that.

Whether Pence’s statement will be enough to let him keep his distance now that Sondland has claimed he had — at the very least — some knowledge of Trump’s desire for investigations is yet to be determined.

Sondland’s testimony has also raised questions about other officials. He told lawmakers “everyone was in the loop” about Trump’s requests of Ukraine, as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias previously reported:

Sondland’s testimony also directly attributes key statements, actions, and knowledge of a quid pro quo between Ukraine and the Trump White House to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry (whose spokesperson also put out a statement contradicting Sondland), and former national security adviser John Bolton. But none of those men has testified before Congress. Neither has Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney nor Rudy Giuliani — the man who did most of the actual legwork on the caper that Congress is investigating.

So far, all of those men have either ignored congressional subpoenas or haven’t been called to testify. They — along with Pence — may now be of even greater interest to the House Democrats leading the impeachment inquiry.

For his part, Trump also worked to distance himself from Sondland on Wednesday.

“I have not spoken to him much. This is not a man I know well. Seems like a nice guy though,” Trump said of Sondland. “He was with other candidates. He actually supported other candidates. Not me. Came in late.”

Trump has tried many defenses to fight the testimony of witnesses in the impeachment hearings, but Pence has not had to do the same. The vice president’s statement seems designed to be a clear attempt to wash his hands of the entire Ukraine affair. Whether he’ll pull it off remains to be seen.

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Presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during The Iowa Democratic Party Liberty & Justice Celebration on November 1, 2019 in Des Moines, Iowa. | Joshua Lott/Getty Images

Data suggests some of her supporters have migrated to candidates who were previously their second choice.

After a blockbuster debate performance in June, Sen. Kamala Harris shot up in the national polls, peaking at 15 percent voter support. Cut to five months later, and she’s about to enter the next Democratic debate polling in the single digits, coming in at 4.3 percent, according to RealClearPolitics polling averages.

This dip prompts a major question: What happened?

According to pollsters and political experts with whom Vox spoke, part of this decline is due to the fact that it’s difficult to sustain a spike after a viral moment — and because Harris didn’t fully capitalize on it, her uptick has since been described as a “sugar high.” Harris’s subsequent debate performances, for example, were not seen as consistent enough to maintain that surge.

What this polling swing also indicates, however, is that Harris, who’s still a new face to many voters, has had trouble growing her core base of support beyond what she had ahead of the June debate. Among the reasons for this is that her less-defined ideological positioning has made it tougher to carve out a niche with voters — and coded assumptions about electability have also affected her campaign.

“Because her bump was based largely on the one event, it wasn’t really baked in, and voters looked around for another candidate that might excite their interest,” Monmouth University polling director Patrick Murray told Vox. “The bigger problem is that she did not have the kind of base in the early states that would have helped sustained her momentum in Iowa and New Hampshire, if not nationally.”

According to YouGov Blue senior political analyst John Ray, 5 percent of Democratic primary voters definitively chose Harris as their No. 1 candidate before her viral debate moment in June, which means the polling slump has brought her back to where she was before, roughly.

Harris’s drop in support has also coincided with surges for other 2020 candidates, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, suggesting that some voters who may have initially backed her have since switched over. Experts, however, said that Harris still has room to make up those losses in the coming months and caution that polling doesn’t capture the entirety of how the electorate is leaning. As indicated by the RealClearPolitics tracker, support for other prominent candidates, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, has fluctuated since the beginning of this year.

“There is great danger in overinterpreting these polls,” said University of South Carolina political science professor Robert Oldendick. “The election is so far out that there is still a lot of volatility.” Harris’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Below are three factors experts said have contributed to Harris’s decline in voter support over the past few months.

1. Her declines have corresponded with gains by South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Buttigieg, Warren, and Biden, all of whom were top second-choice options among Harris’s initial supporters

Some of the slide Harris has seen in the polls is likely because her supporters have switched over to other candidates who have gained momentum.

Warren, for example, has seen a massive surge buoyed by her focus on corporate accountability and structural change. Biden, too, has managed to hang onto a steady lead, including among a crucial contingency of African American voters. And Buttigieg has picked up support from predominantly white voters who are interested in his centrist approach.

These three candidates are the ones early Harris supporters listed as their top second choices in polling — and the data indicates that some of her previous backers may have moved over to them. In a Morning Consult poll in late July, 28 percent of the California senator’s supporters listed Warren as their second choice, while 26 percent picked Biden and 12 percent selected Buttigieg.

“Harris has lost support in the last few months,” said Molly McInerney, communications and sales associate at pollster Change Research. “Our numbers suggest that the majority of those voters have gone to Warren, Biden, and Buttigieg.”

Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy said that the first time Harris really dropped, Biden was the one candidate who really rose. “Then later, as Harris dropped a bit more, we saw Warren as the candidate who at the same time surged,” Malloy said. “So it appears that Harris voters went first to Biden and then a bit to Warren.”

2. As a black woman, Harris has had to field assumptions about electability in a way no one else has

Electability — or the ability of a candidate to beat President Donald Trump — remains top of mind for many Democratic voters. That’s meant a bevy of electability questions for progressive firebrands like Warren or Sanders, but Harris, a black woman, faces a particular set of assumptions tied to both gender and race.

“This focus on beating Donald Trump in 2020 kind of sets her up, and others deemed ‘unelectable,’ for failure,” said Howard University political science professor Niambi Carter. “For many folks in the media and the public, Harris is not the prototypical candidate. She is not white; she is not old; and she is not male. … This belief cannot help but to penetrate the general public’s perceptions of Harris, and for those still reeling from the 2016 election, they don’t want to risk it all again on a person like Kamala Harris.”

Harris has explicitly called out these questions about electability and bias during her campaign, calling them the “elephant in the room” and noting that she’s won numerous races in which she encountered feedback about whether voters were “ready” for her candidacy.

“I’m here to tell you guys that this is not a new conversation,” Harris has said in her stump speech. “In fact, I’ve heard this conversation in every campaign I have — and here is the operative word — won.”

Harris supporters have also pointed to bias in the type of media coverage she receives. The framing of a question about transgender rights at an LGBTQ rights forum earlier this year, especially, prompted blowback when Warren and Harris were asked similar questions, but the one directed at Harris was viewed as far more critical.

“As a black woman, I know from personal experience that Kamala has to work three times as hard as some of the other candidates in this race to get half as far,” said Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, an organization dedicated to promoting women of color in politics. “Like Obama before her, she has to run a competitive campaign at the same time she’s convincing people she is competitive.”

