President Biden News: Live Updates

A pair of moderate Senate Democrats pleaded with Republicans on Tuesday to drop their opposition to creating an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, in an 11th-hour attempt to prevent its collapse on the floor.

The Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, called the formation of a 9/11-style inquiry “a critical step to ensuring our nation never has to endure an attack at the hands of our countrymen again.” Behind the scenes, they were working to tweak the legislation in hopes of attracting the 10 Republicans needed to advance it.

“We implore our Senate Republican colleagues to work with us to find a path forward on a commission to examine the events of January 6,” the senators wrote in a joint statement.

The maneuvering amounted to a long-shot effort to salvage what may be the best chance at a full, bipartisan accounting for the most violent attack on the Capitol in centuries and a stunning series of security failures around it. Modeled after the panel that studied the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the proposed commission would produce a report of its findings and recommendations to prevent a repeat. It was also bipartisan; crafted with the input of a key Republican, the commission won 35 Republican votes in the House.

Still, G.O.P. leaders have moved swiftly to try to destroy its chances in the Senate amid fears of political fallout for their party of any close examination of the assault by a pro-Trump mob.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, blasted the commission on Tuesday as a “purely political exercise” by Democrats merely trying “to debate things that occurred in the past.”

“They would like to continue to litigate the former president into the future,” Mr. McConnell said. “We think the American people going forward and in the fall of ’22 ought to focus on what this administration is doing to the country.”

A handful of Republican senators, including many who voted to convict former President Donald J. Trump during his impeachment trial for inciting the violence, have indicated they are willing to support the 10-person commission anyway. Among them are Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Others, like Senators Susan M. Collins of Maine, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania want to tweak the legislation to ensure Republicans have more say in who the committee hires as staff and to put a hard stop on its work in December, before entering an election year.

Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema are working with Ms. Collins to try to address those concerns, but lawmakers in both parties say there is no guarantee that such changes would yield enough Republican support for passage.

Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema have their own motivation for running up Republican support, as well. Without 10 Republicans, the bill is likely to become the first of the year to be blocked by a filibuster, because of the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to overcome one. The two moderates are the two most outspoken proponents of the filibuster in their caucus, and the commission’s failure would only ratchet up pressure on them from the party’s left flank to cave and change the rules so that legislation could move on a simple majority vote.

Mr. Manchin was adamant on Tuesday that he would not change the rules around the commission vote. “No,” he told reporters. “I can’t take the fallout.”

The Biden administration has decided to fight to keep secret most of a Trump-era Justice Department memo related to former Attorney General William P. Barr’s much-disputed declaration in 2019 clearing President Donald J. Trump of illegally obstructing justice in the Russia investigation.

In a late-night filing Monday, the Justice Department appealed part of a district-court ruling that ordered it to make public the entire memo. It was written at the same time that Mr. Barr sent a letter to Congress claiming the evidence in the then-still secret report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was insufficient to charge Mr. Trump with a crime.

The Justice Department did release the first page and a half of the nine-page memo. While Mr. Mueller had declined to render a judgment about what the evidence added up to because the department’s policy was not to charge a sitting president, the memo said Mr. Barr was justified in making a decision in order to shape public understanding of the report.

“Although the special counsel recognized the unfairness of levying an accusation against the president without bringing criminal charges, the report’s failure to take a position on the matters described therein might be read to imply such an accusation if the confidential report were released to the public,” wrote Steven A. Engel and Edward C. O’Callaghan, two senior Trump-era Justice Department officials.

The Mueller report itself — which Mr. Barr permitted to become public weeks after his letter to Congress had created an impression that the fruits of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry cleared Mr. Trump of obstruction — detailed multiple actions by Mr. Trump that many legal specialists say were clearly sufficient to ask a grand jury to consider indicting him for obstruction of justice.

Those actions included attempting to bully his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, into falsifying a record to cover up an earlier attempt by Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Mueller, and dangling a potential pardon at Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to encourage him not to cooperate with investigators.

The new Justice Department filing also apologized for and defended its Barr-era court filings about the memo, which Judge Amy Berman Jackson had labeled “disingenuous,” saying that they could have been written more clearly but were nevertheless accurate.

“The government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused,” the Justice Department said. “But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the court, and the government respectfully submits” that any missteps still did not warrant releasing the entire memo.

Mr. Barr’s claim — which he made weeks before releasing the Mueller public — that the evidence gathered showed that Mr. Trump did not commit a chargeable offense of obstruction has been widely criticized as deeply misleading.

