Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy.</s>The US Treasury has imposed sanctions on Bank Mellat, Mehr Eqtesad Bank, Mehr Eghtesad Iranian Investment Co. and five other investment firms.

Iran Tractor Manufacturing Company, which is the largest tractor manufacturer in the Middle East, and Esfahan’s Mobarakeh Steel Company, which is the largest steelmaker in the ME region and North Africa, are among other Iranian firms targeted by the US Treasury's new round of sanctions.

According to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the new sanctions have targeted financial and industrial institutes belonging to the Bonyad Taavon Basij (Basij Cooperative Foundation).</s>The US Treasury announced Tuesday that twenty entities, including four banks, will be targeted by new Iran's sanctions.

"This Iran-based network is known as Bonyad Taavon Basij, which is translated as Basij Cooperative Foundation, and is comprised of at least 20 corporations and financial institutions," the release said.

READ MORE: Iran Found New Partners for Oil Exports Despite US Sanctions — Vice-President

The designations target four Iranian banks — Bank Mellat, Sina Bank, Parsian Bank, Mehr Eqtesad Bank — and five investment firms, including Negin Sahel Royal Company and Mehr Eqtesad Financial Group.

The US sanction policy against Iran has commenced when the relations between Washington and Tehran deteriorated following the US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal in May.

After the move, the US pledged to reinstate anti-Iranian sanctions over several waves, with financial restrictions introduced this past summer and energy sanctions planned for November 4. The US withdrawal has prompted other signatories, including Russia, China and the European powers to try to salvage the landmark nuclear deal.</s>As corporations in the United States and around the world continue to reap record profits thanks to enormous tax cuts, widespread tax avoidance schemes, and business-friendly trade and investment policies, an analysis by Global Justice Now (GJN) published Wednesday found that the world's most profitable companies are raking in revenue "far in excess of most governments," giving them unprecendented power to influence policy in their favor and skirt accountability.

"The vast wealth and power of corporations is at the heart of so many of the world's problems—like inequality and climate change." 

—Nick Dearden, Global Justice NowMeasured by 2017 revenue, 69 of the top 100 economic entities in the world are corporations, GJN found in its report, which was released as part of an effort to pressure the U.K. government to advance a binding United Nations treaty that would hold transnational corporations to account for human rights violations.

"When it comes to the top 200 entities, the gap between corporations and governments gets even more pronounced: 157 are corporations," GJN notes. "Walmart, Apple, and Shell all accrued more wealth than even fairly rich countries like Russia, Belgium, Sweden."

In a statement accompanying the striking new figures, GJN director Nick Dearden denounced Britain's Tory government for eagerly assisting this "rise in corporate power—through tax structures, trade deals, and even aid programs that help big business."

"The vast wealth and power of corporations is at the heart of so many of the world's problems—like inequality and climate change," Dearden noted. "The drive for short-term profits today seems to trump basic human rights for millions of people on the planet. Yet there are very few ways that citizens can hold these corporations to account for their behavior. Rather, through trade and investment deals, it is corporations which are able to demand that governments do their bidding."

"Many corporations are richer and more powerful than the states that seek to regulate them." 

—Friends of the Earth Asia Pacific

Denouncing powerful governments for "routinely" opposing "the call of developing countries to hold corporations to account for their human rights impacts at the U.N.," Dearden said his group is "joining campaigns from across the world to tell the British government not to block this international demand for justice."

Despite continued efforts by the international business lobby to squash them, negotiations on the U.N. Binding Treaty on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations began on Monday in The Hague.

"From a coal mine in Bangladesh that threatens to destroy one of the world's largest mangrove ecosystems to hundreds of people at risk of displacement from a mega-sugar plantation in Sri Lanka, corporations and big business are often implicated in human rights abuses across Asia" and the world, Friends of the Earth Asia Pacific noted in a blog post on Wednesday, describing the U.N. treaty as a potential "game-changer."

"Companies are able to evade responsibility by operating between different national jurisdictions and taking advantage of corruption in local legal systems, not to mention the fact that many corporations are richer and more powerful than the states that seek to regulate them," Friends of the Earth concluded. "We must right this wrong."</s>WASHINGTON
• The United States Treasury Department has slapped sanctions on an Iranian paramilitary group along with a network of businesses that was providing it with financing, as part of Washington's campaign of maximum economic pressure against Teheran.

