Politics

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republicans in Texas formally rejected President Joe Biden’s election in 2020 as illegitimate and voted in a state-wide convention that wrapped up this weekend on a party platform that calls homosexuality an “abnormal lifestyle choice.”

The party’s embrace of unfounded electoral fraud allegations in a bedrock Republican state came as a bipartisan congressional committee seeks to definitively and publicly debunk the false idea that Biden did not win the election.

Biden received 7 million more votes than rival Donald Trump. Biden also received 306 votes from the Electoral College, more than the 270 needed to win.

The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol is building a case that Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election — including by denying he lost — amounted to conspiracy to illegally hold onto power.

Trump, the 45th U.S. president, has denied any wrongdoing.

“We reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States,” the Texas party said in a resolution, passed in a voice vote at its convention.

Texas is a major player in U.S. national politics, with 38 electoral votes, the second highest after California. Voters there have backed Republican presidents for the past four decades.

The White House had no comment.

According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, about two-thirds of Republicans believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. State and federal judges dismissed more than 50 lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies challenging the election while reviews and audits found no evidence of widespread fraud.

PLATFORM ATTACKS ‘CHOICE’ OF HOMOSEXUALITY

One of the proposed principles in the latest Texas Republican party platform https://texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-Permanent-Platform-Committee-FINAL-REPORT-6-16-2022.pdf also includes new language criticizing homosexuality and voicing opposition to “all efforts to validate transgender identity.”

“Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice,” it reads, a statement that is not in the 2020 platform https://texasgop.org/platform.

Votes on the provision are being tallied and certified following the bi-annual state party convention, a party spokesperson said.

The Log Cabin Republicans of Houston, an organization that represents LGBT conservatives, said it was once again denied a request to set up a booth at the party’s convention this week, as it has been for past conventions. The group called the Texas Republican Convention’s actions “not just narrow-minded, but politically short-sighted.”

However, the group is seeing “no evidence” of other state Republican conventions adopting similar bans or exclusionary language, Charles Moran, Log Cabin Republican managing director, told Reuters.

“If anything we are being more included” than in the past, he said, noting that the 2020 Republican presidential campaign had an official pride coalition, and the gay Republican vote doubled between 2016 and 2020. “President Trump was the most pro-gay Republican that we have ever had,” he added.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Heather Timmons and Lisa Shumaker)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan tested positive for COVID-19 on Saturday, a spokesperson said, a week before he is due to accompany President Joe Biden to a meeting of the Group of Seven advanced economies.

National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said Sullivan had not been in close contact with Biden, and was asymptomatic. It was his first COVID infection, she said.

Sullivan met at the White House on Friday with Senegal’s foreign minister, Aissata Tall Sall, the White House said on Saturday. He met in person with China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi in Luxembourg for four and a half hours on Monday.

It was not immediately clear whether the positive test would affect Sullivan’s travel plans.

The White House announced last week that Biden would travel to southern Germany for the Group of Seven summit and continue on to Spain for a NATO summit in late June.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Writing by Aram Roston; Editing by Daniel Wallis and William Mallard)

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BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana lawmakers ended a special session Saturday saying they were unable to agree on a new congressional map that includes a second majority Black district as ordered by a federal judge, prompting an angry blast from the governor.

U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick on June 6 had struck down the state’s original U.S. House map approved earlier this year by lawmakers, one with white majorities in five of six districts. It retained a single majority-Black district currently held by U. S. Rep. Troy Carter, a New Orleans Democrat.

On Saturday, the Senate Senate spent two hours grappling with the remapping issue and then took an hourlong recess to see how proposed changes to a last-ditch bill might settle out. But the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Rick Ward III, R-Port Allen, said none of the proposed amendments presented could muster the 20-vote minimum needed for Senate approval, The Advocate reported.

“When you’re dealing with something like this, every time you satisfy four people you lose four people,” Ward told the Senate. “When you satisfy six people you lose seven over here. It is a difficult task.”

