Mike Franken's Chances of Beating Chuck Grassley for Senate in Iowa: Polls

BY JASON LEMON 

ON 7/17/22 

Democrat Mike Franken aims to defeat GOP Senator Chuck Grassley in Iowa in the upcoming November midterms, hoping to flip a Republican-held seat blue to help his political party retain, or possibly shore up, their slim majority in the Senate—but recent polls show he's facing an uphill battle.

Grassley, 88, has held his Senate seat since 1981 and is one of the oldest elected members of the legislative body. Franken is a retired Navy vice admiral and former Defense Department official. The Democrat previously ran unsuccessfully for his party's nomination to run against GOP Senator Joni Ernst in 2020. He won the June primary this year, however, with just over 55 percent of the vote.

In a conservative leaning state that went for former President Donald Trump in 2016 and in 2020, with two Republican senators and a GOP governor, Franken has a difficult race ahead. Recent polls show the Democratic candidate trailing the Republican incumbent.

Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, is the clear frontrunner in his reelection campaign against Democratic challenger Mike Franken, according to recent polls. Above to the left, Franken speaks at a primary election-night event on June 7 in Des Moines, Iowa. Above to the right, Grassley speaks at a hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 12 in Washington, D.C.

STEPHEN MATUREN/ANNA MONEYMAKER/GETTY IMAGES

New polling published by Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll on Saturday had Grassley just 8 points ahead of Franken. The incumbent GOP senator was backed by 47 percent of likely Iowa voters compared to 39 percent who supported his Democratic challenger.

While the Republican has a substantial lead, the new poll results were the worst for Grassley in more than three decades.

"While Grassley leads Franken, the margin is narrower than in any Iowa Poll matchup involving Grassley since he was first elected to the U.S. Senate. Grassley has not polled below 50% in a head-to-head contest since October 1980, before he went on to defeat incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. John Culver," Des Moines Register reported.

The survey included 597 likely Iowan voters and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. It was carried out from July 10 to 13 by Selzer & Co.

A previous poll conducted from June 30 to July 4 for Franken's campaign by Change Research showed a closer race, although Grassley was still in the lead. The survey results had the Republican senator at 49 percent while the retired Navy officer came in at 44 percent. That was a lead of 5 points for the incumbent.

The poll included 1,488 likely voters and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percent.

In April, a similar Change Research poll for Franken's campaign showed the Democrat down by 3 points. Grassley was backed by 45 percent of likely voters and the Democratic candidate had the support of 42 percent. Some 1,070 respondents were included in the survey with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.

Although Grassley is clearly the frontrunner in the Senate race, Franken appears to be performing well for a Democratic challenger to the GOP incumbent. In every reelection campaign since 1986, Grassley has beat his liberal challengers by large double-digit margins.

No Democrat has managed to win even 40 percent of the vote against him. Whether Franken ultimately manages to do so, or potentially even pull off an upset victory, remains to be seen.

"It's a solid lead [for Grassley]," pollster J. Ann Selzer told Des Moines Register. "But it's just not as huge as we've seen in the past."

'Seemingly invincible' Chuck Grassley is in his tightest ever re-election battle in Iowa

Bob Brigham
October 15, 2022

Chuck Grassley / Gage Skidmore
HE WAS MADE FOR TERM LIMITS

Republican Chuck Grassley has been an Iowa lawmaker since 1959, but appears to be in a tight battle for political survival as he seeks his eighth term in the U.S. Senate.

On Saturday night, the Des Moines Register released it's latest Mediacom Iowa Poll, showing Grassley only leading retired Admiral Mike Franken by three points, 46% to 43%.

The poll, conducted by pollster J. Ann Selzer, has often been called the gold standard of Iowa polling.

Selzer told the newspaper the poll "says to me that Franken is running a competent campaign and has a shot to defeat the seemingly invincible Chuck Grassley — previously perceived to be invincible."

The poll shows Democrats may have a chance to flip a seat in a largely overlooked seat.

"Election analysts for months have rated the race in Grassley’s favor, and national Democratic groups have indicated they don’t plan to spend money supporting Franken, instead focusing on states where they see greater potential for victory," the newspaper reported. "But the poll indicates weaknesses for Grassley beyond his head-to-head race with Franken. His job disapproval rating is a record high for him in the Iowa Poll. The percentage of Iowans who view him unfavorably also hit a peak. And nearly two-thirds of likely voters say the senator’s age is a concern rather than an asset."

Grassley, 89, was first elected to the Iowa House of Representatives in the 1958 midterm elections. He served eight terms in the legislature, then three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, before first being elected to the U.S. Senate when he shared the ballot with Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Nate Silver of 538 wrote, "The reason this is interesting is not because Grassley is going to lose (probably not) and not even because the Selzer poll has been accurate (though it has been) but because she's a pollster who will publish what her numbers tell her and not herd toward the conventional wisdom."

Also on Saturday, Grassley posted a video explaining how much corn farming has changed during his time as a farmer.

Watch below or at this link:

GRASSLEY GOT IOWA ON THE BIOFUEL TAX CREDIT KICK WAAAAAAY BACK IN 1984

UNDER RONALD REAGAN

Democrat criticizes Trump administration for giving Senate GOP Ukraine documents but not House

(CNN)The Treasury Department is cooperating with a Senate Republican investigation into Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine, according to a top Democrat on one of the committees.
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, criticized the Treasury Department for sending over information after it had stonewalled the House's impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump's dealings with Ukraine.