Among other fallout, a government watchdog group, CREW, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the United States District Court in Washington seeking disclosure of an internal memo about the matter.

Earlier this month, Judge Jackson issued a scathing ruling in that case saying that the Barr-era Justice Department had been “disingenuous to this court” about the nature of the memo in court filings by arguing that it could be lawfully kept secret under an exemption for pre-decisional deliberations. She wrote that she had made the discovery after insisting that she read it herself.

While the Barr-era Justice Department told her the memo concerned deliberations about whether Mr. Trump should be charged with obstruction, the memo itself showed that Mr. Barr had already decided not to do so, and the memo was instead about strategy and arguments that could be mustered to quash the idea. She ordered the entire document released.

The Biden-era Justice Department had until Monday to respond. In its filing, it acknowledged that its earlier filings “could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused.” But it also insisted that its “declarations and briefs were accurate and submitted in good faith.”

The decision that Mr. Barr was actually making, the department said, was about whether to decide whether the evidence was sufficient to charge Mr. Trump someday — not whether he should be charged at that moment, since longstanding department legal policy is to consider sitting presidents temporarily immune from prosecution while they are in office.

And, it said, the legal analysis in the second part of the memo — the portion it is appealing to keep secret — was, in fact, pre-decisional, even though the memo was completed after Mr. Barr made his decision, because it memorialized legal advice that department lawyers had previously provided to the attorney general.

In an April phone call after a former Minneapolis police officer was found guilty of killing George Floyd, President Biden promised Mr. Floyd’s family that he would win passage of a police reform bill in his name.

“That and a lot more,” Mr. Biden pledged that day.

Mr. Biden has so far failed to make good on that promise, even as he met with Mr. Floyd’s family in a private Oval Office session on Tuesday to mark the day when a white police officer pressed his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, killing him. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was convicted of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

The closed-door meeting was underway Tuesday afternoon.

In a speech to Congress last month, the president used the emotional power of Mr. Floyd’s death, and the national movement it helped spark, to urge lawmakers to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by May 25, the first anniversary of Mr. Floyd’s death. It was, the president implored Democrats and Republicans, a moment to “bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, real justice.”

But Washington missed the moment.

The legislation bearing Mr. Floyd’s name — which would ban the use of chokeholds, impose restrictions on deadly force and make it easier to prosecute officers for wrongdoing — has languished in Congress as lawmakers spar over a series of issues, including a measure that would alter a legal shield known as qualified immunity that protects police officers in brutality cases.

Though both sides say they are optimistic that a deal may still be possible in the weeks ahead, the stalemate is a reminder for Mr. Biden of the limits of presidential power, and of the deepening lack of any real bipartisanship in the nation’s capital, even in the face of the largest racial justice protests in generations.

“He was a son. He was a father. He was a brother. And we failed him,” Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, said Tuesday on the “CBS This Morning” program. “We have to make progress here. We cannot lose this moment.”

A now-famous video of the killing of Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis, which showed Mr. Chauvin kneeling on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, accelerated a nationwide racial reckoning against police brutality and fueled demands for justice and policing reform. The Biden administration said on Tuesday that Mr. Biden will travel next week to Oklahoma to attend the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.

Before arriving at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, the Floyd family made stops with key lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who renewed her party’s commitment to get a bill signed into law.

“Today is the day that set the world in a rage and people realized what’s going on in America and we all said ‘enough is enough,’” said Philonise Floyd, standing with his family and lawmakers beneath a portrait of George Washington.

Among those who are attending the meeting with the president, according to Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, are: Gianna, Mr. Floyd’s daughter; Roxie Washington, Gianna’s mother; Bridgett Floyd, his sister; Philonise Floyd, his brother; Kita Floyd, his sister-in-law; Rodney Floyd, his brother; Terrence Floyd, his brother; and Brandon Williams, his nephew.

Before the meeting, Mr. Biden praised the family on Twitter, saying that Mr. Floyd’s relatives have shown “extraordinary courage” and calling the conviction of Mr. Chauvin a “step towards justice” for Mr. Floyd.

But he added: “We cannot stop there. We face an inflection point. We have to act.”

The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, a former Obama administration health official, to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, one of the most powerful posts at the Department of Health and Human Services. The vote was 55 to 44, with five Republicans joining Democrats to support her confirmation.

