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After the Flip, What’s Next for Manafort, Mueller and Trump?

Now that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, has entered into a cooperation agreement with special counsel Robert Mueller, the question on nearly every observer’s mind is, “What comes next?”

The answer depends, of course, on whether you’re Manafort, Mueller or Trump. Although there are numerous Rumsfeldian “unknowns” in the mix, this much appears clear for each member of the trio:

Manafort

If you’re Paul Manafort, your days as a nattily attired Washington lobbyist and power broker are long gone. No more ostrich jackets. No more $21,000 watches. For the foreseeable future, they’ll be replaced, as they have been for months now, by orange jumpsuits and wristband IDs.

By pleading guilty in a D.C. courtroom Friday to charges of federal conspiracy related to your long and corrupt record as a lobbyist for the government of Ukraine, and obstruction of justice for attempted witness-tampering to cover up that record, you face 10 years behind bars, on top of the potential sentence you may receive as a result of your conviction on eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud in a Virginia courtroom last month.

Your co-conspirators were your former business partner, Richard Gates, who has been cooperating with Mueller since February, and Russian-Ukrainian political consultant Konstantin Kilimnik, who was separately indicted by Mueller in June.

And it gets worse. In accepting the cooperation agreement, you also admitted your guilt on the other 10 counts alleged against you in the Virginia case, on which the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. You’ve also waived your appeal rights and any affirmative defenses based on otherwise applicable statutes of limitations that your lawyers might invoke to block future prosecutions.

And it gets worse. Under the terms of your cooperation agreement, you will forfeit an estimated $46 million in cash and real estate, including your home in the Hamptons, your condo in Trump Tower and another property in Brooklyn.

And it gets worse still. The cooperation agreement requires you to submit to debriefings with Mueller’s team, to turn over requested documents and other materials, and to testify “at any proceeding in the District of Columbia or elsewhere as requested by the Government.”

At a minimum, Mueller is going to want to know every last detail you can ’fess up to on the nature of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian nationals; the reasons why, after joining the Trump campaign, you promised to provide Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska with private briefings; and whether Trump has ever offered to pardon you for your many federal crimes.

Speaking of pardons, whatever Trump has told you or signaled, “forgettaboutit.” Now that you’ve flipped on him, you’re going to experience the full force of his malignant narcissism. I’m not talking about Trump’s boorish personality or his childlike use of superlatives to describe himself and his accomplishments. I’m talking about a genuine mental disorder defined as an amalgam of narcissism, anti-social personality disorder, paranoia and sadism—which many leading experts insist the president exhibits.

Trump is going to turn his back on you. And even if he relents, a pardon for federal crimes won’t save you from state prosecutions for tax fraud in New York or bank fraud in California, among other serious charges.

If—but only if—you fulfill the conditions of your agreement, Mueller will move to dismiss the outstanding criminal charges against you in both Virginia and D.C. Otherwise, they will all get reinstated, and you’ll likely remain in prison for the rest of your life.

You must be kicking yourself for not reaching out to Mueller sooner.

Mueller

If you’re the special prosecutor, you’ve flexed your muscles again. You’ve proven yourself to be a masterful legal architect who runs a multilayered operation without press leaks or appearances on cable news. And, unlike the president, your public approval rating is rising. Nothing succeeds in America like success.

To date, you and your team have convicted seven individuals, including Manafort and Michael Flynn, Trump’s first director of national security. You’ve also filed two lengthy and detailed indictments against 25 Russians and three Russian companies, charging them with conspiracies to defraud the United States during the 2016 election.

In addition, you’re investigating Trump for obstruction of justice. That aspect of the inquiry includes the May 2017 firing of former FBI Director James Comey; Trump’s attempt in July 2017 to rewrite Donald Jr.’s false account of the Trump Tower confab; and the president’s ongoing threats to fire both you and your immediate supervisor, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Long before bagging Manafort, you referred an investigation of Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime consigliere and personal fixer, to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. On Aug. 21, Cohen admitted to committing two campaign finance felonies stemming from hush-money payments to former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film star Stormy Daniels in the fall of 2016. As Cohen stated in open court, the money was doled out “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump, in an attempt to influence the election. In effect, Cohen’s plea rendered the president an unindicted co-conspirator, à la circa 1974.

Going forward, there is no reason for you to let up. You still need to close the deal around the core allegations of the Russia probe and let the rest of us know whether there is hard evidence that proves Trump or any of his aides and associates conspired with Russian interests to sway the election. The Trump Tower assignation comes close, but there’s likely much more.

