Evelyn Reynolds

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    ‘Rotten fruit thrown at you’: Robert Hur speaks out on vitriol after Biden report

    The former special counsel who investigated Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents has said he is stunned at “the level of vitriol” that greeted him across the US’s political spectrum after he declined to prosecute the president yet portrayed him in a report as an “elderly man with a poor memory”.“I knew it was going to be unpleasant” taking on the investigation, Robert Hur told The New Yorker in a lengthy interview Friday, more than a week after he appeared at a congressional hearing in which both Democrats and Republicans heavily criticized him. “But the level of vitriol – it’s hard to know exactly how intense that’s going to be until the rotten fruit is being thrown at you.”Hur’s comments to the publication – his first media interview since his House testimony – largely centered on the Biden report, which he released in February. In it, he concluded that Biden’s handling of classified materials from his time as vice-president to Barack Obama did not warrant criminal charges.Biden’s Democratic allies subsequently hailed that determination but excoriated Hur for throwing into the report a stinging opinion on the president’s memory, which Republicans seized on in their support of Donald Trump’s efforts to return to the White House in November.Meanwhile, Republicans who were enthusiastic about Hur’s thoughts on Biden’s memory were simultaneously furious that he had refused to file charges against the president. Their preferred candidate, Donald Trump, on the other hand, faces more than 80 criminal charges for not only his handling of classified materials after his presidency – but also for attempting to subvert his 2020 electoral defeat to Biden and in connection with hush-money payments.Tensions for Hur hit a fever pitch when he testified in front of a House committee on 12 March. On one side, Democratic congressman Adam Schiff accused Hur of knowing full well that his words would create “a political firestorm” for Biden as he seeks re-election.And at the opposite end, Republican congressman Matt Gaetz berated Hur for purportedly applying a “double standard” benefiting Biden at Trump’s expense.Hur maintained to The New Yorker that he had harbored no partisan intentions when he authored his report. He also said that the document’s intended audience was of one: the US attorney general Merrick Garland, a fellow ex-prosecutor.“I didn’t write it for law students. I didn’t write it for the lay public, and I didn’t write it for Congress,” Hur said of his report, according to The New Yorker. “I wrote it for the attorney general of the United States, who himself was an experienced prosecutor.“I’m just doing the work. I don’t have a particular ideology or crusade that I’m trying to go after.”Also in Friday’s interview, Hur addressed his resignation from the justice department on the eve of his congressional testimony. Among those to criticize that move was Harry Litman, a former US attorney turned law professor and legal analyst who contended that Hur could be more free to vilify Biden before Congress if he testified as a “private citizen”.To that possibility, Hur alluded to a recent precedent set by the former special counsel Robert Mueller. Hur said Mueller stepped down from the justice department upon concluding an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election won by Trump.“Look, if Mueller did it this way, then there must be some reasons,” Hur remarked. “I don’t want to make history here.”Hur received his appointment from Garland to investigate Biden’s handling of government secrets in January 2023. At the time, lawyers for Biden reported having found classified government documents at his home and former thinktank.Garland’s selection of Hur – a former US attorney appointed during Trump’s presidency – was meant to protect the Biden White House from appearances of a conflict of interest or political interference.Hur said to the New Yorker that he accepted the appointment in part to honor his family history. His mother’s family had fled from North Korea to South Korea shortly before the Korean war.After his parents arrived in the US in the early 1970s, and shortly before Hur was born, his father embarked on a career as an anesthesiologist. His mother used her nurse’s training to manage her husband’s medical practice, Hur recounted to the New Yorker.Hur, 51, said he realized he would be living differently if the US had not gotten involved in the Korean war and then accepted his parents, and as a result he believed he had “a real debt to this country”.“And in my view,” Hur added, “if you’re in a position where the attorney general of the United States says there is a need for someone to do a particularly unpleasant task, if it’s something that you can do, ethically and consistent with your own moral compass, then you should do it.” More

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    US politicians exploit loophole to skirt campaign finance rules, study finds

