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    Congressman Henry Cuellar in court accused of receiving $600,000 in bribes

    The US justice department on Friday accused the Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, of accepting about $600,000 in bribes in exchange for influencing policy in favor of Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank.The Cuellars had made their first appearance before a federal magistrate judge in Houston by the afternoon, but it was not clear how they pleaded. Earlier, the congressman, who has represented a swath of Texas’s border with Mexico in the US House since 2005, issued a statement denying unspecified “allegations” against him.“I want to be clear that both my wife and I are innocent of these allegations. Everything I have done in Congress has been to serve the people of South Texas,” Cuellar said.He added that “I’m running for re-election and will win this November,” when Democrats are hoping to regain the majority in the House of Representatives.The justice department said that between December 2014 and November 2021, the Cuellars received bribes from an unspecified bank headquartered in Mexico City as well as an oil and gas company controlled by the government of Azerbaijan.Imelda Cuellar then allegedly used “sham consulting contracts”, front companies and intermediaries to launder the money.In return, the congressman influenced US foreign policy to Azerbaijan’s advantage and pressured unnamed “high-ranking” officials in the executive branch to take actions in favor of the bank.A statement from the House Democratic minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said that under the party’s rules in the chamber, Cuellar would step down as the ranking member of a homeland security subcommittee while he faces these charges.Jeffries added that Cuellar “admirably devoted his career to public service … is a valued member of the House Democratic caucus” and was “entitled to his day in court and the presumption of innocence throughout the legal process”.Two years ago, the FBI raided Cuellar’s Laredo, Texas, home and campaign office as part of an investigation into US businessmen and their links with Azerbaijan. Cuellar said he was cooperating with their inquiry, and months later, an attorney for the lawmaker told Fox News that he was not a target of the investigation that led to the raid.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn his statement on Friday, the congressman said that “before I took any action, I proactively sought legal advice from the House Ethics Committee, who gave me more than one written opinion, along with an additional opinion from a national law firm. The actions I took in Congress were consistent with the actions of many of my colleagues and in the interest of the American people.”Cuellar added that he had requested to meet with “the Washington DC prosecutors to explain the facts and they refused to discuss the case with us or to hear our side”.Federal charges could complicate the re-election of 68-year-old Cuellar, who is seeking an 11th term in office. A moderate Democrat, he supported a bipartisan Senate bill that would have tightened immigration policy, and is the party’s sole House lawmaker opposed to passing federal legislation to guarantee abortion access.After the 2022 raid on his home and office, Cuellar narrowly won the Democratic primary against his progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros, then easily beat the Republican Cassy Garcia in the general election. More

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    Experts dismiss Kristi Noem’s ‘dubious’ claim to have met Kim Jong-un

    The South Dakota governor, Republican vice-presidential hopeful and self-confessed dog-killer Kristi Noem’s bizarre claim in a new book to have met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has been dismissed by experts as “dubious” and not “conceivable”.The Dakota Scout first reported Noem’s claim, which is in her forthcoming book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.The book will be published next week. Last week, the Guardian obtained a copy and reported how Noem describes killing Cricket – a 14-month-old dog she said she “hated” – after deeming her uncontrollable and a danger to people, and a goat she said was “nasty and mean”, smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid”, and bothered her children.Noem has repeatedly defended the story as illustrative of the harsh realities of farm life. But it set off a political firestorm, by most assessments dynamiting the governor’s chance of being named running mate to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.The Scout reported that Noem’s book also contains “at least two instances in which she recounts meetings with world leaders that are in dispute”.In one, Noem writes: “Through my tenure on the House armed services committee, I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders.“I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all).”But the Scout quoted one “longtime, high-level Capitol Hill staffer” who worked on the armed services committee when Noem was on it, between 2013 and 2015, as saying: “It’s bullshit.”“That staffer was among a dozen staffers … who said they had no knowledge of the meeting, or who said Noem had never mentioned it before,” the paper said.It quoted experts saying Noem’s claim to have met with Kim, the autocratic leader of a pariah state who did not even meet with Barack Obama – the US president for the first five years of Noem’s time in the US House – was unlikely.“I don’t see any conceivable way that a single junior member of Congress without explicit escort from the US state department and military would be meeting with a leader from North Korea,” George Lopez of Notre Dame University, an expert on North Korea, told the Scout.“What would have been so critical in his bag of tricks that he would have met with an American lawmaker, this one distinctively?”Another North Korea expert, Benjamin Young of Virginia Commonwealth University, called Noem’s account of meeting Kim “dubious”.“There’s no way,” Young told the Scout. “There’s no way.”Noem also claims to have canceled a meeting with Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. She writes of being in Paris, “slated to meet” the French president.“However, the day before we were to meet he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press. So, I decided to cancel. There is no place for pro-Hamas rhetoric.”Macron’s office told the Scout no direct invitation to Noem was issued, though it did say Noem and Macron might have been scheduled to attend the same event last 10 November.Noem spoke at a conference in Paris that day, the same day Macron called for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.Noem’s spokesperson did not comment to the Scout before it published its story.After the story went live, the paper said, it was told: “The publisher will be addressing conflated world leaders’ names in the book before it is released.”Trump did meet Kim: in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in 2019, and in the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea later the same year. No lasting diplomatic progress was made.
    This article was amended on 3 May 2024 to correct the title of the newspaper cited. It is the Dakota Scout, not the South Dakota Scout as first reported. More

