Andrew Harnik / AP

A top Bernie Sanders official is asking Democratic leaders, including Hillary Clinton, to sign a draft letter recommitting to vastly shrinking or effectively eliminating the party’s controversial “superdelegates” system — and ultimately changing the presidential nominating process.

The Sanders ally, his former campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, is in talks with Clinton’s team about the letter, and also plans to solicit signatures from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez, and DNC vice chair Rep. Keith Ellison, according to two people familiar with the undertaking.

The effort to make Democratic primaries more fair — a process that has spanned two years, two committees, and dozens of arcane rules about how to make changes to the rules — is nearing its long-awaited end. Next month, the party’s Rules & Bylaws Committee convenes to begin drafting the final language that DNC members will or will not approve in a vote this summer.

At stake is the future of “superdelegates,” the 700 or so party leaders entitled to cast votes as “unpledged delegates” for the candidate of their choosing.

“We believe that the passage of these reforms is a fundamental and necessary step in re-establishing faith with those who have lost confidence in the Party as a vehicle for change,” reads the draft of the letter, obtained on Friday. “Now is the time to go forward, not backward.”

Weaver declined to comment. A spokesperson for Clinton also declined to comment when asked whether the former Democratic nominee would sign her name to the letter. When contacted, Pelosi and Schumer aides said they hadn’t been aware of Weaver’s letter.

A DNC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Weaver’s draft letter — meant to lock in public support for shrinking that system — would show Clinton, Sanders, and other party leaders reiterating their commitment to proposals put forward during the 2016 Democratic National Convention. It was there, in Philadelphia, that officials from the two rival campaigns formed the Unity Reform Commission, a 21-member committee tasked with proposing specific changes to rules around delegate allocation, caucuses, and primaries — a set of compromises hashed out by Clinton and Sanders allies ahead of the convention.

Among them was a proposal to effectively reduce superdelegates by about 60%.

Under the existing system for choosing a Democratic nominee, candidates vie for "pledged delegates" by competing in caucuses and primaries, which award delegates based on performance. Later on, at the convention, superdelegates or “unpledged delegates” can vote for however they want. Superdelegates include the 447 members of the DNC; Democratic governors, US senators, and members of Congress; and “distinguished leaders” like former presidents, vice presidents, and party chairs.

The Unity Reform Commission proposal would strip just DNC members of their superdelegate votes during the first and main round of voting at the convention. (In the rare case of a second round of voting, all superdelegates would be unbound, free to support any candidate.)

The superdelegate debate, led by Sanders supporters who felt the system unfairly favored Clinton, has now moved to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, where officials put forward a final set of proposed rules changes.

Committee members remain divided on the idea of a 60% reduction: Some, like longtime party leader Leah Daughtry, support eliminating superdelegates altogether on a first ballot convention vote.

Others see superdelegates as a crucial part of the primary system — a safeguard against nominees like President Trump, said one Rules and Bylaws member, Elaine Kamarck, a DNC member who has studied presidential politics for decades.

Kamarck has backed the original Unity Reform Commission proposal, but also made clear that she believes that, in the long term, more so-called “peer review” by veteran party leaders produces stronger presidential nominees. In a forthcoming study for New York University’s law journal, she said, she will propose a number of changes to the nominating system, from an increase in superdelegates to a new pre-primary endorsement process where the party’s top elected officials would meet with the candidates, question their positions, and issue votes of confidence or no-confidence. Candidates who fail to meet a certain threshold would be barred from debates or from a spot on the ballot, depending on how the party decided to structure the system, she said.

“This whole idea runs completely counter to where the public is,” Kamarck admitted, referring to the broad support particularly among Sanders supporters for a reduction in superdelegates. “However, if the Trump presidency crashes and burns and takes the GOP with it, which is not unrealistic, this dialogue will start.”

When the Rules and Bylaws Committee meets next month in Washington, members will also weigh whether changes should be made to the DNC’s rules, or to its charter document — a distinction that will determine the vote threshold needed at a final vote later this year. Rules changes require a simple majority of DNC members. Charter changes, considered to be more permanent, require a two-thirds majority.

LINK: Democrats Are Considering Dropping Superdelegates Altogether

LINK: All You Need To Know About This Weekend's Vote To Change The Democratic 2020 Primary Process

Sinclair Broadcast Group executives reprimanded and ultimately ousted a local news reporter who refused to seed doubt about man-made climate change and “balance” her stories in a more conservative direction.

Her account, detailed in company documents she provided to BuzzFeed News, offers a glimpse at the inner workings of a media giant that has sought to both ingratiate itself to President Donald Trump and cast itself as an apolitical local news provider — a position the documents undermine.

In one 2015 instance, the former news director of WSET-TV in Lynchburg, Virginia, Len Stevens, criticized reporter Suri Crowe because she “clearly laid out the argument that human activities cause global warming, but had nothing from the side that questions the science behind such claims and points to more natural causes for such warming.”

In recent months, Sinclair has garnered intense national attention for forcing stations across the country to carry pro-Trump, “must-run” segments and instructing anchors to read statements touting conservative talking points. Sinclair, which owns local TV stations “affiliated” with name-brand networks like Fox or ABC, has defended the segments and noted they are a small part of its stations’ overall coverage — but Crowe’s experience as a general assignment reporter demonstrates how the parent company’s ideology can permeate throughout local news reporting.

She faced discipline for social media posts and restrictions in reporting on guns, white nationalism, and Liberty University, she said. Company documents do criticize some of her work as unfair and her behavior as unprofessional at times. Overall, the documents provide an unusually close look at one reporter’s experience working for a Sinclair station, and how the smallest details mattered and were recorded.

Crowe told BuzzFeed News that before the October 2015 climate change segment aired, she was ordered by Stevens to include Donald Trump’s opinion on the matter. “When I instructed you to balance the story, by including some of [the] other argument, you insisted there was no need to add such balance to the story,” he wrote in her Jan. 22, 2016, performance review.

"That was the moment where I realized how things were going to go there."

A veteran reporter who has worked at news stations in Texas and Virginia, Crowe said she viewed the story as environmental — not two-sided or political. “I was always covering the flu. I don’t remember a time when for balance I went out to a group of 20 people who are nutjobs that say flu shots kill,” she told BuzzFeed News. The scientific consensus is that climate change is real and humans are largely to blame, but Crowe ultimately read the updated, “balanced” script on air. “That was the moment where I realized how things were going to go there,” she said.

“The management team felt the story was one-sided — indicating that human activity is to blame for global warming — period,” said Stevens, who now works in the communications department at Liberty University, in an emailed statement to BuzzFeed News. “I understand most scientists agree with that assessment. I, myself, feel that human activity at least plays a role, but our opinions really shouldn’t matter. We were there to deliver news, not opinion. And there is NOT 100% agreement on this issue, even among the scientific community.”

Crowe was, in retrospect, struck that Trump’s thoughts were included before he was even his party’s nominee, but Stevens defended the decision. “It was simply a statement — in the headlines at that time — that provided some balance, some reference to the other side of the argument. That side does exist,” he said. “The same would hold true for any hot button issue — Gun Control, Abortion, the Death Penalty, etc.”

Crowe, 49, says she was badly shaken by her time at Sinclair. She left the news business but decided to speak on the record so other reporters and news consumers would know about what can happen when Sinclair takes over a local outlet. The largest owner of TV stations in the country, Sinclair is poised to expand even more through the $3.9 billion takeover of Tribune Media, which could grant it a foothold in major US cities like Los Angeles and expand its reach to 72% of American homes.

Last year, Crowe’s contract was not renewed and she was forced out of WSET, an ABC-affiliated TV station owned by the company. “We do not comment on individual cases regarding past employees,” said Ronn Torossian, a spokesperson for Sinclair. “We do always maintain high standards for balanced, fact-based reporting.”

“After I left, I just didn’t want to go back to news,” Crowe said. “Now I feel like I’m more committed to journalism than ever. We really have to fight for journalism — it’s worth the fight.”

Suri Crowe in Virginia on Thursday, April 19, 2018.

Matt Eich for BuzzFeed News

Crowe spent the early part of her reporting career in local markets in Texas in the 1990s, covering federal court cases, murders, drug trafficking along the border, and then-governor George W. Bush. “He was a pleasure to cover — a very kind and decent man,” Crowe said. “I enjoyed my relationship with that whole Republican changeup in Austin.”

She left journalism to work in pharmaceutical sales for Pfizer, but returned to other TV stations in Virginia before landing a three-year contract with WSET in 2014. At the time, Sinclair was in the process of acquiring a handful of stations owned by Allbritton, including WSET and the broadcaster’s flagship, WJLA, in Washington, DC. Though Crowe’s position fell in the medium-sized Roanoke-Lynchburg TV market, she was advised by a mentor at Sinclair that the company’s expanding footprint would set her up to move to a market like DC afterward.

"It’s always been a conservative station. We’re right in the Bible Belt. It went beyond that when Sinclair took over."

Former employees said that WSET’s coverage has long focused on the Lynchburg side of the area, where the station is located (unlike the rival broadcasters). “The market strategy was to really not fret about the western half of the market, but to own your backyard counties because there was no competition,” said one former staffer. “That is a far more conservative half — versus the Virginia Tech area.”

“It’s always been a conservative station. We’re right in the Bible Belt,” said another former employee. But Sinclair’s grip on local coverage became clearer to employees after the takeover. “It went beyond that when Sinclair took over,” the former employee said. “It became: ‘This is what we have to do.’ In our morning editorial meetings, anything that went against anything that corporate wanted was just shot down.”

Crowe, for her part, battled with her bosses over political and nonpolitical issues. Younger reporters counted Lynchburg as a “starter” market, but Crowe’s colleagues said she was an outspoken, experienced journalist who wanted to do nationally minded stories. She clashed with management, former employees said, particularly over what exactly constitutes balanced coverage.

