Evelyn Reynolds

More stories

  • 150 Shares109 Views

    in US Politics

    Colorado voters to decide on abortion rights after measure qualifies for ballot

    Voters in Colorado will have a say on abortion rights this fall after supporters collected enough valid signatures to put a measure on the ballot, part of a national push to pose abortion rights questions to voters since the US supreme court removed the nationwide right to abortion.The Colorado measure officially made the ballot on Friday and would enshrine abortion rights into the constitution in a state which already allows abortion at all stages of pregnancy despite the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade.Since that 2022 decision, most Republican-controlled states have new abortion restrictions in effect, including 14 that ban it at every stage of pregnancy. Most Democratic-led states have laws or executive orders to protect access.The announcement on Friday about Colorado’s measure making the November ballot came from the state’s top election official. It would also include requirements that Medicaid and private health insurers cover abortions.Supporters had said they gathered more than 225,000 signatures to put the issue on the ballot, nearly double the requirement of more than 124,000 signatures.Amending the state constitution requires the support of 55% of voters.Those backing a dueling measure – a law to ban abortion – did not turn in signatures, and that measure will not go before voters.The news in Colorado came a day after South Dakota announced voters would decide on abortion rights there this fall as well.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

  • 163 Shares109 Views

    in US Politics

    South Dakota to decide on abortion rights in fall as ballot initiative advances

    South Dakota voters will decide on abortion rights this fall, getting a chance at direct democracy on the contentious issue in a conservative state where a trigger law banning nearly all abortions went into effect after Roe v Wade was overturned.The state’s top election official announced on Thursday that about 85% of the more than 55,000 signatures submitted in support of the ballot initiative are valid, exceeding the required 35,017 signatures.Voters will vote up or down on prohibiting the state from regulating abortion before the end of the first trimester and allowing the state to regulate abortion after the second trimester, except when necessary to preserve the life or physical or emotional health of a pregnant woman.Dakotans for Health, which sponsored the amendment, said in a statement on Thursday that the signatures’ validation “certified that the people of South Dakota, not the politicians in Pierre, will be the ones to decide whether to restore Roe v Wade as the law of South Dakota”.Abortion rights are also on the ballot in Florida and Maryland, and advocates are still working toward that goal in states including Arizona, Montana and Nebraska in the aftermath of the US supreme court’s 2022 reversal of Roe.Voters in seven other states have already approved abortion access in ballot measures, including four that wrote abortion rights into their constitution.South Dakota outlaws all abortions, except those to save the life of the mother.Despite securing language on the ballot, abortion rights advocates in South Dakota face an uphill battle to success in November. Republican lawmakers strongly oppose the measure, and a major abortion rights advocate has said it doesn’t support it.The American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota warned when the signatures were submitted that the language as written does not convey the strongest legal standard for courts to evaluate abortion laws and could risk being symbolic only.Life Defense Fund, a group organized against the initiative, said it will continue to research the signatures.Opponents still have 30 days – until 17 June – to file a challenge with the secretary of state’s office. More

  • 238 Shares139 Views

    in US Politics

    Beware the Biden factor, Keir Starmer: you can govern well and still risk losing the country | Jonathan Freedland

