Politico

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki and the Justice Department are fighting an effort to force her to testify in a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of violating the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to block or remove certain content about the coronavirus pandemic and election security issues.

Lawyers for Psaki filed a motion Thursday in federal court in Alexandria, Va., seeking to quash a subpoena the states of Missouri and Nebraska issued to her in connection with the suit they filed in May against Psaki and a slew of other administration officials.

Last month, a federal district court judge in Monroe, La., Terry Doughty, issued an unusual order requiring Psaki and six other officials to sit for sworn depositions about federal authorities’ interactions with social media firms. The order was rare because it came as the suit remains at an early stage, with the states pushing for a preliminary injunction that would prevent the administration from trying to encourage the social media platforms to limit some speech. It’s also uncommon for courts to require high-level federal appointees to testify.

Now, Psaki and the Justice Department are asking the federal court in Virginia to essentially countermand Doughty, an appointee of President Donald Trump, and excuse Psaki from testifying.

Psaki, who left her White House post in May and is preparing to host a new show on MSNBC, said requiring her to testify in the case would be “extremely burdensome” for her.

“Among other things, I understand that I would need to devote several days preparing for the deposition, as well as attending the deposition itself, and that would be highly disruptive to both my work and my family,” Psaki said in a declaration filed with the Alexandria federal court.

Psaki has retained a high-powered attorney to represent her in the court battle, Jeannie Rhee, a veteran of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Justice Department attorneys have also weighed in, arguing that if her deposition proceeds it will almost certainly to lead to a prolonged fight over executive privilege, due to her role as a top adviser to President Joe Biden.

“If permitted to proceed, the deposition of Ms. Psaki would inevitably set the Executive and Judicial Branches ‘on a collision course’ through adjudications of executive privilege, thrusting the court into ‘the awkward position of evaluating the Executive’s claims of confidentiality and autonomy,’ and ‘difficult questions of separation of powers and checks and balances’ would quickly be pushed to the fore,” Justice Department lawyers wrote, quoting from a 2004 Supreme Court case involving Vice President Dick Cheney.

“Plaintiffs have not identified any evidence showing or even suggesting that Ms. Psaki ever communicated with any social-media company in her capacity as Press Secretary about misinformation, much less that she ‘exercised coercive power’ to compel a social-media company to take any action,”the DOJ brief says.

Under federal court rules, Psaki is permitted to ask the Virginia-based court to quash or limit the subpoena because she lives in Virginia. Her motion was assigned to Judge Patricia Giles, a Biden appointee.

In recent years, such motions have often been transferred to the court handling the original suit, but the Justice Department said it opposes such a move this time. DOJ lawyers also noted that Psaki is no longer a defendant in the suit, since she was replaced by Karine Jean-Pierre when Jean-Pierre took over in May.

“The issuing district has not addressed arguments Ms. Psaki may raise as a nonparty … regarding undue burden,” Justice Department attorneys wrote.

Justice Department officials have agreed to make some current and former officials available for depositions but they have asked a New Orleans-based federal appeals court to block Doughty’s order requiring testimony from three officials: Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Jen Easterly and White House director of digital strategy Rob Flaherty.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has yet to rule on the request.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who’s running for the U.S. Senate, is spearheading the suit, joined by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry. Former President Donald Trump filed three similar suits against the major social media firms last year, but has not managed to get discovery in connection with any of them.

Rhee, Psaki and Schmitt’s office did not respond to messages seeking comment on the dispute.

President Joe Biden hasn’t yet lost control of Congress. But already, his administration is preparing for its first major showdown with a newly emboldened Republican party.

Senior Biden officials and allies are exploring a series of strategies for raising the debt ceiling, in a bid to avert a standoff with Republicans next year that threatens to further rattle financial markets and endanger the nation’s fragile economic recovery.

The private discussions have focused largely on whether Congress can and should head off the high-stakes conflict before it begins by striking a lame-duck session deal to lift the debt limit — or, in a sign of the grave concerns within the party, deploying a procedural tool that would allow Democrats to unilaterally pass an increase. Under consideration is a debt ceiling hike that would extend past the 2024 election, in effect removing the drama for the rest of Biden’s term.

