Misleading by omission. I point the court to page 295 of that decision where it said cloak of office phrase is not inherently novel or objectional way of describing the action. In this setting to consider criminal conduct both and describes conduct that was not potentially criminal. Did the trial court there cite the statute explain the statute to the jury or not. No your honor. First Circuit Decision wasnt turning on instruction, it was turning on whether the conduct alleged was illegal. The instruction could encompass lawful action it didnt. Here if you instruct the jury as your honor was saying that official action potentially includes everything under the sun, when it in fact does not potentially include everything under the sun. Thats not what it did. You have to tell them what it doesnt include. This is an area thats some black official action some white not official and some gray. The District Court only instructed on black, didnt instruct on any of the gray. Gave the good faith instruction which wrapped it up, in good faith no criminal intent and no crime. If he does it in good faith theres no crime. And if good faith is what saves him. And you called all the character witnesses that he was honest, could be believed. Gave you a lot of leeway on that. Got instruction that character evidence alone is enough to prove he acted in good faith. If good faith saves this it opens up every elected official. You all call it crucial defense. Because we had nothing left. If good faith is what saves it then you truly have given that official acts applies to gra tuts given prosecutors broad license to haul in officials. Crucial defense came during jury charge conference though right . And thats what i would like to turn to next. The instructions that we propose were plainly correct in jury conference and in proposed instructions. I would like to address the governments claim they were wrong. First, the government says we categorically excluded meetings. Thats false. Look at 73 of the joint appendix proposed instruction not at jury conference but written. Merely attending a meeting, hosting rhee exception attending are not standing alone official acts even if settled practices of the official. A government officials decision who to invite whether to attend whether to attend snotd official act because mere engrash agency are not corruption. We are not saying about meetings categorically being excluded. Judge thacker, if you look at what we proposed, 73040 and 41. That is word for word out of this courts opinion on jennings. They say if it doesnt they failed a specific instruction and judge spencer said no, presumably because as jennings makes clear, theres no difference between specific type of official act and specific course of official action. Jennings uses terms interchangeably. A course of interaction is more than one instance of a specific type of official action. The instruction we requested is word for word from jennings. And it includes the goodwill gift instruction. Likewise, the next instruction we proposed page seven 341, and providing near credibility or reputation to another is not an official act. Define in that act are whether it constitutes settled practice and whether conduct was intended to or did in fact influence a specific official decision the government actually makes. Another clearly correct instruction. Government doesnt have to give you anything. Has to influence a decision in the governments power, straight out of that circuit that paragraph is out of jennings but the second paragraph is Something Else they were two separate limitations. Finally, pretrial publicity. If you look at the transcript, it is Crystal Clear we said we want to be able to question any juror exposed to sub list tee. And the court said no. Thats why in the portions of the transcript, they went issue by issue, was a section of hearing we talked about pretrial publicity. Thats where he repeatedly said we couldnt question anybody because of exposure. Instead, conduct a stand up, sit down proceeding, allowed us to call forward only witnesses who raised issues other than their mere exposure to publicity. We were not allowed to question because they were exposed to publicity. Judge thacker, you may remember the bailey case, you were assistant United States attorney on that. Even in bailey they asked the jury have you formed opinion based on exposure to pretrial publicity. We were denied that basic question. To this day we have no idea whether any of those 12 jurors that sat in that box and convicted stepped into that box having formed opinion against the governor based on their exposure. You have been very patient. Governor mcdonnell is a longstanding public servant. He committed no crimes here. We respectfully request the conviction be reversed. Thank you very much. We appreciate the argument of both counsel and the very good papers on the case. We would like to come down and brief with various lawyers then take a short recess. When we take that recess anyone that doesnt want to hear the second and third and fourth can leave. Tomorrow night on cspan editorial cartoonists discuss role as sat irists at an event after the event at charlie hebdo. Here is some of what was said. I think being dropped from a paper is a form for the audience a form of quality control. Still being effective. If they run everything you do, you must be doing something wrong. It shows youre still dangerous, a little bit, yes. Or that you have touched a sore point for that particular community. Not all my smoking mr. Butt strips made it into carolina papers. Wrote about Frank Sinatra i went dark in las vegas. Jerry brown, same thing in california. There are regional the most recently i did something about jeb bush and the dallas paper threw it out because it was too political. Too political . The man is running for president molly crab apple participated. She talks about sat irists in the middle east making fun of isis. You see the same thing throughout syria and lebanon where activists are having their lives threatened by isis. Instead