Fernando Alonso has rejected the idea of contesting a full season of IndyCar racing in 2020, insisting any undertaking of the Indy 500 would remain a one-off.

Alonso’s first visit to Indianapolis back in 2017 saw the Spaniard race competitively at the front of the field at the wheel of a McLaren-entered Andretti Autosport-run car.

But Alonso’s involvement in McLaren’s independent effort at the Brickyard last month resulted in a resounding debacle with the two-time F1 world champion failing to make the 33-car grid.

McLaren shrugs off Indy blow and targets Le Mans 2021

While Alonso is hopeful of a return to Indy next year, he has ruled a full season of racing in the US.

“If I do Indy, a one-off will be the approach again,” he said. “To do the full season at the moment is too much of a commitment in terms of races.

“If you go there you should be in contention, you are not a tourist.”

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McLaren boss Zak Brown, who made no excuses for the team’s botched attempt at making the gird this year, alluded to the possibility of running in a few preparation races in 2020.

©McLaren

WASHINGTON — 

President Trump asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to shield him from a New York grand jury’s demand to see his tax returns and other financial records, setting the stage for a constitutional clash over whether the president has “absolute immunity” from being investigated or prosecuted.

It is the first of two appeals from Trump that seek to protect his tax returns from investigators. The House Oversight Committee has been seeking the same records, and on Wednesday, the full U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington refused to block the subpoena. Trump’s lawyers said they would appeal that case to the Supreme Court as well.

The justices are not required to hear Trump’s appeal or to decide the cases. But the pair of appeals when put together raise significant questions about the constitutional separation of powers and whether the president has a privacy right to shield his personal records from congressional investigators or state prosecutors.

If the justices vote to hear Trump’s plea, it could result in a major election-year ruling on whether a president is above the law while in office.

“We have filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to overturn the 2nd Circuit decision regarding a subpoena issued by the New York County district attorney,” said Jay Sekulow, counsel to the president. “The 2nd Circuit decision is wrong and should be reversed.”

The Supreme Court has never before said the president was immune or shielded from all investigations while in office. However, the Constitution says the president may be removed from office only through impeachment by the House and a conviction in the Senate.

The New York prosecutors who sought the tax returns are expected to file a response within 10 days. Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers are expected to move quickly to appeal the ruling involving House investigators. The justices may take some time to decide on what to do.

The New York investigation does not concern Trump’s actions as president. Rather, Dist. Atty. Cyrus Vance Jr. is said to be investigating hush-money payments to two women who allege they had affairs with Trump. As part of its investigation, the grand jury sought eight years of the Trump Organization’s financial records from Mazars USA, its accounting firm, including Trump’s personal tax returns.

Even if the grand jury’s subpoena is upheld and Mazars complies with the order, it does not mean Trump’s tax returns will be made public. The grand jury operates under a rule of confidentiality.

Nonetheless, Trump’s lawyers went to federal court seeking to block the order while the president is in office. William Consovoy, a private attorney for Trump, relied on what he called a “temporary absolute presidential immunity.” In response to a question from one lower court judge, the attorney argued last month that Trump should be shielded from answering questions even if the president shot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York. During the campaign, Trump once famously said he was so popular among his base that he could shot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support.

In the filing Thursday, Consovoy said the court should decide whether the New York subpoena violates the Constitution. “There has been broad bipartisan agreement, for decades if not centuries, that a sitting president cannot be subjected to criminal proceedings.”

He said the subpoena essentially targeted Trump for criminal charges, even though it was sent as a request for documents to his accountants.

“This subpoena subjects the president to a criminal process under any reasonable understanding of the concept,” Consovoy said. “It demands the president’s records, names him as a target, and was issued as part of a grand jury proceeding that seeks to determine whether the president committed a state-law crime. That the grand jury subpoena was issued to a third-party custodian does not alter the calculus. If it did, every local prosecutor in the country could easily circumvent presidential immunity.”

A federal district judge and a three-judge panel of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals flatly rejected the claim of immunity. The judges pointed out that beginning with Thomas Jefferson in 1807, presidents have been required to respond to court orders seeking documents. In the most famous case, President Nixon was required by the Supreme Court in a unanimous 1974 decision to turn over to prosecutors his White House tape recordings.

President Clinton was required to answer questions under oath in response to a civil suit over a sexual harassment claim. He too had suffered unanimous defeat at the Supreme Court in 1997 when he sought to claim temporary immunity while in office.