The debate comes as several Republicans have advocated for using the debt ceiling to extract concessions from the White House, and reflects growing fears in Democratic and economic circles that the GOP may be willing to put the country’s credit and financial stability at risk in pursuit of its political goals.

The U.S. has never defaulted on its debt. But such a move would immediately send the economy into a tailspin, spike interest rates and reverberate across the globe.

“It’s just over-the-top lunacy to go down that path, but I think the odds are rising that we will,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said of breaching the debt ceiling. “If we’re not in a recession by then, we will be.”

The White House is unlikely to land on a way forward until after the midterms, and could still allow the issue to spill into 2023, when a new Congress will be sworn in. In public, officials have refused to discuss any priorities beyond the election — insisting that Democrats still have a shot at holding their House and Senate majorities.

Biden, who as vice president was at the center of Obama-era debt ceiling brinkmanship, has ruled out abolishing the debt limit, deeming it an “irresponsible” idea. But he’s seized on Republicans’ rhetoric around it in the final days of the midterm campaign, warning the GOP will tank the economy if given control of Congress.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing will create more chaos and do more damage to the American economy than playing around with whether we pay our national bills,” Biden said during an appearance Tuesday in Florida.

Still, within the administration and on Capitol Hill, there is little doubt that Republicans are poised to take at least the House — and that Democrats will need to move quickly to take full advantage of their final weeks in power.

Democratic leaders are already juggling several competing priorities for the lame-duck session, including efforts to pass a major defense bill, push through outstanding energy-permitting legislation and vote on proposals protecting same-sex marriage and shoring up the electoral process. Congress also needs to reach a government funding deal before its Dec. 16 deadline.

Yet as those preparations have intensified in recent days, many Democrats have come around to what one person familiar with the discussions described as “growing agreement” that the debt ceiling must be resolved if at all possible before the end of the year.

“You’re talking about really tearing out the insides of the country,” one economic adviser to top Democrats said of the threat of a debt default. “It should take a superhuman effort from rationally minded people to do everything possible to head this off at the pass.”

Still, the paths forward are limited. The Biden administration is weighing whether to negotiate a deal with Senate Republicans to lift the cap in the weeks after the midterms, in hopes Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will be open to avoid the potential economic damage of a debt limit standoff, people with knowledge of the early strategizing said.

The alternative would be for Democrats to use the budget reconciliation process to raise the debt ceiling with just 50 Senate votes — an approach that would bypass Republicans altogether, but require a number of procedural steps that could eat up precious floor time lawmakers had hoped to devote to other last-minute agenda items.

Some Democrats have floated more aggressive proposals, including giving the administration unilateral power to lift the debt ceiling, raising it some unfathomable amount so as to effectively eliminate it, or pushing Biden to reconsider abolishing the cap altogether. In a letter sent earlier this week, 31 House Democrats urged their Hill leadership to “permanently end the threat that the federal debt ceiling poses to our economy and our standing in the world.”

But some Biden advisers view the elimination option as politically ill-advised and far more difficult to find consensus on even among Democrats.

“It would be a very hard vote to explain to people that we will borrow as much as we want to borrow with no limits,” said one Biden adviser. “The attack ads write themselves.”

Officials are still holding out hope that McConnell, who was the top Senate Republican during the 2011 debt ceiling standoff, will be keen to avoid a repeat of that damaging episode more than a decade later. But his willingness to cooperate could hinge at least in part on Democrats keeping control of the Senate; a proposition that’s looked increasingly uncertain in the campaign’s stretch run.

There’s less faith that House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy will be open to discussions, especially in the face of calls from his conservative wing to use the debt limit as leverage to negotiate spending cuts. Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked McConnell for not using the debt ceiling as leverage, saying Thursday that Republicans should “impeach” McConnell if he brokers a debt limit deal with Democrats.