Wyden's office is not saying what documents were turned over and whether they specifically involve Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden. Three Republican chairmen -- Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- have sent letters in recent months seeking information and interviews related to the Bidens, the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma and uncorroborated allegations about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US election. Trump and his allies have repeatedly made unfounded and false claims to allege that the Bidens acted corruptly in Ukraine.

"For its part, the Trump administration refused to comply with all Democratic requests for documents and witnesses associated with impeachment. Applying a blatant double standard, Trump administration agencies like the Treasury Department are rapidly complying with Senate Republican requests -- no subpoenas necessary -- and producing 'evidence' of questionable origin," Wyden spokeswoman Ashley Schapitl said in a statement. "The administration told House Democrats to go pound sand when their oversight authority was mandatory while voluntarily cooperating with the Senate Republicans' sideshow at lightning speed."

A Treasury spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Grassley spokesman Taylor Foy said, "As a matter of routine, we don't discuss sensitive third-party material during ongoing investigations. It's unfortunate that Democrats whom we've kept in the loop on our investigations would recklessly seek to interfere with legitimate government oversight."

The Senate Republican investigation into the Bidens, which is being led primarily by Grassley and Johnson, is a sign that while impeachment has ended, the investigations related to Ukraine have not. House Democrats too are still pursuing probes and court cases post-impeachment, and many Democrats want the House to subpoena former national security adviser John Bolton, who was not called in the Senate trial, after senators voted not to hear from witnesses.

It is not clear what Treasury has provided to the Senate committees, which was first reported by Yahoo News. Grassley and Johnson sent a letter dated November 15, 2019 to the director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Ken Blanco, requesting information related to their investigation "into potentially improper actions by the Obama administration with respect to Burisma Holdings and Ukraine." Johnson and Grassley requested "all Suspicious Activity Reports" -- which financial institutions are required to file when they spot suspicious activity, though the reports don't necessarily indicate wrongdoing occurred -- that were filed related to 11 individuals or entities including Hunter Biden and Burisma Holdings by December 5, 2019.

In addition to the Treasury letter, the Senate Republicans chairmen requested information late last year related to Ukraine from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr. In a sign they are still expanding their probe, they sent a new letter on Wednesday to the Secret Service seeking travel information on Hunter Biden.

During the impeachment trial, Trump's lawyers and congressional Republicans defended the President's actions by saying he had legitimate reasons to worry about corruption Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, the latter of whom who worked for Burisma. Multiple witnesses in the impeachment inquiry testified that Biden's actions in Ukraine were consistent with official US government policy, backed by European allies and both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, including Johnson.

In the House, Democrats are still weighing their next steps following the end of the Senate impeachment trial. They never received documents from the Trump administration related to Ukraine, some of which have been released in the weeks since the President was impeached in December thanks to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. There's also the question of Bolton, who indicated he was willing to testify in the Senate but has not said the same about the House.

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, said Wednesday that it was likely the House would subpoena Bolton, but House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff has not committed to doing so. "We really haven't made any decisions yet," the California Democrat said Thursday when asked about the House's next steps.

In addition to Ukraine threads, House Democrats still have active court cases in their efforts to obtain the President's tax returns, financial and accounting information and the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn. Democrats said they expect those investigations into the President to continue, regardless of having already impeached him -- and the committees will continue aggressive oversight of the federal agencies.

"No one thinks that the Senate's act of jury nullification gives the President any immunity from the Congress' oversight power," said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat on the Oversight and Judiciary committees. "So we will not let up for one second in ferreting out the corruption and the criminality that have overtaken the administration. I believe our oversight power is as necessary as ever, if not more so now. This President appears to be emboldened by the robotic behavior of Republican senators with the notable exception of Mitt Romney."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday noted the ongoing court cases but didn't suggest the Democrats were about to make a new push for testimony from Bolton or others.
"Those cases still exist," the California Democrat said at her weekly news conference. "If there are others that we see as an opportunity, we'll make a judgment at that time. But we have no plans right now."

Treasury Department sent information on Hunter Biden to expanding GOP Senate inquiry


Yahoo News•February 6, 2020

The Treasury Department has complied with Republican senators’ requests for highly sensitive and closely held financial records about Hunter Biden and his associates and has turned over “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” to them, according to a leading Democrat on one of the committees conducting the investigation.

For months, while the impeachment controversy raged, powerful committee chairmen in the Republican-controlled Senate have been quietly but openly pursuing an inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs and Ukrainian officials’ alleged interventions in the 2016 election, the same matters that President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani unsuccessfully tried to coerce Ukraine’s government to investigate.

Hunter Biden in 2016. (Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)

Unlike Trump and Giuliani, however, Sens. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Finance Committee; Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; and Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, have focused their efforts in Washington, seeking to extract politically useful information from agencies of the U.S. government. They’ve issued letters requesting records from Cabinet departments and agencies, including the State Department, the Treasury, the Justice Department, the FBI, the National Archives and the Secret Service.

Grassley and Johnson have sought to obtain some of the most sensitive and closely held documents in all of federal law enforcement — highly confidential suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by financial institutions with FinCEN, an agency of the Treasury that helps to police money laundering.

The senators’ requests to the Treasury have borne fruit, according to the ranking Democratic senator on the Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, who contrasted the cooperation given to the Republican senators with the pervasive White House-directed stonewall that House Democrats encountered when they subpoenaed documents and witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.

“Applying a blatant double standard, Trump administration agencies like the Treasury Department are rapidly complying with Senate Republican requests — no subpoenas necessary — and producing ‘evidence’ of questionable origin,” Wyden spokesperson Ashley Schapitl said in a statement. “The administration told House Democrats to go pound sand when their oversight authority was mandatory while voluntarily cooperating with the Senate Republicans’ sideshow at lightning speed.”

