The site of a fire in the building of the 1st building of the University of Economics and Trade in Donetsk.
Ukrainian forces have reportedly fired cluster munitions into Donetsk city, striking a private residence, a university and other civilian targets.
Four rounds of 155mm cluster bombs were fired into the center of the city on Saturday night, triggering fires in three districts, the Joint Center of Control and Coordination (JCCC) for the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) said. The cluster munitions reportedly exploded in the air.
The Donetsk University of Economics and Trade was on fire after the shelling, the Mayor of Donetsk Aleksey Kulemzin said in a Telegram post. Fires also were reported in apartment buildings.
The shelling comes after at least three people were killed and ten injured by a Ukrainian bombardment on Monday. The shelling killed another civilian in a nearby town, the JCCC said.
Cluster munitions have been banned by more than 100 countries because of their devastating effects on civilians. Cluster shells are typically designed to open up in midair and release tens or even hundreds of submunitions that can saturate a large area with explosives. They tend to have a high failure rate, creating risks to civilians from unexploded munitions for potentially decades after a conflict ends.
Donetsk and other Donbass cities have been under constant Ukrainian attacks which have claimed numerous civilian lives since 2014, when the region broke away from Kiev after a Western-backed coup in the Ukrainian capital. Over the years, Ukraine’s military established heavily fortified positions around the cit. The attacks intensified after the launch of Moscow’s military operation against Kiev in February 2022, leaving scores of civilians killed and delivering major damage to infrastructure.
The Donetsk People’s Republic became part of Russia last October together with the People’s Republic of Lugansk and Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions, following referendums in which the local populations voted overwhelmingly in favor of the move.
Russia Repels Drone Attack in Bryansk Region
Russian air defense has destroyed two aircraft-type drones over the Karachevsky district of the Bryansk region, governor Alexander Bogomaz said on Sunday, adding that there were no casualties.
"The Russian Armed Forces' air defense system destroyed two aircraft-type UAVs over the Karachevsky district. There is no destruction and no casualties," Bogomaz wrote on Telegram.
Emergencies services are working on the site, he added.
Kiev’s Western Allies ‘Getting Tired of Ukrainian Counteroffensive
Ukraine’s much-hyped summer counteroffensive that kicked off in early June has brought no tangible results and is unfolding more slowly than expected, a point of view that is supported even by Ukrainian and Western officials.
Kiev’s allies from the Western countries are “getting tired of the Ukrainian counteroffensive,” US analyst Johnston Harewood has argued.
In an article for an American media outlet, he noted that it is becoming “increasingly difficult” for Western officials to conceal their irritation when it comes to the issues regarding Ukraine, not least its counteroffensive, which is “not progressing as originally envisioned.”
As an example, the author cited Marcin Przydacz, head of the International Policy Bureau in Poland and British Defense Minister Ben Wallace as recently saying that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should have been more grateful to Warsaw and London for their military aid to Kiev.
The analyst recalled in this regard that since the beginning of the Russian special military operation, the Zelensky administration has already received more than $77 billion in Western military aid alone, “which is almost half of Ukraine's GDP last year.”
According to Harewood, those foreign partners of Ukraine who previously expressed strong support for Kiev, “are gradually changing their rhetoric, backing it up with difficult decisions for the Ukrainian government."
The author again referred to Poland, which became one of the countries that had signed a declaration to extend the ban on grain imports from Ukraine, in what Harewood wrote was “a low blow” for the Ukrainian president.
“Such a reaction from partner states may indicate that the countries, if not tired of supporting Zelensky, are already very close to such a state,” the analyst pointed out.
He was echoed by former British Army colonel Bretton-Gordon, who wrote for a UK newspaper that Kiev “has unsettled its friends in rare missteps and admonishments.”
Bretton-Gordon mentioned the incident that took place on August 1, when the Polish ambassador to Ukraine was summoned to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry over recent remarks by Poland’s International Policy Bureau head Marcin Przydacz. He said, in particular, that "it would be worth them [Ukrainian authorities] starting to appreciate the role that Poland has played for Ukraine in recent months and years."
