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    Biden is dramatically out of touch with voters on Gaza. He may lose because of it | Moira Donegan

    Joe Biden’s re-election team is playing it cool. The Biden campaign has long been shrugging at the president’s fading polls, turning down opportunities to put him in front of voters, and generally doing their best to portray an air of confident nonchalance. The campaign’s apparent lack of concern seems, or perhaps is meant to seem, like an expression of certainty in the outcome: that Biden will win re-election, and that it won’t be close. They want us to think that they’ve got it in the bag.They do not. Biden is in no way guaranteed re-election, and all available information suggests that the contest will be close. Donald Trump has been narrowly but consistently ahead in national polls. A new dataset released by the New York Times on 13 May found that Biden was trailing in five key swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania – and suffering from disillusionment among young voters as well as Black and Latino ones.In typical style, the Biden camp brushed this off. “Drawing broad conclusions about the race based on results from one poll is a mistake,” Geoff Garin, a pollster for the Biden campaign, told the New York Times. But at this point, it’s not just one poll. It’s a lot of polls.What’s driving this discontent among young voters and voters of color – those cornerstones of Biden’s coalition that were so key to his 2020 victory over Trump in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania? There are several factors, but one issue remains consistent in these voters’ accounts of their dissatisfaction with Biden: his handling of Israel’s assault on Gaza.The indiscriminate bombing and civilian massacres that have accompanied Israel’s assault on Palestinians are a moral catastrophe that has shaken many Americans’ souls. The United Nations now estimates that more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the start of the fighting. Since many human bodies are buried beneath the rubble of Gaza’s bombed homes, schools and hospitals, that number is likely to be a significant undercount. The dead are mostly women and children. More than 1,000 children in Gaza have lost limbs to Israel’s war of revenge.If that figure cannot shake you into moral recognition, consider that many of those children have endured their amputations without anesthesia, since medicine – like food – has largely been prohibited from being delivered to Gaza by Israeli authorities. More than 75% of Gaza’s population is now displaced, according to the UN; they have left homes, worlds, entire lives that they will never be able to retrieve. More than 1.5 million people are now sheltering in Rafah, the strip’s southernmost city, which Israel is currently bombing and is poised to invade. Many human rights advocates and experts in international law have described Israel’s actions against Gazans as genocide. The death toll will keep climbing.Many voters believe, with good reason, that none of this would have happened without Biden’s assent. Biden has continued to speak of Israel’s attack on Palestinian civilians using the absurd language of “self-defense”. He has insulted Jewish Americans and the memory of the Holocaust by invoking them to justify the slaughter. And though his White House repeatedly leaks that he is “privately” dismayed by Israel’s conduct of the war, he has done little to stop the flow of US money and guns that support it.Even after the US state department issued a vexed and mealy-mouthed report on Israel’s conduct, which nevertheless concluded that it was reasonable to assess that Israel was in violation of international humanitarian law, the Biden administration has continued to fund these violations. That state department report was published on 10 May. The Biden administration told Congress that it intends to move forward with a $1bn arms sale to Israel. “OK, [Israel] likely broke the law, but not enough to change policy,” is how one reporter summarized the administration’s judgment. “So, what is the point of the report? I mean, in the simplest terms, what’s the point?”Meanwhile, Biden has expressed public disdain for the Americans – many of whom he needs to vote for him – who have taken to protest on behalf of Palestinian lives. Speaking with evident approval of the violent police crackdowns against anti-genocide student demonstrations, he said coolly: “Dissent must never lead to disorder.”It is a creepy and nonsensical claim, almost chilling in its Orwellian ahistoricism. But Biden does not see the protest movement against his war support as a legitimate instance of dissent, because he does not seem to understand concern for Palestinians as a legitimate moral claim. At times, he has seemed almost incredulous that any Americans would take sincere offense at the massive violence and waste of Palestinian life, as if such a concern was incomprehensible to him.But it is not incomprehensible to the voters he needs in order to win re-election. The genocide in Gaza has quickly become a moral rallying cry for many Americans, particularly young people and people of color. And the disgust at Israel’s massacres is not confined to campus radicals: more than half of Americans now disapprove of Israel’s handling of the Gaza war, according to a recent Gallup poll. Maybe that’s one of the same polls that the Biden campaign feels determined to ignore. But they shouldn’t: the “uncommitted” movement that aimed to express displeasure at Biden’s support for the attack on Gaza in the Democratic primary produced vote tallies higher than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in some states.Biden’s supporters are quick to point out that the alternative to Biden’s re-election will be dramatically worse, both for Americans domestically, and for those Palestinians who suffer as a result of US policy. And they are right. Biden supporters are right, too, that voting is a binary choice, between the options available. And they are right that abstaining from voting hastens a statistically likely Trump victory.But these lesser-of-two-evils argument do not lessen the tax on the conscience that many anti-war Americans will feel when they consider whether to vote for Biden in spite of his support for the genocide in Gaza. And they are certainly not justifications for Biden’s continued aid to Israel’s war project. Rather, the extreme dangers of a second Trump presidency are all the more cause for Biden to abandon this support, and to align himself with the moral cause championed by the voters he needs.On the issue of Gaza, Biden is dramatically out of touch with the voters he needs to win re-election. If he will not be moved by morality to stop his support of this war, he should be moved by vulgar self-interest. Gaza is not a distant foreign conflict: it is an urgent moral emergency for large swaths of voters. Biden will lose those voters – and may indeed lose the election – if he does not cease his support of these atrocities.Biden has that rare opportunity in politics: to help the country, and himself, by doing the right thing. But he must do so now. Both the Palestinian people and his own election prospects are running out of time.
