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    Pence will not face charges over classified files found at Indiana home

    The US Department of Justice has closed its investigation into former vice-president Mike Pence without filing any charges related to classified documents found in his Indiana home, a department official said on Friday.The department notified Pence through a letter, the official added.Representatives for Pence, who served under Donald Trump, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, although the Guardian confirmed the development via a source familiar with the investigation, and a Pence spokesperson told the Washington Post Pence is “pleased but not surprised” the investigation has come to an end.Pence is expected next week to jump into the increasingly crowded Republican field for president in the 2024 election, as is former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis are currently the frontrunners for the nomination, despite Trump still being the subject of multiple criminal investigations and civil legal action.Though Pence was Trump’s vice-president during his single term, Pence has since turned against Trump in significant ways, testifying against him in front of a federal grand jury in April on the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Meanwhile, Trump has said that Pence did “something wrong” by not standing by his lies that the election was rigged and he defeated Joe Biden.After revelations of classified material found at Trump’s Florida residence last year after he left office, the National Archives called on former presidents and vice-presidents to make checks for any material that should be in the government’s possession.A lawyer for Pence had notified authorities about the discovery of records with classified markings, prompting an FBI search for records at his Indianapolis residence this year.A justice department special counsel, Jack Smith, is investigating Trump’s handling of classified materials since leaving office in January 2021.A separate special counsel was appointed to conduct an investigation after Biden reported finding some classified material in his possession. More

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    Don’t be fooled – Trump’s presidential run is gaining more and more momentum | Lloyd Green

    The Republican field swells but the 45th president’s commanding lead holds. Like Jeb Bush – another Florida governor and defeated Trump rival – Ron DeSantis has demonstrated himself inadequate to the task. By the numbers, DeSantis trails Trump nationally and in the Sunshine state. DeSantis was born there. Trump only recently moved there. To be the man you gotta beat the man, and right now DeSantis is going nowhere fast.Ill-at-ease and plagued by a pronounced charisma deficit, DeSantis can’t even decide how to pronounce his own surname. He is 44 years old. That’s plenty of time to nail down this personal detail.Following his botched campaign rollout on Twitter, a perpetual scowl creases DeSantis’s face. He does not relish the task at hand. Presidential races are marathons, and he does not appear built for endurance.Trump administration alums fare no better. Both Mike Pence, the hapless former vice-president, and Nikki Haley, the forgettable UN ambassador, have generated little enthusiasm. They are stalled in the doldrums of single digits despite years in the public eye. Both come with the word “sell” stamped atop their foreheads.Pence’s near martyrdom on January 6 has earned few plaudits from the Republican base – a passel of enmity is more like it. His religious devotion elicits yawns and his unalloyed social conservatism in the face of modernity hurts more than it helps.On that note, Trump packed the supreme court with three justices who helped overturn Roe v Wade. He proved his point, takes credit, but is cagey about what may follow. Pence, by contrast, announces that “ending abortion is more important than politics”.That’s a losing strategy. In reliably conservative Kansas and Kentucky, voters scotched attempts to strip abortion of constitutional protections. In poker and politics, you have to know when to say “enough”.As for Haley, a former South Carolina governor, she trails Trump and DeSantis in her home state – never a good sign. Back when he was running for president, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s second secretary of state, derided her tenure at the UN as inconsequential. Plenty of Republicans seemingly concur.If any South Carolina Republican has a chance of making it on to a national ticket, it is Tim Scott, the state’s junior senator and one of three African Americans in the upper chamber. Unlike Haley, he does not evoke mockery. He projects unstudied calm; his eyes don’t glow from ambition overload.Like most Republican wannabes, however, he opposed the deal over the debt ceiling. On Thursday night, he cast his lot with the likes of socialist Bernie Sanders and progressive Elizabeth Warren and voted against raising the ceiling.Regardless, for Scott’s poise to matter, Trump would need to badly stumble. The former guy is already under felony indictment in Manhattan and stands adjudicated of sexually abusing E Jean Carroll, none of which has dented his intra-party standing.Indeed, the pending criminal charges look like a gift. Trump’s rivals fell into line. DeSantis and Pence reflexively attacked Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s district attorney. The base wouldn’t have it any other way.Whether Jack Smith, the special counsel, indicts Trump is the looming unanswered question. Still if past is prelude, the ever-growing Republican field stands to effectively boost Trump if and when he comes under increased legal fire.Going back to 2016, no allegation or bombshell proved powerful enough to sink him. In the end, all rallied around the flag. Beyond that, a bloated field stands to dilute opposition to Trump.Chris Christie is set to announce his candidacy next week. The former New Jersey governor brings backing from Wall Street in the person of Steve Cohen, owner of the New York Mets. By itself, that won’t be enough to win hearts and minds. According to a recent Monmouth poll, Christie is underwater among Republicans, 21% favorable to 47% unfavorable. He is the only challenger with unfavorable ratings.But that is not the end of the story. An ex-prosecutor, Christie is also a skilled debater. In his last run, he eviscerated Senator Marco Rubio even as he demolished his own campaign in the process.Whether Trump agrees to appear on the same debate stage later this summer is unclear. Between his huge lead and a shifting legal landscape, he could well balk on the advice of counsel.The Democrats should not mistake Trump’s legal woes as a glide path to their re-election. Joe Biden is singularly unpopular, questions about his physical and mental acuity abound, and inflation’s scars remain ever-present. His on-stage fall on Thursday at the Air Force Academy will raise further doubts.At the same time, Hunter Biden, his surviving son, is getting plenty of unwanted attention. Like Trump, he too could be indicted.Against this backdrop, the president possesses little room to maneuver. His margin for error is close to nil.
    Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

