Principals

☞ White House: Vice President Harris is about to leave for her first trip to Africa as vice president, with planned stops in Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia. Officials said she would discuss concerns about China’s influence on the continent and spotlight issues like climate change and food security.

☞ Chuck Schumer: The passage of a bill repealing the 1991 and 2002 war authorizations will need to wait until next week, after the process was slowed with amendment votes.

☞ Mitch McConnell: The Senate minority leader is still out after his injury two weeks ago.

☞ Kevin McCarthy: The Speaker met on Thursday with the mother of Ashli Babbitt, a Jan. 6 rioter who was shot and killed by a U.S. Capitol Police officer while trying to break into the speaker’s lobby.

☞ Hakeem Jeffries: Reps. Summer Lee, D-Pa. and Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas will join Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. in visiting a D.C. jail as part of a House Oversight Committee field investigation.

If former President Trump is about to be indicted by the Manhattan district attorney, it would happen until at least next week. The grand jury does not meet on Fridays. Meanwhile, an adviser to Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg wrote a letter to House Republicans accusing them of making  “unconstitutional requests” that would interfere in a state matter after they demanded testimony and documents from Bragg on the Trump case. In an overnight post to Truth Social, Trump suggested there would be “potential death & destruction” if he were charged.

The Pentagon said late Thursday that a strike by a suspected Iranian drone killed five U.S. service members and a contractor in Syria, leading the U.S. to retaliate with “precision airstrikes” against facilities in Syria linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are expected to unveil a deal to address asylum seekers today that will allow Canada to turn away migrants that arrive at an unofficial and popular border crossing between the U.S. and Canada called Roxham Road, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It’s an update to the “safe third country” agreement between both nations. In exchange, Canada agreed to admit up to 15,000 migrants from the Western Hemisphere under a new program.

The Senate ethics committee publicly admonished Sen. Lindsay Graham on Thursday for breaking the chamber’s rules against fundraising in federal buildings. The South Carolina Republican got in trouble for urging Fox News viewers to donate to Hershel Walker’s Georgia Senate campaign during an interview filmed on Senate grounds last year. The letter notes the committee also reviewed a similar incident in 2020 when Graham solicited contributions for his own reelection campaign.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas threatened Secretary of State Antony Blinken with a subpoena if the State Department does not turn over a dissent cable related to the withdrawal from Afghanistan by next week. Blinken indicated State would be willing to brief lawmakers on the cable’s contents, but not produce the document itself.

— Morgan Chalfant

Punchbowl News: The House Oversight Committee’s decision to investigate the baby formula crisis seems to have irked members of the Energy and Commerce Committee, who think it’s infringing on their jurisdiction.

Playbook: Lanny Davis, who is representing Trump lawyer-turned-critic Michael Cohen, makes the case to Politico for potential Manhattan D.A. charges against Trump and says he’ll be “disappointed” if Bragg doesn’t indict the former president.

The Early 202: House Republicans are poised to pass their “Parents Bill of Rights” legislation today that would require public schools to publicize reading lists and other information and notify parents of violent incidents. The Washington Post reports that some Republicans have concerns about the bill because it would see federal politicians intervening in local school rules.

Paul Rusesabagina of Hotel Rwanda fame to be freed from prison

THE SCOOP

Imprisoned political activist Paul Rusesabagina, whose story inspired the Oscar-nominated film Hotel Rwanda, will be released from his incarceration as early as Saturday morning, senior Rwandan and Qatari officials have told Semafor.

At the conclusion of a key cabinet meeting on Friday, Rwanda’s Minister of Justice, Emmanuel Ugirashebuja, plans to announce that Rusesabagina and twenty others sentenced with him on terrorism-related charges will have their prison terms commuted. Their underlying convictions will remain intact, according to two senior Rwanda government officials.

“Should any of these individuals return to the criminal activities for which they were originally charged, the sentence will be automatically reimposed,” one official said.

Rusesabagina, a high-profile critic of Rwadan President Paul Kagame, became a global celebrity after Hollywood memorialized his efforts to save more than 1000 Hutus and Tutsis during during his country’s 1994 genocide. But in 2021 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison on terrorism charges for his role leading the Rwandan Movement for Democratic Change, the dissident coalition whose militant wing Rwandan authorities accused of violent attacks resulting in civilian deaths.

Rusesabagina denied responsibility for the killings and in 2022 the U.S. State Department said he was “wrongly detained.” According to officials familiar with negotiations, that framing “evolved” in talks as the U.S. sought to acknowledge Rwandan concerns about the underlying security and terrorism issues involved in the case.

Rwandan officials plan to release a formal letter from Rusesabagina requesting a pardon from Kagame. In it, he expresses “regret for any connection” between his political work at the Movement for Democratic Change and acts of violence by its armed wing, as well as for “not taking more care to ensure that members” of his opposition coalition “fully adhered to the principles of non-violence in which I fully and deeply believe.”

Rusesabagina also writes that he will withdraw from Rwandan politics if released and “spend the remainder of my days in the United States in quiet reflection.” According to sources, the letter was prepared by Rusesabagina with assistance of his own legal counsels in the United States and Rwanda.

STEVE’S VIEW

While details are still unfolding, both Qatar and the United States provided crucial help to secure Rusesabagina’s release. According to my sources, the Biden administration opened a channel from the White House that took a different approach to negotiations than previous U.S. government efforts, while the Emir of Qatar helped facilitate discussions about a “humanitarian” release. The countries reached a crucial compromise that opened the door to a deal by agreeing that Rwanda would not be expected to roll back the convictions of Rusesabagina and his associates.

