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    Joe Biden will cancel $7.4bn in student debt for 277,000 borrowers

    The Biden administration will cancel $7.4bn in student debt for 277,000 borrowers, the White House said on Friday, the latest in a series of debt cancellations.Joe Biden announced plans on Monday to ease student debt that would benefit at least 23 million Americans, addressing a key issue for young voters whose support he needs as he seeks re-election in November.Those plans include canceling up to $20,000 of accrued and capitalized interest for borrowers, regardless of income, which Biden’s administration estimates would eliminate the entirety of that interest for 23 million borrowers.The latest round of debt relief affects 277,000 Americans enrolled in the Save Plan, other borrowers enrolled in Income-Driven Repayment plans, and borrowers receiving Public Service Loan Forgiveness, the White House said in a statement.It follows an announcement in March that $6bn in student loans would be canceled for 78,000 borrowers.The administration said on Friday it had approved $153bn in student debt relief for 4.3 million Americans.Biden, a Democrat, last year pledged to find other avenues for tackling debt relief after the US supreme court in June blocked his broader plan to cancel $430bn in student loan debt.The campaign of the former president Donald Trump, Biden’s Republican challenger in the White House race, in March criticized the student loan cancellation as a bailout that was done “without a single act of Congress”.The issue remains high on the agenda of younger voters, many of whom have concerns about Biden’s foreign policy on the war in Gaza and fault him for not achieving greater debt forgiveness.Republicans have called Biden’s student loan forgiveness approach an overreach of his authority and an unfair benefit to college-educated borrowers while other borrowers received no such relief.Roughly half of federal student loan debt is held by people with a graduate degree, according to the Brookings Institution thinktank. An August 2023 report by the Department of Education said graduate students received the highest share – 47% – of federal student loan disbursements from 2021-22, even though they accounted for only 21% of all borrowers. More

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    Campaign funds used to pay Biden legal bills in classified documents inquiry

    Campaign donations to Joe Biden were used to help pay legal bills during the special counsel investigation of his retention of classified information when out of office, Axios reported on Friday.Citing a review of campaign finance records and two unnamed sources “familiar with the matter”, the site said filings by the Democratic National Committee showed it paid more than $1.5m to lawyers or firms representing Biden during Robert Hur’s investigation.The news opens the Biden campaign to charges of hypocrisy, given its own attacks on Donald Trump and his campaign for using donations to pay legal bills.But the two candidates’ legal situations – and legal costs – are vastly different.Trump faces 88 criminal charges (for election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments) and multimillion-dollar penalties in civil suits over tax fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape claim a judge said was “substantially true”.Denying wrongdoing but seeking to delay trials until he can retake power next year and dismiss them, Trump has fought prosecutors at every step, appealing all the way to the US supreme court. Nonetheless, Trump’s first criminal trial – in the hush-money case and the first criminal trial ever to involve a former president – is scheduled to begin in New York on Monday.The New York Times has reported that Trump’s legal bills since leaving office have topped $100m.Biden was investigated for retaining classified information after his 36-year stint as a US senator from Delaware and eight years as vice-president to Barack Obama. Unlike Trump, he cooperated with the special counsel throughout. Unlike in Trump’s case, the special counsel declined to bring charges – though he did deliver a controversial report.Hur’s investigation began in January last year. Axios said DNC filings showed payments of $1.05m to a company run by Bob Bauer, Biden’s lead attorney, between July 2023 and February 2024 and “largely” relating to the special counsel’s investigation.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAsked about those payments and others, the DNC declined to tell Axios exactly how much was spent on matters concerning the special counsel. Bauer did not comment.Axios pointed to recent statements by Biden campaign officials aimed at Trump’s methods of meeting legal costs, including “We are not spending money on legal bills or hawking gold sneakers” and a hit at the Republican for relying on “a handful of billionaires figuring out how to pay his legal bills”.Alex Floyd, a DNC spokesperson, said: “There is no comparison – the DNC does not spend a single penny of grassroots donors’ money on legal bills – unlike Donald Trump, who actively solicits legal fees from his supporters and has drawn down every bank account he can get his hands on, like a personal piggy bank.” More

