President and CEO of Saudi Aramco Amin Nasser (left) and Aramco’s chair Yasir al-Rumayyan attend a press conference in the eastern Saudi Arabian region of Dhahran on November 3, 2019. | AFP via Getty Images

The oil company that made Saudi Arabia rich is going public. Some say the timing couldn’t be worse.

Pop quiz: What’s the most profitable company in the world? Apple? Google?

Nope. Those two don’t even come close. The answer is Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, Aramco. In 2018, Saudi Aramco made $111 billion dollars in profit. The second-most profitable company, Apple, made $60 billion that year.

On November 3, Aramco officially announced its plan to go public for the first time in the company’s 86-year history. And on November 17, the oil giant announced the company could be valued at $1.7 trillion. Energy historian Ellen R. Wald joined Today, Explained to explain why Aramco’s initial public offering (IPO) is such a big deal.

As the most profitable company in the entire world, she says, the company’s IPO is going to set major records. And since it’s the largest oil company in the world, it’s likely that a lot of everyday things we use — from plastic to the energy fueling our cars — touches this company.

“In the United States,” Wald says as an example, “Aramco owns the largest refinery in the entire country. And it also owns Shell Gasoline Stations in the southeastern United States. So many Americans may be buying oil — or gasoline — that is made by Aramco, and they don’t even know it.”

But some say the timing for the Aramco IPO couldn’t be worse. One reason for that: Some people think that the world has or will soon reach peak oil demand. Another, Wald explains, is the “PR nightmare” that Saudi Arabia created with the killing of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi:

[The killing of Jamal Khashoggi] definitely soured investors and financiers on Saudi Arabia in general. The idea is that the money from this share sale would go to support the Saudi Arabian monarchy that has done and continues to do many horrible things, both in terms of human rights. … And so there are a lot of people out there who look at that and say, “No, I’m not touching this because I don’t want to help these people.”

To understand the significance of Aramco’s upcoming IPO, you have to know the company’s history. If you want to learn all about it, here’s a lightly edited transcript of Wald’s conversation with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram.

Subscribe to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and ART19.

---

Sean Rameswaram

What exactly is it that takes Saudi Aramco from an extremely profitable oil company to the most profitable company in the world?

Ellen Ward

The really key year here is 1972. The United States could no longer pump more oil to meet rising demand. So instead of being able to accommodate America’s vast thirst for oil at the time, they had to import oil from elsewhere. And one of the big sources of that was Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia was pumping and pumping more to meet that demand. All of those gas-guzzling cars, they were meeting that demand.

And the Saudis took note of this. The oil minister at the time, his name was Zaki Yamani, he and other oil-producing countries in the Middle East were already united in the cartel organization we know today as OPEC [the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries].

And they got together and they said, essentially, “We know you’re in a difficult position, and we want to raise the price of oil because the price of oil is just too low.” And they negotiated with the representatives of big oil companies, including the American ones, and they could not reach an agreement. And they said, “You know what? We can’t reach an agreement. [So] we’re going to unilaterally raise the price of oil.”

They do this in conjunction with the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, along with an oil embargo. And the effect was very immediate. The price of oil skyrocketed, and in fact caused a recession in the United States.

But what it also did was help oil companies make a lot more money from this, including Aramco and including the Saudis. And what did the Saudis do with all this cash? Well, they put it into their own palaces and into their own country. But they also used it to buy the company from the Americans. And then in 1988, the Saudis eventually renamed it Saudi Aramco.

Sean Rameswaram

How has [the company] changed from what it was in the 1970s to now?

Ellen Ward

In the 1970s, Aramco was basically an oil-pumping machine. They pumped oil out of the ground, and most of that was sold as crude oil to the four American companies that owned it. Now, it’s much more like an international oil company like BP or Exxon or Royal Dutch Shell or Total in that they pump oil, they have crude oil assets, but they also have a range of what we call “downstream assets,” which are refineries, petrochemical companies. And they have these in Saudi Arabia, but also all over the world.

Sean Rameswaram

What’s the relationship between this company and the Saudi Arabian monarchy right now?

Ellen Ward

It’s much more difficult now than it was. Their first Saudi CEO at the time, a man named Ali al-Naimi, he negotiated with the king to keep Aramco separate from the Saudi government. Yes, they have a board of directors that is appointed by the government that kind of approves their plans. But, essentially, they get to decide how much money they want to spend on capital expenditures, what kind of projects they want to do, and what their strategy is. And that’s unique amongst national oil companies.

So Aramco is not quite a national oil company, but it’s not a private oil company either. It’s somewhere in between, and it has a high degree of independence. That is changing, though. And we’ve seen that change come about since the ascension of King Salman [bin Abdulaziz Al Saud] to the throne and also of his son, the young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and they are taking a much more active role in the larger strategy of the company.

They’re not trying to run it day to day, but they are saying things like, “We want you to buy this petrochemical company” or “we want to go public and this is how it’s going to be.” And that’s been a very different thing for Aramco to have to deal with after so much independence. And it has created some tension.

Sean Rameswaram

It sounds like you’re saying it’s hard to separate the Saudi monarchy from Aramco.

Ellen Ward

It’s hard to separate them from Aramco in terms of the big decisions. Aramco isn’t nearly as intertwined with the government as any other national oil company. But this is the real issue with this IPO. Normally when a company does an IPO, the money is going to go to the company to expand, to do new things, but that’s not the case here.

The monarchy wants to monetize Aramco shares and to take that money that they make from the share sale and put it into things that are not involving the company. So they want to put it into their sovereign wealth fund, which is designed to make investments both in companies in Saudi Arabia to help promote economic development and diversification, but also companies all over the world international companies. And use it to make investments in tech companies and in all sorts of crazy firms that they’ve been investing in, like Magic Leap virtual reality or a tech company or Uber or Tesla.

Sean Rameswaram

This is supposed to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world, right? How do they need the cash for some “sovereign wealth fund” that will finance startups?

