US Business

US President Joe Biden Wednesday said that Elon Musk’s ties with foreign countries were “worthy” of scrutiny, amid questions over the Saudi acquisition of a stake in Twitter as part of the tycoon’s blockbuster takeover.

“I think that Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at,” Biden said, answering a question from a reporter after a long pause.

“Whether or not he is doing anything inappropriate, I’m not suggesting that… That’s all I’ll say,” he said.

Last month reports emerged that the Biden administration was weighing a national security review of Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, in part because of a key group of investors backing the buyout.

The investors include Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

Two US Senators have called for a vetting of the Twitter deal in order to prevent the platform from accessing user information that could endanger human rights activists and critics of the Saudi government.

“We should be concerned that the Saudis, who have a clear interest in repressing political speech and impacting US politics, are now the second-largest owner of a major social media platform,” said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.

Musk has also struck what’s seen as a favorable public posture towards Vladimir Putin despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — notably by echoing the Russian president’s talking points on the conflict.

And he has raised eyebrows by suggesting the self-ruled island of Taiwan should become part of China — a stance welcomed by Chinese officials but which deeply angered Taiwanese officials.

Critics point to the industrial ties linking Musk to China, which has increasingly fraught ties with Washington.

The tycoon’s Tesla electric auto company has ramped up production to record levels at its Chinese factory in Shanghai.

Abortion advocates claimed victory Wednesday after US voters sided with protecting access to the procedure in several ballot initiatives, in a rebuke of the Supreme Court’s June decision to overturn constitutional abortion rights.

Voters in California, Vermont and Michigan strongly endorsed proposed state charter amendments guaranteeing the right to have an abortion.

In Republican stronghold Kentucky — where abortion has been outlawed since the Supreme Court ruling — voters rejected an amendment to the state charter that would have in effect made it impossible to challenge the state’s ban.

In Montana, the fifth state with an abortion measure on the ballot, a preliminary count indicated voters there also opposed proposed legislation hostile to the procedure.

– Key election issue –

The results came after a long national midterm election battle in which President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party sought to make a key issue out of the conservative-majority Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that established abortion as a constitutional right.

The court’s decision pushed the issue to states to decide. 

And as anti-abortion groups mounted strong campaigns to outlaw or severely restrict the practice, some 15 states instituted full-scale bans.

Analysts suggest progressive voters were motivated to turn out in larger numbers by the issue, and one result was the votes on the abortion-related ballot initiatives.

Edison Research said its exit polls showed that abortion was the top issue for 27 percent of voters, just below inflation, cited by 31 percent.

“Across the country last night, we saw an unmistakable repudiation of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

“From Kentucky to Michigan to Vermont to California, Americans want their right to abortion protected,” she said.

Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said it was clear that the issue of abortion rights “redefined this election.”

“Abortion was on the ballot and abortion won,” she told reporters.

– Kentucky court challenge –

The votes in California, Michigan and Vermont for constitutional amendments to protect abortion rights were not surprising: all three are firmly Democratic states, and the electoral verdict was clear.

In conservative Kentucky, however, the ballot measure supported by anti-abortion groups was rejected by a relatively narrow 52 percent to 48 percent margin.

If it had passed, it would have inserted into the state’s constitution a clause saying that there is no right to abortion.

The Kentucky supreme court is scheduled to hear a challenge to the state ban on abortion next week, noted Elisabeth Smith of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The court will find it hard to ignore the outcome of the rejection of the ballot initiative, she told AFP.

Anti-abortion activists played down the ballot initiatives, noting that many candidates sharing their views were elected or reelected on Tuesday.

“Perhaps the most important lesson from the 2022 midterm elections is that pro-life candidates’ success lies in clearly and consistently leading with their position on protections for the unborn,” said the March for Life group.

“This was even more true this cycle when pro-life candidates were outspent 10 to 1 on the issue,” they said.

– Biden backs ‘right to choose’ –

With Republicans poised to capture one and possibly both houses of Congress when the full results of the Tuesday vote are known, some anti-abortion activists want them to pass a federal law outlawing the procedure across the country.

