The Washington Post - 07.09.2019

A4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 , 2019

to argue that the effect of their joint conversations would be to raise prices above what they would be if the companies simply complied with federal law. “It’s never been considered a violation of antitrust law for companies to get together and pro- mote a policy position, said Gene Kimmelman, a senior adviser at the nonprofit free-expression group Public Knowledge who once served as chief counsel in the Justice Department’s antitrust di- vision. The carmakers in this instance “got together not with themselves but with state regulators to set policy,” h e said. “It’s different from sitting down in a smoke-filled room with t hemselves.” Sen. Thomas R. Carper (Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement that “this investigation is nothing but an attempt by the Trump Ad- ministration to retaliate against these companies and stoke fear in others. If we should be investigat- ing anything, it should be what is good for our planet in reducing automobile emissions and pro- moting job creation.” jul [email protected] [email protected]

When the deal between Califor- nia and the four car companies was announced in July, the Na- tional Highway Traffic Safety Ad- ministration said that its push to roll back mileage standards did not mean that automakers could not manufacture more-efficient vehicles. “The proposal contained no language that would prevent any auto manufacturer from design- ing and building next-generation highly fuel-efficient vehicles, including hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, battery electric vehicles, hybrids, and plug-in hybrids in re- sponse to market demands,” the agency said. Margo Oge, who directed the EPA’s Office of Transportation a nd Air Quality from 1994 to 2012, questioned the Trump administration’s basis for the probe. Cali- fornia still has a federal waiver to set tailpipe emissions, she noted, and a similar voluntary framework on low-emissions vehicles was f orged in the late 1990s. “The idea that they did some- thing illegal, and that the companies colluded, it doesn’t pass the laugh t est,” Oge s aid. Some antitrust e xperts said that any Justice Department case against t he c armakers would have

Conspicuously absent from the talks w ith California was G M. Lar- ry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, said Friday morning on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” program: “We did meet with Mary Barra. Mary B arra e xpressed to the p resi- dent her support for our reforms” on fuel standards. Kudlow said that Barra was “doing her best to open up plants.” He said, “Look, the industry asked us to lower the regulatory barriers to safe and cheaper cars.” Asked about Kudlow’s com- ments, GM spokeswoman Jean- nine Ginivan said that the company r emained committed t o finding a compromise on nationwide fuel efficiency standards that Califor- nia and administration officials could accept. In a statement Friday, Califor- nia Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) pledged to press ahead with the auto agreement. “The Trump administration has been attempting and failing to bully car companies for m onths now. We remain u nde- terred,” said Newsom, who later taunted Trump on Twitter about the move. “California stands up to bullies and will keep fighting for stronger clean car protections that protect the health and safety of our children and families.”

adopted standards to boost aver- age fuel efficiency to the equiva- lent of 54.5 miles per gallon for cars and light-duty trucks b y model year 2025. The Obama administration said that fuel efficiency standards it had set would save consumers more than $1.7 trillion at t he g as pump and r educe U. S. oil consumption by 1 2 billion barrels. Since the Clean Air Act’s incep- tion in 1970, C alifornia h as had t he right to seek a federal waiver to impose more-stringent air pollu- tion standards than those of the federal government. Federal au- thorities have almost always granted the w aiver, a nd California based its vehicle requirements on the grounds that it was regulating carbon emissions rather than overall f uel efficiency. Thirteen other states and the District o f Columbia have pledged to accept whatever tailpipe standards California adopts. Under the framework Califor- nia e stablished w ith t he f our companies, which represent about 30 p ercent of t he U.S. auto market, the automakers have agreed to produce fleets averaging nearly 50 miles per gallon by model year

That is one year later than
the target set under the Obama
administration.

