theintercept--2020-02-29--The Fight Inside the Democratic Party Is Playing Out in a Slew of House Primaries in Texas and Calif

The Fight Inside the Democratic Party Is Playing Out in a Slew of House Primaries in Texas and California on Super Tuesday

several weeks , Super Tuesday has loomed as a specter for the Democratic establishment , with leading figures in the party pointing to the March 3 primaries as the deadline for halting the momentum of a potential runaway candidate in Bernie Sanders .
So far , the establishment has made no progress in consolidating its forces against Sanders , who has only continued to rise in the polls .
The double-digit win in Nevada has given him momentum , though polls have him trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in South Carolina today .
Still , Sanders is well positioned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which he could emerge the presumptive nominee .
A slew of House races around the country , meanwhile , could put an exclamation point on the surge of progressive energy — or they could mark a bright spot in a dark moment for the establishment , if it manages to beat back the outspent challengers .
The two states at the epicenter of these fights are Texas and California ( Massachusetts , another Super Tuesday state , doesn ’ t have its congressional primaries until September ) .
The outcomes could signal whether @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is contagious , or contained by the omnipresence of the presidential campaign .
In Texas ’ s 25th District , two women are facing off in the hopes of challenging their district ’ s Republican incumbent , Rep. Roger Williams , a 70-year-old car dealer who has been in office since 2013 .
The Democratic primary on Tuesday is between 47-year-old Julie Oliver , who ran for Congress in 2018 , and 34-year-old Heidi Sloan , an activist with the Austin chapter of Democratic Socialists of America .
The district isn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ standards .
It ’ s a largely rural , red district , which went for Donald Trump in 2016 by 14.8 points .
( Trump won Texas by 9 points . )
But Oliver narrowed that gap in her 2018 run , coming just 8.7 points behind Williams .
She ’ s hoping another two years of campaigning can push her over the edge .
Oliver is endorsed by groups like the Working Families Party , Moms Demand Action , and the Wimberley Indivisible chapter .
Sloan is one of just three congressional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ DSA , and she also has progressive endorsements from the Sunrise Movement , the People ’ s Policy Project , and the Austin Central Labor Council .
The Texas AFT and the Texas AFL-CIO gave dual endorsements to both Oliver and Sloan .
Sloan is hoping to win her race with a record-smashing canvassing effort .
Over the course of six months , her campaign knocked on 80,000 doors and plans to reach 100,000 doors by the primary .
Sloan has worked as a preschool teacher for students with disabilities and more recently @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
She got involved in community organizing with the Austin DSA chapter after the 2016 election .
Oliver is an attorney with two decades of experience in health care finance .
Both candidates are running on a Green New Deal , Medicare for All , and an end to mass incarceration .
Oliver ’ s campaign is rejecting all political action committee money , while Sloan is rejecting all corporate donations and contributions from developers .
Neither has raised much money , though Oliver has raised $ 386,000 compared to Sloan ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ biggest tests for the progressive movement , 26-year-old Jessica Cisneros is facing off in Texas ’ s 28th District against Henry Cuellar , a 15-year House incumbent and one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress .
Cisneros , who is running on Medicare for All , a Green New Deal , and proudly defending reproductive rights against her anti-abortion opponent , is armed with an unusually successful fundraising haul for a first-time candidate and high-profile liberal and labor endorsements , including the Texas AFL-CIO , SEIU , EMILY ’ s List , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez .
In the fourth quarter of 2019 , Cisneros out-raised Cuellar $ 513,000 to $ 431,000 , and — as The Intercept previously reported — progressive groups and unions announced that they ’ d be running an independent expenditure of at least $ 350,000 in the last two weeks of the race on canvassing , ads , and phone-banking to get Cisneros over the finish line .
Supporters are also pointing to an ongoing lawsuit filed by Cuellar ’ s ex-chief of staff , accusing the congressman of firing her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has tools of his own in the campaign arsenal .
In late February , House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Laredo to campaign for him .
“ We want this to be not only a victory , but a resounding victory for Henry Cuellar , ” the powerful Democratic leader said .
Cuellar also has plenty of money on hand and is receiving some outside help from the U.S Chamber of Commerce , the American Banking Association , and a dark-money group called American Workers for Progress , which spent over $ 700,000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He ’ s even the first Democrat in Congress to receive financial support from the Super PAC founded and funded by billionaire Charles Koch , which spent $ 34,000 .
In Texas ’ s 3rd Congressional District , which covers a suburban area north of Dallas and a large swath of Collin County , two Democratic candidates are facing off for the opportunity to take on their district ’ s Republican representative , Van Taylor , who won his seat in 2018 by 10 points .
The Democratic contest is between Lulu @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and labor law , and Sean McCaffity , a trial attorney who specializes in commercial litigation .
Both entered the race in October .
By mid-February , Seikaly had raised $ 173,031 and McCaffity had raised $ 308,240 .
( A third Democrat , Tanner Do , is also running , but has only raised about $ 18,000 in almost a year of campaigning . )
The seat has been GOP-controlled for years , but the district has been trending leftward as it has grown more diverse .
The district went 64-34 for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump in 2016 , and Sen. Ted Cruz only won by 51-48 in 2018 .
The district is also the most highly educated one in the country currently held by a Republican — the kind of suburban district that has been trending Democratic across the country .
Seikaly is the daughter of parents who fled Lebanon ’ s civil war and is running to be Texas ’ s first Arab American congresswoman .
As is not infrequently the case in swing districts , neither candidate embraces Medicare for All or a Green New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ privatization of public schools , a more humane immigration policy , and gun control .
Seikaly , encouraged to run by Texas progressive activist Lillian Salerno , a 2018 congressional candidate , is largely running outside of the party apparatus , and an upset by her would signal that a new brand of candidates are becoming viable in Texas , even as the platforms of the two candidates , on paper , are similar .
While Taylor tries to pitch himself as a less ideological conservative who is more willing to engage with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ note that he has still voted in line with Trump 96 percent of the time .
A suburban district spanning Dallas and Fort Worth pits Kim Olson — a retired Air Force colonel cut from establishment cloth — against Candace Valenzuela .
Olson has raised a substantial sum online with the battle-tested I-was-a-female-bomber route that has worked well for other Democratic candidates .
Olson ’ s biggest obstacle — and likely the reason she doesn ’ t have the backing of the DCCC — is that she was charged with war profiteering in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reported in 2006 : “ Pentagon investigators allege that while on active duty as one of the most powerful figures in Iraq , Olson established a U.S. branch of a South African security firm after helping it win more than $ 3 million in contracts to provide protection for senior U.S. and British officials , as well as for KBR , a subsidiary of Halliburton Co. ” Olson struck a plea deal , copping to two lesser charges relating to conflicts of interest and obtaining outside employment without permission and was allowed to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it makes it hard to see how that record gets past the electorate in a general election , despite Olson ’ s effort to get ahead of it in her opening ad : “ Our government couldn ’ t even pay the security detail protecting Americans .
The warrior in me did what I had to do to get the security team paid and save lives.
” EMILY ’ s List — which very rarely endorses in a race between two pro-abortion women , and even more rarely endorses the progressive of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Valenzuela , a local school board member whose experience with homelessness growing up informs her politics .
This is a sign that D.C. Democrats are distancing themselves from Olson , despite her establishment-friendly profile — and it soothed some of the anger at EMILY ’ s List from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus for having endorsed against Cuellar when it got behind Cisneros .
( Valenzuela ’ s race is a high priority for the CHC , which sees an opportunity to expand its ranks in the 24th District . )
Valenzuela is not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but is plainly allied with that wing of the party .
A third Democrat , Jan McDowell , is running for the second time .
In 2018 , she came within 4 points of unseating incumbent Kenny Marchant with a threadbare campaign , but has raised just $ 73,000 in the 2020 cycle so far — to Valenzuela ’ s $ 442,000 and Olson ’ s $ 967,000 .
That likely means a runoff , if none of them can get above 50 percent .
Marchant , part of the GOP stampede out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” isn ’ t running for reelection , creating an open primary on the Republican side .
In 2018 , the 10th Congressional District — which stretches from the Austin suburbs to the Houston suburbs — was written off by the DCCC , having gone to incumbent Michael McCaul in 2016 by 19 points .
But civil rights attorney Mike Siegel , running as an unapologetic progressive populist , closed it to within 5 points .
That brought in a handful of new challengers this cycle , including Shannon Hutcheson , the clear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the primary by her corporate law work , particularly her defense of a prison guard accused of assaulting migrants , among other controversial cases .
She voted in the 2010 Republican primary , the year of the tea party backlash to President Barack Obama , and has the strong support of her husband ’ s law firm , which is connected to the Texas GOP machinery .
In many ways , the 10th District is a rematch of many of the primary contests of 2018 , which pitted the left against the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ establishment .
But this race also includes a wild card .
While the Houston Chronicle and Austin Chronicle endorsed Siegel , who has a volunteer army that ’ s been in the field for months , the Austin American Statesman got behind Pritesh Gandhi , a doctor who is running to the left of Hutcheson but to the right of Siegel .
A hybrid Super PAC backing Gandhi is spending big attacking Hutcheson .
A runoff is likely ; the question is whether Siegel will make it .
In California ’ s 16th @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the most conservative Democrats in the House and a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition , is facing the first serious primary challenge in his eight-term career in Congress .
Fresno City Council Member Esmeralda Soria , a daughter of Mexican immigrant farmworkers , is challenging Costa from the left .
Her platform rejects corporate PAC money and includes Medicare for All .
Although the 37-year-old hopeful isn ’ t particularly radical , her politics are more aligned with the solidly blue district than Costa ’ s , who has voted along @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the time .
