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    House January 6 panel recommends criminal charges against Donald Trump – video

    The January 6 committee has referred the former US president to the justice department for criminal charges, accusing Trump of fomenting an insurrection and conspiring against the government over his attempt to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election, and the bloody attack on the US Capitol. The committee’s referrals approved by its members on Monday are the first time in American history that Congress has recommended charges against a former president. It comes after more than a year of investigation by the bipartisan House of Representatives panel tasked with understanding Trump’s plot to stop Joe Biden from taking office

    House January 6 panel recommends criminal charges against Donald Trump More

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    January 6 panel to hold final public hearing and vote on referrals against Trump – live

    It’s decision day on criminal referrals for Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden.At 1pm, the bipartisan House panel that has been investigating his insurrection for 18 months will meet for the final time, and has plenty of business to conclude.It’s expected to vote to refer the former president to the justice department for obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, and conspiracy to defraud the United States, among other potential charges.We’ll also hear the panel’s summary of the wide-ranging plot to keep Trump in office, including inciting the deadly 6 January attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters; and scheming to reverse the election result using fake electors.California Democrat Adam Schiff, a key member of the panel, said Sunday on CNN he was confident there was “sufficient evidence” to charge Trump, and several of his closest aides and advisors.They include former chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Trump attorney John Eastman. Also expected are civil referrals to the House ethics committee for Republican members of Congress who defied subpoenas, and a recommendation of disbarments for Trump lawyers.As my colleague Hugo Lowell writes for the Guardian today:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The anticipated criminal referrals against Trump mark a remarkable moment for a precedent-shattering investigation into the former president’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat at any cost and impede the congressional certification that culminated in the Capitol attack early last year.Please stick with us for what is certain to be a busy day. We’ll bring you developments as they happen.While we wait for events to unfold, take a read of our preview of today’s meeting here:January 6 committee to use last meeting to refer Trump to justice departmentRead moreAs the clock ticks down to this afternoon’s final “business meeting” of the January 6 House committee, let’s take a look at some of the winners and losers. Martin Pengelly reports:From Liz Cheney to Donald Trump: winners and losers from the January 6 hearingsRead moreAnother Kennedy is headed for Ireland. The state department said Monday that Joe Kennedy, of the storied Irish-American political family, would become US special envoy to Northern Ireland for economic affairs.Kennedy, 42, will focus on advancing economic development in Northern Ireland and people to people ties between the citizens of the two countries, secretary of state Antony Blinken said in a statement, according to Reuters.“His role builds on the longstanding US commitment to supporting peace, prosperity, and stability in Northern Ireland and the peace dividends of the Belfast Good Friday agreement,” Blinken said.I welcome Joe Kennedy III as the U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs. He will be instrumental to ensuring deeper U.S. support for economic growth in Northern Ireland to benefit everyone.— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) December 19, 2022
    Kennedy is grandson of former attorney general Robert F Kennedy, and great-nephew to former president John F Kennedy, both assassinated in the 1960s. He served eight years in the House before losing a Senate bid in Massachusetts in 2020.His cousin Caroline Kennedy, a former ambassador to Japan and daughter of the late president, is ambassador to Australia.Jury selection begins today in the seditious conspiracy trial of former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio and four other members of the extremist group accused of plotting the deadly January 6 Capitol attack.Tarrio and four of his lieutenants are heading to trial in Washington DC, the Associated Press reports, just weeks after two leaders of another extremist group, the Oath Keepers, were convicted of seditious conspiracy in a major victory for the justice department’s extensive 6 January prosecution.Tarrio is perhaps the highest-profile defendant to face jurors yet in the attack that delayed the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory, left dozens of police injured and led to nearly 1,000 arrests. Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, Dominic Pezzola and Joseph Biggs are charged with several other crimes in addition to seditious conspiracy. If convicted of sedition, they could face up to 20 years in prison. Jury selection is likely to take several days, and the trial is expected to last at least six weeks.More on this story:Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes found guilty of seditious conspiracyRead moreHere’s a handy explainer from my colleague Kira Lerner about the work of the bipartisan January 6 House committee that’s been investigating Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.From the panel’s first meeting in July 2021, through live, televised hearings this year, to its final gathering today, the nine members have focused stringently on the insurrection effort. They have interviewed more than 1,000 witness interviews, reviewed more than one million documents and viewed hundreds of hours of video. The Select Committee will hold a business meeting today at 1pm ET.WATCH LIVE ⤵️https://t.co/qI55tpMLn2— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) December 19, 2022
    They obtained a massive number of call records, text messages, and emails through subpoenas and also got access to White House records from the National Archives.The committee assembled five teams to investigate different topic areas and assigned each team a color, the Guardian has previously reported. The issues ranged from efforts by Trump and his associates to pressure federal, state, and local officials to overturn the election to law enforcement and intelligence agency failures. They also examined domestic extremist groups like QAnon, and online misinformation, those who planned the January 6 rally, the “Stop the Steal” movement and the money behind efforts to overturn the election.Read the full story:What has the January 6 House panel done so far – and what’s next?Read moreIt’s decision day on criminal referrals for Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden.At 1pm, the bipartisan House panel that has been investigating his insurrection for 18 months will meet for the final time, and has plenty of business to conclude.It’s expected to vote to refer the former president to the justice department for obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, and conspiracy to defraud the United States, among other potential charges.We’ll also hear the panel’s summary of the wide-ranging plot to keep Trump in office, including inciting the deadly 6 January attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters; and scheming to reverse the election result using fake electors.California Democrat Adam Schiff, a key member of the panel, said Sunday on CNN he was confident there was “sufficient evidence” to charge Trump, and several of his closest aides and advisors.They include former chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Trump attorney John Eastman. Also expected are civil referrals to the House ethics committee for Republican members of Congress who defied subpoenas, and a recommendation of disbarments for Trump lawyers.As my colleague Hugo Lowell writes for the Guardian today:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The anticipated criminal referrals against Trump mark a remarkable moment for a precedent-shattering investigation into the former president’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat at any cost and impede the congressional certification that culminated in the Capitol attack early last year.Please stick with us for what is certain to be a busy day. We’ll bring you developments as they happen.While we wait for events to unfold, take a read of our preview of today’s meeting here:January 6 committee to use last meeting to refer Trump to justice departmentRead moreGood morning blog readers, for what promises to be a momentous day in US politics.It’s a long-awaited moment of reckoning for Donald Trump as the January 6 House panel investigating his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat meets in public for the final time, and votes to recommend referral to the justice department for criminal charges against the former president.As we reported last week, Trump faces referral for obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the United States, among other potential charges.But the bipartisan panel has plenty of other business to conclude when it meets at 1pm, including outlining investigative findings and legislative recommendations, voting to formally adopt its final report, then voting on referrals for Trump and several key allies and advisers.While we’re unlikely to see the full report today, we expect an executive summary, outlining the extraordinary efforts Trump took to stay in power, including unleashing a mob of supporters on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Today we’re also watching:
    Chief of the Capitol police Thomas Manger testifies on the security of Congress members at an afternoon meeting of the Senate’s rules and administration committee.
    Joe Biden meets with Ecuador’s president Guillermo Lasso at lunchtime.
    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at 2.30pm. More

