A1 0 eZ M2 the washington post.thursday, february 20 , 2020
accounting.“You know that from the
moment, from the moment we
passed that signature legislation,
Mike called it a disgrace.”
— Biden
Biden gets this mostly right,
but some context is required. In a
speech in 2010, after the
Affordable Care Act was passed,
Bloomberg gave a speech at
Dartmouth College.
“We passed a health-care bill
that does absolutely nothing to
fix the big health-care problems
in this country. It is just a
disgrace,” he said, according to a
report by CNN. “The president, in
all fairness, started out by
pointing out what the big
problems were, but then turned
it over to Congress, which didn’t
pay any attention to any of those
big problems and just created
another program that’s going to
cost a lot of money.”
He went on to say: “It’s really
sad because they say they’ve
insured or provided coverage for
another 45 million people. Except
there’s no doctors for 45 million
more people and unless they fix
immigration and let people who
come here for medical education
stay here, those people are just
going to do the same thing.
They’re going to have to go to the
emergency rooms where they’ve
been, except that now it’s going to
cost a lot more money.”
As Bloomberg noted, he did
write an opinion article for the
Daily News supportive of a
health-care overhaul bill.“I’d like to talk about who
we’re running against, a
billionaire who calls women ‘fat
broads’ and ‘horse-faced
lesbians.’ And, no, I’m not talking
about Donald Trump. I’m talking
about Mayor Bloomberg.”
— Sen. Elizabeth Warren
(Mass.)
Warren was referring to a line
in a booklet given to Bloomberg
on his 48 th birthday, and
recently published in The
Washington Post, that
supposedly included actual
quotes from Bloomberg,
including this one:
“The Royal Family — what a
bunch of misfits — a gay, an
architect, that horsy faced
lesbian, and a man who gave up
Koo Stark for some fat broad.”
[email protected]election 2020
BY MICHAEL KRANISHIt was a dramatic moment at
Wednesday’s Democratic debate:
Elizabeth Warren turned to Mike
Bloomberg and demanded that h e
release women from nondisclo-
sure agreements they had signed
after suing him, so they could tell
their stories of alleged harassment
or discrimination.
Bloomberg, v isibly u nsettled b y
the fierceness of the attack, re-
fused to back down, saying the
deals were mutual and there was
no reason to nullify them. “They
signed the agreements, and that’s
what we’re going to live with,”
Bloomberg said.
Warren did not let up. “What we
need to know is exactly what’s
lurking out there,” she said. “He
has gotten some number of wom-
en — dozens, w ho knows — to sign
nondisclosure agreements both
for sexual harassment and for gen-
der discrimination in the work-
place. So, Mr. Mayor, are you will-
ing to release all of those women
from those nondisclosure agree-
ments, so we can hear t heir side o f
the s tory?”
The sharp exchange came as
Bloomberg faces g rowing scrutiny
about whether he has made pro-
fane and s exist comments to wom-
en. His history of such alleged
comments was outlined in a re-
cent Washington Post report that
disclosed an array of new details.
His responses Wednesday reflect-
ed an awkwardness that has not
been evident in the numerous
television ads he has aired show-
ing him as a c an-do leader.
Bloomberg also played down
the alleged offenses involved.
“None of them accuse me of any-
thing other than maybe they
didn’t like a joke I told,” he said,
eliciting an audible gasp from the
audience.
Bloomberg said there were
“very few nondisclosure agree-
ments” but declined to say exactly
how many existed.
While Bloomberg and his cam-
paign previously have said he
would not release ex-employees
from the nondisclosure agree-
ments, his refusal to do so during
his first appearance on a Demo-
cratic presidential debate stage is
likely to heighten attention on the
allegations and on what is con-
tained in the a greements.
The highest-profile agreement
was signed by a former top sales-
woman, Sekiko Sakai Garrison.
She alleged that when Bloomberg
learned in 1995 that she was preg-
nant, he said “kill it,” allegedly
referring to the pregnancy and
advocating a n abortion.
Garrison said in her suit that
she a sked Bloomberg to repeat h is
comment, a nd h e did.
Bloomberg, who denied mak-
ing the remark, has declined to
release his deposition i n the Garri-
son case. He said in a separate
deposition to the Equal Employ-
ment Opportunity Commission
that the allegation by Garrison
was “ ridiculous.”
The Post interviewed a former
Bloomberg employee, David
Zielenziger, who said he heard
Bloomberg ask Garrison, “A re yougoing to kill it?” Zielenziger, who
had not previously spoken public-
ly about the matter, said he found
the comment “outrageous. I un-
derstood why she took o ffense.”
