Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team are nowhere close to launching impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump — with the chances diminishing as the 2020 election moves ever closer.

Democratic lawmakers and senior aides say Pelosi and her deputies are unmoved despite a groundswell of impeachment talk among rank-and-file members who are infuriated by Trump’s stonewalling of congressional investigations.

And absent any bombshell testimony from Attorney General William Barr or special counsel Robert Mueller stemming from his report, they say, senior Democrats view the approaching 2020 election season as a likely hard deadline for any impeachment push.

“Everything’s got to be done this year. Next year, forget about it,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, who said he sees more rank-and-file Democrats leaning toward impeachment but noted everything rides on Pelosi.

Even the most ardent supporters of ousting the president concede that the chance of launching proceedings against Trump gets slimmer once all of Washington — and the country — becomes consumed by the presidential election, and Democrats will be wary of an impeachment backlash.

“There’s a certain point in time … it becomes an issue, for sure,” said Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, an impeachment supporter, of the looming calendar.

Added a senior Democratic aide: “The closer you get to an election year, it’s not going to happen,” the aide said. “I don’t see any way we go there. I just don’t think there’s enough there.”

It’s a sign of how little has actually changed since the release of Mueller’s report, which some Democratic supporters of impeachment had hoped would be the catalyst they needed to spur a formal impeachment inquiry.

The report, plus Trump’s escalating hostility toward congressional subpoenas and investigations, has sparked even some seasoned Democrats to suggest they’re more open to impeachment than they had been. But they make clear that without Pelosi’s blessing, the effort is dead.

“More members that speak out may think that this is what’s going to bring about a new reality,” Pascrell said. “I don’t think so. Nancy has to be committed.”

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Even Democrats who have recently spoken up in favor of impeachment, like Rep. Val Demings of Florida, said they see why Pelosi and other members of leadership aren’t moving in that direction.

“I think the leadership has to be like a good quarterback. They have to have the ability to see the entire field,” said Demings, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, the panel tasked with launching impeachment proceedings.

Leadership aides and top lawmakers say Pelosi’s calculus has not changed, despite devastating evidence outlined in Mueller’s report on Trump’s alleged attempts to obstruct justice and the president’s bellicose posture toward congressional subpoenas.

The main conditions Pelosi and other senior lawmakers have said must be met if Democrats are going to pursue impeachment — a well of public support and at least some Republican buy-in — have not materialized since Mueller’s full report was released less than two weeks ago.

And it’s not just Pelosi. Other senior members of her team, like Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, are in lockstep.

Still, Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn have not ruled out impeaching the president. They want to allow the six committees investigating Trump’s administration, finances and businesses to continue their work — using the Mueller report as a road map. House Democrats will make a final decision once those probes are finished.

“We are not going to over-politicize, we are not going to over-investigate, we are not going to overreach,” New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the No. 5 House Democrat, said Tuesday. “But we are not going to run away from our constitutional responsibilities.”

But the speaker and her top deputies know they must strike a delicate balance between the party’s liberal base — clamoring for impeachment proceedings — and more moderate swing voters, who might be turned off by what could be perceived as Democratic overreach without any Republican support. House Democrats could win the fight over impeachment and lose the war over Trump’s presidency.

And right now, both the public and the caucus aren’t there.

Impeachment didn’t come up at all during Democrats’ closed-door caucus meeting Tuesday, their first time together since the Mueller report was released. And members across the ideological spectrum said voters rarely — if ever — asked about Mueller report and impeachment in their districts during the two-week congressional recess.

Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, a swing-district Democrat who also chairs the caucus’ campaign arm, said no one brought up impeachment during her public events. And Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who represents one of the bluest House districts, said the topics were also barely raised during his time back home.

“While, around here, people like to ask the impeachment question, I think it’s less back home now than prior to the report. Because people understand there’s some easy, simple steps we have to do,” Pocan said in an interview, noting the ongoing investigations by various House panels. “And the president, again, will really expose himself if he doesn’t cooperate.”

Still, the actual appetite for impeachment inside the caucus could soon be on full display. Rep. Al Green of Texas, a longtime impeachment pusher, is promising to force another vote on the issue on the House floor, although he won’t say when. House Democratic leaders are not working behind the scenes to force Green to back off, according to aides, but don’t expect his effort to be successful.

“You can’t impeach someone for threatening to do something,” a senior Democratic aide said of Trump’s promises to continue stymieing House investigations. “Will that lead to more people probably calling for him to be impeached? Yes. But will it lead to impeachment? Not necessarily.”