    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Michael Cohen learned that membership in Trump’s inner circle has a harsh cost | Sidney Blumenthal

    When, in the early days, Donald Trump’s diehard fans failed to show up in front of 100 Centre Street at the Manhattan courthouse to clamor about the rank injustice of the case of The People of the State of New York v Donald J Trump, the lonely defendant roused himself from his fitful slumbers to choreograph a dance of the marionettes. The political delegations that started appearing on 14 May attired for perfectly flattering cosplay in Trump matching red ties was a refrain of surrogates echoing insults and imprecations that if the former president were to mutter himself would earn him further contempt of court citations.Trump assembled around him a miniature court and hierarchy that populated a desolation row. In the front row were seated Eric Trump and his wife, Lara Trump, now installed as the co-chair of the Republican National Committee. There were the senators and congressmen, the failed presidential candidates and hopeful running mates who repeated Trump’s scripted talking points against the judge, the prosecutors and the justice system. There were the Fox News anchors, Jeanine Pirro, who exchanged smiles and nods with Trump, and Laura Ingraham, reprimanded by court officers for staring through forbidden binoculars as though she were on safari. There was former Trump White House adviser Boris Epshteyn, indicted in the Arizona fake electors scheme.The carnival of the Trump vassals was a pop-up court society that formed below the authoritarian ruler. Their ranked serfdom revealed the status pyramid. Like the witnesses, whoever they have been, the trial has dramatized the web of the only kind of relationship Trump knows: master and servant.Day after day, Trump’s underworld has been peeled away. His main line of defense is that the people he has chosen to associate with are sleazy, corrupt and dishonest, and therefore cannot be believed. Illustrating their rotten characters proves Trump must be innocent. Their offense is that they no longer serve him. The reams of hard physical evidence, meanwhile, must be ignored. Trump’s projection reached its risible apogee when his lawyer accused Stormy Daniels of profiting from selling merchandise, which she batted away with a quip: “Not unlike Mr Trump.”The courtroom drama has more than legal implications. While the testimony and evidence may nail Trump on 34 felony charges of business fraud, the trial has painted a vast canvas of human bondage. As the prosecution has built its case, each and every person called to the stand has described their own strange master-servant relationship with Trump.There was David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer and other tabloids, who oversaw the “catch-and-kill” hush-money operation to suppress information about Trump’s dalliances and to crank out smears of his opponents. “I felt that Donald Trump was my mentor,” he testified.There was the former teenage model and ingenue from Greenwich, Connecticut, Hope Hicks, whose association with the Trump Organization began by promoting Ivanka Trump as a fashion icon, and was elevated to Trump’s campaign press secretary and a White House counselor. When the Access Hollywood tape was disclosed a month before the election of 2016 on 7 October – “grab’ em by the pussy” – Trump “wanted to make sure that there was a denial of any kind of relationship”, Hicks testified. She ordered the campaign staff: “Deny, deny, deny.”Four days before the election in 2016, Trump directed her to deny the story of the payoff to Stormy Daniels, Hicks has said. Trump told her the next day that Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer, had paid the money. “I didn’t know Michael to be an especially charitable person or selfless person,” she testified. She averted her eyes from the defendant as she spoke, and under cross-examination by his lawyer broke down crying. Whether heartfelt or crocodile tears, they were either way a tribute to “the boss”.The stories of the two principal witnesses, Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, like those of everyone else who has ever dealt with Trump, are divergent accounts of the Trump syndrome of domination and submission. Daniels refused to accept the dynamic from the start, felt dissociated from their sole, disagreeable sexual encounter, took the hush money when she could, and has since fought a running battle against him. Cohen traded himself for the grift and the glitz, thinking he had become a tough-guy prince of the city, until he became the fall guy. Then, after a stint in the pen, he became both penitent and vengeful. His rage against his former master is his servile rebellion.Stormy Daniels’ account is a passionless play in three clothes changes.Scene 1: Trump invites Stormy to his hotel suite at a Lake Tahoe golf tournament. Trump’s thuggish bodyguard, Keith Schiller, escorts her to his room. Stormy enters to find him lounging in silk pajamas. She cracks: “Does Hugh Hefner know you stole his pajamas?”Scene 2: A chagrined and humiliated Trump changes into a shirt and pants. He asks her whether she has ever had a sexually transmitted disease. She explains that she takes rigorous tests to continue working in the adult film industry. He presses whether “you ever had a bad test?” He asks about condoms. She asks about his wife. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he replies. “We are – actually don’t even sleep in the same room.”He talks more about himself, cuts her off, “and it was almost like he wanted to one-up me”. He shows her a financial magazine with his picture on the cover. “At this point, I pretty much had enough of his arrogance and cutting me off and still not getting my dinner. So, I decided someone should take him on. So I said, are you always this rude, arrogant and pompous? You don’t even know how to have a conversation, and I was pretty nasty. I snapped. And he seemed to be taken aback. And I said, someone should spank you with that.” He rolls up the magazine, she takes it and orders him to “turn around”. He bends over. She swats him. “And he was much more polite.”He raises the idea that she should appear on The Apprentice. Being an “adult actress” would be no problem. “You remind me of my daughter,” he says. She puts a friend, another “adult actress”, on the phone to prove she’s present with the real Trump. Then she goes to the bathroom.In the courtroom, while Stormy testified, Trump loudly muttered, “Bullshit!” The judge told his lawyer to silence him. Trump’s curses were a substitute for himself taking the stand.Scene 3: Stormy comes out of the bathroom to find Trump lying on the bed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. “He stood up between me and the door, not in a threatening manner. He didn’t come at me. He didn’t rush at me. He didn’t put his hands on me and nothing like that. I said, I got to go. He said, I thought we were getting somewhere, we were talking, and I thought you were serious about what you wanted. If you ever want to get out of that trailer park – basically, I was offended because I never lived in a trailer park.” Then, she felt like she “blacked out”.“The next thing I know, I was on the bed, somehow on the opposite side of the bed from where we had been standing. I had my clothes and shoes off. I believe my bra, however, was still on. We were in the missionary position … I was staring at the ceiling. I didn’t know how I got there.” Trump didn’t wear a condom. It worried her.Prosecutor: “Was it brief?” Answer: “Yes.” Her hands shook getting dressed. “He said: ‘Oh, great. Let’s get together again, honeybunch. We were great together.’ I just wanted to leave.” She leaves quickly. She feels “ashamed”. He calls several times a week for a while. She visits him once at Trump Tower. She never gets a gig on The Apprentice.In scene 1, Stormy made fun of Trump decked out in Hefner’s signature silk pajamas, his laughable affectation without the artifice of Hef’s highfalutin Playboy philosophy. Trump, in fact, had long tried to burnish his image through proximity to Hefner. In 1990, Trump appeared with a model on a Playboy cover, which he flaunted at a campaign stop in North Carolina in 2016. In 2000, he made a cameo appearance in a softcore Playboy-produced film called Centerfolds, pouring champagne in a Playboy limousine. He attended several Playboy anniversary parties, in 2003 bringing his then girlfriend Melania Knauss and posed for a photo with Hefner. But Hef exploited Trump for his gilt-edged louche image more than Trump succeeded in exploiting Hefner. When Trump proposed a feature for Playboy, “The Girls of Trump”, it was rejected. Trump was strictly for cameos. Hefner was never Trump’s servant.Stormy sized up Trump’s weakness at first sight. It was not an inflection moment, but a confection moment. Trump’s hollow personality is in great part confected from copying the stylized mannerisms of a swath of male entertainers of an older generation. His shtick is patched together from a variety of sources – borrowing, for example, from the method of Don Rickles, the insult comedian, to whom Trump unsuccessfully tried to sell a condo in one of his properties, to the method of Bob Grant, a now forgotten racist demagogue with a daily program on CBS Radio in New York, on whose show Trump appeared.Trump has been especially obsessed