Evelyn Reynolds

From 2h agoPresident Joe Biden has started his speech marking the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, which he described as “one of the most significant laws … of taking on a special interest and winning”.Biden begins thanking Vice-President Kamala Harris and members of Congress who played a “pivotal” role in getting the bill passed. “Everyone was telling us there’s no possibility with the divided Congress the way it was,” he said.Here’s a recap of today’s developments:
President Joe Biden used the first anniversary of his signature Inflation Reduction Act to pitch the landmark clean-energy law as an economic powerhouse to an American public that remains largely unaware of its contents. Speaking at a White House ceremony, Biden said the legislation has already created 170,000 clean energy jobs and will create some 1.5m jobs over the next decade, while significantly cutting the nation’s carbon emissions.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Maui on Monday to survey damage from the deadly wildfires that ravaged the resort town of Lahaina last week. The Bidens will meet with survivors of the fires, as well as first responders and other government officials, the White House said.
Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has proposed a trial commencement date of 4 March 2024 for Trump and his 18 co-defendants. That would have Trump in court mid-campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Willis is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word. Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges against Trump in the Georgia case were made public on Monday night.
Former vice-president Mike Pence said the Georgia election was not stolen in 2020 and that “no one is above the law” after Trump was indicted in the state’s election subversion case. Pence’s remarks were his first since the indictment was handed down on Monday, and mark a new full-court press in recent days surrounding his certification of the 2020 election results.
Trump’s dubious defense that he was exercising his free-speech rights in response to a four-count federal criminal indictment charging him with pushing illegal schemes to overturn his 2020 election loss is prompting ex-Department of Justice officials and scholars to criticize such claims as bogus and as threats to the rule of law.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election obtained a trove of direct messages that the former president sent to others privately through his Twitter account, according to newly unsealed court documents. A court filing last week showed federal prosecutors obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant. The social media platform delayed complying, prompting a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.
Americans are deeply divided along party lines in their views of Trump’s actions in the most recent criminal cases brought against him, according to a new poll.
We reported earlier that the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has proposed that Donald Trump’s trial on election interference charges start on 4 March 2024.Willis’s suggested date is just one day before Super Tuesday, when 15 states are scheduled to hold primaries or caucuses to select their 2024 candidates.Willis submitted her recommendation in a court filing which also requested arraignment for the defendants charged in the Georgia election case to take place during the week of 5 September.Trump is set to be on trial in New York on 25 March 2024 on separate charges connected to a $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels, a porn star, with whom he is alleged to have had an extramarital affair.He is also set to go on trial in Florida in May on charges of retaining classified documents after leaving office.The US has faced some tough times in recent years, Biden says. Despite this, he says the economy is stronger and better than any other industrial nation in the world right now.He accuses Republicans of having repeatedly tried to repeal key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, and of taking credit for private investments and the jobs coming into their states. “That’s OK,” he says. “I’m proud of the historic law my administration passed, but it’s not about me. It’s about you.”
Bidenomics is just another way of saying restore the American dream.
Biden says the US is investing more than $50bn to build up resilience to the impacts of climate change. He vows to cut carbon pollution by half by 2030.The Inflation Reduction Act is helping families save thousands of dollars in energy bills every year, he says. Consumers will save an estimated $27bn in electric bills between now and 2030, he says.
When I say climate means jobs, I mean good paying union jobs.
Biden says his administration is also boosting the nation’s energy security after years in which China dominated the clean energy supply chains.He says the time is over in which the answer has been to find the cheapest labor, and then to import the product from abroad. “Not any more,” he says. “We are building it here and sending the product over here.”The Inflation Reduction Act is projected to help triple wind power and increase solar power eightfold by 2030, he says.Biden says the Inflation Reduction Act is bringing jobs back to the US.
We’re leaving nobody behind. We’re investing in all of America, in the heartland and coast to coast.
