Atlanta Police Officer Who Shot Rayshard Brooks Had Past Reprimand For Use Of Force

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Atlanta Police Officer Who Shot Rayshard Brooks Had Past Reprimand For Use Of Force

(Reuters) ― The former Atlanta police officer who shot and killed Rayshard Brooks last week was previously reprimanded for use of force involving a firearm, according to records released to Reuters by the city’s police department on Tuesday.

The records show Garrett Rolfe received a written reprimand in October 2017 for a firearm incident in September 2016, his sole use-of-force complaint in seven years on the force prior to Friday’s shooting. No further details were disclosed.

Rolfe was fired from the department after the shooting in the parking lot of a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant, which was captured by body and surveillance cameras. A second officer at the scene, Devin Brosnan, who is also white, was placed on administrative duty.

The death of 27-year-old Brooks, which came after he tussled with Rolfe and Brosnan and took off running with one of their Taser guns, was the latest killing of a black man to spark nationwide outrage at police brutality and racial injustice.

An autopsy conducted on Sunday showed that Brooks died from blood loss and organ injuries and ruled the death a homicide.

Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard has said he would decide by midweek whether to bring charges against the officers, a call that he indicated would hinge on whether they felt Brooks posed a threat.

Justin Miller, an attorney for Brooks’ family, told CNN on Tuesday he did not think the officers’ defense could rest on a Georgia law that allows them to shoot if they were in imminent threat of bodily harm, even though Brooks had a Taser.

“If you look at the tape closely, you can see that police officer was already going for his gun before Mr. Brooks turned around,” Miller said. “I don’t think in this situation that’s going to come up.”

Rolfe’s disciplinary file lists 12 incidents, composed of five vehicle accidents, four citizen complaints, and three involving firearms, including one in 2015, the 2016 matter for which he received a written reprimand and the Brooks’ shooting.

Internal investigations exonerated him in eight of the incidents. He received a written reprimand and an oral admonishment for two vehicle accidents. The file does not indicate any conclusion for the 2015 firearm incident.

Vince Champion, southeast regional director for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, said two firearm incidents over seven years prior to the Brooks’ shooting did not represent a pattern given the inherent dangers of the job.

“It doesn’t raise any flags for me,” Champion said, noting that Rolfe was not charged in any of the firearm incidents, which he said would have been vetted by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and internal affairs before being resolved.

Brosnan, who joined the police force in 2018, has no disciplinary history.

Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut, and Gabriella Borter in New York; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Jonathan Oatis



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The A.P. Apologizes for ‘Thought for Today’ From Jefferson Davis

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The A.P. Apologizes for ‘Thought for Today’ From Jefferson Davis

As part of a daily feature called Today in History, The Associated Press supplied newspapers across the country with a quotation from Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America.

The quote — “Never be haughty to the humble; never be humble to the haughty” — was included as the feature’s Thought for Today on June 3, Davis’s birth date.

“We are embarrassed that this happened and we apologize,” an A.P. spokeswoman said.

Today in History notes historical and trivial events that took place on the date in question, along with the birthdays of famous people dead and alive.

Thought for Today appears at the end of the feature. It can be an anonymous proverb or a quotation from a writer, a philosopher, a scientist, an entertainer or a historical figure.

The line attributed to Davis appeared in more than two dozen newspapers amid worldwide protests against racism and police violence prompted by the killing of George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis last month after a white police officer pinned him to the ground.

As part of a national reckoning, there has been an outcry against the use of the iconography and names associated with the Confederacy.

NASCAR said on last Wednesday that it would ban Confederate flags from its events, two days after Darrell Wallace Jr., the first black driver in 50 years to win one of its top three national touring series, called for the ban. That same day, demonstrators toppled a statue of Davis in Richmond, Va., once the capital of the Confederate States.

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to require the Pentagon to strip military bases and equipment of Confederate names, monuments or symbols within three years, a move that President Trump has opposed.

Newspapers that ran the Davis quote included The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C.; The Daily Independent in Ridgecrest, Calif.; and The Herkimer Times Telegram in Herkimer, N.Y.

“We are totally appalled by it, it should not have happened, and it was a mistake,” said Brian Carovillano, The A.P.’s managing editor. “Under the current climate, it’s especially appalling.”

It also appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette during a week when that paper told a black reporter that she would not be assigned to cover protests and assigned a black photojournalist to photograph the reopenings of a church and an ice-cream parlor instead of the demonstrations he said he had been scheduled to shoot.