In the absence of a more concerted push toward impeachment, Democrats have begun floating other draconian measures to punish Trump and his allies — from raising the prospect of levying fines and jailing those who don’t cooperate with their investigations to formally censuring Trump to challenging the president in court.

The top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee said Democrats’ increasingly aggressive tactics amount to an attempt to convince their base they’re taking the hardest possible line against Trump without actually opening impeachment proceedings.

“They know they don’t have the will or fortitude to have an impeachment resolution,” Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) said.

Collins characterized the Democrats’ efforts to investigate Trump for obstruction of justice and to spar with Barr over access to Mueller’s report as a “sideshow of theatrics” because “they didn’t get what they wanted out of the report.”

Since the Mueller report was published, the president has filed two federal lawsuits to block banks and accounting firms from complying with subpoenas for his financial records, accusing Democrats of trying to stifle his presidency with one-sided investigations.

“I think the president is responsible for the fact that more members are openly talking about it,” said Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.). “He is of the belief that our Article I authority represents a coup. And he is trying to create an environment where it looks like this. So who knows? Maybe he wants this.”

Sarah Ferris contributed to this report.

Sen. Michael Bennet has met the polling criterion to qualify for the first Democratic presidential debates at the end of June, but that doesn’t ensure the Colorado lawmaker a spot on the stage in Miami.

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Bennet crossed the polling threshold Tuesday morning when he got 1 percent in a national poll from CNN, the third qualifying poll in which he’s garnered at least 1 percent. That makes Bennet, who entered the presidential race a month ago, the 20th candidate to qualify for the debate under criteria set by the Democratic National Committee.

The DNC has said that no more than 20 candidates will be allowed onstage during the back-to-back debates on June 26 and 27, hosted by NBC News in Miami. But with more than a week to go until the qualification deadline, another one or two candidates could still qualify, meaning someone who met at least one of the DNC’s two criteria could be left out.

According to a POLITICO analysis, Bennet joins 19 other candidates to qualify for the debates. The others are Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Steve Bullock, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, John Hickenlooper, Jay Inslee, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Tim Ryan, Bernie Sanders, Eric Swalwell, Elizabeth Warren, Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang.

Some poll trackers have also said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has hit 1 percent in three approved polls, though, POLITICO does not project the mayor as having met the polling threshold for qualification. Those who say de Blasio has earned a spot on the debate stage point to Reuters/Ipsos poll in which the mayor apparently qualified via a more expansive sampling of adults, while POLITICO relies on a narrower top-line sample of registered voters that would not qualify him.

The DNC has repeatedly declined to answer questions on specific polls or candidates’ qualifications, including what sample to count in the Reuters poll.

Biden leads in the newly released CNN poll — which surveyed 412 registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent voters — with 32 percent. Sanders is in second place with 18 percent, followed by Harris at 8 percent, Warren at 7 percent and Buttigieg and O’Rourke, both at 5 percent.

The poll, conducted May 28-31, represents a small dip in support for Biden from the previous CNN national survey, which put Biden at 39 percent in late April.

If de Blasio hits 1 percent in a third poll — or the DNC opts to count the Reuters adults sample, giving de Blasio his third poll — a candidate who qualified for the debate will be left off stage.

If more than 20 candidates qualify, the 13 candidates who have crossed both the polling and a 65,000-grassroots-donors thresholds will be given priority. The remaining spots onstage will be determined by a series of tiebreaker rules, ranking candidates based off polling averages. A candidate who crossed only the grassroots donor threshold would not make the stage, as 20 candidates have already hit the polling mark.

The candidates with the lowest polling averages who are in the most immediate danger of being cut from the first debates include Bennet, Bullock and Swalwell.

Candidates have until June 12 to qualify for the first debates, and a second round of debates in July will use the same qualifications as the first round.

Candidates who poll above 2 percent will be evenly and randomly divided among the two nights in June, while candidates polling below that mark will also be randomly and evenly divided. There’s expected to be a random drawing for the two debate stages on June 14.

Later debates this fall will have stricter qualification rules. Candidates will have to get 2 percent in four approved polls and have 130,000 unique donors, with 400 donors in at least 20 states. The higher bar has prompted consternation among some candidates who haven’t broken out of the pack, worried they will be unable to cross the dual thresholds without fundamentally changing how they campaign.

“You have to demonstrate that you’re making progress,” DNC chief Tom Perez said on CNN this past weekend, defending the later qualifications.

John Hickenlooper jumps into the Colorado Senate race with universal name recognition, Democratic establishment cred and a strong electability argument — as well as progressive discomfort with his record and a broad field of primary opponents who say he won’t force them out of the race.

In other words, he’s the Joe Biden of his new campaign.