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    Mass deportations, detention camps, troops on the street: Trump spells out migrant plan

    Donald Trump is planning to unleash the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history should he win re-election in November, involving legally questionable deployments of military and police units and the creation of vast detention camps along the southern border.Trump has laid out his vision for a “record-setting deportation operation” in a series of rally speeches, newspaper articles and social media posts. He intends to move swiftly after inauguration day next January to stage mass roundups of immigrants across the country, conducting raids inside big cities where he would face certain Democratic opposition.“On day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan, on Wednesday. He told his adoring supporters that immigrants were coming in by the millions from foreign prisons and “insane asylums” leading to the “plunder, rape, slaughter and destruction of the American suburbs, cities and towns”.Immigration experts say that the deportation plans for a Trump White House 2.0 dwarf anything previously seen – both in scale and in the intensity of the former president’s determination to run roughshod over legal guardrails. He attempted workplace raids during his 2016 presidential term, but they were largely stymied in the courts.“This time we need to take Trump at his word,” said David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “When he talks about mass deportation – in boxcars, or bus loads, or planes, or whatever – that’s what he’s going to do.”Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior White House policy adviser and hardline immigration guru who is likely to be central in a second term, told the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in a podcast interview that the plans were going to be pushed through. “I want everybody to understand this is going to happen. If President Trump is back in the Oval Office in January, this is going to commence immediately.”In an interview with Time magazine this week, Trump emphasized that speed was critical to his strategy for removing many of the at least 11 million people without legal status living in the US today.“We’re going to be moving them out as soon as we get to it,” he said.To skirt around due process laws protecting asylum seekers,Trump has said he will invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act which allows for summary deportation of any non-citizen from a foreign enemy country. He says he will apply the provision in the first instance against “known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members”.Immigration experts fear that such summary removals could ensnare US citizens in the dragnet.“Trump will have his agents remove people, then ask questions later. If somebody looks like they’re undocumented, meaning they have brown or black skin, or speak with an accent, they could be included irrespective of their citizenship,” Leopold warned.Mass deportation would form the centerpiece of a Trump second term. It aligns with other aspects of his vision for the 47th presidency, which promises to be more ruthless, radical and revenge-laden than any administration in modern times.The former president will be counting on the rightward shift in the federal judiciary, which he effected when he was last in the White House. Over the four years of his presidential term, he placed more than 200 judges on the bench, and succeeded in transforming the US supreme court into a rightwing bastion.View image in fullscreenWith Trump and his team setting their sights on deporting more than a million people each year, the operation would inevitably require major infrastructure including new detention camps. Miller said that “large-scale staging grounds” would be constructed near the border, probably in Texas.“You create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft,” Miller told Kirk.Flesh has been placed on the bones of Trump’s immigration plans by Project 2025, a presidential transition operation spearheaded by the rightwing Heritage Foundation that has compiled a 920-page policy review aiming to “institutionalize Trumpism”. By its calculations, the daily number of beds in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centers would need to rise from the current 34,000 to more than 100,000.Ice itself should be given free rein to carry out “civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate”, Project 2025 says (emphasis in the original). The Trump campaign has stressed that outside groups like Heritage do not speak for the former president, but the policies contained in the review hew closely to his intentions and are likely to provide foundations for administration policy.Even with its 21,000 employees, Ice would be overwhelmed by the task of rounding up millions of people without the involvement of other entities. Trump told Time magazine that he would turn initially to the national guard, and then to the US military.“If I thought things were getting out of control, I would have no problem using the military,” he said.When Time pointed out that under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, the military is prohibited in most circumstances from acting domestically against civilians, Trump replied: “Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren’t legally in our country.”In fact, undocumented immigrants are civilians (though not citizens). As such, they enjoy equal protection rights under the US constitution.Trump likens his immigration plans to the mass deportation of some 300,000 Mexicans by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955. Though Trump is contemplating massively greater numbers, the two plans bear striking similarities.Both schemes were justified using racist stereotypes of immigrants. Eisenhower’s was called “Operation Wetback” and portrayed Mexicans as dirty and dangerous.Trump repeatedly talks about “migrant crime” at his rallies, telling Wednesday’s crowd in Michigan that prisons and mental institutions all around the world were being “emptied into the United States like we are a dumping ground”. Notably, criminologists report that immigrants – whether they have legal status or not – are more law-abiding than US-born citizens.Mass roundups are likely to threaten the “Dreamers”, the more than half a million immigrants who came to the US as undocumented children and who have been granted partial rights to remain under the deferred action program known as Daca. Trump has indicated he intends to tear up the Daca scheme, which he tried and failed to do in his first term.View image in fullscreenTrump also plans to use state and local police forces to assist Ice in roundups. That would be embraced with alacrity by Republican-controlled states like Texas where the governor, Greg Abbott, is already striving to give state police the power to arrest undocumented migrants.But it would be fiercely opposed in Democratic states which have tended to place a firewall between their law enforcement officers and federal immigration activities. Undocumented people are concentrated in big cities under Democratic control, such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, raising the specter under Trump’s plans of open confrontation between law enforcement agencies receiving conflicting orders from authorities led by the two main parties.Miller said that Republican governors would be encouraged to deploy their national guard over the border into Democratic-controlled states where undocumented migrants enjoy so-called “sanctuary city” protections. Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, could send troops into Maryland which has a Democratic governor, Wes Moore.“If you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close,” he told Kirk’s podcast.Leopold predicted that pitching one state against another would quickly deteriorate into a “police state mentality”.“Are we going to see a complete breakdown of the unity of the American state?” he said. “It’s possible.” More