Citing the example of Nixon’s Oval Office conversations, the 2nd Circuit Court said Trump and his lawyers failed to “explain why, if executive privilege did not preclude enforcement of the subpoena issued in Nixon, the Mazars subpoena must be enjoined despite seeking no privileged information and bearing no relation to the president’s performance of his official functions.”

Justice Department lawyers have long maintained that the president is not subject to criminal prosecution while in office. The Supreme Court has not ruled directly on that issue.

Chief Judge Robert Katzmann of the 2nd Circuit said the appeal in Trump vs. Vance raised a narrow issue. The grand jury’s subpoena does not compel the president “to attend court at a particular time or place, or … compel the president himself to do anything.” The order was directed at his accountants.

“We conclude only that presidential immunity does not bar enforcement of a state grand jury subpoena directing a third party to produce nonprivileged material, even when the subject matter under investigation pertains to the president,” Katzmann wrote on Nov. 4.

The House Oversight Committee has broad investigating authority. In February, it heard testimony from Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, who said he believed the president “inflated his total assets” in some financial statements and “deflated his assets” at other times. The committee’s late chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, at first asked Mazars to furnish Trump’s financial records, including any regarding Deutsche Bank’s decision to reduce the interest rate on a $125-million Trump loan after he became a candidate for president.

When the accounting firm refused, Cummings issued a formal subpoena to Mazars in April seeking eight years of Trump’s financial records and tax returns. He said the committee was looking into whether Trump had “engaged in illegal conduct” before or during this time in office, had “undisclosed conflicts of interest” and had complied with the “Emoluments Clause of the Constitution,” which forbids officeholders from taking undisclosed gifts from foreigners.

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Trump sued to block the subpoena, but lost before a federal judge and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last month. Appeals court Judges David S. Tatel and Patricia A. Millett rejected Trump’s claim that the House subpoena should be blocked because it was allegedly aimed at law enforcement, not new legislation. They said Congress has always had broad power to investigate because these probes often reveal the need for new legislation. House Democrats were exploring for the need for new ethics and disclosure laws, they said. Tatel was appointed by Clinton and Millett by President Obama.

Judge Neomi Rao, a new Trump appointee, dissented. She said the majority “breaks new ground” by upholding a subpoena based on Congress’ “legislative power” even though it is “investigating allegations of illegal conduct against the president.” She suggested the demand for documents would have stood on stronger ground if it arose from an impeachment investigation.

“Allowing the committee to issue this subpoena for legislative purposes would turn Congress into a roving inquisition over a co-equal branch of government,” she wrote.

Trump’s lawyer asked the 11-member appeals court to reconsider the decision, but that request was turned down. Rao dissented, along with Judge Greg Katsas, a second new Trump appointee, and Judge Karen Henderson, an appointee of George H.W. Bush.

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KYIV, Ukraine — 

From her second-story walk-up office in Kyiv’s old Perchersk neighborhood, Daria Kaleniuk has been fighting the fire-breathing dragons of Ukrainian corruption — oligarchs and politicians and judges on the take.

Little did she know she would also be going up against the most powerful man on Earth, Donald Trump.

Kaleniuk is one of a new generation of Ukrainians who grew up in a freshly independent former Soviet republic that struggled to break free of Russia and to build institutions of basic governance. These young reformers speak English, aspire to Western values, reject their country’s Soviet past, have turned away from Moscow — and now fear that the U.S. has turned away from them.

Their work to battle graft and demand change belies the Ukraine that President Trump portrays.

According to testimony before the House impeachment inquiry by Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special representative to Ukraine, Trump once said of Ukrainians, “They are all corrupt, they are all terrible people.” Trump has also suggested, despite voluminous evidence to the contrary, that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

There’s no question that Ukraine has a serious corruption problem. Transparency International, which ranks countries according to their level of perceived corruption, lists Ukraine as 130th out of 180 nations, with No. 1 being the cleanest. That makes it among the most corrupt countries in Europe, barely ahead of Russia.

Yet activists, academics and politicians here insist the real Ukraine is making significant progress in fighting corruption. And these Ukrainians are angry that Trump has dragged them into U.S. politics by asking their new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

“We are desperately trying to change the country … from a very corrupt kleptocracy to a democracy,” Kaleniuk said on a recent chilly, gray morning in her office. “This is Ukraine’s moment, the moment to help. And instead, we got a knife in the back.”

