Eliana Willis

Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene apologised for comparing Covid-19 mask requirements and vaccinations to the Nazi Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews. ‘I have made a mistake and it’s really bothered me for a couple of weeks now, and so I definitely want to own it,’ Taylor Greene said. Her apology on Monday came amid calls from some Democrats to censure her for the Holocaust remarks. Her comments had also been denounced by Republican congressional leaders

Marjorie Taylor Greene apologizes for comparing House mask rule to the Holocaust
Fury as Marjorie Taylor Greene likens Covid rules to Nazi treatment of Jews More

Joe Biden said meeting with Vladimir Putin would be ‘critical’ and that he would offer to cooperate on areas of common interest if the Kremlin so choses. Biden warned that if Russia chose not to cooperate in areas like cybersecurity ‘then we will respond’. The US president also characterised Putin as ‘bright’, ‘tough’ and ‘a worthy adversary’. When questioned by reporters, Biden said the potential death of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, now jailed in Russia, would be a tragedy and would hurt Russian relations with the rest of the world and with the United States. The two men are meeting in Geneva on 16 June for the first time as presidents

Biden says US-Russia relations at low point but ‘we’re not looking for conflict’
Vladimir Putin refuses to guarantee Navalny will survive prison
Joe Biden to use Nato summit to atone for damage of Trump years More

Dr Deborah Birx, then the White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, hinted to an Obama-era official shortly before the 2020 election she wanted Donald Trump to lose to Joe Biden.Andy Slavitt, a former acting chief of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, writes in a new book, according to CNN, that he spoke to Birx “to get a sense for whether, in the event of a strained transition of government, she would help give Biden and his team the best chance to be effective.“At one point, after a brief pause, she looked me in the eye and said, ‘I hope the election turns out a certain way.’ I had the most important information I needed.”Slavitt stepped down last week as senior adviser to the Biden pandemic response. His book, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response, is published on Tuesday.The book draws on conversations with Trump insiders. Slavitt, who also worked to fix the Affordable Care Act website, spoke to such figures in an informal role.“Her early optimism was long gone,” Slavitt writes of his meeting with Birx, according to CNN, adding: “At the end of October 2020, she was beyond all of that; she was downright scared.”Slavitt also writes of conversations with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who led the federal response. Slavitt says Kushner told him some governors “clearly don’t want to succeed” and had “bad incentives to keep blaming us”.Kushner’s view that governors should take the blame for US failures has been reported elsewhere. He is reportedly working on a book of his own.Speaking to the Daily Beast’s The New Abnormal podcast, Slavitt said he had “kind of a front-row seat” to the chaos of the US response, prominently including Scott Atlas, a Stanford medic but not an epidemiologist or infectious diseases specialist and an aggressive champion for Trump in the press.“I contacted the White House,” he said, “I contacted Jared Kushner, every one of my conversations with Jared Kushner and Deborah Birx, they’re in the book. And you know the job that they had to do was, essentially, at a bare minimum, acknowledge that we have a more serious situation than we have ever had.“Show a little bit of empathy, lead the country by asking for even a small amount of sacrifice. They didn’t do any of those things and they didn’t plan and put together a competent response and it largely it had to do with the person they all worked for.”Slavitt told the Daily Beast Birx “did some good things”. He called Atlas “a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster that Donald Trump created”.Deaths from Covid-19 have slowed dramatically as more Americans are vaccinated and society reopens. But under the shadow of Covid variants, vaccination rates are also slowing and the US is on track to pass 600,000 deaths this week.Slavitt reportedly writes that Birx, a respected public health official with a history in the fight against Aids before she joined the Trump taskforce, told him she had “no illusions” about the effect on her government career.Another official who came to mass media prominence as part of the Trump response, Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has continued to serve under Biden. Birx has not. More