    The smile was the giveaway. Asked whether he was “just a copycat” of Tony Blair at the launch of his Blair-style pledge card on Thursday, Keir Starmer positively glowed. He was delighted with the comparison, which the entire exercise was surely designed to encourage. Blair “won three elections in a row”, Starmer said, beaming. Of course, he’s thrilled to be likened to a serial winner. And yet the more apt parallel is also a cautionary one. It’s not with Starmer’s long-ago predecessor, but with his would-be counterpart across the Atlantic: Joe Biden.It’s natural that the sight of a Labour leader, a lawyer from north London, on course for Downing Street after a long era of Tory rule, would have people digging out the Oasis CDs and turning back the clock to 1997: Labour election victories are a rare enough commodity to prompt strong memories. But, as many veterans of that period are quick to point out, the circumstances of 2024 are very different. The UK economy was humming then and it’s parlous now. Optimism filled the air then, while too few believe genuine change is even possible now. And politics tended to be about material matters then, tax and public services, rather than dominated by polarising cultural wars as it is now.All of which partly explains why it’s a comparison to the US president that Starmer should be thinking about – even if it’s not nearly so encouraging.Start with those aspects of the Biden story that can give Starmer heart. The veteran Democrat showed it is possible to win office thanks less to a wave of popular enthusiasm than a hunger for change after years of chaos. He proved that you can make a virtue of a lack of swash and buckle, offering steady solidity as a respite after frantic drama. In 2020, Biden demonstrated that dependable and capable can be enough to win when voters have had enough of charismatic and crazy. It worked for him after the era of Donald Trump, just as it’s working for Starmer after an era that, for all Rishi Sunak’s efforts, is defined by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.In other words, in 2020, Biden showed that playing a hand much like the one dealt to Starmer can be enough to win. The trouble is, in 2024 he’s showing why that might not be enough to win twice.Take a look at the New York Times poll published this week. The headline findings are bad enough, with Biden trailing in five of the six battleground states where the election will be decided. Behind in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan, he’s ahead in Wisconsin alone. The underlying numbers are worse still with, improbable as it may seem, Trump gaining among Black, Latino and young voters especially. Most alarming for Biden is the finding that 70% think the US political and economic systems need major change – or should be torn down altogether. It makes the 2024 contest a change election in the US, just as it is in the UK – and for an incumbent such as Biden, that is dangerously bad news.Put another way, the US appetite for change is so great that it is causing the unravelling of key parts of the Obama coalition – minorities and the young – and its reassembly behind Trump. Barack Obama offered himself as the change candidate in 2008, an outsider who would challenge the establishment, and Trump, even though he is a self-described billionaire and a former president less than four years out of office, is successfully making the same rebel pitch.What’s more, those Americans itching for something new are prepared to use as their agent of change a man who incited a violent insurrection against the US government, sought to overturn a democratic election, has made no secret of his dictatorial ambitions for a second term, has been found liable for sexual abuse and is now standing trial on criminal charges in New York. When so many Americans are willing to flock to that person as the alternative, it tells you how much they dislike what they have now.There is a warning here for Starmer. Not for his prospects in the coming election – Biden’s success in 2020 tells him he can be confident – but for the election after that. The former Conservative cabinet minister David Gauke thinks Priti Patel is a decent bet as the next Tory leader, perhaps offering to keep the seat warm for the return of Boris Johnson. If Trump makes the comeback to end all comebacks in November, do not think Johnson will not be tempted to repeat the trick.How is it that a second Trump presidency is even conceivable; how is it that Biden can be lagging behind such a flawed, widely loathed rival? The US economy is improving; the stock market is roaring; inflation is falling. The US is set to grow at double the rate of its fellow G7 nations this year. More to the point, through a series of landmark legislative achievements – a record that outstrips Obama’s – Biden has spread the jobs and investment around, even to those parts of the US left derelict by decades of post-industrial decline. Take his gargantuan infrastructure package, the poorly named Inflation Reduction Act: more than 80% of its green investment dollars have gone to counties with below-average wages. This is levelling up made real.And yet, Biden is struggling, even in those places he has helped most. It’s a reminder of a core fact that is so often forgotten. That politics is an emotions business, one that turns not on what people think but what they feel. All the economic data in the world won’t help you if voters feel squeezed and reckon the country is on the wrong track.As the US commentator Joe Klein puts it, politics often comes down to “the art of competitive storytelling”. The successful politician tells a story that goes beyond the practical matters of pay and public services, speaking instead to voters about the way they see their own lives and the future, for themselves, their families and the country. In that competition, Trump beats Biden. His story is dark and vengeful, pitting his people against a menacing other, but it is compelling. Biden has a narrative, too – he will protect democracy and abortion rights from the Trump threat – but it is defensive.This is the gap Starmer needs to plug – and you can see how he might do it. One Labour luminary says that too many Britons “don’t just feel a loss of income, but a deficit of dignity” and that politicians have to address that. Starmer gets close when he speaks of “dignity at work”, of the human need for respect. It sounds authentic, as if it might even be his animating purpose, when he recalls the way his father, a toolmaker who worked in a factory, “always felt … that he was looked down on. Disrespected.”Whatever the story is, he needs to tell it. Right now, what Keir Starmer offers will almost certainly be enough to get him into No 10. But the lesson of Joe Biden is that, if he wants to stay there, it will take much more.
    Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

