The Washington Post - 22.02.2020

saturday, february 22 , 2020. the washington post eZ sU A

California and throughout the nation arriving at a similar con- clusion. He hopes they will look past this week’s feeble debate performance, ignore his history as a Republican and tune out the allegations of misogyny and ra- cial insensitivities in his past — deciding that the imperative to defeat Trump is so great that they can persuade themselves to love the multibillionaire simply because he’s a multibillionaire. Bloomberg, who founded a media and information company that bears his name, is worth an estimated $60 billion and has pledged to spend whatever it takes to win. He has been a candidate for just three months, but his campaign has reported spending a staggering $464 million through Feb. 1 — $ 259 million of that on television advertis- ing. Bloomberg’s candidacy is chal- lenging the adage in politics that buying your way into office is a net negative. Instead, Bloomberg is pitching his wealth as one of his greatest assets. “I’m a philanthropist who

didn’t inherit his money but made his money, and I’m spending that money to get rid of Donald Tr ump, the worst president we have ever had,” Bloomberg said in Wednesday night’s debate. “A nd if I can get that done, it will be a great contribution to America and to my kids.” The other Democratic candidates ascribed darker motives to Bloomberg. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., said Bloomberg “thinks he can buy this election.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) blasted Bloomberg for embody- ing “a corrupt political system” and warned that “real change never takes place from the top on down, never takes place from an oligarchy controlled by billionaires.” And Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) likened Bloomberg to Trump, warning that “Democrats take a huge risk if we just substi- tute one arrogant billionaire for another.” Ye t here in California, where recent polls show Sanders lead-

ing the field and Bloomberg ris- ing into contention, one likely primary voter after another said they were warming to the former New York mayor. As he was getting off work at a shopping mall in Stockton, Mi- chael Rabago, 25, said that he wants more than anything to deny Trump a second term — and that Bloomberg’s billions make him the guy to do it. “Money buys votes, and I just hope Trump doesn’t win again,” Rabago said. “I think it’s going to take a rich guy to beat Trump. I personally want Bernie to win, but money is everything. That’s sad to say, but that’s how it is. I always see Bloomberg’s commer- cials on TV: ‘Mike for 2020.’ ” Faidrian Smith, 49, said she has decided to vote for Bloomberg for a simple reason: “If you don’t have the money to fight him, Trump is going to win the election. Period.” Smith, who is black and works as a driver for a food-delivery service, said as she dashed into a restaurant here to pick up a customer’s order that she feels a

BY COLBY ITKOWITZ AND MICHAEL SCHERER

Former New York mayor Mike
Bloomberg said Friday that his
company will release from their
nondisclosure agreements three
women who have accused him of
making offensive comments, a
decision that comes after days of
pressure from fellow presiden-
tial candidates.
Bloomberg, w ho is r unning f or
the Democratic presidential
nomination, also said that after
“a lot of reflecting,” he will not
propose confidential agreements
to resolve sexual misconduct
claims in the future.
“I recognize that NDAs, partic-
ularly when they are used in the
context of sexual harassment
and sexual assault, promote a
culture of silence in the work-
place and contribute to a culture
of women not feeling safe or

supported,” Bloomberg said in a statement. Bloomberg said his media and financial services company had identified three NDAs that “ad- dress complaints about comments” h e had made. T he women at t he center of those a greements can ask to be released if they would like to speak publicly, Bloomberg said. It is unlikely that Bloomberg’s release applies to any women who have ever accused the company or other employees of harassment or misconduct. It is also unclear how many NDAs Bloomberg’s company h as signed over the past 30 years. Bonnie Josephs, a New York City lawyer who initially represented a former Bloomberg employee in a sexual harassment case, criticized Bloomberg’s decision as too narrow. “This is ridiculous. What it

appears he’s doing is responding only to the people who have complained about him personally,” she said. “In my opinion, he can’t separate that out. He’s the boss. He’s the owner. It’s his shop, and if it happens in his shop, it’s on his watch. It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t him. He sets the tone.” Josephs represented Sekiko Sakai Garrison, a former Bloomberg employee who filed the m ost high-profile suit against him alleging that he told her to “kill it” when he learned she was pregnant, which Garrison took as a reference to abortion. Garrison also said Bloomberg once told her and other female employees to line up and give oral sex as a present to a male colleague who was getting mar- ried. Garrison settled her case for a sum in the six figures, three

