Biden says landmark climate bill is winning against special interests – as it happened

Here’s a recap of today’s developments:

• President Joe Biden used the first anniversary of his signature Inflation Reduction Act to pitch the landmark clean-energy law as an economic powerhouse to an American public that remains largely unaware of its contents. Speaking at a White House ceremony, Biden said the legislation has already created 170,000 clean energy jobs and will create some 1.5m jobs over the next decade, while significantly cutting the nation’s carbon emissions.

• Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Maui on Monday to survey damage from the deadly wildfires that ravaged the resort town of Lahaina last week. The Bidens will meet with survivors of the fires, as well as first responders and other government officials, the White House said.

• Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has proposed a trial commencement date of 4 March 2024 for Trump and his 18 co-defendants. That would have Trump in court mid-campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

• Willis is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word. Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges against Trump in the Georgia case were made public on Monday night.

• Former vice-president Mike Pence said the Georgia election was not stolen in 2020 and that “no one is above the law” after Trump was indicted in the state’s election subversion case. Pence’s remarks were his first since the indictment was handed down on Monday, and mark a new full-court press in recent days surrounding his certification of the 2020 election results.

• Trump’s dubious defense that he was exercising his free-speech rights in response to a four-count federal criminal indictment charging him with pushing illegal schemes to overturn his 2020 election loss is prompting ex-Department of Justice officials and scholars to criticize such claims as bogus and as threats to the rule of law.

• Special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election obtained a trove of direct messages that the former president sent to others privately through his Twitter account, according to newly unsealed court documents. A court filing last week showed federal prosecutors obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant. The social media platform delayed complying, prompting a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.

• Americans are deeply divided along party lines in their views of Trump’s actions in the most recent criminal cases brought against him, according to a new poll.

We reported earlier that the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has proposed that Donald Trump’s trial on election interference charges start on 4 March 2024.

Willis’s suggested date is just one day before Super Tuesday, when 15 states are scheduled to hold primaries or caucuses to select their 2024 candidates.

Willis submitted her recommendation in a court filing which also requested arraignment for the defendants charged in the Georgia election case to take place during the week of 5 September.

Trump is set to be on trial in New York on 25 March 2024 on separate charges connected to a $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels, a porn star, with whom he is alleged to have had an extramarital affair.

He is also set to go on trial in Florida in May on charges of retaining classified documents after leaving office.

The US has faced some tough times in recent years, Biden says. Despite this, he says the economy is stronger and better than any other industrial nation in the world right now.

He accuses Republicans of having repeatedly tried to repeal key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, and of taking credit for private investments and the jobs coming into their states. “That’s OK,” he says. “I’m proud of the historic law my administration passed, but it’s not about me. It’s about you.”

Bidenomics is just another way of saying restore the American dream.

Biden says the US is investing more than $50bn to build up resilience to the impacts of climate change. He vows to cut carbon pollution by half by 2030.

The Inflation Reduction Act is helping families save thousands of dollars in energy bills every year, he says. Consumers will save an estimated $27bn in electric bills between now and 2030, he says.

When I say climate means jobs, I mean good paying union jobs.

Biden says his administration is also boosting the nation’s energy security after years in which China dominated the clean energy supply chains.

He says the time is over in which the answer has been to find the cheapest labor, and then to import the product from abroad. “Not any more,” he says. “We are building it here and sending the product over here.”

The Inflation Reduction Act is projected to help triple wind power and increase solar power eightfold by 2030, he says.

Biden says the Inflation Reduction Act is bringing jobs back to the US.

We’re leaving nobody behind. We’re investing in all of America, in the heartland and coast to coast.

The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has proposed a trial commencement date of 4 March 2024 for Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case.

Willis also asked to schedule arraignments for the defendants for the week of 5 September, according to a court filing.

Biden says more jobs have been created in the two years since he took office than any administration has in a single four-year term.

The US has more jobs than before the pandemic, he says, and workers are finding better, higher-paying and higher-satisfaction jobs.

Meanwhile, unemployment and inflation are down, he says. He attributes inflation falling to “corporate profits coming back down to earth”.

President Joe Biden has started his speech marking the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, which he described as “one of the most significant laws … of taking on a special interest and winning”.

Biden begins thanking Vice-President Kamala Harris and members of Congress who played a “pivotal” role in getting the bill passed. “Everyone was telling us there’s no possibility with the divided Congress the way it was,” he said.

As we wait for Joe Biden to take the stage, here is some lunchtime reading on the Georgia election investigation.

As part of Georgia district attorney Fani Willis’s delivery of a 41-count indictment against former president Donald Trump and 18 others, the racketeering charge also lists 30 “unindicted co-conspirators”.

