| Good morning, Early Birds. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is reading Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and he really wants you to know it. Tips: earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us. In today's edition: The White House is considering lowering gas prices… why Sen. Lisa Murkowski is mulling a vote for Ketanji Brown Jackson... the Justice Department scrutinizes preparations for the rally that preceded the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol... Pentagon warns Kremlin troops' shift away from Kyiv is not a de-escalation... but first ... | | |  | At the White House | | Biden woos the police as budget calls for more law enforcement spending |  President Biden delivers remarks regarding his Budget for the Fiscal Year 2023 in the State Dining Room on Monday. (Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) | | | President Biden's recent efforts to present his administration as supportive of local police appear to be paying some dividends, even as Republicans ramp up their attacks on Democrats as soft on crime ahead of the midterms. Biden used his State of the Union address earlier this month to decry the "defund the police" movement, saying emphatically that he wants to "fund the police." And on Monday, he released a budget proposal calling for more money for local law enforcement programs. Police groups have noticed. "We're very, very pleased," Jim Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, told the Early. Pasco is one of a handful of police group officials the White House has been in regular touch with as it seeks to build support for his policies — or at least to blunt criticism when there are disagreements — at a time when Republicans hope to make rising homicide and violent crime rates a top campaign issue. | | Pasco said he talks to the White House as often as three or four times a week. He added that he's worked with Domestic Policy Council director Susan Rice and White House counsel Dana Remus as well as senior adviser Cedric Richmond and the Domestic Policy Council staffers Chiraag Bains and Stef Feldman. "They're listening and taking our points of view into consideration, and that's all you can really ask for," Pasco said. | | Biden's increased emphasis on support for the police hasn't impressed Republicans. "This is simply a political reversal, not an actual reversal," Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who has worked with Democrats on a stalled police reform bill, said Wednesday afternoon on Megyn Kelly's podcast regarding Biden's budget proposal. His call to "fund the police" in the State of the Union also drew criticism from some Democratic lawmakers and liberal activists who are strong advocates for overhauling police practices. But many others in the party have praised his recent approach. It's not hard to see why some Democrats are attracted to the message. An NBC News poll released Wednesday found that 75 percent of registered voters — including 59 percent of Democrats — said they'd be more likely to back candidates who support "funding the police and providing them the resources and training they need to protect our communities." Just 11 percent of voters — and 20 percent of Democrats — said they'd be less likely to vote for such candidates. "When you start realizing the spikes in violent crime and the folks that are being attacked out there, you start to realize, well, we better start doing something about this because the American public is not happy," said Larry Cosme, the president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. Cosme met with Biden one-on-one in November — which hasn't been previously reported — and has been in regular touch with top White House and Justice Department officials. | | "They've been very receptive to me," Cosme said. "They've always reached out to me. They've been proactive." Biden has a long track record of supporting law enforcement and tough-on-crime policies, including the 1994 crime bill, which set up a Justice Department office to distribute money to state and local police to hire and train more officers. He said he regretted the impact of some aspects of the law in 2019 months before launching his presidential campaign. Biden also walked a careful line during the campaign, especially after the murder of George Floyd galvanized calls on the left for fundamental changes in policing. He supported reforms but refused to embrace calls to defund the police — a movement that calls for redirecting some law enforcement funds to social services programs aimed at reducing crime. Police groups officials said Biden's long history working with their groups — he collaborated so closely with the National Association of Police Organizations on the 1994 crime bill that he later said it "wrote the bill" — helped give him credibility. "I don't think for a second that President Biden disrespects law enforcement," said Vernon Stanforth, the president of the National Sheriffs Association and the sheriff of Fayette County, Ohio. "I don't believe that." He added that the amount of Democratic support for defunding the police might have been exaggerated. "To categorize that as a Democrat rallying cry to defund was, I think, probably not necessarily accurate," he said. | | That's not to say police groups don't have criticism of Biden's record. They've lobbied against or sought changes to the moribund police reform bill that Biden supports. And Stanforth said the administration hadn't been as receptive to his group's calls for tougher border security policies as it had on police funding. Bill Johnson, meanwhile, the National Association of Police Organizations' executive director, said he wanted to see more of the tens of billions of dollars in law enforcement funding including in Biden's budget proposal go toward hiring police officers. The budget proposes spending $367 million, for instance, on Justice Department efforts to "support police reform, the prosecution of hate crimes, enforcement of voting rights and efforts to provide equitable access to justice." Those are worthwhile aims, Johnson said, but they're not as focused on putting more officers on the streets as the measures Biden would've backed decades ago. "If someone is looking for programs such as then-Sen. Biden, or Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Biden, or even Vice President Biden supported in the past, it's just not in here," he said. Michael Gwin, a White House spokesman, said in a statement to the Early that "putting more cops on the beat is a central element of the President's plan to fight gun crime." "This Administration is taking a comprehensive and holistic approach to making our neighborhoods safer that combines an increase in funds for accountable community policing with tougher federal law enforcement — especially against gun traffickers — and historic investments in community-based programs that are proven to reduce crime," he said. | Biden expected to announce massive release of oil reserves to combat inflation |  President Biden delivers remarks regarding the ban on imports of Russian oil into the U.S. on March 8. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) | | - Biden is expected to announce the release from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve today, per our colleagues Tyler Pager and Jeff Stein. "The United States is coordinating the release with the International Energy Agency and has told allies and partners about the measure."
