Politics
Column: California isn't sending a Black woman to the Senate. But Barbara Lee won anyway
I don’t know what I had expected from Barbara Lee when an aide handed her the phone, but the laughter I heard certainly wasn’t it.
Only a few hours had passed since the longtime congresswoman from Oakland had released a statement conceding the primary election for U.S. Senate and congratulating her Democratic colleague, Rep. Adam B. Schiff of Burbank.
Lee came in fourth place, more than a million votes behind Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey, and hundreds of thousands of votes behind Democratic Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, who came in third. Ballots are still being counted, but the Senate race was called minutes after the polls closed on Super Tuesday.
It was, by any stretch of the imagination, a crushing defeat.
Especially since Lee, and a committed sisterhood of politicians, activists, academics and lobbyists across California, had spent almost four years working behind the scenes to boost representation for Black women at the highest levels of the federal government.
Now Schiff and Garvey will face each other in the November general election — and Schiff will certainly win in this overwhelmingly Democratic state. He’ll be a senator for years to come.
So I wondered, why was Lee laughing?
“I’ve been persistent, and every step of the way there have been roadblocks and obstacles,” she told me, growing serious. “But again, this is such an example of a Black woman’s life.”
::
It’s worth reflecting on how we got here. At least, that’s what California Secretary of State Shirley Weber has been doing.
“The whole thing started with believing that African Americans deserve to have a seat,” she told me.
It was back in 2020, and Weber was serving in the state Assembly and as leader of the Legislative Black Caucus. Joe Biden had just been elected president, with no small amount of help from Black women, and Kamala Harris had just vacated her Senate seat to become the nation’s first Black and South Asian vice president.
Weber and a long list of Black politicians, activists, academics and lobbyists decided that Black women needed to continue to have representation in the upper chamber. That it would be a loss not having someone with such intersectional life experiences when the state and country are becoming more diverse with each passing year.
“The ability around the nation to recognize and to support Black women in statewide positions is very bleak,” Weber told me in 2020. “You got 100 people in the Senate and you don’t have one Black woman.”
The “Keep the Seat” campaign was born, and the words became a rallying cry. Supporters urged Gov. Gavin Newsom to do just that by picking Lee or then-Rep. Karen Bass, both eminently qualified longtime legislators, as a successor to Harris.
Lee, in Santa Rosa last month, stuck to her progressive stances and “Keep the Seat” message as she campaigned for Senate in cities and counties throughout California.
(Josh Edelson / For The Times)
Newsom ended up selecting then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla instead, Lee stayed in Congress and Bass, of course, became mayor of Los Angeles. But the rallying cry didn’t go silent. Rather, it returned alongside calls for Sen. Dianne Feinstein to step down over concerns about her health, prompting Newsom to promise to appoint a Black woman to her seat if it came to that.
Then Feinstein died last year, setting off a days-long political mess, mostly of the governor’s own making. At issue was an apparent caveat in Newsom’s promise. He said he’d make an “interim appointment” because the campaign for the Senate seat had already been underway for months.
Lee and other Black women — myself included — took umbrage, wondering why were only good enough to be a caretaker for Schiff, who was in the lead even then. Newsom said his words were being misconstrued, and resisted calls to appoint Lee outright.
In the end, the governor appointed his political ally Laphonza Butler, the Black woman who led Emily’s List, and she ultimately decided not to run for a full term.
Given all of that back-and-forth, it came as something of a surprise to Weber that Lee would stick with her campaign for Senate and give up her House seat. This is especially true because, even without Lee, the Senate is likely to get another Black woman in November, as Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware are running for seats too.
Some people, looking at the polling, had been quietly pressuring Lee to drop out.
“But that’s Barbara, you know? She does what she believes, and you can never question her heart,” Weber told me. “Another one would have been calculating, ‘Well, if I run I and lose, it’s this versus that.’ And then she didn’t calculate like that. She decided that we needed to have a Black woman in that seat.”
::
I doubt Lee will ever admit it, but she had to know she was probably going to lose.