The remarks come amid Kiev’s efforts to go ahead with its counteroffensive, which both Ukrainian and Western officials admit is going “slower than desired,” and is “behind schedule.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, for his part, recently told reporters that “It is obvious that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is not working out the way it was intended in Kiev.”
"The multibillion-dollar resources that were transferred by NATO countries to the Kiev regime are actually spent pointlessly, and this also raises big questions for Western capitals (…),” Peskov added.
He spoke as the Russian Defense Ministry said that since the start of Kiev’s counteroffensive on June 4, the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) lost over 43,000 soldiers and over 4,900 units of various weaponry, including 26 aircraft, nine helicopters, and 747 field artillery guns and mortars.
This followed Russian President Vladimir Putin telling the country’s Security Council meeting that Ukraine’s counteroffensive had yielded “no results” and that the UAF had suffered extensive losses, with "tens of thousands" of soldiers killed.
FILE PHOTO: A worker arrives at his office in the Canary Wharf business district in London February 26, 2014. Picture taken February 26, 2014.
American workers have given up on quitting. Amid last month’s financial results from Wall Street was a warning from some firms that staff haven’t exited at the rate employers expected. The U.S. economy has weathered inflation without widespread layoffs so far, but a Great Unresignation could make seemingly healthy job numbers harder to read.
Just over a year ago, the financial services industry was one of several facing a labor crunch. Job openings in the industry hit a record 499,000 in June 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as firms’ strong demand for workers clashed with a nationwide labor shortage. That hiring spree has since cooled. The sector added 6,300 jobs last month, nearly half the gains seen in July 2022.
But a big input in firms’ hiring plans is “attrition” – the number of workers expected to quit. Giant lender Wells Fargo (WFC.N) said on July 14 that attrition had been “slower than expected” in its second quarter. State Street (STT.N) gave the same message – one shared by other firms too, executives have told Breakingviews. That creates the problem of headcount costs remaining too high, at least for a while.
Companies generally don’t hope their staff will walk. But when interest rates are going up and workers demand higher pay, attrition feels like a painless way to bring down wage bills. That's not so easy anymore, since the so-called quit rate – the percentage of the workforce leaving their employer – has sunk back to its low levels from before the pandemic. One response is for companies to hire less, and the financial sector’s ratio of job openings to current employees has fallen to its lowest since September. If that doesn’t work, layoffs do. The rate of those is edging higher. Companies have an incentive to defer the moment of wielding the ax though, for fear of seeming more troubled than their rivals. Wall Street’s cull last year showed that once one company takes the plunge, others swiftly follow.
The reassuringly low unemployment of the past 12 months, then, needs to be viewed carefully. It might be a sign that rising rates haven’t hurt the economy. But it might also reflect employees staying put until they’re given a shove. The Great Resignation of recent years was an example of how people can behave in surprising ways, temporarily distorting economic predictions. This season’s corporate earnings may tell whether another surprise is in the works.
CONTEXT NEWS
The percentage of workers leaving their employer in the United States fell to 2.4% in July from 2.6% in the previous month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Aug. 1. The so-called quit rate in the finance and insurance sector dropped to 1.1%, well below a peak of 2.4% in April 2022.
Wells Fargo flagged “slower than expected” attrition as a driver of higher severance costs during the bank’s July 14 earnings call. State Street cited similar pressure from low attrition during its own analyst call on the same day. Citigroup also mentioned severance expenses as a reason for its 9% year-over-year increase in operating costs on July 14.
The U.S. economy added 187,000 nonfarm payrolls in July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Aug. 4. The unemployment rate dipped to 3.5% from 3.6%.
Remnants of the Great Resignation Still Challenge the Fed
The cognoscenti may have been too quick to declare the end of the Great Resignation.