“Your story on proposed gun legislation was not balanced,” Stevens wrote in Crowe’s performance review. “You wrote of the proposed gun restrictions, ‘Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, not to those in charge of passing new gun laws.’ And that tone is carried throughout the story. Another line: ‘Several polls show the majority of Virginians are in favor of tighter restrictions on gun purchases... But Republican lawmakers in Richmond... won’t go for it.’”

On another gun story about the state attorney general’s decision to revoke a reciprocity agreement with other states for concealed carry permits, Stevens wrote that the sum total Crowe offered the other side was a single sentence: “The NRA on the other hand released a statement condemning the attorney general’s decision.” Stevens added that Crowe “had access to the press release sent by the NRA, yet included nothing from the actual statement... This kind of approach damages our reputation as a fair and balanced news organization.”

"I would tell the reporters ‘just give me something I can defend,’ because I was the one who would take the angry calls from viewers."

“I would tell the reporters ‘just give me something I can defend,’ because I was the one who would take the angry calls from viewers if they felt we weren’t giving a fair treatment to ‘their side’ on a particular issue,” Stevens told BuzzFeed News. “When a story was balanced enough, I could simply read it back to the caller, word for word, and highlight to them how all sides were represented. Most often, the caller would agree, thank me for taking the time to explain, and promise to keep watching. Those interactions protected that newsroom’s credibility. Almost everyone there understood this need for balance, agreed with it, and followed through. Any reporter who would outright refuse to balance their stories would certainly get extra oversight and possibly remedial action.”

The review highlighted other complaints, including that Crowe had been late to news shoots and that she had acted unprofessionally with the Lynchburg Police Department. “[An] officer describes a pattern of inappropriate behavior in his time dealing with you, including: ‘overstepping bounds, drama, unprofessional texts, emails, calls, etc.,’” Stevens wrote. One officer had indicated Crowe had “looked very angry” and “looked irritated the entire time you were with him, that you ignored him, and that you got basic facts of the story incorrect.”

In a written response to her review, Crowe said that she was being unfairly targeted. Lots of stories, she told BuzzFeed News, got cut for space, diminishing time given to both sides. Crowe wrote in her response to Stevens that she had also “on multiple occasions reported on ‘pro-gun’ stories,” including a December 2015 pitch about Republicans in Campbell County wanting to pass a pro-gun resolution. “I didn’t have an anti–gun violence side there — and Mr. Stevens had no problem with that story.”

According to Crowe, her relationship with the police department was fine — at times adversarial, but that comes with being a reporter — and she felt horrified that station management would not come to her defense. Crowe’s response continued: “This appraisal is not really about my performance. This is really a character and professional assassination of me because I am a woman. A very good reporter who is not afraid to ask the difficult questions of a police department during a year when so many police departments have been under fire,” she wrote. “If you want me out so much, let me go without any restrictive covenants and I will start looking today for another job.”

Suri Crowe in Virginia on Thursday, April 19, 2018.

Matt Eich for BuzzFeed News

As Sinclair’s corporate control intensified, some employees at WSET began to quietly worry about the introduction of the company’s now infamous “must-run” clips. The segments, produced by the parent company, included a “Terrorism Alert Desk” rounding up terror incidents from around the globe, as well as political diatribes from former Trump official Boris Epshteyn. Inside the newsroom, employees who viewed the segments negatively mostly kept quiet. “We would see a must-run, and we would all glance at each other, but that was about it,” said a former staffer. Some reporters in the field chafed at the must-runs not for political reasons, but because it meant they had less time for their own stories.

The segments also exposed a generational divide. “Half of the newsroom was pretty vocal about drinking the Kool-Aid, and they were all the old people,” one of the former employees said. “I think the general consensus and attitude was that they were probably doing it because they liked their jobs. It was scary to watch.”

Earlier this month, Sinclair’s must-runs came under sharp national scrutiny when Deadspin stitched together a video showing dozens of local TV anchors delivering the same speech about media bias in unison. Critics said that the anchors looked like hostages. Journalism schools sent a letter to Sinclair blasting the video. The clip ricocheted around Hollywood, with liberal actor Amy Schumer canceling a planned interview with Sinclair’s DC station. Former Sinclair employees began speaking out — like one reporter in Florida who told Bloomberg he was ordered to conduct politically tinted “man on the street” interviews.

As the media storm intensified, Sinclair battled back. David Smith, Sinclair’s chair, emailed the New York Times that the must-runs were similar to stations running late-night shows from their affiliated network. The company then ran a banner on the websites of every one of its local stations linking to a YouTube video attacking CNN’s “hypocritical” coverage of the incident.

Despite her negative performance review, Crowe remained in her contract at WSET, and in April 2016, she won a Virginias Associated Press Broadcasters award for coverage of animal inspection violations at a roadside zoo. Crowe’s reporter “reel” from her time at WSET compiles some of her stories, from local weather events to political rallies to an investigation on why a local shelter euthanized a dog set for adoption.

Stevens, the news director from the Allbritton and early Sinclair era, joined Liberty University when he left WSET in 2016. But Crowe continued to feud with the new management, including news director Scott Nichols.

Crowe told BuzzFeed News that she pitched a story about the rise of white supremacists in the area who she said she could get on camera for an interview. According to Crowe, Nichols told her that he didn’t see the news value. The piece would have been prescient, Crowe now says, because she offered the idea well before the race-fueled clashes in nearby Charlottesville that would bring national attention to the region.

Nichols did not return a request for comment for this story.

Crowe also claimed she was called off from digging into potential Title IX issues at Liberty University, a topic that was later covered at length in the local media. Crowe attributed the decision to close ties between WSET at the evangelical university, which is led by Jerry Falwell Jr., an ardent Trump supporter.

“We leave Liberty alone,” said another former employee. “It’s like Liberty is untouchable.”

Stevens disagreed. “When I was in that newsroom, we treated Liberty the same as any other institution, sometimes drawing the ire of university leadership. We were tough but fair and we covered a lot of Liberty news,” he said. “In fact, in my current position at Liberty, I’ve noticed no drop-off in interest by WSET in Liberty-related stories of all stripes.”

By early 2017, Crowe said she believed that Sinclair executives were seeking to build a case against her — in writing — so that they could eventually force her out of the company.

On Jan. 24, Nichols emailed Crowe to reprimand her for two tweets posted on her personal Twitter account that were in violation of Sinclair’s social media policy. “With record unemployment, job creation, lower crime rates and booming stock markets — what America is @realDonaldTrump seeing?” Crowe quote-tweeted along with a Vanity Fair article about Trump’s “dark, raw, partisan” inaugural speech, which depicted an America in crisis. Crowe also quote-tweeted President Obama’s outgoing farewell tweet with three heart emojis.

“Someone could interpret your tweets and re-tweets as media bias because a majority of them are anti-Trump and pro-Obama,” Nichols wrote in an email. “It’s OK to hold those in power accountable. But your tweets and re-tweets should cover a wide breadth of topics, not just point out what some say President Trump is doing wrong. You say you are not biased, and I appreciate that. But you don’t want to have the ‘appearance’ of bias either.”

Crowe responded in an email: “I do tweet on a wide range of topics — I also put hearts next to a social media post regarding the Bushes recovering — am I to understand one positive for the GOP is okay — but certainly not for the other side?”

"What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t outright quit because I was in a contract."

On her social media accounts — particularly since she left the news business — Crowe frequently posts and retweets negative comments about the president and Republicans and in favor of liberal causes. Her politics are no secret. Crowe told BuzzFeed News that she recognizes by coming forward, critics will point to her personal beliefs, but she said that as a reporter her opinions were separate from her work. “People will say, ‘She’s so obviously liberal, she hates Trump, loves Obama,’” Crowe said. “This is the thing. I have never been accused of imbalanced reporting in my effing life until I got to that station.”

“Suri is a good journalist,” said one of her former colleagues. “It wasn't like she was trying to go out for the left. It boiled down to the corporate [structure] that we were under and also our area, where management is just thinking, ‘That's not going to fly here.’”

On Feb. 24 of last year, Nichols sent Crowe a “last chance agreement.”

“Certain aspects of your job performance have been unsatisfactory,” he wrote. Nichols reprimanded Crowe for an incident earlier that month where Crowe called animal control on a family while shooting a story about them. (Crowe said that she filed an anonymous tip because she viewed the situation as dangerous.) Nichols wrote that Crowe had left work early and also brought up incidents of “your apparent bias in your social media accounts.”

“What they were doing is manufacturing incidents to target me. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t outright quit because I was in a contract,” she said. Crowe had wanted to leave for some time, she said, but feared owing the company money or being blackballed from other stations for breaking an agreement.

Toward the end of the contract, Crowe said she was whisked into a room and told that the company had exercised an escape hatch to force her out early. It was her last day at Sinclair and, as it happened, her last day in the news business. She now works in the health and fitness industry.

“I believe the ire at me was politically tainted,” Crowe said. “If they perceived you as a liberal, or someone not going along with that whole credo, then you are done.” ●

Jake Tapper

Nurphoto / Getty Images

Last month, the lawyer for a Russian businessman suing BuzzFeed over the Trump dossier paused in the middle of my deposition to reveal which, among the thousands of documents we’d turned over in discovery, was his favorite.

The lawyer picked out a furious and colorful email Jake Tapper sent me the night we published the dossier, in which Tapper expressed his disagreement with our decision to publish — and added that, “collegiality wise,” I had done something that he described with an intimate and painful-sounding metaphor.

The email reminded me of two things.

First, that Tapper is an excellent writer.

And second, that one of the great secrets to his professional success is his all-out defense of his reputation on all fronts at all times: Before the Tappergram about the dossier, I’d heard from him more commonly about stray tweets from BuzzFeed staffers about everything from the poop cruise (his own coverage, he wanted to point out, had been serious and policy-focused) to the usual arguments over ratings. No tweet about Tapper, not even a subtweet, falls without Tapper’s notice.

“I don't have time for your high school drama club,” he said recently in his fourth rapid-fire tweet to a BuzzFeed News reporter who had botched, then quickly corrected, a Tapper quote.