of giving in to despair, they reacted with vicious, hilarious mockery. Theres a syrian produced web series of actors dressing up as him. Making fun of him. One in beirut about putting bras on cows. Theres this incredible tradition of parody in the middle east and thats really been turned to great effect toward isis now. The thing is authoritarian bass tards of every stripe religious authoritarian or secular just authorize tarns of every kind they hate humor cartooning, gets under their skin. Theres something vis earlily irref rent about it. Theyre serious puffed up people thats why theyre authoritarians. This kills them. When hitler was in power one of the things he made a specific list of was cartoonists in england that had drawn pictures of him. He specifically wanted to kill them because they hurt his feelings just that much. Watch all of the event on the role of satire tomorrow night at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. The chief of the u. S. Forest service presented his wildfire season forecast to snort energy and Natural Resources committee. The Forest Service spent average of 1. 1 billion suppressing wildfires. Fire fighting efforts in wild land areas require different techniques, equipment and training, from the more familiar structure Fire Fighting found in populated areas. From capitol hill, this is about two hours and ten minutes. Good morning. Well call to order the Energy Committee hearing this morning. Welcome to everyone. We are discussing logistics here because we theoretically have a vote at 10 15. Its my intention to offer my Opening Statements and turn to the Ranking Member for hers. And if, in fact, they have called it at that point in time, i think what we will do is just take a quick break, go vote, so that we can come back and hear the testimony from our witnesses this morning. Obviously, a very important issue to all of us around the country. We are here to examine our wildfire management policies including the impacts of wildfire on communities and our current fire operations. Unfortunately, today may be a day where we struggle to find a whole lot that is positive about all of this. Over the last 50 years, weve seen a rapid escalation in the size, frequency and severity of wildfires. The most often cited causes are severe drought, a change in climate, hazardous fuel buildups due in part to decades of fire exclusion, insect and disease infestation and an explosion of nonnative invasive species. These are big problems. Theyre daunting problems. And they are problems that are not easily going away. Weve already seen the consequences unfold firsthand in my home state of alaska. Last may we had the funny river fire just about this time, actually, midmay, burned through the National Wildlife refuge, it spread smoke as far away as fairbanks more than 500 miles away. The fire burned nearly 200,000 acres or 300 square miles before it was finally extinguished. It was the second largest ever recorded on the kenai peninsula. It threatened lower skilack lake forcing evacuations. Were all thankful there were no apparent fatalities. The funny river fire was likely started by human activity, but the area has also changed dramatically in the last 20 years due in part to mass spruce bark beetle kill. Grasses have replaced forests, and those grasses are simply more susceptible to fire. More than half of the peninsulas total forested land, nearly a million acres, has been lost which is, of course, a worrisome sign for the future. Already this year, the concern back home is that we will have an aggressive fire season. Weve had very low snowfall throughout the state. Its dry. I was in fairbanks this weekend. And i cannot recall a time on the 1st of may when not only the rivers are out, but there is no snow anywhere. No snow pack anywhere. So the same factors that we are seeing up north and in the peninsula that are increasing the size, frequency and severity of wildfires are also driving up wildFire Suppression costs both in actual dollars and as a portion of the total budget of the Forest Service. Beyond that, the expansion of the wild urban interface, the wui and fire operation strategies and tactics cant be overlooked. According to a recent usda Inspector General report, 50 to the 95 of Forest Service suppression costs were attributable to the defense of private property much of which is located in the urban interface. It is looking more and more like the Forest Service is morphing into an Emergency Fire Service that throws everything that it has as every wildfire whether effective or not. Last year was a good example there. The Forest Service spent 200 million more on suppression than it spent on average over the last ten years despite there being less than half the number of fires. Less than half the number of acres burned and less than half the number of homes burned. We need to see a paradigm shift from fire control at all costs to actual fire management. So its my hope that we can implement a wildfire policy that responsibly funds wildFire Suppression needs, ends the unsustainable practice of fire borrowing, helps firewise our community, and makes the necessary investments in a full suite of fuel treatments. These will be my policy goals here in the committee. It wont be easy to achieve them, but if we do, i think we create fireresilient landscapes in which wildfires can occur without such devastating consequences for our lands, our communities, and for our budgets. So i look forward to the testimony of our witnesses here this morning. Thank you all and senator cantwell well now turn to you for your comments. Thank you, madam chair, and thanks for calling this important hearing. And i, too, want to thank the witnesses for joining us today. Fire season is upon us. And were looking to you as experts to tell us how we can better prepare for this years fire season. For some time now, the committee has heard time and again that our fires are getting noticeably worse. We have extreme weather conditions. The amount of hazardous fuel in our forests, suboptimal