You have two basic vehicles for delivering the knockout punch: new indictments, and your final report to Rosenstein, due at the conclusion of your work. Although your next move is impossible to predict (a “known unknown”), I’m betting on a fresh round of charges, before or after the midterms. If I were Jared Kushner, Donnie Jr. or Roger Stone, I’d have trouble sleeping.

Whomever you target next, I don’t think your investigation is anywhere near over, Rudy Giuliani’s Fox News apoplexy notwithstanding. Compared with other special counsel investigations, you’re actually moving at a brisk clip. The average length of special counsel probes dating back to Watergate is 2.5 years. Yours, which is more complex than most, has another year to go before reaching that vintage.

And then there is the madman in the high castle, aka the 45th president of the United States. Perhaps you’ve already decided whether you’ll subpoena him to testify before the grand jury you’ve convened in D.C. You know he’ll never volunteer to speak to you or members of your team face to face under oath. He hasn’t got the spine, or the guile. Beneath the bombast, he’s actually the biggest snowflake ever to occupy the Oval Office. Maybe, in the end, you’ll conclude a subpoena won’t be needed to prove obstruction, or that the protracted court battle a subpoena could trigger would be an unnecessary distraction.

In any event, we’ll be watching.

Trump

If you are the president, and it’s true that you’re a malignant narcissist, then you are your own worst enemy and a danger to others. One thing is for sure: As I predicted (no great feat) in a Truthdig column way back in May 2017—in the pre-Guiliani days, when it seemed you would assemble a crack legal defense team—you would turn out to be a nightmare of a client.

If anything, you’ve exceeded expectations.

If only you had held your paranoia in check, not fired Comey and stayed away from Twitter, “the Russia thing” might have blown over by now. But you can’t control yourself, and you can’t stop lying about the neo-McCarthy “witch hunt” that’s out to get you.

Now that Mueller has hunted down seven witches and counting, you find yourself increasingly isolated. In addition to those already convicted, David Pecker—publisher of the National Enquirer, who helped bury your tryst with McDougal—has been granted immunity in Cohen’s case and is cooperating with prosecutors. Same goes for Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of your very own Trump Organization. You also have a whistleblower to contend with in the high-ranking official who penned the anonymous New York Times op-ed published Sept. 5, titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

What, then, are your options?

Do you make good on your threats and fire Rosenstein and Mueller? Do you issue preemptive pardons for yourself and your family members? Wouldn’t that risk impeachment? Even worse, wouldn’t doing so make you look weak to the dwindling numbers of true believers who still buy the snake-oil white nativism you peddle?

Your best option may be to sit back and let others, like Manafort and, in the coming months, maybe Stone and Kushner, “twist slowly in the wind” while you take shelter in the long-standing Justice Department policy that precludes the indictment of a sitting president. Just remember: That policy has never been tested in court.

This isn’t reality TV, Mr. President. It’s reality, and it’s coming for you.

Trump Slaps China With $200 Billion More in Tariffs

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration will impose tariffs on $200 billion more in Chinese goods starting next week, escalating a trade war between the world’s two biggest economies and potentially raising prices on goods ranging from handbags to bicycle tires.

The tariffs will start at 10 percent, beginning Monday of next week, and then rise to 25 percent on Jan. 1.

President Donald Trump made the announcement Monday in a move that is sure to ratchet up hostilities between Washington and Beijing. Trump has already imposed 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods. And China has retaliated in kind, hitting American soybeans, among other goods, in a shot at the president’s supporters in the U.S. farm belt.

Beijing has warned that it would hit an additional $60 billion in American goods if Trump ordered more tariffs. If China does retaliate, Trump threatened Monday to add a further $267 billion in Chinese imports to the target list. That would raise the total to $517 billion — covering nearly everything China sells the United States.

After a public comment period, the administration said Monday that it had withdrawn some items from its preliminary list of $200 billion in Chinese imports to be taxed, including child-safety products like bicycle helmets. And in a victory for Apple Inc. and its American customers, the administration removed smart watches and some other consumer electronics products from the list of goods to be targeted by the new tariffs.

At the same time, the administration said it remains open to negotiations with China.

“China has had many opportunities to fully address our concerns,” Trump said in a statement. “I urge China’s leaders to take swift action to end their country’s unfair trade practices.”

The two countries are fighting over Beijing’s ambitions to supplant American technological supremacy. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has charged that China is using predatory tactics to obtain foreign technology. These tactics include hacking U.S. companies to steal their trade secrets and forcing them to turn over their know-how in exchange for access to the Chinese market.