Sen. Ron Wyden during President Trump's impeachment trial on Jan. 30. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

The “rapid” production of sensitive financial information from the Treasury Department in response to congressional requests is apparently uncommon. A source familiar with the matter said the Treasury began turning over materials less than two months after Grassley and Johnson wrote to FinCEN on Nov. 15, 2019, requesting any SARs and related documents filed by financial institutions regarding Hunter Biden, his associates, their businesses and clients.

Just a couple of weeks later, Wyden and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, complained to FinCEN in a letter that “information requests from Congress, including legitimate Committee oversight requests related to Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), often take months to process, and we understand that certain such requests have yet to be answered at all.”

“Sen. Wyden’s warning was spurred by concern that the agency would prioritize Republican requests over Democratic requests,” Schapitl said of the December letter to FinCEN. “Treasury’s subsequent actions have made his concerns even more urgent.”

“It's strange that any senator would complain about receiving responses to oversight requests in a timely manner,” a Grassley spokesperson said to BuzzFeed News on Thursday.

"The Democrats launched a nuclear weapon with impeachment, and then wanted to negotiate while it was in the air — that’s not how oversight works," a Republican Senate aide said, responding to Wyden's comments about a double standard between the GOP investigation and the impeachment inquiry.

Republicans also noted that Sen. Grassley had first raised his concerns about a DNC contractor potentially coordinating with Ukraine in a 2017 letter to the Justice Department.

"Senate Republicans’ investigation ramped up just as the House impeachment investigation ramped up," Schapitl said, "providing an avenue for them to pursue the trumped-up investigation President Zelensky did not announce in the face of President Trump’s extortion scheme."

With the Senate impeachment trial concluded and the Democratic primaries in full swing, the efforts of the Republican-led investigation may soon appear at the center of the political stage. The flow of information from the administration to Senate Republicans has prompted concerns among Democrats that any damaging information uncovered may be deployed at a time of maximum political advantage for the Trump campaign.

“Republicans are turning the Senate into an arm of the president’s political campaign, pursuing an investigation designed to further President Trump’s favorite conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and smear Vice President Biden,” Schapitl said. The Biden presidential campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A series of letters and public statements shows that since last autumn the senators have been pursuing a wide-ranging joint inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs in Ukraine at the time his father, Vice President Joe Biden, was leading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy and into the activities of Ukrainian officials and a Ukrainian-American Democratic political operative during the 2016 election.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter at a basketball game in 2010. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Aside from the statement from Wyden’s office, there has been scant information about what investigators have uncovered, if anything. Wyden’s statement stopped short of saying whether the “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” produced in compliance with the senators’ request included SARs.

The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 mandates that banks generate SARs to report to FinCEN any transactions that they know or have reason to suspect violate federal criminal laws or are connected to money laundering. SARs are among the most confidential, closely held documents in federal law enforcement. They are forbidden to be disclosed or have their existence disclosed by banks or government authorities, are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and are privileged in most cases from discovery by civil litigants.

Because SARs may be, and indeed are required to be, filed simply on the basis of a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity, the existence of a SAR doesn’t indicate that illegal activity has actually occurred.

The Republican Senate staff conducting the investigation did not respond to inquiries, and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee declined to comment. Treasury, State and Justice did not respond to inquiries. The FBI declined to comment.

The National Archives and Records Administration said that it had not turned over any records to the Senate yet, but that a review of the request by the White House and the office of President Barack Obama, which has purview over some of the records, is ongoing. “NARA has been in regular contact with committee staff,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

The Secret Service, which only received its request from the Republican investigators after the acquittal vote of the president on Wednesday, could not be immediately reached for comment.

From their letters, it’s clear that the senators’ inquiry into the Bidens deals with the same subject matter that Trump and Giuliani’s pressure campaign sought to place under scrutiny. Their interest in suspected Ukrainian influences on the 2016 election, however, has a different point of emphasis.

Instead of the debunked CrowdStrike conspiracy theory that Trump alluded to on his call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky or similar unsubstantiated theories positing that Ukraine was somehow behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the senators have focused on a controversial January 2017 Politico article that alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election to help Hillary Clinton defeat Trump.

The article relied heavily on the allegations of Andrii Telizhenko, then a diplomat in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, who said he was asked by Alexandra Chalupa, a Democratic Party consultant, to get dirt on Paul Manafort, who was then the campaign manager for Trump. Telizhenko has since cast himself as a central figure in Giuliani’s Ukraine investigations.

Rudy Giuliani and Andrii Telizhenko in a photo posted last May 22. (Andrii Telizhenko via Facebook)

The Politico article has been seized on by Trump’s defenders as evidence that there was Ukrainian interference in the U.S. presidential election similar to the Kremlin-directed influence campaign.

“Whether there’s a connection between Democratic operatives and Ukrainian officials during the 2016 election has yet to be determined,” Graham said in a December statement. “It will only be found by looking. We intend to look.”

National security officials who served in the Trump administration have rejected the notion that Ukrainian efforts against Trump were coordinated or could be reasonably be likened to Russia’s systematic election interference campaign, which intelligence agencies have assessed was led by President Vladimir Putin himself.

“It is a fiction that the Ukrainian government was launching an effort to upend our election, upend our election to mess with our Democratic systems,” Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official in Trump’s White House, testified at her House deposition in October.

Yet throughout the fall and early winter, Republican senators peppered executive branch officials with request letters on both the Bidens and the Ukraine interference theory that Hill had implored Congress to avoid.