3. She pitched herself as a coalition-building candidate — but hasn’t been able to carve out a specific niche

Though Harris has sought to build a broad-based coalition, something she succeeded at during her Senate run, experts have said her muddled ideological positioning has prevented her from establishing a specific lane of support. Harris, who is viewed as more moderate than multiple leading candidates, has also tried to court progressive voters — with limited success.

One example: She backed Medicare-for-all, but then released a plan that doesn’t go quite as far as that of Sanders or Warren in eliminating private insurance. Additionally, Harris’s prosecutorial record has prompted critiques from liberals who argue that her approach toward issues such as truancy and wrongful convictions aren’t as progressive as she’s tried to frame them.

“She’s in a no person’s land,” said San Jose State University political science professor Larry Gerston. “She is to the right of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, she’s to the left of Pete Buttigieg.”

Harris’s initial bet on bringing the party together has yet to come to fruition, in part because of how crowded the field has been — and how her competitors have been able to hang onto their core contingencies of support.

“Looking at it now, she probably would have been better off staying in the center,” said Gerston, who argued that Harris’s efforts to establish herself as a progressive may have ultimately hurt her. Allison, meanwhile, said her move to the center was a misstep.

“I think that defining herself as a moderate in this crowded field was a miscalculation about this political moment, especially when progressives are generating excitement and momentum based on bold health care and criminal justice reform plans,” Allison said.

It’s worth noting that there are more than two months before Iowa caucus voters go to the polls, and a sizable proportion of voters in early states could very well change their minds. Harris still has a decent base to work with — if she’s able to convince undecided voters and reclaim some of her backers who have left for other candidates, pollsters noted.

“Harris has some room to regain support. She has been the second choice of 12 percent of Democrats in our polls during the past two months,” Change Research’s McInerney said.

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Honduran migrants heading to the United States travel aboard a pick-up van near Guatemala City on January 17, 2019. | JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP/Getty Images

The administration has started sending migrants back to Guatemala.

The Trump administration began to deport migrants seeking protection at the southern border back to Guatemala on Wednesday, the first migrants to be sent back under a series of agreements brokered earlier this year that make it all but impossible for Central Americans to seek asylum in the United States.

The agreements, which the US has signed with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, require migrants on their way to the US to apply for protections in those countries first.

If they fail to do so, US immigration authorities will send them back to those countries, collectively known as Central America’s Northern Triangle, where crime, violence, and lack of economic opportunity has driven hundreds of thousands to flee over the past year.

A new rule implementing the agreements was published this week. Only the agreement with Guatemala has gone into effect so far, as Buzzfeed first reported, and so far it has affected a relatively small number of single adult migrants, though the administration has not released an official count. But the agreements represent an unprecedented departure from the US’s tradition of protecting vulnerable populations, all in the service of President Donald Trump’s goal of driving down the number of migrants seeking refuge at the US southern border.

Experts warn that the agreements pose deadly consequences for migrants who are being sent back.

“We’re talking about forcing people to remain in these countries where the government is unable to protect them, locking them there and throwing away the key,” said Ursela Ojeda, a migrant rights and justice policy adviser at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “It is unprecedented in the sense that the idea that we would consider these countries safe is laughable. People will suffer and people will die.”

Most migrants seeking asylum in the US travel through Mexico on their way from the Northern Triangle. The deals resemble “safe third country agreements” — a rarely used diplomatic tool that requires migrants to seek asylum in the countries they pass through by deeming those countries capable of offering them protection — although the Trump administration has been reluctant to use that term, perhaps because the countries it’s dealing with cannot be considered safe.

Until recently, the US had this kind of agreement with just one country: Canada. The administration is continuing to pursue similar agreements with Mexico and Panama.

A separate Trump administration rule prevents migrants from being granted asylum if they passed through any country other than their own before arriving in the US, effectively meaning asylum seekers from any country but Mexico are ineligible for asylum. (Some migrants are still eligible for other protections that would allow them to stay in the US under that rule.)

Taken together, these policies achieve Trump’s objective of reducing overall legal immigration levels by putting asylum almost out of reach for migrants arriving at the southern border. They also mean returning migrants to countries that have high levels of crime and instability that are not used to dealing with an influx of people seeking refuge.

The US had just one safe third country agreement — until recently

Migrants can apply for asylum in the US if they face “credible fear” of persecution in their home countries on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinions, or membership in a “particular social group,” such as the LGBTQ community. Asylees can obtain social services through refugee resettlement agencies and apply for a green card one year after they are granted asylum.

Safe third country agreements were created as a way for countries to share the responsibility of aiding asylum seekers, always with their welfare in mind. In 1991, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees invited such agreements where they would result in “clearer identification of those in need of protection” and “international cooperation in the provision of this protection and the realisation of lasting solutions.”

Safe third country agreements are usually signed by two countries. Migrants must apply for asylum in the first of those two countries that they pass through or else they could be sent back to the other country.

In the US, the Immigration and Nationality Act lays out two conditions for the agreements: they must be with countries where an immigrant’s “life or freedom would not be threatened on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” and where they would have “access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection.”

Since safe third country agreements are not considered treaties, which must be ratified by Congress, the president can sign them unilaterally.

The US’s only existing safe third country agreement is with Canada. Drafted in cooperation with international human rights organizations and signed in 2002, the agreement acknowledges that the US and Canada both have robust processes under which asylum seekers can petition for protections and have strong traditions of welcoming asylum seekers.

But even that agreement has not been immune to critique. Canadian advocates filed a lawsuit in July 2017 challenging the agreement, arguing that Trump administration policies have made the US unsafe for asylum seekers. That ongoing suit claims that, in the US, asylum seekers are “unjustly detained” and are at risk of being forcibly returned to countries where they could be subject to persecution, torture, and death.

The European Union also reached a similar agreement with Turkey in March 2016 after migrants largely from the Middle East and Africa, including Syrians displaced by ongoing civil war, had arrived in record numbers — over 1 million in 2015, according to the International Organization for Migration. The agreement allowed Greece to deport migrants who had passed through Turkey unless they had already applied for asylum in Greece. (Few deportations, however, actually took place because migrants started applying for asylum as soon as they arrived in Greece.)

Trump, meanwhile, has sought to restrict asylum even more broadly, issuing a rule in July that strips asylum eligibility from anyone at the southern border who passed through another country en route to the US. There are limited exceptions to the rule, but, for the most part, it effectively closes the door on seeking asylum at the southern border.

Karen Musalo, founding director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies and one of the attorneys challenging the rule in federal court, said the rule has effectively allowed the Trump administration to unilaterally block Central American migrants from obtaining asylum.