It is not clear whether Garrison
wants to be released f rom the con-
fidentiality agreement. She has
not responded to requests for
comment. The Post reported on
Saturday that she sought $5 mil-
lion in compensatory damages
and $300, 000 in punitive damag-
es, and that the settlement was in
the s ix figures.
In her lawsuit, Garrison also al-
leged that Bloomberg regularly
made sexist and profane state-
ments. She said that when
Bloomberg noticed her near a
group of people having their p hoto-graph being taken, he asked her:
“Why d idn’t t hey ask you t o be in the
picture? I guess they saw your face.”
Garrison also alleged that when
Bloomberg learned that a sales-
man was getting married, he said
to a group of saleswomen: “A ll of
you girls line up to give him [oral
sex] as a wedding present.”
Bloomberg on Wednesday ar-
gued that he was a champion of
women, saying the executive who
runs his foundation is a woman, as
are 70 percent of its employees,
and that women hold prominent
jobs in his company.
“I have n o tolerance f or the k ind
of behavior that the # MeTo o move-
ment has exposed,” Bloomberg
said.
Warren told the audience, “Ihope you heard what his defense
was: ‘I’ve been nice to some wom-
en.’ That j ust doesn’t c ut i t.”
Warren also said Bloomberg’s
refusal to release former employ-
ees from the agreements was not
just a matter of character.
“This is also a question about
electability,” the senator from
Massachusetts said. “We are not
going to beat D onald Trump with a
man who has who knows how
many nondisclosure agreements
and t he d rip, d rip, drip of stories of
women saying they have been ha-
rassed and discriminated
against.”
Former vice president Joe
Biden joined in, saying that the
agreements arose when
Bloomberg agreed to pay womenin exchange for silence and that
there is no obstacle to his with-
drawing his insistence that they
not t alk.
“It’s easy,” Biden said. “A ll the
mayor has to do is say, ‘You are
released from t he nondisclosure.’ ”
Bloomberg also faced attacks
Wednesday for statements attrib-
uted to him in a 199 0 booklet
prepared by a top staffer, titled
“The Wit and Wisdom of Michael
Bloomberg.”
Warren, while not citing her
source, said that Bloomberg had
referred to “fat broads” and
“horse-faced lesbians.” Bloom -
berg’s spokesman has denied that
he made statements quoted in the
32-page booklet.
[email protected]Bloomberg holds the line on nondisclosure agreements
etienne Laurent/ePa-eFe/shutterstock
Mike Bloomberg refused to back down in a debate clash with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) over nondisclosure agreements, saying the deals were mutual and there was no
reason to nullify them. “They signed the agreements, and that’s what we’re going to live with,” the former New York mayor said in Las Vegas.According to FactCheck.org,
“Bloomberg gets to his figure of a
95% cut by cherry-picking the
quarterly high point of 203,
stops in the first quarter of 2012
and comparing that with the
12, 485 stops in the last quarter of
2013 — a decline that would not
have been possible without the
numbers ballooning earlier in
Bloomberg’s tenure.”
Bloomberg said he later
discovered that the stop-and-
frisk policy had gotten out of
control and ramped it down, but
that claim misses some context.
For starters, Bloomberg
continued to defend it until
recently, disowning it only before
he joined the presidential race.
In addition, his administration
was buffeted by lawsuits
challenging the practice, and a
federal judge ruled in 2013 that
the way New York police officers
were conducting the stop-and-
frisks was unconstitutional. It
was in the face of those legal
challenges and rulings that New
York reduced stop-and-frisks
under Bloomberg.“Let’s get something straight.
The reason the stop-and-frisk
changed is because Barack
Obama sent moderators to see
what was going on when we sent
him there to say, ‘This practice
has to stop.’ The mayor thought it
was a terrible idea. We send them
there, a terrible idea. Let’s get the
facts straight. Let’s get the order
straight. And it’s not whether you
apologize or not. It’s the policy.”
— Former vice president Joe
Biden
Biden’s claim is misleading,
stretching the minor role the
Justice Department played in the
legal proceedings over New
York’s stop-and-frisk policy
under Bloomberg.
A federal judge, Shira
Scheindlin, ruled in 2013 that the
way New York police officers had
been conducting stop-and-frisks
of predominantly black and
Hispanic men was
unconstitutional. The ruling
came amid a series of legal
challenges brought by groups
such as the ACLU.
The Justice Department underThe ninth
Democratic
presidential
debate of the 2020
campaign, hosted
by NBC, MSNBC
and the Nevada
Independent, had
six candidates,
lasted two hours
— and did not
have many
statements that merited fact-
checking. Here are five claims
that caught our attention. Our
practice is not to award
Pinocchios in debate roundups.