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    Joe Biden hails ‘big win’ as bipartisan debt ceiling bill reaches his desk

    The bipartisan bill to solve the US debt ceiling crisis just days before a catastrophic and unprecedented default was on its way to Joe Biden’s desk on Friday as the US president prepared to address the nation and hailed “a big win for our economy and the American people”.The compromise package negotiated between Biden and the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, passed the US Senate late on Thursday.Biden acknowledged that it leaves neither Republicans nor Democrats fully pleased with the outcome. But the result, after weeks of torturous negotiations, shelves the volatile debt ceiling issue until 2025, after the next presidential election.“No one gets everything they want in a negotiation, but make no mistake: this bipartisan agreement is a big win for our economy and the American people,” Biden tweeted after the Senate voted 63 to 36 to pass the deal agreed between Biden and McCarthy last weekend, which passed the House on Wednesday.The final Senate vote capped off a long day that ground into night, as lawmakers spent hours considering amendments to the legislation. All 11 of the proposed amendments failed to gain enough support to be added to the underlying bill.Several of the amendments were introduced by Senate Republicans who expressed concern that the debt ceiling bill passed by the House did too little to rein in government spending.“Tonight’s vote is a good outcome because Democrats did a very good job taking the worst parts of the Republican plan off the table,” the Senate majority leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer, said after the vote.As part of the negotiations over the bill, McCarthy successfully pushed for modest government spending cuts and changes to the work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Programs. Those changes were deemed insufficient by 31 Republican senators, who echoed the criticism voiced by the 71 House Republicans who opposed the bill a day earlier.The Senate minority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, supported the bill, even as he acknowledged that lawmakers must take further action to tackle the federal government’s debt of more than $31tn.Senate Democrats lobbied against certain provisions in the bill, namely the expedited approval of the controversial Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline. Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat of Virginia, introduced an amendment to remove the pipeline provision from the underlying debt ceiling bill, but that measure failed alongside the 10 other proposed amendments.Refusing a once-routine vote to allow a the nation’s debt limit to be lifted without concessions, McCarthy brought Biden’s White House to the negotiating table to strike an agreement that forces spending cuts aimed at curbing the nation’s deficits.“The fact remains that the House majority never should have put us at risk of a disastrous, self-inflicted default in the first place,” said Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat. “We should prevent the debt ceiling from being used as a political hostage and stop allowing our country to be taken up to the edge of default.” More