Gov. John Bel Edwards issued a statement later Saturday lashing out at the lawmakers for failing to come up with a new map. Since the Legislature did not devise a new map in the session, it now appeared likely any remapping of boundaries would fall to the courts.

“It is disappointing that after every opportunity to do the right thing and create a second majority African-American congressional district as ordered by the U. S. Court for the Middle District the Legislature has once again failed to do so,” Edwards said.

The Republican-dominated legislature and Edwards, a Democrat, have been fighting over the boundaries since February, when lawmakers initially approved their map. Democrats and the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus argue that the current map dilutes the political clout of African American voters and that at least two of the six districts should have Black majorities. Nearly one-third of Louisiana’s population is Black.

Dick, the federal judge, had originally ordered the Legislature to come up with a new may by Monday, which was the deadline for the six-day special session called by Edwards. On Friday, the judge then ordered attorneys to submit proposed maps with a second majority-Black district by June 22, with a hearing on the issue set for June 29.

Backers of the order said the Legislature had a duty to comply with the federal court.

Critics said the issue will ultimately be decided in the federal courts and possibly could rise to the U. S. Supreme Court.

Lawmakers had said for days that any hopes for agreement in the GOP-controlled Legislature appeared unlikely.

A House committee on Friday rejected three bills that would have added a second majority-Black congressional district. A Senate committee on Friday voted 6-3 against a plan by Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, to do the same after two days of testimony.

“There was no will from the Legislature,” Fields said after the session ended. “That is why we are where we are in Louisiana.”

The sudden end of the session finished a six-day roller coaster on the issue.

Dick on Thursday rejected a request by Louisiana Senate President Page Cortez and House Speaker Clay Schexnayder to extend her deadline for action until at least June 30.

The judge also had blasted the House for only devoting 90 minutes to the issue on the first day of the special session, and stopped just short of accusing Schexnayder of ignoring a federal court order.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats are going to hold onto the House after November’s midterm elections. They will pick up as many as four seats in the Senate, expanding their majority and overcoming internal dissent that has helped stifle their agenda.

As the challenges confronting President Joe Biden intensify, his predictions of a rosy political future for the Democratic Party are growing bolder. The assessments, delivered in speeches, fundraisers and conversations with friends and allies, seem at odds with a country that he acknowledged this week was “really, really down,” burdened by a pandemic, surging gas prices and spiking inflation.

Biden’s hopeful outlook tracks with a sense of optimism that has coursed through his nearly five-decade career and was at the center of his 2020 presidential campaign, which he said was built around restoring the “soul of America.” In a lengthy Oval Office interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, Biden said part of his job as president is to “be confident.”

“Because I am confident,” he said. “We are better positioned than any country in the world to own the second quarter of the 21st century. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact.”

While presidents often try to emphasize the positive, there is a risk in this moment that Biden contributes to a dissonance between Washington and people across the country who are confronting genuine and growing economic pain.

Few of Biden’s closest political advisers are as bullish about the party’s prospects as the president. In interviews with a half-dozen people in and close to the White House, there is a broad sense that Democrats will lose control of Congress and that many of the party’s leading candidates in down-ballot races and contests for governor will be defeated, with Biden unable to offer much help.

The seeming disconnect between Biden’s view and the political reality has some in the party worried the White House has not fully grasped just how bad this election year may be for Democrats.

“I don’t expect any president to go out and say, ‘You know what, ‘We’re going to lose the next election,’” said Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, which is in regular contact with the White House’s policy team. What might serve Biden well instead, Marshall said, would be “a sober sense of, ’Look, we’re probably in for a rough night in November and our strategy should be to remind the country what’s at stake.’”

The White House is hardly ignoring the problem.

After years in which Democrats have operated in political silos, there is a greater focus on marshaling resources. Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s 2020 campaign manager who now serves as one of his deputy chiefs of staff, runs the political team from the West Wing along with Emmy Ruiz, a longtime Texas-based Democratic political consultant.