Ellen Ward

Saudi Arabia has essentially a one-trick economy, which is selling oil. And they’ve done pretty well with that. But that doesn’t always go very well for the general economy at large, doesn’t necessarily employ everyone. It doesn’t foster small-business development. It doesn’t foster a vibrant economy.

What if oil prices tank and stay low for a long time? What if the oil runs out? At some point, the oil will run out. So the Saudi government has put together this plan that’s designed to diversify the economy so that they’re no longer wholly dependent on a single commodity.

Sean Rameswaram

Do we have any idea how this IPO will go in December?

Ellen Ward

One of the interesting things is that this company makes $111 billion dollars in profit. That’s what it made in profit in 2018. Apple I think is the next-most profitable company, [and] only made $60 billion in 2018.

And people are not going to just toss that aside, especially in a market today when so many of the IPOs that come up are companies that don’t even make a profit and have never made a profit and may never make a profit. So when an IPO comes along for a company that is immensely profitable, it’s very hard to turn away.

If the IPO doesn’t go very well — and there’s a distinct chance that it might not go very well — it could affect other oil companies’ earnings. Although I would say that if it doesn’t go well, that’s reflective more of the Saudi government than it is of Aramco itself.

If the IPO doesn’t go very well and politically the Saudi monarchy looks bad, that could be very far-ranging, particularly for the United States, which maintains strong diplomatic ties to Saudi Arabia. So it’s something that people definitely need to be on the lookout for; this could in some ways potentially fundamentally alter the balance of power in the Middle East.

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/341Wo6E

Pundits called the first public impeachment hearings boring. SNL answered that criticism by turning them into a soap opera.

The US House of Representatives commenced its public hearings in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump Wednesday, after weeks of closed-door testimonies. The hearings marked the first time the American people heard directly from those with knowledge of Trump’s relationship with Ukraine and the allegations Trump tried to withhold military aid from that country in exchange for an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of his political rival Joe Biden.

Despite the hearings featuring in-depth questioning and new revelations — with top US diplomat in Ukraine William Taylor and US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs George Kent appearing Wednesday and former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch appearing Friday — a recurring critique afflicted pundits’ reactions: that the hearings were boring.

In a cold-open sketch last night, Saturday Night Live addressed that criticism, transforming the depositions into a soap opera, billed as “Days of Our Impeachment.”

“This week, 13 million Americans tuned in to watch the impeachment hearings, as multiple officials testified against President Trump. But some complained the hearings were ‘lacking in pizzazz,’ ‘dull,’ and ‘not The Masked Singer,’” an announcer read during the sketch’s introduction. “So to make sure people are paying attention, we now present the hearings in a way that underscores how scandalous these revelations really are.”

While the Masked Singer barb was satirical, the “pizzazz” comment was a real one from an NBC News analysis by Jonathan Allen, who was widely ridiculed for arguing something as sober as an impeachment inquiry ought to be more exciting. Vox’s Aaron Rupar, for one, held it up as an example of the media’s shortcomings in covering the hearings. But, Allen’s analysis followed the theme of a critique often heard in conservative media in recent weeks: That the impeachment proceedings are too boring for Americans to care about.

“I think impeachment is not only dumb, it’s boring,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson told the Washington Post’s Sarah Ellison, a sentiment that’s been recurrent on his show.

With House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (played by Alex Moffat) leading the proceedings, the sketch opens with Yovanovitch (portrayed by Cecily Strong) sparring with Mikey Day’s Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, introduced as a “cross-examiner with a mysterious brain injury.”

Strong’s Yovanovitch opened by saying she has been a victim of a “smear campaign” from Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Guiliani. When Jordan interrupts to allege Yovanovitch is just seeking attention, she retorts, “I love the glamor and the spotlight, that’s why I spent my career in Ukraine and Somalia.”

The proceedings quickly devolve into soap opera motifs with an audience member (Heidi Gardner) constantly fainting and shocking new twists, like Schiff dramatically halting the hearing because “the president just sent … a tweet.” Yonvanovitch’s hearing was actually interrupted by presidential Twitter attacks, which Democrats have suggested could be added to articles of impeachment as witness intimidation.

One other thing SNL added to spice up the testimonies was an unyielding stream of surprise cameos.

In the midst of the Yovanovitch testimony, Taylor — played by Jon Hamm — arrived to reveal there was a second phone call of note beyond Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraininan president Volodymyr Zelenksy in which Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Democrats and the Bidens.

This second call, between Trump and US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, was overheard by a Taylor aide and featured the president asking for a status report on those investigations.

Before Hamm’s Taylor can go into detail about this call, however, Rudy Guiliani (played by Kate McKinnon) appears, announcing plans to fake his own death should the president try to make him a Ukraine scandal scapegoat.

Giuliani was followed by Beck Bennett’s Mitch McConnell who takes over the hearing saying, “The Senate has voted: acquitted.”

When reminded the House has to impeach the president before the Senate can hold its trial, he says, “Sorry for the spoiler, just tell me when I’m supposed to say it: Acquitted.”

Kyle Mooney, playing Sondland, then takes the stage, spoofing Sondland’s need to revise his sworn testimony after other the closed door hearings made it seem inaccurate. Reviewing those other hearings suddenly made the real-life Sondland “recall” certain matters relating the questions about the withholding of US military aid.

Mooney’s Sondland, in true soap fashion, said his testimony didn’t align with that of other witnesses “because I had amnesia. But now the amnesia is fine again, and I remember: there was a quid pro quo.”

The hearings devolve further with Michael Avenatti (Pete Davidson) announcing dramatic news: that the president had an affair with a porn star; Taylor butts in to say that was a storyline from “last season.”

“Yeah bud, we know,” adds Yovanovitch, noting, “No one seems to care.”

In a final act of drama, Cleveland Browns defensive end Myles Garrett appears. Garrett beat Pittsburgh Steelers Mason Rudolph over the head with his own helmet at the end of Thursday night’s game, and there was some question of whether he would be who could have been subject to criminal charges. “Mr. Garrett, you are not on trial here,” Schiff says.

