News: Miami mayor makes two big bets

Thursday, June 15, 2023

Miami mayor makes two big bets

Jun 15, 2023

Presented by American Edge Project

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez speaks during a press conference at the City of Miami Police Department regarding the city's preparations for the court appearance by former President Donald Trump this week.

THE CRYPTO PRIMARY — Miami’s Republican Mayor Francis Suarez just took a big risk on his future. He also entered the presidential race today.

Recent history, with its bumper crops of presidential primary candidates, shows that there’s little downside in mounting a longshot Oval Office bid. Losers often walk away with consolation prizes like cabinet posts or cable news gigs.

Recent history has been less kind to cryptocurrency, and to those who bind their fortunes too closely to it, as the digital assets market crashed last year, exposing a series of spectacular frauds along the way.

Suarez is among those bound to it. He tied his personal brand and Miami’s to crypto by aggressively boosting the technology during its last bull run — and he continues to embrace the technology as he steps onto the national stage.

He’s not “running away from Bitcoin,” his spokeswoman Soledad Cedro, told POLITICO this morning during a brief interview in which she also revealed she had taken a leave of absence from the mayor’s office to work on his presidential bid.

Indeed, at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami last month, Suarez was bullish as ever. The mayor, who currently takes his salary in Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, suggested he would continue to do so if elected president. He also announced that he was borrowing against the six Bitcoin he’s accumulated in salary — now worth approximately $150,000 — to secure a mortgage on an investment property.

(It was revealed last month that Suarez was also making $10,000 a month consulting for a developer. The news led to the opening of an ethics probe, and the Miami Herald reported last week that the arrangement is now the subject of an FBI investigation.)

Suarez’s public gestures generated more buzz at last year’s conference, when crypto markets were riding high and the mayor unveiled a robotic “Bitcoin bull” statue, a symbol of the city’s ambitions to become a high-tech financial capital.

Back then, pro-crypto politicians could count on the support of colorful crypto moguls and an army of enthusiastic small-time investors. Today, the highest-profile mogul, Sam Bankman-Fried, is indicted, while many of his peers are embattled. Legions of investors have taken hits to their savings.

And Suarez, even if he’s not running away from crypto, has had to temper his rhetoric, at least in some contexts: “We would recommend choosing multiple industries to champion to create a stronger local economy of companies and investors,” he told me in April, in response to written questions. “Miami’s brand is tech and innovation, which is broader than just the crypto industry.”

Despite all this, as Suarez enters the 2024 presidential fray, he doesn’t even have the “crypto candidate” lane all to himself.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an industry-friendly state law last year, before signing a measure last month that restricted the use of central bank digital currency in the state. (A CBDC, whose existence at this point remains merely hypothetical, would amount to a digital upgrade of the existing dollar system, and is vehemently opposed by crypto boosters). That’s helped DeSantis earn the support of pro-crypto tech investors like venture capitalist David Sacks, who is helping the governor raise money.

Over in the Democratic primary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has embraced Bitcoin, trashed CBDCs, and won the endorsement of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who is now working full-time to create a Bitcoin-centric vision of the Internet at his payments firm Block. Dorsey told me on Sunday that he is set to make contact with Kennedy’s campaign this week.

Even in the “young, ethnically diverse, longshot Republican candidate” lane, Suarez faces pro-crypto competition from publicity-savvy executive Vivek Ramaswamy, who, like Kennedy, also spoke at last month’s Bitcoin conference.

All of this suggests that crypto regulation and broader questions about the future of money are creeping their way onto the 2024 agenda.

Whether Suarez’s fortunes will rise or fall by riding that next leg of the crypto roller-coaster is another matter, but it’s a risk the Miami mayor is apparently willing to take.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Tonight’s author Ben Schreckinger covers tech, finance and politics for POLITICO; he is an investor in cryptocurrency. You can reach him at bschreckinger@politico.com or on Twitter at @SchreckReports.

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What'd I Miss?

— Trump judge’s thin criminal trial resume comes with a twist: Aileen Cannon, the federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s latest criminal case, has run just four, relatively routine criminal trials in her short tenure on the bench — a stark contrast to the historic and complex proceedings she’s about to undertake related to the former president. There’s one exception, however, to Cannon’s judicial history that has largely escaped scrutiny. For nearly one-and-a-half years, she’s shepherded a complex, 10-defendant health care fraud case to the verge of trial, and in the course has litigated tangled and fraught issues of attorney-client privilege and motions to suppress — some of which could be precursors to battles in the upcoming Trump case.

In related news, Cannon took one of her first substantive steps today in Trump’s prosecution. In a brief order, Cannon required all attorneys in the case — for Trump as well as his longtime valet, Walt Nauta, who is charged alongside him as an alleged co-conspirator — to contact the Justice Department about obtaining security clearances. The same instructions apply to any “forthcoming” attorneys, the judge said.

— Supreme Court preserves law that aims to keep Native American children with tribal families: The Supreme Court today preserved the system that gives preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings of Native children, rejecting a broad attack from some Republican-led states and white families who argued it is based on race. The court left in place the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which was enacted to address concerns that Native children were being separated from their families and, too frequently, placed in non-Native homes.

— Biden announces end to some hidden fees: Several ticketing and travel companies are committing to get rid of hidden fees for buyers in the United States, President Joe Biden announced today. Biden made the announcement alongside representatives from private-sector companies including Airbnb, SeatGeek and Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation, all of which have pledged to provide consumers with the full price of their tickets upfront. The announcement marks a step forward in Biden’s plan to ban “junk fees” — the extra charges often applied to travel, ticket and banking transactions — as part of a broader appeal toward working-class voters.