Hickenlooper struggled to make an impact on the presidential race, but the ex-governor is now the heavyweight, with a familiar set of pluses and minuses that come with it. While the former governor’s positions on energy, health care and other issues have prompted discomfort and pressure on the left, he’s also a twice-elected known quantity in one of the most important Senate races in the country, and polling shows he enters the race as a clear front-runner. That — as well as signature accomplishments fighting gun violence and boosting his state’s economy — may send him to Washington.

"At the end of the day, I think, the one thing Democrats want is to beat" GOP Sen. Cory Gardner, said Doug Friednash, a former chief of staff to Hickenlooper. He listed off issues from climate change to the Supreme Court where he said Washington was out of step with Colorado voters.

"That will energize a lot of people and that is to John’s benefit because he walks in as the candidate who is the safest bet to beat Cory," Friednash said. "I think that’s the part that’s going to be hard for these other candidates to overcome and gives him a huge advantage."

Democrats need to flip three seats to gain the Senate majority if they win the White House, and their hopes start in Colorado, which is one of only two states Hillary Clinton carried in 2016 where a Republican senator is up for reelection. (The other is Maine.)

Despite Hickenlooper’s early polling advantage, he isn’t likely to clear the field of around a dozen Democrats currently running for Senate — at least not immediately. Each of the top-tier candidates sent out statements Thursday promising to continue their campaigns, for reasons including generational change and more progressive platforms. Several candidates would, unlike Hickenlooper, break demographic barriers: Dan Baer, a former Obama administration official, would be the first openly gay man in the Senate, and several women are running to be the first female senator from Colorado.

Baer said in a statement that there are “new voices ready to lead across our state.” State Sen. Angela Williams said Hickenlooper has “failed to fight for the progressive solutions our state and country need.” Andrew Romanoff, a former state House speaker, said he disagrees with Gardner and Hickenlooper on “some fundamental issues.” Alice Madden, a former state House leader and Mike Johnston, a former state senator who leads the field in fundraising, similarly have vowed to stay in the race.

“Frankly, any of the major candidates in the race right now beat Cory Gardner,” said Joan Fitz-Gerald, a former state Senate president who endorsed Madden. “It is not going to be that the field suddenly clears and the sun comes out and the rainbows and pot of gold go to John Hickenlooper. That’s just not going to happen."

But most strategists in the state think Hickenlooper will consolidate support and resources quickly and maintain his status as a front-runner.

“He’s best positioned because of his track record. He’s a two-term governor that’s proven he can get things done,” said Josh Morrow, executive director of 314 Action, a group that promotes Democratic candidates with a science background and started a draft effort to get Hickenlooper into the race. “I think that makes him the best candidate. If that also means he’s the most electable, fine.”

One Colorado Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, predicted that Hickenlooper would face a relatively painless path to the party’s nomination.

“This primary is going to be absolutely handed to him, unlike Biden, where he’s going to have to fight to the very last vote,” this strategist said.

Hickenlooper, who avoided any negative campaigning during his gubernatorial runs, isn’t likely to attack his fellow Democratic competitors, trying to stay above the fray of the primary. He told the Denver Post there is “a lot of talent in the field” but said he has “unique experience” as a mayor and governor.

In a video launching his campaign, Hickenlooper — who previously said he was “not cut out to be a senator” and disparaged the job of a legislator — said Washington is a “lousy place” but added, “This is no time to walk away from the table.”

“I don’t think Cory Gardner understands that the games he’s playing with Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are hurting the people of Colorado. We ought to be working together to move this country forward, and stop the political nonsense,” Hickenlooper said in the video, while shooting billiards in the Denver brewpub he founded.

Casey Contres, Gardner’s campaign manager, said in a statement Hickenlooper was “just another liberal in the clown car.”

“Whoever their party nominates will be wildly out of step with Colorado and we look forward to facing them in the general election,” Contres said.

But Democrats across the spectrum — from those boosting Hickenlooper to those skeptical of his candidacy — agree the party is in strong shape in Colorado heading into next fall. Democrats swept statewide races in 2018, and they won the gubernatorial race by double-digits despite a hard-fought primary earlier that year.

Ian Silverii, who leads ProgressNow Colorado, a progressive advocacy group, said he expected Democrats to rally and defeat Gardner in the increasingly blue state regardless of who their nominee is.

“Electability, purity, policy, all these tests people are running miss the point,” he said. “The point is win, the point is beat Gardner and beat McConnell.”

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ROCK HILL, S.C. — A generational divide among black voters is persisting in the Democratic primary — between the two old white men.