During the weeks of anti-racism protests, high-ranking editors at The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer have resigned as many media organizations faced questions over the content they have published and their workplace cultures.

The Associated Press provides more than 2,000 stories a day to media organizations, including The Times, that pay to use them. It is led by Gary B. Pruitt, the president and chief executive, and Sally Buzbee, the executive editor.

Mr. Carovillano said a longtime desk editor assembled Today in History about six weeks ahead of time, using material from the organization’s database. Thought for Today quotes are recycled. The line from Davis had run three times — every four years on his birthday since 2008.

Newspapers across the country receive seven installments of the Today in History a week in advance. The batch including the Davis quote was sent May 25.

After a complaint from what The A.P. described as “a customer” on June 3, the service sent out a correction and a replacement quotation from the author Franz Kafka, who died on that date. The Kafka quote was, “There are two cardinal sins from which all the others spring: impatience and laziness.”

“I am embarrassed it was not caught and alarmed that A.P. used that quote at all,” Jennifer Brown, the executive news editor of The Advocate and The Times-Picayune in Louisiana, wrote on Twitter in response to a complaint from a reader. “It was definitely not intentional and inappropriate to run on any day.”

Amalie Nash, the vice president for audience development and local news at Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, said that Gannett reached out to the A.P. standards editor on June 3 after seeing that the quote had been distributed. It was published in several Gannett newspapers, including The St. Augustine Record in Florida and The Daily Review Atlas in Illinois.

“We agree it never should have run in any of our publications and regret that it did,” Ms. Nash said.

An A.P. spokeswoman said that, starting next week, Today in History would no longer include a Thought for Today. She added that the company had deleted the Davis quote from its database.

On Friday, a reporter for The Times asked why the quote remained on the A.P. website’s version of the June 3 Today in History. Minutes later, it was gone.

Marc Tracy contributed reporting. Jack Begg contributed research.



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House Leadership Announces Upcoming Vote On D.C. Statehood

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House Leadership Announces Upcoming Vote On D.C. Statehood

Democratic leaders in Congress announced Tuesday that the chamber will hold a vote next week to officially recognize Washington, D.C., as a state, a move that will bring the district one step closer to representation in Congress and control over its local affairs.

Washington, D.C., residents’ lack of voting power and autonomy has been a matter of debate dating all the way back to the establishment of the District of Columbia in the late 18th century. Activists and some local politicians have been calling for statehood ever since, but the issue was pushed to the forefront recently after President Donald Trump deployed federal police to quell nonviolent anti-racism protests near the White House.

“For more than two centuries, the residents of Washington, D.C., the District of Columbia, have been denied their right to fully participate in their democracy,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at a press conference Tuesday.

“And in recent days, we have seen a disturbing physical manifestation of that injustice when federal agents and out-of-state National Guard troops were deployed against peaceful protesters in the District without residents’ approval,” Pelosi continued.

After the bill passes in the House, it will require approval in the Senate, where Republicans in the majority have long voiced staunch opposition to D.C. statehood.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said the vote for D.C.’s statehood is scheduled for June 26. Currently, the bill has enough Democratic co-sponsors to pass in the House, and a number of Democratic senators have signed on as co-sponsors, as well.

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, thanked the bill’s co-sponsors on Tuesday and said Trump’s recent deployment of federal police against protesters “violated our principles of Americans being able to peacefully protest, and it violated our principles of local autonomy.”

“There shouldn’t be troops from other states in Washington, D.C.; there shouldn’t be federal forces advancing against Americans; and there very definitely shouldn’t be soldiers stationed around our city waiting for the go to attack Americans in a local policing matter,” Bowser said.

After Trump threatened to sic “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” on local protesters, Bowser called his comments “an attack on Black America.” The majority of D.C. residents are Black and brown.

Almost unanimously, Republicans have vowed to oppose any measure giving political representation to the more than 700,000 residents of Washington, D.C. Several of those opposed have made clear their motives are strictly political.

In June of last year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) inexplicably referred to calls for D.C. statehood as “full-bore socialism” because it would “give them two more new Democratic senators.” Democrats’ call for statehood do not guarantee the district will be represented by Democrats, but McConnell said the bill will go nowhere as long as he leads the Senate.

In May of this year, Trump told the New York Post that Washington, D.C., will “never” become a state because of the potential it could elect Democrats to office.