    A study published in Election Law Journal reveals politicians’ widespread exploitation of a loophole to skirt the law barring campaigns from coordinating with outside spending groups.It’s a strategy that takes place not in smoke-filled rooms or encrypted chats, but out in the open.Campaigns leave a directive to groups on their public-facing websites describing the kind of targeted advertising that they want, which outside spending groups then use to craft advertisements on their behalf. Around the text on their website is a literal red box – flagging committees to pay attention.Given its prevalence, examples of red-boxing are easy to find.“Voters, especially women over 50 and voters outside Pittsburgh, need to know that they have a choice to make between Bhavini Patel and Summer Lee,” reads a typical example – outlined by a little red box – at the bottom of the “media” page on Democratic candidate Bhavini Patel’s website.Patel, who is challenging the progressive incumbent Pennsylvania congresswoman Summer Lee in a 24 April primary, establishes a short but specific campaign narrative in her red-boxed statement.“Bhavini is a principled progressive and lifelong Democrat who will fight for abortion rights and freedom from gun violence,” it says. Lee, on the other hand, it continues, “wants to ‘dismantle’ the Democratic party, she undermines President Biden and even wants to ‘abolish’ the police”.It’s a clear narrative that an outside group could easily turn into a campaign advertisement.Since the US supreme court ruled in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission in 2010 that corporations and outside groups can lavish unlimited amounts of money on elections, spending has increased dramatically, with wealthy donors pouring money into elections – including state and local ones. In its ruling on Citizens United, the court added a caveat: groups can spend unlimited funds on elections as long as they are not coordinating directly with the campaign to do so.To get around that requirement, authors Gabriel Foy-Sutherland and Saurav Ghosh found, at least 240 Senate and House candidates in the 2022 elections cycle employed red-boxing; the strategy was most commonly used in competitive races. And it pays off – campaigns that engaged in red-boxing earned hundreds of times more dollars in advertising by “independent” groups supporting their candidate.The Federal Elections Commission has not only declined to prosecute red-boxing cases, it has also practically endorsed the strategy. In response to a complaint that the 2020 presidential campaign for Pete Buttigieg had violated the rule against coordinating with independent groups by tweeting out a suggested advertisement strategy, FEC commissioners wrote in a memo that “the request or suggestion standard is meant to cover requests to select audiences, not statements to the general public”.In effect, said Foy-Sutherland, campaigns engaging in red-boxing are “outsourcing responsibility” to Super Pacs that “don’t face the same kind of regulations on raising and spending money”.The practice is not limited to either party. Foy-Sutherland and Ghosh found that the strategy was deployed in 2022 by Democrats and Republicans alike.Sometimes candidates use red-boxing to coordinate with a specific group. In other cases, said Foy-Sutherland: “It’s more of a kind of cry for help, being like: ‘We’re running against this incumbent, we’re not going to be able to raise as much money as them and so we’re going to need somebody to come in and help us.” More

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    The Exvangelicals review: fine study of faith under fire in the age of Trump