A senior Rwanda government official told me that “the close personal relationship between Qatar Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Rwanda President Paul Kagame played a key role in this equation, as did the very constructive tone from the White House seeking a reset in Rwanda-U.S. relations.”

While Semafor has not yet communicated with the Rusesabagina family, Qatari sources believe that after a short time in Kigali at the Qatar Embassy, the activist will be transported to Doha where his family may join him. And after some transitionary period, he will eventually travel to and live in the United States.

NOTABLE

• Kagame’s views on this issue have evolved dramatically in a matter of months. Speaking on stage at a Semafor event in December, the president suggested he had no plans to release Rusesabagina and half-joked that it would take a foreign “invasion” to free him. “We’ve made it clear there isn’t anyone going to come from anywhere to bully us,” he said at the time.
• When I interviewed Kagame again this month at the Global Security Forum in Doha, he told me his government had begun discussions about freeing Rusesabagina, and struck a much softer tone, saying Rwandans “forgive the unforgivable” and “don’t get stuck with our past.”

The climate idea Republicans are learning to love

Senate Republicans are warming to a climate proposal Democrats have been pushing for years: legislation to impose import taxes on high-carbon industrial commodities.

In interviews this week, several said they saw a “carbon border adjustment mechanism” as ripe for bipartisan cooperation, and plan to introduce new Republican-drafted legislation soon. But the devil is in the details, and senators are divided both between and within party lines over how a CBAM would work, and what costs — if any — it would impose on American companies.

“I do support some form of [a CBAM] as long as it doesn’t become a domestic energy tax,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, told Semafor. “We ought to be acknowledging the excellence of the American manufacturing community, [which is] already paying a lot to comply with our much stricter environmental regulations.”

A CBAM is a fee applied to certain imports — which could include steel, iron, fossil fuels, or others — pegged to the carbon emissions associated with their production in their country of origin. From a climate point of view, it aims to prevent carbon “leakage,” whereby a country essentially offshores its most carbon-intensive industries and imports as needed, reducing its own carbon emissions but not those of the world overall. It also protects domestic companies that face higher production costs due to climate policy, and leverages U.S. purchasing power to exert downward pressure on global CO2 emissions.

The biggest issue dividing proponents of the policy on Capitol Hill is whether a CBAM would need to be paired with a domestic carbon tax. In textbook economics, and in the European Union’s version of the policy introduced last year, a CBAM only makes sense if domestic producers are also paying a price for the carbon they emit. Otherwise, such a policy could be unfairly protectionist and face legal challenges in the World Trade Organization. The U.S. doesn’t have a federal carbon tax, so it’s not clear what a CBAM could be pegged to.

Two separate bills introduced by Democrats in the past two years suggest either imposing a limited carbon tax on companies in high-polluting sectors, or requiring federal agencies to calculate the cost for U.S. companies to comply with federal and state climate regulations and use that figure as a proxy carbon tax to benchmark the CBAM against.

It’s not yet clear how forthcoming Republican legislation will address this issue. But the senators leading the drafting — including Cramer, Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — seem to agree that no new domestic tax is needed. Some appear more focused on how a CBAM could be used to ding trade adversaries, not solve the climate crisis per se. Cassidy told Semafor his goal was to use a “foreign pollution fee” to “address national security issues” and “level the playing field with China.”

— Tim McDonnell and Joseph Zeballos-Roig

To read their full story, out later today, sign up to Semafor’s Net Zero newsletter.

What’s next for TikTok after a brutal hearing

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s brutal reception on Capitol Hill on Thursday was the strongest sign yet that lawmakers are prepared to take dramatic action to rein in the company on national security grounds.

Members of both parties took turns grilling Chew for five hours on everything from parent company ByteDance’s vulnerability to Chinese intelligence to teens who have been exposed to disturbing or addicting content. Nor did they show much interest in Chew’s suggested compromise of housing user data in America under the watch of Austin-based Oracle.

“Your platform should be banned,” House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. told the CEO. “I expect today you’ll say anything to avoid this outcome.”

It’s clear Congress is on the move, but to where? As it stands, there are several competing bills that could potentially restrict TikTok’s operations, force ByteDance to sell them off, or ban them from operating in the U.S. entirely.

The proposal with the most momentum — and backing from the White House — is a bill  from Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va. and John Thune, R-S.D. that would create a new framework for evaluating threats from foreign countries. It would give the President the power to take action against technology platforms tied to foreign adversaries that access data on more than 1 million Americans, including by forcing divestment or preventing American companies from doing business with them.

Another bill from House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul, R-Texas advanced along party lines in recent weeks would allow the president to impose sanctions on foreign-controlled companies that transmit U.S. data to China when it raises national security concerns.

Finally, a bipartisan, bicameral bill from Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. would ban U.S. transactions with TikTok or its parent company.

“TikTok did not do itself favors” at the hearing, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., who sponsors the House version of Rubio’s bill, told Semafor.

It’s not a given that Congress will act and the Biden administration is still conducting its own negotiations with TikTok, telling the company in recent weeks that ByteDance needs to sell its stakes in the app or risk a ban.

Some members have also suggested concerns about TikTok might end up channeled into a broader bill that addresses data privacy issues for domestic and foreign companies alike.

The leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee introduced a proposal last year called the American Data Privacy and Protection Act. A new version is expected to be reintroduced at some point in the new Congress.

— Morgan Chalfant

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Jonathan Cohn is a senior national reporter at HuffPost and author of “The Ten Year War: Obamacare and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage.”

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, according to data from our partners at Ground News.

WHAT THE LEFT ISN’T READING: Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature approved a bill expanding private school vouchers that is now headed to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ desk.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: Most transgender adults report being happier with their lives after transitioning, according to a new survey from the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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— Steve Clemons