The FBI director, Christopher Wray, has said that the bureau considers the 6 January Capitol attack an act of “domestic terrorism” and suggested that “serious charges” were still to come in its continuing criminal investigation.Testifying before Congress on Thursday, the director rubbished Donald Trump’s claims about a stolen presidential election. “We did not find evidence of fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election,” he told lawmakers on the House judiciary committee.Wray’s testimony came as federal prosecutors charged six members of a rightwing militia group with conspiring to storm the Capitol, the latest in a series of such charges arising from 6 January.Democratic lawmakers repeatedly grilled Wray, appointed by Trump in 2017, over what they said were intelligence failures that left law enforcement ill-prepared for the deadly attack.“The FBI’s inaction in the weeks leading up to January 6 is simply baffling,” said Jerry Nadler, the House judiciary committee chairman. “It is hard to tell whether FBI headquarters merely missed the evidence – which had been flagged by your field offices and was available online for all the world to see – or whether the bureau saw the intelligence, underestimated the threat, and simply failed to act.”A Senate report recently concluded that the deadly insurrection had been planned “in plain sight” but that warnings had gone unheeded due to a troubling mix of bad communications, poor planning, faulty equipment and lack of leadership.Wray said that “almost none” of the 500 people charged so far with participating in the attack had been under FBI investigation previously, suggesting it would have been difficult for the FBI to have monitored them in advance.“You can be darn sure that we are going to be looking hard at how we can do better, how we can do more, how we can do things differently in terms of collecting and disseminating” intelligence, Wray said.Thursday’s charges against six men, all from California, were disclosed in an indictment unsealed in federal court in Washington. Two of them, Alan Hostetter and Russell Taylor, were seen a day before the riot with Roger Stone, a friend and adviser to Trump, during a protest outside the US supreme court against the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.About 30 people – including members of two other rightwing groups, the Oath Keepers and Tte Proud Boys – have been accused of conspiracy, the most serious charges related to the riot. Those pending cases are the largest and most complex of the roughly 500 brought by the justice department since the attack.Asked whether the FBI was investigating Trump or Stone, Wray said he could neither confirm nor deny any FBI investigation.“I’m talking about Mr Big, No 1,” said the Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen, referring to Trump. “Have you gone after the people who incited the riot?”Wray responded: “I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to be discussing whether or not we are or aren’t investigating specific individuals.”Wray also faced questions about the recent spate of ransomware attacks against major US companies. The FBI’s director told lawmakers that the bureau discouraged ransomware payments to hacking groups.“It is our policy, it is our guidance, from the FBI, that companies should not pay the ransom for a number of reasons,” Wray said.Still, recently hacked companies including Colonial Pipeline and JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company, have admitted paying millions to hackers in order to regain control of their computer systems.The justice department has said it was able to recover the majority of the ransomware payment made by Colonial Pipeline after locating the virtual wallet used by the hackers. More

US vice-president Kamala Harris has brushed off questions about her decision not to go to the US-Mexico border as part of her work to address the spike in migration. Harris, who was asked about the issue during visits to Mexico and Guatemala, said: ‘I’ve been to the border before and I will go again, but when I’m in Guatemala dealing with root causes, I think we should have a conversation about what is going on in Guatemala’, Harris said. Republican lawmakers have criticised her for not prioritising the shared frontier

Kamala Harris takes on a new role as she heads on her first overseas trip
AOC condemns Kamala Harris for telling Guatemalan migrants not to come to US More

Americans should be worried that the Republican party “is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognisable and unacceptable even five years ago”, Barack Obama said on Monday.The former president warned Americans “to recognise that the path towards an undemocratic America is not gonna happen in just one bang” but will instead come “in a series of steps”, as seen under authoritarian leaders in Hungary and Poland.Obama was speaking to CNN the night before two Senate committees released a report on the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.Five people died after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the building in service of Trump’s lie that his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden in the electoral college and the popular vote was caused by electoral fraud.Trump was impeached a second time, with support from 10 House Republicans. But Republicans in the Senate acquitted him of inciting an insurrection. He remains free to run for office and has returned to public speaking and hinted about plans for running for the White House again in 2024.Last month, Republicans blocked the formation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack. The Senate report released on Tuesday did not address political questions.Away from Washington, in states including Texas, Florida and Georgia, Republicans are pursuing laws to restrict ballot access in constituencies likely to vote Democratic, and to make it easier to overturn election results.In Washington, opposition from centrist Democrats such as the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is blocking federal voting rights protections.Obama told CNN “large portions of an elected Congress [are] going along with the falsehood that there were problems with the election”.Some Republicans did speak up against Trump’s lie after 6 January, Obama said, praising officials like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Georgia secretary of state who resisted pressure to overturn Biden’s win there, as “very brave”.But then, Obama said, “poof, suddenly everybody was back in line. Now, the reason for that is because the base believed it and the base believed it because this had been told to them not just by the president, but by the media that they watch.“My hope is that the tides will turn. But that does require each of us to understand that this experiment in democracy is not self-executing. It doesn’t happen just automatically.”Obama, the first black president, has considered his impact on the American right at length, particularly in his memoir, A Promised Land, which was published after the 2020 election.He told CNN the rightwing media, most prominently Fox News, was a particular driver of deepening division. Republicans and Democrats, he said, “occupy different worlds. And it becomes that much more difficult for us to hear each other, see each other.“We have more economic stratification and segregation. You combine that with racial stratification and the siloing of the media, so you don’t have just Walter Cronkite delivering the news, but you have 1,000 different venues. All that has contributed to that sense that we don’t have anything in common.”Asking “how do we start once again being able to tell a common story about where this country goes?”, Obama said Americans on either side of the divide needed to meet and talk more often.“The question now becomes how do we create … meeting places,” he said. “Because right now, we don’t have them and we’re seeing the consequences of that.” More