His record includes votes — alongside his mostly Republican colleagues — to erode environmental regulations , defend U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement , and stall action on Saudi Arabia ’ s war in Yemen .
And before entering Congress , as a state senator he led the effort to ban most kinds of rent control in California .
Despite not having raised as much money as the eight-term incumbent , Soria successfully blocked Costa from winning the California Democratic Party ’ s early endorsement at a party convention last November @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to his 49 percent .
California ’ s top-two primary system means that the candidates who receive the most votes will make it to the general election in November , regardless of their party affiliation .
In 2014 , Costa , who has only ever had to fend off Republicans , almost lost his safe seat to an obscure , underfunded GOP challenger .
Democrat Kim Williams , a former history professor and U.S. diplomat , is also running in the primary but has struggled to gain traction .
Williams is to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sanders ’ s politics — but has only been able to raise about $ 49,825 in campaign funds .
The influential progressive group Courage California has lined up behind Soria .
With the primary election just weeks away , Costa ’ s reelection campaign began airing two different attack ads , including one that was changed to remove photos of Soria and her fiancé in response to community backlash .
“ Esmeralda received $ 96,000 in pay , perks , and benefits … gave herself a 23 percent pay raise on the City @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Soria ’ s fiancé is also her business partner .
Soria ’ s fiancé received millions.
” Last spring , Democratic Rep. Susan Davis , who held the congressional seat for California ’ s 53rd District since 2003 , abruptly announced she ’ d be retiring .
Now over a dozen Democratic candidates are vying for her spot in the San Diego County district , though the contest is really between Sara Jacobs , a 31-year-old former Obama State Department official , and Georgette Gómez , the president of the San @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaign is being bankrolled by her billionaire grandfather , Irwin Jacobs , who co-founded Qualcomm .
As of mid-February , Jacobs had raised over $ 2 million and spent over $ 1,799,755 , and a Super PAC formed in January to back her has spent over $ 1 million on TV and digital ads since February 5 .
According to Federal Election Commission disclosures , Jacobs ’ s grandparents are the Super PAC ’ s only two donors .
Gómez , who has raised $ 657,970 and spent $ 537,676 , has been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a number of prominent unions and progressive organizations , as well as Sanders , and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan .
Despite not being endorsed by the party , in February the Jacobs campaign distributed mailers and door hangers that said Jacobs was “ endorsed by California Democrats ” with a donkey logo .
Will Rodriguez-Kennedy , chair of the San Diego Democratic Party , blasted Jacobs in a press conference for trying to mislead donors about who the party was rallying behind .
In fact , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Jacobs campaign defended the mailer and pointed to endorsements by California ’ s Lt. Gov .
Eleni Kounalakis and Reps. Katie Porter , Eric Swalwell , and Harley Rouda as evidence that the language was fair . )
Jacobs ’ s 2018 campaign had been dogged , meanwhile , by reports that she wildly inflated her resume .
She lost that California primary to progressive Mike Levin , who went on to win the general election and flip a red seat .
Jacobs is running in a different district this time .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the San Diego Union-Tribune/10News showed Jacobs with a strong first-place lead , and with a Republican candidate , Chris Stoddard , polling second .
In California the top two vote-getters face off in the general election .
But Gómez may benefit from some extra support in the final month of the race .
On February 21 , Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Gómez , making her one the first seven progressive candidates across the country to be supported with her new PAC .
Another challenger , veteran Jose Caballero , competed against Gómez to become the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have largely consolidated around the more widely known Gómez .
Constitutional lawyer and civil liberties activist Shahid Buttar is running a long-shot bid against Pelosi .
Another progressive , Agatha Bacelar , is also running but hasn ’ t picked up momentum .
Before Pelosi pulled the trigger on impeachment , Buttar was gathering steam , and since then , the presidential election has sucked much of the oxygen from the race .
Buttar ’ s goal is to finish second , ahead of the closest Republican , to make it into the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he fell 1,000 votes short .

For the past several weeks, Super Tuesday has loomed as a specter for the Democratic establishment, with leading figures in the party pointing to the March 3 primaries as the deadline for halting the momentum of a potential runaway candidate in Bernie Sanders.
So far, the establishment has made no progress in consolidating its forces against Sanders, who has only continued to rise in the polls. The double-digit win in Nevada has given him momentum, though polls have him trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in South Carolina today. Still, Sanders is well positioned in most Super Tuesday states, from which he could emerge the presumptive nominee.
A slew of House races around the country, meanwhile, could put an exclamation point on the surge of progressive energy — or they could mark a bright spot in a dark moment for the establishment, if it manages to beat back the outspent challengers. The two states at the epicenter of these fights are Texas and California (Massachusetts, another Super Tuesday state, doesn’t have its congressional primaries until September). The outcomes could signal whether the energy behind Sanders’s movement is contagious, or contained by the omnipresence of the presidential campaign.
Texas
25th District: Heidi Sloan vs. Julie Oliver
In Texas’s 25th District, two women are facing off in the hopes of challenging their district’s Republican incumbent, Rep. Roger Williams, a 70-year-old car dealer who has been in office since 2013. The Democratic primary on Tuesday is between 47-year-old Julie Oliver, who ran for Congress in 2018, and 34-year-old Heidi Sloan, an activist with the Austin chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.
The district isn’t considered competitive by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee standards. It’s a largely rural, red district, which went for Donald Trump in 2016 by 14.8 points. (Trump won Texas by 9 points.) But Oliver narrowed that gap in her 2018 run, coming just 8.7 points behind Williams. She’s hoping another two years of campaigning can push her over the edge. Oliver is endorsed by groups like the Working Families Party, Moms Demand Action, and the Wimberley Indivisible chapter.
Sloan’s campaign knocked on 80,000 doors in six months and plans to reach 100,000 doors by the primary.
Sloan is one of just three congressional candidates this cycle backed by the national DSA, and she also has progressive endorsements from the Sunrise Movement, the People’s Policy Project, and the Austin Central Labor Council. The Texas AFT and the Texas AFL-CIO gave dual endorsements to both Oliver and Sloan.
Sloan is hoping to win her race with a record-smashing canvassing effort. Over the course of six months, her campaign knocked on 80,000 doors and plans to reach 100,000 doors by the primary. Sloan has worked as a preschool teacher for students with disabilities and more recently as a farmer with formerly homeless people. She got involved in community organizing with the Austin DSA chapter after the 2016 election. Oliver is an attorney with two decades of experience in health care finance.
Both candidates are running on a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and an end to mass incarceration. Oliver’s campaign is rejecting all political action committee money, while Sloan is rejecting all corporate donations and contributions from developers. Neither has raised much money, though Oliver has raised $386,000 compared to Sloan’s $176,000.
28th District: Jessica Cisneros vs. Henry Cuellar
In one of the biggest tests for the progressive movement, 26-year-old Jessica Cisneros is facing off in Texas’s 28th District against Henry Cuellar, a 15-year House incumbent and one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress. Cisneros, who is running on Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and proudly defending reproductive rights against her anti-abortion opponent, is armed with an unusually successful fundraising haul for a first-time candidate and high-profile liberal and labor endorsements, including the Texas AFL-CIO, SEIU, EMILY’s List, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In the fourth quarter of 2019, Cisneros out-raised Cuellar $513,000 to $431,000, and — as The Intercept previously reported — progressive groups and unions announced that they’d be running an independent expenditure of at least $350,000 in the last two weeks of the race on canvassing, ads, and phone-banking to get Cisneros over the finish line. Supporters are also pointing to an ongoing lawsuit filed by Cuellar’s ex-chief of staff, accusing the congressman of firing her because she was pregnant.
But Cuellar has tools of his own in the campaign arsenal. In late February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Laredo to campaign for him. “We want this to be not only a victory, but a resounding victory for Henry Cuellar,” the powerful Democratic leader said. Cuellar also has plenty of money on hand and is receiving some outside help from the U.S Chamber of Commerce, the American Banking Association, and a dark-money group called American Workers for Progress, which spent over $700,000 on a health care ad in January. He’s even the first Democrat in Congress to receive financial support from the Super PAC founded and funded by billionaire Charles Koch, which spent $34,000.
3rd District: Lulu Seikaly vs. Sean McCaffity
In Texas’s 3rd Congressional District, which covers a suburban area north of Dallas and a large swath of Collin County, two Democratic candidates are facing off for the opportunity to take on their district’s Republican representative, Van Taylor, who won his seat in 2018 by 10 points. The Democratic contest is between Lulu Seikaly, an attorney specializing in employment and labor law, and Sean McCaffity, a trial attorney who specializes in commercial litigation. Both entered the race in October. By mid-February, Seikaly had raised $173,031 and McCaffity had raised $308,240. (A third Democrat, Tanner Do, is also running, but has only raised about $18,000 in almost a year of campaigning.)
An upset by Seikaly would signal that a new brand of candidates are becoming viable in Texas, even as the two candidates, on paper, are similar.
The seat has been GOP-controlled for years, but the district has been trending leftward as it has grown more diverse. The district went 64-34 for Mitt Romney in 2012, 55-41 for Trump in 2016, and Sen. Ted Cruz only won by 51-48 in 2018. The district is also the most highly educated one in the country currently held by a Republican — the kind of suburban district that has been trending Democratic across the country.
Seikaly is the daughter of parents who fled Lebanon’s civil war and is running to be Texas’s first Arab American congresswoman. As is not infrequently the case in swing districts, neither candidate embraces Medicare for All or a Green New Deal, and both are campaigning against privatization of public schools, a more humane immigration policy, and gun control. Seikaly, encouraged to run by Texas progressive activist Lillian Salerno, a 2018 congressional candidate, is largely running outside of the party apparatus, and an upset by her would signal that a new brand of candidates are becoming viable in Texas, even as the platforms of the two candidates, on paper, are similar.