The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data on Thursday showed that the number of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs surged in May by the most since November 2021. On a day of strong labor reports, it might be the most consequential for the fight against inflation. The BLS’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed that quits rose by 250,000 to 4 million, about 2.6% of the labor force. Although that’s well below the 3% peak in 2021, it’s comfortably above the highest value recorded before the pandemic.
(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics data)
Quits, of course, are likely to get short shrift in a week filled with high-profile labor market data, but they may be among the most important. New data from the ADP Research Institute on Thursday showed that US companies added nearly half a million jobs in June, and Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. data showed job cuts fell to an eight-month low. But the US has experienced plenty of strong labor markets in the relatively recent past, and most of them haven’t meant much for inflation overall. What’s different now is the frequency with which workers are switching jobs, a phenomenon that has drastically increased worker bargaining power and fueled rising nominal compensation — a welcome development if you’re a worker bee but a minor nightmare if you’re a central banker operating under the logic that wages fuel inflation.
No one’s predicting a return to that degree of job-to-job mobility, but the latest data suggests that a reversion to normalcy may take a bit longer than expected — just a month after some declared the retracement complete.
The influence of quits on inflation has become better understood in the past decade, but the Great Resignation brought it into stark relief. In 2015’s “ Job Switching and Wage Growth,” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economists Jason Faberman and Alejandro Justiano found that the quits rate was highly correlated with wage growth. More recently, though, another group of authors from the Dansmarks Nationalbank and Chicago Fed developed a comprehensive indicator of labor market slack that combined unemployment with job-to-job flows. They found that the Great Resignation increased overall inflation by about 1.1 percentage point. In a Chicago Fed Letter last year, authors Renato Faccini, Leonardo Melosi and Russell Miles wrote the following (emphasis mine):
By applying for jobs in a different firm, employed workers can elicit wage competition between the current employer and the new candidate employer. The firm that intends to poach the worker from their current employer has to offer a sufficiently large wage to make the offer attractive. And if a worker is particularly valued by their own employer, they may be offered a pay raise that is necessary to retain them in their current job. In this context, if employed workers search more, wage competition among employers increases, leading to an increase in inflationary pressures...
Although the quits rate rate was stable in the Midwest and West, the latest report showed it climbed in the Northeast and South. Among industries, the rate rocketed higher in construction, where signs have emerged that residential activity may have recently bottomed.
Job vacancies, which were also disclosed in the BLS’s JOLTS report on Thursday, fell more than forecast to 9.8 million, a welcome sign for policymakers that leaves about 1.6 openings for every unemployed worker — the lowest since 2021 but still well above the ratio of 1.2 that prevailed before the pandemic.
But quits, I’d argue, is the more important of those metrics by a significant margin. If you run a company, you probably won’t change your compensation plans simply because a competitor posts a series of openings. If — on the other hand — the job openings go up and your own employees decamp, you’re likely to start paying attention. You’d certainly provide counteroffers to many of the exiting employees, and you might consider off-cycle pay increases for others to head off future defections. The job postings matter, but intuitively, quits matter more.
Needless to say, the picture from the labor market data isn’t necessarily bad — especially if you’re a worker. Strength in US payrolls is likely to further delay — and maybe prevent — the recession that Wall Street has been expecting for the past year. Resilient income streams will sustain consumption in a virtuous cycle. The challenge, of course, comes down the road if wage pressure translates into stubbornly high core inflation, which prompts the Fed to keep policy tighter for longer. Many of us keep rooting for the best of both worlds — a so-called soft landing with a resilient real economy and receding inflation pressures — and the definitive end of the Great Resignation would certainly have helped. Ultimately, though, it looks as if the remnants of the strange pandemic labor market are likely to linger for a while.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
Central Banks Should Stop Hammering the Economy: Marcus Ashworth
What’s Opposite a Jobless Recovery? Jobful Recession: Justin Fox
Labor Market Is Not Buying Into Recession Talk: Jonathan Levin
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Levin has worked as a Bloomberg journalist in Latin America and the U.S., covering finance, markets and M&A. Most recently, he has served as the company’s Miami bureau chief. He is a CFA charterholder.
