A drastic escalation in fighting between the Saudi-led military coalition and Houthi rebels in Yemen has killed and wounded hundreds of people over the past week, officials and tribal leaders said on Monday. The U.S.-backed Arab coalition battling to restore Yemen’s internationally recognized government stepped up airstrikes on rebel targets northeast of the capital, Sanaa, following a monthslong lull, while Houthis shelled government-held areas. The sudden spike in violence across long-stalemated frontlines threatens to exacerbate the five-year conflict and complicate indirect peace talks between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-backed rebels.

WASHINGTON -- It became such a central slogan of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign that at rallies his supporters would chant the three words representing his pledge to take on big donors and special interests: "Drain the swamp."But as President Donald Trump ramps up his 2020 reelection bid, it is clear that he has tolerated if not fostered a swamp of his own in Washington, granting up-close access to deep-pocketed supporters and interest groups willing to write six- and seven-figure checks to his political operation. Some have used the opportunity to plead their cases directly to him.The latest evidence came over the weekend, with the release of a secret recording of an April 2018 dinner for major donors and prospective donors to a super PAC supporting Trump.While news of the recording primarily focused on Trump's call for the removal of Marie L. Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine after a donor claimed she had disparaged the president, the recording revealed that Trump engaged in policy discussions with many other donors pushing their own agendas.There was the New York real estate developer whose company's project in South Korea was proposed to Trump as a possible site for his summit with Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea.There was the Canadian steel magnate who pushed the president to further limit steel imports to the United States, and whose companies donated $1.75 million to the super PAC.Other attendees discussed government policies that could benefit their businesses, including building a highway for self-driving trucks and regulations that would help make trucks powered by gas compressors to be more competitive with electric-powered vehicles.The recording is a glimpse into a broader pattern in which the administration appointed industry lobbyists to key policymaking jobs, heeded the deregulatory wishes of big corporations and granted regular access to donors and influential political supporters. Some of the policies sought by the donors at the 2018 dinner have been subsequently introduced in Congress; it is unclear in those cases whether the president or the White House intervened.In other cases, Trump has directly championed the businesses of some of his biggest donors, as he did in the weeks after his inauguration when he reportedly discussed with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan an effort by the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to build a casino there.Trump's assiduous courtship of major donors closely mirrors behavior for which he chastised his opponents in 2016, when he cast himself as a billionaire whose ability to finance his own campaign would ensure that he was not beholden to financial backers.In the months after starting his presidential campaign, Trump branded his Republican rivals, as well as his eventual Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, as "puppets" of major donors who funded their campaigns and supportive super PACs.In one characteristic broadside at his rivals in late 2015, he assailed Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, and Sen. Marco Rubio, also of Florida, both of whom were seeking the Republican nomination at the time, for their embrace of super PACs funded by major donors."And you look at Hillary -- let's go to the other side -- they have super PACs, where they control the candidate just like you control a puppet," Trump said. "We don't want anybody to form super PACs for me. We sent legal notices: 'Please give all the money back.' We don't want it."It was not long before Trump reversed himself.His campaign began aggressively courting donations to supplement the personal money he was spending on his 2016 bid, and his team eventually blessed the formation of a super PAC that solicited large checks from major donors to air ads attacking Clinton.Once elected, Trump's team signaled that he did not intend to spend his own money on his reelection. His allies formed a pair of political groups using variations of the name America First that could accept unlimited donations. He began appearing at events for donors, the most generous of whom were invited to the White House for briefings with top administration officials.He has attended many donor gatherings and fundraisers have been held at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, including the dinner that was the subject of the recording released over the weekend. Held in a private suite on April 30, 2018, it was for donors and prospective donors to America First Action, a super PAC that has raised nearly $50 million to support Trump and allied candidates.The recording, which includes video at times, shows Trump entering the suite and posing for some photographs before joining donors in a dining room with 16 plush chairs around an ornately set table accented with rose centerpieces.Trump updated the donors on some of the most pressing issues facing his administration, including its ongoing negotiations with China over trade and North Korea over nuclear weapons. He seemed to encourage the donors to share their concerns.Trump mentioned to the donors that his administration had selected a date and a location for his first meeting with Kim, which would be held in Singapore in the weeks after the dinner. One of the dinner attendees suggested a different site for the summit: a so-called smart development outside Seoul, South Korea, called Songdo, featuring a convention center, apartments and a golf course designed by the golfer Jack Nicklaus.A leading stakeholder in the development was a company run by Stanley C. Gale, a donor to Republican campaigns and committees who attended the dinner, according to people familiar with the event. It was also attended by the golfer's grandson and namesake, Jack Nicklaus III, who works for Gale's company, according to a LinkedIn profile. Gale did not respond to a request for comment.During the discussion, Trump told the guests, "You know that Kim Jong Un is a great golfer." His remark prompted laughter and led another guest to suggest that Kim's scores were recorded as all holes-in-one in his authoritarian country.Another guest was Barry Zekelman, a Canadian citizen who owned a U.S.