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    Boxing, tacos and TV: Democratic Senate contender aims to win back Latino voters

    When one of the most celebrated Mexican boxers in history, Canelo Álvarez, steps into the ring against the undefeated Mexican fighter Jaime Munguía on Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, excitement will be through the roof at a campaign event just 280 miles away.That’s because the Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego, caught in one of the most critical US Senate races in the country against the former TV anchor Kari Lake, will be holding a watch party for the fight at JL Boxing Academy in Glendale, Arizona, complete with big screens inside, and a truck serving birria tacos and Mexican Cokes outside.The event on Cinco de Mayo weekend, expected to bring more than 100 largely Latino residents and families, is not just happening because Gallego is a boxing fan, but rather serves as evidence of how the campaign from the former US marine and Iraq combat veteran aims to reach Latino voters and Hispanic men who have eroded from the Democratic party in recent election cycles.“I remember leaving work sites with my cousins to gather with friends and family to watch epic boxing matches,” Gallego told the Guardian, citing famous boxing legends like Julio César Chávez, Mike Tyson and Oscar De La Hoya. “Far too often, politicians treat Latino voters as a box to check. Our campaign is different: we’re focused on community events – food tours, town halls in Spanish, and this weekend: boxing watch parties.”Latino voter support for Democrats nationally slipped 8 percentage points from 2016 to 2020, according to the firm Catalist. A 2022 survey of 3,600 exit-poll interviews with voters in battleground states, conducted by the progressive donor network Way to Win, found that 58% of Hispanic men supported Democratic candidates, compared with 66% of Latinas. Meanwhile, the Democratic political action committee Nuestro Pac found after the 2022 midterms that Hispanic men consistently lagged Latinas in Democratic support in battlegrounds by 8 to 12 points.Chuck Rocha, an adviser to Gallego’s campaign, said Gallego himself texted senior staffers in the fall with the idea for the event, recalling his message was that with the Canelo bout coming in 2024 it would be good to have a presence around the fight for boys and their fathers and families who love boxing.“We all know Latino men have been trending away from [Democrats], and Ruben Gallego is reflective of those men,” Rocha said, noting that Gallego had to sleep on a couch in his living room until he went away for college because his sisters shared a room together and he didn’t have a bedroom.“Ruben went off to war and served with men and women who are true blue-collar, working-class kids like him. We both know the reason Latino men are slipping from Democrats is because we’re not showing up in the places we need to, and not having conversations about things Latino men care about.”For its part, Lake’s campaign said Gallego’s events, and ads focused on Harvard and being a marine would not ultimately reach voters who are focused on inflation and border issues.“Broadly every group is facing problems with inflation and the border and our plan all along is as voters learn about Gallego’s record, they will like him less, no matter what events he does and no matter his biography,” said Alex Nichol, a Lake campaign spokesperson, noting Gallego’s votes with Joe Biden’s “deeply unpopular” policies on illegal immigration and the economy.A FiveThirtyEight analysis of Gallego’s votes in the 117th Congress found the Phoenix congressman was aligned with Biden 100% of the time.Reaching voters where they areStill, Gallego’s event is being lauded by veteran political organizers and operatives of both parties who stress that while most Latinos don’t celebrate Cinco de Mayo, with the holiday often viewed as an excuse to drink margaritas and eat Mexican food, Hispanics who enjoy sports often look forward to the holiday as part of a major boxing weekend, when star Mexican prizefighters have high-profile bouts.“This brings politics and engagement into a place candidates often don’t think about,” said Tomas Robles, founder of Roble Fuerte Strategies, and an organizer for 14 years in Arizona who has worked to mobilize Latino voters. “So it’s doing what most politicians hope to do, which is reaching new people and communities with their message, who they haven’t been able to reach in the past.”Gallego has also put on a round table last week with Latino leaders on lowering prescription drug prices, a Maryvale, Arizona townhall last year entirely in Spanish, and a south Phoenix food tour with local influencer Señor Foodie.“The Canelo fight watch party, I would say, is smart, because he’s continuing to mine parts of the Latino vote that Lake will never even touch, so if he can get them to turn out that’s a net gain for him,” said Jaime Molera, who served as an adviser to the former Republican governor Jane Dee Hull and co-founded the Molera Alvarez consulting firm.While the Democratic party for the first time this cycle acknowledged its problem with reaching Latino men amid fear that they are gravitating to former president Donald Trump driven by his bravado and policies, Robles argues it’s an inaccurate view, and Hispanic men have instead been moved by what they perceive as “authenticity”.“He’s no doubt been to a bunch of events like the one his campaign is organizing, like the ones we went to in our 20s. He can have a 15-minute convo by the taco truck and it won’t have to be anything about politics, it will be about boxing,” he said.. “That is the connection politicians are eager to make but a lot of them don’t put themselves in the shoes of the people they’re trying to connect with.”View image in fullscreenGallego led by two points over Lake in a March Hill/Emerson poll 51% to 49% but has enjoyed larger leads in more recent polls. An average of 19 polls from the Hill finds Gallego leading by an average of 4.7%.Chuck Coughlin, who served as a campaign manager for former Republican governor Jan Brewer and is the president of HighGround which runs polls in Arizona, told the Guardian he spoke to Gallego before he ran and he shared that this was exactly the type of event he was going to do.Coughlin described a demographic divide within the Hispanic community between “older, traditional, Catholic, gun-owning, conservative-leaning” members and the more activist, immigration-focused generation that was baptized under the state’s hardline SB1070 immigration law over a dozen years ago.“For him to establish a beachhead with those people he would not be known to, coming from one of the lowest-turnout districts in the state, is smart,” he said. “His DNA – the story he tells on TV of having a hard-working single mom, going to college, being a marine in Iraq – that’s a working man’s story that they can relate to. I don’t think that story has been shared widely among those older Hispanics and this kind of event is a perfect place to allow himself to share those stories in an apolitical format with your tío and your family there.”Junior Lopez, 42, is the owner and trainer at JL Boxing Academy, who has trained fighters for more than 15 years, including current top contender David Benavidez. He said the primary thing people need to know about Latino men is that their number one priority is taking care of their families.In Lopez and men like him, Gallego has the opportunity to start a conversation on Saturday.“I’m not going to lie, I don’t follow too much of the political stuff,” he told the Guardian. “This is a good thing for me and for my people in the community to hear what he’s about and to understand what he’s fighting for.”One interesting wrinkle at the watch party: Benavidez, who Lopez trains, is ranked No 2 in ESPN’s super-middleweight ranking, behind Álvarez. Fans entering the watch party will walk by a giant poster of Benavidez, who is nicknamed the “Mexican Monster”, and has accused Álvarez of ducking a matchup with him. In some ways that makes this under-the-radar watch party in Glendale part of the orbit at the center of the boxing universe.And come November, Arizona too could be the center of the political universe, given the razor-thin margin in 2020 between Biden and Trump, and if Gallego is able to maximize his support with Latinos on his way to becoming the first Latino US senator in Arizona history.Rocha, who wrote a book called Tio Bernie about serving as the architect for Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly robust 2020 Latino outreach effort, said he was impressed by Gallego’s focus on Hispanics at this juncture in the campaign.“I’ve never seen a candidate more focused on maximizing the Latino vote than this candidate,” he said. “He’s from the community and has felt the pain they feel, and he has really good ideas.” More

