Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio awaits sentencing for January 6 conspiracy – live

With Mark Meadows’s plea, all but one of the defendants in the Georgia election subversion case have pleaded not guilty and opted to skip tomorrow’s arraignment in Atlanta.

The lone holdout is Misty Hampton, the former elections supervisor for Coffee county, Georgia, who was present when a Trump-aligned group sought to illegally access voting machines in search of fraud, and directed much of the group’s search.

Mark Meadows, who served as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff during the period when he lost re-election to Joe Biden, has pleaded not guilty to charges related to trying to overturn Georgia’s election result, Reuters reports.

Meadows was among the 19 people indicted last month by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis for the campaign to keep Biden from collecting the swing state’s electoral votes three years ago. By entering his plea, Meadows has opted to skip the arraignment scheduled for tomorrow in Atlanta. Trump, along with several other defendants including attorney Rudy Giuliani, have also entered not guilty pleas.

Republican lawmakers have been on a losing streak lately, as judges strike down congressional maps drawn by the party that disadvantage Black lawmakers, the Guardian’s Michael Sainato reports:

A judge in Florida has ruled in favor of voting rights groups that filed a lawsuit against a congressional redistricting map approved by Ron DeSantis in 2022. Voting rights groups had criticized the map for diluting political power in Black communities.

In the ruling, Leon county circuit judge J Lee Marsh sent the map back to the Florida legislature to be redrawn in a way that complies with the state’s constitution.

“Under the stipulated facts (in the lawsuit), plaintiffs have shown that the enacted plan results in the diminishment of Black voters’ ability to elect their candidate of choice in violation of the Florida constitution,” Marsh wrote in the ruling.

The ruling is expected to be appealed by the state, likely putting the case before the Florida supreme court.

The lawsuit focused on a north Florida congressional district previously represented by the Democrat Al Lawson, who is Black. Lawson’s district was carved up into districts represented by white Republicans.

DeSantis vetoed a map that initially preserved Lawson’s district in 2022, submitting his own map and calling a special legislative session demanding state legislators accept it. Judge Marsh rejected claims from Florida Republicans that the state’s provision against weakening or eliminating minority-dominant districts violated the US constitution.

“This is a significant victory in the fight for fair representation for Black Floridians,” said Olivia Mendoza, director of litigation and policy for the National Redistricting Foundation, an affiliate of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, in a statement.

A three-judge federal court panel struck down Alabama’s new congressional map, saying the Republican-dominated state again violated the Voting Rights Act. The judges wrote that they were “deeply troubled” the state’s effort to redraw its map did not fix issues it identified.

The supreme court had in June ruled that Alabama must draw a second majority Black congressional district, which would likely give Democrats another seat on the southern state’s congressional delegation. But rather than go along, GOP lawmakers attempted to sidestep the ruling by approving new maps that still included only one district where a majority of voters are Black – an effort the federal judges just rejected.

Meanwhile, in Texas, the state senate will today begin considering whether to impeach attorney general Ken Paxton, a staunch conservative who used his office to try to stop Joe Biden’s 2020 election win but has now attracted the ire of his fellow Republicans over corruption allegations.

Texas’s house of representatives impeached Paxton in May, and he’s been suspended without pay ever since. If a two-thirds majority of senators convicts him, he will be removed from his position, but they will need to take another vote to decide whether to permanently bar Paxton from office, the Associated Press reports.

Here’s more from the AP on what we can expect from his trial, which is expected to last between two and three weeks:

Paxton is only the third sitting official in Texas’ nearly 200-year history to be impeached. The House vote suspended the 60-year-old from the office he used in 2020 to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn President Joe Biden’s electoral defeat of Donald Trump.

Paxton decried the impeachment as a “politically motivated sham” and said he expects to be acquitted. His lawyers have said he won’t testify before the Senate, but the trial remains fraught with political and legal risk.

The attorney general is under federal investigation for the same conduct that prompted his impeachment, and his lawyers say removal from office would open the door to Paxton taking a plea in a long-stalled state fraud case.

Here’s what Paxton is accused of and how the trial will work.