the state’s deal with the four automakers “appears to be inconsis- tent with federal law.” The agencies’ general counsels urged the board to break the com- mitments w ith the a utomakers, as the a greement “may r esult in l egal consequences given the limits placed in federal law on Califor- nia’s a uthority.” A spokeswoman f or Ford Motor Co., Rachel McCleery, confirmed that the company had been con- tacted in c onnection with the a nti- trust probe. “We have received a letter from t he D epartment of Jus- tice and will cooperate with respect t o any inquiry,” s he said. The probe was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. California’s push to set stricter tailpipe limits is important because the state ranks as the na- tion’s largest market for automo- biles and its standards often carry weight beyond its borders. Ad- ministration officials have l obbied other automakers n ot to sign o n to the new framework: On Thursday, the issue came up during a meeting between President Trump and General Motors chief executive Mary B arra. The fuel efficiency standards ranked as a top priority for the Obama administration. In 2012, it

(D-Calif.) said the investigation
“seeks to weaponize law enforce-
ment for partisan political pur-
poses to advance the Trump ad-
ministration’s toxic special inter-
est agenda.”
The news coincides with argu-
ments held Friday morning at the
U.S. Court of Appeals in the Dis-
trict o f Columbia over whether the
Trump administration can reopen
— and roll back — fuel efficiency
standards the Obama administra-
tion set for model years 2022
through 2025. Environmental
groups and states argue that the
Trump administration has not
done the technical research need-
ed to make its own findings re-
garding the r egulations.
The proposal to freeze mileage
standards at roughly 37 miles per
gallon through 2026, slated to be
finalized this fall, is part of a
broader effort by the administra-
tion to dismantle a slew of Obama-
era policies aimed at curbing
greenhouse gases linked to cli-
mate change.
The two federal entities — the
Environmental Protection A gency
and Transportation Department
— notified the California Air Re-
sources Board and Nichols that

AUTOMAKERS FROM A

BY GREG JAFFE AND MICHAEL SCHERER

Former Starbucks chief execu-
tive Howard Schultz formally
abandoned his pursuit of an
independent campaign for presi-
dent Friday, telling his support-
ers in a letter that he found it
tougher than he expected to
capture the attention of moder-
ate voters and that he didn’t w ant
to risk reelecting President
Trump.
Schultz’s decision, after spend-
ing months away from public life
because of health issues, will
come as a relief to Democratic
leaders, who feared an independ-
ent candidacy by a self-funded
billionaire would hobble their
eventual nominee. Despite grow-
ing frustration with the country’s
politics, his aborted run serves as
a cautionary tale about the resil-
iency of the country’s two-party
political system.
In a three-page letter to sup-
porters, Schultz outlined his rea-
sons for abandoning his presi-
dential bid and sketched his
plans for the future. Moderate
voters, who he hoped would be
his constituency, have “largely
tuned out of political life,” he
wrote, and many other potential
supporters would not back him
because of their concern that he
would aid Trump’s reelection.
The calendar also worked
against his ambitions, complicat-
ing Schultz’s commitment to

withdraw his candidacy before a general election if a centrist like former vice president Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination. “If I went forward, there is a risk that my name would appear on ballots even if a moderate Democrat wins the nomination, and that is not a risk I am willing to take,” he wrote. Schultz, 66, burst on the political scene in January, when he announced on CBS’s “60 Min- utes” that he was considering an independent campaign, days after the news broke that his advis- ers were exploring the possibility of a third-party run. His campaign was premised on the notion that a large, moderate plurality in the country felt abandoned by the Republican and Democratic shift toward an- grier, more partisan politics and more extreme positions. He also assumed that it was likely that a “far left” candidate would capture the Democratic nomination. “Eighty-four percent of Ameri- cans do not consider themselves far right or far left,” S chultz wrote to supporters Friday. “Among them are an exhausted majority who want common sense, collab- orative and truthful government.” Nine months after he publicly floated the idea of running, Schultz conceded that reaching that “exhausted majority” had proved difficult. In the first weeks of his effort,

which coincided with a national book tour, Schultz received broad media coverage but struggled to turn that attention into a devoted following. He also juggled a fierce backlash from Democrats. “Here is what is going to happen: He is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and he is going to get into September or October of 2020, and he is going to realize he can’t win,” Jim Messina, President Ba- rack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, predicted. “He is going to endorse the Democrat or he will accidentally elect Donald Trump.” Trump, meanwhile, seemed to dare Schultz to get into the race.