with Frank Sinatra, ring-a-ding-ding. He once clumsily tried to impose his will on “the Chairman of the Board”. Their transaction was nasty, brutish and short. When Trump sought to hire Sinatra to play at his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, he tried to renegotiate the contract to pay him less than he originally promised, telling him his fee was “a little rich”. Sinatra sent Trump a message to “go fuck himself”. “He actually did loathe him,” said Nancy Sinatra, his daughter.Trump has long tried to present himself in the image of a cool swinger in Sinatra’s Rat Pack: “I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.” But the improvised group of Sinatra’s friends, accomplished musicians, actors, dancers and wits – Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop – were famous for their talent, not for an empty fame. Together they performed a spontaneous, raucous Las Vegas act and made a heist movie, Ocean’s 11, about robbing all the Vegas casinos. One aspect of their style was the show of casual bravado that was a knowing tribute and parody of the mafia dons who built and presided in Vegas. Sinatra had deflected stage-door johnnies and hangers-on since he was a teenage heartthrob. Trump was a familiar type of blustering wannabe, with a thick wad of bills to be given a ringside table and to be avoided, until he became obnoxious and Sinatra had to tell him to “go fuck himself”.In the midst of the current trial, on 11 May, Trump held a rally in New Jersey, where he hawked a patently false story about Sinatra to connect with the Jersey crowd. Supposedly, like they were pals, according to Trump: “Frank Sinatra told me a long time ago, ‘Never eat before you perform.’ I said, ‘I’m not performing, I’m a politician, if you can believe it.’”If you can believe it, even in the wee small hours of the morning, Sinatra died in 1998, 17 years before “politician” Trump ran for office. On 21 January 2021, when Trump took off from Washington at Andrews air force base, after inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol and being impeached a second time, he had the loudspeakers blaring out one of Sinatra’s theme songs, My Way, as if Sinatra was granting him a pardon.In scene 2, according to Daniels, Trump kept circling, shark-like, to learn if Daniels might be infected with venereal disease. Relieved at her answer, when he pounced, he didn’t use a condom, his triumph in scene 3. “Missionary position,” Stormy testified. He called her “honeybunch”, until she later criticized him and he called her “horseface”.In February 2017, Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller – head of Trump Organization security, then promoted to “director of Oval Office operations” – invaded the New York City office of Trump’s personal physician, Dr Harold Bornstein, to seize Trump’s medical records. Bornstein said he felt “raped”. Those records have never been released. The public has no clear idea of Trump’s medical history, of whether he was ever treated for any disease, sexually transmitted or otherwise.According to Daniels, Trump promised her a spot on his TV show, then she “blacked out”, finding herself vacantly staring at the ceiling. The casting couch routine is a time-worn technique pre-existing the talkies. Trump’s was a dismal variation on the theme of Harvey Weinstein. At the time, Weinstein was a king of Hollywood, producer of the classiest movies and winner of Oscars. Trump occupied a lower rung in the entertainment industry, faking his way through a reality gameshow. They did not cross paths much, though in 2009 Trump turned up at a Miramax premiere in New York of Nine, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as an Italian film-maker with a complicated love life. Trump posed for a photo with his arms around his wife and Weinstein’s.When Weinstein was convicted of sexual assault and rape, Trump stated it sent a “very strong message” and was a “great victory” for women. “I was never a fan of Harvey Weinstein,” he said. “I think he said he was going to work hard to defeat me in the election. How did that work out, by the way? He was a person I didn’t like.” This was after numerous women accused Trump of sexual assault but before he was adjudicated a rapist in the E Jean Carroll defamation case.Before Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was “rigged”, he charged that the Emmys were “rigged” for failing to award him for The Apprentice. In 2017, Stephen Colbert, as the host of the Emmy awards show, mocked Trump. “Unlike the presidency, Emmys go to the winner of the popular vote,” he said. Trump’s whining about the “rigged” Emmys was a rehearsal for his “Stop the Steal” coup.The offstage but oft-mentioned character who never appears as a live witness is Trump’s third wife, Melania, of the separate bedrooms, who was pregnant while Trump was inviting Stormy and a bevy of adult film stars into his Tahoe hotel suite. The overwhelming weight of testimony introduced in the trial is that Trump’s actions were motivated by a desire to suppress the information of his sexual liaisons because they would damage his election chances.Prosecutor: Why, in fact, did you pay that money to Stormy Daniels?Michael Cohen: To ensure that the story would not come out, [and] would not affect Mr Trump’s chances of becoming president of the United States.Prosecutor: If not for the election, would you have paid that money to Stormy Daniels?Cohen: No, ma’am.Prosecutor: At whose direction did you pay the money?Cohen: Trump’s.One of Cohen’s revelations was that when the Hollywood Access tape emerged, it was Melania who invented the alibi that it was just boys’ “locker room talk”. “We needed to put a spin on this,” Cohen said, “and the spin that [Trump] wanted put on it was that this is locker room talk – something that Melania had recommended, or at least he told me that that’s what Melania had thought it was.”To maintain a degree of control in the marriage, Melania dances a tango. She has been vigilantly protective of her investment. She has renegotiated her pre-nup three times, according to Page Six, twice as a post-nuptial agreement. Nobody knows its provisions. But it may be reasonable to assume that Trump’s adamant refusal to acknowledge his sex with Stormy Daniels may relate to sums of money attached to episodes of adultery in the post-nup. Melania was reportedly furious after the disclosure of Trump’s $130,000 payment to Daniels.Cohen testified that he asked Trump,“How’s things going to go upstairs?” referring to Melania’s anger, and Trump responded with the coldest revelation to come out of the trial: “‘Don’t worry,’ he goes. He goes: ‘How long do you think I will be on the market for? Not long’.” Trump was contemplating what would happen after Melania made good on the latest post-nup.On the day that Stormy testified, in a bit of counter-programming, the chair of the Florida state Republican party announced that Barron Trump, Melania and Donald’s son, 18 years old, would be a delegate to the Republican national convention. Floating that story would show that Melania was on board. Two days later, the Florida Republican party issued a statement rescinding the original one, now stating that Barron Trump “regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments”. Perhaps Melania had made her leverage known.Where’s my Michael Cohen? “I regret doing things for him that I should not have,” he said on the stand. “Lying, bullying people to effectuate the goal … to keep a loyalty and to do the things he asked me to do, I violated my moral compass and I suffered the penalty, as has my family.” His plea for redemption was something that never would have passed the lips of Trump’s tutor in viciousness.Roy Cohn owed nothing to Trump. Trump came to him as a supplicant to rescue him from a racial discrimination suit, which Cohn resolved through his trademark intimidation, delay and bluffing. Trump, the youthful bounder, also begged Roy to wheedle him past the rope line into Le Club, an exclusive celebrity hangout. Roy had been a darling of J Edgar Hoover and the counsel for Joseph McCarthy. Roy represented everyone in New York: the Catholic archdiocese, George Steinbrenner of the Yankees, Aristotle Onassis, and the bosses of the mafia families, Fat Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti. Roy’s apprentice was Roger Stone, who introduced him to Ronald Reagan. Roy’s beard, his make-believe fiancee, was Barbara Walters. Roy was Trump’s godfather in the city.Michael Cohen owed everything to Trump. The personal injury lawyer from Long Island claimed he read The Art of the Deal twice before Trump hired him. He eagerly became Trump’s creature. He did whatever Trump asked of him, from lying about whatever needed to be lied about to threatening inquisitive reporters to trying to negotiate a Trump Moscow Tower.One of those tasks was paying off Stormy Daniels at Trump’s orders, he testified, and Cohen served two years in prison for tax evasion and campaign-finance violations, among other crimes, for his service to Trump. Trump was named in his federal indictment from the southern district of New York as Unindicted Co-Conspirator 1. Trump sent him a message during his trial: “Stay strong, I have your back. You’re going to be fine.” Cohen was a made man; Trump had made him. He was his complicit errand boy. Roy Cohn had taught Trump how to create a Michael Cohen. Then, Cohen flipped.Trump called him a “rat”, a term of art applied to an FBI informant snitching on organized crime. Running for re-election with indictments shadowing him this year, Trump began trolling for unofficial character witnesses. In January, he landed the biggest “rat” of them all for an endorsement: Sammy “The Bull” Gravano – a former hitman for the mob who confessed to involvement in the murders of 19 men and a stoolie who sent away his boss, the “Dapper Don” John Gotti, for life – stepped forward to stamp Trump “a legitimate guy”.