Reviving an idea they floated last year with an op-ed urging President Obama not to seek a second term, pollsters Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen are out Monday with a new op-ed drafting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be the Democrats’ 2012 nominee.
Obama should “abandon his candidacy for reelection in favor of a clear alternative,” Caddell and Schoen wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, because “the kind of campaign required for the president’s political survival would make it almost impossible for him to govern — not only during the campaign, but throughout a second term.”
“Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor — one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president’s administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy,” they wrote of Clinton.
The two pollsters have worked for a number of high-profile Democrats — Caddell for George McGovern, Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden, and Schoen for President Bill Clinton and for Hillary Clinton in 2008. But they are also known for taking positions that are at odds with the Democratic Party.
Most recently, Schoen has worked with a group called Americans Elect to put a third candidate on the ballot in all 50 states.
The group plans to hold a nominating convention next summer to select a candidate to challenge Obama and the Republican nominee. Participants will draft candidates by putting their names to a Web-based vote. Hillary Clinton and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg — another former client of Schoen’s — are often mentioned as potential nominees.
Like they did last year in an op-ed for the Washington Post, Caddell and Schoen argue that running for reelection will prevent Obama from governing.
“By going down the reelection road and into partisan mode, the president has effectively guaranteed that the remainder of his term will be marred by the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity, common purpose, and most of all, our economic strength,” they wrote.
The pollster duo believes that: “If President Obama were to withdraw he would put great pressure on the Republicans to come to the table and negotiate — especially if the president singularly focused in the way we have suggested on the economy, job creation, and debt and deficit reduction. “
They argue that Clinton would stand a better chance at winning in 2012 because she enjoys her best-ever approval rating and is favored over Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry in a Time magazine poll. And they call on Sen. Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to urge Obama to step aside “for the good of the party and most of all for the good of the country.”
Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said that she has no ambitions to run again for president. She has brushed aside talk of replacing Joe Biden as the vice presidential nominee on the Democrats’ ticket.
“I’m out of politics, happy to be out of politics,” she said last week when asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd to weigh in on the field of Republican hopefuls.
This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details
Reporting from Washington — A Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee says it is “unacceptable” that the Obama administration is refusing to provide Congress with the secret legal opinions cited to justify killing American citizens during counterterrorism operations.
Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has pushed against the notion of classified legal opinions, expressed his concerns in a letter to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday.
Previously, Wyden has complained about the refusal of the Justice Department to make public secret interpretations of domestic-surveillance law. On Wednesday, the senator said he wanted to know just how much authority President Obama claims when it comes to the matter of killing American terrorism suspects, but that his request, made last April, to see the classified legal opinions exploring that topic has been rebuffed.
“How much evidence does the president need to decide that a particular American is part of a terrorist group?” Wyden wrote. “Does the president have to provide individual Americans with an opportunity to surrender before using lethal force against them? Is the president’s authority to kill Americans based on authorization from Congress or his own authority as commander-in-chief? Can the president order intelligence agencies to kill an American who is inside the United States?”
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, also has asked for copies of any classified legal opinions dealing with killing American citizens — but has not been provided any, his office said. At a Nov. 8, 2011, congressional hearing, Holder told Leahy that he could not “address whether or not there is an opinion in this area.”
For the executive branch to claim that intelligence agencies have the authority to knowingly kill American citizens while refusing to provide Congress with the legal opinions explaining its reasoning “represents an indefensible assertion of executive prerogative, and I expected better from the Obama Administration,” Wyden wrote to Holder.
A Justice Department official said the department is reviewing Wyden’s letter and will respond later.
“It would be entirely lawful for the United States to target high-level leaders of enemy forces, regardless of their nationality, who are plotting to kill Americans both under the authority provided by Congress in its use of military force in the armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces as well as established international law that recognizes our right of self-defense,” the official said.
Last month, officials said Holder would be making a speech in the coming weeks laying out the legal justification for lethal strikes against Americans, such as the September CIA drone strike in Yemen that killed Anwar Awlaki, a U.S.-born citizen accused by U.S. officials of helping plan terrorist attacks against American targets. Wyden said he welcomed that.
U.S. officials have said that the CIA goes through extra legal steps when targeting a U.S. citizen as part of its drone strike program.