For months, polls consistently showed her trailing her opponents, even after she received a plurality of the delegate vote at the California Democratic Party convention. Many of those delegates, like voters in her Bay Area district, tended to lean more progressive than voters in other parts of the state.
Lee also lacked a statewide profile — unlike Schiff, whose prominence rose by leading the first impeachment of Donald Trump; or Porter with her whiteboard notes during congressional hearings; or even Garvey, with his star turns on the Dodgers and Padres.
Perhaps even more important, Lee didn’t have tens of millions of dollars to buy a statewide profile with a TV advertising blitz. Before deciding to run for Senate, the 77-year-old had never needed a sophisticated fundraising operation, and had fiercely guarded her private life rather than blast it across social media to boost her popularity.
“If you don’t have money coming from all directions,” she acknowledged, “it’s very difficult to introduce yourself to voters.”
So while Lee’s campaign only raised about $5 million, according to the latest Federal Election Commission filings, she was running against two of the most prolific fundraisers in Congress. Both Schiff and Porter amassed war chests closer to $30 million, with Schiff, blessed by the Democratic Party establishment, long in the lead.
Which is why it’s ridiculous that, of all of the candidates, it was Porter — with about as much money left over in her campaign account as Lee had raised throughout her entire campaign — who chose to complain about the influence of money in politics.
“Because of you,” she posted to her followers on X, “we had the establishment running scared — withstanding 3 to 1 in TV spending and an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election.” It was a terrible choice of words because, of course, the election wasn’t “rigged.” No ballots were illegally manipulated.
But it’s true that our political system is “rigged” in the sense that societal biases and structural inequities often work against women and people of color who run for office. This has been borne out in study after study, including a recent one from Pew Research Center.
We don’t have an outsized number of white men in elected office because most white men are political geniuses and most women and people of color are terrible candidates. We do because women of color, in particular, have a consistently harder time raising money because they have less access to high-end donors, and therefore have a harder time getting elected.
“That’s a reality when you’re in a poor community, and you’ve just been a regular campaigner and you work hard in your community and you deliver,” Weber said. “You’re not in a circle that raises $30 million.”
Lee, left, stayed in the race despite issues including systemic fundraising challenges and low polling against her higher-profile rivals, Adam B. Schiff, Katie Porter and Steve Garvey, from left at a January debate.
(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)
But Lee’s decision to run in spite of these challenges is what she said inspired many of the people she met on the campaign trail — including numerous Black women who were putting together fledgling campaigns to run for office.
They would swap stories about the hardships ahead. The racism and sexism embedded in the system.
“So many of them would come up and whisper to me, ‘I know what the deal is.’ It’s a common conversation Black women have,” Lee told me. “When you step out and do something that others didn’t think you should do as a Black woman, then you get a lot of pushback.”
I saw it too. At her campaign events in cities and counties where she’d never before had a reason to spend much time, Black women and people of color would hang on Lee’s every word:
How she summoned the courage to travel to Mexcio to get an abortion as a teenager. How she worked with the Black Panthers. How, as a member of Congress, she was among the first to call for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and the only one to resist war after 9/11.
Before running for Senate, Lee was an unknown to many. Now she’s an underappreciated hero with a cult-like following.
Therefore, I agree with Weber when she says that Lee’s loss in the primary doesn’t diminish the fight for representation that started with the “Keep the Seat” campaign. Or even the push to get Harris elected to the Senate in the first place.
“Nobody’s saying we shouldn’t do this again. Nobody seems to be saying, ‘Well, we lost our chance. We missed our shot,’” Weber said. “But a lot of women that I’ve talked to more recently have said, ‘You know, when this is over, we’ve got to organize.’”
Raising money will always been an issue. So will racism and sexism. But in the end, the campaign for Senate might have been more important than the election. And, in that way, it’s Lee who is getting the last laugh.
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The Justice Department is turning to former Trump attorney Joeseph diGenova to spearhead a probe into ex-CIA Director John Brennan and others over the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, as the department reshuffles leadership of the sprawling inquiry.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has tapped diGenova to serve as counsel overseeing the matter, according to a New York Times report, putting a former Trump attorney in a key role in the high-profile probe. A federal grand jury seated in Miami has been impaneled since late last year.