O’Malley Dillon coordinates strategy among the White House, the Democratic National Committee and an array of outside party groups. Cedric Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman who co-chaired Biden’s 2020 campaign and was one of his closest White House advisers, left for a job with the DNC in April. He characterized the move as underscoring the administration’s full grasp of the importance of the midterms.

“We understand that you cannot govern if you can’t win,” Richmond said in an interview. “We are treating it with that sense of urgency.”

The president’s political message is being honed by Mike Donilon, a longtime Biden aide who is a protector of Biden’s public image, and veteran party strategist Anita Dunn, who is returning to the White House for a second stint.

Richmond praised Dunn’s political instincts and said he believes she will team with O’Malley Dillion, White House chief of staff Ron Klain and others to promote messaging that many in their own party may underestimate.

“If I had a penny for every time Democrats counted Joe Biden or Kamala Harris out, I’d be independently wealthy,” Richmond said.

Biden turned to Dunn during an especially low political moment in February 2020, giving her broad control of his then-cash strapped presidential campaign as it appeared on the brink of collapse after a disastrous fourth-place showing in the Iowa caucus.

Barely a week later, Biden left New Hampshire before its primary polls had even closed, ultimately finishing fifth. But he took second in Nevada, won South Carolina handily and saw the Democratic establishment rally around him at breakneck speed in mere days after that. O’Malley Dillon then joined the campaign and oversaw Biden’s general election victory.

A similar reversal of political fortune may be necessary now.

But where White House officials last year harbored hopes that voters could be convinced of Biden’s accomplishments and reverse their dismal outlook on the national direction, aides now acknowledge that such an uphill battle is no longer worth fighting. Instead, they have pushed the president to be more open about his own frustrations — particularly on inflation — to show voters that he shares their concerns and to cast Republicans and their policies as obstacles to addressing these issues.

Though he has increasingly expressed anger about inflation, Biden has publicly betrayed few concerns about his party’s fortunes this fall. opting instead for relentlessly positivity.

“I think there are at least four seats that are up for grabs that we could pick up in the Senate,” the president told a recent gathering of donors in Maryland. “And we’re going to keep the House.”

Biden meant Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, with potential longer shots in North Carolina or Florida possibly representing No. 4. Some aides admit that assessment is too optimistic. They say the president is simply seeking to fire up his base with such predictions. One openly laughed when asked if it was possible that Democrats could pick up four Senate seats.

The party’s chances of maintaining House control may be bleaker. Still, Tim Persico, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is charged with defending the party’s narrow majority, said Biden remains an asset.

“We love when the president is speaking to the country,” Persico said. “There’ll always be frustrations. I totally get that. But I think he’s his own best messenger.”

Biden has traveled more since last fall, promoting a $1 trillion public works package that became law in November, including visiting competitive territory in Minnesota, Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Hampshire. During a trip to Democratic Rep. Cindy Axne’s Iowa swing district, the president declared, “My name is Joe Biden. I work for Congresswoman Axne.”

But Bernie Sanders, the last challenger eliminated as Biden clinched the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is making his own Iowa trip this weekend to rally striking workers at construction and agriculture equipment plants.

The 80-year-old Vermont senator has not ruled out a third presidential bid in 2024 should Biden not seek reelection. That has revived questions about whether Biden, 79, might opt not to run — speculation that has persisted despite the White House political operation gearing up for the midterms and beyond.

“I do think a lot of folks in the Democratic Party, rightfully, are concerned about what’s going to happen in 2024. That doesn’t have to be mal intent,” said Linn County Supervisor Stacey Walker, whose district includes Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and who was a high-profile Sanders supporter during the last campaign. “I think folks are putting the question to the Democratic Party, ‘Is Joe Biden going to run again? Is he not going to run again?’”