| | |  | On the Hill | | Will Murkowski vote to confirm Jackson? |  Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) stands during the Senate Committee for Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing on May 12, 2020. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post) | | | Murkowski's machinations: "The last time a Democratic president sent Supreme Court nominees to the Senate, Sen. Lisa Murkowski was a member of the Senate Republican leadership bracing for a tough Alaska primary against a more conservative GOP challenger," our colleague Mike DeBonis writes. | - "She was accordingly tough on President Barack Obama's picks: Sonia Sotomayor, she said in 2009, had given 'brief and superficial treatment … to important constitutional questions,' and a year later, she said Elena Kagan would be 'one of the least experienced Supreme Court justices in our nation's history.' She voted against both nominees."
- "More than a decade later, Murkowski has undergone a political transformation — thanks in part to a political near-death experience, where she lost that 2010 primary only to resurrect herself in a subsequent write-in campaign with the help of centrist voters. She is now among a handful of Republicans who are seriously entertaining a vote for Biden's pending Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
- "Her vote is being closely watched not only in D.C., where Democrats are eager to put a bipartisan stamp on Jackson's likely confirmation, but also back home in Alaska, where Murkowski is standing for reelection this year under a newfangled election process."
| | Happening tomorrow: Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, Susan Collins and Joni Ernst will travel to the United Nations headquarters in New York to discuss how the U.S. and the international community can support Afghan women and girls. Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August, girls have been barred from attending school beyond the sixth grade, women are prohibited from boarding planes without a male relative, and men and women cannot visit public parks on the same day, per AP News. | | |  | From the courts | | Justice Dept. expands Jan. 6 investigation to review rally preparation, financing |  Supporters of then-President Donald Trump try to break through a police barrier at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Julio Cortez/AP) | | | DOJ goes big: "The criminal investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has expanded to examine the preparations for the rally that preceded the riot, as the Justice Department aims to determine the full extent of any conspiracy to stop Congress from certifying Biden's election victory," people familiar with the matter told Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Jackie and Spencer S. Hsu. | - "In the past two months, a federal grand jury in Washington has issued subpoena requests to some officials in former president Donald Trump's orbit who assisted in planning, funding and executing the Jan. 6 rally," the people familiar with the matter told our colleagues.
- "The development shows the degree to which the Justice Department investigation — which already involves more defendants than any other criminal prosecution in the nation's history — has moved further beyond the storming of the Capitol to examine events preceding the attack."
| | |  | The Data | |  A young woman's journey out of Ukraine, visualized: "At all stages of the journey, we were treated like captives or some criminals. I felt like a sack of potatoes tossed around," the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns about a relative in Russia, told our colleague Mary Ilyushina. "You have no will. How can you resist this? Even if you have a chance to escape, everything around is destroyed, and there is nowhere to hide." | | | What's next: "Ukraine will resume peace talks with Russia online on Friday, a senior Ukrainian diplomat participating in the negotiations said on his telegram channel Wednesday, despite doubts among Ukrainian officials about the Kremlin's sincerity in the discussions," our colleague Andrew Jeong reports. | | |  | The Media | | | |  | Viral | | | | AM/PM | | Looking for more analysis in the afternoon? | | | | Weekday newsletter, PM |  | | | | | | |
