WASHINGTON — With their bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act in tatters, Senate leaders on Tuesday pushed to vote on a different measure that would repeal major parts of President Barack Obama’s health law without a replacement — but that plan appeared also to collapse.

Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all Republicans, immediately declared they could not vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement — enough to doom the effort before it could get any momentum.

“I did not come to Washington to hurt people,” Ms. Capito said in a statement. “I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians.”

Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio hinted strongly that he too would oppose it.

The collapse of the Senate Republican health bill — and the failing struggle to find yet another alternative — highlighted a harsh reality for Senate Republicans: While Republican senators freely assailed the health law while Mr. Obama occupied the White House, they have so far not been able to come up with a workable plan to unwind it that would keep both moderate Republicans and conservatives on board.

By midday Tuesday, the Republican Party’s seven-year-old promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act appeared broken. At the White House, President Trump said his plan was now “to let Obamacare fail,” suggesting Democrats would then seek out Republicans to work together on a health measure.

“It will be a lot easier,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We’ll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, gamely pressed forward on Tuesday even as the ground was giving way beneath him.

“I regret that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failures of Obamacare will not be successful,” Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning. “That doesn’t mean we should give up. We will now try a different way to bring the American people relief from Obamacare.”

On Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats alike were trying to make sense of the bill’s downfall — and what comes next. On Monday night, two Republican senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas, came out in opposition to the bill, leaving Republican leaders at least two votes short of those needed to start debate on the measure.

Two other Republican senators, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Collins, had already said they would not support a procedural step to begin debate.

House Republicans, after their own fits and starts, passed a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act in May, a difficult vote that was supposed to set the stage for quick Senate action. But with conservative and moderate Republicans so far apart in the Senate, the gulf proved impossible to bridge. Conservatives wanted the Affordable Care Act eradicated, but moderates worried about the effects that would have on their most vulnerable citizens.

The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York urged his Republican colleagues to begin anew and, this time, undertake a bipartisan effort.

“This second failure of Trumpcare is proof positive that the core of this bill is unworkable,” Schumer said. “Rather than repeating the same failed, partisan process yet again, Republicans should start from scratch and work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the markets and improves our health care system.”

Roughly 20 million people have gained coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Repealing the law was a top priority for Trump and Republicans in Congress, who say it has driven up premiums and forced consumers to buy insurance they do not want and cannot afford.

The opposition from Paul and Collins to the latest version of the Senate bill was expected, so McConnell had no margin for error as he unveiled it. But he managed to survive through the weekend and until Monday night without losing another of his members — though some expressed misgivings or, at the very least, uncertainty.

McConnell had wanted to hold a vote this week, but he was forced to abandon that plan after Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had surgery last week to remove a blood clot from above his left eye. That unexpected setback gave the forces that opposed the bill more time to pressure undecided senators.

Already, McConnell was trying to sell legislation that was being assailed from many directions. On Friday, the health insurance lobby, which had been largely silent during the fight, came off the sidelines to blast as “unworkable” a key provision allowing the sale of low-cost, stripped-down health plans, saying it would send premiums soaring and undermine protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions.

McConnell has now failed twice in recent weeks to roll out a repeal bill and keep his conference together for it. He first wanted to hold a vote in late June, only to reverse course after running into opposition.

House Republicans in competitive districts who supported their version of the bill will now have to explain themselves — and Democrats are eager to pounce.

“Make no mistake, Paul Ryan can’t turn back time and undo the damaging vote he imposed on his conference,” said Meredith Kelly, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “House Republicans all own a bill that would strip health care from 23 million Americans and raise costs for millions more, and it will haunt them in 2018.”

Lee, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, was part of a group of four conservative senators who came out against the initial version of McConnell’s bill after it was unveiled last month. He then championed the proposal to allow insurers to offer cheap, bare-bones plans, which was pushed by another of those opponents, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. But the language ultimately added was not quite what Lee had been advocating, his office said after the new bill was released.

Moran, a reliable Republican vote and a past chairman of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, had announced his opposition to the bill as drafted after McConnell scrapped plans to hold a vote in late June. He expressed concerns about how it would affect Kansas, including whether it would limit access to health care in rural communities and effectively penalize states, like his, that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

The pressure on Moran at home showed no sign of relenting. The Kansas Hospital Association said last week that the revised Senate bill “comes up short, particularly for our most vulnerable patients.”

Jefferson and Lewis counties saw slight decreases in quarter two sales tax collections compared to the same period last year, but the revenue uptick in St. Lawrence County continues.

For the second quarter in a row, St. Lawrence County’s sales tax revenues were higher than in 2016.

From April to June, the county collected $14,163,580 in sales tax, a 3.18 percent increase over the $13,728,815 collected the same time period in 2016.

Legislature Chairman Kevin D. Acres, R-Madrid, said he’s cautious about being overly optimistic.

He said the flooding experienced early this year in waterfront communities and rainy weather this season is reportedly lowering the number of people renting cabins, staying at campgrounds and spending money at restaurants and gas stations.

“I think we’ll be taking a hit there,” Mr. Acres said Tuesday. “Hopefully, we’ll be drawing people in for this weekend’s Bassmaster Elite (fishing tournament), “

According to sales tax figures released this week, Jefferson County raked in $8,733,841 for the first quarter of this year, a 0.23 percent decrease from revenues during the second quarter of 2016.

But the county did see a spike in growth in the first quarter of the year, allowing projections to stay on track. Quarter one brought $7,832,059 for Jefferson County, the highest second-quarter sales tax total the county has seen in the last seven years.

The climb in revenue can be attributed to a higher sales tax rate. At the end of 2015, the Jefferson County Board of Legislators voted to increase the county’s sales tax rate from 3.75 percent to 4 percent to bring in more revenue in 2016. Additionally, the county decreased its sales tax revenue projections in this year’s budget from $35 million to $34.6 million. This was in response to the $400,000 shortfall seen in last year’s budget.

Michael A. Montigelli, who chairs the Jefferson County Legislature’s Finance and Rules Committee, said the second-quarter decrease could be attributed to the area’s dwindling population. Out of all counties north of New York City, Jefferson County has seen one of the highest decreases in population in recent years.

But Mr. Montigelli said the negative growth in sales tax revenues is not enough to cause any anxiety.

“It’s just a slight dip,” Mr. Montigelli said. He said the sales tax collections are still forecast to hit or exceed this year’s projections.

Lewis County saw a 3.3 percent drop in second-quarter sales tax receipts, from $3.04 million in 2016 to $2.94 million this year.

However, like Jefferson County, the more than $100,000 drop was more than offset by a particularly strong first quarter, and receipts at the year’s midway point are still well ahead of last year. The county has thus far collected $5.8 million, up from $5.5 million at this point last year.

“I consider ourselves in really good shape,” County Treasurer Patricia L. O’Brien said.

Mrs. O’Brien said she still believes the first-quarter spike may have been some type of state adjustment, since other treasurers had said they also saw large gains in that quarter. “I can’t think of anything else,” she said.

With that in mind, Mrs. O’Brien said she was concerned that second-quarter receipts could end up much lower than they actually did.

Lewis County, which does not distribute any of its sales tax revenue to the towns and villages, last year took in nearly $800,000 over the budgeted amount of $10,625,000 in sales tax revenue. County officials this year budgeted for $10,825,000 from sales tax, so it is already nearly 54 percent of that way to that fiscal goal.

CANTON — The state Comptroller’s Office will soon be receiving a letter requesting that a full audit of the town of Canton be conducted in the wake of circumstances that have “caused a furor” in the community, according to Town Attorney Charles B. Nash.

The two-page letter was written by Mr. Nash and is expected to be sent by certified mail to Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, Albany.

“The confidence in all governments is probably at an all-time low in our society,” the letter states. “The Town Board in the Town of Canton would request a full audit as outlined above so that the taxpayers in the Town of Canton can be assured that there are no missing funds and that if the Comptroller’s Office has recommendations concerning a more efficient operation of town government, the town could move forward and put those recommendations into place.”

The Town Board voted unanimously last week to request the audit. The measure was in response to criticism voiced by several citizens about how salary funds for Mr. Button came to be split between himself and his wife, Ann Denice Button, who performs bookkeeping duties.

Mr. Nash on Tuesday required the newspaper to file a Freedom of Information request to obtain a copy of the letter from Town Clerk Lisa Hammond.