Perhaps the best evidence of how fiercely Tapper protects his reputation is that — despite his irascibility being a kind of Washington legend — I can’t find any reference to it in a series of recent glowing profiles of the CNN anchor. These profiles tend to feature a relaxed-looking Tapper, surrounded by red, white, and blue memorabilia. Perhaps his feet are up on his desk. Tapper’s friends and acquaintances were rather surprised to learn, from the lede of a recent Times profile, that “Jake Tapper doesn’t seem to get rattled easily.”

Some of Tapper’s colleagues and Twitter enemies find the heated private responses to criticism over the top, a sign that he takes himself too seriously.

But I’ve always considered this thin skin a positive quality: Tapper should take himself seriously. He has a serious job and has succeeded in part because he’s always engaged critics, including Twitter voices to the right and left of the mainstream television conversation, the kind of critics whom high-profile journalists often ignore. He’s the defining serious TV journalist of the Trump era for a reason.

The Hellfire Club

Little, Brown and Company

And it takes a certain kind of seriousness of purpose to dive unapologetically into genre fiction, which Tapper has done in a fun and necessarily somewhat trashy political thriller called The Hellfire Club.

The novel is true to the genre: The story of a deadly conspiracy in Eisenhower’s Washington is rich with period detail, sex, and murder, and boasts not just one but a handful of conspiratorial secret societies.

It has the best qualities of this sort of historical fiction, which include the winking perspective of the present. The protagonist, a young New York congressman named Charlie Marder, has thankfully anachronistic views that make him alive to Washington’s deep racism and gender inequality.

And Joe McCarthy has more than a little Donald Trump in him — full of lies and bluster, yet impossible to ignore: a planet “blocking out the sun.” McCarthy (and later Trump) consigliere Roy Cohn’s peace plan also sounds familiar: “He’d pick up the phone and call Joe Stalin and say, 'This is Joe McCarthy, I’m coming over tomorrow to talk about things…'”

The media is largely absent from the novel. The courageous Walter Cronkite stands out from a mostly tame press corps.

But Tapper’s own anti-politics come through in the novel’s central conflict, and it helped me understand Tapper’s approach as well as anything else he’s said or written. In The Hellfire Club, McCarthy is a monster, ruining lives with careless lies. But Tapper, like the anti-Communist liberals of that day, goes out of his way to stress that the Communist conspiracy was real and that some of the accused — the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss — were guilty.

“McCarthy’s a drunk but he’s not wrong about everything,” Marder’s father tells him.

Our hero distinguishes himself by avoiding the seduction of either Moscow or the more-than-a-little-fascist Hellfire Club cult of the title, an entertaining fictional updating of an 18th-century sex club whose members, here, include both McCarthy and the Kennedys. The heroic band he joins, in the end, is a third force, a dashing group organized around the president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower, to save the Republic. This nameless force might be confused, in today’s terms, for the Deep State.

The novel is Tapper’s fourth book but his first work of fiction, and while The Hellfire Club might not get glowing blurbs from James Patterson and Shonda Rhimes if it carried a different byline, its quality is a tribute to taking yourself seriously in all things.

Eric Thayer / Reuters

Sens. Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand have all suggested they would support plans for the federal government to guarantee a job for every American, rapidly moving what was once a fringe, progressive vision closer to the mainstream of Democratic politics.

Sanders’ plan, announced today, would give a $15-an-hour public works job, plus health benefits, to anyone who wants it, a vision reminiscent of parts of Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era New Deal.

All three lawmakers are considered top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, a fact that could tip the party toward embracing a version of the plan — just as the weight of the party has moved rapidly toward single-payer health care, or Medicare for all.

“This is about Democrats really working to develop big ideas — and being unshackled from this notion that we have to think small," said Ari Rabin-Havt, a senior adviser to Sanders.

"It's moving forward on a major issue with people across the Democratic Party taking part in this discussion,” he said. “If the debate in 2020 is about how big a jobs guarantee bill should be, that's a great thing."

A federal jobs guarantee program has failed to pick up steam until recently, even among the most progressive Democratic lawmakers. It would be sprawling, perhaps the size and scope of Medicare, and expensive — though Sanders' office hasn't calculated a cost, an estimate of another version of the plan, similar to the one embraced by Booker, put the price tag at $543 billion per year, not much less than the annual defense budget.

Booker put out a bill Friday for a pilot program that would test a jobs guarantee plan in 15 cities and counties across the country. In a statement, he called it "an idea that demands to be taken seriously."

@SenGillibrand / Twitter

Gillibrand, another Democratic Party star, told the left-wing magazine the Nation in March that she supported a jobs guarantee program. She tweeted last week that the government should invest $1.5 trillion — the estimated cost of the Republican tax cut — in guaranteeing jobs for Americans who are "unemployed and willing to work to better their local community."

LINK: With Popular Single-Payer Plan, Bernie Sanders Enters New Territory: A Wealth Tax

LINK: The Lefty Democratic Shift On Wall Street Is Happening For Real

One of the Democratic Party’s leading institutions grappled with a divisive internal battle over sexual harassment during and in the aftermath of the 2016 election, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News and interviews with 19 current and former staffers.

The Center for American Progress, the politics and policy hub for the Democratic establishment, has put out four different policy proposal papers on handling sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as data on how pervasive the issue is “across all industries.”

Neera Tanden

Joe McKendry for BuzzFeed News

The organization’s president, Neera Tanden, has vehemently criticized Republicans for their reaction to the accusations of sexual misconduct against President Donald Trump and wrote in a tweet still pinned to her profile, “I don't think the country has understood how psychologically wounding it was to so many women that Trump won after the Access Hollywood tape.”

But only an hour after the Access Hollywood tape was made public, top officials at CAP received an exit memo from a young woman who'd just quit detailing the sexual harassment she experienced from Benton Strong, a manager on her team — harassment, she wrote, that management already knew about — and how she faced retaliation for reporting it.

"I surely expected better out of an organization that housed a national campaign on sexual assault."

In the email, the junior staffer, who asked that BuzzFeed News refer her to as Mary, which is part of the woman’s formal name, wrote that “on several occasions, myself and others on the team felt as if reporting had been a mistake and that the retaliation, worsening of already tenuous team dynamics, and treatment by supervisors outweighed the seemingly positive act of reporting sexual harassment in the workplace.” When contacted about this story, the woman confirmed the authenticity of the exit memo, but declined to comment further, except to respond on Saturday to a statement from CAP.

“CAP’s culture obscures its mission,” Mary wrote, toward the end of her memo. “All of this to say, I surely expected better out of an organization that housed a national campaign on sexual assault.”

For young Democrats in particular, the Center for American Progress is a training ground, a place to work in progressive politics and policy for a few years under some of the most well-known and well-connected operatives in Washington. “These are important relationships,” as one former staffer described it. “You go along and you get along and they help you get a new job later.”

Documents obtained by BuzzFeed News and interviews with 19 current and former staffers describe a chaotic internal culture, in which, according to a July 2016 memo written by CAP’s employee union, there were “several incidents of sexual harassment against several members of our unit.” The documents and interviews pull back the curtain on a culture in which young staffers felt there was a gap between the organization’s mission and its everyday realities.

The memo — which union leaders never delivered to Tanden, but used as talking points in a meeting with her — laid out what members saw as CAP’s failures, both broadly and in the specific case of Strong, who had recently left the organization:

• “Management failed to promptly take sufficient tangible employment action against the said employee for sexual harassment, thereby allowing the said employee’s behavior to escalate.

• “Management has failed to present measures to correct the effects of the said employee’s sexual harassment, thereby perpetuating a hostile work environment.

• “Management has failed to create a safe space upon which members of our unit — including those subjected to the said employee’s unlawful harassment — feel comfortable enough to report incidents of sexual harassment, among other forms of discrimination, without fear of retaliation or further harassment.

• “Management has failed to take reasonable steps to prevent incidents of sexual harassment from occurring in the workplace.

• “Management has failed to adequately inform employees of what constitutes unlawful harassment in the workplace, how to report such incidents, and what kind of recourse is available under such circumstances.”

The union wrote in its memo that while CAP “eventually took appropriate course of action,” management “failed to adequately address the situation.” And interviews with staffers suggest that the process at the time was messy.

According to the document, one proposal the union offered was that CAP hold a sexual harassment response training “in the immediate future” as well as periodically going forward. The union also wanted CAP to outline to staff how to report issues of harassment.

The union wrote in its memo that while CAP “eventually took appropriate course of action,” management “failed to adequately address the situation.”

Tanden refused, one former union member with intimate knowledge of the discussion told BuzzFeed News. “Neera’s approach was maybe we can start hosting brown bags with HR so people will feel more comfortable coming out and doing things. So they had almost a do-nothing approach. ... They said they would think about things that [the union brought up], and that was essentially it,” the former union member said.

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, CAP said that they did not receive the memo at the time or since, and that “most of the allegations” laid out in the memo “were not stated” during the actual meeting.

“They raised the need for CAP to be a safe space; we specifically asked them if they had heard of any other case of harassment or improper conduct. Other than what had been reported to us, they could not provide any,” CAP said in the statement, noting that Strong only had two reports made against him during his time with the organization, and that the union had not spoken with Mary. CAP said the union would have “no way of knowing that” Strong was disciplined after the first report.

Benton Strong

Joe McKendry for BuzzFeed News

CAP said that Tanden never refused to hold sexual harassment trainings, and that she had asked for union recommendations on improving trainings, but confirmed that she suggested hosting brown bags with HR in the context of the “need to ensure work was a safe space for CAP employees.” The organization pointed to a mandatory “inclusion” training they held in June 2016, which “included discussion of harassment,” while acknowledging that CAP received complaints that the training “was not sophisticated enough for our audience.”

Additionally, CAP said that they were “legally prohibited from making any unilateral changes to CAP policy” — including holding a new sexual harassment training or changing the organization’s sexual harassment policy — because of ongoing contract negotiations with the union. Two former union members noted that CAP could have engaged in a memorandum of agreement with the union to make changes to its sexual harassment policy or to add trainings, as they did when altering CAP’s overtime pay policy in January 2017.