While Taylor tries to pitch himself as a less ideological conservative who is more willing to engage with Democrats across the aisle, his opponents note that he has still voted in line with Trump 96 percent of the time.
24th District: Kim Olson vs. Candace Valenzuela
A suburban district spanning Dallas and Fort Worth pits Kim Olson — a retired Air Force colonel cut from establishment cloth — against Candace Valenzuela.
Olson has raised a substantial sum online with the battle-tested I-was-a-female-bomber route that has worked well for other Democratic candidates. Olson’s biggest obstacle — and likely the reason she doesn’t have the backing of the DCCC — is that she was charged with war profiteering in Iraq. As the Los Angeles Times reported in 2006: “Pentagon investigators allege that while on active duty as one of the most powerful figures in Iraq, Olson established a U.S. branch of a South African security firm after helping it win more than $3 million in contracts to provide protection for senior U.S. and British officials, as well as for KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co.”
Olson struck a plea deal, copping to two lesser charges relating to conflicts of interest and obtaining outside employment without permission and was allowed to retire with an honorable discharge. Still, it makes it hard to see how that record gets past the electorate in a general election, despite Olson’s effort to get ahead of it in her opening ad: “Our government couldn’t even pay the security detail protecting Americans. The warrior in me did what I had to do to get the security team paid and save lives.”
EMILY’s List — which very rarely endorses in a race between two pro-abortion women, and even more rarely endorses the progressive of the two — has gotten behind Candace Valenzuela.
EMILY’s List — which very rarely endorses in a race between two pro-abortion women, and even more rarely endorses the progressive of the two — has gotten behind Candace Valenzuela, a local school board member whose experience with homelessness growing up informs her politics. This is a sign that D.C. Democrats are distancing themselves from Olson, despite her establishment-friendly profile — and it soothed some of the anger at EMILY’s List from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus for having endorsed against Cuellar when it got behind Cisneros. (Valenzuela’s race is a high priority for the CHC, which sees an opportunity to expand its ranks in the 24th District.) Valenzuela is not running as a full-on Justice Democrat, but is plainly allied with that wing of the party.
A third Democrat, Jan McDowell, is running for the second time. In 2018, she came within 4 points of unseating incumbent Kenny Marchant with a threadbare campaign, but has raised just $73,000 in the 2020 cycle so far — to Valenzuela’s $442,000 and Olson’s $967,000. That likely means a runoff, if none of them can get above 50 percent. Marchant, part of the GOP stampede out the door known as “Texit,” isn’t running for reelection, creating an open primary on the Republican side.
10th District: Mike Siegel vs. Shannon Hutcheson
In 2018, the 10th Congressional District — which stretches from the Austin suburbs to the Houston suburbs — was written off by the DCCC, having gone to incumbent Michael McCaul in 2016 by 19 points. But civil rights attorney Mike Siegel, running as an unapologetic progressive populist, closed it to within 5 points.
That brought in a handful of new challengers this cycle, including Shannon Hutcheson, the clear Washington favorite. Hutcheson has been dogged in the primary by her corporate law work, particularly her defense of a prison guard accused of assaulting migrants, among other controversial cases. She voted in the 2010 Republican primary, the year of the tea party backlash to President Barack Obama, and has the strong support of her husband’s law firm, which is connected to the Texas GOP machinery.
In many ways, the 10th District is a rematch of many of the primary contests of 2018, which pitted the left against the establishment and were mostly won by the establishment. But this race also includes a wild card. While the Houston Chronicle and Austin Chronicle endorsed Siegel, who has a volunteer army that’s been in the field for months, the Austin American Statesman got behind Pritesh Gandhi, a doctor who is running to the left of Hutcheson but to the right of Siegel. A hybrid Super PAC backing Gandhi is spending big attacking Hutcheson. A runoff is likely; the question is whether Siegel will make it.
California
California 16: Esmeralda Soria vs. Jim Costa
In California’s 16th District, Rep. Jim Costa, one of the most conservative Democrats in the House and a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition, is facing the first serious primary challenge in his eight-term career in Congress. Fresno City Council Member Esmeralda Soria, a daughter of Mexican immigrant farmworkers, is challenging Costa from the left. Her platform rejects corporate PAC money and includes Medicare for All. Although the 37-year-old hopeful isn’t particularly radical, her politics are more aligned with the solidly blue district than Costa’s, who has voted along with Trump’s agenda nearly half the time.
His record includes votes — alongside his mostly Republican colleagues — to erode environmental regulations, defend U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and stall action on Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. And before entering Congress, as a state senator he led the effort to ban most kinds of rent control in California.
Jim Costa, one of the most conservative Democrats in the House, is facing the first serious primary challenge in his eight-term career in Congress.
Despite not having raised as much money as the eight-term incumbent, Soria successfully blocked Costa from winning the California Democratic Party’s early endorsement at a party convention last November, receiving 46 percent of the vote to his 49 percent. California’s top-two primary system means that the candidates who receive the most votes will make it to the general election in November, regardless of their party affiliation. In 2014, Costa, who has only ever had to fend off Republicans, almost lost his safe seat to an obscure, underfunded GOP challenger.
Democrat Kim Williams, a former history professor and U.S. diplomat, is also running in the primary but has struggled to gain traction. Williams is to the left of Soria, identifying closer to Sanders’s politics — but has only been able to raise about $49,825 in campaign funds. The influential progressive group Courage California has lined up behind Soria.
With the primary election just weeks away, Costa’s reelection campaign began airing two different attack ads, including one that was changed to remove photos of Soria and her fiancé in response to community backlash. “Esmeralda received $96,000 in pay, perks, and benefits … gave herself a 23 percent pay raise on the City Council,” the original ad read. “Soria’s fiancé is also her business partner. Soria’s fiancé received millions.”
53th District: Sara Jacobs vs. Georgette Gómez
Last spring, Democratic Rep. Susan Davis, who held the congressional seat for California’s 53rd District since 2003, abruptly announced she’d be retiring. Now over a dozen Democratic candidates are vying for her spot in the San Diego County district, though the contest is really between Sara Jacobs, a 31-year-old former Obama State Department official, and Georgette Gómez, the president of the San Diego City Council.
Jacobs’s campaign is being bankrolled by her billionaire grandfather, Irwin Jacobs, who co-founded Qualcomm. As of mid-February, Jacobs had raised over $2 million and spent over $1,799,755, and a Super PAC formed in January to back her has spent over $1 million on TV and digital ads since February 5. According to Federal Election Commission disclosures, Jacobs’s grandparents are the Super PAC’s only two donors.
Gómez, who has raised $657,970 and spent $537,676, has been endorsed by the California Democratic Party, a number of prominent unions and progressive organizations, as well as Sanders, and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan.
Despite not being endorsed by the party, in February the Jacobs campaign distributed mailers and door hangers that said Jacobs was “endorsed by California Democrats” with a donkey logo. Will Rodriguez-Kennedy, chair of the San Diego Democratic Party, blasted Jacobs in a press conference for trying to mislead donors about who the party was rallying behind. In fact, the state party had endorsed Gómez. (The Jacobs campaign defended the mailer and pointed to endorsements by California’s Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and Reps. Katie Porter, Eric Swalwell, and Harley Rouda as evidence that the language was fair.)
Despite not being endorsed by the party, the Jacobs campaign distributed mailers and door hangers that said Jacobs was “endorsed by California Democrats” with a donkey logo.
Jacobs’s 2018 campaign had been dogged, meanwhile, by reports that she wildly inflated her resume. She lost that California primary to progressive Mike Levin, who went on to win the general election and flip a red seat. Jacobs is running in a different district this time.
A poll released in early February by the San Diego Union-Tribune/10News showed Jacobs with a strong first-place lead, and with a Republican candidate, Chris Stoddard, polling second. In California the top two vote-getters face off in the general election. But Gómez may benefit from some extra support in the final month of the race. On February 21, Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Gómez, making her one the first seven progressive candidates across the country to be supported with her new PAC.
Another challenger, veteran Jose Caballero, competed against Gómez to become the progressive alternative to Jacobs, but progressives have largely consolidated around the more widely known Gómez.
12th District: Shahid Buttar vs. Nancy Pelosi
Constitutional lawyer and civil liberties activist Shahid Buttar is running a long-shot bid against Pelosi. Another progressive, Agatha Bacelar, is also running but hasn’t picked up momentum.
Before Pelosi pulled the trigger on impeachment, Buttar was gathering steam, and since then, the presidential election has sucked much of the oxygen from the race. Buttar’s goal is to finish second, ahead of the closest Republican, to make it into the general election against Pelosi. In 2018, he fell 1,000 votes short.


theintercept--2020-03-03--Super Tuesday: Which Side Are You On?

Super Tuesday: Which Side Are You On?

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The Democratic Party establishment is rapidly consolidating around the candidacy of Joe Biden as its best chance to stop Bernie Sanders’ drive to the Democratic nomination. This week on Intercepted: It’s Super Tuesday, and the battle lines are drawn in a campaign that will not only determine who will face Donald Trump in the general election, but also the future of the Democratic Party. The Intercept’s Lee Fang discusses who is funding and running the Biden campaign, the role of dark money in the attack against Sanders, and the looming influence of superdelegates. As the Democratic establishment intensifies its battle to ward off a Sanders insurgency, former Hillary Clinton adviser Peter Daou describes why he is now backing Sanders. Daou also discusses the opposition files compiled on Sanders and rejects the claims he has not been “vetted.”
Newscaster: We want to take you now to the White House where moments ago President Trump addressed the coronavirus. Let’s listen in.