The announcement came two weeks before the Trump administration reimposes some of the US' harshest sanctions against Iran, including its oil sector. The Treasury said a network of more than 20 businesses known as the Bonyad Taavon Basij was financing the Basij Resistance Force, a component of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

It also accused the hardline militia of sending child soldiers to Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

"The international community must understand that business entanglements with the Bonyad Taavon Basij network and IRGC front companies have real world humanitarian consequences," said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday. "This helps fuel the Iranian regime's violent ambitions across the Middle East."

The Basij, a paramilitary force formed soon after the 1979 revolution, is one of the Iranian regime's primary enforcers of internal security with branches in every province and city of Iran, according to the US Treasury.

Iran yesterday called the new US sanctions an act of "blind vindictiveness".

"America's new sanctions are a clear insult to international and legal mechanisms and a result of the US government's blind vindictiveness against the Iranian nation," said foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi.

He called Washington's "lack of adherence to international legal mechanisms" a threat not only "to the Iranian people's interests but also to the world's stability and security".

Among the other companies singled out was Iran Tractor Manufacturing Company, the largest tractor manufacturer in the Middle East and North Africa that predates the Iranian revolution.

It generates millions of dollars in profit for the investment firms that represent the Basij.

Also targeted was Iran's Zinc Mines Development Company, described as the country's "pre-eminent, multibillion-dollar zinc and lead mining and processing holding company".

Washington pulled out of a landmark 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers in May and is reimposing punishing sanctions on the Middle Eastern country, hoping to pressure Teheran into what US President Donald Trump calls a "better deal".

Full US sanctions are set to hit Iran next month and the country's economy is already taking a beating.</s>NASHUA, N.H. — A quick stop by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Saturday in the state that holds the first primary in the race for the White House is sparking more speculation about a possible White House bid by the billionaire media company founder and gun safety advocate.

Bloomberg was the main attraction at the get-out-the-vote rally for six candidates running for New Hampshire's state House of Representatives. The event was organized by Moms Demand Action, an arm of Bloomberg's Everytown for Gun Safety organization set up after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings.

Bloomberg's trip came just days after he re-registered as a Democrat after years as a Republican and an independent. Asked by The Associated Press if he has any timetable for deciding on a presidential bid, he said "right now I'm focused on November 6, plain and simple."

But he added that after the midterm elections, "we'll see what happens down the road."

Speaking in front of dozens of Moms Demand Action activists, many of them wearing the group's red T-shirts, Bloomberg told the crowd "together, Moms Demand and Everytown have landed some big punches against the NRA. We haven't knocked them out yet, not by a longshot, but we've got them on the ropes. And while we're getting stronger and stronger every day, they're getting weaker."

He also thanked gun safety activists in New Hampshire for helping to defeat earlier this year in the Statehouse "two bad bills that would have forced colleges to allow guns on campus and punish cities and towns for enacting strong guns laws. You did that. You did stop them."

Bloomberg, who's spent millions of his own money this year to help elect Democrats in the midterms, said "we've got to send a message to elected officials. Vote for commonsense gun laws or we will throw you out."

Prior to the event at Nashua City Hall, Bloomberg met with the city's longtime major, Jim Donchess, who's a member of Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns group. He also met with Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig, a supporter of tighter gun restrictions, and the six state legislative candidates who were endorsed by Moms Demand Action.

While November's election and the issue of guns were the focus of Bloomberg's visit to the Granite State, the trip fueled speculation that the 76-year-old former three-term New York City mayor is serious about a 2020 presidential run. Bloomberg mulled, but decided against White House runs in 2008 and 2016.

Asked if the party he left nearly two decades ago has become increasingly liberal, he said "I don't know that it's moved further left. I think that's conventional wisdom by some people."

Instead, Bloomberg argued that "there are an awful lot of other people who say if you talk to Democrats, they're much more centrist than people understand."

Donchess told The Associated Press that if Bloomberg ultimately decides on running for the Democratic presidential nomination, he may fare well in New Hampshire thanks to his advocacy on gun safety.</s>Last Wednesday, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg posted on Instagram a picture of him filling out a New York State voter registration form, indicating that he was, after a 17-year hiatus, intent on rejoining the ranks of the Democratic party.

“Today, I have re-registered as a Democrat—I had been a member for most of my life—because we need Democrats to provide the checks and balance our nation so badly needs,” he wrote.