sources have told The Post. The NDA issue has dogged Bloomberg for nearly a week, since The Washington Post published a story that detailed de- cades of discrimination lawsuits and claims of sexism against Bloomberg’s company, including one from a former employee that directly blamed Bloomberg for creating a culture that permitted sexual harassment and degrada- tion of women. Unlike President Trump, Bloomberg has not been accused of sexual misconduct, but instead he’s been sued for sexually inappropriate comments that plaintiffs say fostered a hostile workplace culture for women. At Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Sen. Eliza- beth Warren (D-Mass.) ham- mered Bloomberg on the issue, calling on him to release the women from nondisclosure

agreements. Bloomberg initially down- played it, saying “none of them accuse me of doing anything, other t han maybe they d idn’t like a joke I told.” “There’s agreements between two parties that w anted t o keep it quiet and that’s up to them,” he added. “ They signed those agreements, and we’ll live with it.” The next night, Warren goad- ed him with an NDA release f orm she drafted and said he just needed to sign. In internal campaign discus- sions, Bloomberg said Warren’s attacks changed his thinking on the issue, according to a person familiar with Bloomberg who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss campaign de- liberations. Rather than approach the question as a CEO focused on the sanctity of legal agreements,

Bloomberg realized he had to approach the issue as a presidential candidate, this person said. Shortly after Bloomberg’s statement on Friday, Warren said it was “not good enough.” “Michael Bloomberg needs to do a blanket release, so that all the women who have been muz- zled by nondisclosure agreements can step up and tell their side of the story,” she said. “If he wants to be the Democratic nom- inee, and he wants to be the president of the United States, then he’s going to have to be fully transparent on this issue. We cannot have a leader of our party who selectively decides who gets to tell about their history with him.” [email protected] [email protected]

elise Viebeck and Michael Kranish contributed to this report.

Bloomberg says his business will release three women from their NDAs

BY PHILIP RUCKER

STOCKTON, Calif. — Mike
Bloomberg’s rivals for the Demo-
cratic presidential nomination
clamor that the White House is
not for sale — not even for a buyer
worth $60 billion. On the debate
stage as well as the campaign
trail, they castigate him as an
out-of-touch plutocrat unfairly
injecting hundreds of millions of
dollars into the political system
to manipulate democracy.
Ye t here in Stockton, a central
California crossroads where low-
wage warehouse workers feel left
out of the economic boom and
the bustling immigrant commu-
nity has been under siege by
President Trump’s crackdown,
voters have a different take on
Bloomberg’s wealth.
Many Democrats here said
they didn’t know that much
about the former New York may-
or until he started popping up on
television in recent weeks. But
after an unprecedented advertis-
ing blitz in the run-up to the
March 3 Super Tuesday contests
— when California’s primary will
be the biggest prize of all — they
have begun repeating
Bloomberg’s slogan: “Mike will
get it done.”
Lynn Silva, 66, a retired spe-
cial-education instructor for in-
carcerated adults, is a lifelong
Democrat. The Trump era has
made her so anxious and so
worried for the country that she
can no longer stand to listen to
the television when t he president
is speaking. Her list of favorites
to run against him is long and
ever-changing, but she is starting
to conclude that Bloomberg,
hardly her first choice to be the
Democratic standard-bearer,
may be “the ultimate candidate”
for a coldly calculated reason: He
has the money to win.
“I don’t care that he’s a billion-
aire trying to buy the election,”
she said. “If that’s what it takes to
beat Trump, that’s fine. I loved
[Sen. Kamala D. Harris], but look
at her: Out. I loved [Sen.] Cory
Booker, but look at him: Out. No
money.”
“These aren’t regular times,”
Silva added. “We’ve got to get
Trump out. That’s the bottom
line.”
Bloomberg is banking, literal-
ly, on Democratic voters across