Donald J. Trump: You know, I’m the President of the United States. This is a list of the best-rated countries in the world and the United States is now, we’re rated number one.
Reporter: CDC said yesterday that they believe it’s inevitable that the virus will spread in the United States. And it’s not a question of if but when. Do you agree with that assessment?
DJT: I have the worst fever and the worst flu. Is this just like the flu? This is not good. Because of all we’ve done the risk to the American people remains very bad. Very bad, I think American people beyond what people would have thought. Worst case scenario, doesn’t matter what I say, really, I can tell you panic. I hope it’s going to be fine. Thank you all. Thank you all. I may leave you behind and you can answer a few more questions.
[Music interlude.]
Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.
[Music interlude.]
JS: I’m Jeremy Scahill, coming to you from the offices of The Intercept in New York City. And this is episode 119 of Intercepted.
Bernie Sanders: There is a massive effort trying to stop Bernie Sanders. That’s not a secret to anybody in this room. The corporate establishment is coming together. The political establishment is coming together and they will do everything. They are really getting nervous that working people are standing up.
JS: The Democratic Party establishment is rapidly consolidating around the candidacy of Joe Biden as its best chance to stop Bernie Sanders’s drive to the Democratic nomination. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is continuing to blast his propaganda ads across the country. And Elizabeth Warren is vowing to stay in the race regardless of how she fares in the 14 states voting on Super Tuesday. There are SuperPACs parading around as unity groups that are basically just anti-Sanders attack operations. The New York Times reports that Democratic Party bosses are “willing to risk intraparty damage to stop Sanders’s nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance.” And things are certainly going to get even uglier in the days ahead.
James Carville: If you’re voting for him, because you think he’ll win the election, because he’ll galvanize here to for sleepy parts of the electorate, then politically, you’re a fool.
Joe Scarborough: There have been some candidates at times that I’ve seen on the stage in their 70s that just don’t look healthy. Again, I’m not just talking about Bernie Sanders.
Chuck Todd: Is it even possible to stop Bernie Sanders?
Pete Buttigieg: With every passing day I am more and more convinced that the only way we will defeat Trump and Trumpism is with a new politics that gathers people together. We need leadership to heal a divided nation, not drive us further apart.
Joe Biden: It’s going to be much more difficult to win back the Senate and keep the House if Bernie’s at the top of the ticket, but that’s a judgment for them to make and I think that will sort of work itself out in the near term.
JS: With Amy Klobuchar dropping out and tossing her support behind Joe Biden, it will undoubtedly have some impact on the race in the Super Tuesday state of Minnesota. And while conventional analysis would say that it’s to Biden’s advantage, Amy Klobuchar has come under a lot of fire recently on issues of race and her time as a prosecutor and Bernie Sanders was already competitive in Minnesota, even with Klobuchar still in the race. The reality is that Klobuchar’s minuscule support in both primaries and polls was always just akin to basically some crumbs on the Democratic establishment table. It’s also going to be interesting to see what impact Pete Buttigieg endorsing Biden will have. Buttigieg achieved an almost total absence of votes from African Americans and Latinx voters during his four-state run, but he definitely was making aggressive appeals to become the centrist or establishment choice and he was competitive in overwhelmingly white states like Iowa and New Hampshire. He also had a lot of billionaires supporting him, so I guess there’s that.
And then there is Elizabeth Warren. Her campaign sent out a memo over the weekend, saying that Warren was committed to staying in the race past Super Tuesday, and the memo stated that the campaign expects Warren “to have a strong delegate performance on Super Tuesday.” They argued, “Our grassroots campaign is built to compete in every state and territory and ultimately prevail at the national convention in Milwaukee.” Now, while Warren has frequently praised Bernie Sanders’s record and positions, she has been attacking him more sharply, particularly over the past few weeks, including the night of the South Carolina primary.
Elizabeth Warren: Demands more than a senator who has good ideas but whose 30-year track record shows he consistently calls for things that fail to get done and consistently opposing things that nevertheless, he fails to stop.
JS: Now, if Elizabeth Warren believes — and her internal campaign polling shows — that she is going to pull off a series of stunning upsets today, on Super Tuesday, then this strategy makes sense. Warren is making an argument that she is the better progressive candidate and that she would do a better job of implementing progressive policies than Bernie Sanders. Whether you agree with that or not, it is a reasonable argument for Warren to make. But if the public polls hold up, then her only path to the presidential nomination would be in a contested convention where she likely has substantially fewer delegates than either Sanders or as it seems now Biden. So, it is a bit perplexing what exactly is at the core of this strategy to attack Bernie Sanders.
EW: We want to gain as many delegates to the convention as we can from California to right here in Texas.
JS: Are these attacks against Sanders because Warren believes she can win over his voters? Because that has not happened in the four states that already voted. Is it a campaign to be vice president on a Biden-led or establishment ticket? Or is it to gather enough delegates to be a player in a contested convention where she could tip the balance to the establishment or the insurgents? With the entirety of the Democratic Party establishment, Never Trumper Republicans, media outlets, Mike Bloomberg coalescing around the Anybody but Bernie and probably Biden effort, it is interesting that Warren is going out of her way to attack Bernie Sanders, particularly because she says she agrees with him on so much.
Now, it’s worth noting that there are a lot — a lot — of Warren supporters who do not view Bernie Sanders as their second choice. In fact, a majority of her supporters according to polls do not see Sanders as their number two choice. So, I suppose there is also a scenario where Warren garners enough delegates to ultimately unite with Sanders in a brokered convention in battling against an effort to crush Sanders and the possibility of a progressive electoral movement to take on Donald Trump. We shall see what happens.
Nicole Wallace: The last 48 hours have catapulted Joe Biden to the top of the Bernie alternative lane. Essentially transforming the once crowded Democratic contest into a two-man race.
JB: My name’s Joe Biden. I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate.
Look, tomorrow’s Super Thurs— Tuesday and I want to thank you all — I’ll tell you what I’m rushing ahead, aren’t I?
All right, Chuck, thank you very much.
Chris Wallace: All right, it’s Chris. But anyway —
JB: We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by — you know, you know the thing.
JS: But what we are witnessing right now is the picture coming into clear focus: It is Bernie Sanders’s campaign and movements versus the most powerful political, media and economic forces in the United States.
BS: Don’t tell anybody because these folks get very, very agitated and nervous. We’re gonna win here in Texas. We’re gonna bring our people together, black and white and Latino, Native American, Asian American, gay and straight.
JS: Fourteen states and American Samoa are holding primaries today. More than 1,300 pledged delegates are at stake. That’s about a third of all Democratic primary pledged delegates. Compare that to the 155 delegates that made up the four primaries that have already been held. At this point so far, Bernie Sanders still remains in the lead with 60 delegates. Joe Biden close behind him with 53. So, Super Tuesday can and will be decisive for the next phase of the Democratic primary.
Joining me now to discuss all of this is Intercept investigative reporter Lee Fang. Lee, welcome back to Intercepted.
Lee Fang on The Biden Campaign, Dark Money, Attacks Against Sanders, and Super Delegates
Lee Fang: Hey, thanks for having me.
JS: Let’s talk about Joe Biden and South Carolina. What can we learn from the outcome of that Democratic primary over the weekend and what it signals for Super Tuesday?
LF: Well, Joe Biden needed a victory. He has never won a primary caucus. He’s running for president multiple times and for him to focus his efforts on South Carolina and deliver a huge win really resuscitates his campaign. It was a commanding victory. Won every county in the state, you know, in terms of fundraising and telling his donors and telling his supporters that he still has a chance, this was very important. Does this give Biden a direct path to a plurality or a majority of delegates? Who knows? You know, there were a lot of folks on MSNBC and other cable news programs, who made, I think a lot of generalizations that kind of extrapolated too much from this race. On MSNBC, for example, because Joe Biden won a majority of African American voters in the state that means he has a command of those voters, or, you know, a majority supported those voters nationwide.
JC: The single most important demographic in the Democratic Party spoke up tonight, and that’s African Americans. And they spoke loudly and they spoke clearly.
LF: But polls show that, you know, no racial group is a monolith, right? And, you know, just generally, it’s hard to extrapolate too much from a single state. South Carolina voters, a majority of the folks who voted for Biden told exit polls that they self identify as moderate or conservative. That’s not like the rest of the country or at least most other Democratic voters. They’re much more likely to attend church. They’re much more religiously conservative. Again, that’s not like a lot of other states. So this, South Carolina’s particular in many ways, so it’s hard to say how this reflects how folks will perform or vote in other states.
JS: Now on Sunday, Joe Biden was interviewed on Fox News by Chris Wallace, whose name he botched, but that’s, you know, that’s Biden these days. But when Chris Wallace asked Joe Biden about his strategy going into Super Tuesday, he noted that Biden hadn’t held a single rally in a Super Tuesday state in over a month. And in the state of California, where I’m speaking to you from, Biden has only one office in the entire state compared to Bernie Sanders who has 23 or Mike Bloomberg, who’s been spending a lot of money hiring up campaign staff. And here’s what Biden said on Fox News.
JB: I think it’s about the message and I think that people know who I am, although I’ve been outspent forty-one to one, I think it was, or forty to one in South Carolina and other places, I think we’ve now begun to raise money. Nothing like they’ve raised, we’ve raised about $18 million this month as $5 million overnight. And so I think things are picking up but we’ll see.
JS: So, Lee we have Joe Biden suggesting that he won South Carolina because of his name recognition. Who is financing Biden’s campaign right now? And what do you make of Biden’s declared strategy going into these Super Tuesday primaries?
