Politico

President Joe Biden will travel to Brussels, Belgium, later this month to meet with NATO leaders, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced Tuesday.

Biden will participate on March 24 in an “extraordinary summit” convened by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Psaki told reporters at her Tuesday press briefing. The president will “discuss ongoing deterrence and defense efforts in response to Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine, as well as to reaffirm our ironclad commitment to our NATO allies,” the White House press secretary said.

The president will also participate in the European Council summit, scheduled for March 24-25. That meeting, Psaki said, will include discussion of economic sanctions on Russia and offering humanitarian support to victims of the war.

Biden has made two international trips since taking office, both 2021 visits to Europe. He visited Brussels last June, reaffirming support for NATO and the European Union.

The White House is set to pull a key agricultural trade nomination, and instead appoint her in a non-Senate confirmed post in the administration, according to a senior administration official.

Lawmakers have been told there were “paperwork issues” with Elaine Trevino’s nomination to be chief agricultural negotiator at the U.S. Trade Representative, which has been stalled for the past six months. The Agriculture Department is now considering placing the former CEO of the Almond Alliance of California in a senior position at the department, according to the person.

The withdrawal of Trevino’s nomination, however, will prolong the vacancy in a key role at USTR at a time when agricultural trade and rising food prices have attracted global interest. Russia’s war in Ukraine has triggered foreign export controls on grain and prompted rising concern about food supplies around the world. Agricultural negotiations are also a major component of the Biden administration’s proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. And at home, farm groups want USTR to make sure that China, Canada, Mexico and other countries are honoring previous commitments they made to open their markets to U.S. farm goods.

Trevino’s nomination had the support of industry groups: A coalition of more than 170 farm and agricultural organizations sent a letter in October to Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and ranking member Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) urging the committee to send Trevion’s nomination to the Senate floor for a vote “as soon as possible.”

Trevino also lined up a slew of lawmakers to send letters on her behalf, a move that other administration officials later said they thought was odd and appeared unprofessional, according to two Biden officials familiar with the matter.

The lobbying campaign didn’t help. Six months later, Trevino has yet to receive a hearing in the Senate Finance Committee. The White House, USTR and Wyden’s office have all declined to comment on the delay. And Trevino, who quit her job at the Almond Alliance months ago, has also not responded to recent reporter emails and phone calls asking for information. When she did reply previously, Trevino referred POLITICO to the White House for comment.

Asked about the issues with Trevino’s nomination on Monday night, neither Wyden nor Crapo provided any details.

Crapo said in an interview that he was aware there were issues with Trevino’s nomination, but he didn’t know what they were.

Republican and some Democratic lawmakers have grown frustrated with the prolonged and unexplained failure to fill the post.

Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley earlier on Tuesday blasted the “lackadaisical approach that this administration has taken to trade and particularly without enough emphasis upon agriculture.”

Another key agricultural trade position — the trade undersecretary at USDA — has been without a Senate-confirmed leader since Biden took office. The White House had been vetting a man with extensive business ties for the role, but he withdrew in recent weeks after being told he would need to divest of a large swath of his financial holdings, according to one USDA official and one lobbyist.

“What is Biden waiting for?” Grassley asked. “Why does it take so long to fill some of these very key positions in agriculture?”

The White House is considering having President Joe Biden travel to Europe in the coming weeks as a show of support for Ukraine and its allies, according to two administration officials.

The trip has not been confirmed and may not happen, depending on the state of Russia’s invasion, the officials cautioned. If it does, one possible stop for Biden would be Brussels, home to NATO and the European Union. The White House has prioritized rallying together European allies to support Kyiv and isolate Moscow amid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Biden has only made two international trips since taking office, a precaution largely tied to the pandemic that has dominated his first year in office. Both were to Europe last year, and one included a stop to Brussels to reaffirm American support for NATO and the EU, institutions of which former President Donald Trump was loudly critical through his four years in office.

The White House has also been eyeing a possible trip to Asia in May and then back to Europe in June for stops at the G7 and NATO summits in Germany and Spain, respectively. Considerations about the new trip were first reported by NBC News.

Joe Biden is trying to get a historic Supreme Court Justice nominee confirmed while managing the worst military crisis in Europe since World War II. Those around him say he’s more at ease than at other points during his presidency. His Senate tenure, they add, is the reason why.