The letter explains that in 2015, a switch in the allocation of the salaries paid to the supervisor and the bookkeeper was made that boosted Mr. Button’s salary above the advertised salary of $14,977. The same situation existed in 2016 and the beginning of this year. The budget established one amount for the operation of the supervisor’s office.

In each of those years, the supervisor designated his wife as the bookkeeper. Mrs. Button also served as the human resource officer and performed all the administrative functions of the supervisor’s office, according to the letter. In March 2015, Mrs. Button retired and since then has collected retirement from the New York State Retirement System.

“There does not exist any written record of an executive session discussion or any official action of the town board for the years 2015 and 2016. This matter came to light in 2017, and the town believes it is taking the appropriate action to correct that situation,” the letter continues.

Mr. Nash told the comptroller’s office that “this set of circumstances has caused a furor in our small local community.”

“While everyone at the meeting and everyone involved in the town government believe there is no misappropriation of town funds, the confidence in the town government was certainly shaken,” the letter continues.

To correct the situation, the Town Board has scheduled an Aug. 9 public hearing to adopt a local law that would legally increase the supervisor’s salary from $14,977 to $40,000.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Button said Tuesday they’re confident the audit will show that the town’s finances are completely in order. Mr. Button is preparing a request for proposals for auditors interested in doing a separate audit that would focus exclusively on the supervisor’s office.

“I welcome the comptroller and any other party that understands municipal accounting to come in and take a look at what we do here,” Mr. Button said. “We’re pretty proud of the system we’ve created. Not only does it get the accounting right, it also does it at a less expensive price than if we did it another way.”

The letter to the comptroller was signed by Mr. Button and Town Board members James T. Smith, Paul Backus, Robert J. Washo and Philip LaMarche.

Mr. Washo said it’s important that the comptroller’s audit recommend policy and procedures that would prevent similar situations from happening in the future.

“I think the numbers will add up. It’s not a question of whether one plus one equals two,” Mr. Washo said. “It’s about having someone help us adopt best practices so this doesn’t happen going forward. Obviously, there have been lapses in the past.”

Mr. Button, a Republican, has served as town supervisor for the past 16 years. He has filed petitions seeking re-election in November. On Tuesday, Mr. Button said he has not changed his mind about running for re-election.

He said the town needs to move forward on important projects, including developing the community’s waterfront, fixing the Pyrites boat launch and bringing a reliable water source to constituents.

“I think there is a lot of pent-up anger about the dysfunction in Washington. I never thought that would spill over into Canton politics, but I think some of it has,” Mr. Button said. “We’ve got to work to promote a healthy exchange of ideas without upsetting the good thing we’ve had going on in Canton for a number of years.”

WATERTOWN — The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office has charged a Glen Park man with allegedly punching an autistic 22-year-old in the village of Glen Park on June 13.

Joseph A. Brown, 21, has been charged with second-degree harassment and was issued an appearance ticket returnable to Town of Brownville Court.

Cody W. Searchfield, who lives in Glen Park with his mother, Lisa A. Searchfield, was out walking on June 13 in front of Suburban Propane, 23191 White Road, sometime between 5:30 and 9 p.m. when he was allegedly punched and knocked down by Mr. Brown. He suffered cuts and bruises to his face and head.

Community members later rallied in support of Mr. Searchfield, with locals organizing a “Walk with Cody” event June 16 in Watertown.

LOWVILLE — Where can you go to buy cheese for $160 per pound? Only at the Lewis County Fair cheese auction.

“We spread the money around real well,” Gary P. Rosiczkowski, superintendent of the dairy industry building, said just before turning over the microphone to auctioneer Joseph Bush. “Remember, it’s for the kids,”

And the agribusiness leaders, state and county officials and other agricultural supporters in attendance apparently took that to heart, as the 23rd annual event raised a record $17,500, up from just over $14,000 last year.

Mr. Rosiczkowski said the generosity and amount of money spent every year at the event — in which 20-, 10- and 5-pound blocks of cheese donated by Kraft Foods and Lowville Producers Dairy Cooperative Inc. are auctioned off — continues to amaze him.

The “Big Cheese” award, given annually to the high bidder of the sole 20-pound chunk of cheddar cheese, went to a coalition of the 10 Republicans running for county legislator seats and state Assemblyman Kenneth D. Blankenbush, R-Black River. They spent $3,200 — or $160 per pound — to earn the title, and Kraft Heinz once again agreed to match the winning bid.

“It’s a good cause,” said Mr. Blankenbush, who did the bidding for the group. “And we’re going to be doubling that with Kraft Heinz.”

Along with the 35 bricks of cheddar, Muenster, Swiss, Gouda, Monterey Jack, chastinet, peppadew and even chocolate cheese that were slated for auction, Kraft Heinz representatives brought along a bag of Polly-O string cheese that auction officials touted as the first bag for sale that was produced at the Lowville plant. The mill on Utica Boulevard is in the midst of a massive expansion project intended to increase cream cheese production and add new lines, including string cheese.

Ted A. Simmons from the Northern New York Farmers Market was the high bidder at $325. He and his wife, Shari, had earlier been presented with a Hall of Fame award for their more than 30 years of work at the auction house, while Matthew and Windy Klossner of Turin were presented with a Dairy of Distinction award.

Proceeds from the cheese auction are primarily used to help fund youth agricultural programs — like FFA, 4-H and Dairy Princess programs — and provide college scholarships to students going into agricultural fields, said Peggy L. Murray, farm business management educator at Cornell Cooperative Extension of Lewis County.

Mrs. Murray, also a member of the dairy industry building committee, said that group each year meets to determine what initiatives to support. “It doesn’t just sit in an account,” she said.

One beneficiary has been the annual Family Farm Day, which Mrs. Murray helps to organize. “They give us $2,500 a year,” she said. “That’s our budget.”

The program also funds the purchase of calves for local youth to raise, and two of this year’s three recipients — Hannah Raymond and Quinn Hoppel — were on hand to show off their animals.

The cheese auction here was patterned after one at the New York State Fair, Mrs. Murray said. “But we actually raise more money than the state fair does most years,” she said.

Prior to the auction, the 197th annual fair was kicked off with an opening ceremony at the Bostwick Street gate.

Douglas P. Hanno, president of the Lewis County Agricultural Society thanked the 24 fair directors and many more associate directors for all the work they’ve done in preparation for this year’s fair. “This year, with all the rain, we’ve had extra challenges,” he said.

Today is the first of two children’s days at the fair. Featured events include the out-of-field tractor pull at 9 a.m., baby show at 10 a.m. and 4x4 truck pull at 7 p.m. The Coleman Bros. midway will be selling $20 wristbands from noon to 4 p.m. that allow unlimited rides until 6 p.m.

SACKETS HARBOR — Four Sackets Harbor residents have filed a motion with the state Court of Appeals requesting that it hear an appeal of an Appellate Division decision to a allow a village Zoning Board of Appeals vote to stand.

General Smith Drive residents Theresa A. Schillaci, Samuel J. Sanzone, Dorothy Olshefski, and Paul Windover began legal action seeking to annul the village Zoning Board of Appeals’s approval of a variance for the addition of two units at the Liberty Sackets Harbor town home development in 2015.

The neighbors claim that the approval of the variance, which would allow two more units to be built on the site, was “granted illegally, without proper opportunity for the public comment.”

The Planning Board approved site plans for the proposed 12-unit project in 2006 and eight units were built. Between then and 2014, changes to the zoning law put the project out of compliance.

Liberty Sackets Harbor’s principal is Alexandria Bay developer P. J. Simao, who proposed the addition of the new units on General Smith Drive in 2014. The new units would require a density variance, allowing them to be built even though they did not comply with minimum lot size requirements established while the new units were still in the planning phase.

The neighbors believed that during a June 2015 meeting of the Zoning Board of Appeals, an executive session was improperly held. The session was begun, according to meeting documents, for “attorney-client privilege and threat of potential litigation,” as Liberty had threatened to sue the village.

Liberty Sackets Harbor argued that “Liberty had a vested right in the project and the new zoning law interfered with that right.”

Petitioner Theresa Schillaci, an attorney, also threatened the village with legal action.

The variance was approved by the Zoning Board 3-2 on July 15, 2015.

Petitioners argue that this was done after a lengthy executive session and was conducted without any public discussion.

In January 2016, state Supreme Court Justice James McClusky found that the executive sessions were begun appropriately and that “the Zoning Board of Appeals discussed this matter over numerous public sessions.”

The discussions of the new additions were held over several meetings, where their potential threat to the historical characteristics of Sackets Harbor was discussed, the court noted.