LF: You know, the problem for Biden is that he has not built a small donor base like Trump has, like Bernie has, like Elizabeth Warren has. He’s mostly relying on donors giving the maximum amount. He’s kind of tapped out of these more establishment connected fundraising circuits. These are folks in Wall Street people affiliated with lobbying in DC. A lot of the big donors in Hollywood are backing Biden. He’s kind of tapped out these donors. He’s relied more on a new super PAC set up by his supporters. Larry Rasky, a longtime lobbyist, someone who’s lobbied for a range of corporate interests, also some foreign clients has set up a super PAC that has made up the gap in the lack of fundraising for the Biden campaign.
I mean, that’s the other kind of side of South Carolina, is that Biden was running out of money. And now he might get a second wind, donors might open their pocketbooks. They might see him as a way to stop Bernie. He’s trying to coalesce the anti-Bernie forces within the party. But we’ll see, you know, this argument that you need organizers as the only path to the nomination, that’s hard to say. We live in a media climate, you know, we live in a world where there isn’t a lot of social interaction. Everyone’s staring at their phones, staring at cable news. And so if you do have these moments where you’re generating lots and lots of positive press and momentum, sometimes you don’t need organizing, you do need kind of that press narrative to lift up a campaign. But is it enough? Biden has focused so much of his resources into South Carolina, he hasn’t focused on the Super Tuesday states.
One of the other kind of dynamics here with the Democratic nomination is that to receive delegates statewide in a state, you have to be viable, you have to receive at least 15 percent of the support. For a lot of states, including crucial states like California, Biden has consistently polled in the last few months below viability, below that 15 percent. Perhaps he doesn’t have the time or the organizing resources to capture a large share of the vote in these states. But now because of his South Carolina bump, if he does receive a bump, he might reach at least viability. So, that’s kind of a minimum standard. He won’t receive a ton of votes, but just enough to hit that 15 percent could mean a lot of delegates moving forward.
JS: Lee, let’s talk about Mike Bloomberg for a moment. He hasn’t yet been on the ballot, but he will be on the ballot for Super Tuesday and he has just been absolutely dumping money into ads in Super Tuesday states and really across the country. Explain a little bit about the infrastructure that Bloomberg has paid for and set up around the country and also what is the tenor of the ads that Bloomberg is buying and airing in all of these states?
LF: Michael Bloomberg has kind of stitch together a campaign overnight. You know, he got into the race in November incredibly late. So he’s had to go on a hiring spree, hiring a lot of political strategists, campaign consultants to set up campaign offices primarily focused on the Super Tuesday states, but really all over the country. And he’s just carpet-bombing the entire country with ads of every type. He’s already spent over $550 million in broadcast ads. He spent well over $100 million in online ads targeted to Facebook and Google. But he’s spending a lot of other ways that we just don’t know because he’s being very innovative in the way he’s spending his money. Really, wherever you look, if you’re looking on a paid platform or any kind of digital news or media platform, you’re going to end up seeing a Bloomberg ad. Now, most of these ads are positive ads. Many of them imply that Obama endorsed or supports Bloomberg.
Barack Obama: He’s been a leader throughout the country for the past 12 years, Mr. Michael Bloomberg is here.
Announcer: Leadership in action.
LF: Of course, Bloomberg threatened to run against Obama in 2008 did not endorse him in 2008, barely endorsed him in 2012. Did it in a kind of a backhanded way. And then later in leaked audio that came out earlier in February, we heard from a Goldman Sachs event that he didn’t even really sincerely endorse Obama in 2012.
Michael Bloomberg: The second Obama election, I wrote a very backhanded endorsement of Obama saying I thought he hadn’t done the right thing, hadn’t done, hadn’t been good at things that I think are important and Romney would be a better person at doing that. But Romney did not stick with the values that he had when he was governor of Massachusetts.
LF: But you know, the average viewer does not know that. His campaign surrogates and campaign advisors have gone on cable TV and have threatened to unleash a torrent of ads against Bernie Sanders. They’ve released a few online videos that kind of appear like an ad and they attack Bernie and they kind of lifted up random Twitter users to say that, you know, Bernie supporters are violent or angry or toxic, but they haven’t really done the paid advertising to go after Bernie or Elizabeth Warren for that matter.
JS: You know, Lee, I also want to ask you about Elizabeth Warren. Her campaign sent out a memo over the weekend that stated that they’re in it to win it still, that they are going to remain in past Super Tuesday, that they believe she’s going to perform solidly and pick up delegates and continue on to the convention later in the summer in Milwaukee. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it does seem also like over the past several weeks, Elizabeth Warren has more often gone out of her way to criticize or attack Bernie Sanders.
EW: Bernie and I agree on a lot of things, but I think I would make a better president than Bernie.
JS: I’m wondering given that Warren has stated that she’s in sync with Sanders on so many policies and given that you have very powerful wealthy sources from the Democratic Party to Mike Bloomberg and beyond organizing around anybody but Bernie, what is the strategy or potential strategies that Warren is engaging in right now? Like, what’s her endgame here as far as you can tell?
LF: The proportional design of the Democratic, DNC delegate selection process means that if you have the resources to keep competing, as long as no single candidate reaches the 1,991 pledge delegate threshold going into Milwaukee — going into the convention — that means that the nomination is decided on a second or third ballot which means superdelegates can get involved. And some of these minor candidates that you know, might not have even close to a plurality, they might have a sizable chunk of delegates going into the convention, they can wheel and deal and cut an agreement with another candidate to select the nominee. What appears to be happening with Warren is that she’s trying to gather as many delegates as possible going into the convention. So, she has a strong set of cards essentially.
So, she can negotiate for a strong position in the next nomination whether that’s a nominee like Joe Biden, or a more centrist candidate, or perhaps Bernie. She’s really going after all the candidates. She’s sharply criticizing Bernie on the stump on a regular basis. But perhaps she’s just trying to maximize her hand — get enough delegates so she can go in and then negotiate with whoever the final nominee will be.
JS: Last week, the New York Times reported a story titled “Democratic leaders willing to risk party damage to stop Bernie Sanders” and in that piece, they spoke to 93 superdelegates who were opposed to Sanders getting the nomination, even if he ends up with the most delegates but doesn’t have the 1,991 that you were referencing. Jay Jacobs The New York State Democratic party chairman, who is also a superdelegate, was quoted in the article saying that if Bernie “doesn’t have a majority, it stands to reason that he may not become the nominee.” Meanwhile, Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas said, “If 60 percent is not with Bernie Sanders, I think that says something, I really do.” The way they’re doing the math is basically let’s add up everybody that got votes other than Bernie Sanders, and therefore Sanders shouldn’t be the nominee. But what’s your analysis of this reporting and this trend that is now seeping much more into the public space?
LF: Well, this is all kind of murky, because we really don’t know how the majority of delegates, how the majority of lawmakers feel about this. We know that there’s a lot of anti-Bernie sentiment, that’s not shocking. The New York Times only looked at a slice of these folks, as you mentioned about 100 or so. But I went to a DNC meeting last summer to do some reporting on this very prospect of a brokered convention. And all the state party chairman, all these party officials promised me that no, the candidate with a plurality of delegates going into the convention is going to be the nominee. They didn’t see it as a big problem. Back then Bernie Sanders wasn’t performing as well in the polls as he is now, back then Biden was.
And now look, we’re in March of 2020. And you’re seeing superdelegates and party officials come out of the woodworks making the argument that the candidate with a plurality of votes shouldn’t be the nominee. So they’re all reversing course. I think because of the power politics at play. They don’t want an anti-establishment populist Democrat to take the nomination. It’s not the first time. It just hasn’t happened in many years. You know, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, didn’t even run in the primaries and he became the party nominee. In this case, it’s possible that something similar happens again where there’s just so much contentious infighting, so much kind of ugly backroom dealing, potentially maybe some kind of scandal surrounding these backroom deals that delegates will call for a unity candidate, maybe someone who didn’t even run in the primaries to be the party’s nominee. Someone you know, the Times article looked at some potential nominees apparently, party insiders have talked to Senator Mark Warner, a more moderate conservative democrat from Virginia, or even Sherrod Brown, a more progressive senator from Ohio as the unity candidate.
JS: On that issue, Lee, you had Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee suggesting that Sherrod Brown, as you just mentioned, of Ohio, could emerge as the nominee at a brokered convention. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia saying, “At some point, you could imagine saying, ‘Let’s go get Mark Warner, Chris Coons, Nancy Pelosi. Somebody that could win and we could all get behind and celebrate.” Wouldn’t this ultimately just completely shatter the Democratic Party as it currently exists entirely given the kind of support that Bernie Sanders has? I mean, what are your thoughts about these suggestions that some yet unnamed individual could emerge as the nominee through this kind of chaotic brokering and backroom dealing?
LF: Look all across elections in the West and industrialized countries in the world, there is anger at the establishment that powerful elites in the political establishment and the business community, they’re making deals that benefit themselves and they don’t care what the consumers think. They don’t care what patients think. They don’t care what voters think. And this caused a lot of anger. This is the reason that populist candidates have done very well on both the left and the right. It’s very dangerous I think for a party elites in the DNC to say, “Look, we don’t care about voter sentiment, we don’t care how people voted. We know best, and we’re going to select one of our friends to be the nominee, even though you know, you just went through this election process that took six months and this campaign process that’s been going on forever, over the last year and a half.” It’s possible that they disregard everything and just select some caretaker candidate, some unity candidate who didn’t even run in the primaries, and I think that would foster a lot of anger, a lot of resentment. And it could be dangerous because that could potentially help Trump in his reelection.
JS: After that New York Times piece, you did a deeper dive on a superdelegate named William Owen, a DNC member from Tennessee. Tell us what you learned as you dug into this superdelegate, William Owen.