“Oh I know. President Trump just pardoned me too for the war crimes,” Garrett responds. “He said I could bring a helmet to Afghanistan and just go nuts,” referring to Trump issuing presidential pardons for three service members accused of war crimes Friday.

Naturally, the cold open concludes with Garrett seeing Guilini, thinking he’s a vampire, and bashing him in the head with a Steelers helmet.

“I think he actually might have fixed me,” Guiliani says, adding viewers will have to tune in to the next episode to find out.

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/345zc7z

Planned Parenthood created Roo, a sex ed chatbot that answers teens’ questions while maintaining their anonymity. | Planned Parenthood

Can a chatbot teach teens about sex? This episode of the Reset podcast uncovers alternatives to traditional sex ed.

US sex education is decades behind other countries. Right now, it isn’t even mandatory in every state. Add to that the awkwardness people feel about sex and bodies in general, top it with the idea of having to have these discussions in public, and what you get is a system that’s devolved into a total mess.

It’s no wonder 84 percent of teens look for sexual health information online. The problem there is that a lot of the answers they come across — about everything from STIs to puberty to pregnancy to sexual orientation — are often just plain wrong.

Naturally, tech wants to find a solution.

That’s how Planned Parenthood created Roo, a sex ed chatbot that encourages teenagers to ask all of their potentially uncomfortable sex-related without ever revealing their identity.

To build Roo, Ambreen Molitor, senior director of the Digital Product Lab at Planned Parenthood, first interviewed Brooklyn high school students about their online habits and what they would want out of a bot that talked to them about everything from safe sex to coming out. Her team discovered that above all, “teens really wanted to be anonymous.”

“Sometimes they didn’t feel comfortable talking to the community around them or in the sex ed classrooms. But also online, because more often than not, Gen Z’s teens in general are very aware that when you’re searching on Google, you’re being cookie’d. They’re very cognizant of what they type into the browser or the search query — which is really unique.”

In this episode, Molitor tells host Arielle Duhaime-Ross that Roo is seeing great success so far. Parents have even reached out on LinkedIn to praise her bot.

Of course, the complexities of human sexuality, specifically as they need to be explained to a developing and curious teenage population, can never be fully resolved through an anonymous computer that’s been preprogrammed with answers.

That’s where Nora Gelperin, a parent and longtime sex educator who’s currently the director of sexuality education and training at an organization called Advocates For Youth, comes in. She developed a sex ed video series called Amaze.

With over 80 installments on topics ranging from gender identity and sexual orientation to sex trafficking, intersectionality, puberty, and even wet dreams, Gelperin revealed that technology can be “really a great companion for adults, whether they’re parents and caregivers or professionals having these conversations.”

But don’t expect a chatbot like Roo or even an extensive and informative video series like Amaze to solve the problems that a lack of comprehensive sex education leave behind.

“I think that there is a lot of information that needs to be supplemented to any of those technology-based resources because they can’t talk about values, they can’t talk about what do you do if you think you want to have an abortion but your religion tells you you’re going to go to hell. Or what do you do if you think you’re committing a sin by masturbating. Those are the things where the technology is kind of limited,” Gelperin says.

Listen to the entire conversation here, where you can find out what a high-school-age person actually wants to be told about sex. Below, we’ve also shared a lightly edited transcript of Molitor’s conversation with Duhaime-Ross.

You can subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

---

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Kids and teens are hungry for this kind of information.

Ambreen Molitor

Almost 84 percent of teens actually look for sexual health information online. So our team built a sex ed chatbot named Roo. It’s only 9 months old. Very much in its infancy.

Roo allows folks, specifically teens, to anonymously ask all kinds of questions around sexual health information. The interface is very much like a text format. So Roo will prompt you, greet you, and allow you to have the open space to ask a question. It can be as short or as long as you want and Roo will respond to you in 180 characters or less.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

I’ve had pretty terrible experiences with chatbots and they don’t have the greatest track record in general. Maybe you remember Microsoft’s chatbot attempt a few years ago. They had to shut it down because Twitter managed to train it to be racist and misogynistic in less than 24 hours.

So when I heard about Roo, I was honestly pretty skeptical. I know Planned Parenthood is good at teaching people of all ages about sexual health but I wasn’t convinced the organization would have the tech chops to make a bot that didn’t suck. So I decided to put it to the test.

My experience with Roo wasn’t terrible. And that’s surprising. So I asked Planned Parenthood how they went about designing it.

Ambreen Molitor

How Roo works is three-fold.

First there is software that is built. It’s artificial intelligence, and the actual software that we use is called Natural Language Processing (NLP). For folks who are not familiar with what that does, it’s the same software that allows you to talk while you’re texting, it completes your word or completes your sentence.

That’s the same software we’re powering with Roo. So Roo is trained to anticipate the question and also anticipate the sentiment of the question to be able to answer it.

The second and third layer are human inputs.

The second input is we have a content strategist that comes in and ensures that the answers that we provide have that nonjudgmental tone. It provides the personality that brings Roo to life.

The third most important one is a team of educators that reviews each answer and ensures that it’s medically accurate and up to date.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Ambreen’s team talked to teens at a high school in Brooklyn about their online habits and what they wanted out of the bot.

Ambreen Molitor

Teens really wanted to be anonymous. Sometimes they didn’t feel comfortable talking to the community around them or in the sex ed classrooms, but also online. More often than not, Gen Z’s teens in general are very aware that when you’re searching on Google, you’re being cookie’d. So they’re very cognizant of what they type in the browser or search query, which is really unique.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood actually even has a texting service where you can talk to a sex ed professional directly. But now you’re developing a chat bot. So it sounds like you still feel a need to remove a human from the equation even further.

Ambreen Molitor

Yeah. That’s because at certain times we found that teens feel comfortable with talking to a bot because it eliminates some strong bias and they’re quick to open up to the actual questions they need to get to.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

According to Planned Parenthood, teens like using Roo because it protects their anonymity. And the fact that it comes in the form of a cute little avatar doesn’t hurt.

