Biden vows to tackle ‘venom and violence of white supremacy’ and decries Trump over Charlottesville – live

Reality Winner, the intelligence contractor who served more than four years in prison for leaking a report on Russian interference in the 2016 US election, has said she finds accusations that Donald Trump mishandled sensitive documents “incredibly ironic”, given her prosecution under his administration.

An FBI search of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida last month found more than 300 classified documents.

Speaking to NBC News, Winner, 30, said: “It is incredibly ironic, and I would just let the justice department sort it out.”

Winner added that it “wasn’t hard to believe” Trump held on to classified documents.

Reflecting on her own prison sentence, she said: “What I did when I broke the law was a political act at a very politically charged time.”

Winner also said she did not believe Trump should go to prison. She did not comment further on whether the former president should face charges under the Espionage Act, as she did in 2017.

“This is not a case where I expect to see any prison time,” Winner said, “and I’m just fine with that.”

Winner was released early, on good behavior, in June 2021.

The US is expected to announce a new $600m arms package to help the Ukrainian military, Reuters reports:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Two of the people familiar with the deliberations said the package could be announced later this evening

Several sources said it was expected the package would contain munitions, including more High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS). Two of the sources said the package would include ammunition for howitzers

The White House declined to comment.

Washington has sent about $15.1bn in security assistance to the Kyiv government since Russia’s invasion.

Here’s a 2017 interview by my colleague Lois Beckett with Susan Bro:

“I think it’s a damn shame that a white girl had to die for people to have to pay attention,” Bro said at the time. “I think if a black girl had died, or a black man, [the reaction would have been] ‘Oh well, another person lost to violent protest.’”

Biden has honed in on right wing and white supremacist violence as a theme in the last few weeks.

In Philadelphia earlier this month, he a delivered rare primetime address on threats to democracy, taking a far more direct tone than he has in the past in condemning Donald Trump for his role in provoking violence, and Trump supporters’ embrace of white supremacist ideologies.

“We have to confront the ways in which our toxic division fuel this crisis,” Biden said tonight. In the last few years, he said, there has been “Too much hate – all for power and profit”.

Among the new initiatives Biden announced tonight was what he called “a new era” of national service to “foster stronger communities”. He is asking Congress to raise the compensation for national service through programs like AmeriCorps to go to $15 an hour.

AmeriCorps “will develop new training opportunities for members in skills like bridge building, promoting civic engagement, and fostering social cohesion, and will develop new mechanisms to evaluate the impact and cost-effectiveness of national service and volunteerism interventions,” the White House said in a fact-sheet recapping the new initiatives.

The president also mentioned trainings on identifying and reporting hate fueled violence for local law enforcement groups, workplaces and houses of worship.

The Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services will work with schools on programs to deter bullying, the White House said. And the Department of Homeland Security will $20m in grants for state, local and Tribal governments, nonprofits, and universities to prevent hate-fueled violence.

Biden did not mention Donald Trump by name, but while discussing the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, he did mention that “the last guy” defended the white supremacists in the aftermath of the attack.

“When the last guy was asked, ‘What do you think?’ he said he thought there were some fine people on both sides,” Biden said.

“We remain in a battle for the soul of our nation,” Biden said, reviving a central theme of his 2020 campaign.

“White supremacist will not have the last word and this venom and violence cannot be the story of our time,” Biden said.

Biden listed off a series of attacks against Jewish people, trans people, Asian Americans…

He specifically mentioned the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and violence against Asian Americans amid the pandemic, and bomb threats at HBCUs.

“All forms of hate fueled violence have no place in America,” he said, adding that we must “silence it, rather than remain silent.”

The president was introduced by Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer – who was killed in 2017 while protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“Across the country, hate crimes are on the rise,” Bro said. And while her daughter’s death received national and international attention, “all too often these hateful attacks are committed against people of color with unacceptably little public attention,” she said.

Biden has said that attack in Charlottesville spurred him to run in 2020, and he specifically asked Bro to introduce him tonight.

Joe Biden will soon make his appearance at a White House summit about countering hate crimes, where he’s expected to unveil steps to bolster the federal government’s response to violence motivated by antisemitism, xenophobia and racism.

The Guardian’s Joan E Greve has a preview of what we can expect from the president’s address at the “United We Stand Summit”, which you can watch here:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The summit came four months after a white supremacist gunman attacked a supermarket in a predominantly Black area of Buffalo, New York, killing 10. Similar attacks in recent years have included the 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso and the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

“The vast majority of Americans agree there’s no place for hate-fueled violence in our country,” a senior administration official said, previewing Biden’s remarks. “[The summit] is going to be a packed day of very rich conversation and an opportunity to demonstrate that we’re more united than we are divided.”

Ahead of the summit, the Biden administration announced it would take several steps at the executive level to bolster the federal response to hate-fueled violence.

Among other policies, the White House said federal agencies would strengthen coordination to address such violence and more resources would be made available to schools, libraries and other community institutions to prevent hate-fueled attacks.

A bipartisan group of former White House officials will also launch a citizens’ initiative meant to help foster community dialogue and develop solutions.

On that note, reporter Maanvi Singh is taking over the blog to cover Biden’s speech and the political developments in the final hours of the day.

The Biden administration has condemned Republican governors who brought migrants from the southern US border to Democratic-run areas further north.

Texas’s Greg Abbott and other GOP governors have for months been sending migrants to Democratic-run cities including Washington, DC, but controversy over the practice flared anew today when two buses dropped migrants off in front of vice-president Kamala Harris’s residence in the capital, according to the Associated Press. Separately, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis had two planeloads of migrants flown to the upscale island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

“There is a legal way of doing this, for managing migrants. Republican governors interfering in this and using migrants as political pawns is shameful, is reckless,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at her briefing to reporters today.

The American Civil Liberties Union joined in condemning the practice, describing it as dehumanizing:

Also on the list of things Democrats will punt until after the midterms: a ban on stock trading by congress members, Insider reports.

Calls to bar lawmakers from holding or trading securities while in office have risen in recent months, fueled by repeated instances of congress members or their relatives buying or selling shares in companies that intersect with their work in the Capitol. Earlier this week, The New York Times published an analysis that showed 97 lawmakers from both parties had carried out such transactions.

Democratic senator Jeff Merkley told Insider the upper chamber’s effort to restrict trading wouldn’t come up for consideration until after the November 8 midterms. “I’m looking forward to getting this across the finish line, but it’s not going to happen before the election,” he said, citing his colleagues’ busy schedule. “There are a whole lot of other bills and judicial nominations lined up for the balance of the few days we have left here.”

The announcement came despite House speaker Nancy Pelosi saying yesterday that such a ban would be ready to come to the floor of that chamber this month. Some of Merkley’s colleagues were openly disappointed with his comments, with senator Elizabeth Warren saying, “There is no reason that we should not have a stock trading bill on the floor and vote on it.”