Joe Biden has amassed a staggering lead among older African Americans, commanding nearly two-thirds support of black voters 65 and older in the most recent Morning Consult poll. Bernie Sanders is the favorite of black millennials, though his margin with that group is much smaller. Among all black voters, Biden is leading Sanders, 41 percent to 20 percent.

Biden and Sanders have maintained their edges even as other candidates — including two African American senators, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, have courted black voters more aggressively in recent months. Though opinions could change in the runup to voting, the preferences of African Americans this deep into the campaign has major implications for the election: As black voters go, so goes the mantle of Democratic front-runner — and likely the presidential nominee.

The irony of two white septuagenarians commanding majority support among African Americans — despite running in a historically diverse Democratic field — isn’t lost on black elected officials, operatives and voters. Several of them interviewed for this story said it speaks to the belief among many black voters that Biden is both best positioned to beat Donald Trump in a general election and to the loyalty he earned after eight years as Barack Obama’s No. 2.

“You go with what you know. A lot of black voters know Joe Biden,” said Michael Nutter, a former Philadelphia mayor and a current Democratic National Committee member who’s endorsed Biden. “There’s power in that and there’s loyalty in that.”

Sanders won a following among younger black voters during his 2016 run, when his progressive activism and criminal justice record fired up millennials of all races.

At least in the primary, Biden’s lead among older black Democrats is more consequential than Sanders’ edge among younger ones, because older voters typically vote in much greater numbers. That’s especially true in South Carolina, the first-in-the-South primary state where about 60 percent of the Democratic electorate is black. Polls show Biden is doing even better with African American voters there than he is nationally, giving him a potential crucial edge that he hopes to parlay into a string of victories throughout the Southeast and in big cities, where sizable chunks of the Democratic electorate are black.

Similar generational and ideological splits exist among white voters. But African American voters have coalesced to a greater degree behind Biden and Sanders — a dynamic that stands out because of their influence in the early stages of the primary and because they’re not behind Harris or Booker.

Without more black support, the path to the nomination becomes exceedingly tenuous for the African American senators, who are polling in the single digits overall.

Nationally, Harris is the third choice of young black voters, behind Sanders and Biden. Among young black voters in South Carolina, Elizabeth Warren is polling ahead of Sanders. Both of the female candidates have made considerable efforts to court African Americans, especially black women, who are likely to turn out at higher rates than other demographics.

Harris is writing a monthly column for Essence magazine, which caters to black women and has more than 5 million monthly readers, dubbed Kamala’s Corner. To drive engagement and donor support within the black community, she’s also made sure voters know she’s an alumna of Howard University, a historically black institution, and a member of a black sorority.

Warren has also written for Essence and held events with black activists as she touts plans to close the racial wealth gap.

Booker’s polling among black voters is at under 6 percent despite his efforts to promote his work on bipartisan criminal justice reform as well as his two terms as mayor of predominantly African American Newark, N.J.

Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, cautioned that there’s still lots of time for other candidates to make inroads with black voters.

“When you think about Cory Booker, when you think about Kamala Harris, when you think about Elizabeth Warren and others,” he said, “one thing I’ve learned is that when you count people out, they usually teach you that you don’t know how to count.”

Seawright said one explanation for Sanders’ African American support is, "one could argue, he has never stopped running for president.” But while Sanders “enjoyed tremendous millennial support last election cycle,” he added, “that didn’t translate to necessarily showing up at the polls. So support is one thing. Voting for a candidate is another.”

Both Biden and Sanders have held rallies at historically black Clinton College in Rock Hill, S.C. But few students attended Biden’s town hall there Thursday; instead it was mostly older people who showed up. Sanders’ event in June drew a younger crowd.

“Younger voters like what Sanders is saying about free college and legalizing marijuana,” said Jatoya White, a 19-year-old biology student who attended Biden’s rally but prefers Sanders. “With the older voters and Biden, it’s Obama.”

Biden on Thursday finished a two-day tour of South Carolina as part of a renewed emphasis on black voters. It included a sit-down with African American journalists in South Carolina and, before that, in Washington, where he said racism is a “white man’s problem.”

Sanders, meanwhile, is betting on his favorability with young black Democrats to narrow Biden’s lead. His failure to capture the black vote in 2016 crippled his chances of winning the nomination and showed, as other Democratic hopefuls have learned before, that relying too heavily on white liberal voters is not a winning strategy for any candidate.

Phillip Agnew, an activist and surrogate with the Sanders campaign, cited a recent encounter between Sanders and students at the University of South Carolina as emblematic of the way some young black voters feel about him. In the middle of move-in day at the university, when a group of black students heard the senator was inside a nearby Starbucks, they rushed over to thank him for his push to erase college debt.