The filing comes as the federal case centered on Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election gets underway. Trump pleaded not guilty Thursday to four crimes that the government has accused him of committing, including scheming to disrupt the election process and depriving Americans of their right to have their votes counted.
That motion was followed by a back-and-forth exchange of filings from prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers through the weekend — an early dispute in the case that underscores the two sides’ opposing views on the urgency of moving toward trial. But U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is presiding over the case, sided with the federal government late Saturday afternoon, saying that Trump’s team needed to respond by Monday. She denied them the three extra days they wanted to respond.
The government and Trump’s lawyers are working out proposed rules that the former president and his legal team must adhere to when they review evidence materials during the discovery process, or when the defense team reviews all the evidence that the government has collected in the case. It is a standard part of the legal process, and a judge must sign off on the agreement. Evidence that is handed over in the discovery process includes grand jury interviews, recordings and materials obtained through sealed search warrants.
The government’s proposed agreement — called a protective order — dictates that Trump and his lawyers not disclose any of the materials they receive during the discovery process to people who are not authorized by the court to have knowledge of the materials.
Former president Donald Trump at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Va., on Thursday after pleading not guilty in federal court in Washington to charges that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
Prosecutors said that while the agreement is not stricter than ones in standard criminal cases, it is particularly important in this case because Trump has posted on social media about judges, lawyers and witnesses involved in the multiple ongoing cases in which he is a defendant.
The filing includes an image of a threatening post that Trump wrote on the Truth Social platform earlier Friday afternoon, apparently in reference to the D.C. case, that reads: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
Also on Saturday, Trump took aim at his former vice president, Mike Pence, whose handwritten notes form a key part of the indictment against him. According to the indictment, Trump denounced Pence for being “too honest” as Trump pressured Pence to overturn the election.
Trump said in a message on his Trump Social site that he never told “Pence to put me above the Constitution, or that Mike was ‘too honest.’ He’s delusional, and now he wants to show he’s a tough guy.”
Former president Donald Trump appeared at a D.C. courthouse on Aug. 3 for an arraignment on charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election results. (Video: HyoJung Kim/The Washington Post, Photo: Tom Brenner/The Washington Post)
The government’s lawyers also said they wanted to get the protective order settled quickly so they could begin the discovery process — and move forward with pretrial proceedings.
“If the defendant were to begin issuing public posts using details — or, for example, grand jury transcripts — obtained in discovery here, it could have a harmful chilling effect on witnesses or adversely affect the fair administration of justice in this case,” reads the filing, signed by special counsel Jack Smith.
The filing also states that Trump and his attorneys should be barred from writing down any identifying information about people involved in the case.
Chutkan responded early Saturday and ordered Trump’s defense to respond to the government request by 5 p.m. Monday, including any changes they propose.
In response, Trump’s legal team said they needed more time to respond and asked for a Thursday afternoon deadline instead of the Monday one the judge ordered. The lawyers wrote that it was unreasonable for federal prosecutors to file their order late on a Friday, saying it violated the “bedrock due process principle.”
“Friday evening ultimatums, given by the government before even calling defense counsel, are wholly unproductive and undermine the potential for party-driven resolutions,” Trump attorney John Lauro wrote in a court filing shortly after noon Saturday. “Requiring a Monday response to a Friday evening motion likewise forecloses the possibility of agreement and would encourage such improper tactics by the government in the future.”
Prosecutors shot back their response later Saturday, saying that the Monday deadline should stick. They criticized Trump’s attorneys for wasting time requesting that the judge grant them an extension instead of complying with the order.
“The defendant’s extension motion proposes unnecessary delay to normal order,” prosecutors wrote.
Hours later, the judge denied Trump’s request and kept the Monday deadline in place.