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    ‘We must not stop’: potential Trump VP Ben Carson touts national abortion ban

    In a new book, the retired neurosurgeon, former US housing secretary and potential Trump vice-presidential pick Ben Carson calls for a national abortion ban – a posture at odds with most Americans and even Donald Trump himself.Hailing the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson US supreme court ruling that removed the federal right to abortion, Carson writes: “We must not stop there … the battle over the lives of unborn children is not yet finished. Many states have made abortion illegal because of the Dobbs decision, yet the practice continues in many more states.“What is needed is legislation that guarantees the right to life for all American citizens, including those still in the womb. Therefore, we must be boldly vocal about saving our fellow human beings through the legislative process. They are counting on us!”Carson’s book, The Perilous Fight: Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family, will be published later this month. The Guardian obtained a copy.With the book, Carson follows other potential Trump running mates in seeking to sell himself to the reading and voting public as well as the former president, among them the extremist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene; the former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard; and the South Dakota governor and self-confessed dog- and goat-killer Kristi Noem.No 2 to Trump may be a dubious prize – his vice-president, Mike Pence, ended up running for his life from Trump supporters who wanted to hang him on January 6 – but contenders continue to jostle.Recent reporting suggests Carson has slipped from the front rank. On Thursday, Bloomberg said Trump was closely considering Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota, and three senators: Marco Rubio of Florida, JD Vance of Ohio and Tim Scott of South Carolina.But Carson, 72, remains close to Trump, having challenged him for the Republican nomination in 2016 – briefly leading the race – before becoming one of the only members of Trump’s cabinet to stay throughout his term, even after Trump incited the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.Carson’s hardline views on abortion are well known: during his 2016 run he ran into controversy when he likened abortion to slavery and said he wanted to see the end of Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling which safeguarded the federal right.His new book comes nearly two years after Roe was brought down by a supreme court to which Trump appointed three rightwing justices.Carson writes: “I’m grateful that in my lifetime I was able to hear these incredible words established by the supreme court of the United States: “Held, the constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”Planned Parenthood v Casey was a 1992 case that upheld Roe. Thirty years later, tilted 6-3 to the right by Trump, the court brought both rulings down.Carson continues: “The supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson was a crucial correction to the error of Roe v Wade, and I am certainly grateful for that correction. However, we must not stop there.”Many observers suggest Republicans should have stopped their attacks on abortion rights before achieving their goal with the fall of Roe.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPublic opinion remains in favour of legal abortion: according to Gallup, just 13% of Americans agree with Carson that it should be banned entirely.Since Dobbs, fueled by such voter sentiment, Democrats have enjoyed electoral victories, even in Republican-run states, when campaigning on Republican threats to women’s reproductive rights. The issue has been placed front and centre of the presidential election to come by the Biden campaign.Extreme developments among the states have included the introduction of a six-week abortion ban in Florida and in Arizona the triggering (and repeal) of a brutal ban passed in 1864, before statehood and when the age of consent there was just 10.Trump has struggled to reconcile boasts about bringing down Roe with avoiding talk of a national ban.Last month, the former president said: “States will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both. Whatever they decide must be the law of the land, or in this case the law of the state.“Many states will be different, many will have a different number of weeks, some will be more conservative than others. At the end of the day this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart, or in many cases your religion or faith.“Do what’s right for your family, and do what’s right for yourself.” More