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    Tennessee man accused of plot to kill FBI agents in latest January 6 charges

    Tennessee man accused of plot to kill FBI agents in latest January 6 chargesPair allegedly had list of 37 law enforcement agents they planned to assassinate In the latest in an ever-growing list of criminal charges brought against January 6 rioters, a Tennessee man was arrested on Friday for allegedly plotting to kill the FBI agents who were investigating him.With the House of Representatives committee on the insurrection preparing to deliver its final recommendations on Monday, 34-year old Edward Kelley of Maryville was charged with conspiracy, retaliating against a federal official and solicitation to commit a crime of violence, reported CNN.Kelley was already facing charges of assaulting an officer during his participation in the 6 January riots.Exclusive: January 6 panel considering Trump referral to justice department for obstruction of CongressRead moreAustin Carter, from Knoxville, Tennessee, was also arrested and charged for his involvement in the plot, according to the justice department.The two men allegedly had a list of 37 law enforcement agents they planned to assassinate, including the agents who arrested Kelley in May for his involvement in the January 6 attack and those who were present for a search of his home, reported the New York Times.An unnamed acquaintance, who alerted law enforcement to Kelley’s plans, obtained the list from Carter, as well as a thumb drive from Kelley’s home that showed a video of law enforcement officers approaching his home on the day of his arrest, according to court papers.The acquaintance also captured several recordings of Kelley and Carter talking about their assassination plans. At one point, Kelley asked the acquaintance to “stash some stuff” at his home, later clarifying that he meant weapons and ammunition. Kelley also told the acquaintance he planned to recruit people to attack the FBI’s Knoxville office, according to the papers.Carter allegedly told the acquaintance about his plans to participate in Kelley’s plot, urging the acquaintance “to definitely make sure you got everything racked, locked up and loaded”.Also on Friday, another January 6 rioter who is a QAnon supporter and self-described “poster boy” of the insurrection was sentenced to five years in prison.Douglas Jensen, 43, of Iowa was sentenced to 60 months, after a judge ruled that he had led rioters into the breached Capitol building and toward the police officer Eugene Goodman, actions that could have led to mass death, reported the Washington Post.The developments are just the latest in a meticulous and effective law enforcement investigation that has aimed to hold the January 6 attackers to account. As of 7 December, 964 people had been arrested for their involvement in the insurrection, charged with a number of crimes including assault on an officer, destruction of government property and theft, reported Insider.The list of those arrested for their involvement is expected to grow as the FBI continues to look through media and footage from the Capitol attacks.Of the 964, about half – 465 – have pled guilty. The longest sentence to date has been for former the NYPD officer Thomas Webster, who got 10 years in prison in September after a judge ruled he assaulted an officer with a metal flagpole when the officer tried to defend the Capitol.Meanwhile, the separate House investigation into the attacks is aiming to issue its formal recommendations on Monday. It is reportedly considering several criminal referrals against Donald Trump, which could include suggested charges of obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the United States.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsTennesseenewsReuse this content More

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    Republican who wanted Trump to declare ‘Marshall’ law only regrets the misspelling

    Republican who wanted Trump to declare ‘Marshall’ law only regrets the misspellingText from Ralph Norman to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s final chief of staff, urged president to declare martial law A Republican who urged the Trump White House to declare martial law to stop Joe Biden taking office has only one regret: that he misspelled “martial”.Ron DeSantis leads Donald Trump by 23 points in Republican pollRead moreThe text from Ralph Norman of South Carolina to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s final chief of staff, was given to the January 6 committee by Meadows and revealed by Talking Points Memo this week.On 17 January 2021, 11 days after the deadly Capitol attack and three days before Biden’s inauguration, Norman wrote: “Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”No response from Meadows was revealed. On Tuesday, a HuffPo reporter asked Norman about the message.Norman said: “Well, I misspelled ‘martial’.”He added: “I was very frustrated then, I’m frustrated now. I was frustrated then by what was going on in the Capitol. President Biden was in his basement the whole year. Dominion was raising all kinda questions.”The reference to Biden’s basement was to the then Democratic candidate’s decision largely to stay off the campaign trail in 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic.Dominion Voting Systems has filed major lawsuits, notably against Fox News, regarding claims its machines were involved in voter fraud.Trump insists his defeat by Biden – by more than 7m votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college – was the result of electoral fraud. It was not.Norman was among 147 Republicans in the House and Senate who voted to object to results in key states, even after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, a riot now linked to nine deaths including suicides among law enforcement.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, proceedings which were ongoing when Norman texted Meadows.According to CNN, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman, also asked Meadows about “Marshall law” on 17 January, writing: “In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law.”This week, Greene said that if she and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, had organised the Capitol riot, “we would have won”. She also said rioters “would’ve been armed”.Marjorie Taylor Greene: Capitol attack ‘would’ve been armed’ if I was in chargeRead moreAccording to the Congressional Research Service, “crises in public order, both real and potential, often evoke comments concerning a resort to martial law. “While some ambiguity exists regarding the conditions of a martial law setting, such a prospect, nonetheless, is disturbing to many Americans who cherish their liberties, expect civilian law enforcement to prevail, and support civilian control of military authority.”The CRS also says that since the conclusion of the second world war, “martial law has not been presidentially directed or approved for any area of the United States. Federal troops have been dispatched to domestic locales experiencing unrest or riot, but in these situations the military has remained subordinate to federal civilian management.”On Tuesday, Norman told HuffPost: “I was frustrated at the time with everything that was happening. It was a private text between a friend and myself, nothing more, nothing less.”TopicsRepublicansUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsUS militarynewsReuse this content More