The residents immediately appealed the decision to the 4th Department Appellate Division. That midlevel court unanimously upheld Judge McClusky’s initial decision.

However, the four petitioners are now looking to the state Court of Appeals to determine if “the trial court erred in finding that the Open Meetings Law was not violated because the Board did not particularize the nature of the executive session, and the meeting involved public business.”

Syracuse attorney John A. Cirando is representing Ms. Schillaci, Mr. Sanzone, Ms. Olshefski, and Mr. Windover. Jonathan B. Fellows represented the village in the initial action, and Paul J. Curtin, both of Syracuse, represented Liberty Sackets Harbor.

LOWVILLE — A Lowville couple has been accused of smuggling suboxone strips into the Lewis County Jail this spring.

Lewis County Sheriff’s Department officials on July 10 charged Carissa G. Jantzi, 36, with first-degree promoting prison contraband, then on July 12 charged Jeffrey F. Jantzi, 39, with first-degree promoting prison contraband and fourth-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance, according to a department release issued Tuesday.

Both were arraigned in Village Court and sent to jail, with bail set at $2,500 for Mrs. Jantzi and $5,000 for Mr. Jantzi. Mrs. Jantzi is also being held on a parole violation warrant.

Deputies said Mrs. Jantzi in April smuggled the strips into the jail to her husband during visitation and he gave them to other inmates.

Mr. Jantzi in early April was sentenced to one year in county jail on a charge of driving while ability impaired by drugs from a September traffic stop.

State parole and county corrections officers assisted in the investigation. More charges are pending, deputies said.

New York farmers have until Aug. 1 to apply for the Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage programs for the 2017 crop year.

Both programs, which are offered through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s New York State Farm Service Agency, provide financial protections when crop prices and revenue drop substantially due to market forces. Crops that are covered under these programs include barley, canola, large and small chickpeas, corn, crambe, flaxseed, grain sorghum, lentils, mustard seed, oats, peanuts, dry peas, rapeseed, long-grain rice, medium-grain rice, safflower seed, sesame, soybeans, sunflower seed and wheat.

“Producers have already elected (Agriculture Risk Coverage) or (Price Loss Coverage), but to receive program benefits, they must enroll for the 2017 crop year by signing a contract before the Aug. 1 deadline,” said Mark Dennis, acting executive director for the state FSA. “Please contact your local FSA office to schedule an appointment if you have not yet enrolled.”

Farmers can contact USDA’s offices in Watertown, Lowville and Canton at 315-782-7289, 315-376-7021 and 315-386-2401 respectively for more information.

WATERTOWN — Much like the CT scans they get to examine, 20 area teens are getting an inside look at the daily life of medical professionals in the north country this week.

In its 10th year, Tuesday marked the start of Samaritan Medical Center’s 17th MASH camp, which teaches local students grades 8 through 12 about some of the many medical careers they could pursue firsthand.

The camps are sponsored by the Fort Drum Regional Health Planning Organization and hosted by four hospitals in Jefferson and Lewis counties, and Jefferson Community College. They are held twice a year, with Samaritan’s more advanced camp in summer.

MASH stands for the Medical Academy of Science and Health.

“Each student does something different each of the three days,” Manager of Recruitment at Samaritan Michael D. Britt said. “They rotate through six areas in the hospital so they have the chance to come across a career or interest they’ve never considered before, like physical therapy, radiology or biomedicine.”

McKenna MacKay, Madyson Amo and Jessica Bourcy are all heading into grade 11 at Thousand Islands High School. By 11:30 Tuesday morning, Ms. MacKay had learned about respiratory treatment, Ms. Amo received CPR training and Ms. Bourcy has shadowed CT and radiology technicians.

“I don’t think radiology is what I’m interested in doing, but looking into a person’s brain like that was really interesting,” said Ms. Bourcy, who is still exploring her career options but looking at the health field.

“As a kid you want to be a doctor and help people, and you know, that never really leaves you,” said Ms. Amo who wants to pursue anesthesiology.

“A lot of people in my family have diabetes. They would show me how they prick their fingers (to test blood sugar) and I always thought that was interesting,” she said about first becoming interested in medicine.

All three of the young women are taking advanced math and science classes in school.

The 20 students enrolled in Samaritan’s summer camp will get hands-on experiences in areas including physical and speech therapy, oncology, medical imaging, technology and more. They will each become CPR trained and certified, and today will have the interactive session with a Life­Net helicopter and its crew.

One of the program’s main purposes is the reduce the strain of the region’s healthcare shortage — getting local kids interested in the industry can be easier than recruiting outside health care professionals to rural hospitals and practices.

“The camps have been such a benefit to (health care employment) around here,” said Radiologist Bill Cain, who has taught at every MASH camp ever held at the hospital.

He says he’s seen many of the camp kids and other students who have job shadowed him come back years later to work. Ms. MacKay and Ms. Bourcy already know they want to return to the St. Lawrence River area for their careers.

On Thursday, a graduation will be held for the young participants and their family members. According to Mr. Britt, students are encouraged to then attend another MASH camp, do some job shadowing, or even just keep up with math and science courses while they are still young.

Additional MASH camps are being hosted by Lewis County General Hospital, July 25-27; River Hospital, July 25-27; Carthage Area Hospital, Aug. 1-3; and Jefferson Community College, Aug. 8 to 9.

State police announced Maj. Philip T. Rougeux, 57, of Oneida, will be the new commander of their Troop D, which covers seven counties including Jefferson and Lewis.

Maj. Rougeux, a member of state police since 1986, has spent most of his career in Central New York.

His career includes time in Long Island, Sylvan Beach, Marcy, Albany, North Syracuse and Canandaigua.

Most recently, he was in the Professional Standards Bureau covering Troops C, D and Thruway Zone 3.

Maj. Rougeux, who started in the role on Thursday, replaces Maj. Francis S. Coots, who retired in February.

The troop, operating from 27 facilities, provides services to 167 towns, 89 villages and 5 cities.

ALBANY — A federal judge Tuesday evening “severed” the corruption trials against eight individuals in a case that began with an alleged bid-rigging probe of the Cuomo administration’s Buffalo Billion program – setting one of the trial dates in the midst of an expected re-election bid by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

U.S. District Court Judge Valerie Caproni ordered the pay-to-play trial of six of the charged individuals – including Buffalo construction executive Louis Ciminelli and former SUNY Polytechnic head Alain Kaloyeros – for “not sooner than” next May 15.

A separate trial for Joseph Percoco, a longtime friend of Cuomo, and other individuals will start Jan. 8.

The judge did not set a location for the two trials, but they were scheduled to take place in her lower Manhattan courtroom. Ciminelli, along with other defendants in the Buffalo Billion case, have sought to transfer the case to Buffalo.

In her two-page written order, the judge noted that both prosecutors and defense lawyers were on board with separating the case into two trials.

Federal prosecutors last year brought a wide-ranging case against Percoco, Ciminelli and others over alleged bid-rigging and bribery charges connected to economic development projects from Buffalo to Orange County.

Lawyers for Ciminelli, the head of Buffalo’s biggest construction contracting firm, had sought to delay the start of the trial until later this year because of serious health conditions affecting Ciminelli. The health concerns, not specifically identified in recent document unsealed in the case, were said by Ciminelli’s lawyers to prevent him from participating in his defense case until after a previously scheduled October start date for the trial.

The cases have implications for Cuomo’s political future. Though not accused of any wrongdoing, Cuomo will have to react to two trials that will now drag on over at least the first half of 2018 and involve either close former advisers or major upstate economic development projects that he spearheaded. The governor is expected to seek re-election in November 2018.

The judge said that a “discretionary severance is appropriate” so that there will now be two trials in the case originally brought as one by former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. The former prosecutor, fired earlier this year by President Donald Trump, began his probe several years ago in the awarding of the Buffalo Billion contract – led by the $750 million construction deal at the SolarCity plant in Buffalo – that was awarded by the state to LPCiminelli.

Federal prosecutors recently said they did not object to two trials – one focusing on accusations against Percoco and others and the second involving upstate economic development projects in Buffalo and Syracuse. Acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim, the head of the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan, recently told the judge that breaking the case into two trials is fair in order to accommodate scheduling conflicts for defense lawyers as well as Ciminelli’s health issues. He said the two separate trials will also result in less confusion among jurors in the sweeping set of charges.

The first case, to begin Jan. 8, will include alleged corruption charges against Percoco and two Syracuse developers. The second case, starting no sooner than May 8, will include the alleged charges against Ciminelli and two former LPCiminelli executives, as well as Kaloyeros and the two Syracuse developers.

