Joe Biden condemns antisemitism following Kanye West’s remarks: ‘Silence is complicity’ – as it happened

Thanks for joining us today, and through the week, for the US politics blog. We’re closing it now for the day.

• Joe Biden had a busy Friday. He’s currently in Boston, where he’s talking with Prince William about the climate emergency.

• The president has been speaking out about antisemitic hate speech in a forthright tweet condemning political leaders whose silence, he says, equals “complicity”. It comes after Twitter suspended the account of rapper Kanye West for inciting violence with offensive, anti-Jewish posts.

• Closing arguments in the criminal tax fraud trial of the Trump Organization have wrapped up in New York. Former president Donald Trump is not on trial, but prosecutors say he was fully aware of an illegal scheme perpetrated by top executives of his real estate company. Jurors will deliberate next week.

• Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel, was spotted entering the grand jury area of the US district court in Washington DC on Friday, CNN reported, in the justice department’s January 6 case.

• Democrats voted to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024. The move was championed by Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate.

• Biden said the US had dodged an “economic catastrophe” after Congress approved legislation averting a nationwide rail shutdown on 9 December. The president signed a law imposing a labor settlement on rail workers that did not include paid time off that unions had demanded.

• A 15-year-old canvassing for Georgia senator Raphael Warnock was shot through the door of a house he knocked at on Thursday, according to police in Savannah. The youth was hit in the leg, and is expected to survive. A 42-year-old man was arrested.

Please join us again next week for a consequential week in the US Senate. The runoff election between Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker is on Tuesday, and victory for the incumbent would give Democrats a 51-49 advantage in the chamber.

Democrats voted Friday to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024, the Associated Press reports.

It is a dramatic shakeup championed by Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate.

The Democratic National Committee’s rule-making arm made the move to strip Iowa from the position it has held for more than four decades after technical meltdowns sparked chaos and marred results of the state’s 2020 caucus.

The change also comes after a long push by some of the party’s top leaders to start choosing a president in states that are less white, especially given the importance of Black voters as Democrats’ most loyal electoral base.

Read more:

Democrats are poised to shake up the way in which they nominate presidential candidates, after Joe Biden said the primary process should better represent the party’s non-white voters, Adam Gabbatt writes.

Biden has reportedly told Democrats that Iowa, the state that has led off the Democratic voting calendar since 1976, should be moved down the calendar, with South Carolina instead going first.

The move would see New Hampshire, which has technically held the nation’s first primary since 1920 (Iowa uses a slightly different system of caucuses, or in-person voting), shunted down the calendar.

Both Iowa and New Hampshire are predominantly white states. Clamor has been growing inside and outside the Democratic party for a different state, with a population more representative of the US as a whole, to be given the first go.

Associated Press reported that Biden had written to the Democratic National Committee regarding the proposal. The DNC’s rules committee is meeting on Friday to vote on the primary calendar.

“For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” Biden wrote.

“We rely on these voters in elections but have not recognized their importance in our nominating calendar. It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”

Read the full story:

Joe Biden has welcomed the Prince of Wales to Boston, where they will have a discussion about the climate emergency at the John F Kennedy presidential library and museum.

The president and Prince William exchanged a warm handshake and posed briefly for photographs before heading inside.

The Prince and Princess of Wales, who earlier visited the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University, are on the third and final day of what has been a turbulent visit to the US.

They are seeking to end the trip on a high note at an award ceremony later for award ceremony for Prince William’s environmental Earthshot prize.

Read more:

Police in Savannah, Georgia, have charged a 42-year-old man they say shot a teenage canvasser for incumbent Democratic senator Raphael Warnock.

Authorities say the youth was on the campaign trail when he was wounded, and was shot through the front door of a house he had knocked at.

Today is the final day of early voting ahead of next Tuesday’s Senate runoff, in which Warnock holds a narrow polling advantage over Republican challenger Herschel Walker. More than 1.5m votes have already been cast.

The incident took place on Thursday. The 15-year-old was shot in the leg and sustained non life-threating injuries.

A press release from the Savannah police department says “at this point, there is no indication the shooting was politically motivated”.

But it adds: “According to the preliminary investigation, the teen was campaigning for Raphael Warnock for the upcoming run-off election when the incident occurred. While at the front door of one of the residences on Hartridge Street, the suspect fired a shot through the closed door, striking the teen.

“Officers quickly identified and located the suspect, Jimmy Paiz, at the residence. Paiz was booked into the Chatham County jail on charges of aggravated assault and aggravated battery.”

In her Air Force One mini-briefing, Karine Jean-Pierre was pressed on how Joe Biden intended to secure paid leave for all workers. During his signing earlier today of legislation averting a nationwide rail shutdown, which did not include such a provision for rail workers, the president said he would be “coming back at it”.