Ambreen Molitor

It’s gender-neutral. You cannot determine if it has a certain gender identity or even sexual orientation. If you take a long time to type something, Roo starts to like fall asleep and has some Z’s going over his head. And they love that. They’re like, “This avatar is actually paying attention to me. They’re taking the time to understand and connect with me in unique ways.”

Another thing we get so much feedback on is, “Not only is it great that I feel safe, but I also feel like this avatar really is listening and understanding my habits.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Does it have a human form or human shape?

Ambreen Molitor

It’s a blob. It’s just basically an avatar that’s a rounded rectangle with eyes and a mouth to provide gestures.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So it’s your friendly neighborhood sex ed blob.

Ambreen Molitor

Precisely. It winks, sleeps, snores, all of those things.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood doesn’t keep track of who uses Roo but users can opt in to share information about their age and race.

Ambreen Molitor

Of those people who opt in to provide that information, 80 percent of them have identified as teenagers. So it’s about 60-40 percent male to female and 2 percent other gender identities.

Almost 70 percent of the folks that we talked to — again, who have opted in to provide us information — are what we consider people of color. So they’re of a diverse background and race and ethnicity.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood also monitors the questions people ask Roo. And some of the subjects teens broach with Roo have been surprising.

Ambreen Molitor

Consent is a topic that we did not anticipate either from the learnings through visiting the high school or through the data that we were seeing from our website. Otherwise, we anticipated lots of questions around puberty and around those changes.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

“Is this normal …”

Ambreen Molitor

Correct. The spectrum of normalcy is what every teen wants to understand, it’s where they live. Normal is very important to a teen. And that’s something we knew going into it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

These are big, complex, heavy topics. How does Roo answer these questions in 180 characters?

Ambreen Molitor

We start off by describing consent. We say that there’s no one way to do it. And then we provide just an example or some guiding principles for that. Once we answer the question, we recognize that someone may want to go deeper. And we have link-outs to pages on our site and videos on how you can find or figure out different ways that people can ask for consent. So it goes one step deeper when 180 characters cannot fulfill the curiosity that someone has about that question.

Approximately 80 percent of the time, we’re answering the question correctly. A lot of it falls on two years worth of data and testing that we did. So we didn’t just launch it and go with it.

The other reality we need to call out is that machine learning is not 100 percent accurate. I think Roo’s very humble to say, “I’m not built to answer this question,” or, “I don’t understand it,” or, “I actually don’t think it’s appropriate for me to answer it.” And we’re really good about handing it off to a human.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So there are questions Roo can’t answer. Which means Planned Parenthood had to build in some guard rails. For instance, if someone appears to be in crisis, Roo will hand off the conversation to a mental health hotline.

Ambreen Molitor

The other time that Roo does handoffs is when there’s decision-making in mind. So the birth control question is a really good one where there are several different birth control methods and there’s not one directional way to suggest this birth control method that’s universally great. That’s where decision-making comes in. That’s an opportunity for Roo to understand that it’s best to hand it off to an educator.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

The feedback from teens seems to be positive so far. But there’s another demographic that Roo has also been attracting.

Ambreen Molitor

It’s so funny. Parents love this. I’ve actually had, anecdotally, parents reach out to me on LinkedIn and say, “Thank you so much for this bot.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

On LinkedIn — great place to talk about sex ed.

So Roo seems to be a surprisingly not-terrible chatbot. But when I think about Roo, I honestly feel kind of sad. Because I see why teens might prefer to use Roo rather than turn to an adult for help. And that makes me wonder:

Why is sex ed so broken? And is Roo really the solution?

---

For the answers to these questions and many more, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/2Qs1Mvy

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards talks to media as he leaves his campaign office in Shreveport, Louisiana, on November 14, 2019. | Gerald Herbert/AP

He’ll stay on as the only Democrat in this role in the Deep South.

Gov. John Bel Edwards has won an incredibly tight race for reelection in Louisiana, hanging onto his seat as the sole Democratic governor in the Deep South.

Edwards faced an intense challenge from Republican businessman Eddie Rispone, who aligned himself tightly with Trump and touted the president’s endorsement during the campaign. Rispone’s loss marks the second time in recent weeks when Trump’s endorsement hasn’t been enough to boost a candidate to victory in a heavily Republican state. (Republican Gov. Matt Bevin also lost his reelection race in Kentucky.)

Edwards, since his upset of former Sen. David Vitter in 2015, has been the rare Democrat holding statewide office in Louisiana. Of the state’s Congressional delegation, seven of the eight members are Republican, and both the Louisiana House and Senate are poised to hit Republican supermajorities this year.

Edwards won re-election by casting himself as a conservative Democrat who supports Medicaid expansion and increases in teacher salaries while backing stringent restrictions to abortion rights. He’s sought to downplay disagreements with Trump and was the only Democrat invited to the president’s first-ever state dinner last year.

As part of his campaign, Edwards also touted another achievement he made in office: He helped the state recover from an overwhelming deficit it faced prior to his tenure, pushing through a tax plan that has since led to a $500 million annual surplus this year. These successes, coupled with his own background as a West Point graduate and devoted Catholic, likely helped him reach both independents and moderate Republicans.

What Edwards’s victory means

Edwards’s win suggests that Democrats still have the potential to win in states like Louisiana, where Republicans are increasingly dominating rural districts.

“A John Bel win would mean that the Democratic moderate is not dead in the South,” pollster and political strategist John Couvillon previously told Vox. “You don’t need to write the South off a hundred percent of the time.”

Brett Duke/AP

It’s also the latest rebuke of Trump’s endorsement, a sign that its influence may be waning in competitive races. Trump most recently campaigned for Rispone on the Thursday ahead of the election. “You have to give me a big win, please, okay?” he said.

Edwards’s victory is central to Democrats maintaining a foothold in the state, where Republicans in the legislature are gearing up for a redistricting process following the 2020 census.