The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has proposed a trial commencement date of 4 March 2024 for Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case.Willis also asked to schedule arraignments for the defendants for the week of 5 September, according to a court filing.Biden says more jobs have been created in the two years since he took office than any administration has in a single four-year term.The US has more jobs than before the pandemic, he says, and workers are finding better, higher-paying and higher-satisfaction jobs.Meanwhile, unemployment and inflation are down, he says. He attributes inflation falling to “corporate profits coming back down to earth”.President Joe Biden has started his speech marking the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, which he described as “one of the most significant laws … of taking on a special interest and winning”.Biden begins thanking Vice-President Kamala Harris and members of Congress who played a “pivotal” role in getting the bill passed. “Everyone was telling us there’s no possibility with the divided Congress the way it was,” he said.As we wait for Joe Biden to take the stage, here is some lunchtime reading on the Georgia election investigation.As part of Georgia district attorney Fani Willis’s delivery of a 41-count indictment against former president Donald Trump and 18 others, the racketeering charge also lists 30 “unindicted co-conspirators”.Here is the Guardian’s explainer on those individuals and their involvement in the alleged 2020 presidential election fraud:President Joe Biden is set to deliver an address at approximately 2.30pm on the anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act.We will bring you the latest updates of Biden’s remarks.It is the nature of conspiracy theories to turn tragedy into grist, to transform grief and human suffering into an abstract game. The latest horrifying example came out of news late July that Barack Obama’s chef Tafari Campbell had drowned in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard.What was a terrible accident and a tragic loss for Campbell’s family and friends was almost immediately seized upon by the paranoid corners of the internet as proof that somehow Barack and Michelle Obama had been involved in an assassination.It was not the first time that conspiracists have seized on a senseless death as proof of a deeper plot: the 1993 suicide of Vince Foster, lawyer in the Clinton White House, and the murder of the DNC staffer Seth Rich during the 2016 presidential campaign were both used as proof of a “Clinton body count” by the right wing, a playbook that was immediately resurrected as news of Campbell’s death broke. The difference was that those earlier conspiracy theories were focused almost entirely on the Clintons, while the current iteration is far more diffuse and its targets far more wide-reaching.Campbell’s death, these conspiracists claim, is not just proof of the Obamas’ criminality but of a massive network of treasonous child sex traffickers – an elaborate and convoluted narrative all too well known to us now as QAnon. QAnon appeared in 2017 and quickly spread through the far right, before beginning to wane in the wake of Joe Biden’s inauguration.But it hasn’t disappeared entirely, and understanding the conspiracy theory’s rise and fall – and the awful legacy it has left us – reveals a great deal about the modern landscape of partisan paranoia. It also offers some clues on how best to fight back.Read the full story here.Donald Trump is testing the limits of what the federal judge presiding over his 2020 election subversion case will tolerate after warning the former president against making inflammatory remarks.US district court judge Tanya Chutkan last week admonished Trump against violating the conditions of his release put in place at his arraignment, warning that inflammatory remarks from the former president would push her to schedule the trial sooner.Trump immediately tested that warning by posting on Truth Social messages that largely amplified others criticizing Chutkan. “She obviously wants me behind bars. VERY BIASED & UNFAIR,” Trump wrote on Monday.Trump has waged a similarly defiant campaign against others involved in criminal cases against him, including special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, the New York Times reported.
Some lawyers have said that if Mr. Trump were an ordinary citizen issuing these attacks, he would be in jail by now. The question is whether Mr. Trump will face consequences for this kind of behavior ahead of a trial.
‘He is absolutely in my view testing the judge and testing the limits, almost daring and taunting her,’ said Karen Agnifilo, who has a three-decade legal career, including as the chief assistant in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Ms. Agnifilo added that Mr. Trump is so far benefiting from his status as a candidate for office, facing fewer repercussions from the judges in the cases than other vocal defendants might.
Trump could be found in violation of the conditions of his release, which could entail a fine or even being sent to jail, the report writes.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges against Donald Trump in the Georgia case were made public on Monday night.Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia, and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton county commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago. She said:
I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe.