“If I were the Democrats, I would try and move an extension during the lame duck,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who was a House GOP leadership staffer during the Obama debt ceiling battles. He added that the party’s conservative base is likely to cheer on a debt limit fight even if there’s no clear exit strategy. “If they don’t, then they’re in a situation of having to negotiate with Republicans who don’t really want to negotiate.”

Biden advisers expressed confidence that Republicans would ultimately take the blame for any fallout from playing chicken with the debt ceiling, emphasizing that it would be up to McCarthy to hold together his fractious caucus and sell the public on his demands — whereas Democrats could unite behind the simple position that lifting the cap shouldn’t be up for debate.

But Biden himself hasn’t yet come to that position. While the White House has stated that it believes any bill to hike the debt limit should be clean and ruled out entitlement reforms as part of any deal to raise the ceiling, it has not drawn similar lines around discretionary spending cuts.

The assumption, in part, is that the specter of an economic disaster will do some of the political heavy lifting for them.

“Every time we go down this road, we get closer and closer to the brink,” Zandi said. “If they slip up even a little bit, the consequences will be very serious.”

Ben White and Sarah Ferris contributed to this report. 

President Joe Biden will deliver a speech in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday night, warning about escalating threats against the nation’s democracy.

Biden’s speech will come in the wake of the brutal beating of the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and against the backdrop of several Republican election deniers standing a chance to win in next week’s midterms.

It’s become a familiar theme for Biden, who delivered a stark message in September about extreme Republicans challenging the foundations of democracy. He also has repeatedly said that he launched his presidential campaign because he felt then-President Donald Trump was tearing the nation’s very fabric.

The White House had not yet released more details about the speech, save that it will be delivered at 7 p.m. at Union Station, the train terminal just blocks from Congress.

Biden’s advisers had hoped to make his closing campaign argument about economy and inflation but could not ignore the confluence of dark conspiracies that have further tested the nation’s stability.

Since the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, government and law enforcement officials have warned about a surge in political violence, fears that only grew as Election Day approached.

Those worries were borne out by Friday’s brutal assault of the speaker’s 82-year-old husband in the couple’s San Francisco home. The suspect, 42-year-old David DePape, who dwelled in far-right online conspiracy theories, attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, fracturing his skull. Authorities said DePape told police he aimed to hold the speaker hostage while breaking her knees.

And that violence has been fueled by far-right conspiracy theories, which Biden argues have been allowed to fester because some Republican deniers of the 2020 election have amplified hate speech.

Biden has frequently returned to the theme of needing to protect “the soul of the nation,” the centerpiece of his speech in Philadelphia delivered just before the unofficial Labor Day kickoff of the general election season. The speech Wednesday night in Washington will act as a sort of bookend, with the president trying to impress upon voters that their bottom lines aren’t the only things at stake in these midterms.

In Philadelphia, Biden took square aim at so-called MAGA Republicans who refuse to honor 2020 election results and who have espoused violence as a legitimate means of political discourse.

“As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault. We do no favor to pretend otherwise,” Biden declared then. “We have to be honest with each other and ourselves: Too much of what is happening in our country today is not normal.”

Biden has declared the foundation of his presidency was to prove that democracies could still deliver for their people and stand up to rising autocracies across the globe. He vowed to run to heal the wounds opened by Trump’s term and has grown deeply dismayed, aides said, by the political polarization that has only grown during his own time in the White House.

Though polls suggest voters worry about the future of the nation’s democracy, those concerns badly trail fears about the economy and inflation. When mapping out the president’s final weeks of the campaign, aides had planned for Biden to stay the course and center his closing argument largely on pocketbook issues.

But now he will need to strike a balancing act and warn against the dark forces of disinformation and violence, aides said.

Historical trends suggest the party which controls the White House suffers during the midterms. But while Democrats’ hopes were bolstered this summer in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning federal abortion protections, the final stage of the campaign has been dominated by fears about crime and the economy, issues that tend to benefit Republicans.

Most Democrats privately believe that the House will be lost and that maintaining control of the Senate is a toss-up. Biden has largely stayed on the campaign sidelines but will plunge into the foray this week with stops in Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Mexico and California.