The social media post instantly provoked a flurry of headlines and chatter among the—now, thanks to Bloomberg—smoke-free backrooms of political clubs and newsrooms up and down the Acela Corridor, all trying to somehow divine the answer to the same quadrennial question: Is Michael Bloomberg finally going to run for president?

“The move is classic Mike Bloomberg,” said longtime political strategist Bradley Honan who has worked for Bloomberg, as well as both Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and others high-profile names over the years. “At this point, he is just opening doors and creating options. You will know he is serious if we get wind of a spate of early morning breakfasts and power lunches with people like Claire McCaskill, Kamala Harris or Julian Castro—potential running mates he would need to cinch the Democratic primary in 2020.”

Bloomberg certainly has the financial wherewithal to upend the 2020 elections.

Although his 12-year track record running America’s most complex and challenging city would provide ample fodder for political rivals looking to make political hits, Forbes just listed the former mayor as the 10th wealthiest American, with a net worth just shy of $52 billion; Bloomberg writing a $1 billion check to his own campaign on the day he announced his candidacy would be tantamount to a deafening thunderclap, drowning out anything but the most salacious of claims by his Democratic rivals.

Yet despite his overwhelming financial advantage, a Jewish septuagenarian divorcé from New York City is probably not the princely Trump-slayer that most progressives have been envisioning as their standard bearer in 2020. To get through the Democratic primary, Bloomberg will need help from a running mate who can appeal to non-coastal voters who might not immediately see much of a difference between the former mayor and the billionaire president he would be vying to replace. Bloomberg will have to choose his VP wisely—and earlier than typical presidential candidates, who usually wait until they have sewn up the nomination to make their pick for vice president known.

I canvassed several leading political pundits from across the country to get their thoughts on the ideal pairing for an eventual Bloomberg presidential ticket. The results were a bit surprising.

Veteran political consultant Hank Sheinkopf thinks that Bloomberg, who only recently came back into the Democratic fold, will need to drape himself in party royalty.

“I think he would be wise to pick Caroline Kennedy,” said the New York-based strategist who has advised on multiple high-profile political campaigns, including past Bloomberg races. “The Kennedy name is still the gold standard in the Democratic Party, and nothing would inoculate Bloomberg more from progressive critics than having JFK’s daughter on the ticket.”

Darin Broton, a Democratic political consultant who has worked in races across the Midwest, thinks that Bloomberg would have to choose a woman from the heartland.

“It’s inconceivable to me that there will not be a woman on the Democratic ticket in 2020,” explained Broton. “And Bloomberg will need a veep who authentically represents the Midwest or the Rust Belt. If he is serious about running, I think it would behoove him to take a close look at Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill or North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp—even if some of these come up short in close re-election races this November.”

For Fox News political commentator and West Coast radio talk show host Ethan Bearman, there is one obvious choice for Bloomberg: “Julian Castro will not only give Mike a chance to put Texas into play, but it will light a fire among Latinos, who have never been represented on a major party presidential ticket. It would be historic.”

“Julian was already on Hillary’s short list for VP so he has been vetted and accepted by the party stalwarts,” mused Bearman. “He has federal government experience. He even has a twin brother for goodness sakes—it’s like getting two for one!”

Yet despite Bearman’s enthusiasm for Castro, the idea of having a female running-mate was a consistent theme among most of the experts I canvassed.

Some might think that it is too soon to start speculating about potential running-mates for a candidate who hasn’t yet declared for a race that is more than two years out. But nearly all the pundits surveyed agreed that Bloomberg—should he pull the trigger this time around—would be wise to start early, especially given that Trump has effectively already begun campaigning for 2020. They reason that Bloomberg needs to maximize the leverage that his enormous cash advantage would give him, enabling him to get out his message early and unfettered by fellow Democratic challengers.

Bill Hillsman, the legendary political ad man who has worked with Independents and Democrats, thinks that Cecile Richards, daughter of former Texas Governor Ann Richards, would provide an effective counter-balance on Bloomberg’s ticket.

“Cecile has impeccable bona fides among Democrats,” remarked Hillsman of the former Planned Parenthood president. “Her mother Ann was a beloved figure in Texas and is national old-school Democratic politics. Richards appeals to women, both in the primary and the general elections, and helps Bloomberg make an impressive case to women voters, Democrats and progressives. In the era of #MeToo, she’s exactly the kind of VP Mike Bloomberg would need to win a crowded Democratic primary— if she’d agree to do it.”