A Senate investigation of the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol has uncovered broad government, military and law enforcement failings before the violent attack, including a breakdown within multiple intelligence agencies and a lack of training and preparation for Capitol police officers who were quickly overwhelmed by the rioters.The Senate report released on Tuesday is the first – and possibly the last – bipartisan review of how hundreds of supporters of the former president Donald Trump were able to violently push past security lines and break into the Capitol that day, interrupting the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.It includes new details about the police officers on the front lines who suffered chemical burns, brain injuries and broken bones and who told senators that they were left with no direction when command systems broke down. It recommends immediate changes to give the Capitol police chief more authority, to provide better planning and equipment for law enforcement and to streamline intelligence-gathering among federal agencies.As a bipartisan effort, the report does not delve into the root causes of the attack, including Trump’s role as he called for his supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat that day. It does not call the attack an insurrection, even though it was. And it comes two weeks after Republicans blocked a bipartisan, independent commission that would investigate the insurrection more broadly.“This report is important in the fact that it allows us to make some immediate improvements to the security situation here in the Capitol,” said Michigan senator Gary Peters, the chairman of the homeland security and governmental affairs committee, which conducted the investigation along with the Senate rules committee. “But it does not answer some of the bigger questions that we need to face, quite frankly, as a country and as a democracy.”The House passed legislation in May to create a commission that would be modelled after a panel that investigated the 9/11 terrorist attack two decades ago. But it failed to get the 60 Senate votes needed to advance, with many Republicans pointing to the Senate report as sufficient.The top Republican on the rules panel, the Missouri senator Roy Blunt, has opposed the commission, arguing that investigation would take too long. He said the recommendations made in the Senate could be implemented faster, including legislation that he and the Minnesota Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar, the rules committee chair, intend to introduce soon that would give the chief of Capitol police more authority to request assistance from the National Guard.The Senate report recounts how the guard was delayed for hours on 6 January as officials in multiple agencies took bureaucratic steps to release the troops. It details hours of calls between officials in the Capitol and the Pentagon and as the then chief of the Capitol police, Steven Sund, desperately begged for help.It finds that the Pentagon spent hours “mission planning” and seeking layers of approvals as rioters were overwhelming and brutally beating Capitol police. It also states that the Department of Defense’s response was “informed by” criticism of its heavy-handed response to protests in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd at the hands of police.The senators are heavily critical of the Capitol police board, a three-member panel that includes the heads of security for the House and Senate and the architect of the Capitol. The board is now required to approve requests by the police chief, even in urgent situations. The report recommends that its members “regularly review the policies and procedures” after senators found that none of the board members on 6 January understood their own authority or could detail the statutory requirements for requesting National Guard assistance.Two of the three members of the board, the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, were pushed out in the days after the attack. Sund also resigned under pressure.Congress needed to change the law and give the police chief more authority “immediately”, Klobuchar said.The report recommends a consolidated intelligence unit within the Capitol police after widespread failures from multiple agencies that did not predict the attack even though insurrectionists were planning it openly on the internet. The police’s intelligence unit “knew about social media posts calling for violence at the Capitol on 6 January, including a plot to breach the Capitol, the online sharing of maps of the Capitol complex’s tunnel systems, and other specific threats of violence”, the report says, but agents did not properly inform leadership of everything they had found.The senators also criticise the FBI and the homeland security department for downplaying online threats and for not issuing formal intelligence bulletins that help law enforcement plan.In a response to the report, the Capitol police acknowledged the need for improvements, some of which they said they were already making. “Law enforcement agencies across the country rely on intelligence, and the quality of that intelligence can mean the difference between life and death,” the statement said.During the attack, the report says, Capitol police were heavily compromised by multiple failures – bad intelligence, poor planning, faulty equipment and a lack of leadership. The force’s incident command system “broke down during the attack”, leaving officers on the front lines without orders. There were no functional incident commanders, and some senior officers were fighting instead of giving orders. “USCP leadership never took control of the radio system to communicate orders to frontline officers,” the investigation found.“I was horrified that no deputy chief or above was on the radio or helping us,” one officer told the committee in an anonymous statement. “For hours the screams on the radio were horrific, the sights were unimaginable and there was a complete loss of control … For hours no chief or above took command and control. Officers were begging and pleading for help for medical triage.”The acting chief of police, Yogananda Pittman, who replaced Sund after his resignation, told the committees that the lack of communication resulted from “incident commanders being overwhelmed and engaging with rioters, rather than issuing orders over the radio”.The committee’s interviews with police officers detail what one officer said was “absolutely brutal” abuse from Trump’s supporters as they ran over them and broke into the building. They described hearing racial slurs and seeing Nazi salutes. One officer trying to evacuate the Senate said he had stopped several men in full tactical gear who said: “You better get out of our way, boy, or we’ll go through you to get [the Senators].’”The insurrectionists told police officers they would kill them, and then the members of Congress. One officer said he had a “tangible fear” that he might not make it home alive.At the same time, the senators acknowledge the officers’ bravery, noting that one officer told them: “The officers inside all behaved admirably and heroically and, even outnumbered, went on the offensive and took the Capitol back.” More

