Politico

President Joe Biden’s much-touted Summit for Democracy is just weeks away. Whether it will have any lasting impact is another matter.

Biden aides are still shaping the agenda for the Dec. 9-10 virtual summit, and much of their work is confidential. The list of invited governments has not been made public, plans are all tentative, and civil society groups are complaining about being marginalized.

One, somewhat vague initiative the Biden team has discussed launching during the summit is an international alliance to promote internet freedom — called “The Alliance for the Future of the Internet,” according to documents obtained by POLITICO. U.S. officials also have floated a list of potential commitments other countries can make, such as increasing funds for media literacy programs or enacting export controls on some dual-use technologies.

Overall, the variety of ideas underscores Biden’s view that strengthening the world’s democracies at a time of rising authoritarianism requires tools beyond mere rhetoric about free-and-fair elections. Biden is, after all, hosting the summit during a year that has seen at least six coups in countries from Myanmar to Sudan.

But it’s far from clear how many countries attending the summit will sign up for commitments or how many will follow through. Although none of the suggested commitments appear to be internationally binding, many will require governments to sell them to constituencies back home and allocate funding to making them real. That’s also true in the United States, where a polarized political environment has blocked Biden’s efforts to push through priorities such as voting rights legislation.

“The symbolism of the gathering is important, but the actual change on the ground that the summit would generate remains to be seen,” said Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “There are a lot of big questions on the table that the initial gathering won’t address, like what to do about weaker democracies that are showing regression.”

Spokespeople for the White House-based National Security Council did not offer comment for this story. But a person familiar with the upcoming summit stressed the ever-changing status of the ideas under discussion: The document describing the tech alliance, for instance, has been “overtaken by events,” but wouldn’t say what that meant.

“The administration is kicking around a lot of different initiatives and kicking the tires on a lot of different ideas,” the person said. “All of them are at this point pre-decisional and subject to significant refinement.”

‘A fully Hobbesian future’

The document that lays out the tech alliance proposal is tagged as “Non-Paper//Discussion Purposes Only.” It argues that one reason to launch such a democratic-led alliance is to counter the rise of “an alternative vision of the Internet as a tool of state control promoted by authoritarian powers such as China and Russia.”

The alliance’s core principles would include: a collective commitment to develop and implement high standards for data privacy, data security and cyber security; a commitment to cooperation on tech platform regulation and information integrity; and commitment to establish a forum for technical cooperation on cybersecurity standards and incident response.

In addition, the proposal calls for a commitment to ensuring open and interoperable access for software and apps among members; non-discrimination in domestic regulations; and shared commitments regarding data localization.

“In pursuing this proposal, we are not seeing [sic] to splinter the internet but offer a collective response to actions by a growing number of countries, particularly authoritarian countries, and thereby avoid a descent to a fully Hobbesian future where beggar-thy-neighbor conduct becomes the norm,” the document states.

It’s unclear how the alliance would differ from existing networks such as the Freedom Online Coalition. According to the text of a letter seen by POLITICO, people connected to that coalition are urging the Biden team “to seek multi-stakeholder input as you consider creating new initiatives that may be duplicative of, or shift focus or resources from, the FOC’s work.”

The person familiar with the situation said the Biden administration is engaging the FOC’s advocates and fully aware of its concerns, but that the idea for the alliance is not necessarily at odds with the U.S. support for the FOC — of which the United States is a member.

Due largely to the Covid-19 crisis, the administration has had to lower expectations for December’s summit, the convening of which was one of Biden’s most concrete foreign policy pledges during the 2020 presidential campaign.

The original idea was to hold one, in-person summit of world leaders earlier in Biden’s first year. Instead, the administration now plans to host a first, virtual summit in December, to be followed by a “year of action” that culminates in a second, presumably in-person gathering in 2022.

In brainstorming ideas for the summit, administration officials came up with an “Illustrative Menu of Options” for commitments the U.S. could seek from the various countries invited to the gathering. That document includes an array of potential commitments that fall under the three main themes of the summit: fighting corruption, defending against authoritarianism and advancing human rights.

For instance, countries may be encouraged to convene a joint law enforcement-civil society commission that tackles human rights issues. Or they could run for a spot on a United Nations committee that deals with NGOs as a way to counterbalance the influence of authoritarian governments such as China. Or they could pledge to use tools such as export controls and sanctions to limit the ability of other governments to target dissidents across borders.