  • 163 Shares159 Views

    in US Politics

    Harrison Butker’s jersey sales rise as right wing lauds Chiefs kicker after rant

    Harrison Butker’s university commencement address at Benedictine College excoriating Pride month, working women, abortion rights activists and others has prompted the National Football League to disavow his remarks – but the Kansas City Chiefs placekicker’s jersey sales have spiked as conservatives seize on their latest culture war.Butker has also drawn an impassioned statement of support from Josh Hawley, the far-right US senator from Missouri known for his opposition to abortion and a viral video which showed him running away from the mob he incited during the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.“We need a different generation of kids that are willing to say no that’s not right, there is such a thing as right and wrong, I’m not going in for all of this lefty garbage and I just thought that his calls for folks to stand up and be bold was great,” Hawley said in reference to Butker during an interview on Wednesday with Spectrum News.An NFL spokesperson on Thursday said the comments Butker delivered as the graduation speaker at Benedictine College five days earlier ran contrary to the league’s “commitment to inclusion”.“Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity,” said the statement from the NFL senior vice-president Jonathan Beane, the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization.”The NFL’s statement aligned relatively closely with a separate one issued by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Glaad), which dismissed Butker’s 20-minute address as “a clear miss” and “woefully out of step with Americans about Pride, LGBTQ people and women”.Another notable rejection of Butker’s opinions came in the form of a statement from the Benedictine Sisters of Mount Saint Scholastica, which co-founded the college where the kicker spoke.“The sisters … do not believe that Harrison Butker’s comments … represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested,” their statement said. “Instead of promoting unity in our church, our nation, and the world, his comments seem to have fostered division.”Yet, in scenes that called to mind the political right wing’s enthrallment with the film Sound of Freedom last year, Butker’s jersey was among the most sold as of Thursday, according to NFL.com.His jersey sales still trailed that of his Chiefs teammate Travis Kelce, whose support for vaccines and the Black Lives Matter movement – as well as his relationship with Taylor Swift – have infuriated the far-right set that is now coddling Butker. However, Butker’s jersey sales were outpacing that of the Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who has led Kansas City to three Super Bowl victories since the 2019 season.The Kansas City news station KCTV reported that a local store named the Rally House had completely sold out of Butker jerseys amid his speech’s controversy.“Just the demand after the speech – it’s been men and women. It’s been both calling to get his jersey,” the store’s manager, Aaron Lewis, reportedly told KCTV.Hawley on Wednesday then offered himself as one of the most public faces of the conservative delight inspired by the offense Butker caused with his speech.“He talks about not being too nice when you’re standing up for your convictions,” Hawley said to Spectrum News, a little more than three years after he threw up a clenched fist at – and then was caught on video running from – a mob of Donald Trump supporters who carried out the deadly Capitol attack after the former president’s 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden. “And I just think he’s right about that.”In his speech to the conservative Catholic school’s graduating class, Butker referred to “dangerous gender ideologies” in an apparent allusion to Pride month, which has been celebrated annually in June since the Stonewall riots in 1969.He also told the women in the audience that “homemaker” should be the “most important title” they hold.“I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world,” Butker said.Among a host of other arguments, Butker contended that access to abortion – which most Americans favor – stemmed from “pervasiveness of disorder”.The 28-year-old Butker’s conservative Catholic beliefs are well known, and so are his on-field exploits, including booting a field goal that forced the decisive overtime period in Kansas City’s Super Bowl victory over the San Francisco 49ers in February.Benedictine, a private liberal arts school about 60 miles north of Kansas City, invited Butker to be its commencement speaker nearly three years to the day after the college removed its chaplain from his position after he disclosed “inappropriate conduct” with a female student.Meanwhile, a report on Friday from the Chicago Sun-Times documented how an Illinois-based monk belonging to the religious order which is associated with Benedictine pleaded guilty to a felony battery charge against a former student of the school where he taught – and has now landed on a list of organization members deemed to have been credibly accused of child sexual abuse.
    The Associated Press contributed reporting More

