New York attorney general says ‘no one is above’ the law as Trump sued for fraud – as it happened

Donald Trump is in even more legal trouble after the New York attorney general announced a civil suit against him and his children on fraud charges. Elsewhere in the Empire State, president Joe Biden spoke to the United Nations and accused Russia of trying to “erase a sovereign state from the map” by invading Ukraine, in a call for global unity against Moscow.

Here’s what else happened today:

• The Federal Reserve made a big interest rate hike to fight inflation while trying to avoid putting the US economy into a recession.

• We could hear from Trump this evening on Fox News, according to CBS News, though he may opt to post on social media instead.

• Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell came close to voting to convict Trump following the January 6 insurrection, while calling the former president “crazy,” a new book said.

• A bill to amend America’s election law and prevent another January 6 is expected to pass the House today.

• Election officials nationwide are being deluged with public records requests, apparently at the behest of Trump ally and conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.

The New York attorney general’s lawsuit isn’t the only one Trump is facing in the state. A writer plans to sue the former president under a recently signed law, accusing him of battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

E Jean Carroll, the writer who accused Donald Trump of raping her more than two decades ago, plans to file a new lawsuit against the former US president.

In a letter made public on Tuesday, a lawyer for the former Elle magazine columnist said she planned to sue Trump for battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress under New York state’s Adult Survivors Act.

That law, recently signed by the governor, Kathy Hochul, gives adult accusers a one-year window to bring civil claims over alleged sexual misconduct regardless of how long ago it occurred.

Trump has denied raping Carroll and accused her of concocting the rape claim to sell her book.

The House is currently debating the Presidential Election Reform Act, which would tweak the procedures for counting votes to prevent the type of legal schemes that occurred around of the time of the January 6 insurrection from taking place again.

A vote to approve the measure could come later today, but the Democrats controlling the chamber have plans for more bills in the weeks before the midterms. The Associated Press reports that a deal between the party’s progressive and centrist faction has been reached to increase funding for police departments:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The breakthrough came after intense negotiations in recent days between Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a leader of the centrist coalition, and Rep. Ilhan Omar D-Minn., one of the leaders of the progressive faction. Their deal, reached with little time to spare on the House calendar, could help unite the party on a public safety platform more than two years after the police killing of George Floyd.

“I’m proud to have worked closely with Republicans, Democrats, and a broad spectrum of stakeholders to make real progress for public safety,” Gottheimer said in a statement Wednesday.

The package includes reforms to ensure police funding is used to support smaller police departments, along with investments in de-escalation training and mental health resources for officers to reduce fatal encounters between police and people with mental illness.

“With this package, House Democrats have the opportunity to model a holistic, inclusive approach to public safety, and keep our promise to families across the country to address this issue at the federal level,” Omar and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement.

The bills have the backing of policing groups, but it’s unclear if they will be able to clear the much higher bar for passage in the Senate, where the Democratic majority would need the support of at least 10 Republicans.

Last year, Julie Rikelman argued on behalf of abortion rights in front of the supreme court. This year, she has pledged to uphold the court’s decision overturning abortion rights nationwide if confirmed as a federal appellate judge.

Bloomberg Law reports on the exchange that took place during Rikelman’s confirmation hearing for the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which covers the northeastern United States. Rikelman argued before the supreme court on behalf of the Center for Reproductive Rights as they considered Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. When it decided that case, the conservative-dominated court not only upheld a Mississippi law curbing abortion access, it also overturned Roe v Wade entirely, allowing states to ban the procedure.

“Our legal system and the rule of law itself depends on lower courts following Supreme Court precedent and as you said Dobbs is now the law of the land and I will follow it as I will follow all Supreme Court precedent,” Rikelman said in her confirmation hearing before the Senate judiciary committee.

A candidate embellishing their background isn’t unheard of on the campaign trail, but CNN has a story today on something unique and far more troubling going on at election offices across the country.

Administrators nationwide are being hit with a deluge of public records requests for massive amounts of election data, CNN reports, including the little-known cast vote records generated by voting machines. The concern is that the requests will complicate the work of voting officials nationwide ahead of the November midterms.

The requests appear to be traced back to Mike Lindell, a prominent Trump ally and conspiracy theorist who encouraged people to make such requests a month ago:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}In a telephone interview with CNN, Lindell said he first learned of the cast vote records in June and views them as a way to “detect machine manipulation” of the 2020 election.

Asked how they would, he said: “You’d have to talk to a cyber guy… It’s the sequence and the patterns.”

Lindell has spent nearly two years spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election. Dominion Voting Systems, the frequent target of his attacks, has sued Lindell and his company for defamation.

Lindell said the records would bolster his effort to rid the election system of machines. Some of the requesters, he said, are taking what they found to local county officials and sheriffs to demand the removal of machines in their counties.

“I want computers and voting machines gone,” he said.

Voting officials have had to bring on new staff to handle them, but according to CNN, many people making the requests act as if they are just following orders. “‘I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what it does. I just know I’m supposed to ask for it,’” is what one official said the requesters often say.