“Thank you to Sammy the Bull,” Trump tweeted. “I hope Judges Engoron and Kaplan see this” – the judges in his financial fraud and E Jean Carroll defamation cases, which he would lose. “We need fairness, strength and honesty in our New York Courts. We don’t have it now!” But Sammy the Bull, who in 2017 was released from an Arizona prison where he was doing time for running a drug ring, has refrained from further commentary on Trump’s legal troubles. Trump has turned elsewhere for character witnesses.The cavalcade of Republican politicians to the Manhattan courthouse has been a demonstration of the party’s servitude to the defendant. Journalists in the courtroom have observed Trump writing and editing the talking points handed to the pols to spout. These Republicans are more than a sideshow: they’re walking witnesses to the degree to which Trump has transformed the Republican party into his accomplice. It is a made party.Tommy Tuberville, the village idiot of the Senate, who held up military promotions for months, blunderingly gave the entire game away, and conceivably could get Trump into further hot water, by stating that he and the others came on Trump’s behalf to “overcome the gag order”. He complained that the courtroom was “kind of dark, cold”, and that the seats “are very, very, very uncomfortable”.“I’ve not been in many courtrooms in my life,” he went on. “Hopefully I don’t have to go to too many more.” So far, Trump’s further trials have been conveniently delayed.Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, evangelical avatar, arrived on the shuttle to lend moral support to the immoral. “People are curious,” he explained about his motivation last year. “What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview. That’s what I believe.’”In Alabama, while working as an attorney for the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom, Johnson spoke out in favor of Judge Roy Moore’s posting of the Ten Commandments at the Montgomery judicial building. Moore lost a bid for the US Senate in 2017 after accusations of sexual assault and misconduct with underage girls. After Johnson’s little intervention at the Trump trial, he might edit the commandments down to six, dropping the bits about adultery, stealing, lying and greed. If he were especially self-aware about his courthouse antic, he could also drop the first one: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”Standing behind the metal barrier in front of the courthouse, careful not to enter, Johnson waved to Trump. He got the talking points for the courthouse rally, too. The trial, he said, was “a sham”. The gesture was a small price to pay after convincing Trump to help him fend off Marjorie Taylor Greene from carting him away in a tumbril. Empty flattery of Trump is worth the speakership. But Johnson’s bended knee has guaranteed that the Democrats will not vote to maintain him again, if there is another attempt to guillotine him.Mike Johnson is a Trump made man, too, enlisted as an accomplice in the January 6 coup and the subsequent effort to cover it up. He was instrumental in advancing the falsehood that Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic had “rigged software” that came from the deceased “Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela”, sought to nullify the votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania, and charged that the judges who rejected Trump’s bogus claims were committing an illegal “usurpation”. Once he became speaker, he ordered that in the film of the January 6 attack the faces of insurrectionists should be blurred “because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DoJ”. It was too late, however, to obstruct justice. The justice department announced after Johnson’s order that it already had the footage.For Johnson, the courthouse demonstration to denigrate the justice system was consistent with his participation in the January 6 plot. After Johnson fended off the attempt to remove him, he must play a game to defend Trump in order to play Trump in order to defend himself from Trump’s feral acolytes. Everyone who has tried that game has eventually wound up devoured.For the chorus line of vice-presidential hopefuls, the courthouse was an off-Broadway tryout. They pirouetted to win Trump’s nod, but only one could be chosen: “One singular sensation”.Senator JD Vance, of Ohio, who in one of his several past incarnations denounced Trump as “America’s Hitler”, has since turned into a Trump trooper. The cultural contradictions of Trumpism no more bother the pious Vance than they do Mike Johnson. Vance has said he had come just “to support a friend … Sometimes it’s a little bit lonely to sit up there by yourself.” But Vance’s courtroom elegy as Miss Lonelyhearts was clipped. His good friend had previously described him at a campaign rally as “JD Mandel”, confusing him with another Ohio politician. If Trump needs Vance to win Ohio, he has already lost.Who was and who wasn’t present in the worshipful gaggle was a tale of two Dakotas. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, aspiring running mate, was significantly absent from the courthouse, still busily justifying blasting her 14 months-old puppy and a goat after dragging them into a gravel pit. Her tale of slaughter in a recently published memoir was an exhibition of performative sadism to catch the eye of Trump. Her cruelty to animals was an unprecedented bid to secure the second slot under him. But the opprobrium she attracted terminated her short-lived campaign.The trigger-happy governor, quick on the draw, had put a clear bullseye on her target’s viciousness – Trump, not Cricket the dog. But there’s no getting back up on the horse for her. By the way, she has also disclosed offing three family horses. Trump infamously boasted that he could get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, but Noem’s bragging about killing her dog on the farm unexpectedly became her retelling a murder-suicide.Trump’s other Dakota applicant, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum – who dropped out of the Republican contest before a single vote was taken, polling a barely detectable 1% – turned up at the courthouse to drone the Trump talking points that the trial was “election interference” and a “scam”. The colorless Burgum, without the slightest measurable constituency, should be considered the frontrunner as Trump’s vice-presidential pick. His advantage is not that he is bland and can never outshine Trump. Burgum’s asset is his assets. He sold his software company to Microsoft in 2001 for $1.1bn. Trump is frantic for cash.Trump has installed his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, to replace Ronna Romney McDaniel, who had resisted shoveling every last penny of RNC funds into Trump’s legal defense fund. As slavish as McDaniel was to Trump, her sin was that it was not down to the last cent. She could not be subservient enough; so, she was defenestrated. Under Lara Trump, the party’s money will flow in an endless river to his campaign.Burgum, a political nobody, appears as a godsend to Trump. If Trump is the Republican goldencalf, Burgum is his potential cash cow. With him on the ticket, Burgum would be outside campaign finance restrictions and could open the spigot of his fortune for Trump. When it comes to Trump, the mercenary motive always prevails. For Burgum, it might be a cheap deal, a speculation as profitable in its own way as selling his firm Microsoft made him a billionaire. If Trump is elected, the non-entity would be a heartbeat away from the presidency. In the meantime, he simply has to perform like a Mike Pence dummy, until the moment inevitably arrives when Trump tries to coerce him to become a co-conspirator.By Thursday, 16 May, the supporting cast was down to the scraps of Freedom Caucus devotees, most prominently Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz. “And I want all of the news to start asking the question, ‘What is the crime?’” Boebert shouted outside the courthouse. “Because everyone in this court has not been informed of what the crime is. The defendant does not know the crime that was committed.” As she spoke, one bystander heckled: “Beetlejuice!” Boebert had been evicted from a Denver theater staging of “Beetlejuice” for allegedly vaping, making loud noises and groping her then boyfriend, owner of a dive bar named Hooch that features drag queen shows.After Gaetz appeared at the courthouse, he posted on Twitter/X a picture of himself there in a Trump-style red tie with a caption comparing himself to the Proud Boys, whose leader is serving a prison sentence for seditious conspiracy for the January 6 insurrection. “Standing back and standing by, Mr President,” wrote Gaetz. He understood Trump’s bottomless need for displays of subservience. In the courtroom, Gaetz was given a place of honor seated next to Eric Trump.The House ethics committee has yet to report on its investigation into Gaetz’s alleged sexual relation with a minor. Former speaker Kevin McCarthy, removed from the speakership by the people rallying at the courthouse, observed recently that the motive for his ousting was because “one person wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old”.But the red-tie Trump brigade were not a snake line of Proud Boys armed with weapons ready to rush the courthouse to liberate the defendant. Their dim perception about the trial they came on Trump’s orders to deride blinded them to the tragic story of the chief witness, Michael Cohen. The Trump lackey, through a tortured ordeal, at last came to a harsh realization of how grotesquely Trump had manipulated, exploited and betrayed him, and now he stood lashed in the witness box by Trump’s lawyer for being Trump’s lawyer, the liar that Trump depended on. Outside the courtroom, Trump’s self-abasing retinue lines up to serve him like the old Michael Cohen.
    Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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    ‘What’s happening is not genocide’: Biden criticizes ICC for seeking arrest warrants for Israeli officials – as it happened

    “I will always ensure that Israel has everything it needs to defend itself against Hamas and all its enemies,” Biden said. “We want Hamas to be defeated.”But Biden also mentioned support for civilians in Gaza. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said, noting that his administration is working to bring the region together and a two-state solution.“Let me be clear,” he added, “we reject the ICC’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. Whatever these warrants may imply, there’s no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”“What’s happening is not genocide.”Political leaders in the US sharply defended Israel today after international criminal court chief prosecutor Karim Khan has caused a political earthquake by requesting arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas officials. The warrants, which include prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Hamas group’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, were denounced by US president Joe Biden who doubled down on his comments during a speech for the Jewish American Heritage Month Celebration, held at the White House.It will now be up to the ICC’s judges to determine whether to issue the warrants.Here’s a rundown of what else has happened today so far:
    President Biden used his speech at the Jewish American Heritage Month Celebration to highlight his administration’s work to crack down on antisemitism while reiterating his “ironclad” support for Israel.
    Senators Mitch McConnel and Bernie Sanders voiced strong opinions from opposite sides of the debate, with McConnell condemning the ICC and Sanders championing its cause.
    Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, has also come out against the ICC’s request for arrest warrants against top Israeli and Hamas officials, calling them “baseless and illegitimate”.
    US State Department officials also added criticisms of the ICC over it’s approach to Israel but said they would continue working with them to prosecute Russian President Vladimir Putin over actions taken against Ukrainian civilians.
    The UK Foreign Office also objected to Khan’s request, saying it would not help the process of negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza.
    US senator Lindsey Graham said he feels deceived by ICC staff, and accused Khan of rushing the decision to seek arrest warrants.
    Khan thanked international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who he said acted as a special adviser in his investigation.
    Biden concluded his speech by emphasizing his work to combat antisemitism in the US, calling it “absolutely despicable”. Pointing to a national strategy rolled out before last October, Biden said a new wave of financing amounting to $400 million has been made available for jewish nonprofits, schools, synagogues and other faith-based organizations to support their physical security.He added that his administration has “put colleges on notice”. “The department has to investigate discrimination aggressively,” he said.His remarks ended with a promise.“Let me assure you as your president – you are not alone,” he said. You belong. You always will belong.” He thanked everyone in attendance. “In moments like this the ancient story of Jewish resilience endures because of its people. That’s what today is all about.”“I will always ensure that Israel has everything it needs to defend itself against Hamas and all its enemies,” Biden said. “We want Hamas to be defeated.”But Biden also mentioned support for civilians in Gaza. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said, noting that his administration is working to bring the region together and a two-state solution.“Let me be clear,” he added, “we reject the ICC’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. Whatever these warrants may imply, there’s no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”“What’s happening is not genocide.”Emhoff has just introduced President Biden, who noted he was honored to be introduced by the first-ever Jewish spouse.The President talked about the important history of freedom of religion in the US and the important contributions of Jewish Americans, before adding that the reception comes during hard times. Noting the “fresh and ongoing” trauma inflicted on October 7 and in its aftermath, Biden promised that the work continued to free Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, noting his support for Israel is “ironclad”.“We are going to get ‘em home,” he said of the hostages. “We are going to get em home, come hell or high water.”The event kicked off with cheers as Second Gentlemen Emhoff, flanked by the president and vice president, heralded the administration’s support for the Jewish community. But, the celebratory tone shifted quickly.“This is also a challenging time for our community,” he said. “It has been a dark and difficult 7 months. There is an epidemic of hate including a crisis of antisemitism in our country and around the world. We see it on our streets, our college campuses, and our places of worship.”Adding that the work feels difficult, he encouraged the crowd. “We keep fighting because we have no choice but to fight.”Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff will be speaking soon at the Jewish American Heritage Month Celebration. At last year’s event, held at the White House, Biden focused on his support for Israel and his strategy to combat antisemitism.“My support for Israel’s security remains longstanding and unwavering, including the right of Israel to defend itself against attacks,” Biden said last year. “And I’m proud – I’m proud of our support – and my colleagues that are here today as well – for Israel’s Iron Dome, which has intercepted thousands of rockets and saved countless lives in Israel.”Stay tuned as we wait for this year’s event to begin.Even as US political figures continue to rail against the ICC over Israel and Hamas, Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, said the US is fully onboard with actions taken against Russia for crimes committed in the Ukrainian conflict.In a press conference on Monday, following a virtual meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, Matthew Miller, a state department spokesperson, said the US still supports the ICC and the “important work over the years to hold people accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity”.But National Security Council spokesman spokesman John Kirby claimed that there is a difference between what’s happening in Ukraine and what’s happening in Gaza.“It is an actual war aim of Mr Putin to kill innocent Ukrainian people,” Kirby said, noting that targeting of civilians and infrastructure is evidence of that.In Gaza, however, Kirby claimed the high toll taken on civilian lives was inadvertent. Meanwhile, as CNN reports, roughly 40% of Gaza’s population – more than 900,000 people – have been displaced in the past two weeks due to Israeli bombardment.Calling the ICC a “a rogue kangaroo court”, and its prosecutor “self-aggrandizing”, Senator Mitch McConnell vehemently criticized the move for arrest warrants in remarks on the Senate floor.“Since the immediate aftermath of October 7, Israel, her allies, and Jewish people around the world have faced pernicious efforts to equate a sovereign nation’s self-defense with barbaric acts of terrorism,” McConnell said, linking the issue to the protests that erupted across university campuses against the violence that’s been inflicted on Palestinian civilians.McConnell continued, calling the warrants for both leaders of Hamas and Israel are “the most noxious attempt at moral equivalence”. Using the move to question the legitimacy of the international criminal court, the Republican leader pushed his colleagues to act:
    Support Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorist savages like Sinwar … reject the fiction that unaccountable bureaucrats in The Hague have any power over a sovereign nation that isn’t a signatory to its authority … commit to imposing significant costs on the court and its agents if it pursues shameful and baseless charges against Israel … and choose once and for all between actual justice and the rule of the loud campus mob.