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in US Politics

    MTG v AOC: House hearing dissolves into chaos over Republican’s insult

    The two most famous sets of initials in US politics clashed in a chaotic House hearing on Thursday, as the progressive star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, objected fiercely to an attack on another Democrat by the far-right Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, or MTG.The oversight committee hearing concerned Republican attempts to hold the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt, for refusing to release tapes of interviews between Joe Biden and the special counsel Robert Hur.Things went wrong when MTG made a partisan point, trying to tie Democrats to the judge in Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money case – which, by drawing a number of Republicans to the New York courtroom to support Trump, was responsible for the hearing starting late in the day.In answer to MTG, Jasmine Crockett of Texas said: “Please tell me what that has to do with Merrick Garland … Do you know what we’re here for? You know we’re here about AG Garland?”Greene, a conspiracy theorist from Georgia, said: “I don’t think you know what you’re here for … I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”Amid jeers and calls for order, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said: “That’s beneath even you, Miss Greene.”AOC, of New York, demanded MTG’s words be taken down.As defined by the Congressional Research Service, that meant AOC thought MTG had “violated the rules of decorum in the House” and should withdraw her words.“That is absolutely unacceptable,” AOC said. “How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person?”MTG said: “Are your feelings hurt?”AOC said: “Move her words down.”MTG said: “Aw.”AOC said: “Oh, girl. Baby girl.”Amid laughter, MTG said: “Oh really?”AOC said: “Don’t even play.”MTG said: “Baby girl? I don’t think so.”AOC said: “We’re gonna move and we’re gonna take your words down.”James Comer, the Republican chair from Kentucky, struggled to impose order, eventually saying: “Miss Greene agrees to strike her words.”AOC said: “I believe she must apologise.”MTG said: “I’m not apologising.”AOC said: “Well then, you’re not retracting your words.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMTG said: “I’m not apologising.”Comer banged his gavel, pleading: “C’mon, guys.”MTG said: “Why don’t you debate me?”As Raskin tried to interject, AOC said: “I think it’s pretty self-evident.”MTG said: “Yeah, you don’t have enough intelligence.”Comer cried, “You’re out of order, you’re out of order,” and tried to recognise Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, another pro-Trump extremist. Jeers broke out, Raskin calling: “I move to strike the lady’s words.”“That’s two requests to strike,” AOC said.MTG said: “Oh, they cannot take the words.”Raskin told Comer: “Please get your members under control.”MTG said: “I repeat again for the second time, yes, I’ll strike my words but I’m not apologising. Not apologising!”Extraordinarily enough, that wasn’t the end. Crockett asked Comer: “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling. If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”Comer said: “A what now? … I have no idea what you just said.”Next to him, Raskin buried his face in his hands.Comer imposed a five-minute recess. When the hearing resumed, Lauren Boebert – the Colorado extremist and theatrical exhibitionist who usually battles for attention with MTG – was of all people the one to offer an apology “to the American people”.“When things get as heated as they have,” Boebert said, “unfortunately, it’s an embarrassment on our body as a whole.” More