Trump has also complained about America’s gaping trade deficit — $336 billion last year — with China, its biggest trading partner.

In May, in fact, it looked briefly as if Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He had brokered a truce built around a Chinese offer to buy enough American farm products and liquefied natural gas to put a dent in the trade deficit. But Trump quickly backed away from the truce.

In the first two rounds of tariffs, the Trump administration took care to try to spare American consumers from the direct impact of the import taxes. The tariffs focused on industrial products, not on things Americans buy at the mall or via Amazon.

By expanding the list to $200 billion of Chinese imports, Trump risks spreading the pain to ordinary households. The administration is targeting a bewildering variety of products — from sockeye salmon to baseball gloves to bamboo mats — forcing U.S. companies to scramble for suppliers outside China, absorb the import taxes or pass along the cost to their customers.

In a filing with the government, for instance, Giant Bicycles Inc. of Newbury Park, California, noting that 94 percent of imported bicycles came from China last year, complained that “there is no way our business can shift its supply chain to a new market” to avoid the tariffs and warned “a tariff increase of this magnitude will inevitably be paid for by the American consumer.”

Trump campaigned for the presidency on a pledge to tax imports and rewrite or tear up trade agreements that he said put U.S. companies and workers at a disadvantage. But many analysts say his combative actions seem unlikely to succeed.

“The president’s negotiating tactics do not work well with China’s way of thinking,” said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at SS Economics in Los Angeles.

Sohn said he thinks that China will retaliate against every U.S. tariff and that the back-and-forth sparring will escalate until the U.S. is taxing all Chinese imports — $524 billion last year.

Still, he said, the U.S. economy appears strong enough to withstand the damage.

“In the short term, we will have higher prices and fewer jobs than we would have had otherwise,” Sohn said. “Fortunately, the U.S. economy is humming, so we don’t have to worry as much about what this will do to our economy.”

Sohn said the Trump administration is pursuing a legitimate goal of getting China to stop violating international trade rules but that it should have enlisted support from other trading partners, such as the European Union, Canada and Mexico, and presented Beijing with a united front.

On the contrary, Trump has picked fights with each of those trading partners — from imposing tariffs on imported steel and aluminum to demanding that Mexico and China transform the North American Free Trade Agreement into a deal more favorable to the United States.

Trump’s tariffs on China raise costs and create uncertainty for companies that have built supply chains that span the Pacific Ocean. Some companies are looking to move out of China to dodge the tariffs, said Ted Murphy, a partner at the Baker McKenzie law firm. Some will likely move to other low-cost countries that aren’t in the line of fire. Some will bring operations to the United States — one of Trump’s goals.

For years, multinational businesses “went where the labor was cheapest,” Murphy said. “Now the calculus is more complicated.”

____

AP Writer Ken Thomas in Washington contributed to this report.

Larry Kudlow Confirms GOP Plan to Shred Safety Net After Midterms

As the GOP plows ahead with another round of budget-exploding tax cuts for the rich just before the crucial 2018 midterms, President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser and former television personality Larry Kudlow confirmed on Monday that the White House will push for cuts to life-saving safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security if the GOP retains control of Congress in November.

“We have to be tougher on spending,” Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, declared in remarks to the Economic Club of New York.

Asked when Social Security and Medicare will be targeted for “reforms,” which, as one advocacy group noted, is “code for massive cuts,” Kudlow said, “Everyone will look at that—probably next year.”

“Believe them when they say they are coming after Medicare and Social Security,” Topher Spiro, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, wrote on Twitter in response to Kudlow’s comments. “This election is the last chance to stop them.”

Believe them when they say they are coming after Medicare and Social Security. This election is the last chance to stop them. https://t.co/YPVQKZ19Bb

— Topher Spiro (@TopherSpiro) September 17, 2018

In the months since Trump signed into law the GOP’s initial $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich, progressives have been warning that the White House and Republicans would attempt to use the resulting deficit explosion as a justification to slash popular programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Kudlow’s comments represent the latest admission that this is precisely the GOP’s plan of action if they are able to keep control of Congress in November.

“This is wholly unacceptable: Republicans giving huge tax breaks to the rich and now coming after the vital programs that millions of Americans rely upon,” the progressive coalition Tax March declared in a tweet on Monday. “We won’t allow it.”

Last year, the #GOP deliberately chose to give the rich & big corps massive tax cuts that place these vital services on the chopping block.