In early 2010, then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that the intelligence community “take[s] direct action against terrorists” and added that “if we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”
Wyden said he is not suggesting “that the president has no authority to act in this area. If American citizens choose to take up arms against the United States during times of war, there can undoubtedly be some circumstances under which the president has the authority to use lethal force against those Americans. For example, there is no question that President Lincoln had the authority to order Union troops to take military action against Confederate forces during the Civil War.”
However, he said, the question becomes thornier when the U.S. is at war around the world with terrorists who don’t wear uniforms. “And it is critically important for the public’s elected representatives to ensure that these questions are asked and answered in a manner consistent with American laws and American values,” Wyden wrote.
Members of Congress need to understand how or whether the executive branch has attempted to answer these questions so that they can decide for themselves whether this authority has been properly defined, Wyden wrote.
“Americans have a particular right to understand how the U.S. government interprets the statement in the Bill of Rights that no American shall ‘be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,’” Wyden wrote. “The federal government’s official views about the president’s authority to kill specific Americans who have not necessarily been convicted of a crime are not a matter to be settled in secret by a small number of government lawyers.”
A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Wednesday found that 83% of respondents said they approve of the use of drone strikes against terrorist suspects overseas. Sixty-five percent in the poll, conducted by telephone Feb. 1-4, said that American citizens suspected of terrorism are legitimate targets. Democrats approved of the drone strikes on American citizens by a 58%-33% margin, and liberals approved of them, 55%-35%, according to the Post’s blog, the Plum Line.
[For the record, 9:41 a.m., Feb. 10: An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that Anwar Awlaki, a U.S. citizen killed by a CIA drone strike last year in Yemen, was born in Yemen. He was born in New Mexico.]
Reporting from Washington — A pair of influential senators presented President Obama with a three-page blueprint for a bipartisan agreement to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, but the proposal’s viability is threatened by politics surrounding the healthcare debate.
Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), in a 45-minute meeting Thursday in the Oval Office, also asked for Obama’s help in rounding up enough Republican votes to pass an immigration bill this year.
Although details of their blueprint were not released, Graham said the elements included tougher border security, a program to admit temporary immigrant workers and a biometric Social Security card that would prevent people here illegally from getting jobs.
Graham also said the proposal included “a rational plan to deal with the millions of illegal immigrants already in the United States.” He did not elaborate on what the plan would be. But in a recent interview, he suggested that onerous measures were unrealistic.
“We’re not going to mass-deport people and put them in jail, nor should we,” Graham said. “But we need a system so they don’t get an advantage over others for citizenship.”
In a statement after the Obama meeting, Graham predicted that their effort would collapse if Senate Democrats proceeded with a strategy to pass a healthcare bill through a simple majority vote — a process known as “reconciliation.” Senate leaders say they are committed to doing just that.
“I expressed, in no uncertain terms, my belief that immigration reform could come to a halt for the year if healthcare reconciliation goes forward,” said Graham, who portrayed the document handed to Obama as “a work in progress.”
Graham added: “For more than a year, healthcare has sucked most of the energy out of the room. Using reconciliation to push healthcare through will make it much harder for Congress to come together on a topic as important as immigration.”
In their own statements, Obama and Schumer sounded more upbeat.
The president said: “Today I met with Sens. Schumer and Graham and was pleased to learn of their progress in forging a proposal to fix our broken immigration system. I look forward to reviewing their promising framework, and every American should applaud their efforts to reach across party lines and find common sense answers to one of our most vexing problems.”
Immigration has gotten scant attention of late. Obama had initially promised to address the issue in his first year, but the deadline slipped as he struggled to pass a healthcare bill. Latino voters, who were a crucial piece of Obama’s winning coalition in the 2008 campaign, have grown impatient. Some advocates of an immigration overhaul warn that Latino voters will stay home in the November mid-term elections if the issue is delayed again.
In an attempt to defuse the anger, Obama met with a group of 14 immigration advocates in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, hours before his meeting with the two senators.
Afterward, some of the guests described the atmosphere in the room as tense. They said they told Obama that families were being severed by widespread deportations. In the fiscal year that ended in September, the U.S. deported 388,000 illegal immigrants, according to the Department of Homeland Security — up from 369,000 the year before.