A brutal assault on the husband of the House speaker. A rise in celebrities spouting antisemitic beliefs. The world’s richest man pushing fake news on his newly acquired social media site.

With a week until the midterms, a series of major events have fueled a growing sense of national unrest and division and sparked larger debates about the future the country is charting.

Against this backdrop, President Joe Biden plans to stay the course. His closing campaign argument will remain largely centered on economic themes and messages that aides believe are closer to immediate voter interests.

But Biden now has to strike a balancing act.

He can not ignore the rise of political violence and disinformation as his campaign travel finally ramps. That’s true even as aides plan to have him focus on pocketbook issues to underscore how his administration has and will battle inflation and to draw sharp contrasts with the Republicans’ economic plans.

“The president’s value right now is that he has to be used in a very targeted way: What headline do I want the president to produce wherever he goes?” asked Jennifer Palmieri, White House communications director under former President Barack Obama. “The most helpful thing is that they have one [headline] on making inflation better. The Democrats’ economic argument does not get heard unless the president makes it.”

The dichotomy was on full display in Florida on Tuesday. Biden hammered home how GOP policies may accelerate inflation as well as endanger Medicare and Social Security. But he also warned that democracy was “on the ballot” and accused Republicans of being “broken” for their rhetoric and response to the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.

“Look at the response of Republicans, making jokes about it,” said Biden, who slammed the lack of condemnation within the GOP. “These guys are extremely extreme.”

Historical trends suggest that the party which controls the White House suffers during the midterms. But while Democrats’ hopes were bolstered this summer in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning federal abortion protections, the final stage of the campaign has been dominated by fears about crime and the economy, issues that tend to benefit Republicans.

Most Democrats privately believe that the House will be lost and that maintaining control of the Senate is a toss-up. Biden has largely stayed on the campaign sidelines but will plunge into the foray this week with stops in Florida, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and California.

Economic arguments, per White House aides, will be the centerpiece of Biden’s closing campaign argument, as well as touting the bipartisan infrastructure deal and Democrats’ accomplishments on prescription drugs and health care.

But the White House and allied Democrats know Biden will also need to address how the stretch run of the campaign has featured a confluence of dark conspiracies that have further tested the nation’s stability.

“My view is you don’t twist yourself into a pretzel, you talk about both,” said former White House press secretary Jen Psaki. “Biden is going to continue to make the contrast on what Democrats are putting forward, but he also needs to address — and I expect he will — these types of threats, and this type of silence, and what it does to allow conspiracy theories to move forward and give people license to act on them.”

Since the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, government and law enforcement officials have warned about a surge in political violence, fears that have grown alongside the inflammatory rhetoric used by Donald Trump and his allies in the aftermath of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in August.

Those worries were born out by Friday’s brutal assault of Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in the couple’s San Francisco home. The suspect, 42-year-old David DePape, who trolled in far-right online conspiracy theories, attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, fracturing his skull. Authorities said that he told police he aimed to hold the speaker hostage while breaking her knees.

Elon Musk, the controversial new owner of Twitter, amplified conspiracy theories from the darkest corner of the internet about the attack, posting to his nearly 113 million followers a false account that suggested the assailant and victim knew each other.

The assault also came amid fresh worries of anti-Jewish violence and discrimination after celebrities Ye, better known as Kanye West, and Kyrie Irving respectively espoused and disseminated antisemitic views.

But voters seem far more focused on other issues, according to polling. And Republicans in particular feel that any time Democrats spend talking about abstract issues like threats to democracy, they are ceding the more electorally important economic turf to them.

“The most important thing to do right now in any closing argument is to focus on the fundamentals, and that’s the economy,” said Kevin Madden, senior adviser to Republican Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “I don’t want to trivialize it, but ‘threats to democracy’ is much more elusive to the average swing voter right now. People aren’t voting on that.”

Biden has previously taken on extremism and the violence it spawns.

His decision to run for president came after a clash between white supremacists and anti-racist counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Va. And he has repeatedly called out radical elements of the Republican party – he has dubbed them “extreme MAGA” — most notably at a fiery speech in Philadelphia in September.