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    Marjorie Taylor Greene: Capitol attack ‘would’ve been armed’ if I was in charge

    Marjorie Taylor Greene: Capitol attack ‘would’ve been armed’ if I was in chargeFar-right congresswoman says the violent crowd would have won on January 6 if she and Steve Bannon had planned it The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has bragged that had she and the former Donald Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon been in charge of organizing the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, the violent crowd would have won, and everyone in it “would’ve been armed”.The notorious provocateur made her comments about the deadly January 6 attack during a speech to a gala of the New York Young Republicans Club on Park Avenue in Manhattan on Saturday night. Hatewatch monitored the event on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center.Greene, who entered the US House as a newly elected representative from Georgia last year, said: “January 6 happened, and next thing you know, I organized the whole thing, along with Steve Bannon here. And I will tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”She went on: “See that’s the whole joke, isn’t it? They say that whole thing was planned and I’m like, are you kidding me? A bunch of conservatives, second amendment supporters, went in the Capitol without guns, and they think that we organized that? I don’t think so.”The audience – which included Bannon, Donald Trump Jr, and prominent figures on the far right – met Greene’s incendiary remarks with cheers and whoops of affirmation. Among the attendees were the founders of Vdare, a white nationalist website that opposes immigration.Greene’s speech was recorded, and parts of it were posted on Twitter by Patriot Takes, which monitors far-right extremism.The congresswoman has a long track record of controversial statements, including racist comments and expressions of support for the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon. In April, she was forced to testify about her actions in the run-up to the Capitol insurrection in a court hearing in Georgia in which opponents attempted to bar her from Congress.The hearing was presented with text messages between Greene and Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows less than two weeks after January 6. In one text, she told Meadows that other Congress members were telling her that “the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call Marshall [sic] law … They stole this election. We all know that.”Greene told the court she had done nothing wrong and was a “victim” of the Capitol breach, which has been linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of traumatized law enforcement officers. She said she had no memory of sending the martial law text.Other speakers at the Park Avenue event also deployed contentious rhetoric. The president of the Young Republican hosts, Gavin Wax, called for “total war” against liberals.“We want total war,” he said. “We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media, in the courtroom, at the ballot box. And in the streets.”Wax added: “This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power.”TopicsUS Capitol attackRepublicansSteve BannonUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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    Biden rebukes Trump for saying constitution should be ‘terminated’

