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    Steve Bannon hawks disinformation to support Trump as legal troubles mount

    The far-right strategist and Donald Trump loyalist Steve Bannon is again playing an influential role in the propaganda circles around the former US president as he bids to return to the White House, even as Bannon faces a barrage of legal problems.The conspiratorial Bannon, who spearheaded part of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and served as chief White House strategist in the first half of 2017, is waiting to see if a federal appeals court overturns his obstruction of Congress conviction. He also faces other legal problems from New York fraud charges, former lawyers and potentially other fronts.But at the same time he is pushing a tidal wave of election disinformation on his War Room podcast to help Trump win the presidency again and promote a Maga-heavy policy agenda as Trump and his allies plot out authoritarian-style plans for a second presidency.Ex-justice department prosecutors, Democrats and Republicans say Bannon’s odds of winning his obstruction of Congress appeal are long, and foresee more legal headaches ahead for the pugnacious Make America Great Again guru, while analysts warn that by spreading election falsehoods and other misinformation he endangers democracy.At present, the biggest legal threat confronting Bannon is his two-count federal conviction and a four-month jail sentence for defying a House panel subpoena for documents and testimony concerning the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results.Last fall, Bannon appealed his contempt of Congress conviction for refusing the House subpoena, citing executive privilege and advice from a lawyer, even though he had long left the administration and the matters covered by the subpoena.Separately, Bannon is slated to be tried in May on New York charges of fraud and money laundering involving his key role in a private “We Build the Wall” Mexico venture that bilked thousands of investors out of about $25m, a scheme in which three Bannon associates have been convicted.Bannon last month sought to dismiss the charges, which alleged in part that $1m of the funds were improperly diverted to Bannon and a top associate, but Manhattan prosecutors wrote in a court filing that his argument “bears little resemblance to reality”.The charges by the Manhattan district attorney against Bannon, an alleged architect of the scheme to raise private funds for Trump’s abortive Mexico wall, mirror earlier ones from federal prosecutors against Bannon that Trump pardoned him for the night before leaving office.Experts say more legal scrutiny of Bannon could come on other fronts. The exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, a Bannon ally and benefactor who last year was charged by federal prosecutors in a billion-dollar fraud case, was charged again in January for running a “criminal enterprise” that bilked Chinese American dissidents out of tens of millions of dollars.Guo allegedly promoted a cryptocurrency scam, propaganda and other businesses, plus financing a lavish lifestyle including purchasing a yacht, on which Bannon in 2020 was arrested on the federal Mexico wall project charges.Among the businesses linked to Guo in the superseding indictment was the conservative social media platform Gettr, which he helped finance and launch in 2021 and which Bannon’s War Room has profited from. Guo is slated to be tried in April.Bannon’s War Room podcast has reaped tens of thousands of dollars a month in ads from Gettr, according to a source familiar with its operations and news reports.War Room, which regularly hosts staunch Trump allies such as the congresswoman Elise Stefanik and the My Pillow CEO, Mike Lindell, last year was named the top promoter among political podcasts of misinformation about elections, Covid-19 and other issues, according to a Brookings Institution study.Unfazed, Bannon told the New York Times his top ranking was a “badge of honor … What they call disinformation or misinformation we consider the truth.”A key figure in promoting the January 6 Save America rally, Bannon proved prescient shortly before the insurrection on his War Room podcast when he said “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow”.Former justice department prosecutors and members of both parties say Bannon’s legal woes are mounting.“Like former president Donald Trump, Steve Bannon’s sketchy business and political activities seem to be a magnet for criminal prosecutions and investigations,” said Paul Pelletier, an ex-acting chief of the Department of Justice’s fraud section.