As the official charged with overseeing providing services to poor and older Americans in Medicare and Medicaid, Ms. Brooks-LaSure will manage roughly $1 trillion of the federal budget in addition to the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces and regulations.

Ms. Brooks-LaSure, the first Black administrator confirmed to lead the agency, comes to the job with extensive experience in federal health policy. She was a senior official at the agency under President Barack Obama in the years after the health care law passed, working to expand coverage. She also worked on health issues as a congressional staffer and member of the White House’s budget office. She was a managing director at the health consulting firm Manatt before President Biden nominated her as Medicare chief.

The agency is key to fulfilling Mr. Biden’s health care agenda. His administration and a Democratic-controlled Congress are aiming to engineer the first substantial reforms and expansion of the Affordable Care Act since its passage, in part through billions of dollars in the American Rescue Plan. The administration opened a highly publicized special enrollment period in February that allowed the uninsured to sign up for coverage right away, drawing in over a million Americans.

Her nomination was challenged by Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, who opposed a recent Medicaid policy decision affecting his home state. Biden administration Medicaid officials withdrew the approval of a waiver that would have given hospitals more than $100 billion in federal dollars over a decade for treating patients without insurance. The officials said the waiver’s approval, which was granted in the closing days of the Trump administration, had been rushed. The agency has also begun rolling back state Medicaid work requirements approved in some states during the Trump administration.

Ms. Brooks-LaSure’s predecessor, Seema Verma, feuded bitterly during the Trump administration with the H.H.S. secretary, Alex M. Azar II, and she attracted inspector general and congressional investigations into her agency’s lavish spending on outside consultants who worked to polish her personal brand.

President Biden will meet President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Geneva on June 16, the White House said Tuesday, the first face-to-face session between the two leaders at a time of extraordinary tension over Ukraine, cyberattacks and a raft of new nuclear weapons Mr. Putin is deploying.

The meeting is expected to focus heavily on preventing nuclear escalation. Geneva was also the site of the 1985 summit between Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, and Ronald Reagan, also focused on the nuclear arms race.

But Mr. Biden is also expected to use the summit to raise the issues he talked about with Mr. Putin on the telephone recently, just before the United States announced a new series of financial sanctions against Russian officials and financial institutions.

Those include the prosecution and jailing of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition leader that Mr. Putin’s intelligence services attempted to kill with a nerve agent. And Mr. Biden plans to focus on the rising tide of cyberattacks directed at the United States, starting with SolarWinds, a sophisticated entry into network management software used by most of the United States’ largest companies and by a range of government agencies and defense contractors.

Two weeks ago Mr. Biden said he would raise with Mr. Putin the more recent ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, which shut down nearly half the supply of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to the East Coast. That attack arose from a criminal group, but Mr. Biden accused Russia of harboring the ransomware criminals.

For Mr. Biden, the encounter will come after two successive meetings with allies, first the Group of 7 allies — a group the Russians had been part of for several years when integration with the West seemed possible — and NATO allies. Mr. Biden will then travel from Brussels, where NATO is headquartered, to Geneva, where his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, met his Russian counterpart last weekend to plan the meeting of the two global adversaries.

For all the tensions, Mr. Biden has repeatedly said that the United States and Russia must find a way to have a “stable, predictable” relationship.

Russia, despite continued saber-rattling directed at the West, has signaled optimism about the upcoming talks. For Mr. Putin, a high-profile presidential summit can help deliver what he has long sought: respect for Russia on the world stage. And he is sure to repeat his message that the United States must respect Russian interests — especially inside Russia, where the Kremlin claims Washington is trying to undermine Mr. Putin’s rule, and in Eastern Europe.

Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said Tuesday that Mr. Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken had taken a “frank” and “respectful” tone in their recent talks with their Russian counterparts. While Mr. Biden has taken a more critical tone toward Russia than did President Donald J. Trump, some analysts say that the Kremlin also sees benefits in being able to negotiate with a more predictable administration in Washington.

“We can expect — if efforts are made by both sides — that certain irritants will be removed,” Mr. Lavrov told reporters Tuesday. “This won’t be fast and it won’t be easy.”

Mr. Gorbachev — the Soviet leader, now 90, whose 1985 summit with Mr. Reagan in Geneva helped defuse Cold War tensions — said on Tuesday that he was happy to hear Mr. Putin would meet Mr. Biden, whom he cast as a more reliable counterpart than Mr. Trump.