But, commenting on election outcome Wednesday, Biden said he would not accept that.

The voters “sent a clear and unmistakable message that they want to preserve our democracy and protect the right to choose in this country,” Biden said.

“I will veto any attempt to pass a national ban on abortion,” he said.

A US Navy nuclear engineer and his wife were sentenced to long prison terms on Wednesday for plotting to sell submarine secrets to a foreign country.

Jonathan Toebbe, 44, and his wife, Diana Toebbe, 46, pleaded guilty in February to conspiring to sell information related to naval nuclear propulsion systems.

Jonathan Toebbe was sentenced to 19 years and three months in prison while his wife, Diana Toebbe, 46, received a prison term of 21 years and eight months, the Justice Department said.

According to court documents, Diana Toebbe acted as a lookout while her husband delivered highly classified information on nuclear submarine technology to the foreign buyer in a series of “dead drops” in the region around their Annapolis, Maryland, home.

The foreign buyer was not identified by the US authorities but The New York Times, citing people briefed on the investigation, said the country was Brazil.

A teacher at a private school, Diana Toebbe initially pleaded innocent to the charge of conspiracy to communicate restricted data.

But she changed her plea after her husband pleaded guilty and in doing so admitted that his wife took part in the plot.

Jonathan Toebbe was a nuclear engineer for the US Navy dealing with nuclear submarine propulsion systems when the two were arrested on October 9, 2021 after he hid a small SD card carrying US secrets at a dead drop location in West Virginia.

Court documents described a tantalizing, spy-novel-like plot in which they traveled hundreds of miles to secretly hand over information, took payments in cryptocurrency, and followed signals made from an embassy building in Washington.

In one message, Toebbe indicated that he had been considering his actions for several years and was happy to work with “a reliable professional partner.”

He also wrote that he had divided all the data he had collected into 51 “packages” of information, and sought $100,000 for each.

But the FBI was following the plot, after having been alerted to it by the target nation in December 2020, though that was nearly nine months after the Toebbes first mailed their offer to the country’s military intelligence.

“The Toebbes betrayed the American people and put our national security at significant risk when they selfishly attempted to sell highly sensitive information related to nuclear-powered warships for their own financial benefit,” Brice Miller, a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, said in a statement.

It was decried as risky and even a threat to democracy – but the Democrats’ gamble of helping far-right, election-denying candidates to earn Republican nominations for key midterm races appears to have paid off.

Democrats spent millions of dollars boosting the primary campaigns of radical Republicans, initially helping them to fend off more moderate alternatives from within their party, only to defeat them handily in Tuesday’s nationwide votes.

In Maryland, election-denier Dan Cox — who was dubbed a “QAnon whack job” by the state’s outgoing governor, a fellow Republican — benefited from at least $1.7 million in Democratic support to earn a place on his party’s midterm ticket, according to a Washington Post analysis.

He lost on Tuesday to Democrat Wes Moore, who becomes the state’s first Black governor. 

And Democrats put a whopping $34.5 million behind Donald Trump-backed Darren Bailey’s bid to be Republican candidate for Illinois governor, buying television ads highlighting his links to the former president and painting his rivals as centrist.

Thanks to a groundswell in support from Trump’s base, Bailey won the party’s nomination, before being soundly beaten at Tuesday’s midterms by Democratic incumbent JB Pritzker, who painted him as an extremist and too dangerous to serve as governor.

The strategy of interfering with the other party’s primary to boost its weaker candidates is not new, but it has drawn more attention this year.

The tactic has been labeled hypocritical, amid the Democrats’ repeated public insistence that democracy itself was at stake in the midterms.

And it had the potential to significantly backfire, critics say, if even a handful of election-denying Republicans won control of key state-level offices.

“Boy, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee got a lot of grief about it at the time — but now it looks like a very wise move,” said California-based strategist Steven Maviglio.

“Assisting the (election) deniers in achieving higher offices was a risky gamble. But it paid off.”