Grassley and Johnson courted controversy with a letter to the Justice Department seeking to obtain a broad swath of information that Chalupa, the Democratic Party consultant, says she voluntarily provided to the FBI in 2016 when she felt harassed by Russian hacking.

In a January response letter to the Justice Department, Wyden called the request “outrageous.”

“To use [Chalupa’s] voluntary cooperation in order to weaponize her personal information against her in furtherance of a political attack based on unsupported claims and potential Russian propaganda would compromise public trust in our law enforcement, undermine Americans’ rights, and damage our national security interests,” he wrote.

---30---

Conspiracy-mongers in Congress: Republicans go off the deep end

Opinion by Glenn C. Altschuler, opinion contributor • July 22, 2023

Conspiracy-mongers in Congress: Republicans go off the deep end© Provided by The Hill

“The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires,” journalist George Packer once acknowledged. But, he warned, “when facts become fungible, we’re lost.”

These days, in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, conspiracy theories are in the saddle, and facts have become fungible.

During the testimony of John Kerry before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee a couple of weeks ago, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) accused the U.S. Climate Envoy of hyping a global warming “problem that doesn’t exist.” When Kerry pointed to the consensus of climate scientists and the 195 nations that signed the Paris Accords, Perry declared they were “grifting, just like you.” In the 117th Congress, according to one study, 52 percent of House Republicans and 60 percent of Senate Republicans were climate skeptics or deniers. Every time soil or a rock “is deposited into the seas,” opined Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) “that forces the sea levels to rise because now you’ve got less space in those oceans because the bottom is moving.”

In May, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) introduced articles of impeachment against FBI Director Christopher Wray. More recently, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, alleged that the Bureau spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign “raided” the former president’s home and targeted conservatives in a “double standard” of the system of justice. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) described the Bureau as a “creepy personal snooping machine.” Blasting the FBI as “tyrannical,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) claimed agents “stormed” the home of an anti-abortion activist and arrested him.

The FBI did not “raid” Mar-a-Lago, Wray said; agents acted pursuant to a search warrant approved by a judge. “There are specific rules about where to store classified information,” Wray added, “and in my experience, ballrooms, bathrooms, and bedrooms are not SCIFs” (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities). In the case of the anti-abortion activist, agents knocked on his door and “asked him to exit. He did without incident.” Given his background as a registered Republican who was appointed by President Trump, Wray concluded, “the idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me.”

In May, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) issued a press release: “Grassley, Comer Demand FBI Record Alleging Criminal Scheme Involving Then VP Biden.” Hours later Grassley tweeted, “I can’t verify whether or not it’s really criminal activity…” Two weeks ago, the DOJ unsealed an indictment filed on Nov. 1, 2022, charging Gal Luft, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, with arms trafficking, sanctions violations, lying to the FBI, and acting as an unregistered agent for China. Arrested in Cyprus in February 2023, Luft skipped bail in April and may now be hiding in Israel. If convicted, he faces up to 100 years in prison.

After acknowledging that Luft was the whistleblower he and Grassley had referenced, Rep. James Comer (R-Tenn.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, insisted he “is a very credible witness.” Comer alleged Luft was the left’s “worst nightmare,” because the FBI had flown to Brussels to interview him, only to insist as well that the Bureau “never investigated any of this. They turned a complete blind eye.” In another non sequitur, Comer stated that Luft had been charged with failing to register as a foreign agent, “which is the main thing we’ve said the Bidens were all along.”

House Republicans joined Comer in suggesting, without evidence, that Luft had been indicted because he had accused the Bidens of wrongdoing. “I don’t trust the DOJ or FBI. They are trying to silence our witnesses,” maintained Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.). As Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) recommended immunity from prosecution in exchange for Luft’s testimony against the Bidens, Comer doubled down on his undocumented assertion that “the president of the United States and his family has taken millions of dollars from a company that’s 100 percent wholly owned by the Chinese Communist Party.”

There are 154 House Republicans who claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen; objected to certifying the Electoral College results; supported recounts in swing states; or attended and/or supported the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol who returned or were newly elected to Congress in November 2022. A couple of weeks ago, GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel told CNN’s Chris Wallace “I don’t think he [Biden] won it fair.” The only evidence she cited — a woman from Wayne County, Michigan, who claimed she was told to backdate ballots, and the removal of Republican poll watchers — has been debunked.

McDaniel did not mention that more than 60 court cases challenging the results were rejected. In one of them, Stephanos Bibas, who was appointed to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President Trump, summarized a simple principle MAGA Republicans and their enablers continue to ignore. Charges of unfairness, Judge Bibas agreed, “are serious.” But such charges “require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Let’s hope all Americans keep this principle in mind if, as expected, former President Trump is indicted again in the near future.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”

Rekha Basu: Afghan native's help to U.S. 'overwhelmingly unimpeachable,' yet we'd turn him over to Taliban

Zalmay Niazy of Iowa Falls helped interpret for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But after six years in Iowa, his plea for asylum has been denied for a ludicrous reason as the law allows.

Rekha Basu
Des Moines Register



From Afghan translator to small-town Iowa handyman


If you’re not convinced we need to revamp U.S. laws on who gets to enter, work, live and find legal sanctuary in this country, look at the crisis facing Afghan-born Iowa Falls resident Zalmay Niazy. His plight sharply illustrates how our decisions to wage war thousands of miles away can endanger allies' lives at the other end. And it cries out for fixing the fact that service to our nation by foreigners living under terrorism is too often punished rather than rewarded.