As Willis’s investigation approached its climax, Trump intensified his personal attacks on her through social media. He has accused her of prosecutorial misconduct and even of being racist herself.Willis has rebuffed his claims as “derogatory and false”.Trump has also unleashed a barrage of vitriol against Jack Smith, the special counsel who earlier this month brought four federal charges against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has referred to the prosecutor, who is white, as “Deranged Jack Smith”.The judge in the federal case, Tanya Chutkan, has warned him to be careful not to make inflammatory public comments about the proceedings, saying she would “take whatever measures are necessary” to prevent intimidation of witnesses or contamination of the jury pool.Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.“They never went after those that Rigged the Election,” Trump wrote.
They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!
Willis is African American. So too are the two New York-based prosecutors who have investigated Trump, the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted him in April over alleged hush-money payments, and Letitia James, the state attorney general who is investigating Trump’s financial records.Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.The attorney representing Donald Trump in his Georgia case once donated to the campaign of Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who filed charges against the former president on Monday.Drew Findling, who is on the team of lead Trump attorneys fighting against Rico charges in Georgia, has backed several Democrats, including donating $1,440 to Willis’ successful primary campaign in July 2020, Federal Election Commission records obtained by Rolling Stone reveal.Findling also donated $8,400 to Joe Biden’s winning campaign, records show.Findling is an attorney who has represented rap artists like Gucci Mane, Migos and Cardi B. He also has tweeted critically of Trump, calling him in 2018 “the racist architect of fraudulent Trump University”. More

A senior Democrat called Kevin McCarthy “pathetic and shameful” on Wednesday, for continuing to protect George Santos even as a staffer to the fabulist Republican congressman faced charges for impersonating the House speaker’s own chief of staff.Daniel Goldman of New York said: “According to a federal indictment, George Santos paid someone to impersonate Kevin McCarthy’s chief of staff to raise money, yet McCarthy continues to protect Santos.“Pathetic and shameful.”The indictment of Samuel Miele on four counts of wire fraud and one of aggravated identity theft was issued in the same New York court where in May Santos pleaded not guilty to charges including fraud, theft and money laundering, CNBC reported.Miele did not immediately comment.Santos was elected to his New York seat last November. He was soon found to have fabricated most of his résumé and to be under investigation in multiple jurisdictions for alleged misdeeds including campaign finance violations, dubious business schemes and sexual harassment.McCarthy removed Santos from committee assignments but otherwise refused to move against a congressman who backed him through 15 votes for speaker, saying investigations should run their course.In May, Republicans dodged a Democratic attempt to make Santos only the sixth member ever expelled from the House. Santos, who has admitted “embellishing” his résumé but denies wrongdoing, is running for re-election next year.CNBC first reported Miele’s impersonation of a senior McCarthy staffer, saying he called “wealthy donors” during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, identifying himself as Dan Meyer.In that report, in January, CNBC said: “The impersonation of the top House Republican’s chief of staff adds to an emerging picture of a winning congressional campaign propelled by fabrications and questionable tactics.”Since then, almost every aspect of Santos’s political career, even his real name, has been brought into question.Republicans under McCarthy control the House by just five seats, making Santos’s seat a key target for Democrats.Goldman, a former prosecutor and lead counsel to the first impeachment of Donald Trump, has worked with another New York Democrat, Ritchie Torres, to keep Santos in the spotlight.In remarks on the House floor in June, Goldman told Republicans: “You are the party of George Santos.“… The guy is an alleged and acknowledged liar and indicted, and you protect him every day … It’s pathetic, and it’s beneath you and it’s beneath this body.” More