-based steel-tube manufacturing company that donated $1.75 million to America First Action, avoiding running afoul of a ban on foreign donations in American politics. He used the dinner to push the president on two challenges facing his company: cheap steel tube imports from Asia and new federal rules that made it harder to find truck drivers.He urged Trump to go further in his effort to limit steel imports to the United States and questioned the rules intended to prevent fatal truck accidents by using electronic monitoring systems to limit the hours drivers could be on the road."Say someone is half an hour from home on their long-haul truck -- they literally have to pull over on the side of the road and stop," Zekelman said. "They can't go home."Trump did not seem to be aware of the new federal rules that required those monitoring systems."They have a method that you shut down a truck?" Trump said, after Zekelman questioned the effect the new rules had on his ability to move the steel pipe he manufactured. "Wow."Since that dinner, legislation has been introduced in the House with the cosponsorship of 12 Republicans, including the brother of Vice President Mike Pence, to allow smaller trucking companies to get exemptions from the rule.Legislation has also been introduced to help natural gas vehicles compete with electric ones. It was applauded by an Ohio company that makes gas compressors, Ariel Corp. One of its executives, Thomas Rastin, was on the invitation list for the April dinner. He and a woman resembling his wife, Karen Buchwald Wright, who owns Ariel Corp., are briefly visible in the video of the event. Together, the couple have donated a combined $875,000 to America First Action. He did not respond to questions about whether he was the voice on the recording urging the president to take steps to help the industry.Another invitee was Wayne Hoovestol, who owns trucking companies in the Midwest, including one that works with the U.S. Postal Service. On the recording, a male voice says he runs a company that does business with the Postal Service and urges Trump to consider supporting the construction of a 500-mile section of highway to be used exclusively by self-driving trucks.Paying truck drivers, the voice said, was one of his company's biggest costs."All the technology is there, right now," he said. "It is absolutely safe."A limited liability company that shared an address and personnel with one of Hoovestol's companies donated $250,000 to America First Action on the day of the dinner.Hoovestol did not respond to a request for comment.The recording was made by a dinner attendee, Igor Fruman, and was released by the lawyer for another, Lev Parnas, an associate of Fruman.The two, both Soviet-born American businessmen, would go on to play central roles in the pressure campaign against Ukraine that led to Trump's impeachment.During the dinner, Parnas and Fruman discussed with Trump a natural gas venture they were pursuing in Ukraine. Parnas also asked the president to consider changing banking regulations to aid another business venture they would soon pursue: a plan to win marijuana retail licenses in Nevada and elsewhere.The month after the dinner, they donated $325,000 to America First Action through Global Energy Producers, a company they had recently formed to pursue energy deals.The men have since been indicted on campaign finance charges related to their business ventures and have pleaded not guilty.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

WASHINGTON -- In another time, in another Washington, this might be the moment that changed the trajectory of the presidency. A former national security adviser confirms that the president, despite his denials, conditioned security aid to a war-torn ally on its cooperation against his domestic rivals, the issue at the heart of his ongoing impeachment trial.At first glance, at least, John Bolton's account of President Donald Trump's private remarks sounds like an echo of the so-called smoking gun tape that proved that President Richard M. Nixon really had orchestrated the Watergate cover-up and ultimately forced him from office. But this is Trump's era and Trump's Washington, and the old rules do not always apply.The reality show star who was elected president even after he was captured on an "Access Hollywood" tape boasting about sexual assault has gone on to survive one revelation after another in the three years since, proving more durable than any national politician in modern American history. So will this be the turning point or just one more disclosure that validates his critics without changing other minds? Will it be another smoking gun or another "Access Hollywood"?The news of Bolton's account in an unpublished book, first reported by The New York Times, could hardly come at a worse time for Trump, just as his lawyers have opened his defense on the Senate floor and days before the senators will vote on whether to call witnesses like Bolton. Until now, Trump seemed assured not only of acquittal but appeared likely to fend off the testimony of any more witnesses.But the pressure on the handful of Republican senators who had been wavering on calling witnesses will now increase exponentially and the president's defense has suddenly been thrown into disarray. When Trump's lawyers address the Senate on Monday afternoon, they will face the challenge of explaining how his own former top aide says the president did exactly what they say he did not do -- or trying to ignore it altogether.What's perhaps even more shocking is that the White House knew what Bolton had to say at least as far back as Dec. 30, when he sent his manuscript to the National Security Council for standard prepublication review to ensure that no classified information would be released, yet continued to promote a completely opposite narrative.In his book, Bolton writes that Trump told him in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in congressionally approved security assistance to Ukraine until its government helped with investigations into Democrats including former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden -- exactly what Trump is on trial for.Trump and his defenders quickly sought to undercut Bolton by dismissing him as a disgruntled former employee seeking to take revenge and sell books. Bolton abruptly left the White House in September after months of tension with the president over his policies toward