Defense secretary kept his hospitalization quiet
WASHINGTON — It took the Pentagon 3½ days to inform the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had been hospitalized on New Year’s Day after complications from an elective procedure, two US officials said Saturday.
The extraordinary breach of protocol — Austin is in charge of the country’s 1.4 million activeduty military at a time when the wars in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine have dominated the US national security landscape — has baffled officials across the government, including at the Pentagon.
Senior defense officials say Austin did not inform them until Thursday that he had been admitted to the intensive care unit at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The Pentagon then informed the White House.
The Pentagon’s belated notification, first reported by Politico, confounded White House officials, a Biden administration official said. A spokesperson for the National Security Council declined to comment Saturday.
On Saturday night, Austin issued a mea culpa.
“I recognize I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed,” he said in a statement. “I commit to doing better.”
Austin added: “This was my medical procedure, and I take full responsibility for my decision about disclosure.”
President Biden and Austin spoke by telephone Saturday night, a US official said, adding that the president was glad to hear that Austin is recovering. Another official said that the president has full confidence in his defense secretary. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive situation.
It was late Friday evening when Austin’s spokesperson, General Patrick Ryder, put out a statement to the news media that Austin, 70, had been hospitalized. Ryder said patient privacy prevented him from elaborating about Austin’s medical issue.
In the Friday statement, he said Austin was “recovering well and is expecting to resume his full duties today.”
Austin was still in the hospital Sunday, according to the Associated Press.
NEW YORK TIMES
DeSantis losing ad wars
The Republican presidential ad wars were not supposed to end like this.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — once the most wellfunded GOP presidential contender with allies that consistently outspent his foes — has failed to keep up the pace in Iowa, the only state where he can now afford to advertise at all.
Spots supporting former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, long mocked by rivals for her lean bank accounts, now dominate the airwaves in Iowa and New Hampshire.
And former president
Trump, who spent last year vilifying DeSantis, has redirected his attack ads toward Haley in New Hampshire, where his supporters are matching every dollar she spends in the hopes of denying her a springboard to her home state of South Carolina.
The late scramble in ad strategies comes just as undecided voters in the first two states are finally tuning into the race. In mid-November, all three candidates and their supportive super PACs were spending about $1 million a week in Iowa, according to AdImpact, the media tracking firm. Now Haley’s forces are spending more than $3 million, while the DeSantis crew follows with $2.3 million and Trump, who has been dominating local polls, invested $1.2 million.
A separate battle has been taking place in New Hampshire, where Trump’s and Haley’s allies have been jockeying for undecided voters in a contest whose outcome may ultimately be more decisive than Iowa’s. Since early December, both campaigns and their supporters have been growing their investment in the state, effectively matching dollar for dollar to each spend more than $2 million over the last full week.
DeSantis — whose allies have spent more on television than any other effort — has been sidelined in the first primary state, the result of a massive miscalculation about his team’s fundraising ability in the second half of 2023 and a mislaid bet on summer and early fall advertising in an attempt to stop his polling slide.
‘‘If you are not on the air, you are not in the conversation, so that is important,’’ said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire Republican political consultant who worked for the presidential campaigns of Senator Bob Dole of Kansas and Texas Governor Rick Perry. ‘‘You have to have something good to say, and you save it to the end when most people are paying attention.’’
DeSantis’s strategic stumble has been a primary focus of his opponents’ ads, with SFA Fund, a PAC supporting Haley, devoting much of its ad time on spots that highlight the dysfunction of the DeSantis campaign as a way of undermining his central pitch of being a more competent leader that Trump. The group has spent $1.2 million to air an ad called ‘‘Dumpster Fire’’ more than 1,000 times in Iowa that is focused on the Florida governor’s stumbles. Haley is also receiving late ad support from Americans for Prosperity Action.
DeSantis has responded by shifting his campaign message to cast Haley as the puppet of deep-pocketed donors, an ironic attack from a governor who has long boasted of the advantages he has gained from his own wealthy supporters.
DeSantis said last week that his ‘‘bumper sticker message’’ for caucus attendees is ‘‘very simple’’: ‘‘Donald Trump is running on his issues. Nikki Haley is running on her donors’ issues. I’m running on your issues.’’
The governor’s effort to attack Haley has been aided by Trump and his primary super PAC, MAGA Inc., which has turned its focus toward Haley since Christmas. Those spots include an attack on her record on taxes and an attack on her record on border enforcement, which one Trump spot compares to that of President Biden.
WASHINGTON POST
Cheney out to stop Trump
In a flurry of appearances and commentary, former representative Liz Cheney has stepped up her denunciations of former president Trump in a last-ditch effort to persuade Republicans not to nominate him again.
“Tell the world who we are with your vote. Tell them that we are a good and a great nation,” Cheney told primary voters in New Hampshire on Friday, in a speech at Dartmouth College’s Democracy Summit. “Show the world that we will defeat the plague of cowardice sweeping through the Republican Party.”
A day later, she blasted Trump’s suggestion on the campaign trail that the Civil War could have been prevented if President Abraham Lincoln had “negotiated.”
“Which part of the Civil War ‘could have been negotiated’? The slavery part? The secession part? Whether Lincoln should have preserved the Union?” she wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Question for members of the GOP — the party of Lincoln — who have endorsed Donald Trump: How can you possibly defend this?”
And in an interview Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS News, she denounced Trump’s attempts to end or delay his criminal trials by arguing that he had immunity against charges related to anything he did in office. She endorsed efforts to remove him from ballots under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
“I certainly believe that Donald Trump’s behavior rose to that level,” she said, referring to Section 3’s disqualification of people who engaged in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it.
“I think that there’s no basis for an assertion that the president of the United States is completely immune from criminal prosecution for acts in office,” she added of Trump’s appeals on that front. “He’s trying to delay his trial because he doesn’t want people to see the witnesses who will testify against him.”
A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to a request for comment Sunday.
NEW YORK TIMES
Mich. GOP in turmoil
Simmering tensions within the Michigan Republican Party boiled over Saturday, with some party officials voting to remove their embattled chair, Kristina Karamo, in a proceeding that she and other state Republicans argued was illegitimate.
The showdown, which occurred at a meeting held by a breakaway faction of the state party, now appears likely to wind up in court.
The effort to oust Karamo, who was not present for the meeting, is the latest clash in a party that has been marred by infighting and financial difficulties since Karamo took control of it in February, and it is likely to hamper Republican efforts in the 2024 election cycle.
Karamo was part of a cohort of far-right activists who ascended to the top of state parties as former president Trump and his grass-roots supporters raged against his 2020 election defeat.