Not content with trying to destroy America’s trust in the US election system with his big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, Donald Trump is now trying to destroy America’s trust in the US judicial system with another big lie.The second big lie is that judges, prosecutors, witnesses and juries are corruptly prosecuting Trump as a means of keeping him from being re-elected.Late on Monday, following a two-and-a-half-year investigation by the Fulton county, Georgia, district attorney, Fani Willis, a grand jury there charged the former president and 18 others with criminally seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia.This fourth indictment marks another step in the US’s slow but steady process of criminal justice. It is another illustration that no one is above the law.Willis and her staff deserve the nation’s thanks, as do special counsel Jack Smith and his staff at the justice department, who have brought evidence to other grand juries of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election nationwide and to steal secret documents.None of this is easy work under the best of circumstances. With a rogue former president fanning the flames of anger and recrimination, the work is also potentially dangerous.Trump has called Willis “corrupt”, and worse. He has called Smith “deranged”, among many other epithets and baseless charges. He has leveled similar charges against judges who have already been assigned to hear the cases against him.We know all too well of the violent proclivities of a subset of Trump supporters. His wild statements endanger people. Willis and her staff have already been threatened, as has Smith, and potential witnesses.On Monday morning, for example, before the Georgia grand jury even met, Trump posted that he “had been reading reports” that former Georgia lieutenant governor Jeff Duncan would be testifying before the grand jury.Trump then charged that Duncan “was, right from the beginning of this Witch Hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the Election Fraud that took place in Georgia. He refused having a Special Session to find out what went on … and fought the TRUTH all the way.”Was Duncan intimidated by Trump’s post when he testified on Monday? Did he alter or downplay his testimony out of fear of retribution by a Trump supporter?We may never know. But the mere possibility of intimidation is itself troubling.Trump’s conditions of release at his arraignment in Washington earlier this month included a vow – which Trump swore to uphold – that he would not intimidate or harass witnesses and officers of the court or threaten the administration of justice.Yet Trump has not ceased posting inflammatory invective against potential witnesses, against potential jurors in Washington DC, New York and Georgia, against judges who have been assigned to hear the cases against him, and against Willis, Smith and other prosecutors.The possibility that his threats might silence potential witnesses, or that his rants might intimidate jurors, prosecutors and judges, cannot be dismissed. It is incumbent on the courts to stop Trump, even if it requires revoking his release from jail pending his trials.Trump’s invective is also having a more insidious effect. By casting the criminal justice system as corrupt and partisan – as part of a conspiracy to prevent him from being re-elected – Trump is undermining public trust in that system.Republican members of Congress have joined Trump in charging that Democrats have “weaponized” the prosecutions against him, even though those prosecutions come through grand juries composed of average citizens.More than half of Republicans – including 77% of self-identified Maga Republicans – say the indictments and investigations against Trump are an attack on people like them, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll taken soon after the most recent indictment.“I AM BEING ARRESTED FOR YOU,” Trump posted in all caps on 3 August, the day of his indictment in Washington for seeking to overthrow the 2020 election.“I’m being indicted for you,” Trump said in June, after being charged with retaining government secrets.A century ago, the world witnessed fascist leaders who sought to fuse their identities with their followers while sowing distrust in all other institutions, so that followers lost their capacities for independent thought and accepted whatever the leaders said as truth.If a substantial portion of the American public comes to believe that the judges, juries and prosecutors seeking to hold Trump accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election are part of the same trumped-up plot to keep him from becoming president, the US’s 244-year experiment in self-government is seriously jeopardized.Trump’s second big lie is almost as dangerous to the future of American democracy, and to the rest of the world that looks to the US for leadership, as was his first.The second big lie should be understood as an extension of Trump’s attempted coup.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

A senior US lawmaker has challenged a Saudi Arabian official’s refusal to voluntarily testify before a Senate committee investigating the kingdom’s controversial golf deal with the PGA Tour, saying officials should be prepared to be subject to American laws and oversight if they invest in the US.Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator from Connecticut who serves as chairman of the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, also said he would consider “other legal methods” to force Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), to testify if he continued to refuse.Al-Rumayyan, who also serves as the chairman of Saudi Aramco and the Premier League club Newcastle United, was given until 18 August to comply with the committee’s documents request.Any move to testify before the Senate could have significant implications for al-Rumayyan, including being subjected to questions about the controversial so-called “anti-corruption” drive headed by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. That effort saw assets transferred to the PIF, and the alleged use by the kingdom of PIF-owned jets to transport Saudi agents who killed the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.There is no suggestion that al-Rumayyan had any knowledge or personal involvement in the matter.While the increasingly fractious exchanges between the Senate committee and the PIF appear to be centered on the Saudi-backed merger between the PGA Tour and the LIV Tour, Blumenthal’s comments strike at larger concerns in Washington over Saudi Arabia’s investment ambitions.Blumenthal said the PIF, which is worth about $780bn, already has “extensive business dealings” in the US and was much more than a “passive investor”. The sovereign wealth fund holds a $3.5bn stake in Uber, has recently established a US subsidiary, and holds investments in prominent US venture capital firms.“In short, PIF cannot have it both ways: if it wants to engage with the United States commercially, it must be subject to United States law and oversight,” Blumenthal said.The Senate committee investigating the PGA deal sent its first request to al-Rumayyan on 21 June, inviting him to testify at a 11 July hearing. The PIF declined, citing scheduling conflicts.In a letter released on Wednesday, Blumenthal said the committee’s second request – for al-Rumayyan to testify at an acceptable date in September – was met with a letter from PIF’s legal counsel, saying that al-Rumayyan would be “an inappropriate witness” because he was a minister “bound by the kingdom’s laws regarding the confidentiality of certain information”.The senator rejected the claim, pointing to a US district court decision in California, which ruled that al-Rumayyan was not exempt from testifying in legal matters connected to the PIF’s commercial activities. The court added that Saudi Arabia’s “sovereign considerations” were diminished by the PIF’s intent to benefit from its investments in the US.The PIF’s position – that al-Rumayyan deserves sovereign immunity because of his position as a Saudi official, and his obligations to the Saudi state – appears to directly contradict the kingdom’s public stance on other deals.In the UK, the PIF’s takeover of a controlling stake in Newcastle in October 2021 was given the green light after the club was given “legally binding assurances” that the kingdom would not have any control over the club.The PIF has declined in the past to address the apparent contradiction. The fund did not immediately comment on the Blumenthal letter. More

Rudy Giuliani has dined out for years on his aggressive use of Rico, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which he wielded with dramatic effect against New York mobsters in the 1980s.For his pains, he was granted an award by the Italian government. Later, as New York City mayor, he turned his use of the anti-racketeering law into a vote-getter, presenting himself as the hero of Rico.As an in-joke, he handed the keys of the city to the cast of the Sopranos. Then he went on Saturday Night Live and bragged about “sticking it to organised crime”.He may not be laughing so loudly now.On Monday night Giuliani, Donald Trump and 17 other co-defendants were slapped with organised crime charges in Georgia under the state’s Rico law, for allegedly having been part of a vast conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The hero of Rico had been hoist with his own petard.The grand jury indictment charges all of the 19 co-defendants, Giuliani included, with “racketeering activity” in Georgia and other states. It alleges that they acted together as a “criminal organisation” which engaged in illegal activities including forgery, filing false documents and conspiracy to defraud the state.The irony that Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county who is leading the prosecution, chose to hit the hero of Rico with a Rico rap has not been lost on Giuliani watchers. Appointed as US attorney for the southern district of New York in 1983, he did not so much invent the anti-racketeering law, which was enacted in 1970, as become an early adopter in its use against organised crime.His most famous case, the 1986 prosecution known as the “commission” case, targeted eight defendants at the very top of one of the most powerful New York mafia families. “The verdict reached today has resulted in dismantling the ruling council of La Cosa Nostra,” Giuliani said after the convictions were secured in a 10-week trial.His victory demonstrated the huge potential of Rico as a prosecutorial tool against crime gangs. Instead of the traditional approach of picking out individual foot soldiers, one arduous case at a time, Rico allowed prosecutors to take out the entire upper leadership of the criminal enterprise in a single devastating blow.Giuliani may well be ruing his much-vaunted success. The “commission” case put Rico on the map, and since 1986 it has spread widely at both a federal level and across state jurisdictions – Georgia included.The Fulton county indictment makes a specific point of highlighting aspects of Giuliani’s behavior in the thick of the 2020 election that it alleges amounted to racketeering. It recounts some of the more lurid lies that he disseminated in front of the Georgia lawmakers in an attempt to persuade them to subvert Joe Biden’s electoral victory in the state.The falsehoods