    Biden rebukes Trump for saying constitution should be ‘terminated’Former president must be ‘universally condemned’ for comments, says White House The Biden White House rebuked Donald Trump after the former president said the US constitution should be “terminated” over his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign booksRead moreAndrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, said: “Attacking the constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and should be universally condemned.”Bates called the constitution a “sacrosanct document”, saying: “You cannot only love America when you win.”Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, by more than 7m votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result he called a landslide when it was in his favour in 2016, against Hillary Clinton.Trump continues to claim that Biden won key states through electoral fraud, a lie that fuelled the deadly attack on the US Capitol by his supporters on 6 January 2021. Nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including suicides among law enforcement. More than 950 people have been charged. This week, two members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia were convicted of seditious conspiracy. Other members of far-right, pro-Trump groups face similar charges.Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the Capitol attack. He has not yet returned to the latter, despite its new owner, Elon Musk, saying he is free to do so. On Saturday, Trump used his own social media platform, Truth Social, to say of the 2020 election: “A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the constitution.”Trump also said an “unprecedented fraud requires an unprecedented cure”.He was writing after Musk claimed he would show that Twitter was guilty of “free speech suppression” by releasing evidence of how the platform responded to requests from campaigns in the 2020 election.Trump is the only declared candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 but he has faced increased criticism from Republicans and Republican-supporting media since midterm elections in which many of his endorsed candidates were defeated, including election deniers running for governor and key elections roles in battleground states. Republicans took the House, but only by a narrow majority, and failed to retake the Senate.On Saturday, Trump also criticised the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and “all of the weak Republicans who couldn’t get the presidential election of 2020 approved and out of the way fast enough”. Even after the Capitol riot, 147 Republicans in Congress objected to results in key states.Senior Republicans have recently criticised Trump over his decision to have dinner at his home in Florida with Nick Fuentes, a known white supremacist and antisemite. But though the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has surged in polls regarding possible 2024 contenders, few in the party have broken decisively with Trump and those who have have largely been forced out.On Saturday, Brian Schatz, a Democratic US senator from Hawaii, pointed to such hard political reality, saying: “Trump just called for the suspension of the constitution and it is the final straw for zero Republicans, especially the ones who call themselves ‘constitutional conservatives’.”One such conservative is Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader battling to become House speaker. Not long before Trump said the constitution should be terminated, McCarthy said that when his party took control in January, it would demonstrate its constitutionalist bona fides by reading “every single word” of the hallowed document on the floor of the House.On Sunday, Hakeem Jeffries, the newly elected Democratic leader in the House, told ABC’s This Week Trump had made “a strange statement, but the Republicans are going to have to work out their issues with the former president and decide whether they’re going to break from him and return to some semblance of reasonableness or continue to lean in to the extremism, not just of Trump, but of Trumpism”.‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreTrump and Trumpism are becoming more and more of a headache for McCarthy, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and other senior Republicans.On Saturday, Mehdi Hasan, who hosts a show on the TV channel MSNBC, tweeted: “Do you support Donald Trump’s demand to ‘terminate’ the constitution? Doesn’t his demand disqualify him for running for the presidency? Two questions that every single Republican member of the House and Senate needs to be asked, again and again, in the coming days.”Hasan also pointed to Trump’s dinner at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, with Nick Fuentes, saying that in just two weeks the former president had “said or done things that would be lifelong scandals for other politicians … he truly knows how to flood the zone”. Trump critics on the political right did condemn the remark.John Bolton, George W Bush’s UN ambassador who became Trump’s third national security adviser, said: “No American conservative can agree with Donald Trump’s call to suspend the constitution because of the results of the 2020 election. And all real conservatives must oppose his 2024 campaign for president.”TopicsDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS politicsUS elections 2020US elections 2024RepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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    January 6 panel mulls criminal referrals as Trump sees setback in Mar-a-Lago case – live