“I don’t think the president liked hearing that the immigration system is tearing apart families. But that’s our reality,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, who attended the meeting.
Obama agreed to have them meet with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to discuss deportation policies, the White House said.
Even without the healthcare obstacle, passing an immigration bill would be difficult. Schumer has been trying to line up additional Republican co-sponsors in hopes of broadening the bill’s bipartisan support. None has signed up.
Those who attended the meeting said that Obama committed to helping find Republican votes. But he also conceded that in a polarized Senate, that was a difficult mission.
“He was very frank about the challenge of moving this or anything else in the U.S. Congress,” said John Wilhelm, president of the labor union Unite Here.
WASHINGTON — Grammy-winning rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel of the Fugees was sentenced Thursday to 14 years in prison for a case in which he was convicted of illegally funneling millions of dollars in foreign contributions to then-President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
Michel, 52, declined to address the court before U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced him.
In April 2023, a federal jury convicted Michel of 10 counts, including conspiracy and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. The trial in Washington, D.C., included testimony from actor Leonardo DiCaprio and former Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions.
Justice Department prosecutors said federal sentencing guidelines recommended a life sentence for Michel, whom they said “betrayed his country for money” and “lied unapologetically and unrelentingly to carry out his schemes.”
“His sentence should reflect the breadth and depth of his crimes, his indifference to the risks to his country, and the magnitude of his greed,” they wrote.
Defense attorney Peter Zeidenberg said his client’s 14-year sentence is “completely disproportionate to the offense.” Michel will appeal his conviction and sentence, according to his lawyer.
Zeidenberg had recommended a three-year sentence. A life sentence would be an “absurdly high” punishment for Michel given that it is typically reserved for deadly terrorists and drug cartel leaders, Michel’s attorneys said in a court filing.
“The Government’s position is one that would cause Inspector Javert to recoil and, if anything, simply illustrates just how easily the Guidelines can be manipulated to produce absurd results, and how poorly equipped they are, at least on this occasion, to determine a fair and just sentence,” they wrote.
Michel, a Brooklyn native whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti, was a founding member of the Fugees along with childhood friends Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean. Their hip-hop band won two Grammy Awards and sold tens of millions of albums.
Michel obtained more than $120 million from Malaysian billionaire Low Taek Jho — also known as Jho Low — and steered some of that money through straw donors to Obama’s campaign.
Michel also tried to end a Justice Department investigation of Low, tampered with two witnesses and perjured himself at trial, prosecutors said.
Low, who has lived in China, was one of the primary financiers of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a movie starring DiCaprio. Low is a fugitive but has maintained his innocence.
“Low’s motivation for giving Mr. Michel money to donate was not so that he could achieve some policy objective. Instead, Low simply wanted to obtain a photograph with himself and then-President Obama,” Michel’s attorneys wrote.
In August 2024, the judge rejected Michel’s request for a new trial based in part on his defense attorney’s use of a generative AI program during his closing of the trial’s arguments. The judge said that and other trial errors didn’t amount to a serious miscarriage of justice.
Justice Department prosecutors accused Grammy-winning rapper Pras Michel of betraying his country for money.
A United States district judge has sentenced Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, a member of 1990s hip-hop group the Fugees, to 14 years in prison for illegally funnelling millions of dollars in foreign contributions to former US President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
Michel declined to address the court before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced him on Thursday. The trial in Washington, DC, included testimony from former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
This week’s sentencing came after a federal jury convicted Michel on 10 counts, including conspiracy and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, in April 2023.
Michel obtained more than $120m from fugitive Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho – also known as Jho Low – and steered some of that money through straw donors to Obama’s campaign.
Low is wanted for his leading role in the 1MDB scandal, in which billions of dollars were pilfered from Malaysia’s state investment fund in one of the largest financial frauds in history.
Several senior financial figures and members of Malaysia’s government have been convicted for their role in the scandal, including disgraced former Prime Minister Najib Razak, who was handed a 12-year prison sentence in 2022, which was later halved.
Court documents, filed by Justice Department prosecutors on Thursday, said the 52-year-old Grammy-winning rapper “lied unapologetically and unrelentingly to carry out his schemes” as he syphoned illegal payments from Low to the Obama campaign.
It is illegal in the US for foreigners to donate to election campaigns, as well as to pay someone else to make a campaign contribution.