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    Kevin McCarthy’s victory lap over the debt ceiling bill could end early

    Kevin McCarthy was all smiles on Wednesday night after the House passed the debt ceiling bill, crafted by the Republican speaker and Joe Biden, in a resounding, bipartisan vote of 314 to 117.“I’ve been thinking about this day before my vote for speaker because I knew the debt ceiling was coming,” McCarthy told reporters. “I wanted to make history. I wanted to do something no other Congress has done, that we would literally turn the ship and for the first time in quite some time, we’d spend less than we spent the year before. Tonight, we all made history.”But the details of the debt ceiling vote reveal a more nuanced picture of the dynamics in the Republican-controlled House, and they suggest McCarthy’s victory lap may soon be cut short.The debt ceiling bill, which will suspend America’s borrowing limit until 2025 and enact modest cuts to government spending, was supported by 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats in the House. Although roughly two-thirds of House Republicans voted for the bill, 71 members of McCarthy’s own conference opposed the legislation due to complaints that it did not go far enough to rein in government spending.Speaking to reporters after the final vote, McCarthy brushed off questions about why the bill he helped craft proved more popular among House Democrats than his Republican colleagues. Instead, McCarthy focused attention on his successful effort to defy Democrats’ wishes for a “clean” debt ceiling bill with no strings attached. Biden spent months insisting he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling, but the White House was ultimately dragged into talks with Republicans, McCarthy reminded reporters.“We were never going to get everybody, but we have spent four months bringing everybody together. And whether you voted for or voted against it, you wanted something more,” McCarthy said. “But history will write this is the largest [spending] cut in American history.”Members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus did not view the bill the same way. Many of them argued the deal struck by McCarthy and Biden bore little resemblance to the legislation originally passed by House Republicans last month, which would have enacted much deeper spending cuts and stricter work requirements while only raising the debt ceiling into 2024.Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, chair of the Freedom Caucus, attacked McCarthy for failing to “hold the line for the bill that we passed” in his negotiations with Biden.“The speaker himself has said on numerous occasions, the greatest threat to America is our debt, and now is the time to act. We had the time to act, and this deal fails – fails completely,” Perry said on Tuesday. “We will do everything in our power to stop it and end it now.”Those efforts fell short. After Freedom Caucus members failed to quash the bill when it came before the House rules committee on Tuesday, McCarthy’s Republican critics staged one final attempt to prevent the legislation’s passage. Twenty-nine House Republicans opposed the procedural motion to set up the final vote on the debt ceiling bill, and that resistance would have been enough to kill the legislation if Democrats had not come to McCarthy’s assistance. In the end, 52 Democrats supported the procedural motion, clearing the way for the bill’s ultimate passage.But McCarthy’s failure to advance the bill along party lines did not go unnoticed by Democrats.“It appears that you may have lost control of the floor of the House of Representatives,” said the New York representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, on the floor on Wednesday night. “Earlier today, 29 House Republicans voted to default on our nation’s debt and against an agreement that you negotiated. It’s an extraordinary act that indicates just the nature of the extremism that is out of control on the other side of the aisle.”The bold act of defiance from dozens of McCarthy’s fellow Republicans raised questions about his future in the speaker’s chair. Because of Republicans’ narrow majority in the House, McCarthy had to endure 15 rounds of voting before he secured the speakership back in January. To win over the skeptics within his conference, McCarthy offered a number of concessions to allay their concerns about his leadership.One of those concessions could now come back to haunt him. According to the House rules approved after McCarthy’s victory, any single member of the chamber can introduce a “motion to vacate”, which would force a vote on ousting the sitting speaker.Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, one of the Freedom Caucus members who opposed the debt ceiling bill, said on Wednesday that McCarthy “should be concerned” about a potential motion to vacate.“After this vote, we will have discussions about whether there should be a motion to vacate or not,” Buck told CNN.But even Buck acknowledged that he and his allies may not have the votes to remove McCarthy, and the speaker has said he is “not at all” concerned about losing his gavel. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was one of eight Freedom Caucus members to support the debt ceiling bill, dismissed suggestions of ousting McCarthy as “absolutely absurd”.“I think they would find out that it’s not as popular as they think, just because it looks good on Twitter right now,” Greene told reporters on Wednesday night. “It would be a really dumb move.”Even if McCarthy’s critics could somehow muster the votes to oust him, it remains entirely unclear who could earn enough support in the House Republican conference to replace him. So McCarthy’s speakership appears to be safe – for now. More