But also signing safe third country agreements with each country individually gives the US another tool to deflect migrants. It could be the administration’s fallback option if a court strikes down its asylum rule in ongoing legal challenges. Alternatively, it could be used to send migrants to countries other than their own if their governments refuse to cooperate with the US in facilitating their deportation.

“Obviously, the purpose of this kind of an approach is to keep out asylum seekers,” Musalo said. “The safe third country agreement is one way to do it. But this regulation is very effective at doing that as long as it stands.”

Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries can’t offer migrants protection

Safe third country agreements were never meant to be a means of pushing the burden of absorbing asylum seekers onto other countries but that appears to be the way Trump is trying to use them. Even though the administration doesn’t refer to them as “safe third country agreements,” that’s essentially what they are.

More and more people are applying for asylum in recent years: about 208,000 over the past fiscal year as of October, compared to about 82,000 for all of fiscal year 2016. The number of migrants arrested while trying to cross the southern border is even higher, up to almost 978,000 over the past fiscal year through October from 553,000 in 2016. Most of them are families and unaccompanied children, whereas previously those arrested were primarily single adult men.

Trump has seen rising numbers of border arrests, generally considered a proxy for levels of unauthorized immigration, as a crisis worthy of declaring a national emergency in February. He has described safe third country agreements as one of many measures he is pursuing to drive down the numbers.

The agreements that the US is pursuing in Central America, however, are nothing like the one it has with Canada — not in intention and not in development, Ojeda said.

A rule published Nov. 18 establishes a new screening process to determine whether the US or Guatemala will process migrants’ claims for protection. It applies both to immigrants who show up at US ports of entry on the southern border and those who try to enter the country without authorization between the ports.

The rule claims that asylum seekers will only be sent back to countries where they have “access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection.” The administration has certified that Guatemala’s legal framework meets that standard, a former administration official told Vox, but has not evaluated whether Guatemala has the capacity to accept asylum seekers based on, for example, infrastructure or personnel needs.

Initially, the administration will only send relatively low numbers of single adults to Guatemala in order to test out the policy, they said. The United Nations refugee agency, meanwhile, will be working on the ground to bolster Guatemala’s capacity to receive more migrants.

Trump has described the agreements as a means of “sending a clear message to human smugglers and traffickers” and bringing to a close the “widespread abuse of the [asylum] system and the crippling crisis” on the southern border.

By Trump’s definition, however, ending the border crisis means reducing the number of migrants who are coming to the US. It doesn’t mean necessarily addressing the underlying problem: regional instability in Central America pushing people out of their homes.

When border arrests fell in August, Trump touted it as a victory for his immigration policies. Mexico, meanwhile, has been forced to accept more asylum seekers instead.

The Trump administration is sending migrants who line up at a port of entry or who are arrested when trying to cross the southern border back to Mexico to await decisions on their asylum claims. Under the policy, which is known as “Remain in Mexico,” the US has sent about 57,000 migrants back to Mexico, according to US Customs and Border Protection.

Morgan, CBP’s acting commissioner, has claimed that safe third country agreements with Central American countries are in the best interest of asylum seekers.

“If somebody is fleeing their country because they feel that they’re being persecuted for a list of legitimate reasons, it really is in their best interest to apply for asylum to the first country that they have entered outside of the country that they are being persecuted,” he said on September 9. “That’s our design. We believe it’s in their best interest as well.”

But the countries with which Trump has brokered or sought to broker safe third country agreements have a long history of instability and violence, and, in some cases, asylum seekers are in particular danger.

In Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, migrants are commonly robbed, kidnapped for ransom, raped, tortured, and killed. The State Department, meanwhile, has issued travel warnings for US citizens in all four countries.

El Salvador has the highest homicide rate in the world while Honduras is fifth, Guatemala is 16th, and Mexico is 19th, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. They have rampant government corruption and high rates of violence against women and LGBTQ individuals.

Central America remains a hotspot of gang violence. MS-13 and M-18, which together have a presence of about 85,000 members in the area, are gangs that formed in Los Angeles and were transplanted to Central America after mass deportations of unauthorized immigrants with criminal histories in the 1990s. Gangs facilitate drug trafficking, extort local residents, and force teenage boys to join.

While advocates say the Northern Triangle countries lack anything resembling a legitimate asylum system, Mexico does have established procedures for processing asylum seekers. It does not, however, have the resources to process migrants in the numbers that are currently arriving, given that its refugee commission has only 48 staff members nationwide.

The state of El Salvador’s asylum agency is even more pitiful: The Salvadoran newspaper El Faro reported that it only has one asylum officer.

“None of them have anything that you could seriously call a ‘full and fair procedure’ for asylum seekers,” Musalo said.

Asylum grant rates in Mexico are relatively low. The Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, or COMAR, granted asylum to 264 of 3,533 applicants from El Salvador, 43 of the 791 from Guatemala and 279 of the 7,484 from Honduras in 2018. A concerning number of asylum seekers also abandon their claims, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Mexico also lacks the capacity to offer humanitarian aid to masses of migrants. Asylum seekers waiting for decisions on their asylum applications in Mexico have recently faced overcrowded shelters, slim employment prospects, and difficulty finding lawyers, without which their asylum cases are almost surely doomed to fail.

Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries also produce high numbers of people seeking asylum themselves. In 2017, the most recent year for which asylum is available, the US granted asylum to 3,471 migrants from El Salvador, 2,954 from Guatemala, 2,048 from Honduras, and 1,048 from Mexico.

“It’s like saying, ‘Your house was just destroyed by an earthquake but there’s a house down the street that is on fire. Why don’t you seek refuge there?” Musalo said.

Central American countries are under pressure to sign safe third country agreements

In June, the administration threatened to impose tariffs on all Mexican goods if Mexico did not assist in curtailing the number of migrants showing up at the US southern border. But with border arrests on an apparent decline, Mexico seems to have fulfilled Trump’s wishes and may not feel obligated to take the extra step of signing a safe third country agreement. Despite initially being open to discussions of such an agreement, the Mexican foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard dismissed the prospect outright on September 10.

Trump announced in July that the US had reached a safe third country agreement with Guatemala, though it has yet to be ratified by the Guatemalan government. As part of the agreement, the US offered to expand and streamline the H-2A temporary agricultural visa program for Guatemalan citizens, promising to spur what Trump described as a “new era of investment and growth.”