“These are people who are about to go to college, who have the wherewithal to see Bernie as somebody whose platform, should he be elected, is going to make their lives and that dark cloud of [student loan] debt hanging over them not be there,” Agnew said.

Cathy Cohen, a founder of GenForward, whose research focuses on millennial voting behavior by race, emphasized that it’s still early days in the primary. South Carolina, the fourth state to vote in the Democratic race, doesn’t hold its primary until Feb. 29.

“I would argue that it’s anyone’s game,” Cohen said.

But Biden’s team points out his numbers haven’t budged much in the four months since he entered the race. In the Morning Consult poll, black voters 65 and older back Biden over Sanders by 56 percentage points, 63 percent to 7 percent. Sanders, meanwhile, is beating Biden by 12 points among African Americans younger than 30.

Black voters who’ve already made their choice told POLITICO that getting behind a white male candidate over a black woman or man is nothing personal. This time around, black Democrats feel the stakes are too high to be concerned about optics. They are focused on supporting the candidate they feel will champion the policies they care most about — and make Trump a one-term president.

“We want to win. We just want to win,” Nutter, the former Philadelphia mayor, said. “Because Donald Trump is so damaging and so frightening to many people in this country … the primary theme is, ‘I just want to be with someone who I believe can actually win.’ And that’s what people care about.”

Marc Caputo contributed to this report from South Carolina.

Republicans are launching an innovation fund that will funnel cash into digital startups, a move designed to boost the party’s online infrastructure and help combat a liberal tech resurgence.

Startup Caucus, which is billing itself as a Republican venture capital effort, will announce on Tuesday that it will give $25,000 in seed funding to six early stage tech companies. It also plans to provide the startups with a 12-week training and support program.

The fund is intended to provide Republicans with an answer to Higher Ground Labs, a Democratic tech incubator that has helped bankroll a wave of liberal startups. Higher Ground Labs, whose financial backers include LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, supplied more than $5 million in seed funding during the 2018 midterms and recently announced plans to invest more than $10 million during the 2020 campaign.

Eric Wilson, Startup Caucus’ managing partner and a veteran GOP digital strategist, has been giving to would-be investors presentations in which he has outlined the urgency.

“Obviously the Democrats are spending very heavily on this, and so its essential that Republicans narrow the gap with investment, training, and innovation,” Wilson said.

Wilson said he decided to form Startup Caucus after working on Ed Gillespie’s unsuccessful 2017 Virginia gubernatorial campaign. As he examined the results, Wilson zeroed in on historically conservative Chesterfield County, which backed a Democratic gubernatorial candidate for the first time in 56 years. He came to the realization that Higher Ground Labs, which is spearheaded by onetime aides to former President Barack Obama, funded tech companies that played a key role in helping Democrats turn the county blue.

Wilson, who was a top aide on Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid, has spent much of the past two years on the project. He has assembled a 24-person advisory network that will be chaired by Pete Snyder, a Virginia-based angel investor who waged a 2013 campaign for lieutenant governor.

Startup Caucus is particularly focused on providing funding for companies that are helping congressional and state-level candidates. It has made its first investment in Numinar, which describes itself as “the first software platform bringing cutting-edge voter file management and data analysis to political campaigns of all sizes.”

“There aren’t enough people focusing on the down-ballot side of things,” Wilson said.
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Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has privately recommended several potential hires to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, a rare example of direct political involvement from one of tech’s most powerful executives.

Earlier this year, Zuckerberg sent multiple emails to Mike Schmuhl, Buttigieg’s campaign manager, with names of individuals that he might consider hiring, campaign spokesman Chris Meagher confirmed. Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg’s wife, also sent multiple emails to Schmuhl with staff recommendations. Ultimately, two of the people recommended were hired.

The emails between Zuckerberg and Buttigieg have come to light as Zuckerberg faces unrelenting attacks from politicians from both major parties over such issues as misinformation, privacy, election meddling and bias. Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify Wednesday before the House Financial Services Committee on Facebook’s impact on the financial services and housing sectors.

Zuckerberg used to make political contributions more frequently, including to former and current House speakers Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi in 2014, but he hasn’t made any political donations or endorsements to specific candidates in the 2020 election cycle. In June, he gave $5,000 to Facebook’s PAC, which contributes to both Democratic and Republican candidates.

“Since the beginning of the campaign, we’ve built a top-tier operation with more than 430 staff in South Bend [Ind.] and around the country,” Meagher said. “The staffers come from all types of background, and everyone is working hard every day to elect Pete to the White House.”

A spokesman for the Zuckerberg-Chan family said the employees asked the tech mogul and Chan to recommend them.