Donald Trump called Joe Biden a “mental retard” during the 2020 election, a new book says, but was reluctant to attack him too strongly for fear the Democrats would replace him with Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama.Biden went on to beat Trump by more than 7m in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result Trump deemed a landslide when it was in his favour against Clinton in 2016.Trump refused to accept defeat, pushing the lie that it was the result of electoral fraud. The lie resulted in the deadly Capitol attack of 6 January, by a mob Trump told to “fight like hell”, and a second impeachment. Trump was acquitted of inciting the insurrection and remains eligible to run for office.He tops polls of Republican nominees for 2024 and has returned to public speaking. On Monday, Forbes reported a planned tour with the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, who left the network amid claims of sexual misconduct.Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, by Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal, will be published in August. Trump was among interviewees for the book. Vanity Fair published an excerpt on Monday.Previous revelations include that the Fox News host Sean Hannity, who was rebuked for campaigning with Trump, wrote an ad for the Trump campaign – a report Hannity denied.Bender writes that Trump interrupted a White House meeting to ask: “How am I losing in the polls to a mental retard?”The idea Democrats would replace Biden reportedly came from Dick Morris, a former adviser to Bill Clinton who has migrated rightwards and who was informally advising Trump.“Dick Morris told Trump that Biden was too old and too prone to gaffes to be the nominee,” Bender writes.Biden was 78 when he became the oldest president ever sworn in. Trump turns 75 next week.Bender adds that Trump believed his attacks on the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren early in the Democratic primary were too successful. Trump gave Warren a racist nickname, Pocahontas, based on her claim to Native American ancestry.Thinking Warren would have been an easier opponent, Bender writes, Trump fretted to aides that Democrats would “realise [Biden is] old, and they’re going to give it to somebody else. They’re going to give it to Hillary, or they’re going to give it to Michelle Obama.”Trump reportedly feared Democrats would move to replace Biden at their convention.According to widespread reporting, Trump’s fears about Clinton were not entirely without justification. Clinton did consider jumping into a race in which Biden struggled before surging to victory.According to Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere, released last month, the former first lady, senator and secretary of state “would muse aloud sometimes” about taking the nomination at a contested convention.Michelle Obama, however, never expressed interest. The former first lady remains hugely popular with the Democratic base but has repeatedly ruled out a career in frontline politics. More