One of the documents obtained by POLITICO appears to be a compilation of Biden administration achievements that U.S. officials plan to tout during the December summit.

That list includes the creation of a White House Gender Policy Council; Biden’s executive actions designed to improve access to voting; and the release of the “first-ever U.S. National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.”

Civil society shutout?

While the White House is pushing forward with its planning for the virtual summit, civil society organizations have expressed growing frustration at what they see as their marginal role in the global gathering.

Various leaders of NGOs and other activists have been sharing drafts of letters and memos aimed at pressing the White House to engage them and give them more air time during the summit. At the moment, a huge chunk of the virtual event appears to be dedicated to three-minute speeches by the attending government leaders.

The person familiar with the situation stressed that the administration is actively engaging outside groups and that it is “going to involve civil society meaningfully in every aspect of the summit itself … The summit is not just about foreign heads of state.”

During a meeting Thursday with civil society advocates, administration officials read out the list of countries to be invited and said there would be at least 17 approved official side events during the summit, according to a person briefed on the session. Some of those side events will include civil society representatives, administration officials told those gathered Thursday. The administration also has been unveiling websites related to the summit.

It’s tough to say how far such assurances will go.

In one memo seen by POLITICO, some civil society groups urge the administration to “stress to participating governments the importance of consulting civil society and other stakeholders on their commitments in ways that are inclusive and timely.”

The memo also urges the administration to “publish the list of invited countries so that civil society partners in those countries are better aware of the opportunities they have.”

“It is a shame that this initial event in December is not more inclusive,” said Sarah Repucci, a top official with Freedom House, an organization that tracks the health of democracies around the world.

While some details have leaked about the invitees, the administration hasn’t published a full list. Some countries, such as Turkey and Hungary, have not been invited because their leaders have been undermining their democratic systems for years.

Repucci said that it’s important to hold the summit, at the very least to send a signal to seemingly emboldened authoritarian states, especially China and Russia.

“It does matter what democracies do,” Repucci said. “They need to set a positive example and band together, because the dictatorships band together.”

When pro-Trump rioters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence fled for safety. Until recently, the Justice Department contended that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was among them.

But DOJ is now moving to correct the record, acknowledging in court that Harris was in fact away from the Capitol during the riot and only returned later to cast the key votes that certified her own ascension to the vice presidency.

“[T]he government incorrectly stated that Vice President-Elect Harris was present in the U.S. Capitol at the time of the attack,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing in one Jan. 6 case Tuesday. “In fact, Vice President-Elect Harris was not present at that particular time, though she was present earlier in the day and was present later that day.”

Another prosecutor disclosed the mistake in court last week at a sentencing hearing for Eric Torrens. After Chief Judge Beryl Howell said Torrens’ actions contributed to the disorder that prompted Pence and Harris to be evacuated from the Senate chamber, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jamie Carter chimed in to say that the government had “recently learned” that Harris was not actually present when the Capitol was breached.

Although the mistake may have limited legal significance, it’s an indication that even some fundamental facts about the insurrection remain murky — such as, where was the vice president-elect and why did she leave the Capitol?

Harris is one of the two Secret Service protectees who was in the building that day. Pence was the other. Many of the 650-plus defendants arrested for breaching the Capitol are facing charges that they illegally entered a “restricted” area where someone under Secret Service protection was visiting. But because Pence remained in the Capitol complex for the duration of the attack, there’s likely to be minimal impact on the criminal cases.

A source familiar with Harris’ movements on Jan. 6 confirmed that she exited the Capitol after a Senate Intelligence Committee briefing that morning, a detail that was reported in some news accounts within days of the attack.

The source said she had always been planning to leave the building at that time. And associates of Harris, who has faced many personal threats against her over her career, said she has a history of declining to share her whereabouts when asked, often citing safety concerns.

It’s unclear why DOJ included the erroneous information in the first place and continued to do so for months. Published reports as early as mid-January, including interviews that Harris gave as she prepared to make history as the first female vice president, indicated she was not present in the Capitol during the insurrection.

The Washington Post reported on Jan. 14 that Harris “had received an intelligence briefing in the morning and had not returned to the Senate before rioters broke in. She was kept away from the Capitol until the facility was secured.”

And in a Jan. 16 interview with the LA Times, Harris “declined, for security reasons, to say where she was during the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.”