The Guatemala Constitutional Court initially stopped the agreement from going into effect. After the ruling, Trump suggested he would retaliate by blocking all Guatemalan immigrants and introducing a new tax on their remittances. The agreement has since been implemented.

The agreement with El Salvador, which is similar to the one with Guatemala, says that the US “intends to cooperate with El Salvador in order to strengthen El Salvador’s institutional capacities.” As part of that, the US will invest in El Salvador and work on a way for about 200,000 Salvadorans who have lived in the US for about two decades with temporary legal immigration status to remain in the country permanently, McAleenan and Chancellor of the El Salvador Ministry of Foreign Affairs Alexandra Hill told reporters.

While the terms of the deal with Honduras has not been made public, the US government may have some leverage over its government, as Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández faces prosecution in the US for allegedly accepting campaign contributions from drug traffickers.

It’s not clear what advantages other countries might derive from signing a safe third country agreement. Ojeda says that they may just be afraid of going against the wishes of a major economic power that has given them substantial, much-needed aid.

“What we have here is the United States being a bully,” she said.

Safe third country agreements with Central American countries raise legal concerns

Establishing safe third country agreements with Central American countries could run afoul of the US government’s legal obligations to asylum seekers in both federal law and international human rights standards.

If the US sends migrants back to countries where they are endangered, it may be falling short of its duties as a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention. That United Nations treaty says countries cannot “expel or return a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

But other nations are limited in their ability to hold the US accountable for brokering safe third country agreements that put asylum seekers at risk and propagating a rule that achieves the same effect.

International organizations might determine that the US is violating international human rights standards. But their findings are not legally enforceable in the same way that a US court decision might be — it would only matter to presidents who care about upholding international human rights standards.

“I think it would be fair to say that this administration has contempt for international human rights standards,” Musalo said.

Immigrant advocates are nevertheless asking international bodies to weigh in, recently requesting a hearing before the Organization of American States’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Even if a country can’t be forced to comply with the commission’s findings, there is value in having an international body state for the record that the US is in violation of global standards.

The United Nations could also intervene, either through a statement by its refugee office or a resolution, but that is less likely because diplomatic bodies are reluctant to be critical of large powers like the US.

The US court system will therefore be the ultimate arbiter of whether the Trump administration’s attempts to broker safe third country agreements are lawful.

In the lawsuit challenging Trump’s asylum rule, the Department of Homeland Security has invoked its authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to impose “additional limitations and conditions, consistent with [the asylum statute], under which an alien shall be ineligible for asylum.” It claims that barring asylum seekers who don’t “request protection at the first opportunity” is a legitimate use of that authority.

But immigrant advocates have countered that the rule violates longstanding principles in the Refugee Act of 1980, in which the US codified its international human rights obligations as a party to the Refugee Convention.

The Refugee Act says that any noncitizen in the US can apply for asylum “whether or not at a designated port of arrival” and “irrespective of [their immigration] status.” The only exceptions are for those who were “firmly resettled” in another country before they arrived in the US or if they passed through another country with which the US had a “Safe Third Country” agreement.

Opponents also argue that the Trump administration skirted rulemaking requirements by issuing the rule without giving the public notice and the opportunity to submit comments on it.

The Refugee Act would also likely be raised in any challenges to future safe third country agreements with Mexico or other countries.

“It’s a flagrant and shameful attempt to refuse to take on our obligations by putting barriers that make it impossible for people to apply here,” Musalo said.

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Javier Zarracina/Vox

The plague is still a problem around the world — including in the US.

If you thought it went the way of bloodletting and medicinal leeches, think again. Three people have just come down with the plague. Yes, the plague.

In China, two patients were diagnosed with the infectious disease earlier this month. While they’ve been receiving treatment in a hospital in Beijing, the news of the diagnosis has reportedly sparked panic among citizens there.

Public health officials have been working to make sure the disease is contained, and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention told Beijing residents not to panic because the risk of the plague spreading further is “extremely low.”

But this week, a third case was reported. A 55-year-old man was diagnosed with bubonic plague after eating wild rabbit in Inner Mongolia. The region’s health commission says it has no evidence to suggest that this case is linked to the previous two.

The plague comes in three varieties: Pneumonic plague is an infection of the lungs; septicemic plague is a blood infection; and bubonic plague affects the lymphatic system. That last variety is the one we know as the Black Death, the epidemic that wracked Europe in the Middle Ages.

Pneumonic plague may be less famous than the bubonic form, but it’s even more deadly, and that’s what the first two patients have come down with. It’s not clear exactly how they caught it, but they didn’t catch it in Beijing: Like the 55-year-old who ate wild rabbit, they came from Inner Mongolia. They then traveled to the capital seeking treatment, according to Chinese officials.

A bacterium called Yersinia pestis, which is carried by wild rodents and the fleas that feed on them, causes all three types of the plague. Pneumonic plague is highly contagious and transmissible between humans — it can be spread when an infected person coughs.

That fact caused alarm among Chinese citizens when the initial news broke. One user on the popular site Weibo wrote that the government should release information on how the patients traveled to Beijing — if they used public transport, they may have spread the plague to other passengers. “How many people have they encountered potentially?” wrote the user, per the New York Times. “Only 2 kilometers away from Chaoyang Hospital. I’m shaking and trembling.”

Other users complained that the government should have announced the outbreak sooner (the patients reportedly sought treatment on November 3) and with greater transparency. Meanwhile, Chinese censors told online news aggregators in the country to “block and control” discussion of the plague, the Times reported, adding that China has a history of covering up infectious outbreaks. (The government keeps tight reins on the press, and media censorship could be a wild card in how a disease spreads or doesn’t.)

Hopefully, there will be no further transmission of the infectious disease in China. But this is an important reminder that the plague, despite common perception, is not a thing of the past. And nor is it limited to China. In recent years, the plague has popped up in countries from Madagascar to the United States. This is a global problem.

And it’s a reminder of the ever-present risk of pandemics — a risk for which experts say we’re really not prepared. In September, experts warned in a major report that the risk of a global pandemic is growing. “There is a very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen killing 50 to 80 million people,” they wrote.

The plague is more of a concern than you might think — even in the US

When you think of the plague, you may think of Shakespeare’s lifetime. In the Bard’s day, the Black Death wiped out a quarter of his town’s population.

And before that outbreak, back in the mid-14th century, the bubonic plague killed an estimated 60 percent of Europe’s population. Sixty percent. It’s hard to grasp the magnitude of such a catastrophe — or the speed with which the highly contagious disease spread over just six years. Here’s a GIF to help you visualize it:

(Andrei Nacu)

Thankfully, the infectious disease isn’t decimating human populations at such an alarming rate anymore. Although it’s lethal when left untreated, recovery rates are fairly good if it’s treated with antibiotics soon after onset.