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    ‘Chaos will be created’: Arizona court hears election-subversion case – with eyes on 2024

    In a courtroom in Phoenix, Arizona, two elected officials who allegedly tried to subvert the county’s 2022 election tried to get a lawsuit against them thrown out in a case one of their defense attorneys called both “silly” and “scary”.The Cochise county supervisors, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, appeared in court virtually, to defend themselves against charges of attempted election interference for their initial failure to certify the county’s election results.The implications of the case extend far beyond the rural county and the Phoenix courtroom 200 miles away.The state attorney general, Kris Mayes, a Democrat, sought the charges in the deep-red border county, where election denialism has gripped part of the electorate. Those looking to sow doubt in elections found, to some degree, willing ears with the two Republicans on the board.View image in fullscreenTheir attorneys argue that the officials’ conduct did not actually delay the election results statewide. They also claim the two supervisors have legislative immunity for their votes, regardless of their underlying motivations. And, while the state has maintained that signing off on election results is a required duty not subject to supervisors’ discretion, the supervisors claim they don’t just serve as a “rubber stamp” on election results.The Arizona legislature’s Republican leaders filed a brief in the case aligning with the supervisors, saying that the lawsuit “portends further weaponization of legal and judicial processes for political retribution”.“What we’ve got is a rogue prosecution, a rogue prosecutor in a rogue prosecution, arguing, well, we’ll just take any legislative function – clearly, which it was, this vote – and we’re going to now read into it,” Dennis Wilenchik, Crosby’s attorney, said in a court hearing on 19 April.The lawsuit is part of a deeper conflict – a clash between a Democratic attorney general, narrowly elected in 2022, and Republicans who question election results in the state. The recent indictments against the Republican slate of Arizona fake electors, two of whom are sitting lawmakers, further the divide.Both Mayes and the Republican-controlled legislature allege the other side is playing politics instead of doing their job. The state house started a committee to investigate Mayes’ actions on various issues, including Cochise elections; the committee’s chair has said the group could recommend actions be taken against Mayes, including potential impeachment.The battle lines drawn in Cochise county extend far beyond its borders, into whether local elected officials can decide not to sign off on election results, into the fate of Arizona’s future and who controls it. The culmination of the case holds potential consequences for the 2024 election, when officials at the local level could try similar tactics to question results.View image in fullscreenPart of a patternAfter the 2020 election, activists in counties around the country turned up at meetings to allege that voter fraud stole the election from Donald Trump and demanded changes to how their elections are run.In Cochise county, these activists repeatedly brought up unsubstantiated claims about problems with tabulation machines that made their use in elections suspect. They wanted the county to count ballots fully by hand and throw out the machines.Crosby and Judd aligned with those activists, agreeing to a full hand-count. The idea invited a lawsuit, which led to a ruling that a full hand-count would be illegal in Arizona.The supervisors claimed they had lingering questions about the use of tabulation machines, specifically whether those machines had the proper certification, so they refused to certify the election. A court intervened, forcing certification. Judd eventually voted in favor of certifying results after the court ruling, but Crosby didn’t show up for the meeting.Personnel issues have plagued the elections office as these legal battles have played out. The county’s former elections director, Lisa Marra, opposed the hand count, and Crosby and Judd sued her personally in an attempt to get access to the ballots for a hand count. Marra eventually quit because of a “threatening” work environment, leading to a monetary payout.View image in fullscreenThe county is on its fourth elections director since the 2022 election, after the most recent director, Tim Mattix, left in April for personal reasons. The director before him, Bob Bartelsmeyer, was an election skeptic who stayed in the role for just five months after his conservative bonafides were repeatedly impugned by local far-right activists.Mayes’ office contends the two supervisors’ pattern of behavior leading up to delaying certification speaks to a plan to sow chaos in elections and question results.“This is a criminal conspiracy to obstruct the election,” the assistant attorney general Todd Lawson argued, “so that the secretary of state is unable to certify, and that chaos will be created, no one will know what will happen, and that people like the US House of Representatives, perhaps the Arizona legislature, will have to step in and declare election results, irrespective of who actually won.”Whatever happens in the case, now in Maricopa county superior court, it will almost certainly be appealed to a higher court.Crosby did not answer questions sent from the Guardian, responding: “No thanks.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJudd also did not respond, and her attorney said he had advised against her speaking with the media at this time.But Judd told Votebeat that she wasn’t a driving force for a hand count in the first place and voted for it because of what she was hearing from constituents.“You can ask anyone. I never pushed for it,” she said.A separate courtroom battle over the legality of hand counts, stemming from Mohave county, could affect whether Cochise and other jurisdictions pursue the elimination of voting machines in this year’s presidential election.In the Republican-dominated county, the supervisor Ron Gould sued Mayes after her office sent a letter warning supervisors against a full hand-count of the 2024 election, something the board there had been considering but ultimately voted against.Mayes warned that supervisors could face criminal prosecution if they proceeded with a hand count, as many counties across the country have tried to do since 2020.View image in fullscreenLegislature strikes backBefore the first meeting of the house ad hoc committee of executive oversight in early April, Mayes held a press conference and derided the legislature’s “outlandish personal attacks” on her and the attorney general’s office.“Perhaps our Republican senate president and speaker of the house aren’t very used to an attorney general who will actually roll up her sleeves and fight for Arizonans,” she said. “But that is what they have in me.”View image in fullscreenIn the house, Democrats skipped the meeting in protest. Representative Jacqueline Parker, the committee’s chair, said it would investigate Mayes’ actions to see whether she had weaponized her office or abused her authority, but it seemed the committee already believed she had.The Cochise county skirmishes were just one part of their opposition – they also mentioned her refusal to prosecute anyone who violated Arizona’s abortion ban and her unwillingness to defend laws on LGBTQ+ issues such as one outlawing trans girls from playing girls’ sports, among other concerns.One of the first records requests to Mayes’ office from the committee centered on Cochise county – in particular, an unsuccessful lawsuit brought by the attorney general when the board voted to move some election authority to the Republican county recorder, who had pushed for the hand count and cast doubt on elections.“We would like to better understand your motivation for targeting Cochise county and including such inflammatory and irrelevant material in your court filings,” the committee chairs wrote.Parker said in the initial hearing that she hoped Mayes cooperates with the records request because she would “really be interested in finding out why she’s only going after Cochise county and not other bad-acting counties like Pima or Maricopa, who have had, in my opinion, many, many more issues”.After Mayes announced the fake electors charges, Parker called on her to recuse herself from “any legal matters involving elected officials or candidates” because she has “prosecuted or threatened to prosecute public officials if they dare disagree with you”.Mayes’ office said the backlash doesn’t affect her work and that she “won’t let the partisan attacks by the GOP deter her from doing her job”. 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    Dark Brandon popping off: is Joe Biden’s ‘cringe’ TikTok helping or hurting him?