“With his criminal ‘Build the Wall’ fraud trial looming and his criminal contempt of Congress long-shot appeal pending, it appears Bannon’s penchant for associating with and profiting from unsavory characters and his own schemes will keep him busy fending off financial fraud investigations for the foreseeable future.“Bannon’s business and financial ties with Guo should certainly attract rigorous scrutiny,” he added.View image in fullscreenOther justice department alumni concur Bannon faces big legal headaches.“Bannon is nothing more than a garden variety fraudster,” said the ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “He had the benefit of a patron in the White House who rewarded his loyalty and protected him.” But with Trump gone, “he is now going to pay the price.“His appeal will not succeed and his criminal trial in New York will result in conviction. Only a Trump victory in November can save him from the federal [obstruction] case and even that won’t suffice to save him in New York.”Bannon has pleaded not guilty to the various criminal charges he faces, and his attorney Harlan Protass did not respond to calls for comment.Still, the ex-Republican congressman Charlie Dent noted: “It’s absurd and nonsensical for Bannon to think he was protected by executive privilege for events that occurred when he was not a White House employee.”The Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, a key member of the House panel that investigated the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s role in it, said: “Bannon seems to have been deeply enmeshed in the planning of the disruption of the peaceful transfer of power and the seizing of the presidency for Donald Trump.”Raskin noted: “Bannon is the intellectual ringleader of the Maga circus … In fact, he fancies himself not just the philosopher of white Christian nationalism in our country but the political strategist for allied autocrats and theocrats all over the world.”In that role, Bannon’s War Room podcast has loomed large, making him an influential figure in promoting Trump and Maga world views including falsehoods about the 2020 election and Covid-19.Bannon’s personal account shows he has nearly 7 million followers and on Gettr, where War Room is one of the most popular shows, more than 800,000 followers.Bannon’s close Gettr ties are underscored by his frequent mention of the platform on War Room. Valerie Wirtschafter, a Brookings fellow in emerging technologies and AI who led its podcast research, said that Gettr was referenced, often multiple times, in more than 60% of more than 1,000 episodes reviewed.Trump allies who were on War Room multiple times last year included Stefanik, Lindell and the ex-justice department assistant attorney general Jeff Clark, with whom Trump plotted to promote fake electors in several states that Biden won.Bannon has touted Clark, an unindicted co-conspirator in the special counsel Jack Smith’s four-count indictment of Trump over his attempts to subvert the election results, as attorney general if the former president wins another term. Clark was also indicted along with Trump and 17 others by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, for trying to overturn Joe Biden’s win in Georgia.“Bannon’s War Room stands out – with claims about votes being switched by Dominion machines to Sharpies being used to disenfranchise voters to the Covid-19 virus being a plot to deny Trump a second term, among many, many others,” Wirtschafter said.While Bannon’s War Room keeps pushing Maga misinformation, the bombastic strategist faces other financial and legal woes.Robert Costello, a former Bannon lawyer who played a key role in Trump’s pardon of the strategist, filed a claim against him last year for $480,000 in monies owed. Costello and his firm won a summary judgment from New York’s supreme court to obtain payment, but Bannon, with Protass’s help, is fighting the ruling.Interestingly, Protass in a court filing last month wrote that an effort by Costello’s firm to access Bannon’s bank account and depose him “poses a significant risk of compromising” his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination with fraud charges against him pending in New York.Regarding Bannon’s upcoming Mexico wall fraud trial, Raskin said: “Given that three associates of Bannon have been convicted of the conduct charged in these events, it has to be a serious threat to Bannon too.”Bannon’s multiple legal problems do not surprise Raskin. “He has adopted the persona of bad boy lawlessness. Like Trump, Bannon considers himself way beyond the reach of the law.” More