Here is the Guardian’s explainer on those individuals and their involvement in the alleged 2020 presidential election fraud:

President Joe Biden is set to deliver an address at approximately 2.30pm on the anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act.

We will bring you the latest updates of Biden’s remarks.

It is the nature of conspiracy theories to turn tragedy into grist, to transform grief and human suffering into an abstract game. The latest horrifying example came out of news late July that Barack Obama’s chef Tafari Campbell had drowned in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard.

What was a terrible accident and a tragic loss for Campbell’s family and friends was almost immediately seized upon by the paranoid corners of the internet as proof that somehow Barack and Michelle Obama had been involved in an assassination.

It was not the first time that conspiracists have seized on a senseless death as proof of a deeper plot: the 1993 suicide of Vince Foster, lawyer in the Clinton White House, and the murder of the DNC staffer Seth Rich during the 2016 presidential campaign were both used as proof of a “Clinton body count” by the right wing, a playbook that was immediately resurrected as news of Campbell’s death broke. The difference was that those earlier conspiracy theories were focused almost entirely on the Clintons, while the current iteration is far more diffuse and its targets far more wide-reaching.

Campbell’s death, these conspiracists claim, is not just proof of the Obamas’ criminality but of a massive network of treasonous child sex traffickers – an elaborate and convoluted narrative all too well known to us now as QAnon. QAnon appeared in 2017 and quickly spread through the far right, before beginning to wane in the wake of Joe Biden’s inauguration.

But it hasn’t disappeared entirely, and understanding the conspiracy theory’s rise and fall – and the awful legacy it has left us – reveals a great deal about the modern landscape of partisan paranoia. It also offers some clues on how best to fight back.

Read the full story here.

Donald Trump is testing the limits of what the federal judge presiding over his 2020 election subversion case will tolerate after warning the former president against making inflammatory remarks.

US district court judge Tanya Chutkan last week admonished Trump against violating the conditions of his release put in place at his arraignment, warning that inflammatory remarks from the former president would push her to schedule the trial sooner.

Trump immediately tested that warning by posting on Truth Social messages that largely amplified others criticizing Chutkan. “She obviously wants me behind bars. VERY BIASED & UNFAIR,” Trump wrote on Monday.

Trump has waged a similarly defiant campaign against others involved in criminal cases against him, including special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, the New York Times reported.

Some lawyers have said that if Mr. Trump were an ordinary citizen issuing these attacks, he would be in jail by now. The question is whether Mr. Trump will face consequences for this kind of behavior ahead of a trial.

‘He is absolutely in my view testing the judge and testing the limits, almost daring and taunting her,’ said Karen Agnifilo, who has a three-decade legal career, including as the chief assistant in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Ms. Agnifilo added that Mr. Trump is so far benefiting from his status as a candidate for office, facing fewer repercussions from the judges in the cases than other vocal defendants might.

Trump could be found in violation of the conditions of his release, which could entail a fine or even being sent to jail, the report writes.

Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges against Donald Trump in the Georgia case were made public on Monday night.

Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia, and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.

Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton county commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago. She said:

I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe.

As Willis’s investigation approached its climax, Trump intensified his personal attacks on her through social media. He has accused her of prosecutorial misconduct and even of being racist herself.

Willis has rebuffed his claims as “derogatory and false”.

Trump has also unleashed a barrage of vitriol against Jack Smith, the special counsel who earlier this month brought four federal charges against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has referred to the prosecutor, who is white, as “Deranged Jack Smith”.

The judge in the federal case, Tanya Chutkan, has warned him to be careful not to make inflammatory public comments about the proceedings, saying she would “take whatever measures are necessary” to prevent intimidation of witnesses or contamination of the jury pool.

Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.

Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.

“They never went after those that Rigged the Election,” Trump wrote.

They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!

Willis is African American. So too are the two New York-based prosecutors who have investigated Trump, the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted him in April over alleged hush-money payments, and Letitia James, the state attorney general who is investigating Trump’s financial records.

Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.

The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.

The attorney representing Donald Trump in his Georgia case once donated to the campaign of Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who filed charges against the former president on Monday.

Drew Findling, who is on the team of lead Trump attorneys fighting against Rico charges in Georgia, has backed several Democrats, including donating $1,440 to Willis’ successful primary campaign in July 2020, Federal Election Commission records obtained by Rolling Stone reveal.

Findling also donated $8,400 to Joe Biden’s winning campaign, records show.

Findling is an attorney who has represented rap artists like Gucci Mane, Migos and Cardi B. He also has tweeted critically of Trump, calling him in 2018 “the racist architect of fraudulent Trump University”.