CAP said in a statement that the union did not ask for a side agreement of that nature, so they did not pursue one. “If the union had asked us to negotiate a freestanding side agreement, as they did in the case of overtime policies, we would have done so,” they said.

“Our goal was to take steps that would address any concerns from the union,” CAP said, “but also respect the complainant’s request that we respect her privacy and not let details of the complaint get out.”

Not one of the 19 current and former employees interviewed for this story said they underwent workplace training about sexual harassment during their time at the organization. Five staffers mentioned the 2016 inclusion training, but said that it was focused on diversity and that discussion of sexual harassment was minimal.

CAP’s handling of the allegations against Strong came as a profound disappointment to the young progressive women who joined the organization, many of whom saw their jobs as an entrée to what they expected would be the Clinton White House.

In the first months of 2018, nearly two years after CAP’s employee union asked the organization to implement sexual harassment trainings, CAP released a new sexual harassment policy. Asked about this, CAP pointed to the collective bargaining process and said that CAP had asked the union to present “any proposed changes” to the policy. The union, which is under new management, said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that they “delivered a complete and entirely revamped sexual harassment policy following management’s solicitation for input” in late 2017 and that the new policy included “many of the Union’s recommendations.”

“The Union believes that this new policy, combined with what the Union hopes to be a robust rollout that includes future compliance trainings and efforts to educate staff about their rights under the policy, has the potential for marked improvements,” union leadership said in the statement. “However, if the Union does not feel that CAP is living up to its progressive values on this or other workplace issues, it has not and will not hesitate to make management aware and advocate for positive change.”

A man walks into the Center for American Progress, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, at their office in Washington.

Jacquelyn Martin / AP

Founded by former Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in 2003, the Center for American Progress houses two groups, both of which work out of an office not far from the White House.

CAP, the main organization, focuses on policy; its campaign arm, the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action), works on advocacy. Tanden currently serves as the president of the sister organizations, which together employ more than 330 people. (CAP also controls ThinkProgress, an online progressive news organization fairly walled off from the main organization.)

CAP Action hired Strong in May 2014 as an associate director for communications, in what they call the “War Room,” a communications and advocacy shop that ultimately focused on the 2016 election during his time at the organization. Strong, a Seattle native, had run communications for the Washington State Democratic Party and the Climate Action Campaign, a grassroots group based in San Diego, before taking the job.

Two women filed complaints about Strong in 2016 — the first reported in May that Strong had asked several women on the team if they had been flashed or masturbated in front of and then mocked a woman in a team meeting for saying she had cried when it happened to her, and the second, Mary, reported that he had sent her a series of unwanted, sexually explicit text messages — according to interviews with current and former employees, as well as documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, including his personnel file.

Former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray speaks at a rally during the March for Science begins with a rally featuring speakers and events at Cal Anderson Park on April 22, 2017 in Seattle, Washington.

Karen Ducey / Getty Images

Shortly after the first woman — like Mary, a junior staffer in the War Room — reported Strong to HR in May 2016, Strong accepted a job with then–Seattle mayor Ed Murray, which was set to start on Aug. 1. In the weeks leading up to his departure from CAP, Strong also began sending sexual text messages to Mary, according to nine former staffers who viewed the messages or saw screenshots of them.

In her exit memo, Mary described receiving “lewd and inappropriate text messages” from Strong that caused her to feel “uncomfortable being in the workplace around him.”

Five former staffers told BuzzFeed News that they saw screenshots of a text in which Strong, a manager on Mary’s team (though not her direct supervisor), messaged Mary late at night saying that he wanted to perform oral sex on her. In other texts, Strong told Mary that he was discussing with several other male CAP staffers whether white women or black women were better at giving blow jobs; he repeatedly asked her to come over to his apartment or let him come over to hers for a drink; and he frequently made comments about her body. These messages were often interspersed with Strong asking Mary if he had crossed a “line” she had apparently drawn.

A friend of Mary’s, another former CAP employee who viewed the texts, said, “It was like incessant. ... It was like strings and strings of texts and her just being like ‘no no no.’”

In July 2016, after a work meeting and happy hour were held in Strong’s apartment building, Mary filed a complaint with CAP’s HR department. CAP said in a statement that this meeting was not mandatory and was in a “public common room at his apartment complex” in Strong’s apartment building, not his apartment itself.

In their statement, CAP said that after the report of “inappropriate text messages,” the HR department “immediately began an investigation of the incident, under the supervision of CAP’s general counsel and in consultation with outside employment law counsel. On the basis of our preliminary investigation, conducted over the course of a few hours that same day we received the report, we found that Mr. Strong had acted inappropriately, and told him not to return to the office, and not to retaliate against, or even contact, the complainant. He was escorted from the building that afternoon and never returned.”

She described retaliation she faced in the aftermath — including being asked whether she was “worth spending time or money on.”

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

In battleground states in the middle of the country, some Democrats watched with frustration as their party grabbed headlines last week with a splashy new lawsuit alleging a vast conspiracy between President Donald Trump and Russia.

The Democratic National Committee’s drumbeat of messaging on Trump and his relationship with Russia is wearing thin with some Democrats in purple states — particularly in the Midwest, where people on the ground say voters are uninterested and even turned off by the issue. The suit exposes a gap, they say, between the party’s strategy nationally and what Midwest Democrats believe will win elections in their state.

“The DNC is doing a good job of winning New York and California,” said David Betras, the Democratic county party chair in Mahoning County, Ohio, home to Youngstown. “I’m not saying it’s not important — of course it’s important — but do they honestly think that people that were just laid off another shift at the car plant in my home county give a shit about Russia when they don’t have a frickin’ job?”

Trump and Russia, Betras said, is the “only piece they’ve been doing since 2016. [Trump] keeps talking about jobs and the economy, and we talk about Russia.”

For some people working to elect Democrats in Midwestern swing states, the suit — which threads evidence of a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign, WikiLeaks, Russia, and Trump family members — prompted something akin to an eyeroll.

“I’m going to be honest; I don’t understand why they’re doing it,” said one campaign strategist in the Midwest of the DNC’s suit. “My sense was it was a move meant to gin up the donor base, not our voters. But it was the biggest news they’ve made in a while.”

Though he doesn’t see it hurting his campaign now, the strategist said, “I wouldn’t want to see something like this coming out of the DNC in October."

The suit is “politically unhelpful," another strategist in the Midwest said. "I haven’t seen a single piece of data that says voters want Democrats to relitigate 2016. ... The only ones who want to do this are Democratic activists who are already voting Democratic.”

A DNC spokesperson, Adrienne Watson, argued that the Democrats' focus in the midterms was far from Trump and Russia. Instead, she said, the party was "laser-focused on what matters most to Americans – good-paying jobs, affordable and accessible healthcare, and opportunity for all."

The party, Watson said, had been making "unprecedented investments in state parties, our tech infrastructure and base & rural communities — all things that haven’t been done by the DNC in almost a decade. This is our strategy for 2018 and it’s working."

Senator Claire McCaskill, fighting a tough reelection battle in Missouri, which Trump won by almost 20 points, called the DNC’s Russia suit a “silly distraction” through a spokesperson.

In places like Minnesota, for instance, where Trump lost only narrowly and his approval numbers have stayed flat, the state party says it plans to steer clear of him altogether with two Senate seats and an open governor’s race on the ballot. Messaging on Trump doesn’t do anything to move the needle, strategists there say.

And the Democratic Party’s attacks on Trump, especially when it comes to Russia, could even backfire in states Trump won handily — like Ohio, where the focus on taking the president down has kept some voters on the president’s side.

“Somehow we’ve made him into a blue-collar underdog billionaire,” said Betras, of Youngstown. “And people are rooting for him because he’s the underdog.”

Tom Perez, the DNC chair, defended the lawsuit as necessary and non-political, telling Meet the Press that "it's hard to put a price tag on preserving democracy." It would be "irresponsible," Perez said, not to file the suit.

“I don’t think it hurts,” said David Pepper, the chair of the Ohio Democratic Party. “If you have credible claims, you have a responsibility to pursue legal action. I think you have a day or two where [the suit] is the story, but that’s different from your overall message.”

In his state, at least, that message should stay far away from Russia, Pepper said — something he thinks the DNC understands.

“I wouldn’t have our candidates spending the fall talking about Russia or the suit or anything like that,” Pepper said. “They should be focused on health care, education, student debt. We shouldn’t divert the message from those topics to talk about Russia.”

As another Midwestern strategist put it: “I would say it’s a nice stunt — should raise a lot of money. Doesn't do much to change the calculus in the heartland.”

LINK: Democrats Are Nervous (And Republicans Are Excited) About Minnesota

LINK: A Liberal Judge Won In Wisconsin — And That's A Bad Sign For Republicans This Year

Colin Young-wolff / AP

A nonprofit internet library on Tuesday challenged MSNBC host Joy Reid’s claim that someone added anti-gay material to an archived version of her now-defunct blog.

In a statement, the Internet Archive, which maintains a digital archive of websites called the Wayback Machine, said that it had investigated the liberal commentator’s assertion in December 2017, following a request from her attorneys.

“When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions,” read the statement attributed to Internet Archive officer manager Chris Butler. “At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.”

Reid first publicly claimed that an “external actor” had “gained access to and manipulated” her old blog, called the Reid Report, in a statement to Mediaite Monday. According to the Internet Archive, Reid’s lawyers were unclear whether they believed the alteration had happened prior to the original site being taken down from the internet or within the Wayback Machine itself.

The newly surfaced posts, from 2005–2007, make reference to Anderson Cooper — who came out in 2012 — as “the gayest thing on TV,” state that “most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing,” and recount that the author was unable to attend Brokeback Mountain, a love story about two cowboys, because she “didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex.”