Though final turnout numbers will take some time, Edwards’s victory likely reflects strong turnout from African American voters and overwhelming backing from the electorate for Medicaid expansion, which wound up providing coverage to more than 400,000 state residents. Plus, the closeness of the race indicates just how fired up both Democrats and Republicans are going into 2020, suggesting that turnout is on track to be strong next year.

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/358iVi3

President Barack Obama speaks at an October 2019 Obama Foundation Summit. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

“The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it,” Obama said.

Former President Barack Obama has studiously avoided commenting on the Democratic presidential primary, but on Friday, before a crowd of wealthy liberal donors in Washington, he finally weighed in. His message? Don’t move too far to the left.

“This is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement,” he said at the annual meeting of the Democracy Alliance. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”

Obama’s remarks come at a time when the primary’s central dynamic is a clash over whether the best way forward is for the party is to continue along a center-left path, most prominently represented by former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg or to chart a more left-wing course, as Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have argued.

In what seemed a rebuke of Warren and Sanders’ stances, Obama, who is still held in exceptionally high regard by Democratic voters, spent considerable time during his speech counseling against adopting left-wing populism as a party platform.

“Voters, including Democrats, are not driven by the same views that are reflected on certain left-leaning Twitter feeds, or the activist wing of our party,” he said. “And that’s not a criticism to the activist wing. Their job is to poke and prod and text and inspire and motivate. But the candidate’s job, whoever that ends up being, is to get elected.”

Obama pointedly didn’t mention any candidates by name, but his speech decidedly argued for the moderate approach.

In particular, he argued against the strategy that democratic socialist politicians like Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have employed in trying to mobilize voters by building enthusiasm over extremely ambitious policy proposals and questioning accepted wisdom on voter values, saying:

I think it is very important to all the candidates who are running, at every level, to pay some attention to where voters actually are, and how they think about their lives.

And I don’t think we should be deluded into thinking that the resistance to certain approaches to things is simply because voters haven’t heard a bold enough proposal, and as soon as they hear a bold enough proposal that’s going to activate them. Because you know what? It turns out people are cautious, because they don’t have a margin for error.

Just as he was careful not to call out any candidates by name, Obama didn’t mention a specific policy proposal, but he did identify health care and immigration as issues where candidates might be diverging too sharply from public opinion.

Progressives in the 2020 race have, of course, touted their Medicare-for-all proposals, and some, like former Obama official Julián Castro, have called for major changes to immigration policy, including the decriminalization of illegal entry. It is policies like these, Obama suggested, that go too far.

Of late, Obama has often advocated for a middle-of-the-road stance

While his Democracy Alliance comments mark the first time the former president has explicitly weighed in on the 2020 race, he has made other comments and gestures that hint at more moderate views on today’s political climate.

During a discussion about youth activism at an Obama Foundation summit in October, he critiqued call out culture and overzealous activism as dubious strategies for changing the world.

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Obama said. “You should get over that quickly.”

“The world is messy; there are ambiguities,” he added. “People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”

Obama has warned about this “idea of purity” before, cautioning an audience in April about “creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad’ where you start shooting at your allies because one of them is straying from purity on the issues.”

At the same event he said, “One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States … is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be.’”

Comments such as these might seem to be at odds with the former president’s calls for “new blood” in politics — particularly given that the most visible members of the next generation of Democrats, like Ocasio-Cortez or Rep. Ayanna Pressley, are unabashedly progressive and support the sort of bold policy changes Obama warned against Friday.

But he has at times signaled encouragement for younger politicians, like when he met with former congressman Beto O’Rourke and spoke very highly of him in 2018, helping fuel speculation that O’Rourke might be a viable 2020 contender. While Beto is ideologically mercurial, he was widely perceived as more moderate than the Warren-Sanders wing of the party before dropping out of the race earlier in November.

Nevertheless, the question of whether to focus on winning over moderate voters or building enthusiasm among more progressive and anti-establishment voters is a huge topic of (often rancorous) debate among Democrats as 2020 approaches, and is one that will be on display during the upcoming November Democratic presidential debate.

Obama is making it clear that he thinks the former should be the priority.

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/2OiBI3t

State Department official David Holmes arrives at the US Capitol for his impeachment hearing testimony on November 15, 2019. | Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images

David Holmes, aide to William Taylor, offered more damning testimony in the impeachment hearings.

David Holmes, a Kyiv-based State Department aide, told the House lawmakers leading the impeachment inquiry that he overheard a July call between President Donald Trump and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland in which they discussed their efforts to pressure Ukraine into investigating Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Holmes’s opening statement — part of a closed-door testimony — was first obtained by CNN on Friday. It provides new firsthand information about Trump’s role in pressuring Ukraine, and also further highlights the key role Sondland, a former hotel magnate and Trump donor, has played in advancing Trump’s Ukraine agenda.

Holmes is a political counselor in the US embassy in Kiev, and an aide to William “Bill” Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine. Taylor mentioned Holmes witnessed the Trump-Sondland call during his opening statement in the first public impeachment hearing Wednesday.

In his sworn statement, Holmes explained that he overheard the conversation while sharing a bottle of wine with Sondland at a restaurant in Kyiv on July 26 — one day after Trump infamously pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden over the phone. Holmes said that Trump was speaking so loudly that Sondland pulled the phone away from his ear, and that the back-and-forth between the two men was fully audible. He also indicated two other people overheard the conversation as well.

According to Holmes, Trump asked Sondland, who had just come out of his own meeting with Zelensky, “So, he’s going to do the investigation?”

Sondland responded by saying that Zelensky “loves your ass,” that he would pursue the investigation, and that he would do “anything you ask him to.”

After the call, Holmes inquired about Trump’s true feelings about Ukraine. Holmes said Sondland told him that Trump only cares about “the big stuff” when it comes to Ukraine. Holmes said he noted that Ukraine’s armed conflict with Russia was “big stuff,” but Sondland clarified that he meant something else — he was thinking “‘big stuff’ that benefits the president, like the ‘Biden investigation.’”