The back-and-forth in the Washington case echoes the tension in Trump’s Florida case, and all eyes are on how the judges in the two cases respond. In Florida — a case involving highly sensitive government documents that require lawyers to adhere to extra protocols during trial — prosecutors asked the judge to begin the trial in December. Trump’s team said that was too soon, and the best way for the former president to get a fair trial is to wait until after the 2024 presidential election, in which Trump is the early Republican front-runner.
Awkwardness in Trump’s circle: Top aides could be trial witnesses
Trump speaks with Susie Wiles, center, staff and reporters in April. (Jabin Botsford/The Post)
They include his top presidential campaign adviser, as well as a senior communications aide and several other campaign staffers. Walt Nauta, his closest personal aide who is frequently at his side on the campaign trail, is now a co-defendant in the case in which Trump is accused of mishandling classified documents.
Other witnesses could be drawn from a broader network of former Trump employees, political associates and longtime allies. Even the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, a longtime Trump ally who would be responsible for helping Trump win the White House should he become the party’s nominee, could be forced to take the witness stand.
Their roles add another awkward dimension to the never-before-seen prospect of a former president and possible major-party nominee standing trial while running for president. The aides’ involvement in the legal cases could further complicate their scheduling and discussions with the candidate, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, who relies on a relatively small staff.
“My best friends are lawyers,” one Trump adviser joked on Thursday, echoing a common experience among the former president’s aides that their service so often comes with legal bills.
The situation poses practical challenges for a famously undisciplined candidate running a major campaign while also preparing for multiple criminal trials, two brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
Trump has been ordered by a Florida judge to avoid discussion of the documents case with Nauta and a list of witnesses compiled by prosecutors. Prosecutors have identified at least 84 witnesses in that case alone.
At Trump’s arraignment on Thursday, where he pleaded not guilty to charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, a federal judge ordered him not to talk to any witnesses about the case unless through attorneys.
Asked to comment about Trump staffers who may have to serve as witnesses, campaign spokesman Steven Cheung alleged the investigation is harassing Trump aides to interfere with his campaign. “It is clear that Joe Biden knows he’s losing to President Trump and is now using his weaponized Department of Justice to attack his campaign team in order to interfere in the election,” he said.
TRUMP INVESTIGATIONS
Mueller described how Trump badgered McGahn after learning that he had revealed to Mueller’s team that Trump had at one point intended to fire the special counsel. “Actually, lawyer Don McGahn had a much better chance of being fired than Mueller. Never a big fan!” Trump tweeted not long after the report was published.
“When he found out Don McGahn and others went down there and told the truth, it was kind of a shocker to him,” Kelly said. “In the world he grew up in, people would lie and cheat for him because you were theoretically loyal to him. He didn’t like it at all.”
Similarly, during the House Jan. 6 investigation last year, Trump was upset at aides — and even some family members — for their testimony that sometimes directly contradicted his election fraud claims, growing angry as he watched some of the clips played on live TV, multiple advisers said.
In those instances, however, close advisers and friends largely offered testimony behind closed doors, with damaging bits played in small bursts months later. If called to testify at one of Trump’s trials, advisers would be required to take the witness stand and speak live in courtrooms crowded with reporters, separated by just a few feet from their boss at the defendant’s table.
Some of Trump’s current advisers have faced pointed questioning from Smith’s prosecutors, who appeared to believe they have not been forthcoming when questioned about Trump’s actions in the two federal cases, according to two people familiar with the matter. Some told Trump subsequently that they felt as though the prosecutors were hostile to them.
In Trump’s current orbit, advisers say they have tried to separate his legal and political discussions to avoid extra subpoenas to his team, but there is no surefire way to fully separate the two when his legal fate is almost certainly tied to his political fate, and vice versa. The campaign’s messaging and scheduling have become increasingly intertwined with Trump’s criminal defense, making it harder to insulate political aides from legal discussions.
The list of advisers who could serve as witnesses is long.
Nauta, the president’s omnipresent personal aide, will face trial with him in Florida. Prosecutors have alleged that Nauta lied to the government and helped Trump move boxes of documents to hide them from investigators.