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    ‘It left me with nothing’: the debt trap of payday loans

    Meka Armstrong of Detroit, Michigan, has struggled in a cycle of debt from payday loans for years. She first took out a payday loan in 2010 to cover the costs of medication she needs as she is disabled and lives with lupus.“Worst decision I ever made,” said Armstrong. “The interest rate was 49% and I thought I would get my medications and pay the money back, but when I paid the money back, it left me with nothing. That’s how they get you. I, unfortunately, started the payday nightmare, and you can’t get out of the loop.”Armstrong is just one of the 12 million Americans who take out payday loans annually in the states where payday lending is not prohibited, shelling out up to $9.8bn in fees to payday lenders every year. The industry targets Black borrowers such as Armstrong, and Latinos, who are more likely to have lower credit scores and be unbanked compared with their white counterparts.A payday loan is a short-term, high-cost loan typically due on an individual’s next payday. But the payday industry thrives and depends on borrowers who take out numerous loans and face exorbitant fees and interest rates when they can’t keep up. Payday lenders collect 75% of their fees from borrowers who take out 10 or more loans a year, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.The average payday loan customer has an annual income of about $30,000 and four in five payday loans are rolled over or renewed. The average payday borrower stays in debt for five months, paying $520 in fees to borrow $375 on average. The majority of borrowers, seven out of 10, take out payday loans to pay rent, utilities or other basic expenses.It took Armstrong years to get out of the debt cycle, which she said was difficult because the payday lenders have borrowers’ bank account information, can sue them and even threaten them with jail time for nonpayment.During the Covid pandemic, Armstrong had to take out another payday loan, even though she had previously experienced the debt trap and the consequences of doing so, because she caught Covid in 2020 and was sick.“It’s embarrassing because I know how predatory they are, but I had Covid-19 for 98 days, almost died, my whole house was sick and we were behind on bills,” she added. “I’m still in the payday nightmare because of that desperation unfortunately.”The US has a poor record when it comes to regulating payday lenders. Currently 20 states and Washington DC have enacted rate caps of 36% annually or less to rein in the cycle of debt that traps consumers who take on payday loans, aligning these states with the federal Military Lending Act passed during the George W Bush administration that capped annual interest rates on consumer loans for active duty military at 36%.In states without caps, the average annual interest rate for payday loans is about 400% and as high as 664%.“The debt trap is very much by design and it’s how payday lenders’ business model works,” said Yasmin Farahi, deputy director of state policy and senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. “They succeed by making sure their customers fail. They target low-income communities and communities of color, and it’s a model that’s based on their customers failing, essentially, for them to stay in business and generate fees.”In Minnesota, the state legislature recently passed a law to cap interest rates on payday loans to 36% annually, from average annual interest rates in the state of 220% in 2022.Opponents to the legislation claimed the cap would deter lenders from doing business in Minnesota, though advocates have countered that this has not been the case in states where similar legislation has already been enacted.“It’s meant to be a continuous cycle,” said a payday loan recipient in Minnesota who requested anonymity. “You end up having an emergency, and then you think that, OK, I can pay this off, it’ll be a one-time thing and that’ll be that, but then your next paycheck comes, and it comes out of your bank account automatically and then you’re essentially just back where you started. So then you have to take the same loan out, basically the same day that you pay it off. And it just keeps going and going and going every payday.”Anne Leland Clark, the executive director of Exodus Lending in Minnesota, supported the cap. The legislation was split across partisan lines with Democrats introducing and supporting the bill though polling across political lines showed 79% of Minnesotans supporting a 36% or lower interest rate cap.Prior to Democrats in Minnesota winning a trifecta majority in the state government in November 2022, efforts were made at the local level to enact interest rate caps.“No longer will people be turning and getting into debt traps, or balloon payments, where their ability to repay is not accounted for,” said Clark.She noted a provision was added to the legislation that would permit lenders to charge 50% annual interest rates as long as they report doing so, but Clark noted her organization will be monitoring to see how lenders utilize the provision.“When you crowd out the predators, people are going to turn to and find the more responsible lenders and the more responsible lenders are going to license in your state,” Clark added.Jason Ward, a bankruptcy lawyer in South Carolina, where payday lending is permitted and unregulated, said over half of his clients filing for bankruptcy have at least one payday loan.The average annual interest rate for a payday loan in South Carolina is 385 %.“The interest numbers are so high that I honestly don’t believe the payday loan companies even intend to get paid back,” said Ward.He said many of his clients take out the loans out of desperation to cover basic expenses and that desperation is taken advantage of by payday lenders who know many clients will accept loans with exorbitant terms because they are just focusing on trying to survive at the present.“When you weigh how desperate somebody can be with what’s being offered, you get the sense that it can be predatory,” Ward said. “I don’t think people understand the desperation of a lot of people’s situations.” More