— Multiple federal agencies hit by hack: Multiple federal agencies are responding to a large-scale breach affecting a product used to transfer sensitive data, a senior government official confirmed today. The breaches are connected to a file-transfer program called MOVEit, which has a security hole that Russian-speaking cybercriminals have recently exploited to steal data from companies and demand ransom payments. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment about which federal agencies had been hacked and whether any of the networks had been encrypted or if they’d received a ransom demand.

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Nightly Road to 2024

Republican Presidential candidate Chris Christie speaks with voters during a gathering in Manchester, N.H.

Republican Presidential candidate Chris Christie speaks with voters during a gathering in Manchester, N.H. | Charles Krupa/AP Photo

COLLATERAL DAMAGE — When Chris Christie jumped into the crowded Republican presidential primary, it was with the expectation that he would aim his fire at his ally-turned-nemesis, Donald Trump, writes POLITICO’s Sally Goldenberg.

But, on numerous occasions, it’s been Ron DeSantis who is getting hit with shrapnel — and Christie’s team says that’s no accident. Since announcing his long-shot bid for the presidency earlier this month, Christie has occupied the lonely lane of publicly attacking Trump, doing so even as DeSantis and other GOP contenders either defend the former president or avoid discussing him amid his mounting legal troubles.

Christie isn’t on some kamikaze mission to take out the frontrunner. In fact, he isn’t sparing second-place candidate DeSantis at all. Instead, he’s trying to create space for other Trump rivals before the Florida governor further solidifies his second-place standing in the primary.

TEAM GREEN — Four of the nation’s biggest environmental advocacy groups officially endorsed President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign Wednesday night, an early declaration of support that also served as a show of appreciation for having passed the most significant climate legislation in history last year, reports POLITICO’s Eli Stokols.

The backing of the four major green groups — League of Conservation Voters, NextGen PAC, NRDC Action Fund and the Sierra Club — was no surprise, especially after last year’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion in subsidies for clean energy projects. But it does mark the first time the groups have jointly announced a presidential endorsement.

EARLY STATE EMBARRASSMENT — President Biden is almost certain to be Democrats’ pick for president in 2024, but he might not win the first two contests of the primary season if they’re in the traditional first-to-vote states of Iowa and New Hampshire — a scenario that seems increasingly likely, reports Axios.

Biden’s team is indicating he won’t be on the ballots in those states if they vote before South Carolina, his choice to have the first primary.

Why it matters: Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire could defy Biden and move ahead with their contests — even as the party warns it will strip them of their national convention delegates if they jump the gun. That sets up a scenario in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or another long-shot Democrat could win those states — and embarrass the president.

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AROUND THE WORLD

TRADE WAR GAMES — France is ratcheting up pressure on Brussels to hit back against what it sees as China’s unfair advantages in export sectors such as electric vehicles — but the EU is wary about the risks of triggering an all-out trade conflict with Beijing.

Over recent years, Brussels has upgraded its trade defense arsenal and now Paris wants the European Commission — which steers trade policy for the 27-country bloc — to use this new weaponry and show that it is not simply posturing.

Whether France will win round the rest of the EU, especially Germany, is likely to top the agenda when EU leaders meet at a summit later this month. Berlin and others were stung by Brussels’ disastrous attempt to use EU trade tools against Beijing in 2013 and are likely to advocate a more cautious route so as not to provoke Beijing into rolling out countermeasures against EU industry.

The most controversial French idea is that the EU should open a probe paving the way for tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. The main European fear is that Beijing can use lavish state support to churn out unfairly cheap vehicles that can flood the EU market at a speed and scale that threaten the EU’s own e-car production.

The European Commission is discussing whether to launch an investigation that could allow Brussels to impose additional levies, known as anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs, on such cars, two senior officials told POLITICO.

STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today.

Nightly Number

$474,794

The amount of money that former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was fined for using a New York Police Department security detail during his 2020 presidential run. The fine is the largest ever handed down by New York City’s Conflicts of Interest Board. In response, de Blasio filed a lawsuit. In a statement, his attorney said the board’s ruling was illegal and could open elected officials up to all manner of violence in an era where partisanship has reached a fever pitch.

RADAR SWEEP

TRAIN TO NOWHERE — In the past two decades, lending from China to a host of African nations has skyrocketed. In Kenya, a friendly relationship with Chinese authorities led the China Road & Bridge corporation to undertake the building of the Standard Gauge Railway between Mombasa and Nairobi, connecting the city that lies on the Indian Ocean to Kenya’s capital and largest city. The project — coming in at around $5 billion — was meant to reshape the country’s economy. But now, as China’s agreement to operate the railway for five years is close to expiring and the railway hemorrhaging cash and Kenya’s government in debt, Kenyans are left wondering what’s going to happen to the project, and how much they’ll have to pay to keep it operational. Jacob Kushner reports for The Dial.

Parting Image

On this date in 1987: A South Korean student throws a gasoline bottle bomb at shielded and helmeted ranks of riot police in Seoul during a violent clash at Yonsei University, one of Seoul's leading schools. The violence occurred as thousands of students staged pro-democracy demonstrations in the capital and provincial cities, and forced the ruling government to hold elections that established South Korea's Sixth Republic, the present day governmental system of the country. | AP Photo

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