Biden’s time in Congress was marked by service on two major committees: Judiciary and Foreign Relations. He was there in the late ‘80s, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Robert Bork hearings forever changed Supreme Court confirmations. He was there in the 2000s, as America charted out a post 9/11 world and John Roberts ascended to his current post as Chief Justice. As Jeff Peck, Biden’s former staff director on the Judiciary Committee, put it, they are Biden’s “twin loves.”

Indeed, those committees have come to define Biden’s political resume perhaps more than any other biographical detail, including the low moments, such as much criticized stewardship of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and the bipartisan cover he gave George W. Bush for the Iraq War. They are, aides and one-time colleagues say, guiding him now, as he tries to keep European allies united against Russia, and secure Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson the votes she needs for confirmation to the high court.

“He’s been working just like he does, like he’s always done: He’s steady,” said former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) who served with Biden on Judiciary and hailed both Biden’s pick of Jackson and his handling of the crisis in Ukraine. And while Biden has faced criticism that his Senate tenure can make him too accommodating — too vested in forging consensus — at a time when bolder, quicker action is needed, Simpson saw that background as an asset in difficult times.

“He’s doing as best he can in a miserable pile of crap,” he said. “That’s what he’s doing.”

Biden’s service on the Foreign Relations Committee expanded nearly the entire time he was in the Senate. He started in 1975, served as ranking member from 1997 to 2001 and 2003 to 2007 and chair from 2001 to 2003 and again from 2007 to 2009, when he left the chamber to serve as vice president. While there, he emerged as a vocal advocate for U.S. engagement in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, pressing to prevent the killing of innocents in Bosnia and Kosovo and pushing in the ’90s to expand NATO and bring in former Warsaw Pact countries. He also played major roles in both Iraq wars, the second of which dogged him throughout the remainder of his career.

Biden’s critics on the left previously cited his long tenure in the Senate as proof that he was too prone to get involved in intractable issues overseas and too self-confident in his own worldview. But those traits have also manifested themselves in ways that have pleased progressives, including his insistence and repeated defense of his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan last summer. And they extend to the current situation in Ukraine, which Biden and his team view as the fulfillment of a decades-long belief in multilateralism and strong international institutions.

“President Biden was built for this moment, because of his long experience in foreign policy, and specifically his relationship with NATO countries and his understanding of the region,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Biden’s time on the Foreign Relations Committee didn’t just help him hone his worldview. It also enabled him to make connections to world leaders that have come in handy in the White House.

“Just about all leaders of Europe at one time were parliamentarians, they were a member of the parliament, and they had inter-parliamentary meetings and Joe Biden was doing those meetings and meeting with those folks since 1976,” said his longtime Senate chief of staff, former Sen. Ted Kaufman. “If you are a governor or new Senator, you are not going to be very knowledgeable on foreign policy issues. But, President Biden spent over 30 years working on foreign policy issues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

Throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden has leaned on the multilateralism approach he came to value while serving on the Foreign Relations Committee. His focus, aides say, has been on keeping allies united — often to the chagrin of critics who want quicker U.S. action — and not asking them to do something outside the realm of possibility, said Louisa Terrell, Biden’s director of the Office of Legislative Affairs. Those currently on the committee where Biden once served see a throughline between his time there and his conduct now.

“This is the moment that Americans were thinking of when they decided to put [Biden] in the White House and he’s met and exceeded their expectations,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. “This is why you put somebody with his kind of experience in the White House because he’s gonna know what to do at a moment like this.”

It could also present Biden with an opportunity to rebuild trust not just with the American public but with allies abroad after the calamitous exit from Afghanistan. Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he spoke to many ambassadors, and former foreign and defense ministers last summer who were shocked by what unfolded.

“They felt this administration, this president…this is the pro, I mean, how could this happen with Biden in charge?” said Hagel. “Well, it did happen, and not all of it was the administration’s fault but I think it could have been handled a lot, lot cleaner, and a lot better. And he suffered because of that.”

So far, Hagel said, Biden’s handling of Russian aggression has been spot on, “building back some confidence and trust.”

“I’ve been all over the world with him, many, many times. And he studied [geopolitics]. I mean, he really did study it,” said Hagel. The former senator sat on the Foreign Relations Committee with Biden before serving alongside him in the Obama administration. He said he never saw Biden become “captive” to his experience.

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Biden’s tenure on the Foreign Relations Committee is matched only by his time on Judiciary. Starting on that committee in 1977, he was intimately involved in seven confirmation fights, including the hearings for Thomas. Those were marked by fireworks on the all-white and male panel and resulted in longstanding critiques of Biden for his treatment of Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual harassment. Biden was widely seen as fumbling that moment in a desire to appear fair to both parties, and for failing to call additional witnesses who could have corroborated Hill’s claims. He has since expressed his regrets. But Hill wants the president to do more to prioritize ending gender violence.