“She said she had been at the Capitol earlier that day for a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee and was working elsewhere in Washington when she was evacuated,” the Times reported. “She said she watched the mob enter the Capitol on television from a secure location, while texting with colleagues who shared their commitment to return to complete the election certification process.”

Yet in a series of charging documents and other court filings, DOJ has cited Harris’ supposed presence as a given and an indication of the disruption caused by the defendants’ actions.

“On January 6, 2021, at approximately 1:00 p.m., Vice President Michael R. Pence, in his constitutional duty as President of the Senate, presided over the Joint Session,” prosecutors wrote in a March filing seeking to keep UCLA student Christian Secor in pretrial detention. “Vice-President-Elect Kamala D. Harris, in her role as a Senator representing the State of California, was also present.”

“At approximately 2:20 p.m., members of the House and Senate (including Vice President Pence and Vice-President Elect Harris)—who had withdrawn to separate chambers to resolve an objection—were evacuated from their respective chambers,” the submission says, although Harris’ office says she wasn’t there at time and was never evacuated. For good measure, the filing repeats the error a third time, saying both Pence and Harris “had remained within the Capitol building throughout” the Jan. 6 unrest.

Some indictments in Jan. 6 cases, such as one returned in February against self-described Proud Boy Nicholas Ochs and friend Nicholas DeCarlo, use identical, inaccurate language about Harris’ presence. Others, like the March indictment of brothers Jonathanpeter and Matthew Klein, put Harris at the early part of the Electoral College counting session but omit the mention of her being evacuated.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not respond to several requests for comment on how the inaccurate description of Harris’ activities made it into numerous court filings.

More recently, prosecutors seem to have stripped down the narrative in their Capitol riot indictments. However, many still contain arguably misleading language about Harris, saying she was “temporarily visiting” the Capitol when defendants breached police lines or disrupted business.

Prosecutors may have learned about the error last month when they were issuing a filing in the case of Capitol riot defendant Guy Reffitt. In that filing, prosecutors said they intended to call a Secret Service agent during Reffitt’s trial “to testify that at the time of the Capitol breach, Secret Service agents were on duty to protect Vice President Mike Pence and his two immediate family members, all of whom were present at the Capitol.”

Prosecutors are asking the judge, Dabney Friedrich, to prevent defense attorneys from asking this agency about sensitive details, such as the “location within the Capitol or its grounds to which the Vice President and his family, or their motorcade, were taken once the riot began.”

Nicholas Smith, a defense attorney for some of the highest-profile Capitol rioters, agreed that prosecutors’ references to Harris’ presence in the Capitol was always a “backstop” to Pence in prosecutors’ charging documents. But he said questions about Pence’s precise location — particularly as he was evacuated from the Senate and into the underground area of the Capitol — could become significant now that Harris’ absence has been confirmed.

“This might turn on where Pence went — a question [the government] is trying to preclude cross-examination on,” Smith said. “If Pence was in a garage under the Capitol, [the government] has a strong argument that’s still the ‘building.’ However, reporting also suggests Pence went right to the underground tunnels. The next question becomes are those tunnels still Capitol ‘grounds’ even if not the ‘building?’”

Randall Eliason, who spent more than a decade in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Washington D.C. — the office that today is handling the Capitol Riot cases — said the mistake doesn’t fundamentally undercut charges because Pence’s presence would trigger the same potential violations.

Eliason also said Harris’ anticipated return to the Capitol is another basis for prosecution, although the existing charges don’t describe the situation quite that way.

“Absolute worst case for the government, if the defense makes a stink and a judge buys it, is that the reference to Harris is stricken from the indictment and the case proceeds,” said the former prosecutor, who teaches at George Washington University’s law school. “Frankly, I don’t think it should even come to that, at least in most cases. The fact that she was expected to be there should be enough.”

Prosecutors have several options to address the erroneous filings. They could leave the language about Harris in place, although that could open up some opportunities for defense attorneys to highlight the error to impugn the cases against their clients.

Prosecutors could also file “superseding” indictments that drop that erroneous language, but that would require presenting more evidence to a grand jury. They could also ask judges to strike the language, although it’s unclear if judges would agree without the consent of defendants.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday dismissed the idea that immigrant families separated at the southern border under his predecessor’s zero-tolerance policy could receive payments of $450,000 per person in monetary settlements, calling the report “garbage.”