But the plague — bubonic as well as pneumonic — continues to affect people from Africa to Asia, from South America to North America. It afflicted 3,248 people and killed 584 around the world between 2010 and 2015, the WHO reported.

In 2014, China saw one man die and 151 people placed in quarantine because of the plague, with the city of Yumen sealed off. And just this year in Mongolia, a couple died from plague, reportedly after eating a marmot, leading to another quarantine.

In 2015, plague was making headlines in the US, with 11 cases and three deaths spanning six states in between April and August, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Each year, the US records approximately a dozen plague deaths. It’s more common in rural areas.

In 2017, Madagascar suffered a terrible outbreak of plague, with 2,417 cases confirmed, and a death toll of 209.

The plague, then, is still a concern worldwide. It’s something we’d do well to address — along with pandemic preparedness more broadly — before it’s too late.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.

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Universal Pictures

The new song Swift wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber has a lot to teach us about cats, “Memory,” and fangirls.

“Beautiful Ghosts,” the song that Taylor Swift put words to for Tom Hooper’s upcoming Cats movie, has arrived — and guess what? Swift might be Cats creator and famed Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ideal lyricist.

Lloyd Webber, a.k.a. ALW, is the man who brought the world Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and one of the most recorded songs in theatre history, “Memory” from Cats. (Estimates for the number of artists who’ve covered the song range from 150 to 600+.) ALW is notorious for writing musicals with beautiful music and weak lyrics. But “Beautiful Ghosts” makes a compelling argument that what every ALW musical needs is a shrewd lyricist who was once a teenage girl — and who, consequently, is not embarrassed to embrace the gushy romantic heart of his music.

The song was released November 15 as promotion for film ramps up ahead of the movie’s December 20 release date. And while the new trailer that followed sent us into a grim, slow meltdown, “Beautiful Ghosts” is a good song that suggests niceness can still emerge from this trainwreck of a film.

Here are five reasons “Beautiful Ghosts” is worth a second listen, or several.

1) It adds to our understanding of Victoria, the White Cat

“Beautiful Ghosts” isn’t a showy end-credits pop song; it’s a new song inserted into the plot of the show. I use “plot” very loosely. Cats the musical is based on the work of great modernist poet T.S. Eliot, set to music by ALW. It’s about … cats choosing who will go to cat heaven. (Yes, really.)

Not many people remember how weird the plot of Cats is because the only Cats detail most people care about is “Memory,” — a song that musicologist Jessica Sternfeld summarized as “a hit song of massive proportions, by some estimations the most successful song ever from a musical.” But “Memory” itself is such a weird song.

It’s performed by a character named “Grizabella, the Glamour Cat,” a lone, starving alley cat who was once a famously beautiful cat (?!) before she became a friendless, down-on-her-luck feline sex worker (?!?!). She “haunted low resorts” and was exiled by all the cats, until her depression and despair, articulated in “Memory,” finally provokes their sympathy — for which her reward is … getting to die.

Yup. That’s Cats!

“Beautiful Ghosts” will follow “Memory” in the upcoming film. The cat who sings it, Victoria, is principally a dancer, and in the musical her character is creepily portrayed mainly through her dawning sexual awakening. But in Hooper’s film, Victoria has a bigger role: Now, the entire story is framed through her point of view, and Victoria is a younger mirror of Grizabella.

In “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria echoes “Memory” and reflects on Grizabella’s tragic life, as well as her own. “Memory” keeps calling for “new life,” while through “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria transitions from “Memory’s” sadness to a joy that’s all her own — through the realization that she loves the life she has. Where “Memory” is fuzzy, with vague hints of former happiness, “Beautiful Ghosts” weaves a mini-narrative of Victoria’s life: Cast onto the streets, apparently by cruel former owners, she distrusts other cats, but eventually befriends them and comes to love her life. With this one song, she goes from being opaque and silent to having depth, complexity, and a backstory that doesn’t involve her being a sex object.

2) It helps us understand “Memory”

Even though “Beautiful Ghosts” is sung by Victoria to Grizabella, it also gives us crucial insight into Grizabella’s life. When Victoria sings lines like, “Should I take chances when no one took chances on me?” she’s simultaneously referencing her own life and Grizabella’s: Grizabella at least knew a time when she was loved and admired, and had human companionship to look back on. Victoria has only known rejection.

Taylor Swift has clearly asked herself, “How can I bring more coherence to “Memory,” a weird-ass song about a cat who is also a sex worker who is also dying and friendless and stuck with her memories of having once been very hot?” The solution, which she provides in “Beautiful Ghosts,” is to give Grizabella slightly more of a past.

In a recent radio interview, Swift described her approach to creating the song — which involved contrasting Victoria’s life with Grizabella’s:

‘Memory’ is Grizabella singing about how she had all these beautiful, incredible moments in her past. She had these glittering occasions and she felt beautiful and she felt wanted and now she doesn’t feel that way anymore.

This is fanfic on Swift’s part. While this glittering history can be implied, it’s not literally in the lyrics to “Memory,“ or anywhere else in Cats — the most concrete detail “Memory” offers is that Grizabella once enjoyed “days in the sun.” It’s a huge bonus to see Grizabella given a more concrete backstory that has nothing to do with her, uh, hanging out in brothels.

“Beautiful Ghosts” explains that Grizabella was “born into nothing” but now has memories of “dazzling rooms” and a time she was not just beautiful, but loved. In essence, Swift has not only crafted a satisfying character song for Victoria — she’s deepened Grizabella and “Memory” too.

3) It’s clearly a song that could be sung by a cat

This is hard! “Memory” couldn’t manage it — the song does not remotely sound like as if it’s sung by a character who is a cat. But from the first line of “Beautiful Ghosts” (“follow me home if you dare to”) the song feels like one that could be sung by a cat — one who has wandered the streets, hearing the voices of its fellow cats in the dark. Victoria sings of the “wild ones” who “tame the fear” within her as she longs to “get let into” the rooms inhabited by the humans she once knew and yearned for love from. These are bittersweet lyrics, but more importantly, they’re lyrics that pretty clearly describe the life of a cat.

The extent to which Swift has thought about how cats feel becomes increasingly apparent when you realize that “Beautiful Ghosts” is a hymn to found family and the alley cat existence, the freedom of a life lived on the streets, and the beauty of, well, a gang of stray cats. (If this is also maybe starting to sound like a metaphor for marginalized communities finding strength in each other after being turned out of their homes, well, nobody knows how to appropriate queer pride like Taylor Swift.)