“There’s a new president in the White House now, and you can negotiate with him,” Mr. Gorbachev said, according to the Interfax news agency. “The prior team turned out to be unreliable.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia drew a rare condemnation on Tuesday from the top House Republican for the latest in a series of comments she has made comparing mask and vaccine mandates to the treatment of Jews by Nazis during the Holocaust.

In a series of posts on Twitter, Ms. Greene, a right-wing provocateur who previously endorsed a series of violent and racist conspiracy theories, has railed against decisions made by private businesses to impose vaccine mandates or drop mask requirements only for vaccinated individuals. Her comments came amid an uptick in anti-Semitic attacks on Jews across the nation.

“Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star,” she wrote in one post on Tuesday.

In another, referring to a university barring unvaccinated students from attending classes in person, she wrote: “It appears Nazi practices have already begun on our youth. Show your VAX papers or no in person class for you. This is exactly what I was saying about the gold star.”

After Ms. Greene was met with a wave of public criticism, she refused to apologize, arguing that she had never compared mask mandates specifically to the Holocaust, which killed six million Jews, “only the discrimination against Jews in the early years.”

Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, who has largely refrained from criticizing Ms. Greene even as she has courted controversy, issued a statement condemning her language, as did his top two deputies.

“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust to wearing masks is appalling,” Mr. McCarthy said in a statement. “The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in human history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.”

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, also denounced her comments, telling CNN they were “outrageous” and “reprehensible.”

Mr. McConnell earlier this year said Ms. Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracies” were a “cancer for the Republican Party and our country.”

Those rebukes came after one from the Republican Jewish Coalition, a prominent organization whose political action committee contributes generously to the G.O.P.

Matt Brooks, the group’s executive director, said Ms. Greene’s Holocaust comparisons were “wrong and inappropriate,” calling her “an embarrassment to yourself and the GOP.”

Her most recent comments have created yet another problem for House Republican leaders, who recently attempted to take control of their political message by purging Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from her post as the conference chair, citing her refusal to ignore former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of a stolen election. And they muddled a theme that Republicans have attempted to highlight in recent days as they have tried to paint Democrats as insufficiently supportive of Israel and the American Jewish community.

Mr. McCarthy declined earlier this year to take action against Ms. Greene for her earlier incendiary statements, including one in which she endorsed assassinating Speaker Nancy Pelosi, even as he disavowed the remarks themselves.

Some Republicans had argued it would be unfair to rebuke Ms. Greene for comments she made before serving in Congress. But after it emerged that the Georgia freshman had also suggested that a devastating wildfire that ravaged California was started by “a laser” beamed from space and controlled by a prominent Jewish banking family, the Republican Jewish Coalition stepped in and said it was “working closely with the House Republican leadership regarding next steps.”

Ms. Greene was never disciplined.

A spokesman for Ms. Pelosi on Tuesday said Mr. McCarthy’s refusal to punish Ms. Greene and his days of silence about her Holocaust remarks “has spoken volumes about his allegiance to the most extreme elements” of his party.

Asked if the freshman congresswoman should be censured or expelled from Congress for her new comments, Ms. Pelosi responded: “I think she should stop talking.”

Four of the seven members of the federal Commission of Fine Arts, a generally low-key, earnest design advisory group that became embroiled in battles over architectural style during the Trump era, have been told by the Biden administration to resign or face termination, according to the commission’s chairman.

All seven members of the commission were appointed by former President Donald J. Trump; four were appointed Jan. 12, just days before Mr. Trump left office.

The commission offers advice on “matters of design and aesthetics, as they affect the federal interest and preserve the dignity of the nation’s capital,” according to its website. Mr. Trump thrust architecture into the culture wars late in his presidency when he signed an executive order establishing classical architecture as the preferred style for new federal buildings, over the opposition of prominent architecture and preservation groups, which bristled at any attempt that could be seen as trying to impose a national style.

The commission’s chairman, Justin Shubow, who was a driving force behind the push to promote classical architecture, said that he and three other members of the commission — the architect Steven Spandle, the artist Chas Fagan, and the landscape architect Perry Guillot — had been asked to resign. He noted that the commission’s members are appointed to four-year terms, and said that seeking their removal would break a longstanding precedent.

A spokeswoman for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday; nor did Mr. Spandle, Mr. Fagan or Mr. Guillot.

Mr. Shubow declined the request to resign, according to email correspondence reviewed by The New York Times. The emails showed that he had received a formal letter from an assistant to the president requesting his resignation on Monday. The letter said that if the White House did not receive his resignation, his position with the commission would be terminated effective 6 p.m. Monday.