“Howard Schultz doesn’t have the ‘guts’ to run for President!” Trump tweeted after the “ Minutes” announcement. In his letter, Schultz alluded to those challenges, lamenting that “extreme voices currently domi- nate the national dialogue, often with a vitriol that crowds out and discourages thoughtful discus- sions.” Schultz also noted that he has been recuperating from three recent back surgeries that have prevented him from touring the country. His letter announcing his decision not to run was tinged with an irony: Schultz maintained that the window for a moderate,

reasoned third-party candidate was wide open. But he could not figure out how to grab and hold voters’ attention in an electoral cycle dominated by angry, partisan voices. “We don’t have to look far to see proof that empathy, respect and civility run deep,” he wrote. “But not in Washington D.C.” Schultz repeatedly brushed off criticism that his presidential run was driven by vanity, insist- ing that he would withdraw from the race if he risked reelecting Trump. “Trump must not serve a second term,” he said in February. “A s I explore whether to run for office, I will do so with the conviction that my final decision must not make his reelection a possibility.... No one wants Donald Trump fired more than I.” During a tenure as the chief executive of Starbucks, which ended in 2018, Schultz cast him- self as a compassionate leader who wanted to use his company for social good. He earned praise for the benefits Starbucks provid- ed its retail workers, including a stock ownership plan, health- care coverage options for part- time employees and the opportu- nity to attend college online at no cost. When Tr ump announced a ban on U.S. visitors from seven pre- dominantly Muslim countries in January 2017, Schultz announced a company goal of hiring 10,

refugees in stores around the world. As a politician, he promised to operate free from party ortho- doxy, saying as president he would not sign any legislation that did not have bipartisan support and that he would seek to have his Supreme Court nomi- nees approved by two-thirds of the Senate. He promised to “go after” government expenditures in Social Security and Medicare and called for raising taxes on the wealthy, but he also denounced liberal calls for a new tax on wealth or a return to 70 percent tax rates for those in top income brackets. Schultz, whose wealth is esti- mated at more than $3 billion, was stung by the angry and personal nature of the criticism that came at him as he weighed whether to run. In ending his run, he urged Americans “not to become hopeless or complacent.” The last time a third-party presidential candidate won indi- vidual states was in 1968, when former Alabama governor George Wallace picked up 46 electoral college votes in the South on the American Inde- pendent Party ticket. Republican Richard M. Nixon nonetheless won that election, and third-party bids have been blamed by partisans since then for affecting election results. [email protected] [email protected]

BY ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER

Beto O’Rourke’s presidential
campaign sent letters to major
technology companies Friday
morning imploring them to do
more to root out disinformation
ahead of the 2020 election.
The pointed appeals, from
campaign manager Jen O’Malley
Dillon, came after a conspiracy
theory falsely linking the former
Te xas congressman to the gun-
man who killed seven people in
two West Texas towns last Satur-
day was allowed to spread on
social media this week, garnering
thousands of shares and, accord-
ing to the campaign, at one point
becoming the second-highest-
trending Google search query re-
lated to O’Rourke in the preced-
ing seven days.
Among those who amplified
the deceptive claim — which ap-
peared to originate on Twitter
with the charge that the gunman
was a democratic socialist with an
O’Rourke sticker on his truck —
were Anthony Shaffer, a former
Defense Intelligence Agency offi-
cer and a member of an advisory
board whose mission is to pro-
mote President Trump, and Se-
bastian Gorka, who worked brief-
ly in the White House.
Otherwise, many of the ac-
counts that promoted the false-
hoods exhibited botlike charac-
teristics, according to analysts.
Nir Hauser, the chief technology
officer at VineSight, which uses
artificial intelligence to track mis-
information, said the original
tweet received an initial boost

from accounts that behaved like bots, a type of software that can be set up to push messages on social media. After briefly suspending the in- stigating account, which operates under the handle @suemo54 and the name “Sue Moore,” Twitter said Thursday that it would not remove the posts because they do not violate the company’s policies. That did not sit well with O’Rourke’s campaign. The letters were sent to top executives at Twitter, Facebook and Google, companies that together wield vast power over the online ecosystem, shaping how their users communicate, think

