US intelligence resumes national security review of Mar-a-Lago documents – as it happened

With an eye to reclaiming their majority, House Republicans have released their Commitment to America – which is not to be confused with 1994’s Contract with America or 2010’s Pledge to America unveiled before the party won the chamber in those years’ midterms. Joe Biden responded to the plan by hammering the “Maga Republicans” he said want to ban abortion nationwide and slash social security.

Here’s what else happened today:

• A Twitter whistleblower whose anonymous testimony was made public by the January 6 committee warned of the peril facing America’s democracy in an interview with The Washington Post.

• US intelligence agencies have restarted their assessment of the risk to national security posed by the documents found at Mar-a-Lago.

• White House officials are said to be mulling an effort to oust the Trump-installed World Bank president after he quibbled over whether humans caused climate change.

• Former supreme court justice Stephen Breyer expressed remorse over its decision ending Roe v Wade.

Lawyers for Donald Trump are citing legal privilege to try to stop former White House officials from answering questions before a federal grand jury investigating his attempts to meddle with the 2020 election, CNN reports.

The effort shows how attorneys for Trump hope to seize on both executive privilege conferred on presidents as well as attorney-client privilege to frustrate the investigation by the grand jury in Washington. His attorneys had made similar claims when they successfully petitioned a judge to appoint a special master to review documents seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, in a ruling that also temporarily halted the justice department’s probe into the materials found there.

Here’s more from CNN’s story:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Former President Donald Trump‘s attorneys are fighting a secret court battle to block a federal grand jury from gathering information from an expanding circle of close Trump aides about his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, people briefed on the matter told CNN.

The high-stakes legal dispute — which included the appearance of three attorneys representing Trump at the Washington, DC, federal courthouse on Thursday afternoon — is the most aggressive step taken by the former President to assert executive and attorney-client privileges in order to prevent some witnesses from sharing information in the criminal investigation events surrounding January 6, 2021.

The court fight over privilege, which has not been previously reported and is under seal, is a turning point for Trump’s post-presidency legal woes.

How the fight is resolved could determine whether prosecutors can tear down the firewall Trump has tried to keep around his conversations in the West Wing and with attorneys he spoke to as he sought to overturn the 2020 election and they worked to help him hold onto the presidency.

Michael Avenatti was once a firebrand attorney and darling of those who loathed Donald Trump. Now he’s been disgraced by a series of criminal convictions, and today was ordered to pay restitution to former client Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an affair with the former president.

Reuters reports that a Manhattan court ordered Avenatti to pay Daniels $148,750 after his conviction earlier this year on wire fraud and aggravated identity theft charges for embezzling her book proceeds.

He was sentenced to four years in prison in that case, and is also awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to five federal charges in California.

American intelligence agencies have again begun their review of the national security risks of classified documents found at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort after an appeals court overturned a judge’s order that had temporarily blocked it, Politico reports.

The review is one of two that director of national intelligence Avril Haines said would be done of the documents the FBI found at Trump’s Florida resort last month: one focused on their classification levels, the other on what would happen if their contents were made public.

Trump-appointed federal judge Aileen Cannon had granted a request from the former president to halt the review of the seized material, but that was thrown out by an appeals court earlier this week.

More on Sinema: a recent poll on the senator found that she was viewed unfavorably by all political parties and across all demographic categories.

A poll conducted by AARP Arizona on the current political environment found that a majority of voters in both political parties did not view Sinema favorably, including across all age categories, genders, as well as racial and ethnic demographics.

The poll results can be viewed here.

In other news, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona will be giving a talk on Monday at the McConnell Center, an institution named after Republican senator Mitch McConnell that connects young people in Kentucky with political leaders.

The center advertised the talk on Twitter, writing:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}This Monday, Sept. 26, the McConnell Center is excited to welcome U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) to give a talk titled “The Future of Political Discourse and the Importance of Bipartisanship.” Join via livestream at http://McConnellCenter.org at 10 AM.

Reaction to Sinema’s upcoming talk was somewhat negative, as users criticized the first-time senator for agreeing to give a talk at McConnell’s namesake institution given McConnell’s voting record.