personal imperative to defeat Trump. “He’s made racism so blunt and in-your-face now, and we have to change that,” Smith said. “I’m not saying Mike Bloomberg should buy the election. But money helps. It m akes him stron- ger.” Bloomberg’s wealth was a turnoff for some other voters here. Diana Gatewood, 61, a retired special-needs care worker, said: “He’s trying to buy our votes. It d oes take money to make the world go around, but just because he’s a billionaire doesn’t mean he’s doing right by people.” Gatewood said she has not decided whom to vote for in the March 3 primary, but she’s lean- ing toward Sanders, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and To m Stey- er, another billionaire who is self-funding his campaign but has had far more limited success than Bloomberg. Synthia, 57, a retired parole officer who declined to provide her last name for fear of political retribution, acknowledged that Bloomberg’s b illions would p rove helpful in the general election but said she was disinclined to vote for him. “How does he help the people — the underdogs, the working- class, the blue-collar?” s he asked. “I think he’s playing a political game.... We’re not pawns in a game. We’re people with lives. At the end of the day, we go home to our bills and our stressors, and these billionaires go home to their rich lives.” Bloomberg has a prominent and enthusiastic champion here in Michael Tubbs, Stockton’s dy- namic young black mayor and a self-described liberal Democrat. Tubbs, 29, was elected mayor on the same night in 2016 that Trump was elected president, and he quickly began to fully comprehend what Trump’s presidency meant for his city of about 311,000. In his first few months as mayor, Tubbs said, he spent most of his time not on crime or roads or other typical municipal mat- ters, but on immigration — spe- cifically, trying to reassure his constituents, roughly one-third of whom are foreign-born, that despite the president’s rhetoric and the harsh crackdown on

illegal immigration that he au- thorized, they would continue to have sanctuary in Stockton. “Donald Trump is literally an existential threat,” Tubbs said. “Their way of life, their way of being, their way of interacting in the community has been changed by his presidency, and the top priority has to be to get him out.” Tubbs described Stockton as a microcosm of America, a diverse melting pot in which 45 percent of residents are white and the median household income is just $51,000, a ccording to U.S. Census Bureau data. The city is a trans- portation and logistics hub, meaning many jobs here pay low wages, at least relative to Silicon Valley and California’s other booming metropolises. Tubbs is a sort-of Bloomberg protege. He graduated from a Harvard University mayoral training program that Bloomberg funds and said he tries to model his use of data in running Stockton’s municipal af- fairs after Bloomberg’s adminis- tration in New York. As he considered which candidate to support for president, Tubbs first gravitated toward Harris, one of his home state’s Democratic senators. But once she was out of the race, he eyed Bloomberg, who agreed to make Stockton his first stop in Califor- nia as a candidate. Since Bloomberg’s visit here in December, Tubbs has been an evangelist for his candidacy, ex- plaining to his working- and middle-class constituents why they should put their faith in a Manhattan billionaire. “I tell people, ‘Beating Donald Trump is the top priority,’ ” Tubbs said. “Donald Trump and the Republican Party are playing to win.” By nominating one of the other candidates, Tubbs argued, Democrats would be “unilateral- ly disarming” in the face of Trump’s campaign war chest. “You can’t beat Donald Trump with no money,” Tubbs said. “It’s just not happening. You’re going to have to have the resources to compete and also to build up the infrastructure in states so that something like Donald Trump doesn’t happen again, and Bloomberg has shown a willing- ness to do that.” [email protected]

Some voters warm to Bloomberg’s much-maligned wealth

toni L. sandys/the Washington Post Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg makes a call from his campaign headquarters on Jan. 28. Other candidates have castigated the former New York mayor as an out-of-touch plutocrat.

BY JOSH DAWSEY, TOM HAMBURGER AND CAROL D. LEONNIG

President Trump has directly
weighed in on the White House
review of a forthcoming book by
his former national security a dvis-
er, telling his staff that he views
John Bolton as “a traitor,” that
everything he uttered to the de-
parted aide about national securi-
ty i s classified and that he w ill seek
to block the book’s publication,
according to two people familiar
with the conversations.
T he president’s private argu-
ments stand in contrast to the
point-by-point process used to
classify and protect sensitive se-
crets and appears to differ from
the White House’s public posture
toward Bolton’s m uch-anticipated
memoir. The National Security
Council warned B olton last month
that his draft “appears to contain
significant amounts of classified
information,” s ome of i t top secret,
but pledged to help him revise the
manuscript and “ move forward as
expeditiously as possible.”
“We will do our best to work
with you to ensure your client’s
ability to tell h is story in a m anner