LF: William Owen is a Biden supporter. He’s also a lobbyist. He’s someone who represents a variety of clients, including a medical device product company. You know, as someone with multiple job titles, he has multiple interests in politics. At one point he’s arguing as a DNC delegate, that we need a brokered convention. We need the delegates to get together and decide the nominee, potentially overriding voter intent, but he’s also a lobbyist, and that means he needs access to politicians. Even though he’s arguing that he knows best for the Democratic Party, campaign finance disclosures show that he’s given a lot of money to Republicans. Actually, in this election cycle, he’s given only to Republicans. He’s given to a Republican senators from different states, also to a super PAC that benefits the leadership of the Republican Party, including Mitch McConnell.
We interviewed him and he said, look — he was very candid and forthright. He said, I, as a lobbyist need access to both parties. I need to advance my clients’ interest. And that means paying campaign contributions so I get access, and that means even to the Republican Party. But he’s not unique here. I mean, he’s unique in the sense that he’s been so outspoken in his belief that that a brokered convention could give superdelegates additional voting power, and, you know, influence over the ultimate nominee. But there are many different corporate influence peddlers, people who work in lobbying. If you look at our story from last summer, we went through a number of the delegates, the superdelegates, and many of them are like, Mr. Owen, employed by special interests, and these special interests, you know, regardless of what folks say about who would be the best nominee for the party, if you’re a lobbyist and you’re serving your clients interest, you’ve got to wonder if those motivations come into play when they’re selecting the nominee.
JS: Lee, back in October you also reported on a super PAC that was set up to support Joe Biden organized by corporate lobbyists on health care, weapons manufacturers, finance. Who was that super PAC organized by and where is it these days?
LF: Biden’s super PAC Unite the Country is backed by a longtime Biden supporter named Larry Rasky. Rasky is a lobbyist. He runs his own lobbying firm Rasky Partners. His firm is registered to lobby on behalf of Raytheon, hospital interests, even the Republic of Azerbaijan but the super PAC has a number of other folks who are helping organize it. Another individual is Steve Schale. This is a former Obama strategist, someone who works at another lobbying firm at Cardenas Partners. This is a Florida lobbying firm and they have a long list of corporate clients, folks in the insurance industry, Walt Disney, AT&T, the Florida Hospital Association. So you know, Biden has co-opted kind of Obama’s promise also kind of running on the implied support of Obama, although Obama has not endorsed, but he’s surrounding himself and relying on the support of well-heeled corporate interests of political insiders. This is not really, at least, the message of Obama 2008 where he was promising to get rid of lobbyists’ influence. Biden is at least projecting that image, but in practice surrounding himself with special interest.
JS: Now, Lee, last Thursday, a super PAC called Persist PAC announced that it was going to buy $9 million in TV and digital ads for Elizabeth Warren, according to a New York Times report, and the ads are supposed to have been running in California, Texas, Massachusetts, Super Tuesday states. What do we know about the super PAC that is supporting Elizabeth Warren?
LF: We know very little. And I think this is interesting because Elizabeth Warren ran in 2012 for the Massachusetts Senate seat by promising to disavow super PACs support. She had the kind of famous super PAC challenge with her competitor, Scott Brown, the Republican in that race, pressuring him at every debate to disavow his own super PACs. Elizabeth Warren has run in this campaign, again, attacking super PACs, you know, criticizing the support of Super PACs for other candidates.
EW: So if you really want to live where you say, then put your money where your mouth is, and say no to the PACs.
LF: And now we’re in the last kind of final phase before Super Tuesday, and she’s receiving millions of dollars in this super PACs support. And this super PAC was created in such a late stage that it has not disclosed any donor information. It’s spending millions of dollars in paid advertising. Not only does it have, you know, no caps in terms of how much money it can receive or spend, but we don’t even know who’s backing it. It kind of belies the Elizabeth Warren message of clean government, of no special interest influence. But her campaign is essentially being resuscitated by the super PAC.
JS: Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has dropped out of the race along with Pete Buttigieg and Tom Steyer. Amy Klobuchar is from the state of Minnesota and of course, Minnesota is a Super Tuesday state. Klobuchar is endorsing Joe Biden. What is your initial assessment of what this means? Because I was under the impression and I saw a lot of Sanders supporters making the argument that Klobuchar staying in the race was a good thing for Joe Biden in an effort to try to ensure that Bernie Sanders would not win the state of Minnesota but what’s your just well, hot take, I guess, on the impact that Amy Klobuchar leaving the race and endorsing Biden will have?
LF: The 2016 Republican race for the presidential nomination was deeply divided and because of those divides, so many candidates staying in the race for so long, often with super PAC support, you had the Republican establishment struggling to coalesce behind a single candidate. They couldn’t choose if they wanted to get behind Chris Christie or Marco Rubio or finally Ted Cruz as the anti-Trump candidate. Partially because of this divided field, Trump could run away with it.
Here we are in 2020. And we have a very similarly divided field. The Democratic establishment is perhaps more coherent. You know, they’ve worked together to run negative ads on Bernie. Bernie’s really the only candidate that’s received a sustained attack by televised paid advertising. For Amy to drop out and now Pete to drop out, that simply reduces the number of candidates in the field and increases the chance for Biden not only to hit the viability threshold of 15 percent, but to do very well on Super Tuesday.
JS: One of the races, the so-called down-ballot races that’s happening on Super Tuesday that you’ve been reporting on is in Texas. The congressional district 28 where Jessica Cisneros is battling against Henry Cuellar. Cuellar is the incumbent and one of the most conservative Democrats in the Congress. Tell us about Jessica Cisneros and her campaign against Henry Cuellar and why this is a particularly important race to keep an eye on.
LF: There are a lot of interesting primaries on Super Tuesday. But this House race — this South Texas House race — crystallizes the power structure, the struggle between entrenched moneyed interest and this new insurgent, progressive populist movement. It’s just clearly on display here in South Texas, where Cuellar is a very conservative Democrat. You know, he served in Rick Perry’s administration. So, you know, very Republican-friendly, he’s voted with Trump, over 70 percent of the time. Cuellar has received a lot of support from the business community. He’s the number one recipient of private prison campaign contributions. He’s the number two recipient of payday lender donations.
This campaign is really incredible because this is the very first time that the Koch Brothers super PAC — Americans for Prosperity Action — has gotten involved to help a Democrat. They’re spending money in this South Texas race to help Cuellar. Nancy Pelosi has sided with Cuellar. A lot of the big business community is pouring money into the South Texas district. In terms of Democrats and Republicans, you know, you don’t see this partisan divide here.
You see even Republican interest groups coming in to interfere with the Democratic Party and to keep Cuellar in office. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, they’ve gotten involved to endorse Cisneros, who’s you know, a very young immigration attorney, a very progressive activist who supports the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, union reform that would make it easier for workers to join a labor union if they choose. The last time we saw kind of an epic fight between established corporate interest and this progressive populist movement was the AOC primary against Joe Crowley and AOC prevailed. But I think now the establishment has its guard up. That’s why they’re spending so much money in South Texas to prevent another progressive upset.
It’s a terrible cliche, but this is a battle for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. There’s so much at stake at the presidential level. But I think for this one little House race, you just look at the level of spending. It’s much nastier and I think it will forecast whether other progressive populist candidates have a chance later this year.
JS: Lee Fang, thank you so much for your great reporting. I encourage people to follow it and to check out all of your work and thanks for being with us again on Intercepted.
LF: Thanks, Jeremy.
JS: Lee Fang is an investigative reporter for The Intercept with a long-standing interest and how public policy is influenced by organized interest groups and money. You can find him on twitter @lhfang.
[Music interlude.]
JS: As we watch the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party establishment line up behind Joe Biden, it is worth noting that this dynamic of the insurgent versus the establishment has permeated the history of electoral politics in this country. It was at the center of the famed, some would say notorious Democratic National Convention in 1968 in Chicago when Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy entered the convention with the most votes.
Walter Cronkite: Chicago Illinois, the convention of the Democratic Party, nominating tonight its candidate for the presidency. That man will be vice president Hubert Horatio Humphrey.
JS: Eugene McCarthy had run a fiercely anti-war campaign against the Democratic Party’s support for the Vietnam War. And as police attacked protesters in the streets outside the convention, the party bosses stole the nomination from McCarthy inside the hall.
Unidentified Person: What are you trying to strong-arm? He’s an enlisted delegate.
Unidentified Person: Police are now in the aisles here with billy clubs clearing people out.
Newscaster: This surely is the first time that policemen have ever entered the floor of a convention.
Newscaster: In the United States.
Unidentified Person: Police swirling all around us, people screaming being dragged to the paddy wagons, a scene of wild disorder.
Announcer: Twenty-one and one-half votes for Senator McCarthy.
WC: This is going to do it.
Announcer: And 103 and three-quarters —
[Cheers.]
WC: Vice President Hubert Humphrey is the nominee of the Democratic Party for the presidency of the United States.
JS: Now, in more recent years, we certainly saw Donald Trump destroy the establishment Republicans in the primary in 2016. Hillary Clinton failed to stop the challenge from Barack Obama in 2008. He could’ve been considered an insurgent in that scenario but she did succeed against Bernie Sanders in 2016. And while Clinton did win the popular vote by 3 million votes, Donald Trump won the electoral college quite definitively. Right now, the Democratic Party is preparing to intensify its effort to force Joe Biden through as the party’s nominee and to crush Bernie Sanders’ insurgency by any means necessary. We have not even seen a fraction of the dirty business that is about to go down in this primary.
So what can we expect to see in the weeks and months ahead in this battle from the establishment Democrats going against Bernie Sanders. Joining me now is a longtime Democratic Party activist and organizer, Peter Daou. Those of you active on Twitter may know him as one of the most vocal online supporters of Hillary Clinton’s campaign back in 2016, certainly on social media and as someone who frequently clashed with Sanders supporters or Clinton opponents. I had my own slew of arguments with him on Twitter over the years.
