 |  | | Washington, Fast. | | | | | | | Good Tuesday morning. Having issues with your internet this morning? It's not just you: major media websites including the New York Times and the Financial Times, along with the UK government website, are down, per the BBC. This is the Power Up newsletter – thanks for waking up with us. 🚨A joint report on Jan. 6 is out: "The U.S. Capitol Police had specific intelligence that supporters of former president Donald Trump planned to mount an armed invasion of the Capitol at least two weeks before the Jan. 6 riot, according to new findings in a bipartisan Senate investigation, but a series of omissions and miscommunications kept that information from reaching front-line officers targeted by the violence," our colleague Karoun Demirjian reports. - "A joint report, from the Senate Rules and Administration and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees, outlines the most detailed public timeline to date of the communications and intelligence failures that led the Capitol Police and partner agencies to prepare for the 'Stop the Steal' protest as though it were a routine Trump rally, instead of the organized assault that was planned in the open online."
- "…the report shows how an intelligence arm of the Capitol Police disseminated security assessments labeling the threat of violence 'remote' to 'improbable,' even as authorities collected evidence showing that pro-Trump activists intended to bring weapons to the demonstration and 'storm the Capitol.'"
- "There were significant, widespread and unacceptable breakdowns in the intelligence gathering. . . . The failure to adequately assess the threat of violence on that day contributed significantly to the breach of the Capitol," Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the homeland security panel, told reporters. "The attack was, quite frankly, planned in plain sight."
| | | On the Hill FULL COURT PRESS: In the aftermath of Sen. Joe Manchin III's op-ed restating where he's been all along — opposed to the For the People Act and against repealing or modifying the filibuster — Democrats are starting to lash out at the West Virginia lawmaker imperiling the Biden administration's agenda. An aide to Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) took aim at Manchin for calling the shots on the "survival of this democratic experiment" from "a house boat" in a now deleted tweet; Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) called his op-ed "unsound" and "unserious"; and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) took to CNN's 'New Day' to trash him as the "new Mitch McConnell…doing the work of the Republican party by being an obstructionist." This morning at 9 a.m., NAACP President Derrick Johnson along with other prominent Black leaders, including Rev. Al Sharpton and the heads of the National Urban League, the National Council of Negro Women, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, will meet with Manchin to discuss the issue at hand, a spokesperson for the NAACP told Power Up. - "The right to vote is under attack," Johnson said in a statement. "We must do everything we can to protect the American people's sacred right to participate in the democratic process. Our vote is our voice, and we will not be silenced."
 Sen. Manchin walks up the steps of Capitol Hill on Monday. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) | That's not all: Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, leader of the Poor People's Campaign, is planning on leading a "Moral March on Manchin" next week targeting the senator in his home state, our colleagues Mike DeBonis and Sean Sullivan report. - Barber "tweeted Monday that Manchin had 'abandoned' the poor residents of West Virginia and called his political positions 'wrong, constitutionally inconsistent, historically inaccurate, morally indefensible, economically insane, and politically unacceptable.'"
There's more: "The United Mine Workers of America, an influential group in Manchin's state, reiterated its support for voting rights legislation on Monday, citing restrictive laws being passed by Republican legislatures in some states," per DeBonis and Sean. - "It is wrong for these states to attack the basic rights of citizens to participate in our democracy," UMWA International President Cecil E. Roberts said in a statement. "Congress should be doing everything possible to not just maintain, but expand voting access and create freer and fairer elections. If only one party is interested in doing that, then so be it."
After Biden not-so-subtly called out Sens. Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) last week for voting "more with my Republican friends," the White House continued their pressure campaign to protect and expand voting access on Monday, with national security adviser Jake Sullivan calling "the basic notion of democratic reform and voting rights in the United States…. a national security issue." - Sen. Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is meeting with his caucus today, told reporters Monday he still plans on holding the vote during the week of June 24 – regardless of Manchin's position.