    In Joe Biden’s TikTok debut, timed to the Super Bowl in February, the president answered rapid-fire questions like “Chiefs or Niners?” (neither, he picked the Eagles because his wife’s a “Philly girl”) and flashed the Dark Brandon meme. He got more than 10m views, so by pure metrics, the video was no flop. But to use one of TikTok’s favorite disses, for many gen Z viewers it felt “cringe” – even pandering. Worse still, the TikTok, captioned “lol hey guys”, made the rounds after Israel struck Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza strip. Biden’s jokes infuriated users who flooded the post with the comment “WHAT ABOUT RAFAH?”“I don’t want my president to be a TikTok influencer,” read the headline of one USA Today editorial. One (actual) influencer told CNN the president’s attempt at meme-ing felt “performative”. A warm welcome to the app, it was not. But Biden’s team kept posting.Biden’s TikTok account, Biden-Harris HQ, has put out more than 150 videos since February, notching over 3.9m likes and 313,000 followers. That’s more than Maxwell Frost (570,000 likes, 96,000 followers), who became the first gen Z member of Congress in 2023, but a fraction of Bernie Sanders’ 11.4m likes or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 987,000 followers on the app. Congressman Jeff Jackson, a Republican from North Carolina with 2.2 million TikTok followers, is one of the most visible politicians on the app. His posts almost always hit more than a million views – only 11 of Biden’s videos have hit more than a million views.View image in fullscreenIf the idea of a president trying to go viral on TikTok seems frivolous, consider what’s at stake for Biden, who’s running a tight election race against Donald Trump. Gen Z was crucial in staving off a predicted “red wave” during the 2022 midterms, and Biden hasn’t exactly locked down the demographic for 2024: a Harvard poll from April found that Biden leads Trump by eight percentage points among 18- to 28-year olds, down from the 23-point lead Biden had at the same point in the 2020 election. The president’s continued support for Israel in the war on Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 people, is eroding youth support – especially as pro-Palestinian protests spread across US college campuses.TikTok is the most downloaded app among 18- to 24-year olds, and many young people count it as their main source of news. Is Biden winning over young voters by meeting them where they are?Dunking on TrumpHardly any Biden-Harris HQ TikToks show Biden awkwardly interacting with pop culture – not after what happened with his Super Bowl post. Instead, the account has hit its stride focusing on policy issues and dunking on conservatives.More than half of Biden’s TikTok content reminds viewers of Trump’s worst gaffes, such as the times Trump suggested that Americans inject bleach to ward off the coronavirus, or when he stared directly at the 2017 eclipse. The fight to protect abortion rights also features prominently. One post pulls a quote from a recent press conference, during which the former president bragged about ending Roe v Wade. Another reminds viewers that a Trump-endorsed candidate for Michigan state senate seat, Jacky Eubanks, called for banning birth control and gay marriage.“It’s very clear to me that Biden’s primary goals on TikTok are in line with his digital goals overall: to highlight and remind folks how dangerous Trump is, and to highlight the accomplishments that Biden has made that no one knows about,” said Josh Klemons, a Democratic digital strategist.View image in fullscreenNoting that many of TikTok’s younger users “didn’t live through Trump’s first presidency as an adult”, Klemons stressed that it was important Biden use his TikTok to zero in on the former president’s catastrophic track record. TikTok is a largely progressive platform, where anti-Trump content does well, and anti-Trump posts are among Biden’s most-watched TikToks. (They’re also an invitation to trolls: top comments on the bleach post, including “Biden sucks” and “Ban Joe Biden”, are all from pro-Trump accounts.)Many Biden TikToks have hundreds of thousands of views, with videos going moderately viral by TikTok standards. That’s not bad reach, but it could be better.A genuinely moving Biden TikTok, seemingly pulled from a campaign ad, shows a man named Bob approaching the president in a restaurant and shaking his hand in thanks for lowering the cost of insulin. It showcases Biden’s well-honed ability to connect one-on-one with voters … but it has only 224k views. Compare that with someone like Jackson, whose most recent TikTok on the war in Ukraine earned more than 1m views.One of Biden-Harris HQ’s highest-performing videos of late pulls a clip from an interview the president did with Howard Stern, in which he described Trump’s response to the January 6 riot. “When they were storming the Capitol … he was sitting in that dining area off the Oval Office for three hours… He said nothing … It was almost criminal.” The clip has 233,000 views – not a flop, but not a rousing success either.In another TikTok, the Biden campaign reposted a video of Steve Bannon talking about Project 2025, an extensive collection of proposals intended to reshape the federal government in support of a Republican agenda if Trump wins the election. Bannon says a second Trump administration would put his opponents in prison “on the evening after we’ve won”. The Biden campaign captioned the clip: “Project 2025 deserves more attention.”It’s a good caption – and Project 2025 does get attention on TikTok, usually in posts that do better than Biden’s. A recent TikTok from the voting advocacy group NowThis Impact, which has 3.3 million followers, also shared information about Project 2025. That video got more than 3.6m views. Biden’s received 43,000, while