Following remarks at the White House about Covid vaccines for children, Biden was asked by a Fox News reporter whether the payments would incentivize more people to cross the border illegally.

“If you guys keep sending that garbage out, yeah,” Biden said. “But it’s not true.”

When pressed on the matter, Biden appeared surprised by the $450,000 figure.

“$450,000 per person? Is that what you’re saying?” the president said. “That’s not going to happen.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported last week that family members who were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under then-President Donald Trump’s immigration policy could receive hundreds of thousands of dollars as part of settlement negotiations between the families’ lawyers and the Department of Justice. The payments could add up to hundreds of millions of dollars as agencies look to settle lawsuits filed by parents and children who say the U.S. government’s actions subjected them to lasting psychological trauma.

About 5,500 children were separated at the border during the Trump administration, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, citing figures provided by the government. The number of families eligible for the money will likely be smaller, according to the Wall Street Journal report, and around 940 claims have been filed so far.

Biden’s comments on Wednesday drew ire from immigration advocates like ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero, who said Biden might have not been up to speed on the Justice Department’s actions as it “carefully deliberated and considered the crimes committed against thousands of families separated from their children as an intentional governmental policy.”

“But if he follows through on what he said, the president is abandoning a core campaign promise to do justice for the thousands of separated families,” Romero said. “We respectfully remind President Biden that he called these actions ‘criminal’ in a debate with then-President Trump, and campaigned on remedying and rectifying the lawlessness of the Trump administration. We call on President Biden to right the wrongs of this national tragedy.”

Joe Biden suffered his first major political lashing as president Tuesday.

But even as Democrats were processing a battering in the Virginia governor’s race and the uncomfortably close gubernatorial election in New Jersey, the White House and officials across the party pledged to forge ahead with the twin pillars of the president’s domestic agenda. Several made the case that Tuesday’s results only added to the pressure for them to do so.

“We have to show we can govern,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), citing a recent breakthrough in talks to lower prescription drug prices for seniors and allow negotiations in Medicare. “The picture has been of Democrats sparring amongst ourselves. That’s probably not the best face to put out. I hope that there’s more of working toward agreement, like we had today, than openly sparring with each other.”

“We have the ability and the responsibility to govern and I think that’s what we should focus on,” Peters added.

The determination to stick with the $1.75 trillion social and climate spending bill underscores just how much the Democratic Party has bet its future on Biden’s legislative priorities. And it comes right as the president’s own political tailspin has put him in a weakened position to help them sell it.

The White House is expected to turn up the salesmanship of its plans, arguing that the results in Virginia and New Jersey, where things remained too close to call, are in part a reflection that voters want to see Congress get things done, a person close to the White House said.

Biden’s advisers insist the political environment could look vastly different next fall, when members of Congress face voters. Before polls closed Tuesday, Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine cleared its last major regulatory hurdle for kids ages 5 to 11, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent vaccine advisers offering a unanimous endorsement. And the drug pricing provision Democrats were working to revive in the social spending package was generating outright glee among party leaders who contend Republicans would be forced to choose whether to oppose one of the most popular provisions under discussion.

But Biden’s advisers also acknowledge none of these breakthroughs will matter if they can’t sell their achievements to voters. And privately, several Democrats complained that it was Biden himself who helped slow progress on his own agenda by giving progressives tacit approval to hold up a vote on bipartisan infrastructure legislation as they hashed out the social spending plan. Notably, the president was returning from a climate summit overseas — accompanied by close aides including his top political adviser — when the election results came rolling in.

The president’s sagging popularity — recent surveys showed him under water by double-digits in Virginia, a state he won by 10 percentage points in 2020— created insurmountable headwinds for Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Biden’s approval rating in Democratic-leaning New Jersey was equally bleak, though virtually no one in the party predicted it would harm sitting Gov. Phil Murphy. And though historical trends dictate that the party in power loses these elections, it still set off a round of recriminations and finger-pointing down the party ranks.

“Obviously, the president’s 42 percent approval rating is not helpful in a race like this,” said Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat. “If it were 55 or 60 [percent], we’d be sailing.”

“The challenge is he’s laid out a very popular agenda with the American people that has not been fully approved yet,” added Beyer, who lost his own race for Virginia governor in 1997.