– Roll the dice –

Other far-right Republicans who also lost their midterm races after receiving Democratic help to get on the ticket included Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Don Bolduc and Robert Burns in New Hampshire, and John Gibbs in Michigan.

In some races where Democratic spending did not manage to get their far-right rivals nominated, more moderate Republicans won or appeared likely to win Tuesday’s vote.

For instance, in a US House seat representing rural California, Democrats narrowly failed to tip the balance in favor of Trump loyalist Chris Mathys for the Republican candidacy.

A Democratic fundraising group spent $350,000 on primaries in the seat, some of which was used to remind Republican voters that Mathys’s rival David Valadao was one of the few in his party who voted to impeach Trump.

Valadao still won the Republican nomination, and is on course to defeat his Democratic rival as Tuesday’s votes are tallied.

“I don’t think they went in hard enough,” said Maviglio, of the Democratic strategy.

In neighboring Nevada, Republicans took Democratic money earmarked to boost a divisive candidate for the state’s governor, and spent it instead on Jim Marchant, an election-denying nominee for secretary of state.

With vote-counting still under way, Marchant is narrowly winning his race, for a position which grants extensive oversight of future votes — potentially handing him the power to shape rules to the advantage of his favored candidates.

But Maviglio said he expects to see the tactic used more frequently in the future, even despite the reservations of its critics.

“Rank-and-file voters don’t get it, and a lot of progressives don’t like it,” he said.

“But the people that know how to run and win campaigns? Everything’s on the table in terms of strategy.

“It’s risky. No doubt about it. It’s a big roll of the dice,” Maviglio added.

“But like most big gambles, when they pay off, they pay off big.”

The US Senate contest in Georgia that could determine which party controls the upper chamber of Congress is headed for a December runoff, media projections showed on Wednesday.

Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock, a Black pastor at a historic church, and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, a former American football star backed by Donald Trump, will battle for the seat on December 6, CNN and NBC projected.

Neither candidate has earned the simple majority of votes needed by law to win outright.

The 53-year-old Warnock is seeking a full term after winning the seat in a runoff in January 2021 — a one-two punch with fellow Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff that helped secure the party’s control of the Senate for the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term.

Warnock is the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where slain civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr once preached.

Walker, 60, benefitted from name recognition and Trump’s endorsement.

But his campaign has been beset by allegations of past domestic abuse, an exaggerated resume, fathering children outside of his marriage and paying for the termination of pregnancies of two previous girlfriends.

The race is crucial to the future control of Congress, which remained in the balance Wednesday as several key races were yet to be decided.

Republicans appeared poised Wednesday to eke out a slim majority in the US House of Representatives but their hopes of a “red wave” in midterm elections were dashed as President Joe Biden’s Democrats outperformed expectations.

It was a disappointing night for Donald Trump, who was counting on a powerful Republican showing to boost his expected 2024 run to return to White House.

He also saw his main rival for the party’s presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis, record a thumping victory to remain governor of Florida.

With three key races yet to be called after Tuesday’s vote, the Senate remained in play but it was leaning Democratic and control may hinge on a runoff election in the southern state of Georgia in December.

Republicans seemed on track to reclaim the 435-member House for the first time since 2018, but by a handful of seats, a far cry from their predictions.

Top Republican Kevin McCarthy, who had forecast a pickup of as many as 60 House seats, put on a brave face after the underwhelming showing.

“It is clear that we are going to take the House back,” said McCarthy, who hopes to be the lower chamber’s next speaker. 

While the night saw wins by more than 100 Republicans embracing Trump’s “Big Lie” that Biden stole the 2020 election, several high-profile acolytes of the former president came up short.

“Many of the candidates he endorsed underperformed and cost their party a chance at picking up seats that should have been winnable,” said Jon Rogowski, a political science professor at the University of Chicago.

“Not only did voters reject many of Trump’s candidates, but they also rejected his policies,” Rogowski said, citing abortion as an example.

In ballot initiatives in five states, voters supported abortion rights in a rejection of the conservative-dominated Supreme Court’s ruling in June that overturned a constitutional right to the procedure.