another Project 2025-themed TikTok from Biden, featuring Lara Trump, received just under half a million viewers.Bringing in backupThough Biden appears in some of his account’s TikToks – usually dragging Trump – the account isn’t all about him. (Perhaps a lesson learned from Hillary Clinton, who used social media during the 2016 race as if she were typing the tweets herself.) Instead, it often taps surrogates to help make Biden’s case. In one TikTok, Sanders speaks about supporting Biden despite not agreeing with him on every issue – a line the campaign no doubt hopes will land with gen Z voters who are against the war in Gaza. AOC touts Biden’s recent record on the climate crisis, and members of the Kennedy family filmed a video saying they support Biden, a swipe against the third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr.View image in fullscreenBiden also posted a clip of Frost, the token gen Z politician, reminding his peers in Congress that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene had spoken at an event held by white supremacists in 2022. “Someone like Maxwell Frost is going to hit differently [to that audience],” Klemons said. He also pulls in young viewers who might not realize they’re watching what is effectively a Biden campaign ad.Other Biden TikToks smartly mimic influencer content, with what appear to be younger campaign staffers speaking directly to camera about a abortion, immigration or, again, Trump gaffes. “You’ll never believe what Trump is doing in the courtroom,” one such host says in an intro that cuts to a screenshot of a New York Times report on the former president “struggling to stay awake” during his New York trial.“I like how they use younger people from their campaign to be some of the messengers,” said Ashley Aylward, a research manager at the gen Z-focused, DC-based consulting group Hit Strategies. “I think they should lean into that more, and just kind of let [the young people] take it all over. They could make ‘a day in the life working for the Biden campaign’, or a video that humanizes these people and shows that voting for this administration isn’t just voting for Biden, but it’s a group of diverse voices.”Aylward also recommended the account post fewer videos of Biden stumping – recent TikToks that feature Biden himself were filmed during campaign appearances.“If someone isn’t interested in politics, that’s not going to end up on their For You page, and if it does, they’ll scroll by it as soon as they see a podium,” she said. “But if they see a younger person doing a day in the life, or talking through a current event, it’s a smart way to reel people in without them even knowing they’re watching a campaign video.”And though it’s not quite a proxy, Biden’s TikTok has leaned into his so-called Dark Brandon persona, a laser-eyed character that riffs upon a pro-Trump meme. When Biden makes a joke at Trump’s expense during a speech, that’s supposedly Dark Brandon “popping off” or “dragging Trump”, as recent TikToks put it.“I actually do love the humor and using Dark Brandon to show that he can make jokes about himself,” Aylward said. “The account uses young people language in the TikTok caption, like ‘Biden cooks Trump,’ but they aren’t having Biden use the language himself. They’re showing this all from a young person’s point of view, engaging in the language they use.”Whether the effect is cringey or not, it seems, depends on one’s taste.Silence on Gaza and a possible TikTok banBiden’s TikTok account has faced more serious criticisms than cringey-ness. One of young people’s biggest concerns is the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza. In the comment section of his videos, users frequently ask Biden to engage with the topic or to order a ceasefire, but the account has remained silent on the issue.“Biden’s TikTok is clearly a one-way form of communication,” said Yini Zhang, an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo who studies social media and politics. “They’re sticking to some clearly thought-out talking points. They have issues they want to avoid, like Gaza, and the TikTok page is not as interactive as we often think it might be.”Another issue is the irony of Biden’s team putting resources toward TikTok when just last week, Biden signed a measure that could see the app banned in the US. (TikTok remains blocked on most government devices, per a 2022 law.)“It’s a funny position for him to be in,” Klemons said. “I can’t think of a situation that’s similar, where somebody is actively using a platform that they’re actively trying to get rid of. But they need to be where the people are.”It would take at least nine months for the app to disappear if it does at all, so Biden can milk the platform for the entire election cycle. Trump, who does not have a TikTok account, is currently opposed to a TikTok ban. (He’s posting furiously on Truth Social, where, funnily enough, Biden-Harris HQ also runs an account.) In fact, many politicians don’t even touch TikTok due to security concerns.TikTok’s allure has always been its supposed authenticity, with the most popular personas on the app appearing real, raw, unfiltered – even if many of their videos are highly scripted. “They want to project this persona of being authentic in a way that maximizes their appeal, but they also have to be careful in what they say,” Zhang said.Biden is no different. His TikTok follows the trends of the platform. His memes aren’t groundbreaking, but they’re not totally embarrassing either. His stats are middling, and he avoids engaging directly with young people on tough issues. Viewers are constantly reminded of his greatest hits, a persona he’s cultivated through decades in the public eye, but ultimately, the account is just another campaign mouthpiece. A TikTok alone will not clinch an election. More