“Having seen Mark’s visit to South Bend in 2017 and Facebook Live with Mayor Buttigieg, colleagues later asked Mark and Priscilla to connect them with the Buttigieg campaign as they were interested in joining,” spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a statement. Zuckerberg visited South Bend in April 2017 as part of his philanthropic work and got a tour from Buttigieg, which Zuckerberg live-streamed.

“Mark and Priscilla have not decided who to support for president,” he added.

LaBolt didn’t answer a follow-up question asking whether Zuckerberg has made similar connections for other candidates.

In the emails, Zuckerberg and Chan recommended numerous potential campaign hires, and two of them are now on staff: Eric Mayefsky, senior digital analytics advisor, and Nina Wornhoff, organizing data manager.

Mayefsky previously worked as the director of data science at Quora, a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup founded by former Facebook employees. Mayefsky worked at Facebook for almost four years starting in 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile. Wornhoff previously worked as a machine learning engineer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and in Democratic politics in Indiana, Buttigieg’s home state.

The communication was initiated by Zuckerberg and Chan, Meagher said. It was sent shortly after Buttigieg officially launched his campaign in mid-April.

“From the CNN town hall in March to our launch a month later, we literally got 7,000 resumes,” Meagher said. “I think that he [Zuckerberg] thought Eric would be a good staff hire with a lot of experience and same with Nina and Priscilla.”

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Zuckerberg, 35, and Buttigieg, 37, overlapped at Harvard, and Buttigieg was friends with two of Zuckerberg’s roommates. He was also one of Facebook’s first 300 users. But they were only introduced years later by a mutual Harvard friend.

The staff recommendations from Zuckerberg are the first evidence of the Facebook CEO actively assisting a presidential campaign. A number of other high-ranking Facebook executives, including David Marcus, the executive leading Facebook’s cryptocurrency efforts; Naomi Gleit, one of Facebook’s longest-tenured executives; and Chris Cox, former chief product officer who is close friends with Zuckerberg, have donated to Buttigieg.

In recent weeks, Democrats have escalated their criticism of Facebook for its refusal to moderate political ads. Elizabeth Warren, in particular, has repeatedly attacked Zuckerberg and Facebook over its decision not to fact-check posts or ads shared by politicians. Joe Biden wrote to the company on Thursday demanding that an ad paid for by a pro-President Trump super PAC be pulled down for what he said were lies about his Ukrainian-related work as vice president.

Buttigieg, meanwhile, has become somewhat of a darling of Silicon Valley Democrats, repeatedly returning to San Francisco for high-dollar fundraisers.

He’s been more apprehensive about breaking up big tech companies than some of his Democratic counterparts, saying the issue of monopolies extends beyond tech. But he’s also raised concerns about tech companies having too much power and has floated regulation, including fines and the blocking of mergers, for Facebook and other big tech companies.

Republicans have accused Zuckerberg and Facebook of bias against conservative viewpoints, claiming that Facebook and other social media platforms unfairly suppress their views. Zuckerberg reportedly started to hold private meetings last summer with conservative leaders to hear their concerns.

In the past, Facebook embedded staffers with political campaigns to give them guidance on how to best use the social media platform. The 2016 Trump campaign said it greatly benefited from having Facebook staffers on hand. The company announced in 2018 that it would pull back from offering on-site support.

Now Zuckerberg needs friends in Washington, where Facebook is under unprecedented attack. His company is being investigated for possible antitrust violations by two federal agencies and Congress. It’s also trying to get skeptical regulators and lawmakers on board with its goal of launching a cryptocurrency.

But this presidential cycle, Facebook has become one of Democrats’ top punching bags. In recent weeks, Warren’s campaign has bought ads on Facebook claiming Zuckerberg endorsed Trump, a deliberate falsehood that she used to draw attention to Facebook’s policies exempting politicians from fact-checking ads, and corrected later in the advertisement.

— With assistance from Bill Allison

Ever vigilant for ways to save money for the overburdened federal taxpayer, the Trump administration last week delivered its analysis of a change in eligibility for free or reduced-price school breakfasts and lunches.

The savings: $90 million a year, or two thousandths of a percent of the $4.4-trillion federal budget. The collateral damage: about half a million children who would no longer be eligible for free school meals. They’re a subset of about 1 million children living in households that would lose their eligibility for food stamps.

The consequences of this short-sighted policy could be dire. Food stamps and school meals make powerful contributions to household economic stability and children’s health.

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As Hilary Hoynes of UC Berkeley has observed, “the benefits of nutrition support can persist well into adulthood for those who have access to the program before birth and during early childhood.” The benefits include improved achievement in school and lower rates of obesity, hypertension and heart disease in adulthood.