and vote. The technology and publishing giants, O’Malley Dillon wrote, are “being used every day to prolifer- ate misinformation, and corpo- rate leadership is failing in its duty to protect our country from these attacks. In 2016, Silicon Val- ley’s flagrant inaction called into question the very results of our presidential election; and if they don’t do better in 2020, we may lose our democracy forever.” The communications, which were p rovided to The Washington Post, testify to the sense of alarm among some Democrats that not enough has been done to immu- nize the country’s information

landscape from the sort of attacks perpetrated by Russia in the lead- up to the 2016 election, attacks that prosecutors and intelligence officials say were designed t o help elect Trump. And the letters illustrate the campaigns’ increasing willing- ness to go toe-to-toe with the platforms. In July, Rep. Tulsi Gab- bard (Hawaii), another Demo- cratic contender for president, filed a federal lawsuit against Google, claiming that the company denied her free speech when it temporarily suspended h er adver- tising account following the first Democratic debate. The legal claim is believed to mark the first

time a presidential candidate has sued a technology giant. O’Rourke’s campaign did not go that far. But it put the tech companies on notice about objec- tions to the way they construe their role as referees of political discourse. “This is your job, not ours,” wrote O’Malley Dillon, who was a deputy campaign manager for President Barack Obama’s reelection effort in 2012. She made several requests, including that the companies do more to take down fake accounts and shed light on which political posts are gaining attention on their platforms and why. Each of the companies has made attempts to clean up the material it broadcasts to the public. Among the steps over the past several years have been tighten- ing standards for political adver- tising and testing tools for fact- checking content. There have also been notable setbacks. Google on Tuesday agreed to pay $170 million to settle claims that it illegally col- lected data about children as they watched videos on YouTube in order to more effectively target them with ads. Notably not among the recipi- ents of the letters from O’Rourke’s campaign m anager was the federal government, which this week dispatched representatives from the Department of Homeland Se- curity, t he Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI to huddle with major technology companies — including the three criticized by the O’Rourke campaign — at Facebook’s headquar- ters in Silicon Valley. It was the first meeting of its size involving government and industry, and it came at a time when the appetite for regulating Silicon Valley titans appears to be growing in Wash-

ington. Google and Twitter representatives declined to comment on the letters. Facebook didn’t return a request for comment. O’Rourke has not been the only Democratic presidential candidate subject to smears on social media. In June, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, shared — and then removed — a tweet falsely claiming that Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) w as not genuine- ly a black American because her father is Jamaican. Twitter disallows abuse, ha- rassment and threats of violence, among other types of behavior laid out in its rules. The company also says it monitors for manipu- lation and acts when it detects large-scale inauthentic behavior. According to analysis by Vine- Sight, none of the accounts that simply retweeted the original post a bout O’Rourke were verified on Twitter. That doesn’t factor in the users who amplified the tweet and added their own commen- tary, such as Shaffer and Gorka. Joshua Tucker, a professor of politics and co-director of New York University’s Social Media and Political Participation lab, said platforms may run into trou- ble by seeking to remain political- ly neutral if the volume of false content disproportionately tar- gets one party, as it did with Democrats before the 2016 election. Removing an equal amount of anti-Democratic and anti-Repub- lican content, he said, “is actually only a nonbiased action if the supply of ‘fake news’ is roughly equal in terms of favoring or dis- paraging each party.” [email protected]

Tony Romm and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

Not w anting to risk reelecting Trump, Howard Schultz won’t run for president

O’Rourke campaign chastises tech firms after spread of false claim

JOSHUA LOTT/GETTY IMAGES Former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz had planned to capture the attention of moderate voters during his campaign.

WINSLOW TOWNSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke greets students at Tufts University near Boston on Thursday. A recent online conspiracy theory falsely linked O’Rourke to a mass shooter in Texas.

Letters ask Twitter, Facebook and Google to combat misinformation

After administration’s legal threats, Calif. defends emissions deal with carmakers

The Washington Post - 07.09.2019

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