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Joe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries amid a recent thaw in ties between Japan and Korea.
The US has promised to usher in a “new era” in relations with its most important allies in Asia, as the region struggles to address the threat posed by an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.
The leaders are also expected to detail plans to invest in technology for a three-way crisis hotline and offer an update on the progress the countries have made in sharing early-warning data on missile launches.
Kishida, before departing Tokyo for Washington on Thursday, called the summit a “historic occasion to bolster trilateral strategic cooperation based on our stronger-than-ever bilateral relations with the United States and South Korea”.
US officials are confident that its two main allies in the region, Japan and South Korea, share Washington’s view on most global issues, although a joint statement is expected to stop short of directly referring to China to reflect South Korean reservations about openly criticising Beijing.
“Japan and South Korea are core allies – not just in the region, but around the world,” the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said this week, adding that Biden’s summit would “mark what we believe is a new era in trilateral cooperation”.
Blinken said he expected a continued focus on North Korea “given the endless provocation it’s taken” but added that the meeting would address a “much more expansive agenda”.
China has denounced the summit, saying it “opposes relevant countries forming various cliques and their practices of exacerbating confrontation and jeopardising other countries’ strategic security.”
Foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said this week:
We hope the countries concerned will go with the trend of the times and do something conducive to regional peace, stability and prosperity.
A standalone summit bringing together the leaders of Japan and South Korea would have been almost unthinkable just over a year ago, when the north-east Asian neighbours were embroiled in disputes over their bitter wartime legacy.
Bilateral ties were at a low point before the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, took office in May 2022, due to compensation claims by Koreans over Japan’s use of forced labour during its 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula, and the longstanding controversy over Korean women who were coerced into working in Japanese military brothels.
Yoon, a conservative, and the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, appear to have resolved the forced labour dispute and established a warm relationship that has included a joint visit to a memorial to Korean victims of the Hiroshima atomic bombing when the city hosted the G7 summit in May.
This week, Yoon described Japan as a “partner” with shared values and interests, as his county marked the 78th anniversary of its liberation from 35 years of Japanese colonial rule.
The thaw in ties has been greeted with relief in Washington as it attempts to present a united regional front against Chinese military activity near Taiwan and North Korea’s development of more powerful weapons of mass destruction in defiance of UN-led sanctions.
“Suffice it to say, this is a big deal,” National security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Friday shortly before the formal start of the daylong summit.
It is a historic event, and it sets the conditions for a more peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific, and a stronger and more secure United States of America.
Friday’s summit will be the first time Joe Biden has used Camp David to host international leaders.
Joe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries amid a recent thaw in ties between Japan and Korea.
The US has promised to usher in a “new era” in relations with its most important allies in Asia, as the region struggles to address the threat posed by an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.
The leaders are also expected to detail plans to invest in technology for a three-way crisis hotline and offer an update on the progress the countries have made in sharing early-warning data on missile launches.
Kishida, before departing Tokyo for Washington on Thursday, called the summit a “historic occasion to bolster trilateral strategic cooperation based on our stronger-than-ever bilateral relations with the United States and South Korea”.
The US justice department is seeking 33 years in prison for Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy in one of the most serious cases to emerge from the attack on the US Capitol to block the transfer of presidential power in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump in the White House after he lost the 2020 election, according to court documents.
The sentence, if imposed, would be by far the longest punishment that has been handed down in the massive prosecution of the riot on 6 January 2021. The Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in a separate case, has received the longest sentence to date – 18 years.
Tarrio, who was not at the Capitol riot itself, was a top target of what has become the largest justice department investigation in American history. He led the neo-fascist group – known for street fights with leftwing activists – when Trump infamously told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his first election debate with Democrat Joe Biden.
During the months-long trial, prosecutors argued that the Proud Boys viewed themselves as foot soldiers fighting for Trump as the Republican spread lies that Democrats stole the election from him, and were prepared to go to war to keep their preferred leader in power.