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    How badly has US diplomacy been damaged by the war in Gaza? – podcast

    Criticism of Israel’s war strategy has been growing in recent months, but last week there was a marked shift in tone from western leaders after seven aid workers were killed by an Israeli strike. The most notable change has come from the US president, Joe Biden, who this week turned on Benjamin Netanyahu, declaring Israel’s approach to the war a ‘mistake’.
    This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to a former negotiator in the Middle East, Aaron David Miller, about whether pressure from within his own party will force Biden to stop supplying arms to the US’s biggest ally in the Middle East, and what the future holds for the relationship between the US and Israel when the war ends

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

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    Tennessee legislature passes bill banning marriage between first cousins

    The Republican-led Tennessee legislature has overwhelmingly voted to send the Republican governor, Bill Lee, a proposal that would ban marriage between first cousins.The statehouse cast a 75-2 vote on Thursday on the bill after the senate previously approved it without any opposition.A particularly vocal opponent, the Republican representative Gino Bulso, took up most of the debate time, as he argued for an amendment to allow first-cousin marriages if the couple first seeks counseling from a genetic counselor.In a previous committee hearing on the bill, Bulso lightheartedly shared a story about how his grandparents had been first cousins who came to the US from Italy in the 1920s, then traveled from Ohio to Tennessee to get married. He and other lawmakers laughed, and Bulso voted for the bill in that committee.Then, during Thursday’s floor debate, the socially conservative attorney argued that the risk of married cousins having a child with birth defects does not exist for gay couples. He contended there was no compelling government interest to ban same-sex cousins from getting married, saying that would run afoul of the US supreme court’s gay marriage decision.He also couched his argument by saying that he thought the supreme court decision on gay marriage was “grievously wrong”. Bulso has supported legislation aimed at the LGBTQ+ community, including a bill he is sponsoring that would largely ban displaying Pride flags in public school classrooms, which civil liberties advocates have contended runs afoul of the US constitution.“The question is: is there a public health issue with a male marrying a male first cousin?” Bulso said. “And I think the answer is no.”Ultimately, lawmakers voted down Bulso’s amendment and approved the ban proposed by the Democratic representative Darren Jernigan.“I hope it’s safe to say that in 2024, we can close this loophole,” Jernigan said.Jernigan said a 1960 attorney general’s opinion determined that an 1820s Tennessee law restricting some marriages among relatives does not prevent first cousins from marrying. He responded to Bulso that there was no violation to the gay marriage ruling in his bill.Monty Fritts, a Republican representative, was the other lawmaker to vote against the bill. More

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    Trump and Mike Johnson push for redundant ban on non-citizens voting