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
DOJ ACTIVELY PREPARING TO ISSUE GRAND JURY SUBPOENAS RELATING TO JOHN BRENNAN INVESTIGATION: SOURCES
Joseph diGenova represented President Donald Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., who represented Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, has repeatedly accused Brennan of misconduct tied to the origins of the Russia probe—allegations that have not resulted in criminal charges.
He also said in a 2018 appearance on Fox News that Brennan colluded with the FBI and DOJ to frame Trump.
The origins of the Russia investigation have been the subject of ongoing scrutiny by Trump allies, who have argued that intelligence and law enforcement officials improperly launched the probe.
BRENNAN INDICTMENT COULD COME WITHIN ‘WEEKS’ AS PROSECUTORS REQUEST OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPTS
Joseph diGenova has previously said that ex-CIA chief John Brennan colluded with the FBI and DOJ to frame Trump. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
DiGenova’s appointment follows the ouster of Maria Medetis Long, a national security prosecutor in the South Florida U.S. attorney’s office. She had been overseeing the inquiry, including a false statements probe related to Brennan and broader conspiracy-related investigations.
As the investigation continues, federal investigators have issued subpoenas seeking information related to intelligence assessments of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
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John Brennan has denied any wrongdoing related to the Russia investigation. (William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images; Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Brennan has previously denied wrongdoing related to the Russia investigation and has defended the intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election.
Politics
Supreme Court weighs phone searches to find criminals amid complaints of ‘digital dragnets’
WASHINGTON — A man carrying a gun and a cellphone entered a federal credit union in a small town in central Virginia in May 2019 and demanded cash.
He left with $195,000 in a bag and no clue to his identity. But his smartphone was keeping track of him.
What happened next could yield a landmark ruling from the Supreme Court on the 4th Amendment and its restrictions against “unreasonable searches.” The court will hear arguments on the issue on April 27.
Typically, police use tips or leads to find suspects, then seek a search warrant from a judge to enter a house or other private area to seize the evidence that can prove a crime.
Civil libertarians say the new “digital dragnets” work in reverse.
“It’s grab the data and search first. Suspicion later. That’s opposite of how our system has worked, and it’s really dangerous,” said Jake Laperruque, an attorney for the Center for Democracy & Technology.
But these new data scans can be effective in finding criminals.
Lacking leads in the Virginia bank robbery, a police detective turned to what one judge in the case called a “groundbreaking investigative tool … enabling the relentless collection of eerily precise location data.”
Cellphones can be tracked through towers, and Google stored this location history data for hundreds of millions of users. The detective sent Google a demand for information known as a “geofence warrant,” referring to a virtual fence around a particular geographic area at a specific time.
The officer sought phones that were within 150 yards of the bank during the hour of the robbery. He used that data to locate Okello Chatrie, then obtained a search warrant of his home where the cash and the holdup notes were found.
Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea, but the Supreme Court will hear his appeal next week.
The justices agreed to decide whether geofence warrants violate the 4th Amendment.
The outcome may go beyond location tracking. At issue more broadly is the legal status of the vast amount of privately stored data that can be easily scanned.
This may include words or phrases found in Google searches or in emails. For example, investigators may want to know who searched for a particular address in the weeks before an arson or a murder took place there or who searched for information on making a particular type of bomb.
Judges are deeply divided on how this fits with the 4th Amendment.
Two years ago, the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans ruled “geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the 4th Amendment.”
Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s liberals in a 4th Amendment privacy case in 2018.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Historians of the 4th Amendment say the constitutional ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” arose from the anger in the American colonies over British officers using general warrants to search homes and stores even when they had no reason to suspect any particular person of wrongdoing.
The National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers relies on that contention in opposing geofence warrants.
Its lawyers argued the government obtained Chatrie’s “private location information … with an unconstitutional general warrant that compelled Google to conduct a fishing expedition through millions of Google accounts, without any basis for believing that any one of them would contain incriminating evidence.”