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    in US Politics

    Biden was silenced by criticism from families of troops killed in Kabul, book says. ‘Sir, are you still there?’

    Joe Biden was stunned into silence when he was told families of US service members killed in Kabul in August 2021 said that when the bodies were returned and the president met grieving relatives, he spent too much time talking about the death of his own son, Beau.“I paused for the president to respond,” Jen Psaki, then White House press secretary, writes in a new book.“The silence that followed was a bit too long. I worried for a moment that our connection had been lost.“‘Sir, are you still there?’ I asked.”Psaki left the White House in 2022, joining MSNBC. Her book, Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House and the World, will be published in the US next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Biden ordered the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, after nearly 20 years of war, in April 2021. On 26 August, amid chaos in Kabul, 13 US service members and 170 Afghans were killed when a suicide bomber attacked an airport gate.On 29 August, the bodies of the Americans arrived at Dover air force base in Delaware, Biden’s home state. The president and the first lady, Jill Biden, attended.“Of all the president’s duties,” Psaki writes, “this is high on the list of most heartbreaking. For President Biden in particular, it stirred feelings of his own despair about the death of his son Joseph Biden III, aka Beau.”Beau Biden, a former attorney general of Delaware, went to Iraq with the national guard. He died of brain cancer in 2015, aged just 46.Biden has questioned whether “burn pits” at US bases in Iraq might have caused his son’s cancer, championing legislation to help affected veterans. In her book, Psaki cites World Health Organization research which says burn pit emissions contain substances “known to be carcinogenic to humans”.Psaki also notes how Biden endured the deaths in 1972 of his first wife, Neilia Biden, and their one-year-old daughter, Naomi, in a car crash in which Beau and his brother Hunter were critically injured. The president “often refers to these unique and disparate, but nevertheless unbearable, experiences of grief and loss as a way to connect with others”, Psaki writes.But Biden’s visit with the grieving families at Dover stirred up significant controversy, and political attacks.Psaki describes and dismisses as “misinformation” the claim, boosted by rightwing media, that Biden looked at his watch as the transfer of the bodies went on. Citing media fact checks, the former press secretary says footage shows Biden did so only after the remains had left the airport tarmac.Complaints that Biden spoke too much about his own son were tougher to deal with, Psaki writes, particularly when the New York Times “pounced” on the story.As it was part of her job to warn Biden about “unflattering” and “negative” stories, Psaki called him, though this instance was tougher than usual because “Beau was rarely, if ever, the focus of a negative story”.“It was one thing to tell the president the media was planning to criticise his Covid response,” Psaki writes, “and quite another to say the media was planning to criticise the way he speaks about his son, who passed away tragically young.”Still, she writes, Jill Biden had previously told her: “We’ve been through a lot. And we ask that you always be honest with us. Always tell us what’s coming.”Psaki called Biden and warned him about the Times story, which would say he “referenced Beau’s death repeatedly while meeting with families of the soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan last week” and “quote a number of family members making critical comments”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen the president finally answered her, Psaki says, he did so “in a softer voice than usual.“I thought I was helping them. Hearing about how other people went through loss always helps me,” Biden said.Psaki says Biden paused again, then said: “Thanks for telling me. Anything else?”The Times story duly appeared – as did others like it.One bereaved father, Mark Schmitz, told the Times he showed the president a picture of his son, L/Cpl Jared Schmitz, who was 20, and said: “Don’t forget his name.”“But Mr Schmitz was confused by what happened next,” the Times wrote. “The president turned the conversation to his oldest son, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015 … for Mr Schmitz, another father consumed by his grief, it was ‘too much’ to bear.”“I respect anybody that lost somebody,” Schmitz said, “but it wasn’t an appropriate time.”Psaki also describes how she herself dealt with the controversy.In the White House briefing room, she told reporters: “While [Biden’s] son did not lose his life directly in combat as [those killed in Kabul did] – or directly at the hands of a terrorist, as these families did … he knows firsthand there’s nothing you can say, nothing you can convey, to ease the pain and to ease what these families are going through.”Psaki also said Biden was “deeply impacted by these family members who he met … talk[ing] about them frequently in meetings and [the] incredible service and sacrifice of their sons and daughters. That is not going to change their suffering, but I wanted to convey that still.” More