    Donald Trump and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, plan to push for a bill to ban non-citizens from voting, the latest step by Republicans to falsely claim migrants are coming to the country and casting ballots.Voting when a person is not eligible – for instance if they lack US citizenship – is already illegal under federal law. It is unclear what the bill Johnson and the former president will discuss in their Friday press conference at Mar-a-Lago will do to alter that. But it is one more way for the former president to focus on election security and to ding the Biden administration over the situation at the US-Mexico border, a key issue for likely Republican voters this November.Like the other claims Trump makes about the 2020 election being stolen, the talking point about migrant voting does not have facts to back it up.There is no evidence of widespread non-citizen voting, nor are there even many examples of individual instances of the practice, despite strenuous efforts in some states to find these cases. A large study by the Brennan Center of the 2016 election found that just 0.0001% of votes across 42 jurisdictions, with 23.5m votes, were suspected to be non-citizens voting, 30 incidents in total.One review in Georgia found about 1,600 instances of non-citizens registering to vote from 1997 to 2022. In these instances, safeguards in the process worked: none of these attempts led to someone being allowed to register, because they did not submit proof of citizenship needed to be added to the voter rolls.The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, has a database of voter fraud cases across the country, which, according to the Washington Post, includes just 85 cases of non-citizen voting since 2002.Some of the isolated instances of non-citizens voting in the last decade have involved people who were confused about their eligibility and did not do so intentionally.In general, people who are undocumented avoid scenarios that could leave them vulnerable to deportation, such as voting illegally.The lack of prosecutions over migrant voting has not stopped Trump from making claims on the campaign trail that it will somehow steal the election from him, or that it has already happened in other elections in which he was on the ballot.“I think they really are doing it because they want to sign these people up to vote. I really do,” Trump said in Iowa in January. “They can’t speak a word of English for the most part, but they’re signing them up.”Trump is not the only one spreading this falsehood – it’s part of a longstanding Republican line of attack on immigration and Democrats. Now, the myth is also being pushed by Elon Musk, the owner of X, and the prominent Trump-aligned figure Cleta Mitchell, who has been circulating a two-page memo laying out “the threat of non-citizen voting in 2024”, according to reporting by NPR, which obtained the memo.Because this is a concern Republicans consistently bring up, some states have added new laws to try to remove non-citizens from voter rolls or undertaken audits of their voters to assess citizenship status.But, voting rights advocates have warned, these often run the risk of ensnaring naturalized citizens and other people who are eligible to vote and booting them from the voter rolls. One attempt in Texas in 2019 led the then secretary of state to send letters to nearly 100,000 people, including US citizens who were erroneously warned they might not be eligible to vote.Widespread voter fraud, in general, does not exist in the US. There are instances of voter fraud prosecuted across the US every election, but even statewide taskforces have been unable to uncover large numbers of cases, and certainly nothing close to the scale that could swing elections. More

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    Trump campaign calls for more presidential debates ‘much earlier’ in election race – as it happened

    Joe Biden’s campaign launched a seven-figure ad buy in Arizona on Thursday focusing on reproductive rights, just two days after the state’s supreme court upheld a near-total abortion ban dating to 1864.The ad buy focuses on Donald Trump’s latest abortion stance, in which he said laws should be left to individual states, many of which have enacted new restrictions since he appointed supreme court justices who were instrumental in the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade.“Because of Donald Trump, millions of women lost the fundamental freedom to control their own bodies,” Biden narrates in the 30-second ad.
    And now, women’s lives are in danger because of that. The question is, if Donald Trump gets back in power, what freedom will you lose next?
    The ad, dubbed “Power Back”, will run this month on targeted television programs and target key young, female and Latino voters both on television and online, according to the campaign.In a statement, campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said:
    This week, women across the state of Arizona are watching in horror as an abortion ban from 1864 with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of a woman will soon become the law of the land for Arizonans. This nightmare is only possible because of Donald Trump.