In December, Reid apologized for a separate series of remarks on the Reid Report that were criticized as anti-gay.

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web that researchers and journalists rely on for its snapshots of defunct websites and previous iterations of extant ones. Website owners can opt out of their content being captured by the Wayback Machine through what’s called the robots exclusion standard, or “robots.txt.”

According to the statement by the Internet Archive, “A robots.txt exclusion request specific to the Wayback Machine was placed on the live blog” of the Reid Report after its correspondence with Reid’s lawyer. “That request was automatically recognized and processed by the Wayback Machine and the blog archives were excluded, unbeknownst to us (the process is fully automated).”

Neither Reid nor MSNBC immediately returned requests for comment.

Center for American Progress Action Fund President Neera Tanden at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

Mike Segar / Reuters

Center for American Progress president and CEO Neera Tanden told staff in an email Tuesday evening that she is sorry, following a BuzzFeed News report late Monday on sexual harassment issues at the liberal think tank.

Tanden emailed all staff at CAP as well as its sister organization CAP Action, which is focused on politics and elections, twice on Tuesday. In the first email, Tanden claimed “inaccuracies” in the BuzzFeed News report, while declining to name them and stating that CAP had acted “quickly and decisively” in response to sexual harassment allegations at the organization.

By Tuesday evening, Tanden emailed staff to say that she had spoken to “members of our community” and “wanted to share some additional thoughts.” Tanden noted that CAP will hold an all-staff meeting Wednesday to discuss the issue in an “open and frank” way and also invited employees to share their thoughts on an anonymous Google Doc, noting “it’s sometimes hard for some to raise issues at All Staff.”

“I am deeply sorry that anyone has felt unsupported after having the courage to come forward,” Tanden wrote in an email to staff just before 8 p.m. ET. “When any staffer doesn’t feel comfortable or feels like they are being badly treated, that’s a problem for us. It is our commitment to continue to learn and work harder to ensure we have a workplace where every single staffer feels comfortable. At the end of the day the most important thing is that our staff feel safe, supported, and listened to. That that didn’t happen is something that is on me to rectify for the future.”

Tanden added that CAP is working with the employee union to set up sexual harassment training at the company, after 19 current and former staffers told BuzzFeed News that they had not undergone such a training during their time at the organization. “We also recognize the need for ongoing discussion of issues related to harassment,” she wrote.

In closing her email, Tanden said that she would be available to talk with staff one-to-one and said, “CAP has been a proud leader in policy fights to create safe work environments, and we will be just as vigilant to ensure that we do that within our own walls.”

Tanden’s comments come after BuzzFeed News reported late Monday about issues of sexual harassment at CAP, a major progressive organization in Washington, DC, as well as allegations of retaliation by the women who reported the harassment.

Those reports of harassment centered on Benton Strong, a former communications employee with CAP, who was suspended with pay for three days — through his end date at the organization — after he was reported to the human resources department for sending sexually explicit text messages to a junior staffer. Strong had also been reported to HR two months earlier for asking female staff if they had been flashed or masturbated in front of by a stranger and mocking one woman who said she cried as a result of that happening to her.

A spokesperson for CAP declined to comment on the emails Tuesday.

LINK: Inside A Divisive Fight Over How A Top Progressive Think Tank Handled Sexual Harassment

Aaron P. Bernstein / Reuters

A prominent liberal donor is trying to connect the kinds of donors who write big checks with data about what races are most promising for Democrats.

The “Take Back Congress Hub,” a subscription-based online tool to identify House races most likely to flip in 2018, was commissioned and funded by power couple Susan Sandler and Steve Phillips, who are Democratic donors and activists. Phillips is expected to announce the project Wednesday at a talk in Washington, DC, with Sen. Cory Booker.

Phillips told BuzzFeed News that amid new liberal energy and what is already a dramatic increase in Democratic fundraising, a need arose for donors to gain clarity about how to maximize the resources in the effort to take back the House from the Republican Party, free from emotion. Many donors are new to politics and risk being swayed by a powerful or compelling narrative, without relying enough on empirical data to make decisions, he said.

The project is the latest in a variety of projects and programs focused on capturing enthusiasm and flipping the House, from the traditional party establishment group like the DCCC (which has a “red-to-blue” program) to newer grassroots-oriented groups like Swing Left, which has helped send general election money to a series of targeted swing districts.

Why is this one different? People working on the tool argue that, first, the methodology is "more elaborate"; second, the tool emphasizes existing activist groups in the district; and, lastly, this has a different audience: major donors rather than people looking to contribute, for instance, $25.

Using an algorithm integrating 22 statistical variables (e.g., demographics, individual vote history, date of voter registration, partisan index scores, and how individual voters changed their vote from 2012 to 2016). So far the project has highlighted 38 races in 15 states. In one example seen by BuzzFeed News, the algorithm identified Florida's 26th District as one of the most flippable in the country. It notes while Rep. Carlos Curbelo is the incumbent, several factors point to his vulnerability in November: Curbelo is Cuban, but Cuban voters have been trending less Republican the last four cycles, and he’s been one of the most endangered members for years. All of the major prediction think tanks are rating the race as a toss-up. The voting model predicted that the Democrat will beat Curbelo and that unlikely voters will increase the vote total.

The tool also gives donors the ability to contribute directly to grassroots organizations that are working to turn out voters in advance of the primary.

Phillips spoke of donors scrambling to figure out what they can do and on what areas they should focus their attention leading up to the midterms — and not having a lot of guidance in that vein. “There’s a lot of unclarity on that question,” said Phillips, who has fashioned a profile as an under-the-radar herald of the progressive movement. “It’s really addressing that question that a lot of donors had about where to focus and trying to put some empirical data behind that answer.”

This is also part of Phillips’s larger mission to expand fairness in the party and push higher powers to invest more in turning out base voters. Phillips said his thoughts on data go back to dramatic shifts in the party going back to Jesse Jackson’s emergence in Democratic politics and how demographic changes more than doubled his vote total from 1984 to 1988. The Obama phenomenon was simply an extension of that dynamic so few people seem to understand, Phillips said.

The project is another collaboration with Julie Martínez Ortega, who in 2014 conducted through PowerPAC+ the first-ever audit of the Democratic Party’s consultant spending. The results were embarrassing: The study found that of the $500 million the party spent on the 2008 and 2012 elections, just 2% went to minority-owned firms.

“The real thrust of it is to try to move away from the sentiment of the donors and to have a very sober analysis so that people can have objective measures on which to make their decisions,” Martínez Ortega told BuzzFeed News.

But it also reflects an effort for more efficiency among the donor class. “The most frustrating part is that people have not been empirically based,” despite advances in technology, said Phillips. “Most Democratic politics is still not driven by numbers or data. That’s what we’re really trying to bring to this.”

LINK: Democrats Are Nervous (And Republicans Are Excited) About Minnesota

LINK: The Florida Governor Primary Is A Big Experiment For How Democrats Run Against Trump

LINK: The Biggest Names In Democratic Politics Are Just Straight-Up Calling For Legalized Marijuana

Colin Young-wolff / AP

Joy Reid has backed out of a planned speaking event, according to people involved in the conference, as the MSNBC host claims that recently uncovered, anti-gay blog posts were fabricated.

Reid was set to participate Thursday in a "Change Summit" event in New York organized by former US attorney Preet Bharara and his media venture Cafe. Reid planned to moderate a panel with Washington Lt. Gov. Cyrus Habib; Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana; and Ravi Bhalla, the mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey.

MSNBC and Reid did not immediately return requests for comment late Wednesday night.

Reid's cancelation comes as the MSNBC host, a star progressive voice who hosts a weekend show on the cable news network, scrambles to explain a series of decade-old blog entries that she claims she did not post.

On Monday, Reid told Mediaite that the comments were placed by an “external party” that “manipulated material from my now-defunct blog.” The posts, from 2005–2007, included comments calling Anderson Cooper “the gayest thing on TV” and saying that “most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing.” Cooper came out in 2012.

The author of the posts wrote that “most straight people had a hard time being convinced to watch ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ (I admit that I couldn’t go see the movie either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex.)”

These posts follow a separate but similar incident in December, where Reid apologized for making a series of anti-gay remarks on the now-shuttered blog, The Reid Report, including a post that nicknamed Florida Rep. Charlie Crist “Miss Charlie” and claimed that he was a closeted gay man.

In the immediate fallout of the newly surfaced posts, Reid pointed to analysis conducted by a private cybersecurity professional to back up her claims. The Internet Archive, whose digital archive the Wayback Machine was used by a Twitter user who originally uncovered the old posts, said in a statement that it “found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking.”

On Wednesday, Reid's lawyer John H. Reichman issued a statement saying, “We have received confirmation the FBI has opened an investigation into potential criminal activities surrounding several online accounts, including personal email and blog accounts, belonging to Joy-Ann Reid. Our own investigation and monitoring of the situation will continue in parallel, and we are cooperating with law enforcement as their investigation proceeds.”

LINK: An Internet Nonprofit Challenged Joy Reid’s Claim That Her Blog Was Hacked

Mike Segar / Reuters

A federal judge on Friday put Stormy Daniels' lawsuit against President Donald Trump and his longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen on hold for at least 90 days due to the ongoing criminal investigation into Cohen.

The FBI searched Cohen's home and office in New York on April 9. Days later, his lawyers, joined by Trump's, asked US District Judge James Otero to stay Daniels' lawsuit.

Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, is an adult film star who has claimed to have had a sexual relationship with Trump more than a decade ago. Trump has denied Daniels' claims about the relationship.

In 2016, however, she signed a settlement agreement requiring her not to talk about the relationship. As part of the agreement, she received $130,000 — a payment facilitated by Cohen. Daniels' lawsuit is an effort to have that settlement agreement tossed out — in part because Trump did not sign it.

Cohen's and Trump's lawyers argued for the stay, saying Cohen's Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination would be implicated if Daniels' lawsuit were to proceed while Cohen faces the possibility of criminal prosecution in the New York investigation.