Biden’s time on Judiciary — more than 30 years — was so long that he overlapped with now-Justice Elena Kagan, outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer and former Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala)., all of whom once worked for the committee. But his approach to the confirmation process dates back to his first year as chair, said Peck, who worked for Biden from 1987 to 1992 as general counsel and then majority staff director on the committee. When President George H.W. Bush nominated David Souter to the high court, Democrats quickly said he should be opposed, Peck recalled. Biden ultimately supported confirmation.

“It would have been easy for Joe Biden at that point to go along with kind of the reflexive reaction of a number of Democrats,” Peck said. “But rather than doing that, he said, ‘No, wait a second. We’re going to take some time here. I’m going to study David Souter’s record.’”

In nominating Jackson, Biden is hoping that he can use his relations in the Senate and his experiences on Judiciary to win over some Republican support. So far, he’s called Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine.) three times to discuss the Supreme Court vacancy. He reminds his staff frequently that “every single senator is due [a] show of both respect and deference,” said Terrell.

Those who’ve known Biden since his early Senate days say he’s not naive about the modern Republican party. “I don’t think he’s living in the past,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar and Biden confidante. “He would love to have as much bipartisan support as possible but he has no illusions.”

Current and former aides say one benefit of Biden’s experience is that he has a Rolodex of people to call when he wants to talk through a nominee’s record and interpretations of the Constitution. Tribe is one such expert to whom Biden has turned. He recalled that during the failed Bork nomination, Biden found the nominee’s statement that serving on the court would be an “intellectual feast” to be especially “troublesome.”

The idea that somebody wants to exercise power over others because it would be “fun as opposed to because it might help people lead lives that are more free and inclusive” didn’t square well with Biden, Tribe said.

Thirty-five years later, Biden’s current and former staffers say that all that time studying constitutional law and the Supreme Court confirmation process equipped Biden for his own nominee selection process. Kaufman described the rollout of Jackson’s nomination as “a well-oiled machine.”

“It looks simple now but that’s because he knew what to look for; what to ask for, what to be on the listen for to get around potential problems,” a former top Judiciary staffer said.

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The two worlds that Biden occupied when serving on Judiciary and Foreign Relations often overlapped and interfered with each other. In 2005, as Biden considered Roberts’ nomination one of his Foreign Relations staffers would frequently wait for him to exit briefings to discuss committee actions, recalled Terrell, who served as deputy chief of staff and counsel to Biden on the Judiciary Committee at the time.

Others remembered how years before the Roberts confirmation battle, Biden sat for hours with close Judiciary aides mulling over policy only to leap from his seat when foreign affairs aides interrupted them with an update that they didn’t think could wait.

“One of the things we always had to do when we were working on Judiciary was pull him away from Foreign Relations. He was always juggling both of them constantly,” said Victoria Nourse, Biden’s top lawyer on the panel in the early 1990s who later went on to serve as his chief counsel in the Vice President’s office. “It’s normal for him. It was normal 30 years ago, even before the vice presidency.”

The fall of the Berlin Wall left a particular impression on Biden aides. Not merely because of how preoccupied he was with it, but because the natural workload of the two committees meant he was forced to balance the reordering of Europe with court nominations and sweeping legislation to address rising crime, the proliferation of illegal drugs and the scourge of guns.

“The Judiciary committee work — nominations, criminal justice policy, drug policy — for a long time it took more of his time,” another longtime Biden staffer who worked closely with him at the time remembered in a recent interview. “It was always my belief that the foreign policy questions are the ones that captured his imagination.”

Ultimately, when Biden in 2001 was given a choice to again helm the Judiciary Committee or chair the Foreign Relations Committee, he picked the latter.

The same tug and pull is happening now. Russia’s war in Ukraine is rapidly reshaping Biden’s presidency. And it’s taking up his time. But not all of it. Terrell says she will wait outside the Oval Office as her national security colleagues leave the room in order for her and others on her team to give Biden an update on his Supreme Court nominee’s meetings with senators and preparation.

“He’s just able to do this back and forth so smoothly and so expertly and that really has again been something that is a byproduct of what he was doing so well when he was in the Senate,” said Terrell. “These two trains are running at the same time. There really is no one else who is better suited to drive them at the same time.”