Walker noted that other Democrats who could seek the White House in 2024 if Biden does not, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, joined Sanders in signing a letter supporting 1,000-plus plant workers who have been striking for better pay and benefits for more than a month.

“It is responsible, I think, for those folks within the Democratic Party, who have the profile, who have the infrastructure, to make sure it’s all still in good working condition should they have to dust off the playbook,” Walker said.

Asked if Biden was running again in 2024, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president has responded to such queries repeatedly and “his answer has been pretty simple, which is, yes, he’s running for reelection.”

The more immediate question of Biden’s midterm appeal could be even trickier. He campaigned for Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia last November, after winning the state easily in 2020. McAuliffe lost by 2 percentage points, a potentially bad omen for the 16 governorships Democrats are defending this fall.

“We know there are going to be national headwinds, there always are,” Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia, said recently. But she insisted she would be happy to campaign with Biden or top members of his administration: “I welcome anyone willing to lift Georgia up, to come to Georgia and help me get it done.”

That was a departure from Democrat Beto O’Rourke, running for governor in Texas, who told reporters, “I’m not interested in any national politician — anyone outside of Texas — coming into this state to help decide the outcome of this race.”

Biden political advisers say a possible Supreme Court ruling overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, as well as recent mass shootings spurring renewed debate over gun violence, could give Democrats two issues that could energize voters. But they also acknowledge that one or both might help party candidates clinch already close races — not remake the political landscape nationwide.

In the meantime, Biden’s overall approval rating hit a new low of 39% last month. Even among his own party, just 33% of respondents said the country is headed in the right direction, down from 49% in April. The president’s approval rating among Democrats stood at 73%, falling sharply from last year, when Biden’s Democratic approval rating never slipped below 82%.

White House political advisers are already playing down the possibility that some of the party’s most vulnerable candidates may carve out identities distinct from the president’s. As a former senator, Biden understands such maneuvers, they say.

The White House also notes that the president and his party are in far better shape now than before the 2010 midterms, when a tea party wave saw Republicans win back Congress. Since taking office, Biden’s political team has invested significantly in the DNC and state parties, and all sides are cooperating.

The DNC says it has never been larger, with 450 staff members on state party payrolls, or sported a more robust ground operation. It also raised $213 million so far, a midterm record. But DNC Chair Jaime Harrison nonetheless appeared to be trying to head off concerns donors’ contributions might be going to waste, saying, “We’re not promoting it all over the place.”

“When you’re in the Super Bowl, do you think the coach puts all their plays up on Twitter, and says, ‘Here’s what we’re going to run?,” Harrison said at a Los Angeles fundraiser with Biden last weekend. “No. We don’t put all of our stuff out there.”

He said the group is building out an operation “to make sure that, when those close elections happen November, we win them.”

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One by one, several of Donald Trump’s former top advisers have told a special House committee investigating his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection that they didn’t believe his lies about the 2020 election, and that the former president knew he lost to Joe Biden.

But instead of convincing Trump’s most stalwart supporters, testimony from former attorney general Bill Barr and Trump’s daughter Ivanka about the election and the attack on the U.S. Capitol is prompting many of them to simply reassert their views that the former president was correct in his false claim of victory.

Barr’s testimony that Trump was repeatedly told there was no election fraud? He was paid off by a voting machine company, according to one false claim that went viral this week. Ivanka Trump saying she didn’t believe Trump either? It’s all part of Trump’s grand plan to confuse his enemies and save America.

The claims again demonstrate how deeply rooted Trump’s false narrative about the election has become.

“It’s cognitive dissonance,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a Syracuse University professor who has studied how Trump used social media and advertising to mobilize his base. “If you believe what Trump says, and now Bill Barr and Trump’s own daughter are saying these other things, it creates a crack, and people have to fill it.”

The lawmakers leading the hearings into the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol said one of their goals is to show how Trump repeatedly lied to his supporters in an effort to hold onto power and subvert American democracy.