“They unleashed a force on the Capitol that was calculated to exert their political will on elected officials by force and to undo the results of a democratic election,” prosecutors wrote in their filing on Thursday.
The foot soldiers of the right aimed to keep their leader in power. They failed. They are not heroes; they are criminals.
A judge declared Donald Trump had filed a “frivolous” appeal from his decision not to dismiss the first of writer E Jean Carroll’s two defamation lawsuits against him.
US district judge Lewis Kaplan criticized the former president’s “delay” tactics, writing in a 17-page ruling:
This case was largely stalled for years due in large part to Mr Trump’s repeated efforts to delay, which are chronicled in the Court’s prior decisions.
Donald Trump said he had canceled a press conference scheduled for next week in which he claimed he would release a report containing new “evidence” of fraud in the state of Georgia during the 2020 presidential election.
The former president, who was charged in Georgia last week with conspiring to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, said on Thursday that his lawyers would prefer putting his allegations in court filings instead.
Trump, posting on his social media platform, Truth Social, wrote:
Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings.
Trump had claimed on Tuesday that he would publish a 100-page report at the event, which was due to be held on Monday in Bedminister, New Jersey, that would exonerate him.
No compelling evidence of wide-scale fraud has emerged in the two-and-a-half years since the election in Georgia or elsewhere, despite Trump’s baseless claims.
Twice impeached and now indicted in four cases: Donald Trump faces serious criminal charges in New York, Florida, Washington and Georgia over a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election, his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
As Trump prepares for those cases to go to trial, the former president is also confronting a verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E Jean Carroll. A New York jury awarded Carroll, who accused Trump of assaulting her in 1996, $5m in damages.
Here is where each case against Trump stands:
Lawyers for Donald Trump asked the judge overseeing his federal election interference trial to push back the start date to April 2026, nearly 18 months after the next presidential election.
The lawyers filed the request to US district court judge Tanya Chutkan, after Trump was indicted earlier this month on charges that he conspired to defraud the United States, conspired to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructed an official proceeding and engaged in a conspiracy against rights.
Federal prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith had proposed to schedule the trial for the start of January 2024, saying there was a significant public interest in expediting the prosecution.
“A January 2 trial date would vindicate the public’s strong interest in a speedy trial,” prosecutors wrote.
It is difficult to imagine a public interest stronger than the one in this case in which the defendant – the former president of the United States – is charged with three criminal conspiracies.
In their court filing on Thursday, Trump’s attorneys argued a years-long delay was necessary due to the “massive” amount of information they will have to review and because of scheduling conflicts with the other criminal cases Trump is facing.
If we were to print and stack 11.5 million pages of documents, with no gap between pages, at 200 pages per inch, the result would be a tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky. That is taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Lawyers for former president Donald Trump asked the judge presiding over his federal 2020 election interference case to schedule his trial for April 2026 – more than two and a half years from now.
In a 16-page filing on Thursday, the lawyers argued that putting Trump on trial this coming January – as federal prosecutors have requested – would mark a “rush to trial” that would violate his constitutional rights and be “flatly impossible” given the extraordinary volume of discovery evidence they will have to sort through. Trump’s lawyers wrote:
The government’s objective is clear: to deny President Trump and his counsel a fair ability to prepare for trial.
Special counsel Jack Smith is expected to oppose the April 2026 start date, which would put the trial long after the 2024 presidential election, in which Trump is the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination. US district court judge Tanya Chutkan has said she wants to set a trial date at her next scheduled hearing on 28 August.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David today for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries, as the US hopes to cement ties with its two most important allies in Asia amid an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.
Here’s what else we’re watching today:
11am: Joe Biden will welcome the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for a trilateral summit.
3pm: Biden, Yoon and Kishida will hold a joint press conference.
6pm: Biden will leave Camp David for Andrews, where he will fly to Reno
The House and Senate are out.
Source: Elections - theguardian.com