Trump’s senior campaign adviser, Susie Wiles, is one of the people to whom Trump is accused of improperly showing classified documents. The Florida indictment says Trump showed the map to “a representative of his political action committee,” indicating that he should not be doing so and warning her not to get too close. People familiar with the episode have said the PAC representative was Wiles, who was running his political operation at that time. The indictment says Wiles did not have a security clearance.
The indictment also alleges that two weeks after the FBI conducted a court-ordered search at the Mar-a-Lago resort, Wiles was on a Signal chat group in which another Trump employee assured the group that Carlos de Oliveira, the property manager at Mar-a-Lago, remained loyal to Trump. De Oliveira was charged in July with lying to investigators and trying to cover up evidence. Wiles is not alleged to have sent a message herself.
Wiles’s grand jury testimony blindsided others on Trump’s team when it appeared in the indictment, aides said. She remains one of Trump’s closest advisers, overseeing his campaign operation, finances and travel. Wiles has privately told others she only testified because she was required to by law after receiving a subpoena and that she remains loyal to Trump. She declined to comment.
Jason Miller, another senior adviser on the campaign focusing on press and communications, was referenced in Tuesday’s indictment related to the 2020 election as a “Senior Campaign Advisor,” people familiar with the case said.
“You can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases,” Miller wrote in an email quoted in the indictment, referring to the campaign’s loss record in court challenges to the 2020 election and disparaging the efforts to subvert the election results. “It’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy s--- beamed down from the mothership.”
The indictment also alleges that Miller spoke with Trump and informed him that election fraud claims, such as that votes were fraudulently cast in the name of dead people in Georgia, were not true. Those conversations could be critical to the prosecutors’ attempts to prove that Trump knew the claims were false, a required element of three of the four charges in the Jan. 6 case.
Miller has told others that he was not being critical of Trump but of the legal team around him following the 2020 election, and that he too remains loyal to Trump. Trump advisers say they feel many of the inclusions are gratuitous and are designed to draw wedges between Trump and his team.
Miller declined to comment for this story.
Lawyer Evan Corcoran remains a member of Trump’s legal team even after the Mar-a-Lago indictment extensively relied on his accounts of his interactions with Trump, referring to him as “Trump Attorney 1.” In one such conversation, Trump allegedly praised a lawyer who had supposedly deleted Hillary Clinton’s emails. In another, Trump allegedly suggested Corcoran could take documents to his hotel room and pluck out anything bad before turning the records over to the FBI.
Corcoran attended Trump’s arraignment in his case related to Jan. 6 this week, emerging from the judge’s chambers just before the former president and his other attorneys and then sitting behind the defendant's table during the hearing. He is no longer heavily involved in Trump’s defense, multiple advisers said, largely because of his role as a witness.
Reached by phone, Corcoran hung up.
Liz Harrington and Margo Martin, both current campaign aides, were part of a meeting where Trump was recorded seeming to acknowledge that he knew he had secret documents, The Washington Post has reported.
“This is secret information,” Trump said in the recording, taken during a meeting with writers helping prepare former chief of staff Mark Meadows’ book, according to the indictment. “As president I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
“Now we have a problem,” Harrington said, laughing.
Harrington did not respond to a request for comment. She has taken a less influential role in the past year, Trump advisers said. Martin’s attorney, Bob Driscoll, said it is simple and routine for people who work together to comply with a judge’s order not to discuss an ongoing case.
“Every lawyer tells their client, ‘Don’t talk about the case except when talking to me,’” he said. “They can interact on campaign stuff — but you don’t want your witnesses contaminating each other and getting their memories screwed up.”
Will Russell, a White House alumnus who is working for the campaign on a contract basis, testified repeatedly to the grand jury investigating Trump’s actions before Jan. 6. When Russell appeared in July, his lawyer told a judge that the questions potentially involved executive privilege, suggesting they related to conversations with Trump himself.