It seems there’s no specific plan. The White House press secretary said:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}He’ll continue forcefully advocating for Congress and employers to extend paid sick leave to all workers. That’s what’s important. As you can tell from his remarks this afternoon, the president’s focus remains, again, on getting Congress to act.

Biden won’t, however, be returning to Congress to fix the “glitches” in the Inflation Reduction Act he conceded yesterday, during a visit by President Emmanuel Macron of France, had upset European countries.

The president said Thursday they were fixable. When asked on Friday how, Jean-Pierre responded:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}We don’t have any plans to go back to Congress for legislative changes. There is a complex implementation and process which is actively underway at federal agencies, but… we’re not going to be addressing any glitches.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been expanding on Joe Biden’s earlier tweet calling out antisemitic hate speech.

It follows Twitter’s decision to suspend the rapper Kanye West for making offensive posts, including an image of a swastika blended with a Star of David.

“It doesn’t matter who [says it],” Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One as the president headed to Boston to meet the Prince and Princess of Wales.

“What the President is trying to say is being silent is complicit. And when we see this type of hatred when we see the some type of antisemitism, we need to call it out.”

Jean-Pierre was asked several times who Biden was addressing, and whether it was a direct response to West’s message.

She added: “The president is standing with the Jewish community. The common theme of all forms of bigotry is that hate doesn’t go away, it only hides the grotesque poison of antisemitism.

“Just yesterday he and President Macron [of France] recognized the hundreds of thousands of Americans who gave their lives to overcome the horror of Nazism and keep us free. And so he believes as president is important to speak up.”

Prosecutors resumed closing arguments Friday in the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud trial, promising to share previously unrevealed details about Donald Trump’s knowledge of a tax dodge scheme hatched by one of his top executives, the Associated Press reports.

“Donald Trump knew exactly what was going on with his top executives,” assistant Manhattan district attorney Joshua Steinglass told jurors on Thursday during the first half of his closing argument, adding: “We will come back to that later.”

Trump himself is not on trial, but the company that bears his name, through which he manages real estate holdings and other ventures, faces fines of more than $1m if convicted of helping executives avoid paying income taxes on company-paid perks such as Manhattan apartments and luxury cars.

The tax fraud case is the only trial to arise from the three-year investigation of Trump and his business practices by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The company has denied wrongdoing.

Steinglass told jurors that two executives involved in the scheme, longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg and controller Jeffrey McConney, were “high managerial” agents entrusted to act on behalf of the company and its various entities.

The defense has alleged that Weisselberg came up with the tax dodge scheme on his own without Trump, or the Trump family knowing, and that the company didn’t benefit from his actions. Weisselberg testified that Trump didn’t know, but that the Trump Organization did derive some benefit because it didn’t have to pay him as much in actual salary.

“Their entire theory of the case is a fraud,” Steinglass said, insisting the former president had full knowledge of everything that occurred.

Jurors are expected to deliberate next week.

The Colorado secretary of state has ordered a recount in the congressional race where extremist Republican Lauren Boebert led Democrat Adam Frisch by just 550 votes in an unexpectedly tight race.

The Associated Press has declared the race too close to call and will await the results of the recount. The recount, which was expected, was formally announced Wednesday.

One week after the polls closed, Boebert claimed victory and Frisch conceded. Frisch, a former city councilman from Aspen, acknowledges a recount is unlikely to change the results, the AP says.

In a virtual press conference announcing his concession, Frisch argued that the thin margin is its own small victory after his campaign was largely considered futile by the political establishment. He added that he hasn’t ruled out another bid for the seat in 2024.

It’s been a lively morning in US politics news and there’s more to come. We’ll shortly have a post on closing arguments in the Trump Organization trial in New York.

Joe Biden’s on his to Boston to meet Britain’s Prince William and his wife, Kate, the princess of Wales, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will gaggle aboard Air Force One around the half hour (if the White House is on stated schedule, which is rarely.)

Here’s where things stand:

• Joe Biden used Twitter to condemn antisemitism and political leaders who fail to call it out, following Ye’s suspension from Twitter after the rapper formerly named Kanye West posted an image blending a swastika with a star of David, following an interview in which he praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust.

• Pat Cipollone, former White House counsel for Donald Trump, was spotted entering the grand jury area of the US district court in Washington DC on Friday, CNN is reported, in the DoJ’s January 6 case.

• Biden said the US has dodged an “economic catastrophe” after Congress approved legislation averting a nationwide rail shutdown on 9 December. The president was speaking at the White House before signing legislation that was approved in the Senate on Thursday and which imposes a labor settlement on rail workers who were poised to strike in a dispute over pay and conditions.