4) It hints at what a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could be like with a smart lyricist who embraces his romanticism

The typical trade-off with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals is that his lush, lofty melodic lines take priority over lyrics. This approach works to make his songs popular — after all, studies have shown that sweeping, ascendant melodies make people feel intense emotions. But if the lyrics are weak — for example, if characters say lines that feel overblown, generic, or irrelevant to the story they’re in — then the musical as a whole can suffer.

The general wisdom among musical theater fans is that ALW was only truly great when he was composing with his earliest collaborator, the brilliant lyricist Tim Rice. The ALW/Rice shows (Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita) are fantastic — witty, satirical, and incisive, ranging from complex political themes to rollicking whimsy and charming pastiche. But as good as they are, it’s obvious that they weren’t the kind of shows ALW really wanted to write, because after the team split up, ALW wrote a series of increasingly sentimental shows, from 1982’s generically sad Song and Dance to 1989’s bonkers melodrama Aspects of Love (which I love).

ALW’s later shows’ scores were often gorgeous, full of beautiful melodies. But the plots were often too soapy, and he bounced around between lyricists who frequently paired his music with asinine words. When ALW was working with someone equally as or more talented than he was, he managed to create popular, lasting shows, including Cats and Phantom of the Opera, helmed by the late great director Hal Prince. But ALW didn’t always work with equals who could rein him in. And so he only kept getting more extravagant in his desire to combine deeply emotional musical motifs with schmoopy, overblown storylines. In other words, post-Rice, ALW has always been hampered by his own self-indulgence and the lack of a lyricist as good at writing lyrics as ALW is at writing music.

That’s why a Taylor Swift-ALW collaboration is genuinely exciting. In the annals of ALW collaborators, Swift may be the first lyricist with the range, experience, and stature to stand alongside Rice. But more importantly, she clearly loves Cats, loves the music, and loves actual cats. In that interview quoted above, for example, she discussed Victoria’s cat psychology at length. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which Tim Rice would say, as Swift did in that interview, “I got you. I know what that cat would say.”

And that may be what so many previous ALW musicals have lacked: the enthusiasm of a smart, savvy songwriter who’s also not afraid to unironically love and embrace her subject matter. Taylor Swift isn’t just a brilliant songwriter who credits the lyrics of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz for teaching her to write music with sharp edges and blatant emotive power. She’s also a fangirl. And fangirls know how to deliver deep, smart character studies while amplifying the emotional core of the stories they love.

That combination of shrewd songwriting and passion is what propels the final verse of “Beautiful Ghosts” into something truly great.

5) “Beautiful Ghosts” has a surprise twist ending

Taylor Swift learned a lot from brilliant country songwriters, and one of the common country song traits she likes to carry forward is the “twist.” That’s when the final stanza upends the original meaning of the song and shifts the refrain into something new, surprising, and even richer.

Throughout “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria has emphasized the fact that Grizabella still has her memories: “at least you have something to cling to … at least you have beautiful ghosts,” she sings, and the ghosts are the memories of Grizabella’s life of being beautiful and adored.

By contrast, Victoria herself has always lived on the streets, eventually taken in by the stray cats she eventually began to see as family. Initially, she describes the strays as voices she can only hear in the dark, while she wanders the streets, “alone and haunted.” Later, they become “phantoms of night,” as they lure her into her new exciting life.

Finally, when Victoria has her epiphany that she’s happy with her friends, and she loves her alleycat life, she shifts from singing enviously to Grizabella about the “beautiful ghosts” of her memories. Instead, she sings, “So I’ll dance with these beautiful ghosts.”

The ghosts at the end of the song are the cats! Victoria’s ghosts are flesh and blood, and also have you ever met a cat, cats are clearly ghosts, with their silent paws and their eerie glow-eyes, and their ability to vanish into thin air. (Holy shit, the ghosts are the cats!)

Only Taylor Swift could turn a metaphor about lost memories into a literal description of cats that is also a metaphor for found families and friendship. Don’t argue with me, this is perfect.

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Prince Andrew in Thailand in November 2019 for an ASEAN summit. | Lillian Suwanrumpha/AFP/Getty Images

The Duke of York hoped to clarify his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in the BBC interview. He only raised new questions.

The United Kingdom’s Prince Andrew announced on Wednesday that he will be stepping down from public duties “for the foreseeable future” after a widely-criticized interview regarding his relationship with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“It has become clear to me over the last few days that the circumstances relating to my former association with Jeffrey Epstein has become a major disruption to my family’s work and the valuable work going on in the many organizations and charities that I am proud to support,” the Duke of York said in a statement, according to CNN.

The announcement came days after Prince Andrew sat down for an interview with the BBC’s Emily Maitlis and attempted to explain his relationship with Epstein — but offered little in the way of clarity. Rather, the prince, the third child of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, was rambling and inconsistent in the face of pointed questions about his actions and affiliations.

Andrew has faced renewed questions about his relationship with Epstein following the financier’s death in August. At the time, Epstein was in jail, facing sex trafficking charges. Andrew, a longtime friend of Epstein’s, has himself been accused of being involved with girls trafficked by Epstein; it remains unclear, however, how much the prince knew about Epstein’s illicit activities.

One of Epstein’s accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, has said the prince had sex with her a number of times when she was 17 years old. Andrew has directly denied this, and during the interview, made a series of odd statements in his attempt to poke holes in Giuffre’s narrative, including claiming he’d lost the ability to sweat (Giuffre claimed he was “profusely sweating” while dancing with her in 2001 before a sexual encounter) and that he could not have had sex with Giuffre on one of the dates she claimed because he’d taken his daughter for pizza (and he remembers this because “going to Pizza Express in Woking is an unusual thing for me to do”).

Andrew added that he has “no recollection” of meeting Giuffre, but refused to commit to testifying under oath about the matter, saying he would do so only “if push came to shove and the legal advice was to do so.”

Given the FBI is currently investigating Epstein and his associates, the prince may find himself asked to offer testimony. Epstein’s former legal counsel Alan Dershowitz (who has also been accused of sexual misconduct) has said Andrew would be forced to speak with the investigators should they call him in.

Prince Andrew struggled to defend his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

Before discussing the Giuffre allegations, the BBC interview on Saturday centered on Andrew’s relationship with Epstein.