Aiming to deliver a rebuke to Biden against a backdrop of sky-high inflation and bitter culture wars, Republicans needed just one extra seat to wrest control of the evenly divided Senate.

But by Wednesday the only seat to change hands went to the Democrats, with John Fetterman, a burly champion of progressive economic policies, triumphing in Pennsylvania over Trump-endorsed celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, a top Trump ally, bluntly conceded to NBC that the election is “definitely not a Republican wave, that’s for darn sure.”

– ‘Never underestimate’ –

“Never underestimate how much Team Biden is underestimated,” White House chief of staff Ronald Klain tweeted.

A Republican-held House could still derail Biden’s agenda, launching investigations, scuttling his ambitions on climate change and scrutinizing the billions of US dollars to help Ukraine fight Russia.

The president’s party has traditionally lost seats in midterm elections, and with Biden’s ratings stuck in the low 40s and Republicans pounding him over inflation and crime, pundits had predicted a drubbing.

That would have raised tough questions on whether America’s oldest-ever commander in chief, who turns 80 this month, should run again.

Instead Biden stands to emerge in much better shape than either of his Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, who both took a hammering at the midterms.

Democrats need two more wins to hold the Senate, while Republicans need two to flip it.

Wisconsin’s incumbent Republican Senator Ron Johnson was declared the winner on Wednesday, but counting the remaining votes in Senate races in Arizona and Nevada could take days.

Georgia is to hold a runoff on December 6 after neither candidate crossed the 50 percent threshold needed for victory in the Senate race there.

– DeSantis romps to victory –

On a night of close contests, one of the most decisive wins was for DeSantis, who won the gubernatorial race overwhelmingly in Florida.

DeSantis, who has railed against Covid-19 mitigation measures and transgender rights, won by nearly 20 points in what used to be a swing state.

“I have only begun to fight,” the 44-year-old DeSantis told a noisy victory party.

Trump, who faces criminal probes over taking top secret documents from the White House and trying to overturn the 2020 election, has not yet formally entered the 2024 presidential fray but has announced plans to make a major announcement on November 15.

On Tuesday, the 76-year-old former president returned to his playbook of airing unsubstantiated claims of fraud.

In Arizona, Trump and his chosen candidate for governor, Kari Lake, alleged irregularities after problems with voting machines.

Officials in the most populous county of Maricopa said about 20 percent of the 223 polling stations experienced difficulties related to scanners but that no one was denied the right to vote.

Ahead of polling day, Biden had warned that Republicans pose a dire threat to democracy, calling out their growing embrace of voter conspiracy theories that fueled last year’s storming of the Capitol.

Twitter on Wednesday unveiled — and then almost immediately scrapped — a new gray “official” label for some high-profile accounts as Elon Musk struggles to revamp the highly influential platform following his $44 billion buyout.

“I just killed it,” Musk tweeted just hours after the new tag was added to government accounts as well as those of big companies and major media outlets.

“Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t,” the world’s richest man added to explain the U-turn.

The sudden change of heart will invite further scrutiny of Musk’s plans for Twitter a week after he laid off thousands of workers and drew a massive drop in spending by advertisers, who are wary of the site’s direction.

The botched rollout came out ahead of the hotly anticipated introduction of a revamped subscription model in which the site’s famed blue checkmark would be made available for a fee of $7.99.

The blue tick has been a mark of an account’s authenticity and doubts emerged that public figures or media outlets would pay for it. The official gray tag was seen by observers as a workaround to solve that problem.

The rollout of the new official label began on Wednesday and was on the accounts of companies such as Apple or BMW and public ones such as the White House and major media outlets.

But only a few hours later, it was gone.

Musk took control of Twitter after a drawn-out back-and-forth legal battle in which the mercurial tycoon tried to renege on the deal.

It emerged on Tuesday that Musk sold $4 billion worth of shares in Tesla to help pay for the deal in which he took on billions of dollars in debt.

The $7.99 subscription idea is seen as one way to overcome the loss in advertisers since Musk took over the company.

Twitter last week fired half of its 7,500 employees which Musk said was necessary as the company was losing four million dollars a day.