included his claim that 10,315 dead people had voted in the presidential election; that fraudulent ballots had been counted five times in a counting center; and that two poll workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, had passed around USB ports “as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” seeking to infiltrate the voting machines.In July, Giuliani admitted in court that his comments about Freeman and Moss were false. Moss testified to the January 6 committee that the supposed USB ports she had exchanged with her mother were in fact ginger mints.The indictment presents all these incidents not just as lies, but as the actions of a member of a criminal racketeering enterprise, designed to further the conspiracy and achieve its goal of keeping Trump in the White House despite his electoral defeat. That Giuliani should have exposed himself to a Rico prosecution in this way is puzzling to those who have followed his legal career.“Of all the defendants, Giuliani knows Rico better than anyone, he lived with it for decades,” said Michael Discioarro, a former prosecutor in the Bronx. “Rudy knows darn well where the line is drawn, and it’s surprising to me that he even put himself in that position.” More

Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.“They never went after those that Rigged the Election,” Trump wrote. “They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!”Willis is African American. So too are the two New York-based prosecutors who have investigated Trump, the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted him in April over alleged hush-money payments, and Letitia James, the state attorney general who is investigating Trump’s financial records.Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges were made public on Monday night. Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Willis and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton county commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago.“I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe,” she said.As Willis’s investigation approached its climax, Trump intensified his personal attacks on her through social media. He has accused her of prosecutorial misconduct and even of being racist herself.Willis has rebuffed his claims as “derogatory and false”.Trump has also unleashed a barrage of vitriol against Jack Smith, the special counsel who earlier this month brought four federal charges against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has referred to the prosecutor, who is white, as “Deranged Jack Smith”.The judge in the federal case, Tanya Chutkan, has warned him to be careful not to make inflammatory public comments about the proceedings, saying she would “take whatever measures are necessary” to prevent intimidation of witnesses or contamination of the jury pool. More

The Georgia district attorney Fani Willis delivered an extensive 41-count indictment against former president Donald Trump and 18 others over their plot to subvert the 2020 US presidential election, unsealed late on Monday night. While each defendant faces a different list of charges, all 19 have been charged with racketeering in violation of Georgia’s powerful Rico (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, which carries a sentence of five to 20 years.The racketeering charge also lists 30 “unindicted co-conspirators”, as participants in the “criminal enterprise in Fulton county, Georgia, and elsewhere”.Willis did not charge the 30 unnamed co-conspirators in her investigation, but that doesn’t mean they can never face penalties for their involvement in the election fraud plot to keep Trump in power.Here’s what to know about the 30 unnamed co-conspirators.13 unnamed Georgia Republican electorsDavid Shafer, Cathy Latham and Shawn Still are the three fake electors – out of 16 total – that are named as defendants in Willis’s indictment, charged with racketeering and other felonies. But the other 13 appear to be listed among the unnamed co-conspirators: “Individual 2, Individual 8, Individual 9, Individual 10, Individual 11, Individual 12, Individual 13, Individual 14, Individual 15, Individual 16, Individual 17, Individual 18, and Individual 19.”On 14 December 2020, the 16 Republican electors had met to cast fraudulent votes for Trump by signing a document titled “CERTIFICATE OF THE VOTES OF THE 2020 ELECTORS FROM GEORGIA’’ that declared a Trump victory, falsely claiming that they were the “duly elected and qualified Electors” from the state. They then mailed that document, attempting to file it in a Georgia district court.According to the indictment, the fake electors committed three felony offenses, including: impersonating a public officer, forgery in the first degree, and false statements and writings; and they attempted to commit a fourth felony offense of filing false documents, according to the unsealed indictment.Individual 3: references point to Trump adviser Boris EpshteynReferences to “Individual 3” within Willis’s indictment point to Boris Epshteyn, a political consultant and adviser to Trump, as one of the unindicted co-conspirators who aided the plot to subvert the election.Epshteyn, who is also believed to be one of the six co-conspirators in the federal investigation into Trump’s January 6 involvement by Jack Smith, attended a 19 November 