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U.S. Open Tennis Will Start On Time, New York Gov. Cuomo Says

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U.S. Open Tennis Will Start On Time, New York Gov. Cuomo Says

This year’s U.S. Open will take place at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, but fans won’t be in the stands due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP


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This year’s U.S. Open will take place at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, but fans won’t be in the stands due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday that the U.S. Open tennis tournament will take place as scheduled this summer in Queens.

The event will begin on Aug. 31 without fans in the stands because of the continued spread of the coronavirus.

Some tennis stars expressed unease at the announcement. Australian tennis star Nicholas Kyrgios called the move “selfish” on Twitter and joked that he would bring his hazmat suit. Australia has lost 102 people to the coronavirus, a tiny fraction of the more than 116,000 who have died in the United States from COVID-19.

Other stars, including the women’s world No. 1 Ash Barty and 17-time Grand Slam winner Novak Djokovic, have expressed concerns about the safety of the event, according to The Associated Press.

In a tweet, Cuomo stressed that the U.S. Tennis Association will be taking precautions that include “testing, additional cleaning, extra locker room space, and dedicated housing & transportation.”

“It will be held without fans, but we can watch it on TV, and I’ll take that,” Cuomo said at a press conference. “The tennis authority is going to be taking extraordinary precautions.”

The U.S. Open is one of tennis’ four Grand Slam tournaments and would be the second to take place this year, with the Australian Open having ended in February. Wimbledon has been canceled for the year, and the French Open, which usually takes place in May, was rescheduled to September after the U.S. Open.



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U.S. Open Tennis Will Start On Time, New York Gov. Cuomo Says

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U.S. Open Tennis Will Start On Time, New York Gov. Cuomo Says

This photo of Billie Jean King National Tennis Center was taken during the second round of the US Open tennis championships in 2019.

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Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP

This photo of Billie Jean King National Tennis Center was taken during the second round of the US Open tennis championships in 2019.

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced on Tuesday that the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament will take place as scheduled in Queens, N.Y., this summer.

The event will begin on Aug. 31 without fans in the stands because of the continued spread of the coronavirus.

Some tennis stars expressed unease at the announcement. Australian tennis star Nicholas Kyrgios called the move “selfish” on Twitter and joked that he would bring his hazmat suit. Only 102 people have died in Australia due to the coronavirus, a tiny fraction of the more than 116,000 that have died in the United States from COVID-19.

Other stars including the women’s world No. 1 Ash Barty and 17-time grand slam winner Novak Djokovic have expressed concerns about the safety of the event, according to the Associated Press.

In a tweet, Cuomo stressed that the U.S. Tennis Authority will be taking precautions that include “testing, additional cleaning, extra locker room space, and dedicated housing & transportation.”

“It will be held without fans, but we can watch it on TV, and I’ll take that,” Cuomo said at a press conference. “The tennis authority is going to be taking extraordinary precautions.”

The U.S. Open is one of tennis’ four ‘grand slam’ tournaments, and would be the second to take place this year, with the Australian Open having ended in February. Wimbledon has been canceled for the year and the French Open, which usually takes place in May, was rescheduled to September after the U.S. Open.



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‘Infodemic’ undermines democracy: Payne

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‘Infodemic’ undermines democracy: Payne

China and Russia are using the heightened anxiety around the coronavirus crisis to undermine western democracies by spreading disinformation online, the Australian government has warned.

The emphatic statement was delivered by Foreign Minister Marise Payne in a speech at the Australian National University’s National Security College in Canberra on Tuesday night.

“It is troubling that some countries are using the pandemic to undermine liberal democracy and promote their own, more authoritarian models,” the minister said.

“The disinformation we have seen contributes to a climate of fear and division when, at a time like this, what we need is cooperation and understanding.”

A European Commission report last week concluded Russia and China were the main culprits in carrying out targeted online disinformation campaigns “seeking to undermine democratic debate and exacerbate social polarisation, and improve their own image in the COVID-19 context”.

Social media platform Twitter last week revealed it had removed more than 32,000 “political propaganda” accounts linked to the Chinese, Russian and Turkish governments for violations of its platform.

Senator Payne described it as an “infodemic”.

The federal government plans to set up a special unit within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to counter online campaigns spreading false information in Australia’s region of influence, the ABC reported on Wednesday.

The government has not confirmed this but Senator Payne said Australia would respond to coordinated disinformation campaigns.