Otero agreed — granting a stay and setting a conference to discuss the status of the stay on July 27.

"While it is undeniable that Plaintiff has a valid interest in the prompt resolution of her claims, where Mr. Cohen's Fifth Amendment rights are heavily implicated and the potential impact on the criminal investigation substantial, Plaintiff's interests do not outweigh the necessity of a stay," Otero wrote.

Under Otero's order, the parties are to file a joint report on where things stand with the criminal investigation on July 17.

Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, tweeted that he and his client "likely" will be appealing the decision "early next week."

@MichaelAvenatti / Twitter

LINK: Federal Agents Have Seized Communications Of Trump’s Personal Lawyer And Trump Is Very Upset

LINK: Trump And His Longtime Lawyer Ask Court To Put Stormy Daniels' Lawsuit On Hold

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Stormy Daniels has sued President Donald Trump again, saying he defamed her with a tweet.

The lawsuit was filed on Monday in federal court in Manhattan — three days after a federal judge in California put her lawsuit there on hold.

Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, is also named as a defendant in the California case, but Cohen is under criminal investigation and successfully asked for the California court to put Daniels' case there on hold while the criminal investigation proceeds.

The California case focuses on whether a 2016 settlement agreement — which bars Daniels, an adult film star whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, from speaking about her alleged relationship with Trump from more than a decade ago — was ever validly formed.

Monday's case is focused instead on a Trump tweet regarding a sketch that Daniels released that purports to be a man she says threatened her in a parking lot in Las Vegas in 2011. In a March interview with Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes, Daniels described the encounter, saying the man told her to "leave Trump alone" and "forget the story." She later released the sketch in an appearance on The View.

Trump retweeted a picture of the sketch, saying that it was a picture of a "nonexistent man" and adding: "A total con job."

Via Twitter: @realDonaldTrump

"Mr. Trump's defamatory statement was false because Ms. Clifford was in fact threatened in 2011 as she has recounted and the sketch was the result of her recollection regarding the appearance of the assailant," her lawyers, Catherine Keenan and Michael Avenatti, wrote in the complaint filed Monday.

In a tweet announcing the lawsuit, Avenatti, who has been representing Daniels in various venues in recent months, called Trump's tweet "irresponsible and defamatory," adding, "He is well aware of what transpired and his complicity. We fully intend on bringing it to light."

Daniels claims in the lawsuit that her damages are more than $75,000.

This is a developing story. Please check back at BuzzFeed News for the latest.

Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company has already begun to implement a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric.

Zuckerberg said the company has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by asking them to identify whether they have heard of various publications and if they trust them.

“We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time," he said. "We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”

Zuckerberg met with a groups of news media executives at the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel in Menlo Park after delivering his keynote speech at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference Tuesday.

The meeting at the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel in Menlo Park included representatives from BuzzFeed News, the Information, Quartz, the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, NBC, Recode, Univision, Barron’s, the Daily Beast, the Economist, HuffPost, Insider, the Atlantic, the New York Post, and others.

The event, called “OTR” (shorthand for "off the record"), is an annual gathering meant for new media news executives to talk shop. It is in its second year. Zuckerberg’s remarks were initially meant to be, like the name of the conference, off the record, but he agreed to answer questions on the record.

Zuckerberg said the company will invest "billions" of dollars in a combination of artificial intelligence and tens of thousands of human moderators to keep both fake news and deliberate propaganda at bay, especially in elections.

“We’re essentially going to be losing money on doing political ads," he said of the investment the company is making to avoid a repeat of the spread of Russian propaganda in the 2016 US election.

“The big miss is we didn’t expect these kind of coordinated information operations" in 2016, said Zuckerberg, and that the company was more focused on hacking in malware. He said the company is expecting that kind of information war now and has already successfully countered it in elections from France to Alabama.

"We deployed AI tools that have taken down tens of thousands of accounts," he said of those elections.

Zuckerberg also said he remains committed to encryption on WhatsApp and described it as a source of pride.

“WhatsApp wasn’t fully encrypted when we bought it,” noted Zuckerberg. “We rolled out encryption after we bought it. We run the largest fully encrypted communications network in the world."

Zuckerberg didn’t dispute that people are sharing less personal information in NewsFeed, but said that it was because they had more tools to share elsewhere, such as in Groups or Messenger, where they are better able to find the “perfect audience.”

“What’s really happening with technology is people now have different tools to share,” he said.

Zuckerberg also seemed resigned to changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from being prosecuted for the content on their servers — such as pornography or libelous comments — that users might create or upload. (They do have a responsibility to take it down.) This safe harbor protection has traditionally been a third rail, or red line, for the tech giants.

“If we didn’t have that [Section 230], I wouldn’t have been able to start Facebook,” he said. But noting that due to tools like AI, and the ability hire thousands of human moderators, have changed the company and industry’s ability to control what’s on their systems. “We’re in a different place.”

Zuckerberg said the company's goals in the news business include funding more investigative journalism.

But he drew the line at encouraging his own employees to talk to those reporters via leaks.

“If I feel like I can’t communicate stuff openly," Zuckerberg said, "then that breaks down our internal trust."

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Stacey Abrams could in three weeks become the first black American woman to be elected a state’s Democratic nominee for governor. She now has a major backer in that effort: California Sen. Kamala Harris.

Georgia’s fast-approaching May 22 primary has been more competitive than initially expected when Abrams, formerly the minority leader of the state’s legislature, jumped into the race.

"Stacey Abrams is a leader who believes that Georgia's potential is limitless if we work together to uplift every family," said Harris in her endorsement. "From her efforts on criminal justice reform and voting rights to blocking Republican attempts to undermine the economic security of working families, Abrams has a proven track record of achieving progress.”

Both establishment figures and lefty groups have lined up behind Abrams this year: Everyone from EMILY’s List and Rep. John Lewis to Bernie-backed Our Revolution has endorsed Abrams. Harris is widely-believed to be a possible candidate in 2020 for the Democratic nomination. If she does indeed run, she’ll certainly want — as Democrats, including Abrams, long have — to turn Georgia blue. (So intense has this effort become, prominent Georgia Democrats told BuzzFeed News the city will bid to host the 2020 Democratic National Convention.)

Abrams and Harris are both graduates of HBCUs, both were trained as lawyers, and both politicians are seen as party figures who excite black women, the party’s most loyal base. Some Democrats wondered, mostly in private, whether Harris’s close friendship with former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, once a political foe of Abrams — and who, like Harris, attended Howard — would have any bearing on Harris’s entry into the race.

“Now is the time for Democrats to stand together and support candidates who have a clear vision and real plans for how we can move our communities and our nation forward — Stacey Abrams is that kind of leader,” Harris said in a statement.

Abrams, who is criss-crossing the state in an effort to get out the early vote, was effusive in her praise of the California lawmaker. “I am deeply honored to have Senator Harris' support," said Abrams in a statement. “Her work to champion criminal justice reform, health care access, and fight for justice for homeowners against the big banks, is essential to fostering progress in her home state, and across the country.

“I look forward to working alongside Sen. Harris to build a Georgia where every family has the freedom and opportunity to thrive.”

LINK: In The Tense Georgia Democratic Primary, Stacey Abrams Made A Hard Appeal For Black Lawmakers' Support

LINK: Stacey Abrams Wants To Be The First Black Woman Governor. But First She Has To Win The Nomination.

Richard Cordray is seeking the Democratic nomination for Ohio governor.

Pete Marovich / Getty Images

A Republican donor is aiming to influence Ohio’s competitive Democratic primary for governor by attacking the establishment’s preferred candidate — from the left.

Restauranteur Thomas “Tony” George is behind the nonprofit Citizens Policy Institute, which has produced a 30-second television ad blasting Richard Cordray, the state’s former attorney general and the former head of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“Why do Republicans like Rich Cordray so much?” a voiceover asks in the spot, which was first reported by Politico. “He has an A+ rating from the NRA. And he hurt consumers by quitting his job as America's consumer watchdog so Trump could appoint his replacement."

The ad is titled “Republican Lite.”

George, who has contributed the maximum $12,700 to Republican Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor’s campaign for governor and $250,000 to an allied political action committee, confirmed his involvement Wednesday in a telephone interview with BuzzFeed News.

“Look, we’ve got a group of diverse business people concerned about the future of the state of Ohio as well as local politics,” George said. “We wanted to get active in a formal way.”

Asked how much the group was spending, George replied: “Lots.”

Though his political donations have gone to candidates in both parties over the years, George was a prominent Cleveland-area supporter of Donald Trump in 2016. He said he plans to vote for Taylor in next week’s Republican primary, but he also acknowledged he has been friendly with Dennis Kucinich, the former member of Congress who has emerged as Cordray’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination. The NRA line featured in the Citizens Policy Institute ad is one that Kucinich has hammered relentlessly in an effort to paint Cordray as too moderate.

George and Kucinich have common ground: Like Kucinich, George, a Syrian American, has met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and is opposed to the recent US airstrikes in Syria. (George met Assad in 2004.)

“Our president was misled by faulty intelligence by our country,” George recently told a Fox affiliate in Cleveland. “President Bashar al-Assad would never use chemical weapons on his own people. Not at this point in a civil war and bring the wrath of the whole world on his back.”

Kucinich is under fire in the race for accepting money to speak to a group that sympathizes with the Syrian government and Assad. George told BuzzFeed News he respects Kucinich’s thinking on Syria: “Dennis’s position on Syria is he wants peace. Everybody wants peace.”

Tuesday's Ohio primary has quickly become one of this year's most closely watched Democratic races. Despite the support of state-elected officials and national party figures like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Cordray has struggled to fend off a challenge from Kucinich. The two-time presidential candidate, known for his liberal views but most recently a commentator on Fox News, has pitched himself to voters as the true progressive in the race. He has secured the backing of Our Revolution, a political group that Bernie Sanders founded after his 2016 presidential bid. The Vermont senator, meanwhile, has said he won't endorse either candidate, marking a divide in a party where Sanders and Warren often work in lockstep on policy and progressive politics.