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    Biden defends record as special counsel files no charges in handling of classified material – video

    President Joe Biden welcomed the finding of a special counsel report that he would not face criminal charges in his handling of classified documents. Biden said he was ‘pleased’ the special counsel had ‘reached the conclusion I believed and knew all along they would’. The US Department of Justice special counsel investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents after his vice-presidency released a report concluding that he ‘willfully’ kept and shared classified information including ‘classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan’ and handwritten notes about national security and foreign policy ‘implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods’. More

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    US supreme court justices skeptical about removing Trump from ballot – video report

    The US supreme court heard arguments on whether former president Donald Trump should be removed from the ballot on Thursday after Colorado voters filed a lawsuit last year alleging he was ineligible to run for president under a little-used provision of the constitution’s 14th amendment.

    Most justices, liberal and conservative, seemed skeptical of Colorado’s arguments and seemed to agree that states could not act without action from Congress More

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    Ex-Trump aide Peter Navarro ordered to prison despite contempt appeal

    A federal judge on Thursday denied Trump White House official Peter Navarro’s bid to remain out of prison while he appeals his contempt of Congress conviction for refusing to cooperate with an investigation into the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.Navarro was sentenced last month to four months behind bars after being found guilty of defying a subpoena for documents and a deposition from the House January 6 committee. The former White House trade adviser under President Donald Trump had asked to be free while he fights that conviction and sentence in higher courts.But Judge Amit Mehta said that Navarro must report to serve his sentence when ordered to do so by the Bureau of Prisons, unless Washington’s federal appeals court steps in to block Mehta’s order. The judge said Navarro had not shown that any of the issues he will raise on appeal are “substantial” questions of law.Among other things, Navarro has argued that his prosecution was motivated by political bias, but Mehta said Navarro had offered “no actual proof” to support that claim.“Defendant’s cynical, self-serving claim of political bias poses no question at all, let alone a ‘substantial’ one,” wrote Mehta, who was appointed to the federal court in Washington by President Barack Obama.An attorney for Navarro did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.Navarro has said he could not cooperate with the committee because Trump had invoked executive privilege. The judge barred him from making that argument at trial, however, finding that he did not show Trump had actually invoked it.Navarro told the judge before receiving his punishment in January that the House committee investigating the January 6 attack had led him to believe that it accepted his invocation of executive privilege.Navarro was the second Trump aide convicted of contempt of Congress charges. The former White House adviser Steve Bannon previously received a four-month sentence but is free pending appeal.The House committee spent 18 months investigating the insurrection, interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses, holding 10 hearings and obtaining more than 1m pages of documents. In its final report, the panel ultimately concluded that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the election results and failed to act to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol.Trump, the Republican presidential primary frontrunner, has been criminally charged by special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and says the case is politically motivated. More

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    US supreme court hearing focuses on Trump’s eligibility for 2024 election

    The US supreme court will hear oral arguments on Thursday morning in the high-stakes case that will probably determine whether Donald Trump is eligible to run for president this year.The case, Donald J Trump v Norma Anderson et al, came about after six Colorado voters filed a lawsuit last year alleging Trump was ineligible to run for president under a little-used provision of the constitution’s 14th amendment. The provision says that any member of Congress or officer of the United States who takes an oath to defend the constitution and then subsequently engages in insurrection is barred from holding office. The ban can only be overridden by a two-thirds vote by both chambers of Congress.Trump’s conduct during the January 6 Capitol attack disqualifies him from holding federal office, the Colorado voters claimed in their suit, filed last year in state court. After a five-day trial, a judge found Trump had engaged in insurrection, but was not an “officer of the United States” and declined to remove him from the ballot. In a 4-3 decision in December, the Colorado supreme court reversed that ruling and barred him from the ballot. The supreme court agreed to hear the case in January.While there have been several suits seeking to remove Trump from the ballot, only Colorado and Maine have done so thus far. A Maine judge last month ordered the secretary of state there to hold off on excluding Trump until the US supreme court issued a decision.A decision upholding the Colorado supreme court’s ruling would not automatically remove Trump from the ballot across the country. While some states have rebuffed efforts to remove Trump from the primary ballot, a supreme court saying Trump can be disqualified would probably set off a flurry of fast challenges in state courts and other tribunals to disqualify him from the ballot in the general election.It’s generally believed that Trump has the upper hand at the court, where conservatives have a 6-3 supermajority and Trump nominated three of the justices. Still, experts say there is a high degree of uncertainty over what exactly the court will do because it has chosen not to limit the scope of arguments before it and the issues are so unprecedented.In their briefing to the supreme court, Trump’s lawyers have claimed there will be “chaos and bedlam” in the US if a leading presidential candidate is blocked from the ballot. They gave an array of arguments to the justices for why he should not be disqualified, including that the word “officer” does not apply to the president and that he did not engage in insurrection.“In our system of ‘government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people’, the American people – not courts or election officials – should choose the next President of the United States,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “The Colorado voters, backed by the left-leaning non-profit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), argue that it is absurd to claim the 14th amendment does not apply to the presidency and that it would be a danger to democracy to allow him to hold office again.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Section 3 is designed precisely to avoid giving oath-breaking insurrectionists like Trump the power to unleash such mayhem again,” they write. “Nobody, not even a former President, is above the law.”There is no legal precedent for the case – the justices will be wrestling with the key issues in the case, including whether Trump committed insurrection on January 6 for the first time. The 14th amendment was enacted after the civil war to bar former Confederates from holding office and has never been used to bar a presidential candidate. In 2022, the amendment was used to remove a New Mexico county commissioner from office, the first time it had been used that way in a century.The case marks the court’s most direct intervention in a presidential election since its controversial decision in Bush v Gore in 2000. Seeking to preserve its reputation as an apolitical body, the court is usually hesitant to get involved in heated political disputes, but the arrival of the Trump case makes the court’s intervention in the most controversial of political cases unavoidable. It comes as public confidence in the court continues to decline amid a series of ethics scandals and politically charged decisions. More