In his statement, Holmes also points out that he believed that the broader diplomatic mission in Ukraine had become politicized at the behest of the White House:

Beginning in March 2019, the situation in the embassy and in Ukraine changed dramatically. Specifically, our diplomatic policy that had been focused on supporting Ukrainian democratic reform and resistance to Russian aggression became overshadowed by a political agenda being promoted by Rudy Giuliani and a cadre of officials operating with a direct channel to the White House.

All together, the testimony is a big blow for the Trump administration, as it offers new evidence of Trump’s personal involvement in the efforts to pressure Ukraine and undercuts two Republican defenses of the president.

This is bad news for Trump and the Republicans

Holmes’ testimony has a few different implications for how we understand Trump’s conduct regarding Ukraine and the direction of the impeachment hearings.

First of all, the fact that Holmes bore witness to Trump and Sondland’s exchange directly is significant. Republicans complained this week that witnesses in the impeachment inquiry lack firsthand information. (It’s worth noting that part of the reason lawmakers have heard from few witnesses with direct knowledge of Trump’s requests of Ukraine is that key figures in the scandal, like acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, refuse to testify.)

Holmes’ testimony serves as a counterpoint to that grievance, while also offering support for the testimony of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was on Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky. Vindman told Congress Trump pressed an investigation into the Bidens on that call, and that the president made it clear the Ukrainians had to launch such an investigation before he would meet with them.

Secondly, the call further undermines the already unpersuasive Republican defense that Trump was withholding military aid from Ukraine only in order to ensure the money would not be embezzled by corrupt actors.

That line of defense has already been weakened by Trump’s own officials, including acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, who have said the $391 million in aid was withheld for other reasons, involving either Democrats broadly or the Bidens directly.

But the conversation Holmes said he had with Sondland pokes further holes in this defense; according to Holmes, Sondland told him Trump does not “give a shit about Ukraine” and said that the president’s concern with the country stemmed only from political self-interest.

Holmes’ testimony highlights Sondland as a key figure in the impeachment inquiry

Holmes’ statement also confirms it was Trump himself, not his aides, who led the push for an investigation into Biden while simultaneously making Sondland’s testimony appear to be less credible.

In previous testimony, Sondland has seemingly attempted to minimize Trump’s role in the affair, suggesting that it was primarily Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani who was driving the Ukraine agenda. Vindman, Taylor, and other witnesses have testified that Sondland told his colleagues something different when they questioned him about the investigations: That the White House was driving the pro-investigation pressure campaign.

Holmes’ testimony supports this second narrative, and would suggest Sondland was well aware of who was leading the push for an investigation and why he wanted it, given Sondland had a direct line to Trump, and given he used it to give Trump status reports on how things were going towards pressuring Zelensky. This would appear to indicate Trump was hands-on and directly involved very early — at least as early as late July.

Sondland has also claimed he, for a long time, did not know at that calls from Giuliani and others for an investigation into Burisma — a Ukrainian company Joe Biden’s son sat of the board of, and that is central to Trump’s unsubstantiated claims Biden misused the office of the vice president — had anything to do with the Bidens.

“I did not understand until much later that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son,” he said.

Not knowing this would have been difficult, as it would have required Sondland to avoid news outlets and social media for much of the spring, when Giuliani openly tweeted about and discussed the Bidens and their connection to Ukraine. Trump also discussed the matter on Fox News around the same time.

Holmes suggests Sondland did, in fact, know Trump was interested specifically not in anti-corruption efforts or some company called Burisma, but the Bidens. Holmes quotes Sondland as telling him Trump was interested in “big stuff” like the “Biden investigation.”

As a witness in the impeachment inquiry, Sondland has already established a record of hard-to-believe memory failures, and changed his account of events before through revised testimony. It is possible his mention of the Bidens is part of these failures.

But Holmes’ testimony further underscores why Sondland is a key witness in the inquiry — increasingly it seems Sondland was an important link between the president and the Ukrainians, the conduit by which the president’s demands of Ukraine were transmitted.

It is a matter that is sure to come up when the ambassador testifies publicly on November 20. His lawyer has already promised as much, saying in a statement, “Sondland will address any issues that arise from this in his testimony next week.”

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/2CLOsdF

Zac Freeland / Vox

The lone Democratic governor in the Deep South is trying to hang onto his seat.

Louisiana is the last of three states to hold its gubernatorial election this year and the stakes are significant: This race could ultimately determine whether the lone Democrat in the Deep South is able to hang onto his seat.

The contest is also an increasingly close one. Incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards faces a serious challenge from Republican businessman Eddie Rispone, who’s attempted to tie himself tightly with Trump during the campaign. In the week ahead of the election, polling had the two candidates nearly tied, and Cook Political Report has classified the race as a “toss-up.”

Patrick Dennis-Pool/Getty Images

Edwards is a rare Democrat currently holding a statewide position in Louisiana, a role he first won after upsetting former US Sen. David Vitter in 2015. He’s since cast himself as a conservative Democrat, signing one of the most restrictive abortion bills in the nation, while highlighting his efforts to establish a budget surplus and expand Medicaid.

Rispone, meanwhile, has sought to nationalize the race and frame Edwards as just another liberal. As a successful businessman and longtime conservative donor, he’s argued that he’d be best positioned to advance Republican priorities in a state that went for Trump by 20 points in 2016.

Matt Sullivan/Getty Images

Louisiana saw near-record levels of early voting in the weeks before Election Day; polls on the day of close at 8 pm CT. Live results, provided in partnership with Decision Desk, are below:

This particular race offers a litmus test for a couple of different things: It could indicate how much influence Trump’s endorsement still has in competitive races, and it could show whether or not Democrats are able to maintain a foothold in the Deep South. If Edwards wins reelection, it will be the second marquee race in a heavily Republican state where Trump’s candidate has faltered in recent weeks (Kentucky’s gubernatorial election was the first).

Given states’ upcoming redistricting plans following the 2020 Census and Republicans’ growing dominance of the Louisiana state legislature, Democratic gubernatorial control will be central to providing any kind of check on the GOP’s approaches to policy. Saturday’s election will determine if the party can keep it.