TLDR; Pressuring Manchin from the left to change his position on the bill is unlikely to move the West Virginia lawmaker, who has not issued specific policy objections to the bill but simply wants a Republican to support the proposal. | | | The investigations GIULIANI PRESSURED UKRAINE TO INVESTIGATE CONSPIRACIES: "Never-before-heard audio, obtained exclusively by CNN, shows how former president Donald Trump's longtime adviser Rudy Giuliani relentlessly pressured and coaxed the Ukrainian government in 2019 to investigate baseless conspiracies about then-candidate Joe Biden," CNN's Matthew Chance and Marshall Cohen report. - "The audio is of a July 2019 phone call between Giuliani, US diplomat Kurt Volker, and Andriy Yermak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The call was a precursor to Trump's infamous call with Zelensky, and both conversations later became a central part of Trump's first impeachment, where he was accused of soliciting Ukrainian help for his campaign."
- "All we need from the President [Zelensky] is to say, I'm gonna put an honest prosecutor in charge, he's gonna investigate and dig up the evidence, that presently exists and is there any other evidence about involvement of the 2016 election, and then the Biden thing has to be run out," Giuliani said, according to the audio.
"Now we know how far Giuliani went for Trump," CNN's Zachary B. Wolf writes. "Giuliani dangled an in-person meeting between Trump and Zelensky, essentially in exchange for Zelensky investigating Biden." - "Listening to it now — with the knowledge that Trump would ultimately be impeached, twice, and that Giuliani would find himself under criminal investigation for his international efforts on Trump's behalf — does not make Giuliani brazenly trading on American world power for Trump's political gain less jarring."
U.S. REPORT FINDS LAB LEAK THEORY PLAUSIBLE: "A report on the origins of covid-19 by a U.S. government national laboratory concluded that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation," the Wall Street Journal's Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel report. The report was issued by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California in May 2020. - "The assessment is said to have been among the first U.S. government efforts to seriously explore the hypothesis that the virus leaked from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology along with the dominant hypothesis that the virus spread naturally from animals to humans."
| | | From the courts THE DOJ'S SURPRISE CLIENT: "The Justice Department's Civil Division under Biden is continuing the Trump-era push to represent the former president in a defamation lawsuit brought by author E. Jean Carroll," our colleague Shayna Jacobs reports. - Contradictions…: "During the presidential campaign, Biden, then the Democratic candidate, slammed his opponent, Trump, for bringing in the Justice Department to represent him in a defamation lawsuit stemming from a decades-old rape allegation," the New York Times's Alan Feuer and Benjamin Weiser report.
- "At one of their debates, Biden accused Trump of treating the Justice Department like his 'own law firm' … But on Monday night, nearly eight months after Biden's attack, his own Justice Department essentially adopted Trump's position, arguing that he could not be sued for defamation because he had made the supposedly offending statements as part of his official duties as president."
| | | The campaign NEW JERSEY'S BIG TEST: "New Jersey Republicans will select a challenger to Gov. Phil Murphy (D-N.J.) Tuesday after a primary that focused on how candidates would prevent future pandemic lockdowns and whether they'd done enough to support Trump's reelection bid," our colleague David Weigel reports. - "As he fended off opponents who accused him of insufficient support for Trump, former state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli pitched himself as the strongest opponent against the first-term Democrat."
- "Ciattarelli's biggest competition comes from Hirsh Singh, an engineer who has made his support of Trump a key part of his campaign," the Wall Street Journal's Joseph De Avila reports.
- Trump's shadow looms over the state's primary election. "It's a choice between a mainstream candidate who understands that he has to run in the general election after this versus a candidate who is trying to garner as much primary support from the Trump wing of the party as he possibly can," Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, told De Avila.
OBAMA V. TRUMP (AGAIN): "Most presidents stop trying to define the nation's future once they leave office. But Barack Obama and Trump are refusing to concede the battle for America's soul on which they first clashed more than a decade ago," CNN's Stephen Collinson writes. - "No two individuals better exemplify the current chasm between the two halves of the country: one racially diverse and socially liberal, the other mostly White and conservative."