On the weekend, Australia co-signed with 131 other countries and observers a Latvian-led statement warning the COVID-19 pandemic had “created conditions that enable the spread of disinformation, fake news and doctored videos to foment violence and divide communities”.

“I can assure you that Australia will resist and counter efforts at disinformation,” Senator Payne said.

“We will do so through facts and transparency, underpinned by liberal democratic values that we will continue to promote at home and abroad.”

Senator Payne also rejected as “disinformation” Chinese government warnings that its tourists and students should reconsider coming to Australia because of the risk of racism.

“I can say emphatically that Australia will welcome students and visitors from all over the world, regardless of race, gender or nationality,” she said.

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New advice for 80,000 people shielding in NI

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New advice for 80,000 people shielding in NI

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80,000 people received shielding letters in Northern Ireland

Thousands of letters giving updated advice on shielding have begun arriving in homes in Northern Ireland.

They are for those who have been judged to be the most vulnerable to Covid-19 – in the region of 80,000 people.

They received a similar letter three months ago advising them to shield for 12 weeks. The new guidance is valid until the end of June.

In the letter, Northern Ireland’s chief medical officer says he knows it has been “a very challenging time”.

Dr Michael McBride explained “the Covid-19 virus still poses a high risk” but that “infection levels are now falling” so the “risk of exposure is significantly less”.

However, the letter also states that people shielding should continue to practise social distancing of two metres and wash their hands regularly.

The updated guidance from the chief medical officer states:

  • If you wish to spend time outdoors (though not in other buildings, households, or enclosed spaces) you should take extra care to minimise contact with others by keeping 2m apart
  • If you choose to spend time outdoors, this can be with members of your own household. If you live alone, you can spend time outdoors with one person from another household (ideally the same person each time)
  • You should remain vigilant when leaving home, washing your hands regularly, maintaining social distance and avoiding gatherings of any size
  • You should not attend any gatherings, including gatherings of friends and families in private spaces, for example, parties, weddings and religious services
  • You should strictly avoid contact with anyone who is displaying symptoms of Covid-19 (a new continuous cough, a high temperature, or a loss of, or change in, the sense of taste or smell)

Belfast woman Issy McManus has rheumatoid arthritis and takes regular medication which suppresses her immune system.

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Issy McManus said she had found following the shielding advice difficult

She received an initial shielding letter.

Mrs McManus, who recently remarried and lives with her new husband, Gerry, said she found it difficult to follow the shielding advice.

“The only people that came to see me were my nieces – it was talking to them through the patio doors really, and it absolutely wrecked my nerves,” she said.

“I couldn’t cope with it. I’m very sociable, and I just found it impossible. We’re only newly married and so it’s been a poor baptism of fire for Gerry as well, so it was hard work.”

Her new letter with updated guidance arrived on Monday.

Mrs McManus said she initially feared it would tell her to stay indoors.

“I just thought ‘I can’t cope with this really; I can’t go through all that again’. I really need to be outside in my garden… but to think I should be back in the house and doing that, completely locked down, no, I can’t do it.”

Dr Ursula Brennan, a Belfast GP and GP lead for the Belfast Covid Centre, said she is hopeful that with the reduction in the number of cases of Covid-19 in the community there will be a further relaxation of the rules in the coming weeks.

“We know it’s been very difficult for those who’ve been shielding over the 12 weeks, particularly with regards to their mental health and their emotional wellbeing,” she said.

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Dr Ursula Brennan said the new advice was good news for those shielding

“But this is good news, that it allows those people now to spend time outdoors either with their own family, but being particularly careful with social distancing, the two metre gap between individuals outside.

“Those individuals who have been living alone – they can spend time outdoors with one other person not from their household preferably the same person and again being sure to maintain social distancing and hand washing and those are really key features of Covid and they need to continue.”

Dr Brennan advises people who have received a letter to seek clarification from their GP or hospital specialist if they are unclear about anything.

Life-saving drug

In a separate development, Northern Ireland’s health minister has said that the drug Dexamethasone will be rolled out across Northern Ireland in advance of a potential second wave of Covid-19.

The drug is part of the world’s biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus.

The low-dose steroid treatment is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus, UK experts say.

It will provide “huge benefits to those most impacted by the infection, ultimately helping to save lives”, Robin Swann added.

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The first international passenger plane since the end of March arrived into Belfast on Tuesday

Meanwhile, the first international passenger plane touched down at Belfast International Airportl for the first time since the coronavirus lockdown in March.