    Sarah McCammon’s new book about “exvangelicals” like herself is a powerful memoir of her complicated journey away from Christian fundamentalism. Because she experienced it from the inside, she is also able to give the rest of us one of the best explanations I have ever read of how so many Americans became part of the non-reality-based cult that remains so stubbornly addicted to the insanities of Donald Trump.Brought up by rigorous evangelicals equally opposed to abortion and in favor of corporal punishment of their children, McCammon grew up inside a religious bubble supposedly designed to protect everyone within it from the evils of a secular world.Now 43 and national political correspondent for NPR, she was born at the dawn of the Reagan administration, which also marked the beginning of the alliance between religious extremism and the Republican party.The number of Americans who identified as evangelical or born again peaked in 2004, when it reached 30%. McCammon’s parents, though, came of age at the height of the Vietnam war and the sexual revolution. Like millions of others who felt unhinged by the chaos, they cast aside the “love ethos” of their youth, replacing “drug culture and anti-war protests” with “praise choruses” and the teachings of religious reactionaries such as James Dobson.The McCammons took Dobson’s teachings very seriously, especially his book Dare to Discipline, which taught them to spank babies as young as 15 months and to use “a small switch or belt” which should be seen by the child as an “object of love rather than an instrument of punishment”.As the historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez has explained, McCammon’s generation grew up during the creation of “a massive industry of self-reinforcing Christian media and organizations” and a media network that functioned “less as a traditional soul-saving enterprise and more as a means by which evangelicals … maintained their own identity.” Or as DL Mayfield, another writer born into an evangelical family, put it: “Being born into white evangelicalism as marketers were figuring out how to package and sell Christian nationalism … was really bad timing.”The literal interpretation of the Bible McCammon grew up with of course required the rejection of evolution. Everything, including “our understanding of basic scientific facts” had to be “subordinated to this vision of scripture”. By pulling their children out of public schools, parents could guarantee that “they could graduate from high school without ever taking a course on evolution or sex ed” and then move “seamlessly to a four-year Christian college with the same philosophy”.View image in fullscreenEvolution had been invented by scientists so they could reject God’s authority and construct “a world … where they were free to pursue their sinful lusts and selfish desires. What other motive could the there be” for dismissing the story of Adam and Eve?The real-world consequences of this indoctrination include a Republican party blithely unconcerned with the effects of global warming. As Jocelyn Howard, an exvangelical interviewed by McCammon, observes: “When you’re taught that science is basically a fairytale … then why would you care if the world is burning around us … The world around us doesn’t matter, because this is all going to burn like in Revelations anyway.”By distancing so many evangelicals from mainstream thought, their leaders created “a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories that can be nearly impossible to eradicate”. As Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center told FiveThirtyEight: “People of faith believe there is a divine plan – that there are forces of good and forces of evil … QAnon is a train that runs on the tracks that religion has already put in place.”Part of the time, McCammon manages to remember her youth with humor, particularly in a passage describing a discussion of the meaning of “oral sex” with her mother, inspired by the release of Ken Starr’s report about Bill Clinton’s interactions with Monica Lewinsky, an intern at the White House.“I think,” said the author’s mother, “if you have Jesus, you don’t need oral sex.”McCammon can’t remember how she responded but she has been “telling that story for decades when people ask me to describe my childhood”.The first cracks in her evangelical faith began when she spent a semester as a Senate page and befriended a fellow page who was a Muslim.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Do you believe that because I’m Muslim I’m going to hell?” he asked.“Suddenly,” McCammon writes, “everything that felt wrong about the belief system I had been told to promote crystalized in my mind. All she could muster in response to his question was, ‘I don’t know. I think it’s between you and god.’”By the time she graduated from college, McCammon “was exhausted from trying to get my brain to conform to the contours of the supposed truth I‘d been taught. Why did certain types of knowledge seem forbidden, and why were only our experts to be trusted?”Her solution was to choose a career in journalism: “I craved a space to ask questions about the way the world really was, and the freedom to take in new sources of information. Journalism required that: it honored the process of seeking truth and demanded the consideration of multiple points of view.”This book is an elegant testament to how well McCammon has learned her craft. The hopeful message she leaves us with is that her own journey is being replicated by millions of others in her generation, many finally convinced to abandon their faith because of the racism and xenophobia embraced by evangelicals’ newest and most unlikely savior: Trump.Since 2006, evangelical Protestants have experienced “the most precipitous drop in affiliation” among Americans, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, shrinking from 23% in 2006 to 14% in 2020. In November, we will learn if that is enough to keep democracy alive.
    The Exvangelicals is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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    US Senate passes $1.2tn spending package to avert government shutdown