White House aides have counseled the president to avoid talking about Musk. The men have sparred before over auto unions, electric vehicles and taxes. But Biden has not weighed in on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and aides believe it would do little good. The president has condemned the recent rise in antisemitism and called out Republicans for giving life to conspiracy theories by vilifying Pelosi and denying the results of the 2020 election.

“You can’t condemn the violence unless you condemn those people who continue to argue the election was not real, that it’s being stolen, that all the — all the malarkey that’s being put out there to undermine democracy,” Biden said Saturday.

But broad condemnations don’t always translate into voting issues. And as Biden treks across the country, aides have an eye on the local media coverage that his stops draw. The focus, for now, remains on emphasizing economic issues as Democrats try to hang onto at least one body of Congress and several key statehouses.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said Biden would continue to warn “that congressional Republicans’ agenda would worsen inflation and raise costs for middle class families in order to deliver tax welfare to rich special interests, which has made front page news across the country.”

President Joe Biden will attend the U.N. COP27 climate conference early next month, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed Friday.

“On November 11th, President Biden will attend the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt,” Jean-Pierre said in a statement. “At COP27, he will build on the significant work the United States has undertaken to advance the global climate fight and help the most vulnerable build resilience to climate impacts, and he will highlight the need for the world to act in this decisive decade.”

After arriving at the world’s most consequential climate discussions largelyempty handed last year, Biden will now be able to tout the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill that devotes hundreds of billions of dollars to clean energy initiatives and brings Biden’s pledge to cut U.S. emissions in half by 2030 closer within reach.

The Washington Post first reported on Biden’s plan to attend the conference earlier this month.

After the climate conference, Biden will travel to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to participate in the annual U.S.-ASEAN Summit and the East Asia Summit on November 12-13. He’ll then attend the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, from November 13-16, according to the White House.

Joe Biden launched his presidency on a promise to steer the nation out of its pandemic era. And his White House benefited politically when it oversaw the rollout of a vaccine campaign that saw swift uptake across the country.

Now, with two weeks to the midterms and another Covid winter looming, Biden is trying to do something radically different — and potentially harder. He’s trying to remove the politics from the pandemic.

On Tuesday, the president took his latest step in that task, hosting an event in which he tried to convince voters that the vaccines critical to delivering on his pledge to move the nation from a pandemic footing lack any political leaning.

“As we enter this new moment in the battle against Covid, let’s use it to start fresh as a country, to put all the old battles over Covid behind us,” he said, pleading with Americans to seek out the latest round of booster shots. “None of this is about politics. It’s about your health and the health of your loved ones.”

The conciliatory approach — which came as Biden himself received an updated vaccine — reflects a broader effort underway within the White House to tone down the emotions and rhetoric around the vaccination campaign. It comes amid growing concern that the politicization of vaccines is hampering both Democrats’ midterm odds and the success of the government’s public health effort.

Just 7 percent of Americans have gotten the booster shot in the nearly two months since its rollout, with surveys showing Republicans are far more likely to reject the vaccine. Prominent GOP pundits and public officials have effectively fanned skepticism over the shots, equating opposition to the pandemic response with opposition to Biden.

But it’s not just Republican politics that the White House is seeking to alter. Even among those receptive to the government’s approach, little political enthusiasm remains for combating Covid with aggressive measures or government intervention. Most voters are indicating they’ve long since moved on.

Biden himself declared the pandemic over during an interview with “60 Minutes” — a declaration his team quickly sought to clarify as not official doctrine. And as White House aides plotted out the stretch run to the midterms, two people familiar with the matter said some in the building have wondered aloud whether there’s any significant political benefit to having the president speak about the pandemic.

“Covid is not popular,” said one of the people familiar with the matter, summing up the skepticism in some corners of the administration.

Top White House advisers, including chief of staff Ron Klain, have maintained that the Covid fight is critical to Biden’s success and must remain a top political and public health priority — and health officials argued Biden’s on-camera appeal for everyone to “get their shot just as soon as they can” was a critical element to raising awareness ahead of a winter season where Covid cases are expected to rise.