This fact check was written with
my colleagues Salvador Rizzo
and Sarah Cahlan.
“Well, if I go back and look at
my time in office, the one thing
that I’m really worried about,
embarrassed about, was how it
turned out with stop-and-frisk.
When I got into office, there were
650 murders a year in New York
City. And I thought that my first
responsibility was to give people
the right to live. That’s the basic
right of everything. And we
started it. We adopted a policy
which had been in place. The
policy that all big police
departments use of stop-and-
frisk. What happened, however,
was it got out of control. And
when we discovered, I discovered,
that we were doing many, many,
too many stop-and-frisks, we cut
95 percent of it.”
— Former New York mayor
Mike Bloomberg
Bloomberg’s claim that he cut
95 percent of stop-and-frisks,
which disproportionately
targeted black and Hispanic men
in New York City while he was
mayor, relies on a selective
parsing of the data.
He inherited the city’s stop-
and-frisk policy from his
predecessor, Rudolph W.
Giuliani, but it was the
Bloomberg administration that
ramped up the practice by New
York police. In Bloomberg’s first
10 years in office, stop-and-frisks
increased nearly 600 percent,
reaching a high point of about
686,0 00 actions in 2011.
Bloomberg, Biden mislead on
ending of stop-and-frisk policy
The Fact
Checker
Glenn
Kessler
supported nine of Trump’s 31
circuit court nominees. Only
three Democrats scored lower in
the Demand Justice ranking.
But Buttigieg was wrong in
suggesting Klobuchar had the
worst rating of those running for
president. Sen. Michael F. Bennet
(Colo.), who recently dropped
out, was ranked two slots below
her. He tied on the number of
votes on district court nominees
but voted for 11 circuit court
nominees.
Brian Fallon, executive
director of Demand Justice,
tweeted: “Klobuchar was one of
the worst Senate Democrats in
2017-2018 when it came to voting
for Trump’s judges. She has
changed in 2019 since running
for President. Which is welcome.
But in 2017-2018, she supported
two thirds of Trump nominees.”
The Klobuchar campaign,
citing a methodology that also
counted voice votes, said she
voted for Trump’s judges
33.5 percent of the time, which
would place her as the seventh-
most-opposed Democrat. But
ahead of her are five candidates
who ran for president, with Sen.
Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) leading
the list. The only senator who ran
for president who opposed fewer
judges is again Bennet under thismultiethnic movement that rose
in NYC against Bloomberg’s
racist policing program. That’s
what ended stop-and-frisk. Not
Biden, not Obama.”“You have been unusual
among Democrats... the
Democrat among all of the
senators running for president,
most likely to vote for Donald
Trump’s judges.”
— Former South Bend, Ind.,
mayor Pete Buttigieg
“I have opposed and not
supported two-thirds of the
Trump judges. So get your
numbers right, and I am in the
top 10 to 15 of opposing them.”
— Sen. Amy Klobuchar
(Minn.)
In this tiff over votes for Senate
judges, Buttigieg and Klobuchar
offered dueling statistics that are
apples and oranges. He was
comparing her to senators
running for president, while she
responded how she compared to
all other Senate Democrats.
Buttigieg was referring to her
record in 2017-2018, which
earned her an “F” f rom left-
leaning group Demand Justice.
The group said she voted for
Trump’s district court nominees
70 percent of the time when there
were roll-call votes andPresident Barack Obama filed a
“statement of interest” months
before Scheindlin’s ruling. It took
no position on whether stop-and-
frisks violated constitutional
rights.
“The United States takes no
position on the fact-dependent
first question of whether NYPD’s
stop-and-frisk practices violate
constitutional standards such
that Plaintiffs should prevail on
the merits of their claims,” t he
filing says. “ The United States
files this Statement of Interest
only in order to assist the Court
on the issue of remedy, and only
should it find that NYPD’s stop-
and-frisk practices are unlawful.”
The department said an
independent monitor should be
appointed in that case,
something Bloomberg had
opposed. T he claim from Biden
also suggests the White House
was directing these moves from
the Justice Department, which is
typically verboten as prosecutors
and government lawyers are
supposed to exercise
independence.
In response to Biden’s debate
claim, a top ACLU official
tweeted: “One of the greatest
movements I ever had the
privilege of being a part of is the
multiracial, multigenerational,etienne Laurent/ePa-eFe/shutterstock
Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg both mentioned stop-and-frisk, the New York police policy. Bloomberg
said he cut 95 percent of those actions; Biden credited President Barack Obama with helping end them.