“President Trump invested millions of dollars of campaign funds purposely spreading false information, running ads he knew were false, and convincing millions of Americans that the election was corrupt and he was the true president,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the panel’s vice chair. “As you will see, this misinformation campaign provoked the violence on January 6th.”

For those who accept Trump’s baseless claims, Barr’s testimony was especially jarring. In his interview with investigators, he detailed Trump’s many absurd allegations about the election 2020, calling them “bogus” and “idiotic.”

Barr told the committee when he talked with Trump, “there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”

“He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” Barr said.

Following his testimony, many Trump supporters using sites like Reddit, GETTR and Telegram blasted Barr as a turncoat and noted that he’s disputed Trump’s election claims before.

But many others began grasping for alternative explanations for this testimony.

“I’m still hoping Barr is playing a role,” one poster said on a Telegram channel popular with Trump supporters.

One post that spread widely this week suggested Barr was paid by Dominion Voting Systems, a company targeted by Trump and his supporters with baseless claims of vote rigging. “From 2009 to 2018, DOMINION PAID BARR $1.2 million in cash and granted him another $1.1 million in stock awards, according to SEC filings. (No wonder Barr can’t find any voter fraud!),” the post read.

Wrong Dominion. Barr was paid by Dominion Energy, a publicly traded company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, that provides power and heat to customers in several mid-Atlantic states.

Unlike Barr, Ivanka Trump has remained intensely popular with many Trump supporters and is seen by many as her father’s potential successor. That may be why so many had to find an an alternative explanation for why she told Congress she didn’t accept her father’s claims.

Jordan Sather, a leading proponent of the QAnon theory, claims both Barr and Ivanka Trump lied during their testimony on Trump’s orders, part of an elaborate scheme to defeat Trump’s enemies by confusing Congress and the American public.

“I can just imagine Donald Trump telling Ivanka: ’Hey, go to this hearing, say these things. Screw with their heads,’” Sather said last week on his online show.

Some Trump supporters dismissed Ivanka Trump’s testimony entirely by questioning whether any of it was real. That’s another common refrain seen on far-right message boards. Many posters say they don’t even believe the hearings are happening, but are a Hollywood production starring stand-ins for the former president’s daughter and others.

“She looks different in a big way,” one poster asked on Telegram. “CGI?”

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By David Morgan and Doina Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The day after the latest U.S. congressional hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters, the former president criticized Mike Pence’s actions that day, saying that his vice president had lacked courage.

The hearings have detailed the ways in which Trump urged his supporters to turn on Pence for refusing his requests to reject the November 2020 election results, before they stormed the Capitol, fighting with police as some chanted “hang Mike Pence!”

“Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance to be, frankly, historic,” Trump told an audience of Christian conservatives in Nashville on Friday.

“Mike, and I say it sadly because I like him, but Mike did not have the courage to act,” Trump added.

Republican Trump repeated his false claims that his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud, assertions that were rejected by multiple courts, state election officials and members of his own administration.

Multiple Trump allies including his daughter Ivanka, former attorney general William Barr and other officials have testified to the committee that they did not believe Trump’s false claims.

Pence’s staff were not immediately available for comment.

Pence defended his actions, however, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Friday.

“Ultimately, I believe that most Americans understand that we did our duty that day under the Constitution and the laws of this country,” the newspaper quoted Pence as saying.

Trump attacked the bipartisan nine-member Jan. 6 select committee, which has held three hearings in little more than a week and is building a case that Trump acted illegally by trying to overturn his election loss.

“Let’s be clear, this is not a congressional investigation, this horrible situation that’s wasting everyone’s time. This is a theatrical production of partisan political fiction. That’s getting these terrible, terrible ratings and they’re going crazy,” Trump said.

On Thursday, former Pence aides told the committee that Trump pressed Pence to overturn the election results in Congress, after being told repeatedly that it was illegal to do so. Democrats on the panel said Trump kept up the pressure even though he knew a violent mob of his supporters was threatening the Capitol, where Pence and lawmakers worked to certify the election results.