An April poll of Democratic primary voters showed Cordray leading Kucinich by about 14 points, though more than half of respondents said they remain undecided. An earlier poll had shown them tied. Kucinich has high name-recognition in Cleveland, the state’s largest media market, where decades ago he served as mayor.

Many Democrats worry that nominating Kucinich would clinch the general election for Republicans, who are deciding between Taylor and frontrunner Mike DeWine (whose defeat of Cordray in the 2010 race for attorney general also is mentioned in the Citizens Policy Institute ad).

Members of George’s family have donated to Kucinich, campaign finance records show. George said his group’s involvement is not intended to elevate Kucinich in the primary. “That has nothing to do with it,” he said. “It has to do with Cordray’s faults.”

Asked about the ad, Cordray spokesperson Mike Gwin responded via email that the campaign is “focused on getting out the facts on Rich's long track record standing up for Ohio's workers — the reasons that he's backed by AFL-CIO, SEIU, Ohio Legislative Black Caucus, and dozens of other groups that care about the rights and treatment of Ohioans.”

Representatives for Taylor and Kucinich declined to comment.

“I appreciate your reaching out, but why would WE have any comment about this? It has nothing to do with us,” Andy Juniewicz, the Kucinich spokesperson, wrote in an email.

LINK: Ohio Democrats Are Worried That The Wrong Governor's Nominee Could Throw Away Their Shot At Turning Ohio Blue

Carlos Barria / Reuters

A month after President Donald Trump said he knew nothing about a $130,000 payment that Michael Cohen had facilitated to Stormy Daniels in 2016, Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said that Trump repaid Cohen after the election.

Giuliani talked with BuzzFeed News late Wednesday about how the repayment was made and other details of the 2016 settlement. He first made the explosive announcement in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News.

“It’s not campaign money. No campaign finance violation,” Giuliani told Hannity. “[They] funneled through a law firm, and then the president repaid it.”

In a conversation with BuzzFeed News, Giuliani later said that Cohen, Trump's longtime personal lawyer, “had complained to some people” after the 2016 election that he’d not been fully paid by Trump. At some point — Giuliani said he did not know when or where specifically — Cohen met with Trump and told him of his complaint. Giuliani said that Trump told Cohen, “We’ll cover your expenses,” and agreed to pay him $35,000 a month “out of his personal funds” over the course of a year-long period that began in the first few months of 2017 and has since ended.

“It clearly was a payment to reimburse expenses,” Giuliani said — adding the caveat, “I’m almost certain that there wasn’t an itemized bill.”

“This is like petty cash [to Trump],” Giuliani said. In addition to repaying the $130,000, the arrangement gave Cohen “enough left over for him to profit in [2017].” If Trump paid Cohen $35,000 a month for a year, as Giuliani said, that would be a total of $420,000.

Cohen had facilitated the $130,000 payment in connection with an October 2016 settlement agreement signed by Stormy Daniels, the adult film star whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford. Daniels alleges that she had a relationship with Trump more than a decade ago — which Trump denies and which Daniels was not to speak about under the terms of the settlement agreement. Cohen has said that he made the payment out of his own personal funds.

Trump was asked in April aboard Air Force One about whether he knew about the payment, and simply said, “No.” Asked why Cohen made the payment, Trump said, “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney. You’ll have to ask Michael.”

Giuliani maintained late Wednesday that Cohen “never talked about it” with Trump when he made the settlement due to the busy nature of the final weeks of the campaign.

“Michael saw an opportunity to settle it for not very much money, and he took it,” Giuliani said. Calling it “a payment to remove personal embarrassment to Melania [Trump],” Giuliani said, “I don't think they thought about it as a campaign thing” — although he acknowledged that others might disagree.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, noted that, despite Giuliani's claims, “Cohen would have still made an illegal loan to the campaign” if it is determined that the payment was related to the campaign. In those circumstances, Trump also could be in violation of campaign finance laws “for not reporting the expenditure (and the repayment of the loan),” Hasen said.

In his remarks to BuzzFeed News, Giuliani appeared ready to argue on that issue, noting at one point, “If the main reason was the campaign, they would have paid it out of the campaign.”

On Fox News, Giuliani said that Trump “didn't know about the specifics of [the settlement], as far as I know. But he did know about the general arrangement, that Michael would take care of things like this — like I take care of things like this for my clients. I don't burden them with every single thing that comes along. These are busy people.”

Michael Avenatti, Daniels’ lawyer in two pending lawsuits against Trump, responded on Twitter, saying, “Mr. Trump stood on AF1 and blatantly lied. ... This should never be acceptable in our America.”

The repayment comments ended up taking the wind out of the rest of the interview, which already had included Giuliani making several dramatic statements, including discussing why Trump fired former FBI director Jim Comey and arguing that he should be prosecuted. Giuliani also said that Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should end special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

The interview happened on the same day that the White House announced that the lawyer in the White House coordinating the response to Mueller's investigation, Ty Cobb, would be leaving at the end of the month. He will be replaced by Emmet Flood, a partner at Williams & Connolly, who represented Bill Clinton in his impeachment proceedings and worked in the White House Counsel's Office under George W. Bush.

Here's the first exchange about the payment:

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Here's the second exchange about the payment:

View Video ›

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Then-candidate Donald Trump at a Republican primary presidential debate during the 2016 election cycle.

Rhona Wise / AFP / Getty Images

Any Republican who tries to challenge President Trump in the 2020 primaries will face significant hurdles to getting him on a debate stage.

The Republican National Committee is moving toward abolishing a standing committee on primary debates. A panel studying changes to the presidential nominating process — and working very much in lockstep with the Trump White House — recommended the move Thursday during the RNC spring meeting here at the Trump National Doral resort near Miami. A final vote is expected Friday.

Under an existing rule, a debate committee composed of 13 RNC members would have to convene at the national party’s summer meeting. The committee in the past was responsible for setting formats for debates and determining which media outlets could host them. In 2014, the rule carried a threat of penalties — disqualification from future debates, for example — for presidential candidates who participated in unsanctioned debates.

“We felt it was unnecessary,” RNC co-chair Bob Paduchik, who leads the presidential nominating process panel, told members at Thursday’s Rules Committee meeting.

The debate committee played an outsize role in 2016, when more than a dozen prominent Republicans ran for president and the party was eager to exercise more control over the networks that hosted and supplied moderators for the debates. The sanctions, in the minds of RNC officials, prevented an excessive number of debates. And with Trump in the White House and already aggressively raising money for reelection, they believe the rule has run its course.

The proposal “gets rid of the rule we had in place when we had 17 candidates running and didn’t have the White House,” Steve Duprey, the RNC committeeman from New Hampshire who chaired the standing committee on debates last cycle, told the Rules Committee.

But RNC committeeman Randy Evans of Georgia briefly raised concerns at the meeting that the national party might be ceding too much power back to the media by eliminating the debate committee. Paduchik assured him the RNC chair could at any time form an ad hoc debate panel.

The proposal then passed unanimously by a voice vote.

“Obviously this is intended to dissuade a primary challenge to the president,” Evans told BuzzFeed News in a brief interview after the Rules Committee adjourned. “I have no problem with that. But we need to make sure there are no unintended consequences.”

Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake are among Republicans who have expressed interest in a primary challenge, though neither has made any official plans. Both have spent time in New Hampshire, the nation’s first primary state, and Kasich has talked with prospective donors to gauge the feasibility of a primary or independent candidacy.

John Hammond, the RNC committeeman from Indiana who co-chairs the presidential nominating process committee, acknowledged to BuzzFeed News that debates would be necessary if Trump for whatever reason does not stand for reelection in 2020.

Chair Ronna McDaniel “has the authority to create a committee at any time on any topic under our general rules,” Hammond said. “Nothing that was made in the changes today removes her power to do that and to decide at that point how the RNC interfaces with the primary debate process.

“Just like everything else in this world, when unanticipated events occur, you want to have the flexibility and the power to maintain the opportunity to adjust to that.”

LINK: Republicans In Early Voting States Don’t See A Path For A Donald Trump Primary Challenger

Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images

At a book party Tuesday evening, reporters and editors at the New York Times toasted the publication of Chasing Hillary, a rollicking new memoir by Amy Chozick, who led the paper’s coverage of Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated presidential campaign.

But as the Times seeks to move on from 2016, the book has reopened a sensitive wound inside a newsroom fiercely protective of its reputation. Among colleagues, the memoir has resulted in some embarrassment and hurt feelings, particularly among members of the political team that Chozick’s account has exposed to criticism, according to sources at the paper.

At issue, for some of Chozick’s colleagues, is that the book reflects on office politics as much as national politics. The ego boost of nabbing a page-one byline and the joy of pleasing your editor is depicted as the chief goal of a Times reporter — not striving for truth or holding power to account. Private comments from coworkers, in the heat of deadline pressure, appear on the record. Chozick wonders often whether Clinton likes her. And the paper’s perceived obsession with the contents of the campaign’s hacked emails is cast, by the ultimate Times-Clinton insider, as over the top.

Those juicy revelations caught other Times reporters by surprise and ran counter to the paper’s traditional culture that seeks to keep internal drama in the family. Multiple Times staffers told BuzzFeed News, or have relayed to people close to them, that they felt a sense of betrayal, though the fact that they would say so behind Chozick’s back highlights one of the undercurrents in the book: The New York Times is a snakepit.

“I haven't heard any complaints,” Chozick told BuzzFeed News. “I love my newspaper, was honored to have the first excerpt run in Sunday Review, and have been touched by the support my colleagues and editors have shown for the book.”

Amy Chozick

HarperCollins

"Amy is a talented journalist and a wonderful colleague,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said in a statement. “She was not privy to every discussion we had about coverage and I don't agree with some assessments of our coverage in her book but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it."