A federal judge delivered a warning to special counsel John Durham on Thursday after recent court filings became fodder for pro-Trump media and prompted incendiary allegations from the former president himself.

“Keep in mind that the pleadings in this case are under a microscope and may be employed for one reason or another by folks for reasons that have nothing to do with the ultimate issues in this case,” U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper said after offering the attorneys working for Durham a chance to correct any “misinterpretation” of their earlier filings. They declined.

Cooper’s admonishment came in the case of Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with Democratic Party ties whom Durham has charged with making false statements to the FBI.

According to Durham, Sussmann convened a meeting with then-FBI general counsel James Baker in late 2016 and provided explosive allegations about potential links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Those allegations were based on cybersecurity research conducted by one of Sussmann’s clients, Rodney Joffe. But Durham says Sussmann misled Baker by declining to reveal that he was presenting the information on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, rather than simply as a good citizen without a political interest.

Sussmann has denied that the meeting was convened on the campaign’s behalf and argued that Baker was well aware of his ties to the Democratic Party, largely through his law firm, Perkins Coie. Marc Elias, a longtime attorney at the firm, was the top lawyer for the Clinton campaign in 2016.

But the most explosive moment in the case came last month when Durham filed a motion for Cooper to review whether Sussmann’s attorneys had a conflict of interest. In the filing, Durham’s team laid out a string of allegations that suggested Joffe tapped into confidential pools of internet data in order to try to prove that Donald Trump or his allies were communicating with the Russians.

Durham’s prosecutors said that Joffe and his associates had access to nonpublic data because of their work for the government, and that they “exploited this arrangement” by mining White House data “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

The filing immediately became fodder for pro-Trump media outlets that erroneously interpreted it as a suggestion that even after Trump was inaugurated, Joffe surveilled the Trump White House. Trump himself tweeted that it proved he had been spied on, and suggested that such activities would once have been punishable by death.

Sussmann quickly moved to strike the allegations from the court record, calling them false and inflammatory. And Joffe filed a separate, sealed action in federal court seeking to expunge the details that referenced him, albeit without using his name.

At Thursday’s hearing, held by videoconference, Cooper said he agreed with Sussmann’s lawyers that those details were “not necessary” to resolve the conflicts issue. The judge also briefly pressed Durham’s team to explain why it included the detailed allegations against Sussmann and Joffe in its filings related to a conflict of interest.

“I didn’t see any link to areas that were relevant,” said Cooper, an appointee of President Barack Obama. “I don’t know why the information was in there.”

Cooper noted that Sussmann did not object to the court’s reviewing a potential conflict of interest and that the whole matter could have been handled cooperatively in about “20 minutes.” Indeed, the judge quickly ruled the conflicts waived during Thursday’s hearing, but he also lamented that the provocative filing led to a “sideshow.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew DeFilippis, a member of Durham’s team, defended the filing, saying that prosecutors wanted “a crystal clear factual record” related to the alleged conflicts.

However, when given the chance by the judge to make any corrections or clarifications that could set matters straight, DeFilippis declined.

“We don’t want to get into that game. We’re being very careful,” he said. “We think everything we said in the motion was accurate. I’d be hesitant to call out misinterpretations or misstatements that may be out there.”

Cooper stopped short of granting Sussmann’s motion to strike the information altogether from the docket. He noted that much of it would likely have come out anyway, either in pretrial motions or at a trial in the case.

“I extend a presumption of good faith to all counsel, especially government counsel,” he said. “I’m not going to strike anything from the record. … Striking it will not unring the bell and will probably make the bell ring even louder.”

Cooper added that he understood that attorneys sometimes include extra information in filings “under the guise of educating the judge.” But he urged caution in future filings and reminded both sides that they should stay focused on what he needs to know to make legal decisions related to the case and not on the swirl of publicity over it.

“Until we swear a jury in this case,” the judge said, “you folks have an audience of one: me.”

After years of false starts, patchwork regulation and congressional inaction, the federal government is finally developing a comprehensive strategy for overseeing cryptocurrency markets.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday will direct federal agencies to produce a series of reports over the coming months that will lay out the future of U.S. policy toward digital assets — including the possible launch of a federally issued digital dollar that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

The highly anticipated executive order follows months of speculation around how Biden planned to coordinate the federal government’s oversight of crypto marketplaces that whipsawed between $1 trillion and $3 trillion in size during the first 14 months of his term. Lawmakers and federal agencies have struggled to develop a cohesive regulatory framework for the upstart industry, which has quickly emerged as a major force on Wall Street and on Capitol Hill.