Trump has protested that the hearings lack “equal representation.” Democrats initially pressed for a balanced bicameral investigation, but Republicans rejected the plan.

The committee’s proceedings are taking place in the runup to congressional elections in November, which will determine the balance of power in the Senate and House of Representatives ahead of the 2024 general election.

Trump continues to flirt publicly with the idea of running for president again in 2024.

But for now, the former president is concentrating on a revenge election campaign this year against his perceived enemies, including 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him after the Capitol attack, among them Representative Liz Cheney, who is vice chair of the investigating committee.

(Reporting by David Morgan, Doina Chiacu and Katharine Jackson; Editing by Scott Malone; editing by Grant McCool)

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By Tim Reid

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A Republican-controlled county commission in New Mexico that refused to recognize election returns this month after citing unfounded conspiracy theories about voting machines bowed to legal pressure on Friday and certified the results.

Otero County commissioners voted 2-1 to certify the county’s June 7 primary election results, but only after the New Mexico Supreme Court ordered them to do so and after threats of legal action by the state’s Democratic attorney general.

The commissioner who still voted against certifying the results, Couy Griffin, did so hours after being sentenced for breaching the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.

Griffin, an election-fraud conspiracist and founder of “Cowboys for Trump,” avoided jail time, was fined $3,000 and given one year supervised release with the requirement that he complete 60 hours of community service.

Former Republican President Donald Trump has continued to push falsehoods that Democratic President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. Many Republicans believe Trump even after revelations in a congressional hearing this month that the former president’s own daughter and other close allies rejected them.

There are fears of more election turmoil ahead because of the hold unfounded conspiracy theories about voting machines and vote counts now have on many Republican lawmakers and grassroots Republican voters.

Otero’s initial move not to certify comes ahead of the November midterm elections that will decide control of the U.S. Congress, with both chambers now narrowly held by Democrats, as well as the 2024 presidential election, in which former President Donald Trump has indicated he could seek a second White House term.

U.S. Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 House of Representatives Republicans who voted to impeach Trump on a charge of inciting the deadly Jan. 6 attack, said Otero’s initial refusal to certify was a worrying harbinger of election turmoil ahead.

“Wake up America and GOP, this will destroy us,” Kinzinger, a member of the congressional commission investigating the Jan. 6 attack, tweeted on Wednesday.

New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who had previously said the county commission was acting “illegally,” expressed relief that the elections results had been certified.

“The voters of Otero County and the candidates who duly won their primaries can now rest assured that their voices have been heard and the General Election can proceed as planned,” Toulouse Oliver said in a statement.

(Reporting by Tim Reid; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico county certifies June primary results, ending standoff with state over unproven election security claims.

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By David Shepardson and Echo Wang

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Republican senators on Friday asked TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew about reports the social media site had allowed Russian state-approved media content but barred other videos.

“Recent reports indicate TikTok… has allowed Russian state media to flood the platform with dangerous pro-war propaganda. No company should find itself in the position of amplifying the Kremlin’s lies, which fuel public support for Russia’s war of choice in Ukraine,” said the letter, led by Steve Daines and signed by John Cornyn, Roger Wicker, John Barrasso, James Lankford and Cynthia Lummis.

The senators wrote they were “deeply concerned” that TikTok “is enabling the spread of pro-war propaganda to the Russian public, which risks adding to an already devastating human toll for both Ukrainians and Russians.”

The Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment. TikTok said in a statement to Reuters that the company was looking forward to continuing to engage with members on these issues and answer their questions.

Reuters reported in March the Chinese-owned video app said it would suspend live-streaming and the uploading of videos to its platform in Russia as it reviewed the implications of a new media law signed by President Vladimir Putin.

The senators said TikTok has failed “to equally enforce this

policy” and cited a news report that said it “appears TikTok belatedly closed this loophole on March 25.”