As the bad news for Democrats poured in Tuesday evening, the party’s moderates blamed progressives for withholding their support for Biden’s massive infrastructure bill, while progressives charged centrists with stalling and watering down the president’s agenda. The stinging rebuke for Democrats was already spurring other calls from party leaders to rehabilitate a brand that’s been tarnished by infighting and a lack of action.

“Being anti-Trump is not enough,” said former Rep. Tom Perriello, a Virginia Democrat who also lost a bid for governor in the 2017 primary. “Democrats need to run on results, and this should light a fire under frontline Democrats to get Build Back Better passed.”

A senior Democratic official working on the upcoming midterms warned that if Tuesday’s results appeared lackluster, “it will get so much worse if we don’t pass the agenda and aren’t able to run on it.”

Another Democratic strategist who didn’t want to speak on the record before the results were final, warned of dire consequences for the party if infighting keeps up. “Democrats need to stop fighting each other and start delivering for voters. If we don’t, 2022 is going to be brutal.”

To move his legislative priorities through Congress, Biden still must resolve major policy and procedural disputes within his party. A single Senate Democratic defection would doom the social spending bill and Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.), who has been openly wavering on the proposal, has routined expressed fears of deficit spending and inflation and insisted that aspects of the social spending plan be more carefully studied.

To dig out of his political predicament, the president may need a lot more than advancing legislation, however. While a smoother process would have avoided months of backbiting, the gubernatorial contests also highlighted potentially potent issues that had little to do with Biden, namely education, the rights of parents and taxes.

Virginia alone was also never going to be a particularly useful predictor for the midterms. In 2013, McAuliffe himself bucked the decades-old trend of the president’s party losing the state, when he narrowly captured the commonwealth’s governorship while Barack Obama was in the White House. But a year later, Republicans netted nine Senate seats in the 2014 midterm election, the largest pickup since 1980, along with another 13 seats in the House.

“People in my district don’t care what happens in the Virginia governor’s race,” said Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.), who narrowly won his Trump-supporting northeast district last fall. “A year from now, what happened in the Virginia governor’s race will be a distant, dim memory.”

Eleven years ago, when the Democratic Party unexpectedly lost Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat to Scott Brown, its lawmakers reacted by openly wondering whether they needed to abandon their pursuit of a health care overhaul. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) admonished then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel for pushing to scale back their ambitions. In the process, she convinced Obama to plow forward with Obamacare, which he did.

This go around, the party has a much smaller majority in each chamber and is considering an even more expensive and far-reaching piece of legislation, one that’s been the subject of months of painstaking negotiations. Tuesday night brought recriminations. But no one — at least immediately — called for a pause in considering the legislation.

“I don’t think this complicates passage,” said Ben LaBolt, Obama’s 2012 campaign press secretary. “I think it helps accelerate it. It’s clear to the average Democratic member of Congress that they need to go into the election with a strong case that they’ve helped families economically in the short and long term. These bills do that.”

Sam Stein contributed to this report.

The White House has informed Congress that it will nominate Adm. Christopher Grady, the commander of the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command, to serve as the military’s No. 2 officer, just weeks before the current Joint Chiefs vice chair is set to retire.

Grady’s nomination has been expected for weeks, as Joint Chiefs Vice Chair Gen. John Hyten is due to retire Nov. 20. The late date of the nomination all but guarantees that there will be a gap between retirement and confirmation of a new vice chair.

The late nomination has been a concern among lawmakers. Any gap in the position will have some downstream effects as the Pentagon rewrites its Nuclear Posture Review and tries to speed up the process by which it buys new equipment.

The White House has not officially announced the nomination, but a post on Congress.gov and a Hill staffer confirmed the impending announcement.

Grady has been interviewing at the White House since the spring, and as late as last week, a Pentagon official confirmed that the admiral had one more conversation to go before any announcement was made.

The delay in nominating Grady has already pushed back his handover of Fleet Forces Command to his successor, which was slated for mid-October. His replacement, Vice Adm. Daryl Caudle, who left the Submarine Force Atlantic command on Sept. 10, has been waiting in the wings for almost two months.

The Virginia-based Fleet Forces Command is tasked with ensuring that the entire fleet is manned, trained and equipped before being deployed to meet the needs of commanders around the globe.

POLITICO first reported last month that the field had been narrowed to Grady and Adm. Charles Richard, head of U.S. Strategic Command.