Now they want to do it again with #TaxScam2! We can’t let the rich profit at the expense of working families. https://t.co/Uk2uM084Qt

— For Tax Fairness (@4TaxFairness) September 17, 2018

It’s as if this was part of the #GOP‘s plan the entire time! Give the rich & big corporations massive tax breaks that balloon our national debt, then demand cuts to #SocialSecurity, #Medicare, #Medicaid, & #education. #HandsOff https://t.co/9pfDYrIQeF

— For Tax Fairness (@4TaxFairness) September 17, 2018

Republicans have long placed obliterating the safety net near the top of their party’s list of priorities, but their attack on key public programs will likely take on even more intensity if they ram through Tax Scam 2.0, which experts say could cost an additional $3 trillion over ten years.

“For weeks, Republicans have been misleading the American public—the truth is they have been trying to cut Medicare for years,” the advocacy group Protect Our Care noted. “Today, Larry Kudlow, Director of the National Economic Council, confirmed that they still have their sights set on Americans’ care.

Despite Trump’s insistence on the campaign trail that he would not go after Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the president’s “morally bankrupt” 2019 budget proposal released earlier this year called for $1.7 trillion in cuts to safety net programs—including hundreds of billions in cuts to the very programs he vowed to shield.

U.S. Targets Volunteers Who Aided Immigrants

Nine members of No More Deaths, an Arizona faith-based advocacy group, are facing federal charges, including—for some—harboring and conspiracy. Their crimes? Providing food, water and a place to stay for migrants attempting to cross the U.S. border with Mexico. According to a report from The Intercept on Sunday, the Justice Department is “fighting to keep the communications of law enforcement officials celebrating [the nine members’] prosecution from becoming public.”

During the summer of 2017, No More Deaths members responded to distress calls from migrants crossing the border at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calls “incredibly hostile to those that need water to survive.”

The volunteers attempted to contact the U.S. Border Patrol for help, but according to The Intercept, their calls went unanswered for hours. Taking matters into their own hands, the volunteers drove their pickup trucks into the desert. But while Border Patrol agents ignored the calls, they began tracking the volunteers’ movements, which they would do for more than a year.

Last week, lawyers for the volunteers filed motions to convince Arizona Magistrate Judge Bruce Macdonald to drop the charges. Attached to those motions were exhibits that included text messages between U.S. Border Patrol and Fish and Wildlife Service agents, in which they appear to be celebrating the volunteers’ upcoming arrests and charges.

The Justice Department moved to seal the motions, but The Intercept was able to download them from a court records database called PACER (Public Access to Electronic Records) before it could. According to The Intercept:

The exhibits include text messages between a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee and a Border Patrol agent, in which the Fish and Wildlife employee declares ‘Love it’ in response to the prosecution of the volunteers. Described in the text messages as ‘bean droppers,’ volunteers with the group No More Deaths and their organization are referred to by name in the communications between federal law enforcement officials, who describe, with apparent glee, the government’s ‘action against them.’

Additional evidence that the government specifically targeted No More Deaths includes a meeting with Robin Reineke, a cultural anthropologist and director of the Colibrí Center for Human Rights, an internationally renowned organization that repatriates the remains of migrants who die in the desert. In what The Intercept calls a sworn declaration, Reineke says that during the meeting, “a senior Border Patrol agent angrily told her that because of the bad press No More Deaths stirred up for his employer, the agency’s plan was to ‘shut them down.’ ”

“I got a really strong sense of retribution, revenge,” Reineke told The Intercept, adding, “he didn’t like what No More Deaths was saying to the press about Border Patrol. … I really got the strong impression that he wanted to see the camp shut down and gone.”

The Justice Department is requesting that Reineke’s declaration be sealed, too.

Nine members of No More Deaths are facing at least misdemeanor charges. One, Scott Warren, also is battling harboring and conspiracy charges, because he gave two immigrants food, water and a place to stay for three days.

Read more and see the documents at The Intercept.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Pleads Case for ‘Medicare for All’

New York congressional candidate and democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defended a key (and widely supported) pillar of her progressive platform—Medicare for All—on Sunday, saying such systems are “not just pie in the sky” but have been proven in other Western democracies and would be “good for our future.”

Ocasio-Cortez made the comments on CNN‘s “State of the Union” when pressed by host Jake Tapper about how she proposes to fund a platform that also includes a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free public college and trade school, and student loan debt cancellation.