that protects U. S. national security,” E llen Knight, senior director of the council’s records office, wrote in a Jan. 23 letter to Bolton’s attor- ney. B ut the president has insisted to aides that Bolton’s account of his work in Trump’s White House, “The Room Where It Happened,” should not see the light of day before the November election, according to the two people familiar with the c onversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House de- liberations. Trump has told his lawyers that Bolton should not be allowed to publish any of his interactions with him about national security because they are privileged and classified, these people said. He has a lso r epeatedly b rought up t he book with his t eam, a sking whether Bolton is going to be able to publish it, t hey said. Trump told national television anchors on Feb. 4 during an off- the-record lunch that material in the book was “highly classified,” according to notes from one par- ticipant in the luncheon. He then called h im a “traitor.” “We’re going to try and block

the publication of the book,” Trump said, according to the notes. “A fter I leave office, he can do this. But not in the White House.” “I give the guy a break. I give him a job. And then he turns on me,” Trump added during the West Wing lunch. “He’s just making things up.” Bolton’s book has promised to unveil key first-person moments between Bolton and Trump that were at t he heart o f the president’s handling of Ukraine, a saga that led to his impeachment by the House. In a recent appearance at Van- derbilt University, former Obama national security adviser Susan E. Rice attacked Bolton for failing to testify in the impeachment hear- ings and said she “couldn’t imag- ine” withholding critical information from the American people to preserve it for a book. Bolton insisted his testimony would not have changed the Senate’s impeachment acquittal. As t he Senate launched a trial in late January o n the House’s c harg- es that Trump abused t he power of his office and obstructed Con- gress, the New York Times report-

ed it had learned a key detail al- leged b y Bolton in his manuscript: that Trump told h im he was condi- tioning the release of military aid to Ukraine on whether its government would help investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son. Trump responded to that story on Jan. 27 by tweeting that he “NEVER t old John Bolton t hat aid to Ukraine was tied to investiga- tions into the Bidens or Demo- crats.” Democrats demanded that Bol- ton be summoned to testify in the Senate trial, but Republicans re- jected those calls. A person close to Bolton s aid h e has grown concerned in recent weeks that the White House has appeared t o claim t hat broad cate- gories of topics are classified, without clearly identifying or ar- ticulating the reasons for that lev- el of p rotection. A s eparate person close to Bolton said the t eam antic- ipates t he possibility of a long l egal battle over t he issue. Bolton’s lawyer, Charles J. Coo- per, declined to comment Friday on the claim of classified material and t he president’s p ledge to block the b ook’s r elease.

“The NSC’s pre-publication review of Ambassador Bolton’s m anuscript is proceeding,” Cooper said. “Ambassador Bolton is con- tinuing to pursue it in good faith. We have nothing to say beyond that.” In m any ways, Bolton r emains a captive of t he White House r eview process. He has earned a reported seven-figure advance for his account from publisher Simon & Schuster, which has planned to release the b ook o n March 17. But Bolton would take a huge legal risk — including the p ossibil- ity of a criminal investigation — if he published h is m anuscript w ith- out the National Security Coun- cil’s f inal approval. There is precedent to give Bol- ton and his lawyers reason to pause. A former Navy SEAL wrote a 2012 book about his role in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, triggering a Justice Department criminal investigation into allegations he published classified de- tails of his work and training as a special operator. In a 2016 settlement, Matt Bis- sonnette, who wrote “No Easy Day” under the pen name Mark Owen, agreed to turn over to the

government all the profits and future royalties stemming from his book — which amounted to at least $6.6 million at the time. As part of the deal, Bissonnette acknowledged he failed to get his manuscript properly cleared by the Pentagon. In exchange, the Justice Department agreed to dis- miss any other claims and drop any plans to prosecute h im for t he release of classified information. Robert Luskin, the lawyer who represented Bissonnette after he came under investigation, said Bolton can challenge the White House review but it is u nclear h ow he might fare. “ The challenge for Bolton is that the president has pretty broad power to classify or declassify; but once the manuscript has actually been submitted for review, Bolton would have the right to challenge undue delay or purely capricious or vindictive exercises of the government’s authority to review and require changes,” Luskin said. “He could get judicial review, but the process would not be fast and the rules n ot especially clear. ” [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Trump, claiming conversations are classified, wants to block Bolton’s book

The Washington Post - 22.02.2020

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