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/2QmMV5L

Rodney Reed listens during a hearing at the Bastrop County Criminal Justice Center in 2014. | AP Photo/Austin American-Statesman, Jay Janner

Amid a growing movement to #FreeRodneyReed, an appeals court has ruled that new evidence must be considered.

An appeals court has stayed the execution of Rodney Reed, who was scheduled to be executed next week for a murder he says he did not commit.

On Friday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to delay Reed’s execution by 120 days; shortly after that, Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas ruled to also halt the execution and ordered that new evidence be considered by the court in which Reed was originally tried.

“At every turn we have asked for a hearing at which we can present the evidence, in full, of Rodney Reed’s innocence,” one of Reed’s lawyers, Bryce Benjet, told the New York Times. “So it is extremely rewarding that we can finally have a chance to fully present his case in court, so it can be determined that he did not commit this crime.”

In October, a new witness came forward claiming that it was not Reed who killed Stacy Stites in 1996, but her fiancé at the time, a former police officer named Jimmy Fennell. Reed’s lawyers and the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization for criminal justice reform, filed an application for clemency with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles following the sworn affidavit of Arthur Snow, who said Fennell confessed to the murder of Stites when the two men were in prison together. In addition to Snow’s testimony, several other witnesses have come forward with similar stories around Fennell and his disdain for his fiancé, a white woman who he suspected was sleeping with Reed, a black man, behind his back.

Reed, 51, has long admitted to having been in a romantic relationship with Stites, but at the time of the trial, no witness would corroborate the affair. Now, Stites’s cousin and a former coworker have both said the two were involved, according to the Innocence Project. Reed’s lawyers told the Times that other witnesses could still come forward and they may even subpoena Fennell. (Fennell’s attorney told the Times that his client maintains his innocence.)

National attention to Reed’s case — and the call to reexamine it — had grown in recent weeks. A petition on Change.org has garnered over half-a-million signatures asking for the execution to be stopped and a new trial ordered. Nearly 100 supporters of Reed also showed up to the capitol building in Austin, Texas, earlier this month to urge Gov. Greg Abbott to show clemency. Celebrities like Rihanna and Meek Mill have also urged the governor to free Reed.

”Please @GovAbbott How can you execute a man when since his trial, substantial evidence that would exonerate Rodney Reed has come forward and even implicates the other person of interest. I URGE YOU TO DO THE RIGHT THING,” tweeted Kim Kardashian West, who also notably used her influence in the clemency cases of Alice Johnson and Cyntoia Brown in recent years.

Even Republicans, like Sen. Ted Cruz, stepped in to advocate for Reed, writing a letter to Gov. Abbott and the parole board asking to stay his execution, which was scheduled for Wednesday. With the court’s late-minute reprieve, the attention and advocacy seemed to have paid off.

Reed wasn’t the first suspect in Stites’s murder. It was her fiancé, Fennell.

In 1996, the body of 19-year-old Stacey Stites was found in a wooded area in Bastrop, Texas, having been assaulted, raped, and strangled. When the case was first opened, police initially questioned and suspected Fennell of committing the crime. Fennell went on to fail two lie detector tests administered by the police, but the DNA found on Stites’s body didn’t match Fennell’s.

That’s when the investigation shifted to Rodney Reed — his DNA was a match, according to police. Reed admitted that he and Stites were having a sexual relationship behind Fennell’s back but maintained that he was innocent and was not involved her in death. Despite having another viable suspect in Fennell, police arrested Reed. He was tried, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death.

Now nearly 21 years since the verdict, much is in question following the new evidence obtained by Reed’s attorneys and the Innocence Project. On October 30, Snow filed a sworn affidavit stating that in 2010, Fennell admitted to killing Stites while the two men were both serving time at a DeWitt County, Texas, prison. According to the affidavit, Fennell, who was there on a rape conviction, was in need of protection from the Aryan Brotherhood, so he went to Snow, who was a brotherhood member, and confessed to the crime as a way to build trust.

“Toward the end of the conversation, Jimmy said confidently, ‘I had to kill my n*****-loving fiancé,’” Snow wrote in the affidavit. Snow said he later realized that Reed was serving time for Stites’s murder after reading an article about him; he has only come forward now after seeing a more recent story about Reed, he said.

Fennell’s attorney responded to Snow’s allegation by calling Snow a career criminal, according to CNN, and that following Fennell’s release for rape, his client has converted to Christianity and begun helping people with drug addictions.

However, others have also claimed in recent weeks that it was Fennell who killed Stites. Heather Stobbs, a cousin of Stites’s, now feels that Reed was wrongly convicted and even possibly framed. She told the Fox affiliate in Austin that she has no doubt in her mind that Fennell did it.

The movement to #FreeRobertReed spread wide

Even before Snow came forward, a social media movement started putting pressure on Gov. Abbott to release Reed. Kardashian West’s tweet plea came about a month ago. Meanwhile, Black-ish star Yara Shahidi quoted Audre Lorde in a tweet: “Without community there is no liberation,” urging people to sign the petition. Cyntoia Brown, who was granted clemency earlier this year for killing a man who had allegedly solicited her for sex as a teen, also tweeted out the petition for Reed’s clemency.

The biggest surprise, though, came from Republicans who also asked the governor to delay the execution. Sen. Cruz, along with seven fellow Republican state senators and eight Democrats, wrote Abbott and the parole board a letter on Wednesday asking them to look at the new evidence and witness testimony.

“If there’s a real question of innocence, the system needs to stop and look at the evidence, because an innocent man should be set free,” said Cruz.

While the pressure to stay Reed’s execution ultimately worked, cases like his have not historically ended in the inmate’s favor. According to a 2014 study, one in every 25 people with a death sentence is innocent. Between 1973 and 2014, 144 people on death row have been exonerated, or 1.6 percent of all death sentences. That means that many innocent people — over twice the number of those who’ve been spared — have likely been executed.