Niazy, who goes by Zee, was born to professional parents, and educated in private schools to serve as an English-language interpreter. During “Operation Enduring Freedom” — the Bush administration’s military response in Afghanistan and elsewhere to the Sept. 11 attacks — he interpreted for our forces. Beginning at age 19 in 2007, he spent three years helping them fight the Taliban by scanning radio signals, writing up reports on their internal communications, and translating for coalition forces. That put him in life-threatening situations and led to injuries and threats from the Taliban, which also killed his uncle, his Des Moines lawyer says.


Zee later got other employment, which led to his attending a conference in Washington, D.C. in 2015. While here, he applied for political asylum under a program created especially for foreign interpreters for U.S. military. He learned the Taliban was tracking him abroad with threats and his parents feared he’d be killed if he returned home.

Political asylum is selectively awarded to foreign nationals who can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their homelands based on their political affiliation or membership in a marginalized group. Applicants are allowed to stay in the U.S. while awaiting a decision. In Zee’s case, that took four years to come, from the time he was granted an interview after appealing for Sen. Chuck Grassley’s intervention at a 2017 town hall.

In the meantime, Zee created and runs a handyman business, and he bought and renovated a home.

Yet last month the Department of Homeland Security denied him asylum, for a reason so unfair it’s almost laughable. As his lawyer Keith Herting tells it: “When he was 9, the Taliban came to his home. They threatened to burn his house down if he didn’t give them food, (so) his mom gave him bread to take to the fighters.” In his interview with Homeland Security officials, Zee told about that incident in answer to a question on whether he had ever had direct contact with the Taliban.

They used it against him, claiming it showed he’d been “providing material support to terrorists.” They also said he had shown no real threat of persecution, he said in a June 10 interview on Iowa Public Radio’s "River to River":

“I said, ‘I fought this group. How can I be engaged in their activities?’”

The material-support statute, elements of which were in the 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act signed by Bill Clinton, were barely invoked until passage of the 2001 USA Patriot Act. It makes it illegal to provide assistance to any group the U.S. government considers a foreign terrorist organization. But the precedent-setting asylum denial came in 2018 under the Trump administration, after Trump had campaigned pledging to use it more broadly. “In the Matter of A.C.M.” involved a Salvadoran woman who was enslaved by a paramilitary group and escaped, says Herting:

“The Department of Justice said while she was enslaved, she cooked and cleaned for the terrorists,” concluding she provided them material support, he said. That concept has since been applied in a number of other cases, as documented by the New Yorker magazine.

“His story is so overwhelmingly unimpeachable,” said Herting of Zee, “that I would hope there would be some decency or rationality. But I haven’t seen a ton of evidence to suggest that exists.”

More:Basu column: An Iowa City 'Documented Dreamer' tells a U.S. House panel about her plight, shared by 200,000 others

Herting challenges Grassley's contention that he can do nothing because it’s a law. The senator can push to change the law, he says.

Zee will appear June 28 before an immigration appeals court in Omaha to plead his case. A GoFundMe account has been set up for his legal fees.

More broadly, Congress must immediately set about getting rid of or modifying the material support law. That, by the way, doesn’t apply to domestic terrorist groups revealing its underlying bias. Donald Trump leaned on it to ban travel from Muslim countries. He also made asylum the only grounds for foreigners presenting at the border to seek permission to stay, and reduced the number of refugees permitted in annually. Some of his moves have been relaxed under Joe Biden, but there’s much more work to do on immigration law.

In a pointed CNN commentary about Vice President Kamala Harris’ visit to Central America to address the issues that prompt people to leave their countries, Mari Aponte, a former ambassador to El Salvador, wrote:

“The enforcement-first immigration strategy has failed us in the past. Instead of a heated rhetoric that paints immigrants as dangerous, we need real, evidence-based solutions that get at the heart of why migrants leave their homes and make the trek to the U.S.”

That would surely apply to Zalmay Niazy, whose home country the U.S. has had its fingers all over for decades. Now we're pulling out, leaving many who supported us at risk of reprisals from the Taliban. If his plight matters to you, stand up and support Zee’s claim for asylum, and ask Grassley and Sen. Joni Ernst to do the same — and then change the law.

We asked Republican senators about Tucker Carlson's 

favorite authoritarian leader. 

Their praise and dodges 

underscore the danger to 

the US.

Eliza Relman,John Haltiwanger

Fri, August 13, 2021, 

The Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. YouTube

• Carlson's recent visit to Hungary sparked alarm among democracy watchdogs and Democratic lawmakers.

• But some Republican senators endorsed Carlson's embrace of Viktor Orbán and his authoritarian model.

• Romney, however, denounced Orbán as an autocrat who's "only a few clicks away from Vladimir Putin."

The host of America's most-watched cable news show recently spent a week in Budapest extolling the virtues of a small European country sliding into autocracy, triggering alarm among democracy experts and Democratic lawmakers.

Insider approached nearly a dozen Republican senators this week to ask them whether they endorse Fox host Tucker Carlson's promotion of Hungary's right-wing populist leader. Their answers - and nonanswers - underscore the ongoing erosion of support for democracy on the American right.

Some Republican lawmakers either tacitly or explicitly portrayed Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's government as a model for US conservatives. Others insisted they weren't well-informed enough to answer questions about Hungary, which has attracted widespread condemnation, while putting its European Union membership in question.

"The only thing I know about [Orbán] is what I heard right there on [Carlson's] program," Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who's served in the Senate for 40 years, told Insider at the Capitol on Tuesday. "I saw enough snippets that I thought that he was a rational person."