    Donald Trump’s campaign wrote to the commission on presidential debates asking for this year’s general election debates between him and Joe Biden to take place “much earlier” and calling for more to be added to the schedule.
    The Trump campaign letter comes after five of the major TV news networks banded together to prepare a letter urging Biden and Trump to participate in televised debates ahead the November general election.
    Joe Biden’s re-election campaign launched a seven-figure ad buy in Arizona on Thursday focusing on reproductive rights, just two days after the state’s supreme court upheld a near-total abortion ban dating to 1864.
    Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister, called on Americans to overcome their “self-doubt” as he offered a paean to US global leadership before a bitterly divided Congress.
    Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman of Georgia who has filed a motion to remove Mike Johnson, said the House speaker offered her a spot on a proposed “kitchen cabinet” of advisers after a meeting at the Capitol.
    Senator Tim Kaine, a former vice-presidential nominee and leading foreign policy voice in the Democratic party, has said Joe Biden now understands that Benjamin Netanyahu “played” him during the early months of the war in Gaza but “that ain’t going to happen any more”.
    The joint press conference between Mike Johnson and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago tomorrow will come just two days after the former president called on Republicans to kill legislation the speaker put forward to extend a controversial surveillance law. Trump had urged House GOP members to reject a reauthorization of the law, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), ahead of the key procedural vote on Wednesday.
    Johnson is dashing to Florida to meet with Trump, where the pair are expected to appear tomorrow at an event at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate for a “major announcement on election integrity”. Friday’s appearance will mark their first public event together since Johnson was elected to the speakership last fall.
    FBI director Christopher Wray is currently speaking before the House appropriations committee, where he is expected to warn lawmakers of his concerns over potential bad actors carrying out attacks on US soil.“Our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home,” a transcript of Wray’s opening statement obtained by ABC News reads.
    But now increasingly concerning is the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, akin to the ISIS-K attack we saw at the Russia Concert Hall a couple weeks ago.
    Wray said he was “hard pressed to think of a time where so many threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once,” according to the transcript.While he was careful not to touch on US domestic politics, the address by Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, today comes amid a deadlock in Congress on approving billions of dollars in additional military aid to Ukraine, due to pressure from hard-right Republicans aligned with Donald Trump.Kishida warned that the biggest challenge the world faces comes from China:
    China’s current external stance and military actions present an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge, not only to the peace and security of Japan but to the peace and stability of the international community at large.
    “Ukraine of today may be East Asia of tomorrow,” he added.Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, on Thursday called on Americans to overcome their “self-doubt” as he offered a paean to US global leadership before a bitterly divided Congress.Warning of risks from the rise of China, Kishida said that Japan – stripped of its right to a military after the second world war – was determined to do more to share responsibility with its ally the United States.“As we meet here today, I detect an undercurrent of self-doubt among some Americans about what your role in the world should be,” Kishida told a joint session of the House of Representatives and Senate during a state visit to Washington.
    The international order that the US worked for generations to build is facing new challenges, challenges from those with values and principles very different from ours.
    Kishida said he understood “the exhaustion of being the country that has upheld the international order almost single-handedly” but added:
    The leadership of the United States is indispensable. Without US support, how long before the hopes of Ukraine would collapse under the onslaught from Moscow? Without the presence of the United States, how long before the Indo-Pacific would face even harsher realities?
    A majority of voters in Florida say they believe a six-week abortion ban is too strict, but only 42% said they will vote in favor of a ballot measure to enshrine abortion protections into the state constitution, according to a new poll.The study by Emerson College Polling found that 57% of respondents said the six-week abortion ban that will become state law next month is “too strict”, compared with 15% who said it is not strict enough.Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said:
    Fifty-six percent of Democrats and 44% of independents plan to vote in favor of a constitutional right to abortion before fetal viability. Republicans are more split: 36% plan to vote no, 30% yes, and 34% are unsure.