    The January 6 House panel investigating the Capitol attack, and Donald Trump’s insurrection, is set to meet in private on Friday as it prepares to mull criminal charges against the former president.The “walls closing in on Trump” headline has been written often, but this time with an elevated degree of peril for a man who recently announced his third run at the White House as a Republican.A subcommittee formed in October to make recommendations will present its report to the full panel today, according to NPR, and a determination on recommending any particular action will follow in short order.“We’ll just accept the report, and probably one day next week, make a decision one way or another,” Mississippi Democratic Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, told the network.The committee is expected to release its final report around the middle of this month, and it is expected to focus heavily on Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack and his potential culpability.The Guardian reported last week that it has provoked something of a rift between panel members, with some believing it concentrates too much on Trump himself, and not enough of alleged intelligence failures by the FBI that resulted in the Capitol being overrun by supporters he incited.New: Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson tells me the full committee will receive the subcommittee’s recommendations tomorrow at 8:30a but likely wont make a decision on referrals and what to do about subpoenaed GOP members until next week.— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 1, 2022
    Members of the subcommittee, which is chaired by Democrat Jamie Raskin, and includes Republican Liz Cheney alongside other Democrats Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, all have a legal background, or, in Schiff’s case, prosecutorial experience.As well as making recommendations on criminal charges, the subcommittee was also tasked with resolving how to respond to Trump’s lawsuit against his subpoena.Read more:January 6 report expected to focus on Trump’s role and potential culpabilityRead moreLate on Thursday, a federal appeals court delivered a major blow to Donald Trump by knocking down the appointment of a special master to look at documents seized by the FBI from the former president’s Florida resort.The court also sternly rebuked Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge who assigned the special master, for meddling in a justice department investigation. Here’s my colleague Hugo Lowell’s report:A federal appeals court on Thursday terminated the special master review of documents seized from Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago property, paving the way for the justice department to regain access to the entirety of the materials for use in the criminal investigation surrounding the former president.The decision by the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit marked a decisive defeat for Trump in a ruling that said a lower-court judge should never have granted his request for an independent arbiter in the first place and is unlikely to be overturned in the event of appeal.“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote in an unanimous 23-page opinion. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”The ruling removed the lower-court judge’s order, allowing federal prosecutors to use the unclassified documents – in addition to the documents marked classified they previously regained in an earlier appeal – in the criminal investigation examining Trump’s mishandling of national security materials.Trump can only appeal to the US supreme court, according to local rules in the 11th circuit, though it was not immediately clear whether he would do so. The former president has lost multiple cases before the supreme court, most recently including whether Congress can get access to his tax returns.In a statement, a Trump spokesman said: “The decision does not address the merits that clearly demonstrate the impropriety of the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted raid on Mar-a-Lago. President Donald J Trump will continue to fight against the weaponized Department of ‘Justice.’”Read the full story:US court strikes down appointment of special master to review Trump recordsRead moreWhile we’re looking at the machinations of the January 6 House committee, we’re certainly not the only ones. Republicans, already committed to shutting down the panel when they assume control of the House next month (assuming it hasn’t done so itself by then) appear dead set on investigating the investigators.MSNBC’s MaddowBlog, from the Rachel Maddow show, takes a closer look at would-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s role in the plan, in an article published Friday.The House minority leader, if he wins enough party support to get the gavel of course, appears eager not to find answers about the 6 January Capitol attacks, or Donald Trump’s desperate efforts to retain the presidency despite his defeat by Joe Biden.Instead, he wants to cast shade on the integrity of the bipartisan panel. In a letter last week, reported by the New York Times, he wrote to the committee chair Bennie Thompson, ordering him to preserve all documents, including transcripts of more than 1,000 interviews. It’s being seen purely as a political display, as it’s something the panel would have to do anyway.This from a man who resolutely refused to cooperate with the panel last year when he received a subpoena.According to MSNBC, the tactics of McCarthy and the Republicans are “intended to discredit probes they consider politically inconvenient”. You can read the MSNBC report here.The January 6 House panel investigating the Capitol attack, and Donald Trump’s insurrection, is set to meet in private on Friday as it prepares to mull criminal charges against the former president.The “walls closing in on Trump” headline has been written often, but this time with an elevated degree of peril for a man who recently announced his third run at the White House as a Republican.A subcommittee formed in October to make recommendations will present its report to the full panel today, according to NPR, and a determination on recommending any particular action will follow in short order.“We’ll just accept the report, and probably one day next week, make a decision one way or another,” Mississippi Democratic Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, told the network.The committee is expected to release its final report around the middle of this month, and it is expected to focus heavily on Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack and his potential culpability.The Guardian reported last week that it has provoked something of a rift between panel members, with some believing it concentrates too much on Trump himself, and not enough of alleged intelligence failures by the FBI that resulted in the Capitol being overrun by supporters he incited.New: Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson tells me the full committee will receive the subcommittee’s recommendations tomorrow at 8:30a but likely wont make a decision on referrals and what to do about subpoenaed GOP members until next week.— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 1, 2022
    Members of the subcommittee, which is chaired by Democrat Jamie Raskin, and includes Republican Liz Cheney alongside other Democrats Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, all have a legal background, or, in Schiff’s case, prosecutorial experience.As well as making recommendations on criminal charges, the subcommittee was also tasked with resolving how to respond to Trump’s lawsuit against his subpoena.Read more:January 6 report expected to focus on Trump’s role and potential culpabilityRead moreThe White House has announced that Joe Biden will deliver live remarks at 10.15am as he signs legislation averting a national rail strike.The Senate voted 80-15 on Thursday to progress an imposed settlement on rail workers, one day after the House did the same.Biden, who became known as Amtrak Joe for his days riding the railroad to and from the Capitol when he was a senator, is likely to praise the speed at which Congress moved to avoid the planned 9 December shutdown. Biden’s pushing of the settlement, however, is not without controversy. Read more here:Biden just knifed labor unions in the back. They shouldn’t forget it | Hamilton NolanRead moreGood morning politics blog readers, and happy Friday. It’s a big day for the January 6 House committee investigating Donald Trump’s insurrection as it meets to mull potential criminal referrals for the former president, and those in his inner circle.The bipartisan panel’s closed-doors meeting follows a massive setback late on Thursday for Trump’s tactics of obstructing a parallel justice department inquiry into his improper handling of classified documents at his Florida resort. A federal appeals court struck down the assignment of an independent special master reviewing the documents, and delivered a direct rebuke for the Trump-appointed judge who engaged him.We’ll have plenty more about those developments coming up.Here’s what else we’re watching Friday on what promises to be a busy day:
    Joe Biden has picked up an unexpected fan in the form of Republican firebrand Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker who says the president is getting things right and enjoyed one of the best first-term midterm elections in history.
    Biden will meet the Prince and Princess of Wales later today at the John F Kennedy presidential library in Boston.
    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at lunchtime aboard Air Force One en route to Boston.
    It’s the last day of early voting ahead of next Tuesday’s crucial Senate run-off in Gerogia. Latest polls give Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock a 3-4% lead over Republican challenger Herschel Walker. More