And in that scenario, the sooner Bloomberg picks a vice president, the quicker he would be able to placate the more progressive wings of his newly adopted party, lock up the nomination and set his sights on Donald Trump.

Of course, for now, Bloomberg has merely switched his party affiliation, but it’s a move that comes on the heels of his having pledged at least $100 million in support for Democrats running in House and Senate races.

It’s an amount that will buy him quite a few political chits, should he ever have a need or reason to cash them in some day.</s>The U.S. Treasury Department identifies a network of Iranian businesses as specially designated global terrorists, saying they provide financial support to a paramilitary force known as Basij Resistance Force that's linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Iran-based network is known as Bonyad Taavon Basij, translated as Basij Cooperative Foundation, and is comprised of at least 20 corporations and financial institutions, the Treasury Department says.

Companies now listed under the designation include: Mehr Eqtesad Bank, Bank Mellat, Mehr Eqtesad Iranian Investment Co., Tadbirgaran Atiyeh Investment Co., Negin Sahel Royal Co., and Technotar Engineering Co.

"This vast network provides financial infrastructure to the Basij’s efforts to recruit, train, and indoctrinate child soldiers who are coerced into combat under the IRGC’s direction,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

As a result of the action, all property and interests in property of these entities that are in the U.S. or in the possession or control of U.S. persons must be blocked and reported to the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.</s>Here’s the premise: A white, by then 78-year-old New Yorker, who built his fortune on Wall Street and is one of its most vocal defenders, and who’s had issues with African Americans and women, is the answer to what’s going on in the Democratic Party right now. Oh, and he’s a former Republican. And he’s a terrible campaigner whose signature move is awkwardly asking kids to give him high fives. And he says he’s not sure how true all the accusations against Charlie Rose are. But … he does have close to $50 billion. And he did spend Saturday night in New Hampshire. So Mike Bloomberg can maybe run for president as a Democrat? Or, as so many politicos and reporters have been reacting to the talk: Are we really doing this again? His team thinks he could win over voters who don’t like him, because they are desperate to win—his appeal is right in line with the people in the states the party needs. Donald Trump couldn’t mock him for being too far to the left, and even if the president is somehow worth what he claims to be, Bloomberg is worth at least 15 times as much.

They think he has until around next summer to decide. We’re at the stage of the Bloomberg-for-president bubble inflation when pretty much no one believes he’ll actually go through with it, but his small circle of media-fascination-stoking virtuosos are excelling at what he pays them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to do. Bloomberg himself sees a campaign as still far-fetched, according to people who have spoken to him about it, though he misses the spotlight and can’t help wondering if it could work. The life of full-time philanthropy he said he was going to devote himself to when he finished as mayor of New York never really interested him. The company he returned to running when he gave up on that doesn’t really need him. He’s bored. He thinks Trump’s a moron. “Mike Bloomberg would like to be president, and he looks at a situation that he thinks he can help,” says Kevin Sheekey, who ran Bloomberg’s 2001 mayoral campaign and who has been coyly floating presidential speculation every few years since he first did so in an interview on NY1 the night after Bloomberg was reelected in 2005—and who urged that this quote be on the record. “Whether or not he wants to run for president is a question.” He is definitely enjoying being in demand again, and having crowds crush around to see him, showing up in his black-tasseled loafers at the annual seafood gala for the Camden, New Jersey, Democrats he headlined in late September. He likes being thought of, at least by some in the punditry and political intelligentsia, as the savior from Donald Trump, who might just be able to win the White House on his own terms. He likes those articles about himself in The New York Times and being mentioned on the Sunday-morning talk shows, which he is old and insistent enough to still think of as the only outlets that matter in the media. He does not know the password to the Instagram account his aides used to announce that he’d reregistered as a Democrat on Wednesday morning.

Asked on Saturday night during that New Hampshire trip how he’d deal with the party’s surging progressive energy, Bloomberg repeated an argument that his aides have been nudging around for months: “There are an awful lot of other people who say if you talk to Democrats, they’re much more centrist than people understand.’’ The response from Democratic operatives and officials around the country is laughter. And when they’re not laughing, they’re just confused. One compared imagining the way Bloomberg would be greeted in a primary field to the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. But, as has happened throughout Bloomberg’s political career, his money—already topping $100 million this cycle, making him by far the biggest Democratic donor in 2018 (though still under the $109 million he spent in just the five boroughs on his own campaign for a third term)—has bought a lot of silence. “I don’t want to say anything negative about him, because I want him to come and spend a lot of … money here for the next four weeks,” said one top Democrat in a key state. “I give him a lot of credit for what he’s done on guns. He’s personally put a lot of money into it (and has been doing so for a while now). So I’m not going to slam the guy publicly, even if my honest assessment is that he has little chance of winning,” texted a Democratic congressman, who added, “Seeing him campaigning in Iowa will be funny and fascinating.”