    Wisconsin Republicans have hit the state election commission with complaints alleging that officials in the state’s two largest cities illegally rejected Republican applicants for poll worker positions for the primary election.The complaints, filed by the Milwaukee county Republican party and Dane county Republican party, claim officials in Milwaukee and Madison violated state law by not contacting eligible Republicans nominated by their party to work the polls. The move furthers the GOP strategy of questioning election processes in key battleground states.“This is the kind of misconduct that drives down faith in elections,” the Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman, Michael Whatley, said in a statement on Wednesday.
    The Republican Party is filing these complaints to compel election officials to follow the law and guarantee bipartisan access to important election administration positions in the Badger state.
    Burt Jones, Georgia’s state senator turned lieutenant governor, will be investigated for his role as a fake elector for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.Pete Skandalakis, director of the prosecuting attorneys’ council of Georgia, said he will look into whether Jones should face criminal charges over efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state.Jones was one of 16 state Republicans who signed a certificate stating that Trump had won Georgia and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors even though Joe Biden had been declared the winner in the state.The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, was barred from prosecuting Jones in 2022 as part of her election interference case against Trump and others, after she hosted a campaign fundraiser for his Democratic opponent in the lieutenant governor’s race.Skandalakis announced on Thursday that he would appoint himself to spearhead a potential case against Jones, after facing criticism for not moving more quickly to find a prosecutor to replace Willis.The Trump campaign letter comes after five of the major TV news networks banded together to prepare a letter urging Joe Biden and Donald Trump to participate in televised debates ahead the November general election.The letter, endorsed by ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News, urged the presumptive presidential nominees “to publicly commit to participating in general election debates before November’s election”, according to CNN.In a statement responding to the Trump campaign’s letter asking for more presidential debates, Republican national committee Michael Whatley and co-chair Lara Trump said:
    Election calendars have become longer than ever before – and scheduling debates after millions of Americans have already cast their ballots does a grave disservice to voters who want to hear solutions to the economic, border, and crime crises created by Joe Biden.
    Donald Trump’s campaign wrote to the commission on presidential debates asking for this year’s general election debates between him and Joe Biden to take place “much earlier” and calling for more to be added to the schedule.In a letter to the commission, Trump co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita wrote:
    The Commission must move up the timetable of its proposed 2024 debates to ensure more Americans have a full chance to see the candidates before they start voting, and we would argue for adding more debates in addition to those on the currently proposed schedule.
    The first presidential debate is scheduled to take place on 16 September in San Marcos, Texas. There are three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate scheduled.Wiles and LaCivita noted that by the date of the first proposed debate, more than a million Americans are likely to have already voted, and three million may have cast their ballot by 1 October, when the second proposed debate is scheduled. They added:
    We have already indicated President Trump is willing to debate anytime, anyplace, and anywhere – and the time to start these debates is now.
    Trump, who did not participate in any of the Republican primary debates, made similar requests during the 2020 election.The Republican National Committee sent out a scripted robocall on behalf of its new co-chair Lara Trump, falsely claiming Democrats were guilty of “massive fraud” in the 2020 election.“We all know the problems,” the RNC call said, according to CNN, which also said the call was sent 145,000 times in the first week of April.
    No photo IDs, unsecured ballot drop boxes, mass mailing of ballots and voter rolls chock full of deceased people and non-citizens are just a few examples of the massive fraud that took place. If Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.
    Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who repeatedly defeated Trump in court after the 2020 election, said the RNC robocall showed the Republican party to be “more committed to the big lie than ever”.Donald Trump, who installed his daughter-in-law at the RNC last month, lost the 2020 election conclusively to Joe Biden and was told by close aides including William Barr, his attorney general, and Chris Krebs, his head of cybersecurity, that there was no widespread fraud.Regardless, Trump pursued his fraud lie through the courts – losing every case – and ultimately by inciting the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021. More