WHY WAS PAXTON IMPEACHED?

At the center of Paxton’s impeachment is his relationship with a wealthy donor that prompted the attorney general’s top deputies to revolt.

In 2020, the group reported their boss to the FBI, saying Paxton broke the law to help Austin real estate developer Nate Paul fight a separate federal investigation. Paul allegedly reciprocated, including by employing a woman with whom Paxton had an extramarital affair.

Paul was indicted in June on federal criminal charges that he made false statements to banks to get more than $170 million in loans. He pleaded not guilty.

Paul gave Paxton a $25,000 campaign donation in 2018 and the men bonded over a shared feeling that they were the targets of corrupt law enforcement, according to a memo by one of the staffers who went to the FBI. Paxton was indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015 but is yet to stand trial.

The eight deputies who reported Paxton — largely staunch conservatives whom he handpicked for their jobs — went to law enforcement after he ignored their warnings to not hire an outside lawyer to investigate Paul’s allegations of wrongdoing by the FBI. All eight were subsequently fired or quit and four of them sued under the state whistleblower act.

Paxton is also accused of pressuring his staff to intervene in other of Paul’s legal troubles, including litigation with an Austin-based nonprofit group and property foreclosure sales.

Jury selection has started today in the trial of Peter Navarro, a former aide to Donald Trump who was indicted for contempt of Congress after defying subpoenas from the January 6 committee, Politico reports:

Last week, a judge rejected Navarro’s argument that Trump had asserted executive privilege in the case, clearing the way for him to stand trial.

Trump confidant Steve Bannon was convicted of similar charges last year, after declining to cooperate with subpoenas from the committee investigating the insurrection at the Capitol. He is appealing the verdict.

Yesterday, the White House announced that first lady Jill Biden had tested positive for Covid-19, but the president appears to have avoided the virus.

“This evening, the first lady tested positive for Covid-19. She is currently experiencing only mild symptoms. She will remain at their home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware,” her communications director Elizabeth Alexander said in a statement.

“Following the first lady’s positive test for Covid-19, President Biden was administered a Covid test this evening. The president tested negative. The President will test at a regular cadence this week and monitor for symptoms,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said minutes later.

Both Joe and Jill Biden came down with Covid-19 in the summer of 2022, and recovered without side effects.

Here’s more from the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe on the sentencing of the two Proud Boys militia group members last Friday:

Two members of the far-right Proud Boys militia group who took part in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol with the intention of keeping Donald Trump in the White House were sentenced to lengthy prison terms on Friday.

Ethan Nordean, described by prosecutors as a leader of the extremist group, received an 18-year sentence for crimes that included seditious conspiracy, committed when thousands of Trump supporters overran the Capitol building.

Dominic Pezzola, who attacked a police officer and was filmed using the officer’s shield to smash a window, got 10 years from the federal judge Timothy Kelly in Washington DC, following his conviction in May for assault and obstructing an official proceeding.

Prosecutors had sought terms of 27 and 20 years, respectively, for Nordean and Pezzola.

The pair, described by prosecutors as “foot soldiers of the right [who] aimed to keep their leader in power”, were part of a mob seeking to disrupt the certification by a joint session of Congress of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. The comeuppance continues today for the the Proud Boys, a rightwing militia group whose members are blamed for organizing and perpetrating some of the violence on January 6, and have been convicted of serious federal crimes. The Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio will be sentenced today after being found guilty of seditious conspiracy, and prosecutors are asking he receive a 33-year prison term.

Last week, a judge handed down an 18-year sentence to Ethan Nordean, a leader of the group, and a 10-year term for Dominic Pezzola – both penalties that were less than prosecutors had requested. We’ll see if that pattern continues when Tarrio goes before a judge in Washington DC.

Here’s what else is going on today:

• The first big book providing an insider account of Joe Biden’s presidency is out today, and appears to be full of scoops.

• The Senate is back to work for the first time since July, and will today consider Philip Jefferson’s nomination as vice-chair of the Federal Reserve

• White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and national security adviser Jake Sullivan brief reporters at 1pm eastern time.