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    Lachlan Murdoch alleges Crikey hired marketing firm to turn legal threat into subscription drive

    Lachlan Murdoch alleges Crikey hired marketing firm to turn legal threat into subscription driveNews Corp co-chair’s lawyer tells federal court she intends to show Crikey did not republish article for public interest reasons

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    Crikey hired a marketing company to capitalise on a legal threat from Lachlan Murdoch in order to drive subscriptions, the co-chair of News Corporation has alleged in the federal court.Murdoch launched defamation proceedings in August against the independent news site over an article published in June that named the Murdoch family as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the US Capitol attack. The trial has been set down for March 2023 but the parties are in dispute over pretrial matters.One of the matters heard by justice Michael Wigney in a brief hearing was an allegation by the Murdoch team that a marketing campaign, run by brand strategists Populares, undermines the public interest defence on which Crikey publisher Private Media was relying.Lachlan Murdoch’s legal team loses bid to have parts of Crikey’s defamation defence dismissedRead moreIn response to a concerns letter from Murdoch in June, Crikey initially agreed to take down the article but after failing to reach agreement it was reinstated on 15 August.Sue Chrysanthou SC, for Murdoch, said she intends to show that republication of the article was not for public interest reasons but for a marketing campaign.She said Populares produced a “significant report” titled “Lachlan Murdoch Campaign” about how “a dispute with my client could be marketed for the purposes of attracting new readers and gaining subscriptions”.“The purpose of the re-posting was not for the public interest, it was for the media campaign,” she said.
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    In his statement of claim in August Murdoch alleged that the placement of a New York Times advertisement inviting him to sue Crikey over the alleged defamation was “seeking to humiliate” the executive chair and chief executive of Fox Corporation.Chrysanthou said social media was “the modern-day grapevine” and alleged Crikey had paid for some posts about her client “to be promoted and advertised”.She sought orders for Crikey to provide further information in response to questions because the submitted outlines of information did not address anything after the 29 June publication of the article by Crikey’s politics editor, Bernard Keane. Wigney said the request for written answers to about 180 questions, including sub-questions, could delay proceedings and he repeatedly asked Chrysanthou: “Do you want this to go to trial in March?”“I would withdraw those interrogatories you can cross-examine them,” he said.‘Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies’: Murdoch biography stokes succession rumorsRead morePrivate Media’s lawyer, Clarissa Amato, said Chrysanthou’s request would result in a “a catastrophic waste of time and money”.“Some of those may be things simply left out of the discovery list by accident … there are other requests that are effectively new categories of documents,” Amato said.Chrysanthou said the social media posts about her client had spread “like a virus”, and she would call a social media expert to give evidence explaining the reach.“We want the expert to address that issue, and the effect of promoting particular posts and how that then causes those posts to appear in different people’s feeds,” Chrysanthou said.She said the expert would be asked to explain a few essential posts, relevant to claims of serious harm from the publication.Murdoch is seeking damages because through the publication and republication of the article he alleges he “has been gravely injured in his character, his personal reputation and his professional reputation as a business person and company director, and has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial hurt, distress and embarrassment”.The parties will return to court on Thursday.TopicsLachlan MurdochAustralian mediaLaw (Australia)Defamation lawMedia businessNews CorporationMedia lawnewsReuse this content More