Epstein, who was awaiting trial when he died, had been previously incarcerated after facing accusations of abusing dozens of underage girls. In 2007, he was required to register as a sex offender, and Maitlis asked Andrew why he continued to visit Epstein and stay at his home knowing this.

Andrew said he visited — and stayed at Epstein’s home — in 2010 in order to, as he put it, “break up the friendship.” However, he could not explain why he stayed with Epstein in New York after the break-up conversation — a conversation during which they were notoriously photographed together. He said Epstein’s home was a “convenient place to stay” and chalked up his staying there to his “tendency to be too honorable.”

He also blamed his framing of Epstein’s sex crimes during the interview on this same tendency.

“Do I regret the fact that [Epstein] has quite obviously conducted himself in a manner unbecoming? Yes,” Andrew said.

“Unbecoming?” Maitlis asked. “He was a sex offender.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, I’m being polite,” Andrew said. “I mean in the sense that he was a sex offender. But no, was I right in having him as a friend? At the time, bearing in mind this was some years before he was accused of being a sex offender.”

The prince went on to say he regrets not having avoided Epstein following his entrance to the sex offender registry, saying, “I kick myself for on a daily basis because it was not something that was becoming of a member of the Royal Family and we try and uphold the highest standards and practices and I let the side down, simple as that.”

In-depth interviews are uncommon for the UK’s royal family, especially when its members are on the defensive. And many in the media and the public argued Andrew’s choice to sit for the interview was deeply unwise — in fact, the reception to the interview has been overwhelmingly negative.

Many have scoffed at his Pizza Express alibi; the Guardian’s Catherine Bennett argued it eclipsed Princess Diana’s oft-criticized 1995 Panorama interview as the “most catastrophic, ill-advised royal broadcast ever made”; and Charlie Proctor, the editor of a news site about the royal family, called it, “a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion level bad.”

In the wake of such criticisms, Andrew announced in a statement Wednesday that he would be stepping back from public life.

“I continue to unequivocally regret my ill-judged association with Jeffrey Epstein,” Andrew said in the statement announcing his decision. “His suicide has left many unanswered questions, particularly for his victims, and I deeply sympathize with everyone who has been affected and wants some form of closure. I can only hope that, in time, they will be able to rebuild their lives.”

After Epstein’s arrest and death, questions still linger about Andrew’s involvement

Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide in August awaiting trial for sex trafficking, but his death has not ended questions about his known and alleged crimes, or the network of people around him. In fact, at the state, federal, and international levels, investigations into the allegations he faced at the time of his death continue.

It is not yet clear what role, if any, Prince Andrew will play in those investigations or in court cases surrounding them. However, two other high-profile Epstein associates: his legal adviser Alan Dershowitz and his long-time girlfriend and alleged “fixer” Ghislaine Maxwell face legal action.

It was through Maxwell that Andrew says he was connected to Epstein; he told the BBC because he was friends with Maxwell, it was “inevitable that [Epstein and I] would have come across each other.”

Come across each other they did, and as Vox’s Jane Coaston has explained, Epstein and Andrew became quite close, with the prince spending time on the financier’s private island and, of course, allegedly having sex with Giuffre:

Epstein and Prince Andrew were so close that the Duke arranged for Epstein to help pay off $15,000 in debts owed to a former personal assistant of Prince Andrew’s former wife, Sarah Ferguson — an arrangement that took place several years after Epstein was already a convicted sex offender. In 2011, Ferguson admitted to the arrangement, telling the Daily Telegraph, “I am just so contrite I cannot say. Whenever I can I will repay the money and will have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again.”

According to claims made by Giuffre in court proceedings and elsewhere, Epstein forced her to have sex with Prince Andrew on multiple occasions in New York, London, and on Epstein’s private island, Little St James, while Giuffre was underage. And while Prince Andrew has denied the allegations, flight logs released in 2015 backed up Giuffre’s claims and the Duke and Giuffre were photographed together (though supporters of Prince Andrew say the photograph is fake.)

That photograph was raised during the BBC interview, with Andrew saying, “Nobody can prove whether or not that photograph has been doctored but I don’t recollect that photograph ever being taken.”

It was reportedly taken in Maxwell’s London home, and she can be seen in its background. Despite describing his friendship with Maxwell, Andrew worked to distance himself from her during the interview, saying, “If there are questions that Ghislaine has to answer, that’s her problem I’m afraid.”

There, of course, remain many questions for Prince Andrew as well. The interview answered none of them, particularly those around his relationship with Giuffre. Whether they will be answered through legal means remains to be seen.

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Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The talking points were scrawled in all caps on an Air Force One notepad.

While ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland presented damning testimony before the House Intelligence committee’s impeachment inquiry hearings on Wednesday morning, President Trump responded from the South Lawn of the White House.

“In terms of testimony with Ambassador Sondland and I just noticed one thing and that means it’s all over. ‘What do you want from Ukraine?’ he asks me, screaming,” said Trump in reference to what Sondland said during today’s hearing. “‘What do you want from Ukraine? I keep hearing all these different ideas and theories.’ … to which I turned off the television.”

But what was really getting attention were the notes Trump brought with him:

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The notes — handwritten in black marker on a notepad — read, “I WANT NOTHING. I WANT NOTHING. I WANT NO QUID PRO QUO. TELL ZELLINSKY TO DO THE RIGHT THING. THIS IS THE FINAL WORD FROM THE PRES OF THE U.S.”

Trump went on to continue to refute Sondland’s testimony about their interaction, even going so far as to distance himself from the ambassador by claiming not to know him very well. The hotel owner donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and raised money for his 2016 campaign as well.

But Trump may need more than a few Sharpie talking points to fight the impeachment tide against him. Sondland’s testimony clearly laid out that there was a quid pro quo and that the investigations being demanded were, in his words, “important to the president.”

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President Trump, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, announced on October 23, 2019, that the US will lift sanctions on Turkey. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Sondland’s bombshell testimony demands answers from top officials.

Rep. Devin Nunes is actually right about something: The key witnesses in the Trump impeachment hearings so far haven’t said that Donald Trump directly told them to get Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. But while Nunes keeps ranting and raving about his desire to hear directly from the no-longer-relevant whistleblower, the real issue is that we need to hear from people in Trump’s inner circle: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Vice President Mike Pence, and of course Rudy Giuliani.

Wednesday morning’s testimony from Ambassador Gordon Sondland was full of bombshells, including sworn testimony that he had a conversation with Vice President Mike Pence in Poland about the linkage between the suspension of aid and Trump’s desire for investigations into the former vice president. “Everyone was in the loop,” according to Sondland — a point he insisted on at several points during his opening statement, asserting that all the top officials in the Trump administration understood what was happening.