She stressed that “one of the things that we need to realize” is that “Medicare for all would save the American people a very large amount of money.”

“And what we see as well is that these systems are not just pie in the sky.” She noted that “many of them are accomplished by every modern, civilized democracy in the Western world.” For example, she said, “the United Kingdom has a form of single-payer health care, Canada, France, Germany.”

“What we need to realize is that these investments are better and they are good for our future. These are generational investments… they’re not short-term Band-Aids, but they are really profound decisions about who we want to be as a nation… and how we want to act as the wealthiest nation in the history of the world.”

She went on to acknowledge the “political realities” the prove barriers to needed reforms. “They don’t always happen with just the wave of a wand. But we can work to make these things happen.”

Ocasio-Cortez addressed the same issue last month with CNN‘s Chris Cuomo. “People talk about the sticker shock of Medicare for All—they do not talk about the sticker shock of the cost of our existing system,” she said.

“We only have empty pockets when it comes to the morally right things to do,” she said at the time, “but when it comes to tax cuts for billionaires and when it comes to unlimited war, we seem to be able to invent that money very easily.”

Watch the new exchange below:

Roads Closed as 2 Fall Ill in City Where Poisonings Took Place

LONDON—British police closed roads and called a hazardous response team Sunday night after two people became ill at a restaurant in the English city where a Russian ex-spy and his daughter were poisoned with a chemical nerve agent.

Wiltshire Police described the emergency steps taken in response to “a medical incident” in Salisbury as precautions. The city spent months with quarantine tents and investigators in full-body protective gear combing for evidence after Sergei Skripal and his adult daughter were found unconscious on a bench in March.

Its residents were put back on edge in June when a man and a woman living in a nearby town was hospitalized with signs of exposure to the same Soviet-made nerve agent, Novichok. The woman, 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess, died.

Britain’s counter-terrorism police said this month they think Sturgess’ boyfriend found a counterfeit perfume bottle containing remnants of the substance originally applied on the front door of Skripals home in Salisbury.

The conditions of a man and woman who got sick at Prezzo restaurant in Salisbury was under investigation.

“As a precautionary measure, the restaurant and surrounding roads have been cordoned off while officers attend the scene and establish the circumstances surrounding what has led them to fall ill,” Wiltshire police said in a statement.

British prosecutors have charged two Russian men in absentia with poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. They have alleged Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov were Russian intelligence agents, which they and Moscow have denied.

Kavanaugh’s Accuser Comes Forward

WASHINGTON—The woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct when they were in high school has come forward, alleging in an interview that Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, clumsily tried to remove her clothing and covered her mouth when she tried to scream.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Christine Blasey Ford told The Washington Post in her first interview. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

Ford, now 51 and a clinical psychology professor at Palo Alto University in California, says she was able to get away after Kavanaugh’s friend jumped on top of them and everyone tumbled.

Kavanaugh, now 53 and a federal appeals judge in Washington, has denied the allegation. He repeated that denial again Sunday through the White House.

“I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time,” Kavanaugh said.

Top Senate Democrats, including New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, immediately called for postponement of a Thursday vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee on whether to recommend that the full Senate confirm Kavanaugh to replace retired Justice Anthony Kennedy on the nation’s highest court. Republicans gave no indication Sunday that they would do so.

A spokesman for Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Judiciary committee’s Republican chairman, said Kavanaugh already went through several days of hearings and was investigated by the FBI. He said the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who was first notified of the allegation in late July, should have brought the matter to the panel earlier.

“It raises a lot of questions about Democrats’ tactics and motives,” said Taylor Foy, the spokesman.

The White House accused Feinstein, who revealed the existence of the letter late last week, of mounting an “11th hour attempt to delay his confirmation.” Both Democratic and Republican senators questioned her handling of the allegation.

Feinstein called on the FBI to investigate Ford’s story “before the Senate moves forward on this nominee.”

Kavanaugh’s nomination by President Donald Trump has divided the Senate, with most Democrats opposing him and most Republicans supporting him.

But the allegations of sexual misconduct, particularly coming amid the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment, coupled with Ford’s emergence could complicate matters, especially as key Republican senators, including Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, are under enormous pressure from outside groups who want them to oppose Kavanaugh on grounds that as a justice he could vote to undercut the Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion in the U.S.

Collins and Murkowski have not said how they will vote. Neither senator is on the Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled to vote on a recommendation for the lifetime appointment.