The judge opened the door to a potentially later start than May 8, ordering the defense lawyers to report previously existing trial commitments they might have between next May 1 and Sept. 30.

Lawyers for Ciminelli and Percoco did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A ninth individual, Todd Howe, a longtime Cuomo ally, pleaded guilty in connection with the cases. Howe has been cooperating with investigators for more than a year as part of his plea deal.

WASHINGTON — Hours into a long dinner with world leaders who had gathered for the Group of 20 summit meeting, President Donald Trump left his chair at the sprawling banquet table and headed to where President Vladimir Putin of Russia was seated. Earlier in the day, the two presidents had met for the first time, yielding what the Trump administration later described as a warm rapport, even as they talked about Russia’s interference in the United States’ 2016 elections.

The July 7 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, was the single most scrutinized of the Trump presidency. But it turned out there was another, potentially just as important, encounter: a roughly hourlong one-on-one discussion over dinner that was only overheard by a Kremlin-provided interpreter.

No presidential relationship has been more dissected than the one between Trump and Putin, a dynamic only heightened by the swirl of investigations into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to sway the election in his favor. Nevertheless, the meeting was confirmed by the White House only on Tuesday, after some attendees privately expressed surprise that it had occurred.

The dinner discussion caught the attention of other leaders around the table, some of whom later remarked privately on the odd spectacle of an American president seeming to single out the Russian leader for special attention at a summit meeting that included some of the United States’ staunchest, oldest allies.

The White House acknowledged the conversation on Tuesday but said there was nothing unusual about it, batting aside the suggestion that it had been deliberately hidden from public view.

Late Tuesday night, Trump derided news reports about it as “sick.” He said the dinner was not a secret, since all of the world leaders at the summit meeting and their spouses were invited by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. “Press knew!” he tweeted.

“Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!” Trump added.

While the private leaders-and-spouses dinner was on Trump’s public schedule, the news media was not allowed to witness any part of it, nor were reporters provided with an account of what transpired. Trump’s traveling press contingent did note, however, that his motorcade left the dinner four minutes after Putin’s did.

The conversation took place at a private meal that lasted more than three hours after a concert for the leaders and their spouses at the Elbphilharmonie, a concert hall on the banks of the Elbe River.

In the earlier, formal meeting, Trump said later, he asked the Russian president twice about his role in the U.S. vote. Putin denied involvement, and the two men agreed to move beyond the dispute in the interest of finding common ground on other matters, including a limited cease-fire in Syria.

There is no official U.S. government record of the intimate dinner conversation, because no American official other than the president was involved.

“Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn’t care,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based research and consulting firm, who said he had heard directly from attendees. “They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled.”

The encounter occurred more than midway through the lengthy dinner, when Trump left his chair and approached Putin, who had been seated next to the first lady, Melania Trump. It was described to Bremmer by other guests as lasting roughly an hour and not initially disputed by a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

But Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, disputed that account. He said Trump had described the exchange with Putin as purely social, and as lasting far less than an hour. “It was pleasantries and small talk,” Spicer said.

In a separate statement, the White House said the two presidents had spoken through the Kremlin’s interpreter because the American translator with Trump did not speak Russian.

Experts in United States-Russia relations said such an encounter — even on an informal basis at a social event — was a concern because of its length, which suggested a substantive exchange, and because there was no note taker or national security or foreign policy aide present.

“We’re all going to be wondering what was said, and that’s where it’s unfortunate that there was no U.S. interpreter, because there is no independent American account of what happened,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who also specializes in Russia and nuclear arms control.

“If I was in the Kremlin, my recommendation to Putin would be, ‘See if you can get this guy alone,’ and that’s what it sounds like he was able to do,” added Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

The Trump administration is struggling to improve its relationship with Russia while under pressure from multiple investigations into possible ties between Trump’s campaign and Moscow. Those inquiries have cast a shadow over what would normally be seen as an attempt at diplomacy between world leaders.

The evening after his two meetings with Putin — the first lasting 135 minutes and the second an hour — Trump returned to Washington. On the Air Force One flight back, his top advisers helped draft a statement about a meeting his son Donald Trump Jr. attended last year with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

“We have the worst relationship as a country right now with Russia than we have in decades, and yet we have these two leaders that, for reasons that do not make sense and have not been explained to anyone’s satisfaction, are hellbent on adoring each other,” Bremmer said. “You can take everything that’s been given to us, and it doesn’t add up.”

On Tuesday, the Kremlin intensified its demands that the Trump administration return two compounds in the United States that the Obama administration seized from Russia last fall in retaliation for the election meddling. After meeting with Thomas A. Shannon Jr., the undersecretary of state for political affairs, Sergei A. Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said he had warned the Americans that there must be an “unconditional return” of the property or Moscow would retaliate.

The State Department said no such agreement was in store.

“These deals, so to speak, are going to take some time,” Heather Nauert, the State Department spokeswoman, told reporters on Tuesday. “Nothing is coming together anytime soon.”

Trump announced Tuesday night that he planned to nominate Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former envoy to China and Singapore, as his ambassador to Russia. Huntsman’s nomination has been expected for months, but the investigations into Trump’s campaign and whether it colluded with Russia are likely to figure prominently in his confirmation hearing.

WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans all but admitted defeat Tuesday in their seven-year quest to overturn the Affordable Care Act, acknowledging that they lacked the votes to make good on their vow to “repeal and replace” President Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment.

Hours after GOP leaders abandoned a bill to overhaul the law known as Obamacare, their fallback plan - a proposal to repeal major parts of the law without replacing them - quickly collapsed. A trio of moderate Republicans quashed the idea, saying it would irresponsibly snatch insurance coverage from millions of Americans.

“I did not come to Washington to hurt people,” tweeted Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., who joined Sens. Susan Collins, Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, Alaska, in opposing immediate repeal.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell , R-Ky., who spent weeks trying to knit together his fractious caucus in support of the original GOP legislation, said he would nonetheless schedule a vote “early next week” on the repeal plan. But he appeared to acknowledge that it seemed doomed.

“This has been a very, very challenging experience for all of us,” McConnell told reporters. “It’s pretty obvious that we don’t have 50 members who can agree on a replacement.”

The collapse of the effort marks a devastating political defeat for congressional Republicans and for President Trump, who had pledged to roll back the Affordable Care Act on “Day One” of his presidency.

It also leaves millions of consumers who receive health insurance through the law in a kind of administrative limbo, wondering how their care will be affected now that the program is in the hands of government officials who have rooted openly for its demise.

On Tuesday, Trump told reporters in the White House’s Roosevelt Room that he now plans to “let Obamacare fail. It will be a lot easier.” That way, he said, his party would bear no political responsibility for the system’s collapse.

“We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it,” the president said. “I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We’ll let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us” to fix it.

But Trump’s comments appeared to ignore the many Republican lawmakers who are anxious about depriving their constituents of federal benefits on which they now rely. The president invited all 52 Republican senators to join him for lunch Wednesday at the White House to try to get the repeal effort back on track.

Senate leaders have been struggling to devise a plan to overhaul Obamacare since the House passed its version of the legislation in May, a flawed bill that some House members openly invited the Senate to fix. With just 52 seats, McConnell could afford to lose the support of only two members of his caucus - and even then would rely on Vice President Pence to break the tie.

The measure he produced would have scaled back key federal insurance regulations and slashed Medicaid deeply over time. But it did not go far enough for many conservative Republicans, who wanted to roll back more of the ACA’s mandates on insurers.

And the bill went much too far for many moderates, especially Republicans from states that had taken advantage of the ACA’s offer to expand Medicaid eligibility. The bill would have cut Medicaid funding and phased out its expansion in 31 states and the District of Columbia. Some senators worried that their states would be saddled with the unpalatable choice of cutting off people’s health coverage or shouldering a massive new financial burden.

“This is the Senate. Leadership sets the agenda, but senators vote in the interests of their states,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, offered a blunt assessment of why the effort fell short: “We are so evenly divided, and we’ve got to have every Republican to make things work, and we didn’t have every Republican,” he said.

Two Republicans - Collins, a moderate, and conservative Sen. Rand Paul, Ky. - declared late last week that they could not support the latest version of the bill. Late Monday night, as six of their colleagues talked health-care strategy with Trump over dinner at the White House, conservative Sens. Mike Lee, Utah, and Jerry Moran, Kan., announced that they, too, would oppose the bill, and the measure was dead.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, whose job is to count votes, said he had “no idea” Lee was defecting until he left the White House meeting - though he had gotten a heads up from Moran.