As part of the movement undertaken by a robust post-communist civil society, and often working with U.S. development grants, Kaleniuk’s Anti-Corruption Action Center and other grass-roots organizations have helped create a new anti-corruption court in Kyiv, replace several dishonest prosecutors and expose illicit campaign contributions, money-laundering schemes and political backroom deals.

They were instrumental in the Maidan revolution of 2014, a popular revolt that led to the ouster of an unpopular, pro-Russia president and ushered in Western-leaning governments, including that of Zelensky, a TV comedian who won a landslide victory this year.

Supporters call them nothing short of fearless.

“The fight isn’t over yet,” said Sviatoslav Yurash, a newly elected member of parliament in Zelensky’s Servant of the People party. “Our goal is to see a completely different country in five years.” At 23, Yurash is the youngest member of parliament in Ukraine’s history and another participant in the reform movement.

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Former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani campaigned successfully to have recalled from Kyiv in May, was an enthusiastic supporter of the reformers, as is her replacement, William B. Taylor Jr. , fulfilling his second stint as America’s senior diplomat in the country.

“This new government has appealed to young people who are so idealistic, pro-West, pro-United States, pro-Europe, that I feel an emotional attachment, bond, connection to this country and these people,” Taylor testified before the congressional panel investigating Trump.

The turning point for the generational shift was the Maidan revolution that forced out President Viktor Yanukovich who, along with his business associates, robbed the country of around $100 billion. He fled to Russia, confronted by the massive demonstrations in which more than 100 protesters died.

Weeks later, the Kremlin seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and backed separatist militias in Ukraine’s east, where fighting continues.

“Maidan was about fighting corruption and an authoritarian government,” said Yulia Marushevska, 30, another of the new generation of anti-corruption crusaders in Kyiv. “How can a country that lost a hundred people on Maidan in the fight against corruption and authoritarianism be called the most corrupt country in the world?”

The Maidan revolt set into motion an anti-corruption movement led in part by young activists such as Kaleniuk and Marushevska. Their work led Ukraine to overhaul the police system in an attempt to eliminate bribe-taking. It established a transparent, online system for public procurement. It created the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine to investigate graft.

When a new, pro-Western government was elected in March 2014, Marushevska was appointed to the Odessa regional government and eventually put in charge of reforms in the Black Sea city’s notoriously corrupt ports and customs office.

The Maidan street revolution had another, perhaps more important outcome for Ukrainians, Marushevska said.

“Empowerment,” she said. “People now understood that we have the power to change the country.”

In May, long before the scandal broke in the U.S., Kaleniuk’s organization and 19 other Ukrainian groups petitioned the U.S. Treasury Department to blacklist former Ukrainian Atty. Gen. Yuri Lutsenko, the man who initially worked with Giuliani to smear the former U.S. ambassador, Yovanovitch, and spread unsupported stories about Joe Biden’s dealings with Ukraine. Treasury took no action.

Lutsenko, in a September interview with The Times, recanted the claims he made, but they had already reached, and convinced, Trump.

All of the work earned Kaleniuk and her organization the enmity of Ukraine’s most powerful people: billionaire tycoons backed with armies of lawyers and highly paid American crisis management public relations firms. This was no surprise, she said.

But then Giuliani added his voice.

In public appearances, Giuliani painted the anti-corruption group as a dubious tool of George Soros, the Hungarian-born philanthropist who founded the Open Society Foundations. Like many pro-democracy groups across Europe, Kaleniuk’s organization receives funding from Open Society, last year to the tune of about $150,000, or about a quarter of the Ukrainian group’s budget. But branding people or groups as having ties to Soros has become a trope, often tinged with anti-Semitism, used by the American right wing, which considers Soros a leftist partisan.

Slightly more than half of the money the Anti-Corruption Action Center has received since 2012 comes from the U.S. government.

In some cases, attacks have been even more direct. The group’s founder, Vitaly Shabunin, 34, whose investigations exposed Yanukovych’s gross abuse of power and illicit resources, was doused with a green substance while he and dozens of other activists were demonstrating in a Kyiv square last year. The substance, a harsh chemical commonly used as an antiseptic here, left burns on his face and eyes.

The broadsides from the Trump administration have made the anti-corruption crusade that much more difficult, Kaleniuk said, and given sustenance to the recalcitrant, old-school oligarchs “who try to protect themselves through all possible means.” And that, she said, ultimately helps Russian President Vladimir Putin, who benefits from a weak Ukraine.