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    Inside the youth anti-abortion movement in the US: ‘Victory is on its way’ – video

    Since the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, 16 states have enacted stringent bans on nearly all abortions. But that is not enough for a new generation of organised and passionate activists intent on pushing even stricter laws across the country. Carter Sherman spends time with students and organisers at the annual March for Life in Washington DC and meets the influential woman spearheading the national movement More

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    US supreme court to hear arguments on keeping Trump off 2024 ballot

    The US supreme court will hear oral argument on Thursday in one of the most high-stakes cases in American politics this century, thrusting a beleaguered court to the center of the 2024 election.The court is considering whether Donald Trump is eligible to run for president. The novel legal question at the heart of the case, Donald J Trump v Norma Anderson et al, is whether the 14th amendment to the constitution prohibits Trump from holding office because of his conduct on 6 January 2021. Section 3 of the amendment says that any member of Congress or officer of the United States who takes an oath to protect the constitution and then subsequently engages in insurrection cannot hold office. That ban, the amendment says, can only be overridden by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress.There is no precedent for the case. The 14th amendment, enacted after the civil war, has never been used to challenge the eligibility of a presidential candidate, but the idea began picking up steam after two conservative legal scholars published a 126-page law review article last summer arguing the amendment clearly disqualified Trump.A group of Colorado voters sued under the law last year, relying on the theory to try to disqualify Trump from the ballot. After a five-day trial, a Colorado district court judge said Trump had committed insurrection, but was not disqualified because he was not an officer of the United States. The Colorado supreme court reversed that ruling in December, removing Trump from the ballot in a 4-3 decision. While lawsuits have been filed in dozens of other states seeking to remove Trump from the ballot, only Colorado and Maine have done so thus far.The justices accepted a request from Trump to hear the case and expedited its review because of Colorado’s fast approaching 5 March primary. The compressed schedule and likely quick turnaround of the case means that oral argument – currently set for 80 minutes on Thursday – could offer an unusual level of insight into how the justices are weighing the arguments.“I feel more at sea than I usually do,” said Richard Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California Los Angeles, who co-authored an amicus brief urging the court to rule definitively on the case now. “There are a million ways the court can go. The court has given no signal, at all, as to which of those directions it wants to go in. And so, more than usual, I’m going to be very closely listening to the oral arguments to see which arguments are resonating with which justices.”The case also arrives at a perilous moment for the court itself. Public confidence in the court has been declining, exacerbated by a series of ethics scandals and controversial decisions that came down along ideological lines. The court is essentially now seen as a political body and as a result, the betting money seems to be that they will find a way to keep him on the ballot. Trump appointed three of the six justices in the supermajority on the body.“I don’t think it wants to be involved in these disputes. I think, on a bipartisan basis, there’s an interest on staying as far away from these issues as possible,” said Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, who wrote an amicus brief in the case that wasn’t in support of either party.Trump’s lawyers offer five reasons to the court for why he should not be disqualified from the ballot. First, they argue that the word “officer” in the 14th amendment does not apply to the presidency. His lawyers also argue that his conduct on 6 January did not amount to insurrection and that the 14th amendment cannot be enforced absent implementing legislation from Congress. Last, they say, the Colorado supreme court cannot invent its own criteria for running for president nor can it interfere with the method the legislature has chosen for selecting presidential electors.The idea that the president isn’t an officer is nonsensical, lawyers for the six Colorado voters – four Republicans and two independents – who filed the case wrote in their own brief. “Section 3 does not give a free pass to insurrectionist former Presidents. The Constitution says the Presidency is a federal ‘office’. The natural meaning of ‘officer of the United States’ is anyone who holds a federal ‘office’,” they write.Trump’s arguments to the court essentially amount to the idea that “somehow there’s a Donald Trump specific loophole”, said Donald Sherman, a lawyer with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represents the Colorado voters.“Donald Trump’s arguments are not about January 6. They’re not about the fundamental goal of Reconstruction, the Reconstruction amendments, or the 14th amendment. Or section 3. They’re basically about creating an exception that allows Donald Trump to wriggle out of accountability.”They also point out that Trump’s conduct on 6 January would have clearly been understood to amount to insurrection by the framers of the 14th amendment. “The original public meaning of “engag[ing] in” insurrection extends to those who organize and incite it,” they wrote.The brief also notes that the federal constitution gives states the power to only allow candidates who are qualified to appear on the ballot – no federal legislation is necessary to enforce that.“The more I spend time on this case, the harder it seems for Trump,” Muller said. “I don’t think the court is interested in one-offs. The notion that the Colorado supreme court got Colorado law wrong is not gonna interest the court.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe challengers in the case have been bolstered by amicus briefs from historians who argue that the public would have understood the 14th amendment to apply to the president and to cover the kind of conduct Trump engaged in. Those kinds of arguments could hold sway with the court’s conservative justices who are professed adherents of originalism – understanding the constitution through its original public meaning.Hasen predicted the court would try to resolve the case without addressing of whether Trump engaged in insurrection – the most politically charged issue in the case.“I was thinking what are ways the court can side with Trump without weighing in on the merits of whether he committed insurrection,” he said. “One of them is Congress has to pass a statute [to enforce the disqualification provision]. If I had to lay down money on how Trump would win if he wins, I guess I’d put a few dollars down on that, but I’m not betting the farm.”A ruling upholding the Colorado supreme court’s decision would not mean that Trump would be automatically kicked off the ballot in every US state. Instead, each state would probably have to have its own legal proceedings to determine whether or not he should appear. Some states have already rejected such efforts ahead of the primary, setting up a potentially confusing and chaotic legal sprint to the general election.“I think people think if they say he’s ineligible it’s gonna end it, but it’s not,” Muller said. “It would be a state-by-state basis in the primary. He could still win the primary so there’s this whole separate layer of what the RNC would do at a convention if its candidate would be kept off the ballot in some states.”At the core of the case are two competing ideas of democracy. Trump and his attorneys argue that any effort to kick him off the ballot would be anti-democratic since it would prevent voters from choosing their preferred candidate for the presidency.“The court should put a swift and decisive end to these ballot-disqualification efforts, which threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans and which promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead and exclude the likely Republican presidential nominee from their ballots,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.The challengers and their supporters argue that protecting democracy requires banning those who attempt to subvert democracy from holding higher office. “Our democracy is not a chaotic free-for-all in which anyone can be elected. The voters are entitled to decide within the framework of the applicable rules,” the good government group Common Cause wrote in an amicus brief supporting the challengers.“If Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment (“Section 3”) is not enforced in this case, there is a genuine risk that our system of government will not survive,” they wrote. More