Some are more diplomatic, like John Fetterman, the Braddock, Pennsylvania, mayor and lieutenant-governor nominee who’s seen by many as embodying an important new strain of left-behind progressivism for the Democratic Party’s future. He praised Bloomberg for “compassionate pragmatism” and management skills, while noting, “In a Democratic primary, you’re going to have a much different perspective. I think he has a series of barriers and challenges given where the party is going overall.” Some are more dismissive, like Representative Ro Khanna. “Donald Trump ruined it for billionaires,” the Silicon Valley congressman, who’s identified himself with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, told me in June, when the Bloomberg rumors were first being floated—right around the time of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise primary win in a district that includes parts of Queens, which helped carry Bloomberg in his three elections. The PAC that’s supporting Andrew Gillum, the Democratic nominee for governor in Florida, got a $250,000 check, and Bloomberg then appeared with Gillum at a center for Jewish seniors in Florida last week. But Fred Hubbell, the Democratic nominee for governor in Iowa, received a check of his own, several people told me, that his campaign wouldn’t confirm, and he didn’t respond to multiple requests to discuss the donation. Bloomberg’s 2020 math is also almost all about money.

For a guy who has nearly $50 billion and earns a couple billion more in interest every year, people who have been having the conversations point out, there’s no difference between spending $500 million and $3 billion. Or more. The unacknowledged reality of the supposedly enormous presidential-primary field is that it’s likely to be a long slog, and that will require at least $40 million to keep a campaign running into the spring. Add that superexpensive California is for the first time going to be right after the South Carolina primary, headlining a day of at least nine states voting on the first Tuesday in March 2020, and it matters that Bloomberg could be easily writing checks to buy wall-to-wall TV time in the Los Angeles market while his opponents are running between cocktail receptions where they’ll be lucky to pull in a few hundred thousand bucks. They’d lean in to the work he’s done promoting gun control, years of support for Planned Parenthood, becoming a global leader on climate change, and speaking up for immigration. “There’s lots of reasons to talk about Mike Bloomberg in a vacuum and say he doesn’t fit in a Democratic primary. But you don’t look at it in a vacuum,” Sheekey said. “The question isn’t who is he, but it’s ‘How does Mike stack up against 11 other candidates—and what has Mike done compared to the other 11?’” Then there’s stop-and-frisk, the New York police program that let cops search anyone on the street they wanted, whenever they wanted. The police department argued it was just coincidence that most of the people stopped were young black men.

I asked Hazel Dukes, the president of the New York chapter of the NAACP, whether Bloomberg would be able to move past those years of what was seen as endorsed racism and harassment. “I don’t think so,” she said. The best that Bloomberg’s team has come up with to blunt that is to talk up all he’s done to reduce gun violence, pushing the idea that he’s helped save more black and brown lives than anyone realized. Or as Bloomberg himself put it in 2014, when talking about his record on guns, the citywide ban on smoking in restaurants and bars that quickly became a global norm, and anti-obesity campaigns: “I am telling you, if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.” Al Sharpton, who had a good working relationship with Bloomberg while he was mayor, said that although stop-and-frisk “would be a problem, it wouldn’t be insurmountable.” “He would have the same advantage he had running for mayor,” Sharpton said. “Because we were so mad at [Rudy] Giuliani, we forgot he’d never marched with us. Because we’re so mad at Trump, it’s almost like déjà vu.” Sharpton said Bloomberg “could be a billionaire version of Bill Clinton, like the DLC done 21st century.” He then noted that he ran against exactly that kind of politics himself in the 2004 primary. Bloomberg joined the Republican Party as a way of getting around the 2001 Democratic mayoral primary in New York, then threw himself into courting the state GOP and bringing the 2004 Republican convention to Madison Square Garden. When he was thinking of running for president in 2008, he reregistered as an independent and quietly paid an aide to go around the country preparing the framework to get him on the ballot, according to people who were involved. He took a more cursory look at running in 2012, having privately complained that Barack Obama was inexperienced and wrong on business issues, and telling Rupert Murdoch after a round of presidential golf that Obama was the most “arrogant man” he’d ever met.