"I haven't been tracking what's happening," Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty, who served as Trump's ambassador to Japan and sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, told Insider.

"Call our press office," Sen. Ted Cruz, who also sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, told Insider. Cruz's spokespeople declined to comment when Insider reached them by email.

The only GOP senator who said he was very familiar with Hungary's government was Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican and close ally of former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Orbán's leadership as a model for the US. He called Carlson's glowing portrayal of the autocrat "pretty accurate."

"I recognize the liberal left doesn't like Hungary, but there are so many positive things about what they're doing in that country," Johnson told Insider.

Carlson on the cover page of the Hungarian weekly magazine Mandiner on August 7. Janos Kummer/Getty Images

Hungary's democratic backslide

Orbán has spent the past 11 years in power asserting control over the judiciary, enriching his loyalists, and eliminating the free press, while remaking his country's laws to benefit his far-right Fidesz party.

After winning two-thirds of the seats in parliament in 2010, Orbán wasted no time in overhauling the nation's constitution. Foundational laws were promptly rewritten without the approval of any lawmakers outside Fidesz, with the EU and UN raising concerns, and critics warning that Hungary was "sliding into authoritarianism." This set the tone for Orbán's rule.

Fidesz has since remade Hungary's electoral system - gerrymandering parliamentary districts and nearly halving the number of seats in parliament - to give it an advantage. The party has consistently won a two-thirds majority in parliament since 2010, despite not always winning a majority of the national vote. And Orbán granted dual citizenship to ethnic Hungarians outside the country's borders, who vote overwhelmingly for Fidesz.

In his domestic policy, Orbán has taken particularly aggressive stances against immigration - including erecting a 180-mile border wall - and LGBTQ rights in his efforts to keep the country of nearly 10 million white, Christian, and conservative. He's forced Central Europe's premier university out of the country, and he's funneled billions of dollars in government money into conservative institutions run by his loyalists as part of an effort "to turn Hungary into the intellectual capital of the nationalist conservative movement," Dalibor Rohac, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Insider.

Orbán's close ties to Russia and China have also been a source of tension with the EU, which has frequently condemned the Hungarian leader on issues like human rights.

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), a project that monitors the health of democracy worldwide, said in its 2021 report that Hungary lost its status as a democracy in 2018 and ranked among the top 10 autocratizing countries.

"Over the past decade, the Orbán government has undermined the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, and freedom of the press; impeded Ukraine's cooperation with NATO; and cozied up to Russia, among many other acts inconsistent with a modern European liberal democracy," James Kirchick, a visiting fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, told Insider.

'Everybody's got different views' on Hungary

Multiple GOP senators declined to comment or said they didn't know enough about Orbán's leadership to have an opinion on the state of Hungarian democracy or the US right's affinity for it. Others took the opportunity to criticize American democracy.

Grassley said he didn't have "the slightest idea" what Orbán had done in Hungary but had a favorable opinion of the leader after watching clips of Carlson's show last week. He went on to suggest that it wouldn't be out of character for Republicans to look abroad for political inspiration.

"Have you ever heard of Mrs. Thatcher?" he said, referring to the former conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. "A lot of things that Republicans started to do in the 1980s was because of what Thatcher was successful doing in Great Britain."

An aide to the senator interjected to say Grassley didn't condone what Orbán has done in Hungary, but the senator insisted the Hungarian leader appeared "rational."

Sen. Rick Scott of Florida insisted that "everybody's got different views" on Hungary's leadership and pivoted to criticizing American democracy. He said he had a Hungarian friend who's considering moving back to his home country if the US "keeps going down this path of systemic socialism."

Orbán at the White House with then-President Donald Trump. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Johnson, the Wisconsin senator who said he felt Hungary was a model for the US, was asked if he thought Orbán's restrictions on free speech and civic society were still problematic. He replied by turning the question around.

"I think what's problematic is what's happening in this country in terms of the media censorship and the media bias," he said.

Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, declined to comment on Hungary and Carlson and instead emphasized American exceptionalism.

"I think the US model should serve as a model for the world, one in which we continuously improve each generation upon the previous generation's handiwork and we leave a more perfect union for our children and grandchildren," Young told Insider. "I've got nothing else to say."

Why Hungarian autocracy appeals to the American right

Carlson's full-throated embrace of Orbán and his populist-nationalist Fidesz party didn't surprise many observers of conservatism. Orbán has become a hero to the far-right across Europe and the US, who've applauded his efforts to create a conservative ethnostate through strict anti-immigration policies, incentives for Hungarian parents, and censorship of progressive civic and educational institutions.

After years of criticism from US administrations, Orbán has found admirers in Trumpian Republicans. Right-wing commentators and operators, including the former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and writers at conservative outlets like National Review and American Conservative, are big fans.

Johnson told Insider he'd met "repeatedly" with Hungarian parliamentarians and called them "family-oriented." He added that Orbán's anti-immigration policies had shown "you actually can defend your border and represent the people of your country, as opposed to an open border and chaos that we're seeing here."

Experts on authoritarianism say that Trump's embrace of autocratic leaders and his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election have deepened the American right's disdain for democracy.

Staffan Lindberg, a Swedish political scientist and the director of V-Dem, said that embracing Orbán and his politics "means espousing authoritarianism and anti-pluralism."

"The suggestion that the GOP should emulate Fidesz and Orbán's politics is nothing short of saying that democracy is no longer the system for the US: Democracy should be dismantled, die," he told Insider.

Democrats are outspoken in their condemnation of Orbán, who President Joe Biden last year suggested was a totalitarian "thug," and say they're increasingly worried about the US right's embrace of authoritarianism.