Ford told the Post that Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” she says — corralled her into a bedroom during a house party in Maryland in the early 1980s when she was around 15 and Kavanaugh was around 17. She says Kavanaugh groped her over her clothes, grinded his body against hers and tried to take off her one-piece swimsuit and the outfit she wore over it.

Kavanaugh covered her mouth with his hand when she tried to scream, she says. She escaped when Kavanaugh’s friend jumped on them and everyone tumbled, she says.

In the interview, Ford says she never revealed what had happened to her until 2012, when she and her husband sought couples therapy.

Portions of her therapist’s notes, which Ford provided to the Post, do not mention Kavanaugh by name but say Ford reported being attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.”

Kavanaugh attended a private school for boys in Maryland while Ford attended a nearby school.

Ford’s husband, Russell Ford, also told the newspaper that his wife described during therapy being trapped in a room with two drunken boys and that one of them had pinned her to a bed, molested her and tried to prevent from screaming. He said he recalled his wife using Kavanaugh’s last name and expressing concern that Kavanaugh — then a federal judge — might someday be nominated to the Supreme Court.

The therapist’s notes say four boys were involved, but Ford says that was an error by the therapist. Ford says four boys were at the party, but only two boys were in the room at the time.

Ford had contacted the Post through a tip line in early July after it had become clear that Kavanaugh was on Trump’s shortlist to fill a vacancy but before the Republican president nominated him, the newspaper said.

A registered Democrat, Ford contacted her representative in Congress, Democrat Ann Eshoo, around the same time. In late July, Ford sent a letter through Eshoo’s office to Feinstein. Feinstein said she notified federal investigators about the letter, and the FBI confirmed it has included the information in the letter in Kavanaugh’s background file, which all senators can read.

Sixty-five women who knew Kavanagh in high school defended him in another letter, circulated by Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, as someone who “always treated women with decency and respect.”

Both Eshoo and Feinstein said Sunday that they supported Ford’s decision to come forward.

Ford told the Post she changed her mind about coming forward after watching portions of her story come out without her permission. She said if anyone was going to tell her story, she wanted to be the one to tell it.

___

AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

Grim Warnings for White House, GOP Ahead of Election

WASHINGTON—The prognosis for President Donald Trump and his party was grim.

In a post-Labor Day briefing at the White House, a top Republican pollster told senior staff that the determining factor in the election wouldn’t be the improving economy or the steady increase in job creation. It would be how voters feel about Trump. And the majority of the electorate, including a sizeable percentage of Republican-leaning voters, doesn’t feel good about the president, according to a presentation from pollster Neil Newhouse that spanned dozens of pages.

Newhouse’s briefing came amid a darkening mood among Republican officials as the November election nears. Party leaders were already worried that a surge in enthusiasm among Democrats and disdain for Trump by moderate Republicans would put the House out of reach. But some Republicans now fear their Senate majority is also in peril — a scenario that was unthinkable a few months ago given the favorable Senate map for the GOP.

“For Republican candidates to win in swing states, they need all of the voters who support President Trump, plus a chunk of those who do not,” said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster. “That is threading a very narrow strategic needle.”

Operatives in both parties say Republicans still have the edge in the fight for control of the Senate. But GOP officials are increasingly worried that nominees in conservative-leaning states like Missouri and Indiana are underperforming, while races in Tennessee and Texas that should be slam-dunks for Republicans are close.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell raised an alarm last week, warning that each of the competitive Senate races would be “like a knife fight in an alley.”

Some of the public fretting among Republicans appears to be strategic, as party officials try to motivate both voters and donors. Many moderate Republican voters “don’t believe there is anything at stake in this election,” according to the documents Newhouse presented to White House officials. He attributed that belief in part to a disregard for public polling, given that most surveys showed Democrat Hillary Clinton defeating Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

Newhouse and the White House would not comment on the early September meeting. The Associated Press obtained a copy of Newhouse’s presentation, and two Republicans with knowledge of the briefing discussed the details on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the matter publicly.

At the White House, anxiety over the midterms has been on the rise for months as polls increasingly show a challenging environment for the GOP and heightened Democratic enthusiasm. The sheer number of competitive races in both the House and Senate is stretching cash reserves and forcing tough calculations about where to deploy resources and surrogates. And there are growing fears that the coalition of voters that delivered Trump to the White House will not come out for midterms.

Even if those voters do show up in large numbers, Republicans could still come up short. The polling presented to White House officials, which was commissioned by the Republican National Committee, showed that Trump’s loyal supporters make up about one-quarter of the electorate. Another quarter is comprised of Republicans who like Trump’s policies but not the president himself and do not appear motivated to back GOP candidates. And roughly half of expected midterm voters are Democrats who are energized by their opposition to the president.