- "And even though a new President is now in office, his immediate predecessors — who revile one another but will be forever linked in history — still embody the dominant forces tearing at the nation."
Exhibit A: "Obama said Republicans have been 'cowed into accepting' a series of positions that 'would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago,' telling CNN's Anderson Cooper he is worried about the state of democracy in the United States in an exclusive interview that aired Monday," per CNN's Dan Merica. - "Obama, in an interview that comes after his latest memoir, 'A Promised Land,' [which] was published in late 2020, said he never thought some of the 'dark spirits' that began rising within the Republican Party during his tenure would get this dark and reach the epicenter of the party."
| | | Global power 'DO NOT COME': "Vice President Harris arrived [in Guatemala] at her first summit with the promise of millions of dollars in American aid and investment, pledges she said would give Guatemalans 'hope that help was on the way' and dissuade potential migrants from trying to cross into the United States," our colleagues Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Kevin Sieff report. - "She also came with a 'frank and open' admonition for President Alejandro Giammattei, telling him his government needed to mount an all-out effort to fight corruption if it hopes to improve life for millions of Guatemalans and stem the flow of migrants to the U.S. border."
- But Giammattei defended his record: "How many cases of corruption have I been accused of?" he asked an American reporter. "I can give you the answer: Zero."
The exchange is "emblematic of the deep-rooted issues facing Harris as she becomes the latest American politician trying to help solve the problems that have prompted numerous Guatemalans to embark on a perilous search for a better life elsewhere." Happening today: "Harris will meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and participate in roundtables with labor leaders and women entrepreneurs," Politico's Sabrina Rodriguez reports. - "Her meeting with López Obrador comes after his coalition just lost its congressional supermajority in the midterm elections, which were also one of the country's most violent campaign seasons in history."
| | | In the agencies THE REPUBLICAN REVOLT AGAINST BIDEN'S OPM PICK: "Senate Republicans are blocking a quick confirmation for Biden's nominee to lead the federal personnel agency, targeting her past emphasis on the concept of systemic racism known as 'critical race theory' that has become a lightning rod for conservatives," our colleagues Lisa Rein and Seung Min Kim report. - "Republicans also are pushing back on Kiran Ahuja's support for abortion rights at a time when a long-standing ban on federal funding for the procedure — known as the Hyde Amendment — has emerged as a renewed flash point for the right due to Biden's support for overturning it."
- "The delay on Ahuja's nomination is being led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). The move will force Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to go through procedural hurdles on the Senate floor, rather than move quickly with a pro forma vote that is more common for nominees to lower-profile posts."
Big picture: The move delays Biden's quest to rebuild the federal government. "With no nominee to head the White House Office of Management and Budget and no one confirmed to lead the General Services Administration, which handles federal procurement and real estate, the three agencies in charge of overall management of the vast government and its 2.1 million career employees are without permanent leadership six months into the administration." | | | In the media THE TIGER MOM AND THE HORNET'S NEST: "In a place where everyone was brilliantly credentialed and yearned for a way to set themselves apart, students believed Chubenfeld's favor, especially Amy Chua's, could grease their path to the top, or at least to the clerkships that obsess the legal upper crust," the Intelligencer's Irin Carmon reports. "Both students and faculty flocked here, for dinners and their big annual Harvard-Yale party, and sometimes for more glamorous gatherings like one she threw for Wendi Murdoch." - "Yale Law, the top ranked in the country, is both intellectual hothouse and finishing school for the American elite, and for the past two decades, the couple was 'the self-appointed social center of the entire institution.'"
- "Now this house is the locus of so much of what has lately made Chua, 58, and Jed Rubenfeld, 62, into pariahs. Rubenfeld is halfway through a two-year suspension without pay after a university committee found he sexually harassed at least three former students … Chua was investigated by a fact finder, hired by the law school, who looked into claims that she had abused her power over the clerkship process, made inappropriate comments, and engaged in 'excessive drinking' with students."
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