“It is in the interest of Russia to portray us as a … hopelessly corrupt country … [and] a constant place of instability,” ineligible to join Western institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the European Union, Kaleniuk said. “This is about more than corruption and Ukraine. It’s about an autocratic regime fighting the liberal democratic world.”

Putin seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 and continues to occupy it. Russia-backed separatists are fighting a deadly war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Ukrainians have noted that Trump often seems to be using Putin’s talking points when discussing Ukraine, telling filmmaker Oliver Stone in June that “Russians and Ukrainians are actually one people” and dismissing Moscow’s aggression. By contrast, many foreign policy experts and geopolitical strategists argue that Ukraine is the key bulwark against an expansionist Russia, caught as it is in a tug-of-war between East and West.

“The future of Ukraine is the future of Europe,” said Daniel Hamilton, a former diplomat who specializes in Europe at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

As the young reformers confront that challenge, they also worry now, amid the Trump impeachment inquiry, that they are also losing the traditional bipartisan U.S. congressional support they have enjoyed for years in executing reforms and building democracy.

Alyona Getmanchuk, director of the New Europe Center, a progressive think tank in Kyiv, is a foreign policy expert and ardent supporter of the new generation of reformers. Trump’s antagonism toward the country and its endeavors is clearer than ever, she said. Trump has made Ukraine a “political football,” a position the country does not want. And she fears that the topic of Ukraine has become “toxic” in the halls of Congress.

“All the major reforms [were] launched with major U.S. support and involvement along every step of the way,” she said. “That is why it would be harder to push for them without the U.S. It would not stop the process, but it would slow it down. And we can’t risk that.”

Times staff writer Wilkinson was recently on assignment in Kyiv. Ayres is a special correspondent.

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WASHINGTON — 

A second U.S. Embassy staffer in Kyiv overheard a key cellphone call between President Trump and his ambassador to the European Union discussing the need for Ukrainian officials to pursue “investigations,” the Associated Press has learned.

The July 26 call between Trump and Gordon Sondland was first described during testimony Wednesday by William B. Taylor Jr., the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Taylor said one of his staffers overhead the call while Sondland was in a restaurant the day after Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that triggered the House impeachment inquiry.

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The second diplomatic staffer also at the table was Suriya Jayanti, a foreign service officer based in Kyiv. A person briefed on what Jayanti overheard spoke to AP on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter under investigation.

Trump on Wednesday said he did not recall the July 26 call.

“No, not at all, not even a little bit,” Trump said.

The staffer Taylor testified about is David Holmes, the political counselor at the embassy in Kyiv, according to an official familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Holmes is scheduled to testify Friday before House investigators in a closed session.

Taylor was one of the first witnesses called Wednesday during the impeachment inquiry’s initial open hearing. He testified that his staffer could hear Trump on the phone asking Sondland about “the investigations.”

The accounts of Holmes and Jayanti could tie Trump closer to alleged efforts to hold up military aid to Ukraine in exchange for investigations into political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings.

Current and former U.S. officials say Sondland’s use of a cellphone in a public place in Ukraine to speak with anyone in the U.S. government back home about sensitive matters, let alone the president, would be a significant breach of communications security.

Jayanti is an attorney who joined the State Department in 2012 and was previously posted at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. She has been stationed since September 2018 at the embassy in Kyiv where she helps coordinate U.S. business interests with the former Soviet republic’s energy industry.

Jayanti was in Washington last month and scheduled for a closed-door interview with impeachment investigators. But the deposition was canceled because of the funeral for former House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings and has not yet been rescheduled.

Holmes, a career diplomat, joined the Foreign Service in 2002 and has served in Afghanistan, Colombia, India, Kosovo and Russia as well as on the White House National Security Council staff. He won an award for constructive dissent from the American Foreign Service Assn. in 2014 for complaining about problems that an alternate diplomatic channel had caused in South Asia and recommending organizational changes to the State Department’s bureaucratic structure for the region.

U.S. diplomats and other government employees are instructed not to use cellphones for sensitive official matters while traveling anywhere abroad but notably in countries known to be targeted for surveillance by intelligence agencies such as Russia, China and Israel.

Ukraine has long been among the countries of concern, particularly since a 2014 incident in which the U.S. accused Russian intelligence of eavesdropping on and then leaking a recording of a conversation between two senior U.S. officials in Kyiv that led to great embarrassment and strains between the U.S. and its European allies.

In that recording, then-Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland is heard telling former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoff Pyatt “… the EU,” using an expletive, because of the European Union’s slowness to respond to the political crisis in the country.