Key Republicans held out hope that the effort could be revived. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Tuesday that he “would like to see the Senate move on something” to keep the repeal-and-replace process alive.

Pence, speaking at the National Retail Federation’s annual Retail Advocates Summit, lent his support to the repeal plan, challenging Congress to “step up” and repeal the current law so lawmakers could “work on a new health-care plan that will start with a clean slate.”

Republicans last voted on repeal in 2015. Every current GOP senator who was then in the Senate voted for it, except Collins. But it was a meaningless protest vote; Obama was president, and he quickly vetoed it. With Trump in the White House, a vote to repeal the law without replacing it could have far-reaching consequences.

Abolishing Obamacare’s central pillars - such as the mandate that taxpayers buy coverage; federal subsidies for many consumers’ premiums; and Medicaid coverage for roughly 11 million Americans - without replacing them could wreak havoc in the insurance market. In January, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that premiums in the individual insurance market would rise by as much as 25 percent next year and would roughly double by 2026.

The CBO said repeal would cause the number of uninsured people to rise by 18 million next year and by 32 million by 2026.

“For insurers, the worst possible outcome in this debate has always been a partial repeal with no replacement, which is exactly what Congress is about to take up,” Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation, wrote in an email. “Insurance companies would be on the hook for covering people with preexisting conditions, but with no individual mandate or premium subsidies to get healthy people to sign up as well.”

With the repeal effort foundering, White House officials seem to lack a clear road map for managing the law. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who chairs the appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Health and Human Services Department, said Tuesday, “I’m not sure what’s going on right now.”

HHS Secretary Tom Price issued a news release Tuesday saying, “The status quo is not acceptable or sustainable.” But he offered no clues to what his agency plans to do in the coming weeks as insurers finalize rates for 2018 and decide whether to participate next year in the federal insurance marketplaces.

“We will work tirelessly to get Washington out of the way, bring down the cost of coverage, expand healthcare choices, and strengthen the safety net for future generations,” Price said.

Several lawmakers and governors, meanwhile, said they would begin pushing for a bipartisan fix to shore up the ACA. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said in a statement that his panel would hold hearings to explore “how to stabilize the individual market” under the existing law.

A bipartisan group of 11 governors - including Republicans Charlie Baker, Mass., Larry Hogan, Md., John Kasich, Ohio, Brian Sandoval, Nev., and Phil Scott, Vt. - said they “stand ready to work with lawmakers in an open, bipartisan way to provide better insurance for all Americans.”

Asked if he would be willing to work with Democrats, McConnell said that “we’ll have to see what happens” with next week’s vote.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., renewed their calls for Republicans to work with Democrats.

“It should be crystal clear to everyone on the other side of the aisle that the core of the bill is unworkable,” Schumer said. “The door to bipartisanship is open now. Republicans only need to walk through it.”

As Schumer spoke on the Senate floor, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., one of the few in the chamber who has tried to be a bipartisan broker on health care, was placing calls to fellow senators who, like him, are former governors - a total of 11 senators including Alexander, John Hoeven, R-N.D., Mike Rounds , R-S.D., Angus King, I-Maine, Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Margaret Wood Hassan, D-N.H.

Aides said Manchin was presenting nothing specific yet to his colleagues, just a plea to “sit down and start bipartisan talking.”

While the path forward remained uncertain, consumers and health industry players continued to reach out to lawmakers. On Monday, two members of the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network journeyed from West Virginia, and one of them spoke with a Capito aide about an 18-month-old girl who had developed cancer while her mother was working part-time at a bank. After the woman lost her job, both she and the little girl went on Medicaid, allowing the child to receive treatment.

“A lot of times people assume anyone on Medicaid is too lazy to work,” the child’s grandmother Lora Wilkerson told the aide, handing her a photo of the girl - bald, with a teddy bear in her arms.

“Can you please ask Ms. Capito to look at this picture when she casts her vote?” Wilkerson said.

The aide, according to Capito’s spokeswoman, made sure the senator saw it.

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Video: The Senate Republicans’ health-care bill was dealt a fatal blow on July 17, when two more senators came out against it. Now President Trump is suggesting to repeal Obamacare, let the insurance market fail and then come up with “a great healthcare plan.” (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

http://wapo.st/2uvSwMs

A commission set to convene Wednesday to advise President Donald Trump on “election integrity” includes the publisher of “Alien Invasion II,” a report on undocumented immigrants who mysteriously showed up on the voter rolls in Virginia.

Another member is known for scanning obituaries in his West Virginia county to make sure dead people are promptly deleted from voter lists. Another championed some of the strictest voter identification laws in the country during her days in the Indiana legislature.

And yet another warned nearly a decade ago of the “possibility for voter fraud on a scale never seen before in this country.” During his tenure as Ohio secretary of state, the Social Security numbers of 1.2 million state voters were accidentally posted on the agency’s website.

Even before this panel of 12 holds its first official meeting at the White House complex, it has sparked more controversy - and more questions about its competency - than any presidential advisory commission in memory.

Spawned by Trump’s baseless claim that illegal voting cost him the popular vote against Democrat Hillary Clinton in last year’s election, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity will gather Wednesday to chart its agenda, led by Vice President Mike Pence and guided by a goal to shore up Americans’ confidence in voting systems.

The commission’s first public action - requesting massive amounts of voter data from the states - seems to have had the opposite effect.

The request late last month was met with stiff resistance, even from many Republican-led states, and prompted multiple lawsuits that accuse the panel of breaching the privacy of tens of millions of Americans and offering no indication of what it plans to do with the data, including home addresses, dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers.

In the wake of those concerns, the commission posted on its website last week hundreds of comments it had received about its work - almost all of them negative and some laced with profanity - and drew criticism for not redacting, in some cases, the email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers and employers of those weighing in.

On Tuesday, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund became at least the seventh party to sue the commission in federal court. The group alleged that the panel “was formed with the intent to discriminate against voters of color in violation of the Constitution.”

Separately, a federal judge on Tuesday declined to block the commission from meeting as planned Wednesday, while she considers challenges by two civil rights groups that charge that the voting panel was violating government transparency laws.

Members of the commission, which is billed as bipartisan, say they are undeterred.

“I think the hysterical reaction to this commission is just that: hysterical,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a Fox News Channel commentator.

“I long ago stopped worrying about people who say mean things about me because I wrote about actual cases of voter fraud,” said von Spakovsky, adding he was bewildered by how many people seemed “scared” of an advisory commission.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, R, the vice chairman and driving force behind the panel, dismissed much of the criticism as “irrational hyperventilating” and said the collection of data will be integral to quantifying the extent to which voter fraud is a problem - an exercise that will inform recommendations on changes in state and federal laws over the next year.

“Part of the commission’s job is to just put data on the table and say, ‘Well, here’s what we know’ - and let people draw their own conclusions about how big or small the problem is,” Kobach said. “It seems to me that’s a good thing, no matter what one’s party and what one’s perspective.”

Data collection has been put on hold pending the decision on one of the lawsuits. Kobach and other commission members said they are seeking only data that states already make public - a point they argue has been lost.

Critics say the past actions of several of the panel’s leading members - including Kobach, who is now running for governor of Kansas - provide little comfort.

“Secretary Kobach wants permission to do surgery with a chain saw quickly on a rickety table,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who was deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Obama administration. “Some of the other folks he’s got on the commission have shown themselves to be equally careless.”

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, said her organization fears that the commission will push “discriminatory” voter ID laws, “burdensome, documentary proof of citizenship requirements” and undertake other efforts that “could lead to massive purging of the voter registration rolls.”

In recent years, Kobach has become an outspoken critic of the U.S. voting system and claimed that voting fraud is rampant.

He has turned his perch in Kansas into a powerful platform for his ideas. Next to his desk in Topeka, which overlooks the state capitol, is an 1892 copper ballot box with a secure lock, lent to him by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, for whom Kobach worked in 2001 as a White House Fellow.

On Kobach’s office wall is a framed copy of a voting law he helped craft, the 2011 Secure and Fair Elections Act, which requires citizens who register to vote using the state voter form to provide certain proof-of-citizenship documents, such as a birth certificate or a passport. Those with incomplete voter registration applications are removed from the rolls after 90 days and must try to re-register. In the past couple of years, he has pushed for other states to require similar proof of citizenship.

“The reason we have to do this is there is a significant problem in Kansas and in the rest of the country of aliens getting on our voting rolls,” Kobach said.