With an eye to reclaiming their majority, House Republicans have released their Commitment to America – which is not to be confused with 1994’s Contract with America or 2010’s Pledge to America unveiled before they reclaimed the chamber in those years’ midterms. Joe Biden responded to the plan by hammering the “Maga Republicans” he said want to ban abortion nationwide and slash social security.

Here’s what else has happened today:

• A Twitter whistleblower whose anonymous testimony was made public by the January 6 committee warned of the peril facing America’s democracy in an interview with The Washington Post.

• White House officials are said to be mulling an effort to oust the Trump-installed World Bank president after he quibbled over whether humans caused climate change.

• Former supreme court justice Stephen Breyer expressed remorse over its decision ending Roe v Wade.

This speech has amounted to a point-by-point rebuttal of House Republicans’ Commitment to America, and as he wrapped up the speech, he turned to its call to “increase accountability in the election process”.

“And finally, with a straight face, Kevin McCarthy says that Maga Republicans will restore faith in our elections. As we say in my faith, bless me father for I have sinned,” said Biden, a practicing Catholic. “Maga Republicans refused to accept the results of the 2020 election and the will of the people.

“You can’t let the integrity of elections be undermined,” Biden said. “When one side believes there’s only two outcomes in an election, either they win or they were cheated, that’s not democracy. And that’s where the mass majority of Maga Republicans are today. They don’t understand what every patriotic American knows: you can’t love your country only when you win.”

Biden is hitting back at House Republicans and the Commitment to America plan they announced today, calling it “a thin series of policy goals” and saying the GOP’s true goal is banning abortion nationwide.

He cited the words of rightwing supreme court justice Samuel Alito, who wrote in his opinion overturning Roe v Wade that the decision “allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion.”

“I don’t believe Maga Republicans have a clue about the power American women,” Biden said to applause in his speech stumping on behalf of the Democratic National Committee.

Referring to the plan announced by top House Republican Kevin McCarthy, Biden said, “Here’s a few of the things we didn’t hear. We didn’t hear mentioned the right to choose. We didn’t hear mentioned Medicare. We didn’t hear mentioned social security.”

He went on to link the upcoming midterms to continuing availability of abortion in America, saying, “In 46 days, America is going to choose Republicans when control the Congress and abortion will be banned. And by the way, it will be initially banned but if they went Congress, I will veto it.”

We’re about to hear from President Joe Biden at an event hosted by the Democratic National Committee, where he’ll no doubt stump for the party and potentially respond to House Republicans’ Commitment to America plan announced today.

You can follow the event at the headquarters of the National Education Association here.

“Without intervention we really are on this path to catastrophe.” Those are the chilling words of former Twitter employee Anika Collier Navaroli, whose anonymous testimony to the January 6 committee was shared last July, and who has now made her name public in an interview with the Washington Post.

She recounted how the platform relished the attention brought by Trump as he turned Twitter into a bully pulpit to rival all others, and downplayed her concerns that he was inciting violence:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}After Trump told the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence, at a September 2020 presidential debate to “stand back and stand by,” Navaroli pushed for the company to adopt a stricter policy around calls to incitement.

Trump “was speaking directly to extremist organizations and giving them directives,” she told the committee. “We had not seen that sort of direct communication before, and that concerned me.”

She had also seen how his tweets were quickly sparking replies from other accounts calling for “civil war.” After Trump’s “will be wild” tweet in December, she said, “it became clear not only were these individuals ready and willing, but the leader of their cause was asking them to join him in … fighting for this cause in D.C. on January 6th.”

The company, however, declined to take action, she told the committee. She pleaded with managers, she said, to face the “reality that … if we made no intervention into what I saw occurring, people were going to die.”

In the interview with the Post, Navaroli called on other whistleblowers to come forward while warning that America’s democracy may be irrevocably damaged:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}“My fear within the American context is that we have seen our last peaceful transition of power,” Navaroli said. But “the same playbook,” she added, is being used around the world, “teeing up the idea that if an election is not in someone’s favor, it’s been rigged. Without intervention we really are on this path to catastrophe.”