“Prakazrel Michel betrayed his country for money. He funnelled millions of dollars in prohibited foreign contributions into a United States presidential election and attempted to manipulate a sitting president to serve a foreign criminal and a foreign power,” prosecutors said.
Prosecutors also said Michel had attempted to end a Justice Department investigation into Low and the 1MDB scandal, as well as “tampered with witnesses and then perjured himself at trial”.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly was advised by prosecutors that federal sentencing guidelines recommended a life sentence for such crimes, urging her to take into account the “breadth and depth of his crimes, his indifference to the risks to his country, and the magnitude of his greed”.
Michel’s lawyers downplayed the extent of his crimes, saying Low’s motivation for donating money was not to “achieve some policy objective”.
“Instead, Low simply wanted to obtain a photograph with himself and then-President Obama,” Michel’s lawyers wrote.
Low – who remains in hiding and claims innocence – courted America’s rich and famous during a years-long spending spree allegedly financed by funds stolen from 1MDB.
Notably, he was one of the primary financiers of the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street, starring DiCaprio.
Defence lawyer Peter Zeidenberg said Michel will appeal.
He labelled his client’s 14-year sentence “completely disproportionate to the offence” and “absurdly high” given such terms are typically reserved for deadly terrorists and drug cartel leaders.
Instead, Zeidenberg recommended a three-year prison sentence for Michel.
Michel, a Brooklyn native whose parents immigrated to the US from Haiti, was a founding member of the Fugees along with childhood friends Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean. The group won two Grammy Awards during their peak in the 1990s and sold tens of millions of albums.
With his million-dollar donation to the pro-Obama “super PAC,” Bill Maher has established himself among the top Democratic mega-donors, a field dotted with boldface Hollywood names.
Donors from the entertainment industry gave $2.2 million through January to Priorities USA Action, according to the Center for Responsive Politics — half of the group’s overall fundraising since it formed last spring.
Much of that came from a single donation by Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who wrote a $2-million check to the group last May. His former producing partner, director Steven Spielberg, contributed $100,000 in July.
Director/producer J.J. Abrams and his wife, Katie McGrath, kicked in a combined $100,000 to the group in June.
Each new round of Federal Election Commission filings have revealed a new set of million-dollar donors, although the vast majority have given to super PACs supporting Republican candidates or the GOP as a whole.
And none of those prolific givers have made their pledges quite as public as Maher, who brandished a gigantic check onstage at his comedy special CrazyStupidPolitics.
Maher’s past political giving has been relatively modest – a total of $4,850 given since 2004, mainly to the Democratic presidential campaigns of Sen. John F. Kerry, former Sen. John Edwards and then-Sen. Barack Obama, as well as to the successful 2008 Senate run for fellow comedian Al Franken.
NEW YORK — Voters were casting ballots in high-stakes elections on both coasts Tuesday, including for mayor of New York, new congressional maps in California and governor in both New Jersey and Virginia, states whose shifting electorates could show the direction of the nation’s political winds.
For voters and political watchers alike, the races have taken on huge importance at a time of tense political division, when Democrats and Republicans are sharply divided over the direction of the nation. Despite President Trump not appearing on any ballots, some viewed Tuesday’s races as a referendum on him and his volatile second term in the White House.
In New York, self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, 34, was favored to win the mayoral race after winning the Democratic ranked-choice mayoral primary in June. Such a result would shake up the Democratic establishment and rile Republicans in near equal measure, serving as a rejection of both former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a more establishment Democrat and Mamdani’s leading opponent, and Trump, who has warned that a Mamdani win would destroy the city.
On the eve of voting Monday, Trump threatened that a Mamdani win would disrupt the flow of federal dollars to the city, and took the dramatic step of endorsing Cuomo over Curtis Sliwa, the Republican in the race.
“If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home, because of the fact that, as a Communist, this once great City has ZERO chance of success, or even survival!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Monday.
A vote for Sliwa “is a vote for Mamdani,” he added. “Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice. You must vote for him, and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!”
Mamdani, a Ugandan-born naturalized U.S. citizen and New York state assemblyman who already defeated Cuomo once in the primary, has promised a brighter day for New Yorkers with better public transportation, more affordable housing and high-quality childcare if he wins. He has slammed billionaires and some of the city’s monied interests, which have lined up against him, and rejected the “grave political darkness” that he said is threatening the country under Trump.