He worked for John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004 against George Bush and Dick Cheney. He worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2008 against Barack Obama and he worked on an independent initiative to support Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race. But this time? Peter Daou is all in for Bernie Sanders. He has seen the so-called opposition research files on Bernie Sanders that were compiled by the Clinton campaign universe and its supporters.
Peter Daou, welcome to Intercepted.
Former Hillary Clinton Adviser Peter Daou Rejects The Claims Bernie Sanders Has Not Been “Vetted”
Peter Daou: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
JS: What I find fascinating about watching your journey and the candor and honesty that you’re clearly showing is the story of how you ultimately have decided in this particular field in this year to support Bernie Sanders. What is it about his campaign that has put you front and center particularly on social media in trying to defend and promote the ideas of the Sanders campaign?
PD: The simplest answer to the question and I’ll elaborate on it is that he’s the only candidate in this race and really one of the only people in national politics calling for an overhaul of the entire system, questioning capitalism, questioning the entire establishment. He’s calling for political revolution, Jeremy, that’s quite an audacious thing, a bold and courageous thing. The word revolution is not that commonly used.
BS: I do believe we need a political revolution where millions of people stand up and say loudly and clearly that our government belongs to all of us, and not just a handful of wealthy campaign contributors.
PD: He has also sparked a massive grassroots movement that wants the same thing and that’s willing to back him up. That’s powerful, and that’s essential. I find myself at a point and over the past year or two, there’s been a very as you noted, a very open reexamination of my priorities. When I see kids in cages, when I see half the country can barely afford $400 while billionaires are buying $60 million condos on billionaires row in my hometown of New York and just leaving them empty, just bartering them for fun. When I see kids being shot in classrooms, when I see the torture of migrants. And these kids were in cages, now, of course, the family separation was really the Trump/Miller policy, but the cages existed under Obama and Pelosi.
So, I’m seeing these travesties, moral travesties, injustices that just don’t change. They just don’t get fixed. They don’t end and I finally reached a point, I thought, OK, I’m in my 50s now. I’ve got a family. Am I going to look back and keep accepting incrementalism, keep accepting sort of this mid, mushy midpoint between justice and injustice that the Democratic Party keeps going to? You know, well, we gotta appease some Republicans but some of these policies are not good, but we’ll keep others. You have to reach a point where you need moral clarity and Bernie Sanders and his campaign are providing moral clarity. He’s not afraid to say the things that need to be said to change this entire system. So that’s the long version of the answer.
JS: Peter, you recently tweeted “As a staunch Hillary advocate and Bernie critic in 2016, I was privy to the Bernie oppo book meaning opposition research book. I also did my own extensive research.” Talk about what opposition research you saw against Bernie Sanders and your response to the refrain that Bernie hasn’t been vetted.
PD: This really gets me quite infuriated. I keep getting people coming at me online and I see these constant comments from a lot of mainstream figures. You know, Bernie hasn’t been vetted just wait till he gets vetted.
JC: I think it’s obvious that he’s never been vetted into press. I’m not seeing the four-part series in The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News or anything else. So we’re in a whole new ball game here. And this game could end a little after mid-March.
PD: And then you’ll hear people saying there’s this massive trove of opposition research that the Republican, the RNC is holding, just waiting to unleash it on him. I can tell you categorically from everything I saw, and I’ll describe in more detail what I saw, that that’s a complete fabrication. There is no big treasure trove of Bernie Sanders oppo waiting to drop. That’s a tactic that’s being used, similarly, the way Bernie bros being used to tarnish the whole movement, the idea that he hasn’t been vetted is being used to tarnish his whole campaign. It’s really fear-mongering.
So, here’s the reality back in 2015, 2016, I was obviously very publicly pro-Hillary Clinton. And by as I said, by 2016, I went from being very favorable to Bernie Sanders to being quite critical of his campaign and his surrogates. I, at the time, became the CEO, early 2016, of a media company called Blue Nation Review, which I renamed Share Blue, and I have full editorial control, but the business was owned by David Brock, who clearly is another very, very pro-Clinton operative. What I did at the time was I tried to stay fact-based in my critiques of Bernie Sanders. So what I did was I had an entire research team. I had writers, journalists, you know, people all working for me at this company. I said, “OK, we’re going to dig into every policy difference between Bernie and Hillary. We’re going to find all this stuff that may be negative.” You know, stuff like the early NRA stuff, and other things that I thought would show that he wasn’t everything that he was saying that he was.
I was also given, I can’t share the source just because of confidentiality, a comprehensive oppo book — opposition research book on Bernie Sanders — and I’m talking not five pages, ten pages, I’m talking 70, 80 100 pages long, digging into comments from the 70s and 60s and just about everything you would want to know about Bernie Sanders. And I’ve seen oppo books before because I’ve worked at two presidential campaigns, it was clearly a professional work. It was shared among very few people. And it was thorough, thoroughly done and professionally put together by, clearly by expert researchers. So here’s the thing, Jeremy, nothing I’ve seen today or to date, since then shows that there’s anything left that hasn’t already really been aired. Now, maybe there could be something that was not in there, maybe a comment that he made in 1973 that just the researchers didn’t find. But overall, the bulk of it is really the communism, socialism stuff. It’s some policy issues. It’s, you know, the essay that he wrote, I don’t know 40, 50 years ago. It’s all this stuff has been aired publicly in one form or the other since then.
So again, categorically, after seeing a massive amount of research on Bernie Sanders in 2016, a lot of it confidential. There just is no big treasure trove waiting to drop on him. It’s a lie. The one thing that I’m confident of is there are going to be no surprises. And I can’t say that for any of the other candidates in the race. I certainly can’t say that about Joe Biden. I can’t say it about anybody else who is still among the frontrunners. Bernie is really the safest bet as far as I’m concerned and from my experience.
JS: You know, Peter, because you are our guest today, I feel like we can have an intelligent discussion about the dynamic I want to present to you which is that what goes unstated because corporate media outlets are not actually embedded in any way whatsoever in social, racial, economic, gender justice movements, is that for many people on the left in this country, Bernie is not hardline enough on certain war positions. His comments on Obama’s drone strikes, some of Bernie Sanders’ past positions and votes.
You know, I know just from talking to many, many people who have been involved with organizing on justice issues, that there are a lot of leftists in this country who are essentially holding their nose to support Bernie Sanders because they don’t view him as a revolutionary socialist and that actually Sanders is expanding the tent. And he’s getting people that would possibly vote third party or would sit out the election or would vote libertarian.
He’s getting so many people who are militants in this country to consider in the case of New York State registering as Democrats, and yet we never talked about that. We talk about Bernie’s dividing. Bernie’s going to hand the election to Trump. Bernie Sanders is probably the best chance Democrats have had in decades to encourage people who are outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party to contemplate voting the Democratic Party ticket in November.
PD: 100 percent and look, I’m actually one of those people who’s more to the left of Bernie on certain issues. I think a lot of people would not believe that considering what I did in 2016. But in 2016, I made what I thought was a moral judgment of electing the first woman president and that representation being so critically important for the country, was I wrong about the moral judgment? People will say, many people say yes, some people will say no, but I was coming from a place of “OK, I think I’m doing the right thing here.” Now, of course, I’ve reconsidered, reassessed and looked back and looked in my soul and bared my soul to people saying, Look, I’m taking a look at what this Democratic Party’s leadership in the 20 years I’ve been in politics, the moral injustices around us are, yes, the fault of the Republican Party and the far-right to a large extent, but they’re also the blame and the fault of those who will not stand up to them for whatever their motives, and that includes the entire Democratic Party leadership.
Let’s just talk about drones for a second. When Obama was elected, I felt hopeful like the rest of the country. Then he goes ahead and expands these programs. He expands the drone program. He then conducts extrajudicial assassination which is something that I don’t believe Bush, he had contemplated but hadn’t done. So they actually killed somebody without due process.
BO: When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens and when neither the United States nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot, his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team.
PD: Indefinite detention continued. Now these are profound human rights abuses, right? And this was being done by Democrats who control every branch. So from my perspective, you’re right, Bernie Sanders is really not calling in many ways for enough of a revolution. I’ve said the Democratic party should be calling for a national strike. Now whenever I ask for stuff like that, I say should be certainly nonviolent. I’m a big believer in absolute nonviolence. I grew up in a war so I would never advocate violence.
But to your point, Bernie Sanders is actually one of the few politicians in this country, he’s seen extremely favorably because he sticks by his principles. I’ve said this a billion times since 2000 when I started. People want political leaders who believe in what they believe in. Democrats keep thinking “Oh, if we just pander to appease to some Republican voters and be wishy-washy. They’re going to like us.” No, they’re going to hate you because they’re going to see that you’re pandering and you have no principles. The way you win is with somebody like Bernie who just is unapologetic about his values.
JS: Give people a sense of how the Democratic Party’s establishment or the elite wing of the Democratic Party responds, what is their playbook look like when facing an insurgent campaign like that of Bernie Sanders?
PD: Let me give it a little bit of of color to the whole thing. So when I worked for Kerry’s campaign, and for Clinton’s campaign, I actually lived in the Beltway. I lived in Washington. I lived in Arlington for Clinton’s campaign and literally near K Street for the Kerry campaign because that’s where its headquarters were. So here I am a house music producer turned Democratic progressive activist, online guy sitting here among the absolute elites of the media, and Democratic and Republican politics because it’s, you know, it’s quite incestuous. Everybody knows everybody in Washington. Everybody goes to the same parties. Everybody goes to the same few hotspots, and you see them all being, you know, buddy, buddy with one another. So, there I was really an outsider, but inside the system and I have to say it was just illuminating to see how the machine protects itself.