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    Who won the debt ceiling negotiations? – podcast

    On Wednesday night the House debated legislation to increase the US debt limit until January 2025, before passing the bill by a vote of 314 to 117, in a rare showing of bipartisan action.
    It then narrowly passed the Senate late on Thursday night, heading straight to Biden’s desk to sign just days before the 5 June deadline. This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the congressional reporter for the Washington Post, Marianna Sotomayor. They discuss whether Biden and McCarthy are right to see this as a win, or have they failed by simply giving into the demands of the other side

    How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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    Donald Trump and Fox News play it safe in town hall as network faces lawsuit

    Donald Trump and Fox News played it safe on Thursday with a town-hall event in Iowa that swerved past the former US president’s election lies and liability for sexual abuse.The uncharacteristic omissions were a striking contrast to Trump’s recent town hall on rival network CNN and likely a source of relief for both his own lawyers and those of Fox News.In April, the beleaguered network agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787m to avert a trial in the company’s lawsuit over its promotion of Trump’s debunked claims about the 2020 election.The case had already embarrassed Fox News over several months and raised the possibility that its founder, Rupert Murdoch, and stars such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity would have to testify publicly. Fox News still faces a defamation lawsuit from another voting technology company, Smartmatic.But Thursday night’s town hall with Trump in the Des Moines suburb of Clive was pre-taped, giving Fox News the option of editing out egregious lies about the 2020 election in general, or Dominion and Smartmatic in particular, before it was broadcast.The choice might have been informed by CNN’s fateful decision last month to go live with a Trump town hall from New Hampshire. The ex-president repeated a fusillade of bogus election claims and insulted writer E Jean Carroll a day after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against her; Carroll now intends to go back to court to seek additional damages.Fox News’s version, hosted by Hannity before a partisan pro-Trump crowd, managed to avoid references to either the stolen election conspiracy theory or the Carroll case. Instead, via soft questions and rambling answers, it took aim at Joe Biden and Republican primary election rivals such as Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor.Hannity began: “Unlike fake news CNN, it’s not my job to sit here and debate the candidate. We are going to ask him about the issues of the day that matter to the people – the voters who will also have their questions as well.”Despite this promise, Hannity launched the event by showing film of 80-year-old Biden suffering a fall at a US Air Force Academy graduation ceremony earlier on Thursday. Republicans and Fox News have long sought to make the president’s age an election issue.After Trump had entered to whoops, cheers and chants of “USA! USA!”, Hannity asked him to comment on the incident. “Not so good,” said Trump, 76, wearing his usual dark suit, white shirt and long red tie, perched on a tall chair opposite a tieless Hannity. “It’s sad, it’s sad. They’re representing – we are all representing the country when you become president – and you’re sort of not allowed to do that.