He also mocked Trump’s endorsement of Cuomo — calling Cuomo Trump’s “puppet” and “parrot.”
Samantha Marrero, a 35-year-old lifelong New Yorker, lined up with more than a dozen people Tuesday morning at her polling site in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn to cast her vote for Mamdani, whom she praised for embracing people of color, queer people and other communities marginalized by mainstream politicians.
Marrero said she cares deeply about housing insecurity and affordability in the city, but that it was also “really meaningful to have someone who is brown and who looks like us and who eats like us and who lives more like us than anyone we’ve ever seen before” on the ballot. “That representation is really important.”
New York mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo speaks to reporters as he marks his ballot in New York on Tuesday.
(Richard Drew / Associated Press)
And she said that’s a big part of why people across the country are watching the New York race.
“We’re definitely a beacon in this kind of fascist takeover that is very clearly happening across the country,” she said. “People in other states and other cities and other countries have their eyes on what’s happening here. Obviously Mamdani is doing something right. And together we can do something right. But it has to be together.”
Elsewhere on the East Coast, voters were electing governors in both Virginia and New Jersey, races that have also drawn the president’s attention.
In the New Jersey race, Trump has backed the Republican candidate, former state Rep. Jack Ciattarelli, over the Democratic candidate, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, whom former President Obama recently stumped for. Long a blue state, New Jersey has been shifting to the right, and polls have shown a tight race.
In the Virginia race, Trump has not endorsed Republican candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by name, but has called on voters to “vote Republican” and to reject the Democratic candidate, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a 46-year-old former CIA officer whom Obama has also supported.
“Why would anyone vote for New Jersey and Virginia Gubernatorial Candidates, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, when they want transgender for everybody, men playing in women’s sports, High Crime, and the most expensive Energy prices almost anywhere in the World?” Trump recently wrote on Truth Social, repeating some of his favorite partisan attacks on Democrats from the presidential campaign trail last year.
At a rally for Spanberger in Norfolk, Va., over the weekend, Obama put the race in equally stark terms — as part of a battle for American democracy.
“We don’t need to speculate about the dangers to our democracy. We don’t need to wonder about whether vulnerable people are going to be hurt, or ask ourselves how much more coarse and mean our culture can become. We’ve witnessed it. Elections do matter,” Obama said. “We all have more power than we think. We just have to use it.”
Voting was underway in the states, but with some disruptions. Bomb threats disrupted voting in some parts of New Jersey early Tuesday, temporarily shutting down a string of polling locations across the state before law enforcement determined the threats were hoaxes.
In California, voters were being asked to change the state Constitution to allow Democrats to redraw congressional maps in their favor through 2030, in order to counter similar moves by Republicans in red states such as Texas.
Leading Democrats, including Obama and Gov. Gavin Newsom, have described the measure as an effort to safeguard American democracy against a power grab by Trump, who had encouraged the red states to act, while opponents of the measure have derided it as an anti-democratic power grab by state Democrats.
Trump has urged California voters not to cast ballots by mail or to vote early, arguing such practices are somehow “dishonest,” and on Tuesday morning suggested on Truth Social that Proposition 50 itself was unconstitutional.
“The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” Trump wrote, without providing evidence of problems. “All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED!”
Both individually and collectively, the races are being closely watched as potential indicators of political sentiment and enthusiasm going into next year’s midterm elections, and of Democrats’ ability to get voters back to the polls after Trump’s decisive win over former Vice President Kamala Harris last year.
Voters, too, saw the races as having particularly large stakes at a pivotal moment for the country.
Michelle Kim, 32, who has lived in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn for three years, stood in line at a polling site early Tuesday morning — waiting to cast her vote for Mamdani.
Kim said she cares about transportation, land use and the rising cost of living in New York, and appreciated Mamdani’s broader message that solutions are possible, even if not guaranteed.
“My hope is not, like, ‘Oh, he’s gonna solve, like, all of our issues,’” she said. “But I think for him to be able to represent people and give hope, that’s also part of it.”
Lin reported from New York, Rector from San Francisco. Times staff writer Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta contributed to this report.