management schemes and an increasing inner urban wildland interface, as the chair was saying, are combining to produce more lethal fires. So the people in my state are all too familiar with this and want to know what we can do to better prepare. Throughout the country, we saw fires, but i think washington the state of washington probably was most hard hit. I see chief tidwell nodding his head. More than twice the average of number of acres burned across the northwest. Last july, washington suffered the carlton complex fire. And we spent many time talking to people in the community. This fire alone burned 149,000 acres in a single day. It burned an average of five acres per second for 24 hours straight. So the combination of extreme weather combined with this fire over 353 homes were lost. So despite many efforts for people to coordinate and resources, the people in those towns lacked the power of communication for weeks because of downed telephone lines, homeowners were not able to call to warn about the continued encroaching fires, and instead police had to drive around from town to town, calling for evacuation from their vehicles using a megaphone. So one thing that i will be calling for is better coordination between the Forest Service and fema on communication responses during these natural disasters. If they are becoming worse, we need better memorandums of understanding that require communications be set up right away so that our communities can continue to deal with these disasters. I know that we can get ahead of these issues. And as the chair mentioned, we need more hazardous fuel reduction in the wildland inner urban the wildland urban interface, and we need to figure out how to use resulting biomass to offset these costs. I know were going to hear some testimony about that today, and i look forward to it. Im also eager to hear from the witnesses on more prescribed fire burns also. We need to address fresh ideas on how to fund Forest Service efforts to protect our communities. Senator wyden, as we know, has introduced legislation on this. And im happy to be a cosponsor and look forward to discussing that. The science is clearly telling us that wildfires are not behaving the same way they have in the past decades. The witnesses will talk more about why this is, but i want to make sure that we discuss today what our response is going to be to this evolving problem. Researchers from the Forest Service just last week published a major scientific report. The report made it clear that if we are ever going to get ahead of the problem, the Forest Service needs to respond to wildfires in a fundamentally different way. To quote the report, our modern wildfire problems derive themselves from selfreinforcing cycle of countereffective actions. End quote. We cannot keep using the same tired approaches that we have for the last 100 years. We need to make sure were focusing on getting different results. Common sense tells us that a response needs to be modified now that the problem is different. The Forest Service report does a great job of summing up what the Forest Service needs to do. The report says that altering the current trajectory will require a total system transformation. The report bluntly states that maintaining the status quo will actually increase wildland fires, increases the losses we suffer from wildfires, and significantly affect the Forest Services ability to meet its core mission. So we need new solutions. Im certainly going to work with the chair and my colleagues here on the committee over the next few months to find some of those solutions. I see four areas ripe for us to work on. First we need to do what we can to reduce the probability of catastrophic fires, and we need to see that at least that we are doubling the amount of hazardous fuel treatments and double the amount of prescribed fire burn. Second, we need to fight large wildland fires which are becoming very expensive. Since 2000, the federal government has spent nearly 24 billion just fighting the large wildfires. So we need to ensure that federal agencies have the money necessary to protect our communities. And we need to treat large wildfires differently in our budget. Third, we need to make sure that these fires are are and the management on the ground is being done to assure accountability. Weve seen questions about spending practices in the media. And we need to make sure that we are incentivizing the right kind of cost savings in the budget. And finally, but most importantly, as i mentioned earlier, the assistance communities receive after the wildfire has started needs to be different. The assistance needs to show up quicker. The assistance needs to be tailored to these issues that are being raised. The federal government is responding to a new type of disaster where these events are blowing up in greater degree and reaching communities in unbelievable lightning speed. So we need to have a more proactive, upfront coordination with our federal agencies. The Forest Service and fema. For example, just in delivering Realtime Communications and making sure that the resources and i know the chief will address this are actually on the ground. The fire season forecast came out last week, and its particularly troubling for our state. I hope people are ready to help, and i hope fema will work to stage things like generators and assistance equipment and things that are closer to these areas so they can respond more quickly. Again, madam chair, thank you so much for this hearing. I look forward to the witnesses, and i look forward to working with our committee to try to institute some new approaches. Thank you, senator cantwell. Lets go ahead and get started with our witnesses. And depending on what happens with the vote, we may just keep powering through. I may take a pause in the hearing. But id like to welcome all of our witnesses before the committee, particularly you, chief tidwell. I appreciate your leadership at the u. S. Forest service there. Next to chief tidwell, we have dr. Steven pine. He is a regents prof