But Biden’s gentler rhetoric underscores the balance the administration is trying to strike between driving a sense of urgency around the vaccination campaign and trying not to deepen the existing political divisions tied to the shots.

Gone are the debates over mandates and orders for Republican governors to “get out of the way” that were part of the administration’s earlier vaccination efforts.

Instead, Biden on Tuesday positioned the shots as a personal choice aimed at protecting individuals and their immediate circles of friends and family.

“We’ve made the vaccines free and available,” he said. “Please use them and encourage your friends and loved ones and neighbors to use them as well.”

The approach also represents a sharp contrast from Biden’s attempt to press his party’s political advantage on other health issues in the run-up to the midterms. In remarks a day earlier at the Democratic National Committee, the president hammered Republicans over drug prices and health care costs, at times singling out individual lawmakers for criticism.

Biden of late has emphasized the specter of GOP demands for cuts to Medicare, betting that it will prove an effective centerpiece to Democrats’ closing message.

Yet the administration has found no similar benefit to picking fights over Covid. GOP candidates who sow doubts about the vaccine or spread misinformation about it pay no apparent political price, Biden officials note with frustration. In a more ominous sign, they believe that such anti-science rhetoric has increasingly become a way for some Republicans to shore up their support with conservative voters.

Last week, outside advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the Covid vaccine be added to the agency’s immunization schedules for children and adults — kicking off days of false claims that the government was trying to require the shots for kids in public schools.

Such mandates are decided at the state and local levels, but several prominent Republicans — including Senate candidates Adam Laxalt in Nevada and Blake Masters in Arizona — seized the opportunity to oppose the prospect of mandates, with Masters suggesting there’s “no evidence” the vaccine protects young children.

“They’re playing to the base and scoring political points,” said Leslie Dach, a former Obama-era senior health official and chair of the Democrat-aligned group Protect Our Care. “These Republican elected officials, they’re back to not wanting Biden to succeed and believe at best it’ll help them — and at worst, it’ll help them.”

John Moore, a virologist at Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medicine, said the explosion of vaccine-related misinformation across conservative-leaning media has effectively turned the decision to get vaccinated into a declaration of party affiliation.

“The politicization and polarization has killed people,” he said. “If you trash the vaccines, people don’t take them and then they die — it’s a causal chain of events.”

There are few new signs that the sweeping Covid response that propelled Biden’s approval ratings to its highest point in early 2021 is still paying dividends more than a year later.

Voter satisfaction with how Biden handled the pandemic has remained relatively level since March. Democrats have shunned the issue on the campaign trail, in favor of emphasizing economic concerns and abortion rights that rank far higher on constituents’ priority lists.

And even after helping develop and distribute an updated vaccine in the space of just a few months, the administration has seen little in the way of enthusiasm. Roughly 20 million people have sought out the vaccine so far.

“It’s disappointing,” Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said of the uptake to date. “We really haven’t seen the level of participation that we’d hoped for.”

Biden health officials are still holding out hope that the vaccination rate will pick up, especially ahead of a Thanksgiving holiday where more people will be visiting older relatives. And they emphasize that, regardless of the political dynamics, the administration has no choice but to keep up the Covid fight.

But there’s also acknowledgment among some officials that earlier fights with the GOP over vaccine mandates drove division in addition to vaccinations — and that after touting the pandemic response as a chief success of Biden’s early presidency, the only path to preserving the administration’s progress across the board may be divorcing it in people’s minds from the president’s political fortunes.

“There’s still a lot of inroads that can be made,” said one senior administration official. “We’ve got to be careful about just saying, oh they’re all antivax.”

President Joe Biden on Wednesday urged American oil companies to increase production and refining to bring down the price of gas for consumers.

“You should be using these record-breaking profits to increase production and refining,” Biden said during a speech at the White House. “Invest in America for the American people. Bring down the price you charge at the pump to reflect what you pay for the product.”