    Senator Bernie Sanders supports the request for arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders relating to the Israel-Gaza conflict, saying that the “ICC prosecutor is right to take these actions”, in a written statement released on Monday afternoon.Noting that the warrants may or may not be carried out, he said: “It is imperative that the global community uphold international law.”Here is Sanders’ statement in full:
    In the last several years, the international criminal court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for political leaders who violate international law and engage in war crimes and crimes against humanity. That includes Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose illegal invasion of Ukraine initiated the most destructive war in Europe since world war II; Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who started the horrific war in Gaza by launching a terrorist attack against Israel, which killed 1,200 innocent men, women, and children; and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in response, has waged an unprecedented war of destruction against the entire Palestinian people, which has killed or injured over 5% of the population.The ICC prosecutor is right to take these actions. These arrest warrants may or may not be carried out, but it is imperative that the global community uphold international law. Without these standards of decency and morality, this planet may rapidly descend into anarchy, never-ending wars, and barbarism.
    The rights group Amnesty International is not pleased with the British Foreign Office’s criticism of the international criminal court prosecutor Karim Khan and his application for arrest warrants against Israel and Hamas’s leaders.“To see the UK undermining the International Criminal Court like this is a real slap in the face for Israeli and Palestinian victims of war crimes and other grave human rights violations who sorely deserve justice,” Amnesty International UK’s head of government affairs Karla McLaren said in a statement. She continued:
    By failing to recognise the ICC’s jurisdiction – which the court itself has established – the UK is placing itself on the wrong side of history and continuing a pattern of soft-pedalling over Israel’s crimes. This is deeply damaging for international justice and for the protection of civilians everywhere.
    We need major change from the UK over the human rights crisis in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including a realisation that justice and accountability processes are the best way out of this decades-long crisis.
    The UK should back the ICC chief prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants, get behind the ICJ genocide case, call for an immediate ceasefire and a massive scaling up of aid into Gaza, and it should order an immediate halt to further UK arms transfers to Israel.
    Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the US House of Representatives, echoed Joe Biden’s rejection of the international criminal court chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defence minister Yoav Gallant.In a statement, the House minority leader said:
    The arrest warrant request by the International Criminal Court against democratically elected members of the Israeli government is shameful and unserious. America’s commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad. I join President Joe Biden in strongly condemning any equivalence between Israel and Hamas, a brutal terrorist organization.
    Biden has generally supported Israel since Hamas’s 7 October attack, though recently warned Benjamin Netanyahu against allowing its military to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah, and held up a weapons shipment.Despite Jeffries’s solidarity, rank-and-file Democrats are growing uneasy with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and its impact on civilians. Here’s more on that:Inside Iran, the Guardian’s Deepa Parent reports that Ebrahim Raisi was remembered by many for his crackdown on nationwide protests that began after a woman died in custody following her arrest under the country’s hijab laws. Here’s more on that:Activists in Iran have said there is little mood to mourn the death of the country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash near the border with Azerbaijan on Sunday.Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, announced a five-day public mourning period after the deaths of Raisi, the foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and other passengers on the helicopter. However, Iranians who spoke to the Guardian have refused to lament the death of a man who they say was responsible for hundreds of deaths in his four-decade political career.It was during Raisi’s tenure that protests swept the country after the death of the 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested by police under Iran’s harsh hijab laws. More than 19,000 protesters were jailed, and at least 500 were killed – including 60 children – during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. The police continue to violently arrest women for refusing hijab rules.Hours before Raisi’s death was confirmed by state media, videos circulated on Telegram showing celebratory fireworks, one of them from Amini’s hometown of Saqqez. Iranians from inside and outside the country shared posts reminding the world of Raisi’s brutal presidency and his repression of political dissidents.A spokesperson for the White House’s national security council offered condolences on the death of Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash, but noted he had channeled funds to armed groups in the Middle East, Reuters reported.“No question this was a man who had a lot of blood on his hands,” the spokesperson John Kirby said at the White House.Raisi perished in a helicopter crash alongside Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and six other passengers and crew. Here’s more about his death:In an interview with CNN, the international criminal court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, defended the investigation that led to his request for arrest warrants against top Israeli and Hamas officials.Khan accused Hamas’s leaders, including the group’s head, Yahya Sinwar, of extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape, sexual assault and torture. He also leveled allegations against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defence minister, Yoav Gallant, of extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberately targeting civilians.Here’s what Khan had to say about how he reached his conclusion: More

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    FDIC chair Martin Gruenberg to resign after sexual harassment allegations

    Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) chairman Martin Gruenberg announced his resignation on Monday, amid a months-long scandal over sexual harassment and other misconduct at the top bank regulator.Gruenberg said he would step down from his responsibilities once a successor is confirmed.Earlier in the day, a top Democrat had called for Gruenberg to be replaced after an external review found sweeping reports of employee mistreatment and sexual harassment.There must be “fundamental changes” at the agency, Senate banking committee chairman Sherrod Brown said, adding that he wanted Joe Biden to immediately nominate a replacement, which the Senate should quickly advance. Brown is the most senior Democrat to call for Gruenberg’s replacement, ramping up pressure on the FDIC chair.Spokespeople for the FDIC and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Last week, Gruenberg testified alongside several other banking regulators before Congress. He vowed to take steps to address longstanding cultural issues at the agency, as well as his own personal conduct, after the review found multiple instances in which he lost his temper with subordinates.But Republicans and Democrats alike expressed skepticism that Gruenberg would be able to overhaul the agency, where he has served for nearly two decades. He was sworn in to his current five-year term as chair of the FDIC in January 2023. He had also served as chairman from November 2012 to mid-2018.“After chairing last week’s hearing, reviewing the independent report, and receiving further outreach from FDIC employees to the Banking and Housing Committee, I am left with one conclusion: there must be fundamental changes at the FDIC. Those changes begin with new leadership,” Brown said in his statement.Notably, Brown did not call for Gruenberg to immediately resign, as many Republicans in Congress have. Should Gruenberg leave the agency without a confirmed replacement, leadership of the FDIC would fall to Travis Hill, the agency’s vice-chair and a Republican. The agency would then be deadlocked 2-2.The FDIC is working with the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on several rule-writing projects that would tighten requirements on larger banks, including a contentious plan to boost big bank capital requirements. More

