January 6 committee to investigate Trump’s pressure campaign on election officials – live

There’s been another alarming revelation about the botched police response to the Uvalde school shooting last month.

The director of Texas’s Department of Public Safety told a state Senate committee that police officers could have stopped the shooting three minutes after it began, and called their response an “abject failure,” according to the Associated Press:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} Police officers with rifles instead stood and waited in a school hallway for nearly an hour while the gunman carried out the May 24 attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, testified at a state Senate hearing on the police handling of the tragedy.

Delays in the law enforcement response have been the focus of federal, state and local investigations of the mass shooting.

McCraw told the Senate committee that Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief, decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.

The public safety chief began outlining for the committee a series of missed opportunities.

Breaking along ideological lines, the supreme court has struck down a state-funded program in Maine that covers the costs of some private schools — but only those that are nonsectarian.

The decision will allow people in the state to use public money to pay for religious schooling, as Reuter’s Lawrence Hurley explains:

The court’s conservative justices all supported the ruling, while its three liberals Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer dissented.

The supreme court has ended its release of decisions today with a ruling on a 233-year old statute regarding federal court orders:

The supreme court has thus far announced three decisions, none of which deal with abortion, gun rights, environmental regulation or the other contentious topics they are expected to rule on before the current term ends.

Here’s a rundown of what they’ve done so far, from SCOTUSblog:

Attorney General Merrick Garland has made a surprise visit to Ukraine, expressing support for the country’s effort to prosecute the perpetrators of war crimes following Russia’s invasion.

Here he is along with Ukraine’s prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova:

The United States has already formally accused Russia of committing war crimes in Ukraine, and the country has started trying Russian soldiers for alleged abuses.

When it begins announcing decisions in a few minutes, the supreme court could release an opinion that sharply curtails abortion rights nationwide, and Democratic leaders are trying to make the most of what they hope many of their voters would see as a bad situation.

As Politico reports, the party is making plans to focus voters’ attention on the ruling’s implications, and away from the issues that have swamped Biden’s approval ratings in recent months, such as gas prices and inflation overall.

From their article:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s preparations, previewed by a committee official, are a window into the Democratic Party’s broader efforts to capitalize — in the middle of a brutal-looking midterm election climate — on the Supreme Court’s likely reversal of Roe v. Wade, which would change a half-century of precedent and let states decide the legality of abortion.

Support for Roe is at an all-time high with voters, and the Democrats’ strategy is aimed at firing up a flagging Democratic base, while also trying to compete for some of the college-educated, female, suburban swing voters who backed them during the Trump era. The question, though, is how to make abortion a top issue for voters in November while facing a range of challenges, especially gas prices averaging $5 a gallon and inflation ticking up.

“We’re not going to be able to keep it in the national news, but we’re going to put a lot of money on paid advertising — on TV, on digital ads, on mail, on radio — and in key places across the country, and that’s how this issue will matter,” said Stephanie Schriock, former president of EMILY’s List, a Democratic pro-abortion-rights group. “And in some states, it will be in the news every day, because state legislatures are going to push this issue further and further to the right with outright bans.”

What else can you expect from the January 6 committee? The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell has taken a closer look at how the House lawmakers will present their witnesses and evidence at today’s hearing:

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is expected to show at its fourth hearing on Tuesday that Donald Trump and top advisers coordinated the scheme to send fake slates of electors as part of an effort to return him to the White House.

The panel is expected to also examine Trump’s campaign to pressure top officials in seven crucial battleground states to corruptly reverse his defeat to Joe Biden in the weeks and months after the 2020 election.

At the afternoon hearing, the select committee is expected to focus heavily on the fake electors scheme, which has played a large part in its nearly year-long investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the election at the state level.

In its hearings thus far, the January 6 committee has focused on the circumstances leading up to the attack in Washington, particularly Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen.

Viewers will be taken farther afield in today’s hearing, which will feature testimony from state officials about how Trump pushed them to interfere with their election results for his benefit.

Among its guests will be Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who last month fended off a Trump-backed attempt to oust him from office. He will be joined by Arizona House speaker Rusty Bowers and Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the Georgia secretary of state’s office.

The hearing will also feature an appearance by Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a Georgia poll worker who, along with her mother, was accused of rigging the vote in a number of conspiracies promoted by Trump supporters. She is now suing Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, rightwing One America News Network and several of its senior executives for defamation, saying the claims put them in physical danger.

Expect to hear more about just what she endured at the hearing today.

Good morning, US politics live blog readers. At 1pm eastern time, the January 6 committee will be holding its fourth hearing into last year’s attack on the Capitol, with this session focusing on former president Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on state officials to throw the 2020 election in his direction. The committee is meanwhile continuing its search for evidence. Politico reports that it has subpoenaed a documentary film-maker who had access to Trump’s inner circle around the time of the insurrection.

Here’s what else to expect today:

• Democrats and Republicans in Congress are scrambling to find agreement on gun control legislation and an innovation bill as time runs out to pass the legislation before an upcoming two-week recess.
• The supreme court will release another batch of opinions at 10 am eastern time. Among these could be their opinions on closely watched cases dealing with abortion, gun rights, environmental regulation and other controversial issues.
• Voters will head to the polls (or cast mail-in ballots) in Virginia and Washington DC, while run-off elections are being held in Alabama and Georgia.
• President Joe Biden announced he will appoint Marilynn Malerba as treasurer of the United States. She is the chief of the Mohegan Tribe and would be the first Native American in the position that oversees the US Mint, among other responsibilities.