  • 163 Shares109 Views

    in US Politics

    Biden and Trump are betting on debates to help magnify the other’s weaknesses

    It’s game on for a pair of presidential debates between two unpopular candidates most Americans wish weren’t running for the nation’s highest office.In a ratatat social media exchange on Wednesday, Joe Biden and Donald Trump agreed to participate in two debates on 27 June, hosted by CNN, and on 10 September, hosted by ABC.“Make my day, pal,” Biden said in a video, challenging his predecessor and rival to a high-stakes showdown. Trump, who had been insisting for months he would debate Biden “anytime, anyplace”, quickly accepted the offer: “Let’s get ready to Rumble!!!”The arrangement jolted a general election campaign that had begun to feel stagnant. And if their plans hold, Americans will be treated to a presidential matchup far earlier than usual – before either candidate will have formally accepted his party’s nomination.“The candidates realize the value of the debates, especially given their ages,” said Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan. “They need to show that they have the stamina to debate for 90 minutes or two hours to reassure the country.”The decision to square off at least twice before the November election reflects a careful calculation by both candidates who believe televised confrontations will help magnify the other’s weaknesses.Trump has repeatedly cast the 81-year-old president as greatly diminished. At his rallies, Trump, just four years the president’s junior, often mocks Biden as confused in an exaggerated impersonation that draws laughter and applause.But Democrats argue that Biden can more easily draw a contrast with Trump and remind voters why they rejected his Republican rival in 2020.“We need voters to see Trump 2024 with their own eyes,” the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg wrote on Thursday, “a candidate who is far more extreme and dangerous; whose performance is far more erratic, wild, impulsive and disturbing.”Biden is clearly eager for an opportunity to change the trajectory of the race, which has remained largely unchanged despite the start of Trump’s criminal trial in New York, a brightening economic outlook and tens of millions of dollars in advertising touting the president’s record and blaming Trump for the wave of unpopular abortion bans.While both campaigns are bracing for an extremely close contest in November, a series of recent New York Times/Siena College surveys found Biden trailing Trump in five of six critical battleground states.Widespread discontent over his handling of the economy, immigration and Israel’s war in Gaza have hurt the president’s standing with key Democratic constituencies, particularly young people.Even in a polarized media environment, presidential debates remain the “SuperBowl” of politics, Kall said, offering candidates what is likely to be the most prominent platform of the election cycle. For both Biden and Trump, the events are high-risk, but also potentially high-reward.“Everyone is expecting the election to be decided by half a dozen states. Those states will be decided by thousands or tens of thousands of votes,” he said. “So a debate that 70 or 80 million people watch could certainly change enough votes to matter.”In 2020, Biden and Trump’s first face-off drew 73 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings, while Trump’s debate against the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 captured 84 million viewers.Many more Americans will not watch the events live but will pay attention to reactions on social media.“A lot of people who don’t tune into the actual debate will likely know what the breakout moments of the debate are,” said Yanna Krupnikov, professor of communication and media at University of Michigan. “What happens afterward is going to be really, hugely important.”Americans are arguably more familiar with Biden and Trump than any pair of presidential challengers in American history. Voters may still tune in to hear what the president and former president have to say about major issues, such as the Israel-Hamas war. But Emily Van Duyn, an associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who specializes in political communication, expects most will be watching for how the candidates perform.“For the most part, it’s going to be an assessment of: can these dudes hold up?” Van Duyn said.Democrats say Biden must deliver an energetic performance that reassures voters unsure whether the oldest president in American history is up for a second term.“The debate is the hurdle he has to cross,” David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, said on CNN. “He needs to dispel that notion in that debate.”Voters tend to express fewer concerns about the 77-year-old former president’s age, but Democrats believe a debate could highlight Trump’s tendency toward verbal slips and gaffes.He is also likely to be pressed on his criminal cases. By then, the Manhattan hush-money case should be finished. Polls suggest a sizable share of Republican and independent voters would be uncomfortable voting for a candidate convicted of a felony.The format poses different challenges for each candidate.Trump feeds off the energy of a crowd. CNN has said its debate at the network’s Atlanta studios will take place without an audience, which was a prerequisite for the Biden campaign.Trump turned off voters in 2020, when he repeatedly hectored and interrupted Biden during their first debate. “He needs to play to the voters that may like his policies but not his temperament,” Kall said.Biden, meanwhile, has built a political brand around defying expectations, as he did earlier this year with a rousing State of the Union speech and in the 2020 debates.. “People will say he can’t do it, it’s too late at night,” Kall said. “Then as long as he doesn’t fall down or forget something, people will say he did OK.”The terms of the campaigns’ agreement, which bypasses the non-partisan commission that has hosted presidential debates for more than three decades, was designed to ensure a head-to-head between Biden and Trump.In a tweet, Robert Kennedy Jr, the independent candidate for president who is unlikely to qualify for the CNN debate, accused the frontrunners of “colluding” to exclude him. “Keeping viable candidates off the debate stage undermines democracy,” he said.While jumpstarting the debate season creates an opportunity for an early reset, it also makes the events less “existential” for the campaigns, said Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America, discussing the development on his podcast with the former White House press secretary Jen Psaki.After the September debate, there are still weeks to recover from a potentially subpar performance or embarrassing gaffe. Though momentum from a strong showing could fade before election day, early voting ​m​eans millions of Americans will have already cast their ballots.Psaki said the back-and-forth between Biden and Trump this week was part of a new approach. Whereas four years ago, Biden led with sophisticated appeals to democracy and civility, he’s now playing humor as a way to tweak his famously thin-skinned opponent.“It’s figuring out how to land the best needles,” Psaki said.In a sign of Biden’s more pugnacious approach, the president opened public negotiations over the general election debate on Wednesday, the one day a week Trump is not confined to a New York courtroom. “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays,” Biden said in the video, suggesting a date for their face-off. His campaign is now selling merchandise that read: “Free on Wednesdays.”On Thursday, Biden’s re-election campaign also announced that it had accepted an offer from CBS News to participate in a vice-presidential debate and proposed two dates for that fall after the Republican national convention in July. Trump has yet to choose his running mate, but a carousel of Republican hopefuls have been openly auditioning for the role.With just weeks before the first debate, both candidates have an abbreviated timeline to prepare.Neither has participated in a debate since their final showdown in 2020. This year, Trump declined to take part in the Republican primary debates and Biden as the incumbent faced only nominal challenges.In an MSNBC interview this week, Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and 2012 Republican presidential nominee, insisted that the debates still mattered to voters and predicted a “huge audience” would tune in for the spectacle.As far as what they would see, Romney quipped: “the image that comes to mind is those two old guys on the Muppets”. More