From the outside the Democratic Party leadership, OK, there are some amazing Democrats. I’m not trying to paint the whole party with a broad brush, but there are certainly Democratic leaders who still consider people like Trump and McConnell and others, you know, they say they’re adversaries but behind the scenes, they’re all part of the same system. And that system enriches everybody inside. It enriches Democrats. It enriches Republicans.
So to your question the way the establishment works, it will fight fiercely like as fiercely as possible and it’ll fight dirty too. Like this whole you know, Bernie bro thing trying to taint a massive diverse coalition as a bunch of raging young white males, trying to go from a few trolls on Twitter to taint a whole movement. They will fight dirty, Jeremy and they will fight hard. The party’s going to fight hard and do everything they can to have either Biden or somebody like that take it, take the nomination.
JS: Peter Daou, thank you very much for being with us on Intercepted.
PD: My pleasure. Thank you.
JS: Peter Daou has advised major political figures, including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, and was described by the New York Times as “one of the most prominent political bloggers in the nation.” He is now supporting Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic nomination. Peter Daou is the author of “Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace.”
[Music interlude.]
JS: And that does it for this week’s show. Tonight we will be doing special coverage of Super Tuesday along with our friends at Democracy Now. That will be from 7 PM to midnight Eastern. You can watch the live stream of that five-hour program at theintercept.com or democracynow.org. You can follow us on Twitter @intercepted and Instagram @InterceptedPodcast. If you like what we do on this program, you can support our show by going to TheIntercept.com/join to become a sustaining member.
Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our lead producer is Jack D’Isidoro. Our producer is Laura Flynn. Elise Swain is our associate producer and graphic designer. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Transcription for this program is done by Nuria Marquez Martinez. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. Until next week, I’m Jeremy Scahill.


theintercept--2020-03-03--Bernie Sanders and the Establishment Red Scare Meltdown

U.S. Official Hints at Possible Plea Deal for Julian Assange
The U.S. ambassador to Australia said there could be a “resolution” to the Justice Department’s pursuit of Assange.


theintercept--2020-03-03--As Another Syrian Child Drowns at Sea, Greece and Turkey Trade Blame on Social Media

after Europe ’ s conscience was stung by the image of a young Syrian refugee ’ s lifeless body washed up on a beach , another Syrian boy drowned on Monday when a dinghy filled with refugees and asylum-seekers fleeing Turkey for the safety of Greece capsized in the Aegean Sea .
Unlike in 2015 , when the horrifying images of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi face down in the Turkish sand prompted an immediate outpouring of sympathy for the plight of Syrian refugees , the drowning of the 6-year-old off the Greek island of Lesvos this week has attracted little attention @ @ @ @ @ @ @ climate in Europe and the United States has changed dramatically since then , as political leaders who offered shelter to Syrians fleeing chaos at home have been either replaced or cowed into closing their borders by a xenophobic , populist backlash .
Another factor is that no photographs of the victim have emerged .
Instead , coverage of the tense stand-off between Greece and Turkey over which side is to blame for the appalling treatment of refugees and migrants at their land and sea borders has been illustrated by selectively edited video clips @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Monday , as news of the boy ’ s death was reported , Greek officials released video of its own coast guard officers screaming “ Go back !
” at a dinghy filled with migrants and refugees in the eastern Aegean .
The Greek news site Kathimerini reported that coast guard officials said that the dinghy seen in the footage was the same one that later capsized off the coast of Lesvos , killing the young boy .
According to Greece , the video showed that a nearby Turkish patrol boat seen in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ migrant craft to Greek waters , in concert with people smugglers .
Turkish officials responded by sending news organizations their own video , which showed a Greek coast guard ship and patrol boat repelling a different migrant dinghy , forcing it back with poles and firing warning shots into the sea .
Despite some confusion over the two video clips , it was clear that each showed a different boat , since the dinghy seen in the Turkish footage had black markings on it , whereas the one seen in the Greek footage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right-wing prime minister , Kyriakos Mitsotakis , said in a statement after a phone call with President Donald Trump that the American leader had voiced support for his government ’ s decision to shut its border and stop accepting asylum claims from anyone who entered its territory illegally , despite a surge in Syrians fleeing their homes during a government offensive on the rebel-held territory of Idlib .
Trump , the Greek prime minister ’ s office said , “ recognized the right of Greece to enforce the law on its borders.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have been displaced by the Syrian government offensive on the final pocket of rebel-controlled territory in Idlib .
Turkey , which already shelters millions of Syrians , has pressed Europe to help share the burden by opening its borders with Greece to refugees and asylum-seekers .
After taking visiting European leaders to his country ’ s land border with Turkey on Tuesday , Mitsotakis accused Turkey of attempting to blackmail Europe .
“ My duty is to protect the sovereignty of my own country , ” the prime minister said in a statement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the same time , Greece is also doing Europe a great service .
The borders of Greece are the external borders of the European Union .
We will protect them.
” As the International Rescue Committee noted in a statement on the crisis , there has been a surge in violence recently on the Greek islands of Lesvos , Samos , and Chios , “ with asylum seekers and aid workers being targeted by local populations who have had enough of bearing the brunt of European migration policies.
” “ For almost five @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrival of refugees on the islands ; reception centers are at six times their capacity , with almost 40,000 people living in centers with space for 6,000 , ” Imogen Sudbery of the IRC said .
“ It is shameful , ” she added , that Syrians fleeing the violence , “ arrive on Europe ’ s shores only to be threatened by the European forces to which they are looking for safety.
” “ It is clear that vulnerable people are being used as pawns in a bigger political context , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beyond the reach of a wealthy and stable region like Europe to welcome people seeking protection in a fair and dignified way .
E.U .
member states need to step in with a solution .
”

Nearly five years after Europe’s conscience was stung by the image of a young Syrian refugee’s lifeless body washed up on a beach, another Syrian boy drowned on Monday when a dinghy filled with refugees and asylum-seekers fleeing Turkey for the safety of Greece capsized in the Aegean Sea.
Unlike in 2015, when the horrifying images of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi face down in the Turkish sand prompted an immediate outpouring of sympathy for the plight of Syrian refugees, the drowning of the 6-year-old off the Greek island of Lesvos this week has attracted little attention.
One reason is that the political climate in Europe and the United States has changed dramatically since then, as political leaders who offered shelter to Syrians fleeing chaos at home have been either replaced or cowed into closing their borders by a xenophobic, populist backlash.
Another factor is that no photographs of the victim have emerged. Instead, coverage of the tense stand-off between Greece and Turkey over which side is to blame for the appalling treatment of refugees and migrants at their land and sea borders has been illustrated by selectively edited video clips released by the two governments.
On Monday, as news of the boy’s death was reported, Greek officials released video of its own coast guard officers screaming “Go back!” at a dinghy filled with migrants and refugees in the eastern Aegean.
The Greek news site Kathimerini reported that coast guard officials said that the dinghy seen in the footage was the same one that later capsized off the coast of Lesvos, killing the young boy.
According to Greece, the video showed that a nearby Turkish patrol boat seen in the background had “escorted” the migrant craft to Greek waters, in concert with people smugglers.
Turkish officials responded by sending news organizations their own video, which showed a Greek coast guard ship and patrol boat repelling a different migrant dinghy, forcing it back with poles and firing warning shots into the sea.
NEW: The Turkish authorities have sent us this video which they claim was filmed at 0726 this morning off Bodrum. It shows Greek coastguard carrying out ‘pushbacks’ of migrant dinghies. Shots are also fired into the water. More @SkyNews pic.twitter.com/GrlXGNIRTt — Mark Stone (@Stone_SkyNews) March 2, 2020
Despite some confusion over the two video clips, it was clear that each showed a different boat, since the dinghy seen in the Turkish footage had black markings on it, whereas the one seen in the Greek footage did not.
Greece’s new right-wing prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, said in a statement after a phone call with President Donald Trump that the American leader had voiced support for his government’s decision to shut its border and stop accepting asylum claims from anyone who entered its territory illegally, despite a surge in Syrians fleeing their homes during a government offensive on the rebel-held territory of Idlib. Trump, the Greek prime minister’s office said, “recognized the right of Greece to enforce the law on its borders.”
Since December, nearly a million Syrians have been displaced by the Syrian government offensive on the final pocket of rebel-controlled territory in Idlib. Turkey, which already shelters millions of Syrians, has pressed Europe to help share the burden by opening its borders with Greece to refugees and asylum-seekers.
After taking visiting European leaders to his country’s land border with Turkey on Tuesday, Mitsotakis accused Turkey of attempting to blackmail Europe. “My duty is to protect the sovereignty of my own country,” the prime minister said in a statement tweeted by his office. “At the same time, Greece is also doing Europe a great service. The borders of Greece are the external borders of the European Union. We will protect them.”
As the International Rescue Committee noted in a statement on the crisis, there has been a surge in violence recently on the Greek islands of Lesvos, Samos, and Chios, “with asylum seekers and aid workers being targeted by local populations who have had enough of bearing the brunt of European migration policies.”
“For almost five years Greece has struggled to manage the arrival of refugees on the islands; reception centers are at six times their capacity, with almost 40,000 people living in centers with space for 6,000,” Imogen Sudbery of the IRC said. “It is shameful,” she added, that Syrians fleeing the violence, “arrive on Europe’s shores only to be threatened by the European forces to which they are looking for safety.”
“It is clear that vulnerable people are being used as pawns in a bigger political context,” Sudbery said. “It is not beyond the reach of a wealthy and stable region like Europe to welcome people seeking protection in a fair and dignified way. E.U. member states need to step in with a solution.”