Meanwhile, the more liberal 4th Circuit in Virginia divided 7-7 to reject Chatrie’s appeal. Several judges explained the law was not clear, and the police officer had done nothing wrong.
“There was no search here,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a concurring opinion that defended the use of this tracking data.
He pointed to Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s declaring that check records held by a bank or dialing records held by a phone company were not private and could be searched by investigators without a warrant.
Chatrie had agreed to having his location records held by Google. If financial records for several months are not private, the judge wrote, “surely this request for a two-hour snapshot of one’s public movements” is not private either.
Google changed its policy in 2023 and no longer stores location history data for all of its users. But cellphone carriers continue to receive warrants that seek tracking data.
Wilkinson, a prominent conservative from the Reagan era, also argued it would be a mistake for the courts to “frustrate law enforcement’s ability to keep pace with tech-savvy criminals” or cause “more cold cases to go unsolved. Think of a murder where the culprit leaves behind his encrypted phone and nothing else. No fingerprints, no witnesses, no murder weapon. But because the killer allowed Google to track his location, a geofence warrant can crack the case,” he wrote.
Judges in Los Angeles upheld the use of a geofence warrant to find and convict two men for a robbery and murder in a bank parking lot in Paramount.
The victim, Adbadalla Thabet, collected cash from gas stations in Downey, Bellflower, Compton and Lynwood early in the morning before driving to the bank.
After he was robbed and shot, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective found video surveillance that showed he had been followed by two cars whose license plates could not be seen.
The detective then sought a geofence warrant from a Superior Court judge that asked Google for location data for six designated spots on the morning of the murder.
That led to the identification of Daniel Meza and Walter Meneses, who pleaded guilty to the crimes. A California Court of Appeal rejected their 4th Amendment claim in 2023, even though the judges said they had legal doubts about the “novelty of the particular surveillance technique at issue.”
The Supreme Court has also been split on how to apply the 4th Amendment to new types of surveillance.
By a 5-4 vote, the court in 2018 ruled the FBI should have obtained a search warrant before it required a cellphone company to turn over 127 days of records for Timothy Carpenter, a suspect in a series of store robberies in Michigan.
The data confirmed Carpenter was nearby when four of the stores were robbed.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, joined by four liberal justices, said this lengthy surveillance violated privacy rights protected by the 4th Amendment.
The “seismic shifts in technology” could permit total surveillance of the public, Roberts wrote, and “we decline to grant the state unrestricted access” to these databases.
But he described the Carpenter decision as “narrow” because it turned on the many weeks of surveillance data.
In dissent, four conservatives questioned how tracking someone’s driving violates their privacy. Surveillance cameras and license plate readers are commonly used by investigators and have rarely been challenged.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer relies on that argument in his defense of Chatrie’s conviction. “An individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements that anyone could see,” he wrote.
The justices will issue a decision by the end of June.
Politics
Trump renews bridge, power plant threat against Iran in push for deal, mocks ‘tough guy’ IRGC
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President Donald Trump mocked the Islamic Revolutionary Guard on Sunday morning for staking claim to a Strait of Hormuz “blockade” the U.S. military had already put in place.
“Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait, which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They’re helping us without knowing, and they are the ones that lose with the closed passage, $500 Million Dollars a day! The United States loses nothing.
“In fact, many Ships are headed, right now, to the U.S., Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska, to load up, compliments of the IRGC, always wanting to be ‘the tough guy!’”
Trump declared Saturday’s IRGC fire was “a total violation” of the ceasefire.
“Iran decided to fire bullets yesterday in the Strait of Hormuz — A Total Violation of our Ceasefire Agreement!” his post began.
“Many of them were aimed at a French Ship, and a Freighter from the United Kingdom. That wasn’t nice, was it? My Representatives are going to Islamabad, Pakistan — They will be there tomorrow evening, for Negotiations.”
Trump remains hopeful about diplomacy, but is not ruling out a return to force, where he once warned about ending “civilation” in Iran as they know it.
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran,” Trump’s stern warning continued.
“NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
“They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END!”
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