Other commission members who’ve been targeted by critics include von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams, a longtime crusader against alleged voter fraud by undocumented immigrants.

“Election fraud, whether it’s phony voter registration, illegal absentee ballots, vote-buying, shady recounts or old-fashioned ballot stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States,” van Spakovsky wrote with a co-author in the 2012 book “Who’s Counting?”

He said in an interview that the commission is seeking data to build on previous studies that have found people registered to vote in more than one state. The panel wants to go further by showing how many of those are actually voting in multiple states, he said.

In states where data requests have been rebuffed, the commission is contemplating filing public-records requests to obtain what it wants. In other instances, members said, they are willing to comply with procedures that require payment for the data. One state, Alabama, has said that would cost more than $32,000. The commission has an estimated budget of $500,000.

Van Spakovsky also suggested another target for data: lists kept by clerks in courthouses nationwide of jurors, culled from voter rolls, who are dismissed because they are noncitizens.

Adams, who previously served in the voting rights section of the Justice Department and heads a foundation that produced this year’s report on the “alien invasion” in Virginia, said in a recent Fox News Channel interview that those complaining about the commission are “flat-earthers.”

“They want to hide the truth,” he said.

Levitt said Trump’s panel stands in “pretty stark” contrast to a 2013 presidential election commission that “was designed to make bipartisan recommendations and based on careful research.” The Obama-era commission, he said, was co-chaired by “longtime exceedingly well-respected” Democratic and Republican campaign lawyers.

The Trump commission includes seven Republicans and five Democrats. Pence and Kobach, both Republicans, occupy the chairman and vice chairman slots.

The commission includes no members who live west of Kansas - meaning the nation’s most populous state, California, is not represented, nor is the rapidly growing Southwest.

The only Latino named to the panel, Maryland Deputy Secretary of State Luis Borunda, a Republican, has already resigned.

The commission’s only African American member is former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell, a Republican who was accused of voter suppression during his tenure by ordering county clerks to not accept voter registrations on anything less than 80-pound stock paper, the thickness of a postcard.

The commission’s five Democratic members include two secretaries of state whom Kobach knows well, Bill Gardner of New Hampshire and Matthew Dunlap of Maine, who said in an interview that his inclusion remains “a little bit of a mystery to me.”

The three other Democrats are local officials in Alabama, Arkansas and West Virginia with connections to the Republican secretaries of state in their states, who in turn have relationships with Kobach.

That includes David Dunn, a former Arkansas state legislator who now runs a government relations firm and said he learned of his appointment when the White House sent out a news release announcing it.

“I think they were looking for a Southern Democrat to serve on the commission for some diversity,” he said.

Dunn said he is skeptical of Trump’s claim about losing the popular vote because of illegal voting and of claims of widespread voter fraud more broadly.

But, he added, “I’m certainly open to considering what makes people feel that way.”

Mark Rhodes, the county clerk in Wood County, West Virginia, who has pared his county’s voter rolls by combing through obituaries and death certificates, said he has not seen evidence of widespread voter fraud.

“I can speak for Wood County, West Virginia, and the local clerks around here that I deal with, that it’s not a concern,” Rhodes said.

Alan King, a probate judge in Jefferson County, Alabama, insists that he will not be a “rubber stamp” for the commission. King, who serves as his county’s chief election official, said he is wary of talk about widespread voter fraud.

“If this commission is going to go down that road, there needs to be hard, cold facts,” he said.

Dunlap, Maine’s secretary of state, said he agreed to serve on the panel with the hope that the exercise will prove purveyors of widespread voter fraud wrong. That includes Trump’s claims about millions of illegal votes, he said.

“I would be astonished to see anything that comes close to that, even one-tenth of that, even one-twentieth of that,” Dunlap said. “My premise I work from is that most of the public is very law-abiding.”

After Minneapolis police officers fatally shot an Australian woman who had called 911 over the weekend, her friends, relatives and neighbors wanted to know what happened. Her fiance, in an emotional news briefing this week, pleaded for any answers about how Justine Damond wound up dead.

But even though officials on Tuesday gave a brief account of the shooting - saying that officers were startled by a loud noise right before Damond approached their car - her final moments remain shrouded in mystery, in part because the two officers who encountered Damond did not turn on their body cameras as they arrived at the scene, preventing any video from capturing what happened.

The shooting in Minneapolis on Saturday has renewed scrutiny of how police in the Twin Cities use force. The incident also highlighted the limitations of police-worn body cameras, which reform advocates and law enforcement officials alike have championed as a way to help repair trust between officers and communities, something Minneapolis officials cited when rolling them out last year.

“Officer-worn body cameras are merely a tool for improving police-community relations; they are not a solution in themselves,” Janeé Harteau, the Minneapolis police chief, and Betsy Hodges, the mayor, wrote in a July 2016 letter announcing that all officers would begin wearing them. “But body cameras are an important tool, one that will help us continue to transform the relationship between police and community for the better.”

Yet even in departments that have adopted body-worn cameras - like Minneapolis, where all patrol officers now wear them, along with SWAT members - the devices have inherent limitations, which might have contributed to the lack of footage capturing the moments surrounding Damond’s death. Key among them: In many departments, including in Minneapolis, body cameras must be manually turned on, which means they rely on officers to activate them.

In Damond’s case, the body cameras were not turned on until after the shooting, according to investigators; so far, the only details about what happened have been provided by one of the officers in the car.

Specific policies on body cameras vary from department to department, but in Minneapolis, the police department’s policies for body-worn cameras lay out a list of reasons for officers to start recording. The policy states that “when safe to do so,” officers must turn on the body cameras during traffic stops, contact that is adversarial and searches of vehicles and buildings. They also are required to activate the body cameras before using force, and if not beforehand, “as soon as it is safe to do so.”

It is still unclear why the two officers did not activate their cameras on Saturday night as they responded to a call about an assault. State investigators have said only that the cameras were not on at the time of the shooting, but they have not said why. (The squad car camera also was not turned on, investigators said late Tuesday.) The Minneapolis Police Department has declined to answer questions about whether the officers violated departmental policy and whether that is under investigation, citing a state probe into the shooting.

Even though the Minneapolis body cameras have to be turned on, there is a failsafe for when officers only start filming after something takes place. The cameras worn by Minneapolis officers come with what is known as a “buffer time” function, which means they are always filming but almost never actually saving the footage. When the cameras are manually activated, they save the 30-second clip filmed right before the officer started recording. (Similar technology is used within some public transit agencies, like several in the Washington region, which use constantly filming cameras that perpetually record over old footage unless the system is triggered and begins saving those clips.)

Body cameras worn by officers in Minneapolis are made by Axon (also known as Taser International, which has changed its name, along with its focus, as it pivots from handheld electrical shock devices to the lucrative body camera market). One day before the letter from Harteau and Hodges declaring that body cameras were coming to Minneapolis last year, Axon announced that it had sold more than 600 Axon Body 2 cameras to the city’s police department.

Though the Axon Body 2 allows that “buffer time” - the period when it is always filming, but only saving when activated - to be extended as long as two minutes, according to Axon’s website, a Minneapolis police spokesman said the cameras worn by the department’s officers have a 30-second buffer time.

Damond’s death is not the first controversial police shooting involving an officer who wore a body camera but failed to capture the pivotal moments. In perhaps the most high-profile case, one of the Charlotte police officers who fatally shot Keith Scott there last year, setting off intense demonstrations, failed to activate his body camera as soon as he responded to the situation, violating departmental policy. Because the 30-second “buffer” footage recorded before the shooting has no audio, investigators and the public could not see key details about what preceded that shooting. (The officer was cleared by a prosecutor last November.)

More fatal shootings by police have been captured on video recently, including both bystander video and footage captured by officers’ body cameras. Police departments have been equipping officers with body-worn cameras for nearly a decade, but this push expanded after protests erupted in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014, the beginning of a wave of demonstrations nationwide. Michael D. White, an Arizona State University professor who has researched police implementation of body cameras, told The Washington Post last year that up to half of the 18,000 police departments nationwide have officers who wear body cameras.

Even when videos exist, police departments have pushed against releasing video footage too early in their investigations. And just because an officer was wearing a body camera does not mean it recorded key incidents. Case in point: In at least a dozen fatal shootings last year, officers were wearing cameras that failed to record fatal encounters, according to a Washington Post survey of departments. Some of these included among the most well-known police shootings in recent years, such as Alton Sterling’s death in Baton Rouge, where both officers’ body cameras fell off during the encounter.