The wide-ranging order will kick off a process to examine the impact that rapidly evolving digital asset markets will have on consumer and investor protections, as well as on financial stability and even the climate.

Senior administration officials say crypto assets have the potential to speed payments and vastly improve access to financial services, especially for lower-income Americans often left out of the system. But they also noted that the industry’s spectacular growth could pose significant risks to investors, consumers and businesses that the federal government has barely begun to explore.

The order’s timing coincides with growing concern among lawmakers that Russians might use digital assets to evade sanctions imposed since the invasion of Ukraine. Federal regulators say that’s unlikely to happen on any meaningful scale, and senior administration officials dismissed the notion that the order was linked to the conflict.

While Biden stopped short of setting policy with the order, officials framed the president’s approach as a necessary first step to clarify the U.S.’s uneven approach to policing digital assets.

“Without oversight, the explosive growth in cryptocurrency use would pose risks to Americans to the stability of our businesses, our financial system and our national security,” one senior administration official said on a call with reporters.

One aspect of the order that’s being undertaken with the “highest urgency” is a whole-of-government exploration of a digital dollar, the official said. A central bank digital currency — which would allow individuals and businesses to transfer money without using a private bank account — could have profound effects on the payments, banking and commercial sectors.

Other countries, including China, have already piloted digital versions of their native currencies.

The Federal Reserve has been studying that question for the better part of the last year. The Fed began a public consultation in January on whether it should issue a digital dollar. The Boston regional Fed branch has also released preliminary research into how a central bank digital currency might work from a technological standpoint, concluding that it was possible to pull off such a project.

While Biden’s executive order encourages the Fed to continue its research — and to explore products that would ease transfers across borders — a second senior administration official said that laying out a coordinated path across other federal agencies “is really the game-changer here.”

In addition to directing more work on a digital currency, Biden will order the Treasury Department and other agencies to produce reports that would help develop policies to address the systemic risks and benefits that the digital asset sector would have on consumers, investors and businesses. The emphasis would be on ensuring that those products might assist in making the financial system more equitable.

The order also urges the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a panel chaired by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and made up of top independent regulators, to study what effect digital assets are having on financial stability and to develop recommendations to address any regulatory gaps.

The Commerce Department is being tasked with developing a framework to assure that the U.S. remains competitive in developing digital assets. Other agencies will explore the environmental impact of digital assets and technological changes that will be necessary to further the adoption of the new currencies.

The computational power required to process crypto transactions and mint new digital assets can be tremendous. The amount of electricity required to power Bitcoin’s blockchain — which refers to the digital ledger where transactions are recorded — is equivalent to the amount consumed annually by Ukraine, according to a University of Cambridge estimate.

Biden’s order will direct federal agencies to heighten efforts to ensure that international partners are aligned on rules that prevent money laundering or other illicit activity.

“This executive order is a signal to industry of the need to build in critical protections needed for financial systems so we can leverage these innovative technologies for our benefit,” the second official said.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday spoke with the family of a former U.S. Marine detained in Russia, vowing to do “everything he can” to bring Trevor Reed home.

The president called Trevor Reed’s parents, Joe and Paula, and his sister, Taylor, after his trip to Fort Worth, Texas, where Biden met with veterans. The Reed family lives less than an hour from Fort Worth and waited for Biden’s motorcade to pass through in hopes of holding an in-person meeting with the president. Paula Reed held a hot pink sign that said, “Bring my son home!” and Biden appeared to acknowledge her message with a hand gesture, the Dallas Morning News reported.

“The president called Joey and Paula Reed to reiterate his commitment to do everything he can to bring their son home, to staying in close touch with them through his national security team, and to finding a time to meet in person,” a White House official said afterward.

Trevor Reed has been in prison in Russia for more than two years. He was arrested in Moscow in 2019 after a night of drinking and was sentenced to nine years in prison on assault charges for endangering the “life and health” of Russian police officers. Both Trevor and his family have vehemently denied the charges; U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan has condemned them as “absurd.”

Trevor and his family have again been in headlines this week, as Russia’s attack on Ukraine dominates the news cycle and Russian officials recently arrested another Texas native, WNBA player Brittney Griner, who is facing drug charges after Russian customs officials said they found hashish oil in her luggage.

Reed’s parents say they last spoke to Trevor on July 15, 2021. They’ve recently expressed concerns about his deteriorating health, particularly worries that he has tuberculosis.