When Bloomberg was thinking of running in 2016, he had aides dispatch teams to key states, do polls, and build a plan that depended on a deadlocked election throwing the decision to the House of Representatives, where they thought he might be able to prevail. Bradley Tusk, an aide who would likely have been the 2016 campaign manager, writes in a just-published book that he even drew up a fantasy Cabinet—including Bill Gates as secretary of state, Oprah Winfrey as commerce secretary, Elon Musk as energy secretary, and Gabby Giffords in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. So far, there isn’t permanent staff on the ground anywhere, say people involved. Most in the Bloomberg orbit roll their eyes at “Kevin being Kevin,” as Sheekey’s Dennis the Menace–style pot-stirring has become known. He’s been seeding the idea through old friends among reporters. Howard Wolfson has been taking the lead on doling out the campaign cash and scheduling appearances. A few others have pitched in, like the longtime right hand Patti Harris, and the former city-hall press secretaries Stu Loeser and Marc LaVorgna. But the circle has remained small. “It’s much more ad hoc than you’d think,” said one person in the Bloomberg camp. None of them has been involved in a campaign since the last time Bloomberg ran, in 2009, long before the earthquakes that have transformed politics since. With the exception of Wolfson, who was the communications director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 White House run, most of them haven’t done much in politics outside New York. The only time Bloomberg’s machinery worked on anything directly political other than electing him mayor was the 2008 effort to get Caroline Kennedy appointed to Clinton’s Senate seat, which ended in a spectacular face-plant.

Then there are all the Republicans he’s helped along the way, and is continuing to now. Yes, he slammed Trump as a con man onstage at the 2016 Democratic convention in Philadelphia, but he did it while helping bankroll the reelection campaign of Senator Pat Toomey, who both co-sponsored the failed post-Newtown background-check gun bill and who took the bold stance of refusing to answer whom he was supporting for president until announcing on Election Day that he’d picked Trump. In a Senate that just confirmed Brett Kavanaugh by two votes, that’s a decision with consequences. Nor has Bloomberg’s new commitment to a Democratic majority in the House stopped him from backing old Republican friends, like Representative Dan Donovan, a top target for his seat in Staten Island, or Representative Pete King, lower on the Democratic prospect list, but higher on the Democratic rage list for comments over the years like calling for the mass surveillance of Muslims and saying they don’t act “American” when the country is under attack. “He’s not going to like that I say this, but in many ways, he’s like Donald Trump,” King told me the day Bloomberg switched his registration. “Donald Trump didn’t really run as a Republican; he used the Republican Party to run. Mike’s just using the Democrats to run.” He recalled being with Bloomberg and Trump at Ground Zero for the 9/11 memorial service in 2016, expecting to get caught in the middle of a fight, and being surprised by how cordial they were.

“They certainly seemed to be speaking the language,” King said. “Maybe it’s the language of billionaires.” King kept calling the former mayor a good friend, laughing about a night when he was invited over to watch Driving Miss Daisy and then being joined at dinner afterward by James Earl Jones. So I asked him what he’d do in an election that pitted his friend against a president whom he’s been a big defender of. “I’d have to go with President Trump, because he’s a Republican,” King said. “But you wouldn’t hear me saying a bad word about Mike Bloomberg.” Then there’s Bloomberg’s history with women. His company has been sued for discrimination against pregnant women, including one who famously alleged that he greeted the news of her pregnancy by telling her to “kill it.” And he has made comments for years about women’s looks and his own interest in having sex with them. There’s the real possibility that a Bloomberg 2020 primary run would go down much like Meg Whitman’s 2010 campaign for California governor, when she dumped $144 million into losing by 13 points to an old liberal who had already held the job for eight years 30 years before. Bloomberg’s team knows it. They know that if he runs, they’ll have to get him into the mind-set of his first mayoral campaign, which he knew he would likely lose, rather than his 2016 presidential exploration, when he refused to take a chance unless his team could tell him he’d win. Not a lot of people are expecting that Sheekey or anyone else will get Bloomberg to pull the trigger, once he finishes having fun toying with the idea and really looks at the data. “You don’t get to be where he is,” said one person who’s talked with him about running, “by being an idiot.”
The United States Treasury Department announces new sanctions on 22 Iranian corporations and banks.