The classical architecture issue proved divisive in the architecture community. The order Mr. Trump eventually signed, titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” established classical architecture as the preferred style for new federal buildings but stopped short of banning other styles.

The American Institute of Architects called on the Biden administration to reverse the order, and he did so soon after he took office.

The Biden administration said on Tuesday that it had requested the establishment of a panel to address a dispute over American dairy exports to Canada, an early attempt by the United States to enforce the terms of the updated North American trade deal.

The request stems from a challenge announced in December by the Trump administration, which accused Canada of improperly limiting the ability of the American dairy industry to sell its goods into Canada.

The Trump administration had highlighted the trade deal, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, as a victory for American dairy farmers, who stood to gain increased access to the Canadian market. Enabling exports of U.S. milk and other dairy products to Canada was a key issue in negotiations over the trade deal, with the Trump administration threatening to leave Canada out of the North American pact if it did not allow access.

The final agreement opened the Canadian market to more exported American dairy products, and it included a concession by Canada to jettison a program that helped Canadian sellers of certain milk products, both domestically and abroad.

But the Biden administration said that consultations with Canada over the challenge announced in December had not been successful in resolving the dispute.

“A top priority for the Biden-Harris administration is fully enforcing the U.S.M.C.A. and ensuring that it benefits American workers,” Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, said in a statement, referring to the trade deal by its initials. “Launching the first panel request under the agreement will ensure our dairy industry and its workers can seize new opportunities under the U.S.M.C.A. to market and sell U.S. products to Canadian consumers.”

Mary Ng, Canada’s minister of small business, export promotion and international trade, said in a statement that Canada was “disappointed that the United States has requested a dispute settlement panel.”

She said that “Canada agreed to provide some additional market access to the United States for dairy while successfully defending our supply management system and dairy industry,” and that “we are confident that our policies are in full compliance” with the trade agreement.

One of the most interesting new alliances in the Senate these days is between Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, and Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who have been working together on the Senate Armed Services Committee on possible solutions to sexual assault in the military.

Mr. Hawley has repeatedly praised Ms. Gillibrand for her work on the issue culminating in bipartisan legislation to change the way those crimes are handled. Ms. Gillibrand has often sought out Mr. Hawley, a first-term lawmaker and vocal supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, directly for such work, even though the two are on opposite ends of nearly all things political.

The two are planning on Tuesday to introduce a bill designed to improve one of the military’s sexual assault response coordinators, which came under scrutiny after the killing of a soldier at Fort Hood, and an ensuing report that showed many members of the coordination team lacked training to help victims of assault.

Under their measure, the Defense Department would have to more carefully evaluate the programs and report their findings to Congress, and increase training and other resources to professionalize the military justice system. It is one of a few initiatives Ms. Gillibrand and Mr. Hawley have joined together on — and attracted bipartisan support for — to try and make the military more accountable.

“This legislation would aid the Department of Defense in identifying next steps to professionalize the role of Sexual Assault Response Coordinator throughout all branches of the military,” Mr. Hawley said in a statement.

President Biden is coming under increasing pressure to abandon a Trump-era immigration rule that has sealed off the United States to most migrants during the pandemic, with human rights officials and two of the administration’s own medical consultants saying it endangers vulnerable families.

The policy, known as Title 42, allows border agents to turn away migrants without giving them a chance to apply for protections in the United States. White House officials declined to comment on the record, but a government official said the White House position was that the rule was necessary given the many Americans who had not been fully vaccinated. Like the Trump administration, the Biden administration has defended the policy as a “public health directive” rather than an immigration tool.

On Monday, two physicians who work as consultants for the Department of Homeland Security sent a letter to members of Congress saying the rule had the “perverse impact” of encouraging parents to send their children to cross the border alone, since Mr. Biden has chosen not to immediately turn away minors. Most single adults and many migrants traveling together as families are immediately turned back.

The complaint came days after Filippo Grandi, the United Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, who rarely criticizes U.S. immigration policy, said the expulsions have had “serious humanitarian consequences.”

The Biden administration’s embrace of Title 42 highlights a difficult balancing act for the president: how to make good on his pledge to have a more compassionate approach to migrants fleeing poverty and persecution while managing a surge of people who want to come to the United States. The topic also leaves Mr. Biden open to political attacks from Republicans and moderate Democrats who say he risks losing control of the border.