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    Lara Trump’s RNC robocall falsely claims ‘massive fraud’ in 2020 election

    The Republican National Committee sent out a scripted robocall on behalf of its new co-chair Lara Trump, falsely claiming Democrats were guilty of “massive fraud” in the 2020 election.“We all know the problems,” the RNC call said, according to CNN, which also said the call was sent 145,000 times in the first week of April.“No photo IDs, unsecured ballot drop boxes, mass mailing of ballots and voter rolls chock full of deceased people and non-citizens are just a few examples of the massive fraud that took place. If Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.”Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who repeatedly defeated Trump in cases over alleged electoral fraud after the 2020 election, said the RNC robocall showed the Republican party to be “more committed to the big lie than ever”.Donald Trump, who installed his daughter-in-law at the RNC last month, lost the 2020 election conclusively to Joe Biden and was told by close aides including William Barr, his attorney general, and Chris Krebs, his head of cybersecurity, that there was no widespread fraud.Regardless, Trump pursued his fraud lie through the courts – losing every case – and ultimately by inciting the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.Impeached for inciting an insurrection but acquitted when enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal, Trump has ridden unprecedented legal jeopardy, including 14 charges related to election subversion, to claim the nomination again.The RNC did not consistently fundraise off Trump’s stolen election lie before its change of leadership, a process the Guardian recently reported has been “buffeted by staffing problems and operational headaches as [Trump allies] attempt to bring the party apparatus under the control of the Trump campaign”.But Trump has never stopped broadcasting his lie.On Friday, he is due to appear at his Florida home with Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, for an event trumpeted as important for Republican party unity but focusing on “election integrity”.USA Today reported that the two men will announce a bill meant to “elevate the issue of non-citizens voting in federal elections”.The Bipartisan Policy Center, a group dedicated to creating solutions across party lines, points to research by groups on the right and left of US politics, which says non-citizen voting is exceptionally rare and does not affect election results.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs reported by CNN, the RNC robocall sent in April told recipients: “I’m sure you agree with co-chair [Lara] Trump that we cannot allow the chaos and questions of the 2020 election to ever happen again.”CNN also detailed Lara Trump’s extensive and recent history of supporting her father-in-law’s electoral fraud lie.In just one recent instance, at a campaign event in South Carolina in February, she said: “Does anyone actually believe that in 2020, 81 million people were so inspired by a guy [Biden] who could only get 10 people [to attended events] … that he had the most massive turnout in the history of elections? No, we don’t believe that.”In late March, Trump told NBC the 2020 election was “in the past” but did not disown allegations of a stolen election.On Wednesday, Trump told Newsmax her father-in-law was the victim of political prosecutions and having “nothing but misinformation and disinformation thrown at him every single day”. More

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    Wisconsin Republicans allege anti-GOP bias in latest election challenge

    Wisconsin Republicans have hit the state election commission with complaints alleging that officials in the state’s two largest cities illegally rejected Republican applicants for poll worker positions for the primary election.The complaints, filed by the Milwaukee county Republican party and Dane county Republican party, claim officials in Milwaukee and Madison violated state law by not contacting eligible Republicans nominated by their party to work the polls. The move furthers the GOP strategy of questioning election processes in key battleground states.“This is the kind of misconduct that drives down faith in elections,” the Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman, Michael Whatley, said in a statement on Wednesday. “The Republican Party is filing these complaints to compel election officials to follow the law and guarantee bipartisan access to important election administration positions in the Badger state.”State law requires clerks to choose poll workers, also called election inspectors, from lists submitted by the Republican and Democratic parties. If there aren’t enough party-nominated applicants to staff the polls, municipalities turn to non-party-affiliated applicants.Officials in Madison and Milwaukee have rejected the claim that they unfairly rejected Republican applicants.In an email, the executive director of the Milwaukee election commission, Claire Woodall, said that her office “has remained in frequent contact with Republican leadership both at the state and local level regarding the status of all nominated inspectors”. Charles Hanna, who claims in the Milwaukee complaint that he was unfairly rejected, failed to complete a mandatory online application, Woodall said.Woodall sent the Guardian a screenshot of an internal log showing how municipal workers emailed Hanna five times regarding his application between 30 January and 25 March.Michael Haas, the Madison city attorney, also disputed the characterization of the complaint filed against Madison officials, saying in an email that it “contains significant misstatements of the facts” and that “many individuals nominated by the Republican Party did not complete required paperwork to be hired or respond to communications from the Clerk’s Office regarding their availability.”After the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies spread the false claim that Democrats and election officials colluded to rig the election for Joe Biden. The claims took hold among many of Trump’s supporters, prompting party activists to aim their focus on election administration, including training poll workers to challenge ballots and submit legal complaints in real time.Since March, when the RNC co-chairs Lara Trump and Whatley took over the leadership of the party, the RNC stripped dozens of senior staff of their positions in a step towards stocking its ranks with Trump loyalists. Amid the overhaul, RNC leaders have hired prominent lawyers who promoted Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen – and have promised to double down on election litigation ahead of the 2024 presidential election. The RNC has already filed multiple lawsuits questioning states’ voter rolls – including one in Michigan, which the state’s top election official, Jocelyn Benson, denounced as “a meritless lawsuit filled with baseless accusations”.The Republican party of Dane county and the Republican party of Milwaukee county did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More