Biden made the plea to the oil industry while also announcing the planned release of 15 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in December, a move aimed at bringing gas prices down. The president also outlined a plan to refill the reserve once oil prices drop to $70 a barrel, which he emphasized would allow oil companies to ramp up production now with the confidence that they’d “be able to sell their oil to us at that price in the future.”

With the price of a barrel of oil having fallen about 30 percent since the spring, Biden said the price of gas at the pump should reflect that drop. The average gas price soared to a high of about $5 over the summer and has since dropped closer to $3 a gallon, but prices started to increase again last month amid refinery outages in California and Ohio.

“My message to oil companies is this: You’re sitting on record profits. And we’re giving you more certainty so you can act now to increase oil production now,” Biden said.

Despite calling for an increase in oil and gas production, the president maintained that these plans are consistent with his administration’s promise to transition to clean energy. Biden said that by focusing on both oil and gas production and the clean energy transition, “we can lower energy costs” for consumers and “enhance our national security at a very difficult moment.”

He also asked Congress to pass an energy permitting bill to accelerate the development of clean energy. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) proposed such a bill last month as part of funding legislation, but getting it passed proved difficult as it faced stiff opposition from both parties.

“Right now the process of getting clean energy projects approved is too cumbersome and too time-consuming,” Biden said. “So I’m asking the Congress, pass a permitting bill to speed up the approval of all kinds of energy production, from wind, to solar, to clean hydrogen. Because we need to get this moving now.”

Biden’s pressure on both oil companies and Congress in his speech on Wednesday comes less than three weeks before the midterm elections, when gas prices and inflation are sure to weigh on voters’ minds. Asked by a reporter following the speech what his response was to Republicans saying he’s releasing the oil from the reserve only to help Democrats in the midterms, Biden responded: “Where have they been the last four months?”

The president also told reporters that the move was not politically motivated.

“It’s motivated to make sure that I continue to push on what I’ve been pushing on, and that is making sure there’s enough that’s being pumped by the companies, so that we have the ability to be able to produce enough oil that we need here at home, and at the same time, keep moving in the direction of providing for alternative energy,” Biden said.

As migrant encounters along the southern border continue to set records, frustration is mounting inside the Biden administration with the head of Customs and Border Protection.

Five current administration officials who work with CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus portrayed him as unengaged in his job, saying he often doesn’t attend White House meetings on the situation on the border, badmouths other agencies to colleagues and superiors, and has not built relationships within CBP and across other agencies to address the influx of migrants at the border. They complain he is unfamiliar with some of the operations of CBP and instead is focused primarily on reforming the culture of the Border Patrol, addressing its long list of allegations of racism and violence.

Some of the officials believe Magnus hasn’t prioritized addressing the high number of migrants attempting to cross the border, but instead has continually tried to shift blame to other agencies. As an example, two of the five current administration officials said Magnus brought his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, pages of grievances about Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While CBP is responsible for securing U.S. borders at and between ports of entry, ICE is the agency responsible for arresting and detaining undocumented people within U.S. borders.

After a trip earlier this year to the border to meet with his Border Patrol colleagues, Magnus asked for an emergency meeting with Mayorkas and other senior DHS officials, during which he listed complaints about ICE that he’d gathered during tour stops from the Border Patrol’s rank and file, according to one of the five administration officials, who was familiar with the meeting.

“He’s not in the game,” said another one of the administration officials. “Every time there’s a meeting and he’s in it, we’ll get to a conclusion and Magnus will have some sidebar issue that he wants to raise and we’re all like ‘What the fuck is that about?’”

Magnus, 61, a former police chief with more than 40 years of law enforcement experience, was narrowly confirmed by the Senate last December, taking over an agency of more than 60,000 employees amid a record year of migrant encounters at the southwest border.

In a statement, he acknowledged he has spent his 10 months on the job getting up to speed on the agency’s “many complex areas.” He noted CBP is an operational agency, not a policy-making one. But he added that he is “closely involved in the major DHS immigration, border security, trade, and other policy discussions.” And he defended the approach he has brought to the role.