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    Pro-Israel group pours millions into unseating New York progressive Jamaal Bowman

    A Super Pac affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) has revved up its campaign spending, pouring $2m into a New York congressional primary to oppose the progressive incumbent Jamaal Bowman.Campaign finance disclosures released this weekend showed the Super Pac, called United Democracy Project (UDP), spending about $1m in support of Bowman’s opponent, the moderate Democrat George Latimer and $1m in negative advertisements opposing Bowman. If the group succeeds in defeating Bowman, it will deliver a significant blow to the progressive wing of the House.“They don’t want Israel to be criticized, they don’t want Israel to be held accountable – they don’t want anyone to mention Palestine or speak up for Palestinian rights and lives,” said Bowman during an interview with MSNBC on Saturday.In comparison, progressive groups including Justice Democrats and Working Families Party have spent less than $300,000 in support of Bowman and opposing Latimer. Latimer’s campaign has similarly outpaced Bowman’s in fundraising, with Latimer garnering more than $3.6m and Bowman raising about $2.6m so far.In an email to the Guardian, an Aipac spokesperson previously described Latimer as “a strong advocate for the US-Israel relationship in clear contrast to his opponent who is aligned with the anti-Israel extremist fringe”. Bowman has sharply criticized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and was among the first of his colleagues to call for a ceasefire.Notably, ads countering Bowman do not mention Israel at all. One ad from UDP accuses Bowman of having “his own agenda”, highlighting policy differences between the congressman and Joe Biden.The heavily Democratic contested district, with large numbers of Black, Jewish and Latino constituents, elected the progressive “Squad” member Bowman in 2020 in an upset primary election in 2020.Aipac’s forays into campaigns represent a new avenue of political activism for the pro-Israel lobbying group, which until the 2022 election cycle did not spend on campaigns. By forming a Super Pac, which can legally contribute unlimited amounts of money on advertisements and communications in races, Aipac has been able to ramp up its influence.Aipac planned to spend $100m on campaigns this year and has so far targeted a wide and at times unexpected range of races – with mixed results.In an Indiana congressional primary, UDP spent $1.6m in a successful bid to stop the former Republican congressman John Hostettler, an isolationist-leaning Republican who in the past made antisemitic remarks, from regaining a seat in the House. In a Maryland race, the Super Pac threw its support behind the Democratic candidate Sarah Elfreth, who beat the former US Capitol police officer Harry Dunn. Neither Dunn, whose book about the January 6 attack propelled him to national prominence, or Elfreth, a Maryland state senator, made comments about Israel-Gaza during the race.But candidates backed by pro-Israel groups have not succeeded in every race so far this year – UDP also dropped $4.6m in a failed bid to stop the Democratic congressional candidate Dave Min from advancing in his primary race against Democratic candidate Joanna Weiss. More

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    Rudy Giuliani complains Arizona indictment not served ‘stylishly’

    The former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has complained that an indictment handed down against him in connection with Arizona’s fake electors case was not served “stylishly”.Giuliani was one of 17 defendants who was charged over his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The Trump ally was served a copy of a document containing the charges against him during a celebration for his 80th birthday in Palm Beach, Florida, a party thrown by a Republican fundraiser, Caroline Wren.He expressed dissatisfaction with the way the indictment was presented in remarks he made on Sunday alongside his girlfriend, Maria Ryan.“So one guy, he walked in between a couple of people who didn’t know who he was. And he handed me a folded-up, crumpling piece of paper. It was a crumpling piece of paper. It wasn’t, like, done stylishly,” Giuliani said.“And he handed it to me, and he said, this is from Arizona attorney general [Kris Mayes]. I still don’t have the indictment,” he added.Giuliani’s indictment papers came after he mocked Mayes on social media.In a post on X that has since been deleted, Giuliani bragged about evading Mayes – and the former attorney to Trump claimed that charges against him would be dismissed if officials could not serve him in time.“If Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow morning: 1. They must dismiss the indictment 2. They must concede they can’t count votes,” Giuliani wrote in the post, which also had a picture featuring smiling friends and party balloons.The indictment was served hours later. Mayes tweeted on 17 May: “The final defendant was served moments ago. [Rudy Giuliani, ] nobody is above the law.”Mayes also shared a screenshot of Giuliani’s deleted post.A Giuliani spokesperson, Ted Goodman, said the ex-New York City mayor was “unfazed” by the indictment-related disruption at his party, according to a statement reported by Politico.“He was unfazed, and enjoyed an incredible evening with hundreds of people, from all walks of life, who love and respect him for his contributions to society,” Goodman said. “We look forward to full vindication soon.”In her own remarks to Politico, Wren described the birthday celebration as “a wonderful evening celebrating an American hero”.“It’s a shame that while the Arizona southern border is wide open and crime is reaching an all-time high, the [Arizona] secretary of state’s office thought it was a good use of resources to send agents across the country to serve an indictment to a man who has spent his entire life dedicated to law and order and was just trying to celebrate his 80th birthday amongst friends & family,” Wren said.The latest indictment is one of several legal and personal issues facing Giuliani.Among other matters, Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in December after being ordered to pay $148m in a defamation case for falsely accusing two Georgia poll workers of election subversion in 2020. More

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    Alito’s flag shows the US supreme court is neither honorable nor functional any more | Moira Donegan

    These people can’t help themselves. Last week, the New York Times revealed that during the days after the violent attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, when the US supreme court was still considering whether to take up cases challenging Joe Biden’s election victory, the home of the supreme court justice Samuel Alito, in suburban Virginia, flew a pro-coup flag. The Times printed photos of the American flag flying upside-down on a pole in Alito’s front yard; by January 2021, the upside-down flag had become a well-known symbol of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement, champions of Donald Trump who supported his legal and violent attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.At the time, pro-Trump social media groups were encouraging supporters to fly their flags this way; upside-down flags had been carried by some of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, just a few days before the symbol appeared outside Alito’s house. In the election case that was then before the court, Alito voted to hear Republican challenges to the election results. But he didn’t get enough of his colleagues to vote his way. Not that time.The flying of the pro-Trump, pro-coup flag is in clear violation of the ethics rules that apply to federal judges. After several high-profile controversies at the court – including investigations into gifts given to Alito and his fellow conservative justice Clarence Thomas by deep-pocketed Republican donors – a controversy arose over why, precisely, those ethics rules have never extended to the supreme court justices.Under enormous political pressure, the court agreed to assign itself a version of those ethics rules last year, aiming, it said, to dispel any public concerns and recommit the court to maintaining an appearance