North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan and Ukraine; the president insisted he fired him while Bolton insisted he resigned.Starting early Monday morning, hours after the Times' report on Bolton's book, Trump firing off more than a half-dozen messages on Twitter rebutting his former adviser's account and attacking him as untrustworthy."I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens," the president wrote. "In fact, he never complained about this at the time of his very public termination. If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book."He also reposted messages from supporters assailing Bolton and comparing him to others the president viewed as disloyal like James Comey, the FBI director he fired in 2017. "Just like James Comey, John Bolton is trying to get rich off a lie- and leak-fueled campaign to overturn the 2016 election results," read one of the messages the president retweeted.But Bolton is a hard witness for Trump to simply brush off. He is no liberal Democrat or deep-state bureaucrat, nor is he even a Never Trump Republican, but a conservative hawk with years of credibility among Republicans and a strong following from his days as ambassador to the United Nations and Fox News commentator. He spent 17 months as Trump's national security adviser and knows a lot about what happened on the inside during that time.Bolton's account on its face seems to eviscerate a central part of the defense that the White House began presenting on the Senate floor Saturday. The president's lawyers hammered House Democrats for relying on secondhand testimony and argued that no witness had come forward to say that Trump had explicitly linked the aid to the investigations."Most of the Democrats' witnesses have never spoken to the president at all, let alone about Ukraine security assistance," Michael R. Purpura, a deputy White House counsel, told the Senate on Saturday. "The two people in the House record who asked President Trump about whether there was any linkage between security assistance and investigations were told in no uncertain terms that there is no connection between the two."In their trial brief submitted earlier last week, the president's lawyers made that one of their key points. "Not a single witness with actual knowledge ever testified that the president suggested any connection between announcing investigations and security assistance," the lawyers wrote. "Assumptions, presumptions and speculation based on hearsay are all that House Democrats can rely on to spin their tale of a quid pro quo."The House managers prosecuting Trump said that distorted the strength of their evidence, but either way, Bolton's recollection is clearly a firsthand account -- which at least some in the White House had reason to know at the time the brief was filed and the presentation was made on the Senate floor.Bolton has been one of the most intriguing figures in the Ukraine matter for weeks, ever since other former officials testified that he opposed the pressure campaign, calling it a "drug deal" he wanted no part of and warning that Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney organizing the pressure, was a "hand grenade who's going to blow everybody up." He told aides to report what they learned about the pressure campaign to a White House lawyer.Until now, Bolton has remained publicly silent and, in fact, despite the Times report about his book, has remained so. His lawyer blamed the report on a leak by the White House.House Democrats requested his testimony during their hearings last month, but they ultimately did not subpoena him, reasoning that a court fight would only prolong the investigative process for months.Once the House impeached Trump and the case reached the Senate, Bolton announced that he would testify if subpoenaed. But Senate Republicans voted against subpoenaing him at the start of the trial, putting off a final decision until after arguments are complete, which could come later this week.Another witness sought by the House managers, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, has already publicly confirmed to reporters that Trump suspended the security aid in part to get Ukraine to investigate a conspiracy theory involving Democrats during the 2016 election campaign, although he later issued a statement trying to take that back.As damaging as Bolton's account would seem to be, it was too early to judge its effect. Unlike the Nixon smoking gun tape, there is no recording -- and events of the last three years have suggested even that may not matter.Trump has endured so many scandals that would have brought down an ordinary politician not even counting "Access Hollywood."Just weeks before moving into the White House, he agreed to pay $25 million to settle fraud claims against Trump University. Since becoming president, he repaid hush money given to Stormy Daniels, the pornographic film actress, to keep quiet about an alleged affair. Another woman has sued him for rape and more than a dozen others have accused him of sexual misconduct.His son, son-in-law and campaign chairman met with Russians offering "dirt" on his opponent that they said came from the Russian government. A special counsel investigation identified 10 instances when the president may have obstructed justice. His family foundation was forced to shut down after authorities found "a shocking pattern of illegality." His businesses have benefited from foreign patrons with cause to curry favor with the president despite the Constitution's emoluments clause.Investigative reporting found that he engaged in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud. A wide swath of people around him have been convicted of various crimes, including his campaign chairman, his deputy, first national security adviser, longtime political adviser, longtime personal lawyer and others. And now Giuliani and a couple of his longtime associates are under federal investigation.To Trump's most fervent supporters, all of that is proof not that he is corrupt but that he has struck a nerve in Washington's "swamp" and the establishment is coming after him, manufacturing "hoaxes" to tear him down. That unwavering support within the Republican Party, which he telegraphs on Twitter regularly, has hardly gone unnoticed by Republican senators as they sit in judgment of him.But polls also show that two-thirds of the public wanted to hear from new witnesses in the trial now underway on Capitol Hill. Given the latest revelations, Bolton stands ready to testify with the fate of the president on the line.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

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