The United States on Friday hit Iran with a fresh set of sanctions as President Joe Biden prepares for a key weekend meeting with European leaders to discuss the possible resumption of nuclear talks with the Islamic Republic.

The Treasury Department announced the new penalties against two senior members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and two affiliated companies for supplying lethal drones and related material to insurgent groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Ethiopia.

Although the sanctions are unrelated to Iran’s atomic program, the Biden administration has said it wants to build on a potential agreement to revive the languishing 2015 nuclear deal to include Iranian support for such groups and curtail its ballistic missile development.

Iran has yet to commit to a date to return to the nuclear talks in Vienna but has signaled it will do so next week with a target of late November for resuming the negotiations. The U.S. and others have expressed skepticism about Iranian intentions, and Biden is set to meet the leaders of Britain, France and Germany on Saturday in Rome to plot strategy on Iran.

The Vienna negotiations halted in June ahead of Iran’s election that brought hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi to power. The talks, which do not directly involve the U.S. because President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018, have languished since despite the stated intentions of both Washington and Tehran to return to compliance with the agreement.

Friday’s sanctions block any assets that those targeted may have in U.S. jurisdictions, bar Americans from transactions with them and, perhaps more importantly, also subject foreign people and firms that do business with them to potential penalties.

The two targeted Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, Brig. Gen. Saeed Aghajani and Brig. Gen. Abdollah Mehrabi, oversee the Guard’s drone activities, including support for unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, attacks by proxies on commercial vessels, Saudi oil facilities and U.S. and allied interests throughout the Middle East, according to Treasury.

“Iran’s proliferation of UAVs across the region threatens international peace and stability. Iran and its proxy militants have used UAVs to attack U.S. forces, our partners, and international shipping,” Treasury said in a statement. “Treasury will continue to hold Iran accountable for its irresponsible and violent acts.”

The two firms, the Kimia Part Sivan Co. and the Oje Parvaz Mado Nafar Co., along with the latter’s managing director, were sanctioned for supplying engines and technical assistance to the drone programs, Treasury said.

President Joe Biden said Friday that Pope Francis told him he should continue to be allowed to receive communion, a sacrament some Catholic leaders in the U.S. have said the president should be denied over his support for abortion rights.

Biden, a practicing Catholic, met with the pope Friday at the Vatican to discuss a broad set of topics, including climate change, global poverty and the distribution of vaccines to fight the coronavirus pandemic. Biden is only the second Catholic president in U.S. history and has long sought to keep aspects of his faith shielded from public view.

Following their meeting, Biden told reporters that the topic of abortion did not come up in their conversation.

“We just talked about the fact that he was happy that I was a good Catholic and … keep receiving communion,” Biden said, according to pool reports.

Asked specifically whether Francis said that Biden should keep receiving communion, Biden responded “yes.”

The press office of the Vatican’s Apostolic Nunciature to the United States, the Holy See’s embassy in Washington, did not immediately respond to an email seeking confirmation of Biden’s readout of his meeting with the pope.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the set of bishops and cardinals who comprise the church’s hierarchy in the U.S., has publicly debated whether to rebuke pro-choice politicians by denying them communion — a cornerstone rite of Catholicism. While on the campaign trail in 2019, a South Carolina priest denied Biden communion, going so far as to switch lines with another minister in order to do so.

Francis has declined to wade into simmering U.S. debate, other than to warn against politics seeping into such decision-making and urge clerics to minister with “compassion and tenderness.”

Biden also said he gave a prayer while with Francis and that the pope “said one for me” and blessed the president’s rosary — which he carries in honor of his late son, Beau.

Biden said he did not take communion on Friday and rebuffed questions about whether the pair discussed the U.S. Conference of Bishops during their conversation, calling it a “private conversation.”

Biden’s meeting with the pope ran for over an hour, longer than expected, and is the first leg of Biden’s multiday trip to Europe, the second of his 10-month-old presidency. Later Friday Biden met with Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi at Chigi Palace in Rome.

ROME — Hours after arriving in Rome, President Joe Biden will meet with Pope Francis on Friday at the Vatican, where the world’s two most notable Roman Catholics plan to discuss the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change and poverty.