of credible neutrality. (Such rules have long applied to court employees, who, the Times points out, are not permitted to so much as attend a protest or put a bumper sticker on their car.) The justices did not elect, however, to make the new ethics code in any way enforceable for themselves. They’re not rules that can be enforced; they’re guidelines that can be – and are – ignored.The court is currently considering several cases stemming from the January 6 insurrection, and will rule on two questions that concern its aftermath in the coming weeks: first, whether insurrectionists can be charged with obstruction of an official proceeding; and second, whether Donald Trump can be held legally responsible for crimes he committed while in office. After this November’s general election, there are almost certainly going to be further legal challenges to the election results, just as there were in 2020. Alito will be on the court to hear Trump’s arguments in those cases, too.The flag, then, is just the latest reminder of a disturbing reality: that as the Republican party further radicalizes against democracy, the supreme court – the body which is tasked with checking these unconstitutional impulses – has become their ally. The rule of law cannot be relied on to stem the tide of rising authoritarianism, because our legal institutions have been captured by the authoritarians.Why would Alito make such a brazen display of his partisan loyalties and disregard for the legitimate results of an election at a moment when the court is under such intense scrutiny? When the Times asked him about the pro-insurrection flag, Alito blamed his wife: he said she put it up after getting in a fight with a neighbor who had an anti-Trump lawn sign. It’s not clear exactly how this story is supposed to exonerate him: it doesn’t explain why the Alitos used this pro-coup gesture, of all the possible options, as a way to retaliate against their progressive neighbors. And the story is still one in which the Alitos are affirmatively voicing their partisan loyalty in public, and showing themselves unable to tolerate even the proximate presence of Americans who do not share their own morbid, conspiratorial and punitive worldview.But asking why Alito feels he can get away with it misses the point: he knows he can get away with it. The justice is perfectly aware that he does not need to pretend to neutrality, or hide his partisan loyalties, or behave, with anything like a convincing effort, like his work on the court is motivated by the law and not his own reactionary political preferences. Alito knows that he does not need to maintain any pretext of integrity, intellectual commitment or seriousness in his work. The supreme court has accumulated enough power to itself – and the justices have done a sufficiently good job of insulating themselves from any accountability or consequence – that he doesn’t even think he needs to lie any more. He’s comfortable being a partisan operative right out in the open.And why shouldn’t he? He’s not even the worst offender. After all, Clarence Thomas has not recused himself from insurrection-related cases, either, even though his wife, Ginni, was a vocal supporter of the insurrection – texting Trump’s then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, over and over about the effort before, during and after the riot, and attended the “Save America” rally on January 6 herself. Like Alito, there is no way to force him to step aside.The justices do not enforce rules of impartiality, integrity, honesty, disclosure or decorum on themselves. And there are few mechanisms – and absolutely no political will – for anyone else to impose these on them. The people have no check on the court; Congress is dysfunctional and can’t act. And so the justices are acting like spoiled children: petulant, self-indulgent, shameless, jeering and unsupervised. Men like Alito and Thomas have not done what decency requires – and there are no means to compel them to.If this was an honorable court, a man like Alito would never have been appointed. If it was a functional court, he would resign. If it was a court composed of jurists capable of shame, he would recuse himself from election-related cases. But it is none of these things.It is time to admit what this court has become: an elite, but no less sadistic and vulgar, bastion of the anti-pluralist, anti-democratic forces that have captured so much of the Republican party and the conservative base. To say that the court is composed of partisan operatives – and that at least two of them are either so delusional that they have lost touch with reality or so cynical that they don’t mind when the facts diverge from their preferred outcomes – is so obvious as to be almost banal to any honest court observer. That anyone pretends that the court is a legitimate judicial body is a farce. That its actions still carry the force of law is a tragedy.
    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Robert F Kennedy Jr lists foreclosed New York home as voting address

    Robert F Kennedy Jr has listed a home in foreclosure for non-payment as his voting address, though he does not own the property and is not listed in public searches as one of its residents, according to online records.In a statement late Sunday to the New York Post, which first reported on the home in question and how neighbors have never seen him there, the independent candidate’s presidential campaign insisted that the property was his “official address”.“He receives mail there,” said the statement provided to the publication, which noted how the candidate’s father, Robert F Kennedy Sr, served as a US senator for New York before his assassination in 1968. “His driver’s license is registered there. His automobile is registered there. His voting registration is from there. His hunting, fishing, falconry and wildlife rehabilitation licenses are from there. He pays rent to the owner.”Kennedy went on the defensive about his ties to the luxury home on Croton Lake Road in the Westchester county community of Katonah as both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have perceived him as a threat to their prospects in November’s race for the White House.Both the the Democratic incumbent and the former Republican president fear that the conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist – who is averaging about 10% in national polls – could siphon off enough votes to swing the race.Voting records first reviewed by the New York Post show Kennedy used the Croton Lake Road address in eight primary or general elections between 2008 and 2020.Property records show the home’s owner is Barbara Moss, an interior and landscape designer who is married to Timothy Haydock – a doctor, Kennedy’s longtime friend and the father of the candidate’s goddaughter.Moss received notice in late April that the US Bank Trust company in March had filed to foreclose on the Croton Lake Road home, saying she owed more than $46,000 plus interest on the property. A conference to settle the matter was scheduled for 7 June.The Post said it interviewed neighbors of Moss – and even local authorities – who described themselves as “shocked” that the home was linked to Kennedy, also known for being the nephew of both John F Kennedy and Ted Kennedy.One police officer told the Post, “No … he doesn’t live here.” And publicly accessible property search records show Kennedy’s most recent addresses are in Los Angeles as well as Foxborough, Massachusetts.But in an interview that he granted to the Post, Kennedy’s brother, Doug, said Robert lived or at least stayed with Moss and Haydock “for a number of years”.The statement added that Kennedy moved to Croton Lake Road long term – at Haydock’s invitation – after his declaration as a presidential candidate in the spring of 2023 prompted the landlord at his old place in nearby Bedford, New York, to ask him to relocate over fears about “becoming embroiled in political controversy”.Kennedy had not been seen on Croton Lake Road since running for the presidency required him to constantly travel to other states, according to his campaign’s statement to the Post.Among other things, the campaign also claimed that Kennedy has always planned to resettle in New York permanently after his wife, the actor and comedian Cheryl Hines, retires from her film and television career.Kennedy, 70, grappled with Sunday’s revelations less than two weeks after the New York Times published a story about a 2012 deposition in which he said he had endured a previous neurological problem because a worm got in his brain, “ate a portion of it and then died”.He later boasted that he could “eat five more brain worms and still beat” both Biden, 81, and Trump, 77, in a staged debate. More