"Orbán is trying to model a kind of repressive, pseudo-democracy where free speech is virtually nonexistent," Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, told Insider this week.

"There's obviously a lot of sympathy in the Republican Party for authoritarianism and there's a lot of Republicans who are giving up on democracy," he added. "That's what January 6 was all about. ... The Republican Party right now presents a real threat to American democracy."

Many European conservatives and experts on the right are also increasingly critical of the Hungarian ruling party.

Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, said conservative respect for Orbán "reflects the continued deterioration of the American Right."

"Supposed conservatives are sacrificing once strongly held commitments to liberty and the rule of law," Bandow told Insider. "Support for the family and tradition are important but are secure only when nestled within a democratic system and based on a liberal constitutional order."

Carlson broadcasts from Hungary and praises the country's autocratic leader. YouTube

There used to be stronger opposition to Orbán's leadership in the GOP's ranks. In 2019, the bipartisan leadership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a letter to Trump expressing its concern with Hungary's "downward democratic trajectory." The lawmakers, including Republican Sens. James Risch and Marco Rubio, urged Trump to press Orbán on Hungary's embrace of China and Russia and its authoritarian slide.

Rohac said the right's criticism of Orbán had mostly dried up since then and "pro-Orbán and anti-anti-Orbán voices are dominating the conversation."

"It wasn't taken as a given that Viktor Orbán is a friend of conservative values, of the conservative movement," Rohac said. "I think those scruples have just disappeared. It's very hard to find anybody who would be critical of Orbán among politically active Republicans."

Still, a few GOP elected officials remain willing to speak out against Hungarian authoritarianism.

"I think Viktor Orbán and Hungary are far from a model for any other nation," Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican and former GOP presidential nominee, told Insider on Tuesday. "Mr. Orbán is only a few clicks away from Vladimir Putin, and autocracy is antithetical to the American experience."

Spokespeople for Risch and Rubio didn't reply to Insider's multiple requests for comment.

Rohac said Orbán's appeal to Republicans came down to his success in crushing progressive culture and politics.

"The best explanation was provided by Tucker Carlson himself at this dinner with Orbán last week when he said that you are hated by the right sort of people," Rohac said, referring to Carlson's comment last week to Hungarian right-wingers.

"I'm afraid that's where we are with intellectual conservatism - that it's no longer about policy. It's no longer about principles. It's no longer about having some sort of coherent worldview that reflects conservative principles.

"It's squarely about owning the libs. It's squarely about just doing things that the other side will hate. And for that, Orbán is your man."

Read the original article on Business Insider

Democrats, Republicans sponsor bill to give thousands of Afghans path to citizenship


Asylum seekers from Afghanistan enter the U.S. at El Chaparral port of entry, in Tijuana


Tue, August 9, 2022 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in both houses of U.S. Congress to establish a path to American citizenship for thousands of Afghan evacuees admitted to the United States on temporary immigration status, the sponsors announced on Tuesday.

The bill also would expand eligibility for Special Immigration Visas (SIVs) beyond Afghans who worked for the U.S. government to those who fought alongside U.S. forces as commandoes and air force personnel, and to women who served in special counterterrorism teams.

Identical versions of the bill were introduced days before the first anniversary of the final U.S. troop withdrawal and the chaotic evacuation operation that ended America's longest war and saw the Taliban overrun Kabul.

"We must keep our commitment to provide safe, legal refuge to those who willingly put their lives on the line to support the U.S. mission in Afghanistan," Democratic Representative Earl Blumenauer, co-sponsor of the House bill with Republican Peter Meijer, said in a statement.

Three minority Republicans, including Senator Lindsey Graham, joined three majority Democrats in introducing an identical version of the Afghanistan Adjustment Act in the thinly divided Senate, enhancing its chances of passage.

Even so, a congressional aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the measure likely will face "resistance" from anti-immigration Republicans.

Many of the 76,000 Afghans flown out in last year's evacuation operation entered the United States on humanitarian parole, a temporary immigration status that typically only lasts up to two years.

The legislation would allow those evacuees to apply for permanent legal status if they submit to additional background checks.

Generally, those Afghans only can gain permanent legal status in the United States by applying for asylum or through SIVs, programs beset by major backlogs.

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay; Editing by Sam Holmes)

A Year Later, Afghan Refugees Remain in Legal Limbo as Vets Continue Evacuating Allies Left Behind



Rebecca Kheel
Tue, August 9, 2022

 
d States during the chaotic American military evacuation after the Taliban overran Kabul remain in a legal limbo nearly a year later, unsure whether they will be able to remain in their new country when their temporary immigration status expires soon.

Meanwhile, as the one-year anniversary of the withdrawal approaches, veterans groups have not let up efforts to get out the estimated 78,000 Afghans who aided the 20-year effort but were left behind when the last U.S. troops departed.

A bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers is taking initial steps to fix the immigration status of those who did make it out ahead of the U.S. withdrawal, introducing bills in the House and Senate this week to allow the Afghan refugees to permanently stay in the United States.

Supporters are hopeful the bill will become law, but the clock is ticking on both the legislative calendar and the Afghans' immigration status, with the August recess meaning a fix likely can't come in time for Afghans already in the U.S. before some see their legal status expire. The bill also contains several provisions meant to ease ongoing relocations.

"We're hopeful that passing this bill won't be as hard as passing the PACT Act," said Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and president of the #AfghanEvac Coalition, referring to a veterans benefits bill that passed Congress last week after veterans camped outside the U.S. Capitol, protesting for several days straight. "It shouldn't take veterans standing watch in the hot sun to great physical detriment to get people to take action."