  • 138 Shares159 Views

    in US Politics

    Biden asserts executive privilege to block release of special counsel interviews

    Joe Biden asserted executive privilege to stop House Republicans obtaining recordings of his interviews with Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s retention of classified information after his time as a senator and as vice-president to Barack Obama.In a letter reported by the New York Times and other outlets on Thursday, the White House counsel, Edward Siskel, told the Republican chairs of the House judiciary and oversight committees: “The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal – to chop them up, distort them and use them for partisan political purposes.“Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally protected law enforcement materials from the executive branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate.”The two chairs, Jim Jordan of Ohio (judiciary) and James Comer of Kentucky (oversight), both close allies of Donald Trump, have led Republican efforts to ensnare Biden in damaging investigations including a sputtering impeachment.Biden’s retention of classified information was discovered as Trump, Biden’s opponent in this year’s election, came to face 40 criminal charges on the same issue.Unlike Trump – who faces 48 other criminal charges and has been hit with multimillion-dollar civil penalties – Biden cooperated with the special counsel appointed to investigate the matter.Hur, who was appointed as a US attorney by Trump, cleared Biden of wrongdoing. But Hur caused uproar when in his report he made repeated reference to the 81-year-old president’s age, including saying if he had brought charges, jurors would have seen Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.Hur has defended his work. Republicans have clamoured for access to recordings of Hur’s interviews with Biden, particularly after Biden’s own angry claims about what was said were contradicted by transcripts.News organisations have sued to obtain the recordings.In Congress, Republicans threatened to hold the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt after he rejected subpoenas for the recordings and other materials.In a letter to Biden, reported by the Times, Garland said handing over Hur’s interviews “would raise an unacceptable risk” of undermining “similar high-profile criminal investigations – in particular, investigations where the voluntary cooperation of White House officials is exceedingly important”.The Department of Justice said the decision to withhold the interviews was not made for partisan reasons.Carlos Uriarte, assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, told Jordan and Comer: “It is the longstanding position of the executive branch held by administrations of both parties that an official who asserts the president’s claim of executive privilege cannot be prosecuted for criminal contempt of Congress.”In response, House Republicans cited comments in February in which a Biden spokesperson said the president had “nothing to hide”, and asked: “Why is Biden hiding behind executive privilege now?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionComer said: “It’s a five-alarm fire at the White House … Today’s Hail Mary from the White House changes nothing for our committee.”Jordan told reporters transcripts already handed over were not “sufficient evidence of the state of the president’s memory” and said: “This last-minute invocation does not change the fact that the attorney general has not complied with our subpoena.”Jordan’s House judiciary committee later voted to advance contempt proceedings against Garland. The oversight committee was due to take up the issue.Trump’s campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said Biden “and his feeble administration have irretrievably politicised the key constitutional tenet of executive privilege, denying it to their political opponents while aggressively trying to use it to run political cover for Crooked Joe”.But Glenn Ivey, a Maryland Democrat who sits on the House judiciary committee, told the Times Republicans’ demands were “purely political”.“The only reason they want the recording is to try to use clips for campaign ads, or something along those lines, which obviously doesn’t meet the legislative purpose standard that the supreme court set for congressional oversight.” More