Stan Woodward, a lawyer for Russell, declined to comment.
The head of the main super PAC supporting Trump’s campaign, Taylor Budowich, testified to the grand jury in the documents case in June. Budowich was Trump’s spokesman during 2022 when the former president drafted a statement saying he had given “everything” back to the federal government. Budowich declined to release the statement after consulting with lawyers and advisers, fearful that it might not be accurate, people familiar with the matter have said.
Budowich is already largely walled off from direct interactions with Trump because campaign finance law prohibits super PACs from coordinating with allied campaigns. Budowich did not respond to a request for comment.
Another campaign adviser and lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, has come under scrutiny in the Jan. 6 case. Federal agents with court-authorized search warrants seized his cellphone last year, and Epshteyn appeared before the special counsel’s team in April. Epshteyn’s ongoing involvement in Trump’s legal team caused tensions with some of the other attorneys, leading at least one of them to quit in recent months.
Epshteyn declined to comment.
The indictment filed Tuesday also describes a phone call in which Trump and “co-conspirator 2,” identified as attorney John Eastman, spoke to Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman, about a plan to convene Trump’s electors even in states where President Biden had been certified the winner of the 2020 election. The indictment alleges that Eastman “falsely represented to her” that the phony electors would only be submitted if the campaign’s court challenges succeeded in changing the outcome in one of the decisive states.
McDaniel speaks with Trump often, including recently to lobby him to attend the first primary debate later this month.
An RNC spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
Presiden Majelis Nasional Republik Sosialis Vietnam Vuong Dinh Hue. (Foto: Istimewa)
Presiden Majelis Nasional Republik Sosialis Vietnam Vuong Dinh Hue menyanjung Indonesia sebagai negara ASEAN terdepan dalam mencari solusi damai untuk perdamaian dan kerja sama kesamaan budaya.
"Dalam ideologi pendirian kedua bangsa, kedekatan geografis dan hubungan sejarah, serta aspirasi bersama kita untuk perdamaian, ikatan alami antara Indonesia dan Vietnam membawa nilai-nilai yang telah teruji oleh waktu," kata Vuong Dinh Hue.
Ia berbicara dalam dialog bertema "The Viet Nam - Indonesia Steadfast Strategic Partnership: Striving for a Dynamic and Inclusive Asia and Pacific Region of Peace, Cooperation, and Development”, yang diselenggarakan oleh lembaga kajian hubungan internasional FPCI (Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia) di Jakarta, Sabtu.
Dinh Hue memandang Indonesia sebagai rumah bagi banyak ide inspiratif yang melampaui wilayah, di mana independensi, kemandirian dan ketidakberpihakan telah lama menjadi filosofi Indonesia.
Indonesia dan Vietnam, lanjut dia, juga berbagi afinitas budaya yang mendalam.
"Sejak abad ke-7, telah terjadi pertukaran dan koneksi dalam budaya perdagangan, linguistik, dan antropologi antara kerajaan-kerajaan kuno Vietnam dan Indonesia," sambung dia.
Dia juga menilai kedua negara berbagi pembangunan jangka panjang dan pertanian, selain fitur arsitektur yang serupa.
Dinh Hue menjelaskan bahwa Indonesia adalah teman dekat sekaligus tetangga yang baik yang telah lama menemani Vietnam di masa lalu.
"Indonesia adalah negara pertama di Asia Tenggara yang menjalin hubungan diplomatik dengan Vietnam pada 1955. Presiden Ho Chi Ming dan Presiden Sukarno memiliki kesamaan pandangan dan visi tentang dunia yang damai dan berkembang," kata dia.
Presiden Soekarno adalah kepala negara pertama yang mengunjungi Vietnam pada 1975 ketika Vietnam diisolasi dan diembargo pada 1980-an.
Kedatangan Dinh Hue ke Indonesia dalam rangka menghadiri Sidang Umum ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA) Ke-44 yang digelar pada 5-10 Agustus.