Monday will mark the one-year anniversary of Kabul falling to the Taliban, swiftly reversing many of the efforts of the longest war in U.S. history. The Taliban's victory set off a scramble among U.S. officials to evacuate as many vulnerable Afghans as possible before the Biden administration's self-imposed withdrawal deadline of Aug. 31, 2021.

Throngs of Afghans desperate to get onto a U.S. military flight swarmed the Kabul airport, leading to chaotic and heartbreaking scenes, including Afghans who had clung to the side of an American C-17 Globemaster III plummeting to their deaths as the aircraft ascended into the sky. Amid the chaos of the evacuation, the Afghan branch of ISIS carried out a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops.

By the time the last American forces departed just before midnight of the withdrawal deadline, more than 76,000 Afghans had been evacuated. Still, the majority of Afghans who worked as interpreters or otherwise helped the U.S. military and are eligible for what's called Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs, were left behind, with advocates estimating that number was around 78,000 people plus family members.

Work on extracting the Afghans left behind continues. While declining to discuss specific numbers on the record, VanDiver, who meets with State Department officials weekly, said relocations of Afghans are ongoing. He said he's satisfied with the relocation process that's been put in place, but still said more could be done.

"More and faster, that's the best way I can describe it," he said. "I want to see a lot more relocations and a lot faster."

Matt Zeller, co-founder of No One Left Behind, an SIV support organization, said he fears many of those left behind have already been killed, based on anecdotal reports and preliminary results from a survey conducted by two organizations he works with, the Association of Wartime Allies and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

"Just yesterday, an interpreter that I've been trying to get out since the evac -- poor guy who was on the freakin' airfield the night Kabul fell … he texted me just yesterday morning at 11 o'clock in the morning our time to tell me that a friend of his, a former interpreter, had been killed by the Taliban," Zeller said Monday.

Of the Afghans who made it to the United States last August, most were brought under a temporary immigration status known as humanitarian parole, which allows people otherwise ineligible to enter the United States to come into the country temporarily for emergency humanitarian reasons.

Parole does not provide a pathway to apply for legal permanent resident status, more casually known as green cards. Some Afghan refugees were given two years of protection to stay in the United States, but some were given only one -- meaning they have weeks until they technically won't be in the United States legally anymore.

The Afghan Adjustment Act, which was introduced in the House on Tuesday and the Senate on Sunday, would create a streamlined process for the evacuated Afghans to get green cards. The Department of Homeland Security would also have to establish new vetting procedures for the Afghans seeking green cards.

Supporters of the bill have likened it to similar measures passed after other U.S. conflicts, such as for Vietnamese and other South Asian refugees after the fall of Saigon.

"We must keep our commitment to provide safe, legal refuge to those who willingly put their lives on the line to support the U.S. mission in Afghanistan," Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., the lead sponsor of the House bill, said in a statement. "Congress has provided a legal adjustment process for previous wartime evacuations and humanitarian crises and should do so once again, without delay."

The bill also seeks to fix issues with the SIV program, such as the requirement that interviews be conducted at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, which no longer exists. Instead, the bill would establish a new State Department office to conduct interviews for visa applicants and carry out other duties that would have otherwise been the responsibility of the embassy. It also creates an "Interagency Task Force on Afghan Ally Strategy" to develop a plan to support SIV and refugee applicants.

The bill would also extend special immigrant status to certain former Afghan troops, including former members of the Afghanistan National Army Special Operations Command, the Afghan Air Force, the Special Mission Wing of Afghanistan and the Female Tactical Teams of Afghanistan.

"Giving them that statutory requirement will make sure that, no matter what happens in politics, that these folks get to realize the American Dream that they've earned," VanDiver said.

The introduction of the stand-alone bills is the most public progress made on the issue since May, when the Biden administration requested Congress include an Afghan Adjustment Act in a Ukraine aid bill. The proposal was left out of that bill amid objections from Republicans.

Supporters of the Afghan Adjustment Act have specifically blamed Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, for not signing off on including it in the Ukraine bill. A spokesperson for Grassley did not respond to Military.com's request for comment Tuesday.

Grassley has previously expressed concern about vetting of the Afghan refugees, saying in a statement Friday that Congress "should not even begin to consider proposals related to sweeping immigration status changes for evacuees, such as an Afghan Adjustment Act, until the Biden administration, at the very least, guarantees the integrity of and fully responds to long-standing congressional oversight requests regarding the vetting and evacuee resettlement process."

Supporters of the bill are hopeful for its chances now that it has bipartisan co-sponsors. The House bill is co-sponsored by Reps. Peter Meijer, R-Mich.; House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.; Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.; Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.; Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa; Jason Crow, D-Colo.; Fred Upton, R-Mich.; and Scott Peters, D-Calif. The Senate bill was introduced by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Chris Coons, D-Del.; Roy Blunt, R-Mo.; Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

But even with bipartisan support, the bill still faces hurdles, including a legislative calendar truncated by election season and with several priorities competing for floor time. Passing the measure before the end of this Congress in January could be done by attaching the measure to a must-pass bill such as one to fund the government when the fiscal year ends Sept. 30, but that is still after some Afghans' immigration status is set to expire at the end of August.

"This is not a matter of immigration. This is a national security issue," Zeller said. "This is down to, are we going to be able to have allies in the future going forward and future wars? Because allies, quite frankly, equals fewer American deaths."

-- Rebecca Kheel can be reached at rebecca.kheel@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @reporterkheel.

Related: 10 Months Later, Afghan Refugees Labor to Build New Lives in US