The president takes pride in his Catholic faith, using it as moral guidepost to shape many of his social and economic policies. Biden wears a rosary and frequently attends Mass, yet his support for abortion rights and same-sex marriage has put him at odds with many U.S. bishops, some of whom have suggested he should be denied Communion.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki, in previewing the visit, said she expected a “warm and constructive dialogue” between the two leaders.

“There’s a great deal of agreement and overlap with the president and Pope Francis on a range of issues: poverty, combating the climate crisis, ending the Covid-19 pandemic,” Psaki said. “These are all hugely important, impactful issues that will be the centerpiece of what their discussion is when they meet.”

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said the president and pontiff would meet privately, then hold talks with expanded delegations. Biden is visiting Rome and then Glasgow, Scotland, for back-to-back summits, first a gathering for leaders of Group of 20 leading and developing nations and then a global climate conference.

As only the second Catholic president after John F. Kennedy, Biden has made his audience with the pope a clear priority. It will be his first scheduled meeting on a five-day trip abroad and his wife, Jill, will also attend. Biden and Francis have previously met three times but Friday’s encounter will be their first since Biden became president this year.

Biden was set to arrive at the Vatican in an unusually long motorcade, owing to Italian Covid-19 restrictions on the number of people sharing a vehicle.

Following the papal meeting, Biden will meet separately Friday with Group of 20 summit hosts Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi. He will end the day by meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, part of an effort to mend relations with France after the U.S. and U.K. decided to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, scotching an existing French contract.

Biden’s meeting with Pope Francis generated some controversy in advance as the Vatican on Thursday abruptly canceled plans to broadcast the meeting with Biden live and denied press access. Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said the revised television plan reflected the virus protocol for all heads of state audiences, though he didn’t say why more robust live TV coverage had been initially scheduled and then canceled.

Viewers will only see the arrival of the presidential motorcade in the courtyard of the Apostolic Palace, where a Vatican monsignor will welcome Biden. There will be no live broadcast or independent photographs of Biden greeting Francis in the palace Throne Room, nor live footage of the two leaders sitting down to begin their conversation in Francis’ library.

The Vatican said it would provide edited footage of the encounter after the fact to accredited media.

A live broadcast was particularly important because the Vatican has barred independent photographers and journalists from papal audiences with leaders since early 2020 due to the coronavirus, even though external news media are allowed into other papal events.

That decision comes as U.S. bishops are scheduled to meet in roughly three weeks in Baltimore for their annual fall convention. Among the agenda items for that convention is an effort by conservatives to disqualify Biden from receiving Communion. Any document emerging from the event is unlikely to single out the president by name, but he still could face some form of rebuke.

Francis has stressed that he will not reject political leaders who support abortion rights, though Catholic policy allows individual bishops to choose whether to prevent people from taking Communion.

On the eve of Biden’s visit, a leading U.S. conservative cardinal and Francis critic, Cardinal Raymond Burke, penned an impassioned plea for U.S. bishops to deny Catholic politicians Communion if they support abortion rights legislation.

Burke didn’t cite Biden by name, but said such Catholic politicians were causing grave scandal to the faithful since church law says someone who is “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin” should not be admitted to Communion.

Catholic politicians who support abortion rights “have, in fact, contributed in a significant way to the consolidation of a culture of death in the United States, in which procured abortion is simply a fact of daily life,” Burke wrote.

Over the years, Vatican meetings between presidents and popes have had their share of awkward moments.

President Ronald Reagan had trouble keeping his eyes open on his first visit to the Vatican in 1982. When George W. Bush met with Pope Benedict XVI, his overly casual behavior was noted by many Italians and Vatican watchers as he addressed the pope as “sir,” rather than the customary “your holiness,” and as he leaned far back in his chair. When Donald Trump met in 2017 with Francis, with whom the president had a prickly relationship, photos showed a stone-faced Francis standing next to a grinning Trump.

President Biden has long cast his faith as a cornerstone of his identity, writing in his 2007 memoir “Promises to Keep” that Catholicism gave him a sense “of self, of family, of community, of the wider world.” He admits to becoming angry with God after the death of his first wife and baby daughter in a 1972 traffic accident, but Biden said he never doubted God’s existence.

In a 2007 interview with The Christian Science Monitor, Biden said he believes his faith is universal enough to accept those with differing viewpoints.

“My views are totally consistent with Catholic social doctrine,” Biden said. “There are elements within the church who say that if you are at odds with any of the teachings of the church, you are at odds with the church. I think the church is bigger than that.”