The letter added the “misleading, pro-regime content that flooded the service has not been taken down, creating an easily-accessible archive of pro-war propaganda” and asked TikTok to answer a series of questions.

TikTok, owned by Beijing-based internet technology company ByteDance, has been under mounting U.S. scrutiny over the personal data it handles. At a U.S. congressional hearing last October, the company faced tough questions from U.S. lawmakers.

Senator Marsha Blackburn, the panel’s top Republican, said she was concerned about TikTok’s data collection, including audio and a user’s location, and the potential for the Chinese government to gain access to the information. Blackburn questioned TikTok on whether the company could resist giving data to China’s government if material were to be demanded.

TikTok is one of the world’s most popular social media apps, with more than 1 billion active users globally.

(Reporting by David Shepardson and Echo Wang; Editing by David Gregorio)

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By Michael Martina and Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A duo of U.S. senators introduced a bill on Thursday to significantly enhance support for Taiwan, including provisions for billions of dollars in U.S. security assistance and changes to the decades old law undergirding Washington’s unofficial ties with the Chinese-claimed democratic island.

The United States, which accuses China of ramping up military coercion toward Taiwan, is its main supporter and arms supplier, a point of increasing friction between Washington and Beijing, whose relations are already at their lowest point in decades.

The senators’ Taiwan Policy Act of 2022 threatens severe sanctions against China for any aggression against Taiwan, and would provide $4.5 billion in foreign military financing over the next four years, as well as designate Taiwan a “major non-NATO ally,” according to the text.

The sponsors, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez, a Democrat, and Republican Lindsey Graham, said it would be the most comprehensive restructuring of U.S. policy toward Taiwan since the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 – the bedrock of U.S. engagement with the island since Washington opened up relations with China that year.

“As Beijing continues to seek to coerce and isolate Taiwan there should be no doubt or ambiguity about the depth and strength of our determination to stand with the people of Taiwan and their democracy,” Menendez said in a statement.

He said the bill sent a clear message that China should not make the same mistakes Russia made in invading Ukraine.

“The danger will only grow worse if we show weakness in the face of Chinese threats and aggression toward Taiwan,” Graham said. Senate aides said the pair hoped to have the committee vote to send the bill to the Senate floor as early as next week.

Washington and Beijing have stood firm on their opposing views about Taiwan’s right to rule itself.

“If the U.S. insists on taking actions that will harm China’s interests, we are compelled to take resolute countermeasures,” Liu Pengyu, spokesman for China’s embassy in Washington, said in response to a question about the bill.

UNEASY

One U.S. official familiar with the bill said some of its elements made President Joe Biden’s administration and the State Department uneasy given concerns it could antagonize China.

Any legislation would also have to pass the House of Representatives, and another expansive bill intended to boost U.S. competitiveness with China has been languishing in Congress for months.

The White House and State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Should it become law as currently written, the bill would “prioritize and expedite” arms sales to Taiwan until Congress determines the threat to the island has significantly abated, as well as direct the Secretary of Defense to establish a training program to increase Taiwan and U.S. armed forces interoperability.

The U.S. president would be required to impose sanctions on Chinese officials, including its president, in response to “significant escalation in hostile action in or against Taiwan”, such as undermining or overthrowing Taiwan’s government or occupying the island.

It would amend parts of the Taiwan Relations Act, including by adding that U.S. arms provisions to Taiwan be “conducive to deterring acts of aggression” by China.

It would also push the State Department to seek negotiations to rename Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington to the Taiwan Representative Office, and would elevate the role of Washington’s top official in Taiwan by requiring Senate confirmation for the post.

Beijing has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control, and Chinese Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe last week said China’s military “would have no choice but to fight at any cost and crush any attempt of Taiwan independence.”

(Reporting by Michael Martina and Patricia Zengerle; editing by Grant McCool, William Maclean)

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