“But it’s happened. It’s happened and it’s happened pretty badly. We won’t go into it, but we all know the ones and they count those acts, you know, they never forget. But that was a bad fall.”Hannity went on to suggest that Biden is “cognitively not there”. Trump replied that he had urged Hannity not to joke about the matter, for example by referring to Biden needing a “sippy cup”. He added “This is the most dangerous time in the history of our country because of the power of the weaponry and we have somebody that doesn’t understand what’s happening.”Later Trump also went on the offensive against his Republican primary rivals, whose names elicited boos from the crowd. He dismissed DeSantis’s claim to be a better candidate because he can theoretically serve two terms. “I heard ‘DeSanctis’ say, ‘Oh, I get eight years, he gets four.’ You don’t need four and you don’t need eight. You need six months.”The former president mocked Chris Christie’s approval rating in his native New Jersey, branded Asa Hutchinson as “Ada” Hutchinson and suggested that DeSantis will soon no longer be his main challenger: “I really go after the one who second and I think the one who second is going down so much and so rapidly that I don’t think he’s going to be second that much longer. I think he’s going to be third or fourth. He had a very bad day today. He got very angry at the press.”As the audience chuckled, Trump added: “At the fake news, he got angry.”Just as in the CNN town hall, Trump stressed his role in appointing supreme court justices who helped overturn Roe v Wade, the supreme court precedent that enshrined the constitutional right to abortion, but warned against alienating voters by taking an extreme position on the issue. DeSantis recently signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida.Trump said: “I did something that nobody thought was possible. I got rid of Roe v Wade and by doing that, it put pro-lifers in a very strong negotiating position. Now they’re negotiating different things and I happen to be of the Ronald Reagan school in terms of exemptions, where you have the life of the mother, rape and incest. For me, that’s something that works very well and for probably 80, 85%, because don’t forget, we do have to win elections.”The issue had energised Democrats in last year’s midterm elections, he noted. “When you didn’t have the exceptions, they went after the people viciously – the ads – and those people generally speaking didn’t do very well in terms of election.”The former president also railed against multiple criminal investigations into his conduct (“If my poll numbers went down, it would all end”), insisting that everything he did in handling classified documents was “right” and making false assertions about the quantity of documents found in Biden’s possession. He made racist comments about Washington’s Chinatown district and claimed that he could settle the war between Russia and Ukraine “in 24 hours”.Ammar Moussa, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said: “In what was mostly an incoherent, rambling appearance full of recycled lies on Fox News, Donald Trump told the truth at least once in his safe space – no one did more to pave the way for abortion bans across the country than him.“Whenever Trump is given a platform, he reminds America not only how much of a failure his presidency was, but just how extreme and dangerous he is. While President Biden focuses on continuing to deliver historic results for working families and protecting Americans’ hard-won freedoms, all Trump does is remind the American people why they rejected him and his failed presidency.”DeSantis, aiming to recover from a glitchy campaign launch, was touring New Hampshire on Thursday. In Laconia, he took a dig at former reality TV star Trump by remarking that “leadership is not about entertainment”. Former vice-president Mike Pence and former New Jersey governor Christie are expected to join the race next week. More

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    Trump repeats his usual lies in Fox News town hall – but the big lie is missing