The analysis came from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the food stamp and school meal programs. It’s a more precise estimate of the impact of rule changes the USDA first announced in July.

Hilary Hoynes, UC Berkeley

The latest figures, however, inspired such an uproar among anti-poverty experts that the administration reopened the official comment period on the rule — extending it by two weeks to Nov. 1.

We’ve written before about the assault by conservatives and the Trump White House on people they choose to think of as the undeserving poor. That’s the outgrowth of a mind-set that views our most vulnerable populations as malingerers, rip-off artists or guilty of moral turpitude.

The USDA’s proposal is an especially nasty example of this behavior. Let’s examine how it would work.

The main thrust of the rule change is an end to “broad-based categorical eligibility” for the food stamp program, which is formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Food stamps are cut off for households with income of more than 130% of the federal poverty line, or $33,475 per year for a family of four (about $2,790 a month). Household income is calculated after exemptions for certain expenses.

Under broad-based categorical eligibility, states can deem households eligible for food stamps based on if they’re receiving assistance from some other anti-poverty programs. The rule, which has been in effect for about 20 years, also allows states to raise the income eligibility and asset limits to promote SNAP eligibility.

Many also do so to avoid the “benefit cliff,” which happens when a modest increase in a family’s income results in a complete cut-off of benefits, leaving the family worse off then when its employment income was lower.

The USDA calculated that the rule change would throw more than 680,000 households with children off SNAP. Of those, about 80% have children in school — 982,000 children, according to the agency’s calculations. And of those, 55%, or about 540,000, would no longer be eligible for free meals, although most would be eligible for reduced-price meals. About 40,000 would have to pay the full rate.

There’s a further wrinkle. Households thrown off SNAP will have to apply separately for access to free or reduced-price school meals for their children. That raises an administrative barrier that may keep many from gaining access, and will raise administrative costs for states.

The USDA didn’t bother to assess the administrative impact. Its cost estimates, it said, “do not account for potential state and local administrative costs incurred due to collecting and processing household applications … and also do not account for any increased responsibility placed on the households to complete and submit a school meals application.”

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has defended this rule change as part of a campaign to close eligibility “loopholes” that allow people to claim benefits to which they’re not entitled, but that’s just window-dressing.

The truth is that there’s no evidence that broad-based eligibility has allowed significant numbers of ineligible people into SNAP. When the Government Accountability Office examined the issue in 2012, it found that 473,000 recipients, or 2.6%, received benefits under broad-based eligibility that they wouldn’t have received without the system — but that was largely because many states raised income limits under broad-based eligibility, as they were permitted to do.

Those households received smaller benefits than the average. The GAO didn’t find that applicants were gaming the asset rules, but rather, that most fell within SNAP guidelines.

Broad-based eligibility, the GAO concluded, had raised SNAP benefit costs by less than 1%. And that was when the aftereffects of the 2008 crash and the recession were still very much in evidence. Since peaking in 2013, SNAP rolls have declined by more than 16%.

But that hasn’t eliminated the need for SNAP or for the school meals program. In this as in so many other initiatives, the Trump administration is trying to present sheer malevolence as a virtue.

SACRAMENTO — 

California voters who are unaffiliated with a political party will be able to participate in the Democratic presidential primary next year, but they will be prohibited from casting ballots for President Trump or any possible Republican challenger, according to information released Monday by state elections officials.

Those rules are made by the individual political parties, not the state. And while the split decision by Democrats and Republicans isn’t new — the same conclusion was reached in elections past — it’s a reminder of the somewhat confusing rules that cover primaries in the nation’s largest voting state.

“As we enter the fifth election cycle under the ‘top-two primary’ system, California voters have become increasingly accustomed to voting for the candidates of their choice regardless of political party preference,” said Secretary of State Alex Padilla in a written statement. “The presidential primary, however, remains the exception.”

Because presidential primaries determine each officially recognized party’s national nominee, party leaders get to determine who is and isn’t eligible to participate. Primary elections for Congress and the Legislature, on the other hand, are subject to California’s top-two primary rules enacted nine years ago, allowing a voter to cast a ballot for any candidate. In those contests, the names of all candidates are printed on every primary ballot and only the two candidates receiving the most votes move on to the November election.

The state’s unique primary system has empowered the 6.2 million voters who are registered as having “no party preference,” currently the second largest group of California voters behind registered Democrats. Both major parties have criticized the top-two primary because it can mean two candidates from the same party can be the only choices come November.

Presidential contests, however, have changed very little through the years.