The pitch to voters made by J.R. Majewski, who is running to unseat a long-serving Democrat in an Ohio district redrawn in the GOP’s favor, is this: elect a Donald Trump-backed conservative who served his country in Afghanistan.

The only problem being that the last part isn’t true, according to an investigation just released by the Associated Press.

The article says it all:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Campaigning for a northwestern Ohio congressional seat, Republican J.R. Majewski presents himself as an Air Force combat veteran who deployed to Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, once describing “tough” conditions including a lack of running water that forced him to go more than 40 days without a shower.

Military documents obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request tell a different story.

They indicate Majewski never deployed to Afghanistan but instead completed a six-month stint helping to load planes at an air base in Qatar, a longtime U.S. ally that is a safe distance from the fighting.

Majewski’s account of his time in the military is just one aspect of his biography that is suspect. His post-military career has been defined by exaggerations, conspiracy theories, talk of violent action against the U.S. government and occasional financial duress.

The Federal Reserve made yet another aggressive interest rate hike at the conclusion of its meeting today as it looks to cut into the rapid price growth that’s beset the US economy without causing a recession.

The three-quarter percentage point increase in the central bank’s funds rate approved by the Federal Open Market Committee is the third straight hike of that size, and comes after data released earlier this month showed inflation declining by less than expected in August.

Led by Jerome Powell, a Republican whom president Joe Biden nominated for a second term last year, the American central bank ended the easy money policies it rolled out during the Covid-19 pandemic and earlier this year started raising rates and running down its massive holdings of debt. The catalyst was price pressures that rose throughout 2021, prompting the Fed to abruptly pivot from a strategy of spurring growth by keeping borrowing costs low to rapidly increasing rates as inflation hit levels not seen since the 1980s.

However, analysts say the Fed waited too long to begin hiking, allowing inflation to get far worse than necessary as it was being driven higher by factors like Russia’s war in Ukraine and supply shocks caused by the pandemic. The concern now is that the central bank – which uses interest rates as a powerful but blunt tool to stabilize employment and prices in the world’s largest economy – could cause a recession that undermines the recovery made by American workers and businesses over the past two years.

Liberal pundits and Twitter accounts are cheering the investigation into Donald Trump for holding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. What they may not know is that they are also throwing their support behind one of the most pernicious and terrible laws that exists: the Espionage Act.

Holding Trump accountable doesn’t mean we should all become cheerleaders for an often-abused law primarily used to prosecute whistleblowers and threaten journalists.

Ever since the 100-year old Espionage Act was cited in the warrant for the search of Trump’s Florida residence, Twitter and cable news have been rife with misinformation about the law and what it means. Those clamoring for Trump to be prosecuted under the act are spreading a ton of misleading statements in the process.

First, let’s get this out of the way: just because the law is called “the Espionage Act” doesn’t mean there is any evidence Trump committed “espionage”. MSNBC hosts and their former CIA guests are even baselessly speculating that because Trump had these documents at his house, it is connected to the spate of deaths of CIA assets around the world.

What a convenient excuse for the CIA! There’s not one hint of evidence that Trump having some classified docs at this compound led to any deaths, and it lets the CIA completely off the hook for continually getting people killed, which – by the way – has been happening for decades.

There was a New York Times investigation from several years ago about CIA asset networks in China and Iran being rounded up and executed, which dated back to 2010. Or go read Tim Weiner’s classic history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, which details how that has happened over and over again throughout the agency’s history, with little or no public accountability.

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The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, warned last month that there would be “pain” ahead as the US central bank struggles to contain a surge in inflation unseen in 40 years.

Powell will offer some indication of how much pain he expects at 2pm today.

The Fed is expected to announce another sharp rise in interest rates after the conclusion of its latest meeting. It will also update its economic forecasts for the US economy.

Economists are predicting the Fed will raise its benchmark interest rate by 0.75 percentage points, the third such rise in a row, and signal plans to raise rates again in the coming months.

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The Fox News anchor Bret Baier wanted the network to withdraw its famous call of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020, citing pressure from Donald Trump’s campaign and saying the swing state should be “put back in his column”, a new book says.

The news is contained in The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021, published in the US on Tuesday.

The authors, Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker, call Baier’s request “stunning”, as Arizona “was never in Trump’s column. While the margin of his defeat in the state had narrowed since election night, he still trailed by more than 10,000 votes.”

In a statement emailed to the Guardian by a Fox News spokesperson, Baier responded to the report.

He said: “The full context of the e-mail is not reported in this book.

“I never said the Trump campaign ‘was really pissed’ – that was from an external email that I referenced within my note. This was an email sent after election night.

“In the immediate days following the election, the vote margins in Arizona narrowed significantly and I communicated these changes to our team along with what people on the ground were saying and predicting district by district. I wanted to analyse at what point (what vote margin) would we have to consider pulling the call for Biden. I also noted that I fully supported our Decision Desk’s call and would defend it on air.”

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