Five passengers were on board the flight from Faro, in the Portuguese Algarve.

The passengers are subject to new isolation regulations in force across the UK, meaning they must self-isolate for 14 days.

The quarantine rules came into force on 12 June. Anyone arriving from the Common Travel Area (CTA) – the Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands, or the Isle of Man – does not have to enter quarantine.

In other developments on Tuesday:

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‘Distressing’: Reverend reveals what evangelicals say privately about Trump – CNN Video

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‘Distressing’: Reverend reveals what evangelicals say privately about Trump – CNN Video

Reverend Rob Schenck, a former evangelical activist, discusses President Trump’s photo-op after police forcibly moved protesters and what evangelicals are now saying about Trump.



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Mississippi Set To Become The 13th State To Criminalize Fossil Fuel Protests

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Mississippi Set To Become The 13th State To Criminalize Fossil Fuel Protests

Mississippi is on the verge of becoming the 13th state in the past three years to slap new penalties on protests against fossil fuel infrastructure.

A bill that cleared the state Legislature earlier this week makes knowingly trespassing any property where oil, gas or petrochemical pipelines or tanks are located a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison and a $1,000 fine.

Individuals who cause damage or losses that total more than $1,000 ― for example, by halting production at a refinery or stopping the flow of fuel through a pipeline ― could face felony charges punishable by up to seven years in prison and fines of up to $10,000. 

The bill also threatens any “organization that aids, abets, solicits, compensates, hires, conspires with, commands or procures a person to commit the crime of impeding critical infrastructure” with fines of up to $100,000 and civil action from companies to recoup “damages for lost profits, whether or not any fine is imposed.” 

The legislation passed 67-to-47 in the Magnolia State’s House of Representatives in March, just before quarantine orders to prevent the spread of the coronavirus pandemic delayed the legislative session. The state Senate voted 43-to-9 on Monday to approve it.

Gov. Tate Reeves (R) did not respond to a request for comment, but is expected to sign the legislation into law. 



President Donald Trump stands beside Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R). 

The measure, tracking with laws 12 other states have enacted since late 2017, designates fossil fuel sites as “critical infrastructure” and ups the penalties for protests that take place near them. It would be the latest of several to become law since the COVID-19 crisis began in March, according to a tally by the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law and data from Greenpeace. 

Kentucky, South Dakota and West Virginia enacted the laws in March. A similar measure advanced in Alabama, but the Legislature failed to send it to the governor before its session ended. Louisiana, which already has a critical infrastructure law on the books, passed new draconian measures at the end of May that would have established three-year mandatory minimum sentences with hard labor for peacefully trespassing on fossil fuel property during a state of emergency, but the governor vetoed the bill last week. 

The bills started popping up in state legislatures following the end of the protests to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline under a sacred water source on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. The months-long standoff with militarized security forces left hundreds of indigenous activists and environmentalists injured. 

After the Trump administration fast-tracked the project for completion, the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) began shopping around a model bill to ramp up penalties for participating in similar demonstrations in an effort to chill future protests. 

“Legislators in many states continue to pamper big polluters over constituents, under the double-cover of COVID-19 and a nationwide uprising against a deadly, racist policing system,” Connor Gibson, a senior researcher at Greenpeace who tracks anti-protest bills, told HuffPost. “Rather than  protecting the life and liberty of Black people, or the needs of people who have lost work, politicians are helping fossil fuel interests subvert the fundamental right to protest.”

The Industry Asks And Receives

While ALEC helped promote the bills, the oil and gas industry deployed its vast influence network to ensure their passage. Such was the case in Mississippi.

Last year, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a refinery trade group, retained well-known Mississippi lobbyist Joe Sims to champion the legislation, according to an email published by the watchdog group Documented. Sims said he was “working on legislation to provide a definition of ‘critical infrastructure’ and to provide for criminal penalties for those who willfully and illegally trespass, disrupt, destroy, etc. regarding such facilities.”

On Feb. 12 of this year, Sims took four Republican state lawmakers ― Reps. Becky Currie, Jansen Owen, Hank Zuber and Rob Roberson ― to a meal at an upscale steakhouse, according to lobbying disclosures published by Greenpeace’s Gibson. Three of those lawmakers ― Owen, Roberson and Zuber ― serve on the House committee, where the current version of the bill was introduced five days after the meal. The trio voted to advance the bill out of the committee less than a month later. And joined by Currie, they supported its final passage.