Pence, via a spokesman, says this isn’t true. He says that Sondland “was never alone with the Vice President” during the trip in question and the “alleged discussion recalled by Ambassador Sondland never happened.”

Someone is mistaken — or lying — here. And given that scrupulous honesty is not exactly a hallmark of the Trump administration, it’s certainly possible that it could be either of them. The difference is that Sondland has testified, in person, before Congress, while Pence is putting out a statement through a spokesperson.

Sondland’s testimony also directly attributes key statements, actions, and knowledge of a quid pro quo between Ukraine and the Trump White House to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry (whose spokesperson also put out a statement contradicting Sondland), and former National Security Adviser John Bolton. But none of those men has testified before Congress. Neither has Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney nor Rudy Giuliani — the man who did most of the actual legwork on the caper that Congress is investigating. Some of these men are defying subpoenas, others haven’t even been called.

The sheer volume of leaks coming out of the Trump White House has consistently created the sense that we have a lot of knowledge of what’s happening on the inside. But in a practical sense, this has been one of the least transparent administrations of all time. Testimony from these players could greatly increase our understanding of relevant events.

The multiple bombshells dropped by Sondland in his testimony are a reminder of the critical value of hearing from political appointees with access to the president, not just career civil servants. But Sondland himself is far from the top of the chain of command. America needs to hear from more people.

Most of the star witnesses don’t know Trump

One valid point congressional Republicans repeatedly raised during earlier days of the hearings is that many of the Democrats’ star witnesses — including George Kent, Bill Taylor, and Marie Yovanovitch — don’t know Trump personally, didn’t work directly with Trump, and to an extent are relying on second-hand information for their understanding of what’s happening.

Trump, similarly, took a time out from a cabinet meeting to observe “I don’t know [Lietenant Colonel Alexander] Vindman at all,” and, “I never heard of him,” while a variety of House Republicans, when not actively smearing Vindman, argued that he was less important in the policy process than he made himself out to be.

None of this changes the fact that their detailed knowledge of Ukraine and US policy toward Ukraine makes them valuable witnesses. But it’s true that to get a full picture of what’s going on, you’d want to hear from more people who had direct access to the principals. It actually makes quite a bit of difference what other people in the presidential line of succession said and did around all of this.

Democrats haven’t forgotten to ask the higher-ups. The White House has asked everyone to refuse to comply with subpoenas, leaving Democrats to rely on testimony from those willing to defy Trump and come forward. That group contains some key witnesses, most critically Sondland himself, but nowhere close to everyone you might want to hear from. That leaves Sondland’s sworn testimony dueling with Pence’s spokesman-written statement, and leaves the American people at least partially in the dark about what was happening.

Democrats have tools to turn up the pressure

The best way to resolve this situation would be for the officials in question to do the right thing and agree to testify. Following that, in an ideal world congressional Republicans would stand up for the institutional prerogatives of Congress and the interests of the American people and vocally call for them to testify.

In the real world, neither of those things is going to happen.

Unfortunately, that leaves the ball in Democrats’ court, but they’re not entirely without tools here. They could, for starters, attempt to use their powers of inherent contempt to raise pressure on non-cooperating officials.

Doug Mills-Pool/AFP/Getty Images

They could also engage in some political combat. Congress is working on government funding bills that give Democrats some leverage over the White House. There are also ongoing negotiations about ratification of the president’s signature USMCA trade deal.

And there’s also simply a question of public messaging. Democrats, as of now, haven’t made a big deal in public about the failure of key officials to testify. That’s in keeping with what seems to be prevailing sentiment that the impeachment inquiry should be fast and narrow rather than broad and quick.

A speedy approach makes sense if Senate Republicans are open-minded about this situation. The facts revealed so far are extremely damning, so it could make sense to just move forward quickly rather than get bogged down in political and legal warfare about additional testimony. But of course that isn’t the situation.

Republicans aren’t going to agree to remove Trump. Everything that’s happening here is political display for the benefit of the voters. And to that end it would be extremely edifying to have extended public discussion of why the White House is stonewalling and why we can’t find out more about exactly who did what when.

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President Trump reads from his notes as he talks to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House on November 20, 2019. | Joshua Lott/AFP/Getty Images

Sondland, who gave $1 million to Trump’s campaign, just got the “coffee boy” treatment.

Last month, President Donald Trump described Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, as “a really good man and great American” in a tweet. Trump said that he didn’t intend to let Sondland testify before impeachment investigators about the administration’s shady dealings with Ukraine.

On Wednesday, Sondland testified. And Trump suddenly barely knows the guy.

Sondland delivered a bombshell opening statement in which he implicated everyone from Trump to Rudy Giuliani to Vice President Mike Pence to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a “quid pro quo.” He testified he believed White House officials wouldn’t allow a state visit and hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid would be withheld until Ukrainian officials delivered “a public statement announcing investigations of the 2016 election/DNC server and Burisma.”

On Wednesday, Trump — who nominated Sondland for an ambassadorship after Sondland gave $1 million to his inaugural fund — said to reporters outside the White House, “I don’t know him very well.”

“I have not spoken to him much. This is not a man I know well. Seems like a nice guy though,” Trump said of Sondland. “He was with other candidates. He actually supported other candidates. Not me. Came in late.”

Trump then read a “response” to Sondland’s testimony that was handwritten on a sheet of paper and included the phrases, “I WANT NOTHING. I WANT NOTHING. I WANT NO QUID PRO QUO. TELL ZELENSKY TO DO THE RIGHT THING.”

Trump’s comments were reminiscent of how he and his representatives have previously distanced themselves from associates as soon as the association became problematic. In October 2017, when campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos struck a plea deal for lying to the FBI and started cooperating, Trump downplayed him on Twitter as a “low level volunteer” who “few people knew.”

Meanwhile, other Trump associates characterized Papadopoulos as nothing more than a “coffee boy.”

Trump similarly distanced himself from his longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, after Cohen implicated him in felonies in a federal court.

The handwritten notes Trump read to reporters on Wednesday indicates that he thinks his comment will be “the final word” about Sondland.

Sondland, for his part, primarily placed blame for the Ukraine fiasco on Giuliani, but said he viewed him as “expressing the desires of the president of the United States.” So even though he doesn’t want to, the president will now certainly face questions about what he knew regarding the quid pro quo and when he knew it.

Trump wasn’t alone in quickly trying to distance himself from Sondland. Vice President Mike Pence responded to his testimony in the same way.

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

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