In a case similar to Reed’s, Troy Davis was executed in 2011 for killing a cop in the state of Georgia. According to the Innocence Project, the organization sent a letter to commute Davis’s sentence “due to serious questions about his guilt,” along with a petition with more than 660,000 signatures, shortly before his death. But in a 3-2 vote, the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles ultimately rejected the clemency bid.

In Davis’s case, seven out of nine witnesses who aided in the guilty verdict all recanted their statements. Kimberly Davis, sister to Troy, told the Guardian, “If those seven witnesses were credible enough to put my brother on death row, then why weren’t they credible when they recanted?”

She added, “My brother was murdered by the state of Georgia. For the Troy Davises who came before him and the Troy Davises who will come after him, we want to stop the killing of innocent men.”

In recent years, lawmakers and the public have been forced to reckon with the harsh sentences and convictions of black people caught up in a biased justice system. A few of those cases have even ended redemption, like that of Brown and Alice Johnson, a great-grandmother who was serving a life sentence for drug-trafficking. The power of social media, protest, and petition created enough pressure to sway those in power to grant those women clemency. While Abbott hasn’t done the same for Reed, the courts have at least opened the doors, once again, to allow him to prove his innocence.

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/2qoIDzN

President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison inspect US troops at the White House in September 2019. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Trump loves the military. But he doesn’t seem to respect its justice system.

In fulfillment of a controversial pledge he made earlier this year, President Trump has intervened in three war crime cases on Friday, granting full pardons to a pair of Army officers and restoring the rank of a Navy SEAL.

The unusual move puts Trump at odds with the judgment of the US military, an institution that he tends to revere in his rhetoric and prioritize in budget proposals.

One of the pardoned Army officers is First Lt. Clint Lorance, who has served six years of a 19 year sentence rendered after he was convicted of second-degree murder and obstruction of justice after ordering soldiers to shoot at unarmed men in Afghanistan — a command which resulted in the death of two of the Afghani men.

The other pardoned Army officer is Maj. Matthew Golsteyn, who had been awaiting trial after being accused of an extrajudicial killing of a suspected bombmaker in Afghanistan; in December 2018, he was charged with premeditated murder.

Finally, Trump reversed the demotion of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who was convicted of posing with the corpse of an enemy combatant in Iraq. In July Gallagher was acquitted of murder and other charges.

The three military pardons aren’t the president’s first. Earlier this year, Trump pardoned Michael Behenna, a former first lieutenant in the Army who was in prison for killing an Iraqi during an interrogation, marking the first pardon for a convicted murderer in modern US history.

Presidents rarely intervene in the military justice system, but it does happen on occasion. Before Trump, President Obama commuted the bulk of Chelsea Manning’s prison sentence, after she was convicted for leaking hundreds of thousands of documents published by WikiLeaks exposing the key details of the US war on terror.

But Trump has signaled a willingness to participate in the military justice system that his processors have lacked. Earlier this year, the president suggested that soldiers are mistreated in the military justice system.

“Some of these soldiers are people that have fought hard and long,” Trump said in May. “We teach them how to be great fighters, and then when they fight sometimes they get really treated very unfairly.”

There are signs Trump views siding with servicepeople regardless of what they’ve been accused of is a politically savvy move that will be appreciated by his base. For example, when Gallagher was acquitted of murder this summer, Trump was quick to take credit, tweeting “Glad I could help!” in an apparent reference to his order for Gallagher be released from pre-trial confinement. Trump’s role in the process was praised by Fox News, who Gallagher said had been “with us since day one.”

The Washington Post has reported that some senior Pentagon officials tried to convince Trump to change his mind on the pardons because they feared it would undercut the power and reputation of the military justice system. And they are not alone in their concern — many military experts and former officials in the military seem to agree that offering these three members of the military a pardon could cause lasting institutional damage.

Trump likes the military. But he doesn’t seem to trust it.

National security analysts say that when Trump decries the fairness of the military justice system and interferes in or reverses its decision-making processes, he does damage to the institution as a whole.

“Executive clemency like this introduces doubt into the chain of command, and creates uncertainty about accountability for breaches of military rules,” Phillip Carter, a former Army officer and official in the Obama administration, told the Washington Post.

Nora Bensahel, a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who focuses on US defense policy, told Vox earlier this year that Trump’s intervention in cases where a trial (as is the case with Golsteyn, whose trial was scheduled for next year) haven’t even begun is particularly concerning.

“The president has the right to pardon whoever he wants, but it is not always wise to do so,” Bensahel said. “I find it very concerning that these pardons may be given before trials are conducted to determine guilt or innocence, before the military justice system goes through its process.”

Military experts also point out that it sends a message to troops and US partners that misconduct is acceptable.

“Absent evidence of innocence or injustice the wholesale pardon of US service members accused of war crimes signals our troops and allies that we don’t take the Law of Armed Conflict seriously,” retired Gen. Martin Dempsey, who served as President Barack Obama’s senior military adviser, tweeted in May around the time that Trump raised the issue of forthcoming pardons. “Bad message. Bad precedent. Abdication of moral responsibility. Risk to us.”

But the White House obviously disagrees. In its statement on the pardons, the executive branch said, “For more than two hundred years, presidents have used their authority to offer second chances to deserving individuals, including those in uniform who have served our country.”

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/2QpUOaH

Amanda Northrop/Vox

Andrew Prokop breaks down this week’s public hearings and Brianne Gorod explains the term “obstruction of justice,” on Impeachment, Explained.

This week kicked off the public phase of the impeachment inquiry. On Wednesday, we heard the testimonies of State Department officials Bill Taylor and George Kent and on Friday the testimony of former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Vox’s Andrew Prokop helps us break them down.

Then, Brianne Gorod, the chief counsel for the Constitutional Accountability Center, helps us understand the term “obstruction of justice.” What does it mean? When does it apply? And has the president committed it?

Plus: How Republicans are normalizing obstruction of justice in all of its forms and the precedent that sets for the future.

You can subscribe to Impeachment, Explained on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get podcasts.

References:

Andrew Prokop’s 4 takeaways from the first public impeachment hearing

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/2QoLljH