    Fox News hosted a town hall event in Iowa with Donald Trump on Thursday night, allowing the president to repeat his well-worn grievances and lies. But remarkably, the pre-taped hour-long prime-time special hosted by Sean Hannity excluded any mention of Trump’s conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him.The first installment of the broadcast came just two weeks after CNN broadcast a chaotic, lie-laden town hall with the former president that has been harshly criticised by journalists within and outside the network.Here are our main takeaways from the night.Fox News pre-taped the event, allowing the network to edit out lies that could provoke further lawsuits. And notably the hour-long special didn’t include a single reference to Trump’s election conspiracy theories.Fox has good reason to tread carefully. The network recently agreed to a $780m settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over its broadcasting of Trump’s election lies, and it is still facing a defamation lawsuit from another voting technology company, Smartmatic.The network plans to air more footage from the town hall Friday evening, but Thrusday’s broadcast steered Trump away from the 2020 election, instead directing him to discuss Joe Biden’s mental acuity, the border wall, and a host of other topics that reliably rile up Fox views and Trump’s base.The night stood in stark contrast to the CNN event, during which Trump repeatedly, baselessly claimed that the 2020 election was rigged against him, and that “millions” of votes were stolen from him. On that night, Trump also disparaged author E Jean Carroll, prompting her to seek “very substantial” additional damages soon after he was found liable in a civil case for sexually abusing her.On Thursday, Trump’s very strong tendency to compound his own legal troubles by repeating lies and conspiracy theories that have already landed him in trouble were tamped by Hannity’s gentle questioning and redirection – and perhaps some strategic editing.The night showed just how much Fox News and Trump still depend on each other.Fox helped launch the former president’s political career, readily backing and promoting his most extreme views. For years, Trump would call in to the rightwing news channel seemingly whenever he wanted to. But the relationship appears to have frayed over the past year. The network began to host Trump less often, while the former president disparaged hosts who proffered even mild critiques.Then the Dominion lawsuit aired out Fox executives’ and hosts’ private disdain and mockery of Trump and his allies, even as the network continued to air interviews with them.Still, with Trump still leading among Republican candidates, Fox has continued to offer him more coverage than any other major network, even as some hosts hedge their bets on his rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Trump, meanwhile, needs Fox – the only network that is likely to offer him largely unchecked access to a nationwide audience of supporters. Smaller rightwing networks like Newsmax still have nowhere close to as much reach.As Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), said earlier this year: “It’s a toxic relationship” – but evidently, or necessarily, a committed one.Though Fox may have edited out any defamation, they left in several lies and exaggeration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump town halls have overwhelmed and exhausted factcheckers for years. Thursday night’s carefully stuctured and edited broadcast wasn’t an exception – Trump certainly embellished personal grievances and accomplishments.The former president repeated outlandish claims about abortions, including the allegation that doctors want to continue “killing” babies after they are born and lamented that the military wasn’t learning to fight because of “wokeness”. Some of the lies were a bit b-side – he deflected discussion of the investigation into his handling of national security materials and obstruction of justice approaches with niche allegations that Biden stored documents in Washington DC’s Chinatown.Still, the pace of Trump’s falsifications, and his tendency to run away with a conspiracy theory had largely been tamed by the event’s produces and editors.Hannity reprised his role as Trump’s promoter.The Fox News host was one of Trump’s first and strongest champions and advisers – but his relationship with the former president was tested after he testified under oath that he never believed Trump’s 2020 election falsehoods.At the town hall in Clive, Iowa, Hannity served Trump a series of softball questions, gently directing him to speak to his strengths. The event began with Hannity asking about Joe Biden’s mental and physical fitness to serve, and replaying footage of the president taking a tumble at an event earlier in the day. When Trump referred to his own stumble down a ramp, Hannity helpfully chirped: “You were coming down a ramp didn’t have a rail. You had dress shoes on like you have now, which are very slippery.”He raised the newly publicized recordings of Trump discussing classified documents, but accepted the former president’s response: “I did everything right.” More