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 Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast/GettyFor weeks now, I've been worried about Joe Biden. Yes, the deadly coronavirus presents serious political problems for Donald Trump (despite his current glowing approval ratings, this crisis undermines the one thing he had going for him: a good economy), but consider how quickly the pandemic killed the Joe-mentum.
It wasn't that long ago that Joe, not COVID-19, was the talk of the town—and rightly so.
After a campaign season when Biden barely managed to tread water, and when we nearly wrote him off on the heels of pathetic performances in Iowa and New Hampshire, suddenly Joe came roaring back with a stunning victory in South Carolina that propelled him to a huge Super Tuesday.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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The finding by Inspector General Michael Horowitz came after an earlier inquiry found numerous errors in court submissions seeking surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser.
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 In a private conversation with President Donald Trump during the rapid acceleration of the pandemic, China's leader Xi Jinping went out of his way to deploy one of the most effective diplomatic maneuvers of the current American era: aggressive flattery.
In a phone call to discuss the international coronavirus crisis last week, Xi stressed to Trump how decisive, strong, and successful he feels his U.S. counterpart's public health and economic responses have been, two U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter said. The flattery came at a time when Trump was continuing to experience a deluge of criticism for his administration's response to the pandemic. It also came as some of the American president's most prominent officials were still engaged in a multi-pronged campaign to castigate the Chinese government for an alleged coronavirus cover-up and to rebrand the illness as the "Chinese virus" and the "Wuhan virus."
Trump had begun incorporating that language into his public utterances, framing the pandemic as a war whose origins were in China. But lately, he has softened his tone and adopted a more deferential stance toward Xi—whom he routinely calls his good "friend" and an "incredible guy"— going out of his way to compliment and excuse Beijing for its response to the virus, and to even publicly shrug off new reporting on China's disinformation apparatus in the midst of the pandemic.
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Campaign officials briefed the president in recent days about their fears of reopening the economy too soon, arguing that a spike in deaths could be even more politically damaging in November than the current economic downturn.
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DA Jackie Lacey's campaign opponent called out her office for risking lives by pushing cases that could have been dismissed or delayed.
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