“That phone call was also a mistake the way it was conducted and it had huge implications for our foreign policy,” said Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia who is now at Stanford University. “Particularly after that, anybody should understand how dangerous it is to make an unsecured call in Kyiv, or anywhere else for that matter.”

“Obviously, making a phone call from Kyiv to the president of the United States means that not just the Russian intelligence services will be on the call, but a whole lot of other people too,” McFaul said. “If it was that important, he [Sondland] could have easily gotten up from the restaurant, gone to the embassy and made a secure call through the White House operations center. A lower-level official would probably be reprimanded for this kind of breach.”

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WASHINGTON — 

When Donald Trump was constructing the opulent Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan four decades ago, he was infuriated when he saw a thin layer of golden-hued marble lining the walls and column in the lobby, and ordered aides to make it appear twice as thick.

Sure, he had architects and engineers to handle those decorating details so that he could focus on the building’s multimillion-dollar budget and other big-picture concerns of a business empire that would teeter in and out of bankruptcy.

But when something bothers Trump, however small, he can obsess over it.

That tendency to become preoccupied by narrow interests is haunting him in the impeachment inquiry, which hit a milestone Wednesday when the Democratic-led House Intelligence Committee held its first public hearing since the investigation began in September.

A second hearing is scheduled Friday, and eight more witnesses will testify over three days next week.

The first hearing provided compelling evidence of one of Trump’s most audacious fixations: getting Ukraine’s new president to announce investigations of Trump rivals, including potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden, after Trump had suspended $391 million in congressionally approved security aid to the government in Kyiv.

House Democrats argue that the evidence shows Trump hijacked foreign policy, and put national security at risk, to help his reelection bid. On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went further, saying for the first time that the president’s demands to Ukraine amounted to bribery.

“The bribe is to grant or withhold military assistance in return for a public statement of a fake investigation into the elections. That’s bribery,” Pelosi told a news conference.

During the hearing Wednesday, William B. Taylor Jr., the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, revealed publicly for the first time that an embassy staffer had overheard Trump speaking to the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, who had called the president on a cellphone from a restaurant in Kyiv after meeting senior Ukrainian officials.

Taylor said the aide, who was later identified as political counselor David Holmes, specifically heard Trump ask Sondland about “the investigations,” and that Sondland said after the call that Trump cared more about Biden than about U.S. policy toward Ukraine, an ally battling a Russian-backed insurgency.

On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that a second U.S. diplomat, a foreign service officer based at the embassy in Kyiv, also heard Trump speaking on the call.

If confirmed, the cellphone conversation could place both Trump and Sondland in jeopardy.

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It contradicts Sondland’s previous sworn testimony about his direct interactions with the president, when he failed to mention the conversation, and potentially puts him at risk of perjury. Sondland is scheduled to testify publicly next Wednesday.

More importantly, it places the president more directly into the alleged scheme to demand political favors from Ukraine in exchange for U.S. assistance, a narrative that largely has been outlined by White House aides and U.S. diplomats so far.

As a side issue, it raises questions about why Trump was willing to risk security by taking a cellphone call from abroad.

Sondland’s call normally would be routed through a senior member of the national security staff or an assistant secretary of State, who might brief the president through a memo or verbally to a superior, who would then pass the information to the president.

“Nothing is particularly orthodox” in the way Trump runs diplomacy, said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

Sondland’s ability to dial up the president in a public place was particularly alarming to U.S. security experts, who cited Russia’s well-documented efforts to undermine the fragile democracy in Ukraine, and its near-certain surveillance of American diplomats there.

“The fact that [Sondland] either didn’t know or knew but took a cavalier attitude — neither answer is a really good answer,” said Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior U.S. intelligence official who ran the White House Situation Room from 2011 to 2013.

Pfeiffer said calls to the president from a foreign country are supposed to be made from a secure area in an embassy to the White House switchboard or the Situation Room, and then patched through to the president.

He said President Obama received some personal calls on his BlackBerry device from a very small group of friends, but they were not supposed to contain potentially sensitive information.

Placing a call from a restaurant is particularly brazen. Even with the best equipment, government employees are constantly warned that “your call is only as secure as the place you’re sitting,” Pfeiffer said.

Republicans contend that Trump did nothing wrong, or at least worthy of impeachment, and suggested that his aides may have been acting on their own. They also complain that few of the witnesses had direct conversations with Trump, and derided their accounts as hearsay.