Interspersed with a chronicle of her upbringing and life on the campaign trail in 2008 and 2016, Chozick describes maneuvering to get her stories on the Times’ front page over fellow reporters. (“I no longer had the energy to yell at my editors when Pat Healy or Jonathan Martin got to write the daily A1 stories.”) She lays bare how unprepared the paper was for Trump. (“We have enough candidates to cover. Let the TV writers do it,” one editor told her early in the cycle.) And Chozick includes details ribbing colleagues. (“[Mike Schmidt] kept yelling into the phone, ‘They've got [Anthony] Weiner by the balls!’ until I finally g-chatted him that he had to stop saying that.”)

Even Chozick’s plaudits are enough to make any reporter feel awkward. “Maggie Haberman sat near the center of the main table,” Chozick writes in a paragraph celebrating the reporter’s arrival at the Times from Politico. “She didn’t have to work the room. Everyone came up to her.” Chozick praises Haberman as “another badass woman” with whom she wants to be friends, but also notes that Clinton aides sought to undermine Chozick by fighting back on tough stories with the line, “Maggie would never do this to us.” (Chozick added that the antics didn't work with Haberman, a "hardened pro.") Regarding reporter Patrick Healy, Chozick writes, “Trump favored him, calling him ‘smart Irish.’” (Haberman declined to comment, and Schmidt and Healy, who is now the Times politics editor, did not return requests for comment.)

Carolyn Ryan, the Times’ then-political editor and Chozick’s main patron, comes off as supremely talented but also steely and manipulative. “There was nothing like the warmth of Carolyn’s sun when it shined on you,” Chozick writes. “But when she went dark — casting her light on another colleague or hardly looking away from her screen in disappointment that we hadn’t brought her that killer quote or nailed down that delicious detail — life could be a cold, desperate place.”

Ryan, who Chozick thanks in the acknowledgments section for her support and coming up with the book’s title, did not return a request for comment. Now an assistant editor on the Times masthead, Ryan attended Chozick’s book party this week with other high-ranking Times editors and reporters like Healy, Michael Barbaro, Rebecca Blumenstein, Susanne Craig, and Nick Corasaniti.

To be sure, Chozick has defenders who applaud her sharp elbows, bold writing, and critical look into the gender dynamics at play inside the paper. (“I got an email from another (male) editor saying, ‘Don’t use this quote, it’s going in Pat’s story.’”)

And when it comes to delving into the hacked Clinton campaign emails, Chozick airs publicly what some Times reporters have shared privately. “I can’t explain it exactly except to compare it to a fever that spread through every newsroom and made us all salivate over the tiniest morsels,” Chozick writes as she grapples with her ability to set aside ethical considerations. “I chose the byline. I always chose the byline.”

“I do like the idea of someone not being precious about the paper’s coverage and openly being like, ‘Yeah, that was fucked up,’” said one Times reporter.

Chozick is also not the only Times staffer to raise questions about the paper’s email coverage. A story in 2016 described how major publications, including the Times, became “a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.” David Leonhardt last year described in an opinion piece how, “despite the mundane quality of the Clinton emails, the media covered them as a profound revelation.”

Still, colleagues were surprised to learn about reservations from a person with the actual byline on Clinton email stories, and thought the book exposes the Times to even more criticism on a story critics have hounded them on for years. Though the Times has opened up more — a forthcoming Showtime documentary delves into the paper’s political coverage — the outlet is still instinctually old-fashioned when it comes to self-criticism.

“Our coverage is under a microscope from politicians, from other media outlets, even internally, and we’ve never gotten comfortable with talking about ourselves,” said one Times reporter.

Nick Confessore, who wrote some email-related stories with Chozick, defended the coverage on Twitter. “I think on balance the decision to publish stories about the emails was correct,” he tweeted.

Some of Chozick’s colleagues were only loosely aware that she was working on a book, or were expecting a traditional campaign story with little newsroom-insider coverage. And her internal critics have fixated on why she grants male Clinton aides nicknames like Brown Loafers Guy, Hired Gun Guy, and Original Guy — identifiable to those familiar with the campaign — but uses full names for other reporters and Clinton’s female aides. In the book, Chozick describes the decision to group the male aides as a literary choice, but some Times reporters felt it protected Clinton staffers in a way it did not protect her coworkers.

Though it’s not as though former Clinton aides have been rapturously praising the book, and Chozick spends much of the account documenting her back-and-forth relationship with the Clinton campaign (and sexist taunting from “The Guys”). Chelsea Clinton, for her part, disputed on Twitter facts from Chasing Hillary: that she popped Champagne on election night or had received hair keratin treatment.

This week, Chasing Hillary debuted at No. 9 on the New York Times combined print and e-book best-seller list. Apart from a biting Washington Post review that bounced around the Gchats and DMs of political reporters, Chozick’s book has generated positive buzz and prime placement with excerpts in the Times’ Weekend Review section and Vanity Fair. In a review for the Times, Charlotte Alter called the book “Devil Wears Prada meets Boys on the Bus,” and Entertainment Weekly wrote that "Chasing Hillary succeeds because, unlike so many recent tell-alls which have purported to shed light, Chozick relishes the incendiary.”

Jeenah Moon / Reuters

Confusion surrounded NBC reporting on surveillance of Michael Cohen's phone lines on Thursday, leading to a 5 p.m. correction that downgraded the level of reported surveillance to a phone call log — a substantial difference from its initial reporting that Cohen's phone lines were being wiretapped.

Rudy Giuliani told BuzzFeed News on Thursday afternoon that he didn't believe there was a wiretap of Cohen — two hours after NBC reported that "[f]ederal investigators have wiretapped the phone lines of Michael Cohen," a report that also was covered extensively on MSNBC.

"I am told by two people now that it is not true," Giuliani said. "FBI is saying it’s not true off the record, and Special Counsel is saying it’s not true," he said, claiming that the Special Counsel's Office "told the press that."

NBC's correction proved Giuliani to be right.

Two hours after Giuliani made his comments in an interview with BuzzFeed News, NBC corrected its earlier story — reporting, instead, that a pen register, which only logs calls and cannot record them, had been authorized to be placed on Cohen's phone lines.

"Now, three senior U.S. officials are telling us that this is a it was not a wiretap. Instead it was what is referred to a pen register. That means it is a log of phone calls that were made from a specific phone line or a specific phone lines," Tom Winter, an author of the NBC report, said on MSNBC a little past 5 p.m. He added that, in Cohen's circumstances, it was "several phone lines."

In discussing the original story, Giuliani pointed to what he considered procedural irregularities about the circumstances as he understood them — had it been a wiretap — saying, "I would find it strange they didn’t notify us. They’re supposed to under the statute. ... I also think it’s strange that they would wiretap a lawyer and not the minimize the conversation with the client."

The NBC story was updated with the correction at 5:27 p.m.

“We will decline to confirm or comment on any specific aspects of the investigation,” a spokesperson for the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is running the investigation into Cohen, said regarding the initial reporting and Giuliani’s questions. The spokesperson did not respond to a question about the reported pen register authorization.

Cohen's lawyers didn't immediately return a request for comment.

Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images

Ohio’s tighter-than-expected Democratic gubernatorial primary is still tighter than expected just days before voters head to the polls.

The race between Richard Cordray, the former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and Dennis Kucinich, the firebrand progressive and former member of Congress who’s pitched himself as a progressive Donald Trump, has garnered national attention this spring — as yet another example of Democrats deciding what the party should prioritize.

How close it is depends on which poll you’re looking at.

A late March poll from SurveyUSA showed the candidates tied with 21% each, among 509 likely voters. A mid-April poll from the 1984 Society showed Cordray in the lead with 27% of the vote and Kucinich with 13% among 500 likely Democratic primary voters. The latest polling — of 333 likely Democratic voters from the Community Research Institute at Baldwin Wallace University — gives Richard Cordray 31% to Kucinich’s 15%, but 41% of voters are still undecided just days before Election Day.

That one remained constant across all of the polling: an unusually large pool of undecided voters, leaving the race up in the air.

This is not for want of persuasion efforts from of the party’s most prominent figures and groups that have thrown their support behind the two candidates. Sen. Elizabeth Warren endorsed and stumped for Richard Cordray, who also pulled endorsements from a sizeable portion of Ohio’s unions, while the Sanders-aligned group Our Revolution endorsed Kucinich (though not Sanders himself), along with the National Nurses Organizing Committee, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (who previously accompanied Kucinich on a much-scrutinized trip to Syria).

“Now, this election could be very close,” Gabbard tells Ohio voters in her endorsement video. “Every single vote matters.”

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Tom Sutton, the director of the Community Research Institute, agrees.

“There’s only about a 15-point spread between Cordray and Kucinich,” Sutton told BuzzFeed News over a phone call. “It’s possible that you could see an upset by Kucinich if progressives turn out in the Cuyahoga County area.”

“Primary voters here see Cordray as the safe choice but are attracted to Kucinich’s message, but they’re concerned that Kucinich brings a bit of baggage,” said Sutton.

The primary has seen the two candidates attack each other on everything from NRA records to tax filings. The Kucinich campaign has regularly reminded voters that in 2010, Cordray had an A rating from the NRA while the Cordray campaign has talked about Kucinich’s trips to Syria to visit Bashar al-Assad and his paid speeches for pro-Assad groups (Kucinich says he’s returning the $20,000 speaking fee).

The race has left some Democrats in the state nervous that if Kucinich can inch out a victory in the primary, it would greatly reduce the party’s chances of winning the general election. Others have criticized Cordray around this same line of electability — given his campaign pitch has practically been “a safe pick, who’s looked out for Ohioans as the CFPB director” — and worry he doesn’t have enough flair to turn voters out.

“Maybe Richard Cordray is boring,” said Sandy Theis, the executive director of ProgressOhio. “But you know what? Maybe after electing Donald Trump boring is good.”

LINK: A New Group Is Attacking An Ohio Democrat From The Left. A Republican Is Behind The Group.

LINK: Ohio Democrats Are Worried That The Wrong Governor's Nominee Could Throw Away Their Shot At Turning Ohio Blue