Experts have cautioned that video footage, even when it captures critical moments of deadly encounters, can still be incomplete. Having body camera footage alone might not say everything about what happened before the recording or appropriately capture an officer’s frame of mind. In Ohio, explicit body-camera video showed an officer fatally shooting a driver during a traffic stop in 2015, drawing curt condemnation from a prosecutor; on Tuesday, after two mistrials, the same prosecutor said he was giving up on the case because some jurors convinced him they would never vote to convict.

“Video is not a magic solution,” David A. Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert in police use of force, told The Post last month. “Sometimes it will be very helpful. And sometimes it will put certain facts, even if not all the facts, but certain facts beyond dispute. But many times, it does not put enough of the facts beyond dispute.”

According to The Washington Post’s database tracking police shootings, there have been at least 547 fatal shootings by police this year, and 57 of them involved police-worn body cameras, on pace to trail last year but to be up from two years ago.

There were 963 fatal shootings by police last year, and 138 of them involved officers wearing body cameras. In 2015, the first year The Post began tracking such shootings, there were 991 fatal shootings by police with 74 of them captured on video.

Policies on body cameras can vary depending on department, and in a 2014 report, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) found numerous agencies that did not have written policies in place governing body cameras. Few of the departments surveyed by PERF recorded all encounters with the public, and it was more common for departments to activate them when responding to calls for service or during law-enforcement related encounters.

PERF recommended that officers “be required to activate their body-worn cameras when responding to all calls for service and during all law enforcement-related encounters and activities that occur while the officer is on duty.”

The American Civil Liberties Union said in 2015 that the ideal policy for body-worn cameras would be “continuous recording throughout a police officer’s shift,” though the group acknowledged that this raised privacy issues for the public and officers alike. So instead, the ACLU recommended recording all public encounters.

In Minnesota, the officers’ failure to record the encounter has drawn criticism. The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota said the officers “thwarted the public’s right to know what happened to Ms. Damond and why the police killed her.”

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, whose office will decide whether the officers involved will face charges, similarly said he felt the cameras should have been filming.

“I think they should be turned on,” Freeman said Monday, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “I do understand this, they were driving down an alley, the victim approached the car. That’s not necessarily a time you must, but frankly I think it’s a time you should.”

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll offers conflicting forecasts for the 2018 midterm elections, with voters clearly preferring Democrats in control of Congress to check President Donald Trump even as Republicans appear more motivated to show up at the polls.

A slight majority of registered voters - 52 percent - say they want Democrats to control the next Congress, while 38 percent favor Republican control to promote the president’s agenda, according to the poll.

Yet a surge in anti-Trump protests does not appear to have translated into heightened Democratic voter enthusiasm - a signal that could temper Democrats’ hopes for retaking the House majority next year.

Trump’s low approval rating, which dropped to 36 percent from 42 percent in April, could also be significant if it fails to improve in the next year.

The survey also suggests that a shifting electorate could end up propelling Democrats to major gains if voters who have skipped prior midterm elections show up to cast ballots in 2018.

The snapshot emerges just as Congress has hit a major stumbling block in its effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, with Republican leaders in the Senate falling short this week of the votes they need to advance their deeply unpopular bill.

Although the poll was conducted prior to the collapse of the health-care push, the results suggest fresh uncertainty as to whether Democratic can recruit strong candidates and mobilize voters despite negative views of the Republican agenda.

Republicans currently hold a 24-seat advantage in the House, and Democrats have pointed to the spike in activism, Trump’s unpopularity and voters’ general preference for Democratic congressional candidates as evidence that the majority could be in play.

The Post-ABC poll shows that Republicans actually hold the advantage in enthusiasm at this early point in the campaign cycle. A 65 percent majority of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents say they are certain they will vote next year, versus 57 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

Among Americans who did not cast ballots in the last midterm elections, in 2014, Democrats and Republicans are about equally as likely to say they plan to vote in 2018 - suggesting there is not a disproportionate number of newly motivated Democrats ready to come off the sidelines next year.

Independents, meanwhile, prefer Democratic control as a bulwark against Trump’s agenda by the same 14-point margin as registered voters as a whole.

And then there is history: The party holding the White House, with few exceptions in the modern era, has tended to lose congressional seats in midterm elections.

“We have a unique opportunity to flip control of the House of Representatives in 2018,” Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, wrote in a memo last month. “This is about much more than one race: the national environment, unprecedented grassroots energy and impressive Democratic candidates stepping up to run deep into the battlefield leave no doubt that Democrats can take back the House next fall.”

Democrats, however, already this year have suffered a series of losses in special elections for open House seats - none more crushing than their failure to win a suburban Atlanta race that drew more campaign and outside committee spending than any other House contest in U.S. history.

While Democrats came closer to winning these heavily Republican districts than in the past, the losses have spurred infighting and questions about how Democrats can best hone their strategy going into 2018.

The survey results suggest some reasons that Democrats have not been able to capitalize yet on voter antipathy toward Trump. For one thing, Americans who strongly disapprove of Trump do not appear to be any more motivated to vote than the average American.

Just over 6 in 10 of those who “strongly” disapprove of Trump’s job performance say they are also certain to vote in 2018 midterm elections. Overall, 58 percent of voters say they are certain to vote next year, while 72 percent of strong Trump backers are certain they will vote.

That result contrasts with a Post poll taken soon after the presidential election and the post-inauguration Women’s March that found Democrats more interested in increasing their involvement in politics.

Thirty-five percent of Democrats said then that they were more likely to become involved in political causes in the next year, compared with 21 percent of Republicans and independents. Nearly half of liberal Democrats and 4 in 10 Democratic women said they would become more engaged.

Now, it seems, the potential for a Democratic wave rides on whether the party can turn out voters who have tended to skip past midterm elections.

Democrats were more likely than Republicans to skip the 2014 congressional elections, and the poll finds that among those who sat out 2014 and now say they are certain to vote in 2018, Democrats have a major advantage. By 64 percent to 30 percent, more prefer Democrats as a check against Trump than Republicans who will support Trump’s agenda.

On the other hand, there is evidence that Trump’s struggle to pass major legislation has not sapped Republicans’ motivation to turn out.

There’s no significant difference between Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who say Trump is making significant progress toward his goals as president and those leaning Republicans who say he is not. About two-thirds of each say they are certain to vote in midterm elections, although Republicans who doubt Trump’s accomplishments are less likely to support GOP control of Congress to help his agenda.

And despite Trump’s dismal approval ratings, only slightly more voters say their congressional vote will be to “oppose Trump” - 24 percent - versus the 20 percent who say they will vote to support him. Just over half of voters say Trump will not be a factor in their votes.

The poll did not ask a generic congressional ballot question - an indicator often cited by party strategists - but recent polls show that voters favor Democrats over Republicans for Congress by between six and 10 percentage points when asked whom they would rather vote for.

A report by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics last month suggested that if Democrats maintain at least a six-point advantage on this question, they would be predicted to win enough congressional races to take control of the House in 2019.

While Democrats are heavily targeting the House in 2018, the Senate is seen as a tougher prize. Of the 33 seats in that chamber being contested, 25 belong to Democrats or independents who caucus with them. Of the eight GOP seats, forecasters and party campaign committees consider only two to be genuinely competitive.

The Post-ABC poll was conducted July 10-13 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults reached on cellular and landline phones. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points and four points among the sample of 859 registered voters.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced Tuesday that six north country health systems will be awarded more than $30 million in funding — part of $491 million allotted statewide.

As part of the state’s Health Care Facility Transformation Program, River Hospital in Alexandria Bay will receive $9.5 million and Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown will get $9.8 million. The United Cerebral Palsy Association of the North Country will also see a $3.4 million grant.

“Now, more than ever, we need to protect health care in New York and ensure the system in place is meeting the needs of current and future generations of New Yorkers,” Gov. Cuomo said in a public statement. “While others seek to decimate our hospitals and reduce access to quality healthcare, we are investing to help ensure a stronger, healthier New York for all.”

River Hospital is in the early stages of an expansive renovation of its medical offices, outpatient services and more.

Also awarded funding in the north country category are the Alice Hyde Medical Center in Malone and U.S. Care Systems in Utica.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will nominate Mark Esper, a top lobbyist for Raytheon and a former Army officer, as the next secretary of the Army in the coming week, a U.S. military official confirmed Wednesday.