White House aides say Trump is getting regular briefings on the political landscape and is aware of the increasingly grim polling, even though he’s predicted a “red wave” for Republicans on Twitter and at campaign rallies. Aides say Trump’s sober briefings from GOP officials are sometimes offset by the frequent conversations he has with a cadre of outside advisers who paint a sunnier picture of the electoral landscape and remind the president of his upset victory in 2016.

The paradox for Republicans is that most Americans are largely satisfied with the economy, according to numerous surveys. But the party has struggled to keep the economy centered at the center of the election debate. Trump keeps thrusting other issues to the forefront, including his frustration with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and his intense anger with unflattering portrayals of his presidency in a book by journalist Bob Woodward and an anonymous editorial from a senior administration official that was published in the New York Times. He stunned some backers Thursday when he disputed the death toll in Puerto Rico from last year’s Hurricane Maria, just as another storm was barreling toward the East Coast.

Newhouse told White House officials that Trump could appeal to moderates and independents by emphasizing that a Democratic majority would be outside the mainstream on issues like abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and government-funded health care. Other Republican strategists have offered candidates similar advice.

Karl Rove, who served as chief political strategist to President George W. Bush, said that if Republicans cast their Democratic rivals as soft on immigration or in favor of high-dollar government spending on health care, “that’s a toxic mix to the soft Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.”

In his most recent campaign appearances, Trump soft-peddled his predictions for a Republican wave and warned supporters that a Democratic congressional majority would have consequences. But he focused less on the policy implications of Democrats regaining control of Congress and more on the impact on his presidency, including the prospect of impeachment.

“If it does happen, it’s your fault, because you didn’t go out to vote,” Trump said of the prospect of getting impeached. “You didn’t go out to vote — that’s the only way it could happen.”

Palestinian Kills American-Israeli Activist in West Bank

JERUSALEM—A Palestinian assailant on Sunday fatally stabbed an Israeli settler outside a busy mall in the West Bank.

The victim was identified as Ari Fuld, a U.S.-born activist who was well-known in the local settler community and an outspoken Israel advocate on social media platforms.

The military said the attacker arrived at the mall near a major junction in the southern West Bank, close to the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, and stabbed the Fuld before fleeing.

Video footage showed Fuld giving chase and firing at his assailant before collapsing. Other civilians shot the attacker, whom Israeli media identified as a 17-year-old from a nearby Palestinian village. He was reportedly in moderate condition.

Fuld, a 45-year-old father of four who lived in the nearby settlement of Efrat, was evacuated to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Fuld was a well-known English-language internet commenter on current affairs and the weekly Torah lesson. He was known for his hard-line nationalist ideology and strong support for the Israeli military.

Settler spokesman Josh Hasten, who said he had known Fuld for about a decade, said his friend traveled widely to showcase “the beauty and reality of life” in the country.

He delivered care packages to Israeli soldiers and would go on solidarity trips to communities near the Gaza Strip during times of fighting with the Hamas militant group, Hasten said.

“When the rockets were falling, that’s when he would get in his car and go down to Sderot,” Hasten said.

Fuld also was known for an outspoken manner that included verbal clashes with Palestinians and critics of Israel that could land him in trouble. At times, his Facebook account was suspended.

“He did not hold back on his opinions,” Hasten said. “If that meant 30 days of Facebook jail, so be it.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lauded Fuld on Facebook for fighting his attacker “heroically” and remembered him as “an advocate for Israel who fought to spread the truth.”

On Twitter, David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel and a strong supporter of the settlements, called him “a passionate defender of Israel & an American patriot.”

Since 2015, Palestinians have killed over 50 Israelis, two visiting Americans and a British tourist in stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks. Israeli forces killed over 260 Palestinians in that period, of which Israel says most were attackers.

Typhoon Pounds South China After Killing 64 in Philippines

HONG KONG—Typhoon Mangkhut barreled into southern China on Sunday, killing two people after lashing the Philippines with strong winds and heavy rain that left at least 64 dead and dozens more feared buried in a landslide.

More than 2.4 million people had been evacuated in southern China’s Guangdong province by Sunday evening to flee the massive typhoon and nearly 50,000 fishing boats were called back to port, state media reported. It threatened to be the strongest typhoon to hit Hong Kong in nearly two decades.