2020 press conference on behalf of the Trump campaign along with Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell where they made false statements of election fraud.Epshteyn was also copied on previously reported emails that detail parts of the fake electors scheme, which the Willis indictment identifies as being received by Individual 3.Individual 4: references point to Robert Sinners, Trump 2020 campaign election day operations officialDavid Shafer sent a previously reported email to Robert Sinners on 20 November 2020, asking him to help Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall “as needed”, which matches a reference involving “Individual 4” from the Willis indictment. Individual 4 was also copied on a number of messages asking for help with the 16 Georgia Republican electors scheme on 14 December 2020, to “avoid drawing attention” and ensure everything went according to plan.From the indictment: “On or about the 20th day of November 2020, DAVID JAMES SHAFER sent an e-mail to unindicted co-conspirator Individual 4, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, and other individuals. In the e-mail, DAVID JAMES SHAFER stated that SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, a Georgia bail bondsman, “has been looking into the election on behalf of the President at the request of David Bossie” and asked unindicted co-conspirator Individual 4 to exchange contact information with SCOTT GRAHAM HALL and to “help him as needed.” This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”Sinners sent the 14 December 2020 email referenced in the Willis indictment to Michael Roman and others saying: “All votes cast, paperwork complete, being mailed now. Ran pretty smoothly” which was previously presented by the House January 6 select committee.OthersIndividual 1: discussed with Trump on 31 October 2020 a draft speech for a widely televised 4 November 2020 news conference during which Trump falsely declared victory.Individuals 5 and 6: met with a group of Pennsylvania legislators at the White House on 25 November 2020 along with Trump, Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis to discuss holding a special session of the Pennsylvania general assembly.They also met with Arizona legislators, along with Giuliani and Ellis, on 30 November 2020 where the two Trump attorneys requested the Arizona legislators to unlawfully appoint Republican electors from their state.Individual 7: ‘Electors Whip Operation’Assisted with the fake electors scheme in six states – Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.This person is probably among a group of individuals associated with the Trump campaign whom Mike Roman enlisted to participate in his “Electors Whip Operation” – who kept track of Trump electors. That team included G Michael Brown, Peter McGinnis, James Fitzpatrick, Shawn Flynn, Jesse Law, Thomas Lane, Valerie Phillips McConahay, Robert Sinners and Ryan Terrill, as revealed by the House January 6 select committee.Individual 20: met with Trump, Giuliani, Powell and others at the White House where they “discussed certain strategies and theories intended to influence the outcome of the November 3, 2020, presidential election, including seizing voting equipment and appointing SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL as special counsel with broad authority to investigate allegations of voter fraud in Georgia and elsewhere”. While the individual’s identity is unclear, the 18 December 2020 meeting was infamously “unhinged” as Trump and his allies screamed at White House aides who pushed back against their plan to overturn the election. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, were among the Trump allies at that meeting.Individuals 21 and 22: copied on a 21 December 2020 email from Sidney Powell to the chief operations officer of SullivanStrickler LLC, who instructed him that they were to “receive a copy of all data” obtained by SullivanStrickler LLC from Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Michigan.Individual 23: Participated in a four-way phone call with Harrison Floyd, Trevian Kutti and Steve Lee on 5 January 2021.Coffee county, Georgia, voting machine data schemeIndividual 24: traveled with Scott Hall to Coffee county, Georgia on 7 January 2021. That day, Hall, Cathy Latham and Misty Hampton sought to unlawfully access voting machines at the Coffee county board of elections & registration office.Individuals, 25, 26, 27, 28, and 29: unlawfully sought to access data from voting machines in Coffee county, Georgia, at various points in January and February 2021.Individual 30: involved with the unlawful effort to access voting machine data. More

Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is flailing: the Florida governor, once considered a formidable contestant for the Republican nomination, is polling at a pathetic 14.8% among the Republican contenders. His camp is struggling to raise money, and the candidate’s public appearances have revealed him to be interpersonally unpleasant – coming off stiff, judgmental and creepy.At the Iowa state fair last week, DeSantis was caught on video telling a little girl, who was clutching a fairground treat, “that’s probably a lot of sugar”. The governor, a man so joyless that he scolded a child for eating candy, was later the subject of a taunting banner flown over one of his events: “Be Likable, Ron!”But just because DeSantis will not become president doesn’t mean that his constituents in Florida will be relieved of the policies he put in place there while trying to draw national attention to himself. In a years-long campaign that now seems destined to end with a third-place finish in Iowa, DeSantis reshaped Florida in his image, pursuing culture-war fights that he hoped would grab media attention and convince Republican primary voters that he was hurting their most hated enemies.Among these was the seizure and restructuring of New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college in Sarasota that was long known in the state for its curious students, eclectic faculty and countercultural bent. DeSantis overhauled the college’s board of trustees, appointing his own loyalists. The man newly in charge of New College is Christopher Rufo, a rightwing influencer known for whipping up moral panics. He’s been given a mandate to make the school conservative, bringing the curriculum in line with the governor’s ideological preferences, and reshaping it in the image of Hillsdale College, a private conservative Christian school in Michigan.Now Rufo has escalated his attacks on New College, transforming a board of trustees meeting into an ideologically driven attack on academic freedom – and eliminating the school’s gender studies department.Last Thursday’s trustees meeting was supposed to be mostly about the college’s quest to hire a new president: three far-right candidates were interviewed earlier that day. The meetings were already tense. New College’s students and faculty, along with staff, alumni and many ordinary Floridians, are appalled at what is being done to the school. The candidate interviews were livestreamed, but they had to be conducted in a secure separate building, cordoned off by police tape. When the board met in public in front of an audience, the proceedings became so contentious that four different onlookers were removed by police.For his part, Rufo seems to be courting this controversy. Like DeSantis, his is a politics of contempt, made up largely of sneering attempts to elicit an outraged reaction from his victims. At the board meeting, he brought up the proposal to eliminate gender studies abruptly, without advance notice to the full board, and without allowing any time for public comment. When student and faculty trustees – including Grace Keenan, the student body president, and Amy Reid, the director of the gender studies program – pointed out that the proposal violated procedures required by Florida state law, Rufo, who appeared at the meeting on Zoom, bulldozed through anyway. When Reid spoke movingly in defense of her program and its importance to students, Rufo could be seen in mute on the projector screen above her, laughing.Rufo’s own plans for the school are vague. Earlier in the meeting, he and his fellow DeSantis appointees had voted to overhaul the college’s course load, so as to require students to take courses in fields he designated using the Greek words “logos” and “technos”. It’s unclear what these terms are supposed to signify, or how exactly Rufo is translating them: “logos” is often interpreted as “word” but “technos” can mean either “technology”, “art” or “skill”. But perhaps the old-timeyness of the ancient Greek is all that Rufo is really going for: like much of the modern right, and indeed like DeSantis himself, he is solemn only in his style, and merely peevishly cruel in his substance.More to the point might be the fact that the end of New College’s gender studies department mirrors the broader project of Rufo’s boss, the terminally unlikable Ron. DeSantis has long been modeling his governorship of Florida on the rule of the autocratic Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, a darling of the American right who hosted 2023’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” ban on LGBTQ+ content in instruction for K-12 students was an imitation of an Orban-backed law banning “gay propaganda” anywhere minors might see it; the destruction of the gender studies program at New College follows Orban’s ban on gender studies programs in 2018.But DeSantis’s attacks on education go beyond the strictly defined gender studies field. Florida’s 2023 high school social studies curriculum advances the insultingly reductive lie that “slaves developed skills” that could be used “for personal benefit”. The attempt is to twist historical fact to legitimize a brutal and unjust racial hierarchy, and the same could be said of DeSantis’s attack on gender studies: to render natural and right what is in fact unnatural, constructed and violent.For his part, Rufo framed the attack on gender studies at New College in flippant, even blase terms: “The best universities, when they have programs that do not fit in with the mission … make hard calls to discontinue those programs.”Thanks to Rufo, New College is no longer among Florida’s best universities. And the “mission” Rufo was assigned to pursue there had less to do with scholarly integrity than with DeSantis’s culture-war fight-picking and presidential aspirations. It is a mission that is doomed to fail. Students and faculty at New College, however, are the ones who will suffer the consequences.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More