“I’ve always been someone who aggressively questions the status quo, looks for ways to do things better, and engages directly with the public and workforce,” he said. “In any organization, some people are threatened by this. They don’t like it when someone questions ‘why’ certain things must be done the way they’ve always been done. I’m not here to back down to the predictable challenges from those people.”

Magnus also made the case that his critics were either unfair or uninformed. Six of those internal critics, for example, remarked to POLITICO that they had seen Magnus fall asleep during multiple meetings, including one earlier this year on how to handle the current swell of Venezuelans crossing the border. Magnus explained to POLITICO that he experienced brief periods of tiredness as a side effect of his multiple sclerosis, the neurological condition he was diagnosed with 15 years ago; and that he adjusted medication levels to deal with those side effects.

“Ironically, the most common complaint I’ve received from colleagues is about my tendency to ask too many questions in meetings and my desire to know what some believe is more than necessary on various topics,” he said, adding he intends “to remain fully engaged in the work of leading CBP and advocating on behalf of those who work here as well as for the American public.”

A DHS spokesperson backed up Magnus’ leadership, saying in a statement: “On border security, CBP is a critical component of the DHS-led $60 million anti-human smuggler campaign that has already led to 5,000 arrests with our partners, and we’re mobilizing additional personnel to support the Border Patrol. Commissioner Magnus plays a key role in all of this, and that’s where our focus remains.”

The complaints about Magnus’ management and his pushback to it reflect the latest tensions that have erupted inside the Biden administration’s immigration apparatus. There have been multiple high ranking departures on the team within the White House and general confusion about who has what portfolio.

CBP officials have privately complained that ICE needs to step up its work to help move migrants out of border facilities. Currently, most migrants who approach the border are turned away, or “expelled,” under a Trump-era public health directive. But those released into the country are held in CBP facilities intended to be short-term — for no more than 72 hours. Some of those migrants are then transferred to longer-term detention centers managed by ICE. But the pace of migration has overwhelmed holding facilities overseen by both agencies.

CBP has also complained that ICE has failed to keep up with issuing “notice to appear” documents, which instruct migrants when to appear before immigration judges and can begin the deportation process, according to one former Biden administration official. CBP has raised concerns that decreased enforcement action by ICE may encourage even more migrants to make the trek north — and strain already overwhelmed Border Patrol officers.

In turn, other administration officials have complained that Magnus, a former police chief in Tucson, Ariz., and Richmond, Calif., has lacked knowledge of or interest in key immigration issues.

One former senior White House official said it was noticed among staff how often Magnus sent a deputy to sit in on high-level interagency calls about immigration. One of the current administration officials said Mayorkas, in turn, often relied upon CBP’s deputy commissioner, Troy Miller, or its chief of staff, Nathaniel Kaine, or Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz for help.

“Operationally he’s not even in the conversation,” said the administration official. “He knows the border, but the ins-and-outs and the size and capabilities of CBP is pretty far outside his remit and understanding how to deal with other parts of the administration.”

Magnus’ focus on reforming the culture of CBP is not unusual for the agency chief. Former commissioner Gil Kerlikowske also prioritized bringing order and discipline to CBP almost a decade ago when he served in the role.

Between 2005 and 2012, more than 2,000 CBP employees were arrested for misconduct, according to the Government Accountability Office. The problems have continued since then, with a congressional investigation revealing last year that CBP leaders failed to provide “adequate discipline” against Border Patrol agents who posted violent and sexist comments in secret Facebook groups, and cited the agency’s “failure to prevent these violent and offensive statements.” Results of a separate investigation by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility, released this summer, found agents used undue force against Haitian migrants who had gathered beneath an international bridge outside Texas.

One person who worked with Magnus in his previous police jobs in Tucson and Richmond thinks he’s a logical choice to reform an often-troubled agency given his track record in revamping police departments he led prior to the Biden administration.

“Every job he’s taken on, he’s left it a better place, and he’s overcome his own medical challenges and he’s able to make the agency that he works for a better agency when he leaves,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “He’s willing to challenge conventional thinking.”