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    Trump is not immune from prosecution in 2020 election interference case, court rules

    A federal appeals court panel has decided to reject Donald Trump’s arguments that he cannot be criminally prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results because it involved actions he took while president.While hearing oral arguments in Washington DC on 9 January, the three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit had expressed skepticism with Trump’s claim to immunity, while the former US president looked on in the court room. On Tuesday they rejected the claim.Last year, Trump filed a motion to dismiss the federal indictment brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, which charged the former president over his efforts to reverse the 2020 election, including by advancing fake slates of electors and obstructing Congress on 6 January 2021.The motion was rejected by the trial judge, prompting Trump to appeal to the DC circuit. The special counsel sought to bypass the potentially lengthy appeals process by asking the US supreme court to intervene directly, but the nation’s highest court returned the case to the appeals court.The ruling has been issued by the panel, which includes one judge appointed under George HW Bush’s presidency and two chosen by Joe Biden.The very legal process itself is acting as a hindrance to the prosecution in the federal criminal case and playing into Trump’s hands.Observers before the decision came down viewed a long-shot ruling in Trump’s favor as an obvious, significant blow to Smith – while a ruling that Trump is not immune would mean him appealing to the full DC circuit and then potentially the US supreme court, causing huge delay in the case amid the primaries and thrusting the conservative-leaning highest court into the middle of the presidential election.The appeal the panel just ruled on arose after the DC federal judge Tanya Chutkan in early December rejected Trump’s claim, based on his sweeping and unprecedented interpretation of executive power, that she should dismiss the case. She ruled that he enjoyed no immunity from prosecution simply because when the actions in question took place when he was still president.A grand jury indicted Trump last August, accusing him of conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights, in the case brought by the Department of Justice-appointed Smith.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe charges relate to Trump’s wide-ranging efforts after losing the 2020 election to Biden to overturn the results, campaigning in vain in court, in the media and by pressuring election officials in swing states, culminating in his encouragement of supporters on 6 January 2021, to stop the certification by Congress of Biden’s victory, which led to the deadly invasion of the US Capitol.Trump faces 91 charges in four separate criminal cases, two federal, one in New York and one in Georgia. More