The state’s six officially recognized political parties — the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Peace and Freedom Party and the American Independent Party — are not required to give permission for unaffiliated voters to cast ballots in their quadrennial presidential primaries.

On Monday, state officials said three parties — the Democratic Party, the Libertarian Party and the American Independent Party — have agreed to do so. The other three will only allow their party’s voters to participate in the March 3 primary.

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“The California Democratic Party is the Party of inclusion,” said Rusty Hicks, the party’s chairman. “Unlike others, we will continue to make it easier — not harder — for Californians to ensure their voices are heard at the ballot box.”

Republicans insist that all voters, including those who decline to join a political party, can vote for their standard-bearer in November.

“It’s been our long-standing position that Republicans should pick the Republican nominee,” said Cynthia Bryant, executive director of the California Republican Party.

But even when they’ve been welcomed into the primary, the rules have been confusing for unaffiliated voters, who frequently refer to themselves as “independent” voters. To participate in a party’s presidential primary, they must specifically request a ballot with the names of party candidates, a step that some who are absentee voters didn’t know about in 2016.

News reports chronicled stories of “no party preference” voters who discovered at the last minute that their mailed ballot didn’t include presidential candidates, but the voter wanted to cast a ballot for either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

If those voters were able to show up at a local elections office in 2016, they were able to exchange the ballot. If not, they were out of luck. That will be true, too, in March’s primary.

Other Californians experienced a different but equally vexing problem in the last presidential primary: they believed they were “independent” voters, but had mistakenly registered with the American Independent Party. An investigation by The Times in 2016 showed widespread confusion by the obscure, ultra-conservative party’s name. In those cases, the voter had no last-minute option because Democrats had only given permission to voters who were actually unaffiliated.

That quandary should be resolved under a law signed earlier this month by Gov. Gavin Newsom that will allow election day voter registration at all polling places and regional vote centers. That includes existing voters who want to change political party affiliation.

Local elections officials are already preparing a robust public awareness campaign, hoping to avoid both mistakes that prohibit voters from choosing a presidential primary candidate and last-minute decisions that could slow down the process of counting votes in March.

Gail Pellerin, the registrar of voters in Santa Cruz County, will send information cards to unaffiliated voters just after the holidays. “We’re asking them to decide in January,” she said.

WASHINGTON — 

The top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine will testify before House investigators Tuesday as Democrats move forward with a shortened schedule this week on their impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

William B. Taylor, who came out of retirement to lead the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, has already provided Democrats with what they consider some of the most damning evidence that Trump was engaged in a quid pro quo with Ukraine.

He and U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland exchanged text messages in July in which Taylor expressed concern about whether a delay in sending congressionally approved aid to Ukraine was linked to Trump’s demand that the new Ukrainian government open an investigation into whether that nation interfered in the 2016 election.

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“As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor wrote in a text message.

About four hours later, Sondland texted Taylor that Trump “has been crystal clear, no quid pro quos of any kind.”

Sondland told House investigators last week that Trump personally told him in a short phone call that there was no quid pro quo.

But on Thursday, White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney confirmed that Trump’s decision to withhold about $400 million in aid was in part due to his desire for Ukraine to look into claims that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. Mulvaney later tried to walk back his comments, insisting there was no quid pro quo.

There has been no evidence that Ukraine intervened. Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report confirmed the conclusion reached by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the presidential election to help Trump.

Taylor came out of retirement to take the job in Ukraine shortly after Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was removed from the post. She testified earlier this month that she was removed for political reasons.

Trump administration officials have said they would not cooperate in the House’s impeachment investigation.

House Democrats had originally planned up to seven depositions this week but they are now expected to hold as few as two because of the recent death of House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.). He will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol National Statuary Hall on Thursday and his funeral will be Friday.

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — 

Tom Brady set the tone with a long slice-and-dice touchdown drive, New England’s blitz-happy defense forced Sam Darnold into five turnovers and the Patriots remained undefeated by cruising to a 33-0 victory over the New York Jets on Monday night.

Brady threw a TD pass to Phillip Dorsett and Sony Michel ran for three scores to help the Patriots improve to 7-0 for the third time in franchise history, and first since 2015.

They also swept the two-game season series against their AFC East rivals for the fourth straight year, outscoring the Jets (1-5) 63-14 in the two meetings this year.

And, the top-ranked Patriots defense was a big reason in this one.

Darnold was the AFC offensive player of the week after leading New York to a 24-22 win over Dallas last Sunday in his return from missing three games with mononucleosis.

He was miserable against New England, finishing 11 of 32 for 86 yards and a 3.6 quarterback rating.

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