The nomination, first reported by the Washington Examiner, marks Trump’s third attempt to fill the post. In February, Vincent Viola withdrew his name from consideration because of family business ties, and two months later, Mark Green - a state senator from Tennessee - pulled out after drawing fire for his past remarks on LGBT rights.

Esper is the vice president for government affairs at Raytheon. Before that, he was an executive vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Aerospace Industries Association of America. Trump has now nominated a number of people with defense industry ties for positions at the Pentagon.

On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed Trump’s pick for deputy secretary of defense, former Boeing executive, Patrick Shanahan. During his confirmation hearing last month, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., voiced his concern about the defense industry’s representation on the Pentagon’s senior staff.

WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans aren’t the only ones making life hard for President Trump.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., on Tuesday made Trump’s economic agenda - dubbed MAGAnomics - more difficult to pass.

On Tuesday morning, House Republicans unveiled their 2018 budget. It didn’t get much attention amid the fallout over the Senate’s Obamacare repeal failure. But the House GOP had a clear message to Trump: If you want tax cuts, you have to find a way to pay for them.

“They are drawing the line against tax reform that increases the deficit,” says budget expert Ed Lorenzen, a senior adviser for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Translation: Trump, the “king of debt,” won’t be able to borrow more money to pay for his tax plan. He’ll have to offset the tax cuts by reducing spending.

That puts Trump in a difficult place. The economic advisers from his campaign team are urging him to move fast on tax cuts because businesses and many individuals like them, but spending cuts are painful. Someone loses out on benefits or programs.

The most likely result: Trump’s tax cut is going to get smaller.

MAGAnomics was supposed to deliver the “biggest tax cut we’ve ever had.” The goal is to put more money into the hands of consumers and businesses, prompting more spending and investment to fuel economic growth.

Now, the size of the tax plan is in doubt, and that could hurt chances for hitting the 3 percent (or better) growth level Trump has promised.

So far, the White House has only put out a one-page tax “plan.” It’s a list of bullet points, not a detailed proposal. But when Lorenzen’s group tried to estimate its budget effects, the analysts said it would cost between $3 trillion and $7 trillion.

That price tag won’t fly with House Republicans.

Instead, the tax cut will be about $1 trillion if House Republicans have their way, says Romina Boccia, deputy director for economic studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

It’s shaping up to be another congressional disappointment for Trump.

“It’s virtually impossible they could lower the top corporate rate to 15 percent. They can’t afford it,” says Greg Valliere, chief global strategist at Horizon Investments and author of a daily politics and markets newsletter. “If they stick to revenue neutrality, the tax cut is going to be far less extensive than Donald Trump wanted - and perhaps the markets wanted, as well.”

The tagline of House Republicans’ latest attempt to balance the budget over the next decade without touching Social Security or raising taxes is “a plan for fiscal responsibility.”

“For too long, the federal government’s excessive spending has put future generations at risk . . . Failure to take swift and decisive action is not only inexcusable, it is immoral,” House Republicans wrote in a 63-page document accompanying the budget release.

Budget experts applauded the House GOP for doing a far better job at crafting a budget than the fuzzy math from the White House. Lorenzen’s group called it a responsible start. Still, there are a lot of controversial cuts, some of which might not even sit well with moderate Republicans.

The GOP budget slashes a lot from welfare, federal employee benefits and even Medicare. And it relies on yearly 2.6 percent economic growth. That’s lower than the 3 percent assumption in the White House budget, but it’s a lot higher than the 1.9 percent the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects.

It also relies on the repeal of Obamacare passing the Senate.

“They are assuming the passage of the health-care bill. Their timing is somewhat awkward in that respect,” says Alan Viard, a tax and budget expert at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. After last night, “they may need to adjust.”

There’s a long way to go on the key pillars of MAGAnomics. The future of U.S. health care is hugely uncertain, and tax and budget reform isn’t looking any easier to do.

House Republicans know they can’t count on votes from Democrats. They plan to use a two-step process to get what they want: First, pass the budget resolution, and then get a tax cut done during the so-called budget reconciliation process. Step 1 is to get the resolution done. That’s not a guarantee.

There’s a committee vote set for Wednesday on the House budget, but everyone agrees the document released Tuesday is a starting point. Even among Republicans, consensus will be tricky. Moderate Republicans, especially in the Senate, have shown in the health-care debate that they don’t want dramatic cuts to Medicaid. The GOP budget calls for about $1.5 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade.

On the flip side, the Freedom Caucus in the House wants deeper spending cuts. The budget released Tuesday assumes that more than $4 trillion in spending reductions happen over the next decade. But in reality, only $203 billion in cuts - a mere 5 percent - would be mandatory. That might not be enough to satisfy the Freedom Caucus.

“To get to a balanced budget - or even a stable debt - we’re going to have to go much further than this budget does. We’ll have to take on Medicare and Social Security,” says Lorenzen.

Clearly, he is a hero.

“Good boy, Storm!” a man’s voice says in the video, calling to a golden retriever paddling toward a brown lump bobbing in the water of Port Jefferson Harbor off Long Island. Taking it in his mouth, the dog hauls it toward the beach, a moment filmed by his owner on Sunday that has been seen by 5.2 million and counting on Facebook.

The lump was a fawn, which the dog dragged onto the sand. There it lay, alive but barely moving.

Storm gently nudged the fawn’s belly. It scarcely responded. He nuzzled it again. Nothing. He pawed at its tiny hooves. Then the video ended.

The video footage has launched Storm to sudden social media stardom and sent him on a tour of morning TV talk shows.

Banish any thought that the dog, a 6-year-old English golden retriever owned by Mark Freeley, a personal injury lawyer from East Setauket, New York, might have simply been following his instinct to retrieve.

Definitely do not imagine that the dog was hungry.

“I was there, and if anybody knows Storm, they know that’s not in his heart,” said Freeley, who captured the moment on his phone while out with the golden retriever and his other, less famous dog, Sarah, a rescued Border collie. “He is the most gentle, gracious dog you ever want to meet.”

Freeley, who also fosters rescue dogs and does pro bono legal work for a local animal rescue, said Storm “grasped the deer by the neck — just the way a lifeguard would put his arm over someone’s neck — and dragged him in.”

In the video, Storm licks the deer’s jugular. “It was so touching,” Freeley said. “It showed he really had a care and was worried about the fawn.”

Freeley said he left to get help. He called a group he knew, Strong Island Animal Rescue League. Frank Floridia, who runs the organization, arrived with leashes and nets.

By then, the fawn had wobbled back up. It took one look at the men and two dogs and darted back into the water, Floridia said.

“They are animals of flight; they are going to take off wherever they can go,” he said. “In a yard, they will smash through a wooden fence.”

The fawn paddled out again, this time about 250 feet. After a failed attempt by Storm to fetch it once more, Floridia took off his shirt and, in his sneakers and shorts, swam out and grabbed the deer.

The 3-month-old white-tailed deer had unexplained wounds on its head and one closed eye, he said. Floridia and his partner, Erica Kutzing, drove the deer to Save the Animals Rescue Foundation in Middle Island, New York, where it was in stable condition late Tuesday, said Lori Ketcham, a director of the organization. The fawn was being treated with antibiotics and was drinking baby goat formula from a bowl.

Many fawns that are brought to the animal rescue, Ketcham said, are there because of dogs — and not heroic ones.

“I think the dog did a very good thing, but I’m very realistic about what dogs do — dogs tend to chew these little deer up,” she said.

The fawn will eventually be returned to the wild, she said. But it is recovering from many ailments, including subcutaneous emphysema, a condition in which air bubbles are trapped under the skin, making it feel like “Bubble Wrap,” Ketcham said. The illness can be caused by trauma.

Being in a dog’s mouth, Ketcham said, could be considered traumatic — but so could falling off a sandy cliff, the rescuers’ leading theory of how the fawn got in the water.

(Pay no attention to the naysayers who may suspect that a dog chased it there.)

“Officially this was a wonderful thing that the dog saved the deer,” Ketcham said. “But I think, if he was left to his own devices, the deer would not survive.”

Character witnesses for Storm include a parade of foster puppies the Freeleys have taken in over the last month. “They tortured this poor guy,” Freeley said. “And he did nothing.”

The family’s rabbit, Speedo, often sleeps on the dog’s back. Although Storm adamantly refuses to fetch, Freeley said, the dog seemed to know the stakes were high in retrieving the fawn.

“A dog with his need to retrieve spearheaded the rescue,” said Kutzing, the animal rescuer. The details, she said, do not really matter “as long as the ending is happy.”