For his part, Trump retweeted a Fox Business host who said the hearing amounted to a “policy dispute” that average Americans would not find impeachable.

In some ways, the cellphone conversation, as described, would confirm available evidence about Trump’s preoccupation with getting Ukraine to investigate his political opponents.

On July 25, a day before Sondland picked up his cellphone, Trump had asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a phone call for a “favor” immediately after Zelensky had pleaded for U.S. anti-tank weapons.

Trump made clear that he wanted Zelensky to investigate a debunked theory that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and to reopen an inquiry into Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company that had put Biden’s son Hunter on its board.

Since Biden effectively led U.S. policy to Ukraine as vice president, the arrangement appeared to pose a conflict of interest. But no evidence has emerged to suggest that Biden or his son committed a crime, and Trump has never said why, if he believes such evidence exists, that he asked a foreign power instead of the Justice Department to investigate U.S. citizens.

Trump’s obsession with “the investigations” is not new, although its meaning appears to have shifted over time.

He often brings up his upset victory in the 2016 election in his speeches before supporters, and still claims — without any credible evidence — that Democrats committed voter fraud. He beams when he mentions Hillary Clinton at his rallies and supporters chant, “Lock her up.”

And he complains bitterly about the “phony” special counsel investigation that concluded the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election, in part to help him win, and that his campaign “welcomed” the Russian help. Federal prosecutors indicted 25 Russians for alleged hacking and other crimes.

Analysts said Trump’s eagerness to blame Ukraine, despite U.S. intelligence and Justice Department conclusions that Russia was responsible, is partly aimed at sowing doubt about the Russia inquiry that tarnished his presidency.

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ATLANTA — 

Ten Democratic presidential candidates have qualified for next Wednesday’s debate in Georgia, giving voters a smaller lineup onstage to consider even as the party’s overall field expands.

The Democratic National Committee confirmed the lineup Thursday after reviewing polling and grass-roots fundraising thresholds. Those on the stage will be: former Vice President Joe Biden; New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.; Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard; California Sen. Kamala Harris; Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar; Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; billionaire activist Tom Steyer of California; Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren; and entrepreneur Andrew Yang of New York.

Former Obama administration housing chief Julián Castro is the most high-profile remaining candidate to miss the cut. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas ended his campaign last month. Those two created headlines with their earlier debate performances, including some spirited exchanges with each other.

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney and author Marianne Williamson already have missed debates as the party chairman, Tom Perez, continues to raise qualification requirements.

This month, candidates were required to have reached 3% in at least four qualifying national polls since Sept. 13 or 5% in two early nominating state polls since that date, while also having collected contributions from at least 165,000 unique donors, with at least 600 each in a minimum of 20 states.

Some candidates have criticized Perez for the requirements. Some argue that the donor emphasis has forced them to spend disproportionately for online fundraising efforts that drain resources they could be using to reach voters other ways. Perez counters that candidates have had ample time to demonstrate their supporters, both in polls and through small-dollar contributors, and that any Democrat falling short this far into the campaign almost certainly isn’t positioned to win the nomination or defeat President Trump.

Perez already has announced even stiffer requirements for a Dec. 19 debate. The polling marks: 4% in four national polls or 6% in two early state polls taken after Oct. 16. The donor threshold: 200,000 unique donors with at least 800 each from 20 states.

Biden, Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg — the four who top most national and early state polls — are not threatened by those goals. Harris and Klobuchar already have met them, as well. But the higher targets put pressure on several other candidates to broaden their support or risk falling out of any reasonable contention with less than three months to go before the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses.

Two new candidates also could be vying for December spots.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick launched his campaign Thursday and filed to appear on New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary ballot. Former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is considering a bid as well, already having filed paperwork for some Super Tuesday primaries.

Patrick has strong ties to Wall Street and deep-pocketed Democratic donors. Bloomberg is among the world’s wealthiest individuals. Both may be able to afford television advertising and other campaign operations relatively quickly. But, as Perez has said throughout the process, party leaders consider debate slots not as rewards for the amount a campaign raises or spends, but as a recognition of how much support a candidate has attracted.

Patrick seemed unconcerned Thursday in New Hampshire.

“All of that is important,” he told reporters in Manchester, “but I think I’m more interested in forums where you can actually engage with regular voters and not just ones where the moderator is tempted to treat it like a cage fight.”

Next week’s debate will be broadcast on MSNBC from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. EST.

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