“Prepare for the worst,” Hong Kong Security Minister John Lee Ka-chiu urged residents.

That warning came after Mangkhut’s devastating march through the northern Philippines, where the storm made landfall Saturday on Luzon island with sustained winds of 205 kilometers (127 miles) per hour and gusts of 255 kph (158 mph).

Dozens of people, mostly miners and their families, were feared to have been trapped by a landslide in the far-flung village of Ucab in Itogon town in the northern Philippine mountain province of Benguet, Itogon Mayor Victorio Palangdan told The Associated Press by phone.

At the height of the typhoon’s onslaught Saturday afternoon, Palangdan said three villagers who nearly got buried by the huge pile of mud and rocks told authorities they saw residents rush into an old three-story building, a former mining bunkhouse that has been transformed into a chapel.

The mayor expressed sadness that the villagers, many of them poor, had few options to survive in a region where big corporations have profited immensely from gold mines.

“They thought they were really safe there,” he said.

Police Superintendent Pelita Tacio said 34 villagers had died and 36 remained missing in the landslides in Ucab and another village in Itogon. Rescuers were scrambling to pull out the body of a victim from the mound of mud and rocks in Ucab before Tacio left the area Sunday.

“I could hear villagers wailing in their homes near the site of the accident,” Tacio said.

As Mangkhut spun forward, Hong Kong braced for a storm that could be the strongest to hit the city since Typhoon York in 1999.

A video posted online by residents showed the top corner of an old building break and fall off, while in another video, a tall building swayed as strong winds blew.

The storm shattered glass windows on commercial skyscrapers in Hong Kong, sending sheets of paper pouring out of the buildings, fluttering and spiraling as they headed for the debris-strewn ground, according to several videos posted on social media.

Mangkhut also felled trees, tore bamboo scaffolding off buildings under construction and flooded some areas of Hong Kong with waist-high waters, according to the South China Morning Post.

The paper said the heavy rains brought storm surges of 3 meters (10 feet) around Hong Kong.

The storm made landfall in the Guangdong city of Taishan at 5 p.m., packing wind speeds of 162 kilometers (100 miles) per hour. State television broadcaster CGTN reported that surging waves flooded a seaside hotel in the city of Shenzhen.

In Macau, next door to Hong Kong, casinos were ordered to close from 11 p.m. Saturday, the first time such action was taken in the city, the South China Morning Post reported. In the city’s inner harbor district, the water level reached 1.5 meters (5 feet) on Sunday and was expected to rise further. The area was one of the most affected by floods from Typhoon Hato, which left 10 people dead last year.

Authorities in southern China issued a red alert, the most severe warning, as the national meteorological center said the densely populated region would face a “severe test caused by wind and rain” and urged officials to prepare for possible disasters.

Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific said all of its flights would be canceled between 2:30 a.m. Sunday and 4 a.m. Monday. The city of Shenzhen also canceled all flights between Sunday and early Monday morning. Hainan Airlines canceled 234 flights in the cities of Haikou, Sanya, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai scheduled over the weekend.

All high-speed and some normal rail services in Guangdong and Hainan provinces were also halted, the China Railway Guangzhou Group Co. said.

In the Philippines, rescuers for the Itogon landslide were hampered by rain and mud. The search and rescue operation was suspended at nightfall and was to resume at daybreak Monday, said Palangdan, the mayor. Police and their vehicles could not immediately reach the landslide-hit area because the ground was unstable and soaked from the heavy rains, regional police chief Rolando Nana told the ABS-CBN TV network.

Overall, at least 64 people have died in typhoon-related incidents in the northern Philippines, mostly from landslides and collapsed houses, according to the national police. Forty-five other people were missing and 33 were injured in the storm.

The hardest-hit area was Benguet province, where 38 people died, mostly in the two landslides in Itogon, and 37 are missing, the police said.

Still, the Philippines appeared to have been spared the high number of casualties many had feared. In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan left more than 7,300 people dead or missing, flattened villages and displaced more than 5 million in the central Philippines. A massive evacuation ahead of Mangkhut helped lessen potential casualties, with about 87,000 people evacuating from high-risk areas, officials said.

The typhoon struck at the start of the rice and corn harvesting season in the Philippines’ northern breadbasket, prompting farmers to scramble to save what they could of their crops, Cagayan Gov. Manuel Mamba said.

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Gomez reported from Manila, Philippines. Associated Press writers Aaron Favila and Joeal Calupitan in Tuguegarao, Philippines, and Gillian Wong in Beijing contributed to this report.