Mississippi’s disclosure don’t indicate the legislation on which companies lobby. But fossil fuel that actively lobbied in the state in 2019 and 2020, according to Gibson’s analysis, include petrochemical behemoth Koch Industries, utility giant Southern Company’s Mississippi Power division, pipe supplier Plains All-American Pipeline, and oil giant Chevron Corporation.   

This article was updated to reflect an additional law passed in Iowa in 2018 that was not included in the ICNL tally. 



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Polish leader may visit White House as Trump pushes troop shift in Europe

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Polish leader may visit White House as Trump pushes troop shift in Europe

U.S. President Donald Trump and the President of Poland, Andrzej Duda speak to the media during a news conference in the Rose Garden at the White House on June 12, 2019 | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

U.S. President Donald Trump may soon be welcoming foreign leaders to the White House again after a pause due to the coronavirus pandemic, and his aides are in talks to host the president of Poland, U.S. and Polish officials said.

A visit by Poland’s Andrzej Duda, if finalized, is likely to coincide with Trump’s plans to announce an increase in the number of U.S. troops stationed in Poland. But it also comes at a sensitive time for Duda, who is up for reelection on June 28.

Close observers of the relationship expressed surprise at the possibility of a Duda visit.

“Duda has done a good job with the Trump administration and President Trump. But Poland is in the final days of a presidential election, with Duda facing strong competition from several credible candidates,” said Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland in the Clinton administration who is now at the Atlantic Council. “A Duda visit now would be seen as the U.S. playing a partisan role in Poland. Not a good idea.”

In early February, Trump welcomed the man many countries have recognized as Venezuela’s rightful leader, Juan Guaidó, and in late January, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also visited Washington. Trump also met in early March with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro at Mar-a-Lago, a visit that was marred by the Brazilian leader’s press secretary testing positive for the coronavirus soon afterward.

It’s not clear what sorts of precautionary measures will be taken due to the pandemic if Duda stops by the White House, such as whether or not he will wear a mask. Trump has avoided wearing a mask in public, despite recommendations from U.S. health officials that people do so.

A Trump administration official told POLITICO that the Polish leader could visit as early as next week, though another U.S. official said only that a visit by Duda was expected “soon.” And a Polish government official also confirmed there were discussions underway, with troops and a defense deal dubbed “Fort Trump” on the agenda, but did not know exactly when the meeting would take place.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot declined to comment Tuesday, while State Department officials did not respond to emails or referred POLITICO to the White House. A spokesman for the Polish embassy said it didn’t “have any information about any visit in coming days.”

Duda has earned criticism recently for saying that the LGBTQ movement is spreading ideas that are worse than communism. Duda is allied with the ruling Law and Justice Party, which has a conservative agenda that LGBTQ activists say targets them.

The Polish government has maintained a relatively good relationship with the Trump administration, at least when compared to Western European allies such as Germany. Critics of Trump’s handling of the relationship say the U.S. administration has not done enough to push back against the Polish ruling party’s autocratic tendencies.

The Polish visit would take place as Trump plans to cut U.S. troop numbers in Germany by more than 9,000 while increasing the U.S. troop presence in Poland. The plan is “coming soon” and will be larger than expected, according to U.S. Ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher.

Trump has said he won’t change his mind about withdrawing troops from Germany; he insists that Germany is not paying its fair share of costs for NATO, though a voluntary agreement for member states to boost their defense spending has set 2024 as the goal. His plan to reduce the troop numbers is drawing fierce opposition in Congress, including from Republicans.

Senior Pentagon leaders were caught off guard by the decision to withdraw troops from Germany, which is the permanent home to roughly 35,000 U.S. service members and their families and serves as a critical staging base for operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, according to one senior defense official. The department has not yet been given any orders to begin bringing home any units, another U.S. official said.

The United States has avoided permanently basing troops in Poland because many European allies believe such a move would violate the NATO Russia Founding Act, the roadmap for NATO-Russia cooperation, said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe.

Poland also likely does not have the capacity to absorb nearly 10,000 troops from Germany and their families on a permanent basis, Hodges said.

“This whole thing was a political decision, not the result of the traditional disciplined interagency process and no strategic analysis led to it,” Hodges said. “So you can imagine that the staffs at European Command and U.S. Army Europe and U.S. Air Forces Europe are really hustling right now.”



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