    The Senate has passed a $1.2tn package of spending bills, a long overdue action nearly six months into the budget year that will push any threats of a government shutdown to the fall. The bill now goes to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.The vote was 74-24. It came after funding had expired for government agencies at midnight, but the White House sent out a notice shortly after the deadline announcing the Office of Management and Budget had ceased shutdown preparations because there was a high degree of confidence that Congress would pass the legislation and the president would sign it on Saturday.“Because obligations of federal funds are incurred and tracked on a daily basis, agencies will not shut down and may continue their normal operations,” the White House statement said.Prospects for a short-term government shutdown had appeared to grow Friday evening after Republicans and Democrats battled over proposed amendments to the bill. Any successful amendments to the bill would have sent the legislation back to the House, which had already left town for a two-week recess.But shortly before midnight Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer announced a breakthrough.“It’s been a very long and difficult day, but we have just reached an agreement to complete the job of funding the government,” Schumer said. “It is good for the country that we have reached this bipartisan deal. It wasn’t easy, but tonight our persistence has been worth it.”The news came hours after the House voted 286 to 134 to pass the bill, which will fund the departments of state, defense, homeland security and others through September.Biden has already said he will sign the bill “immediately” once it reaches his desk. The president signed a spending bill covering the rest of the federal government earlier this month, so all agencies are now funded for the rest of the fiscal year, eliminating any threat of a shutdown until October.The bill’s approval brings an end to a tumultuous appropriations process that forced Congress to pass four stopgap funding bills, known as continuing resolutions, since the fiscal year began in October. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the Democratic chair of the Senate appropriations committee, praised the lawmakers who helped bring the process to a close but lamented the considerable delay in reaching a resolution.“It should never have taken us this long to get here,” Murray said in a floor speech on Friday. “We should not teeter on the verge of a shutdown and lurch from one CR to another.”The Senate vote came down to the wire. Members had to unanimously agree on fast-tracking the bill’s passage, and some Republicans raised objections to the expedited process, insisting on taking up amendments to the proposal.Senator Rand Paul, a Republican of Kentucky, attacked congressional leaders for releasing the lengthy bill in the early hours of Thursday morning and holding a final vote one day later.“Why are we up against a deadline? Because they didn’t give us the 1,000-page bill until 2.30 in the morning on Thursday,” Paul said in a floor speech. “You think we ought to read it? You think we ought to know what’s in it?”Paul warned the bill was “teeming with about $2bn worth of earmarks at a time when we can’t afford the additional debt”, calling on colleagues to block the proposal.Rejecting that line of criticism, the senator Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the Senate appropriations committee, reminded colleagues that members of both chambers spent months negotiating over funding levels.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Every single bill – each and every one of them – was subject to robust debate and amendments. Many of them passed unanimously,” Collins said. “No one can say that they were not available for scrutiny, since we reported the last of them from committee way back in July.”Murray blamed hard-right Republicans for repeatedly jeopardizing the federal government’s functionality and urged her colleagues to “learn from the hard lessons of the past few months about how we do get things done in a divided government”.“The far-right elements who forced this dysfunction claim to care a lot about fiscal responsibility, but the constant chaos that they create is the opposite of fiscal responsibility,” Murray said. “Working together, focusing on solutions, solving problems for people back home: that is the responsible way to get things done.”With Associated Press More

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    Marjorie Taylor Greene files motion to remove House speaker Mike Johnson

    The far-right Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor-Greene filed a motion to remove Mike Johnson as House speaker on Friday but did not pull the trigger on a move that would probably pitch Congress into a repeat of chaos seen last October, when the right ejected Kevin McCarthy.Speaking after Johnson relied on Democratic votes to pass a $1.2tn spending bill and avoid a government shutdown, Greene said her motion was meant as “more of a warning than a pink slip” because she did not want to “throw the House into chaos”.Claiming to be a Republican “member in good standing”, Greene said her motion was “filed, but it’s not voted on. It only gets voted on [when] I call it to the floor for a vote.”Speaking to a scrum of reporters on the Capitol steps, she said: “I’m not saying that it won’t happen in two weeks or it won’t happen in a month or who knows when. But I am saying the clock has started. It’s time for our conference to choose a new speaker.”Congress goes into recess on Friday and returns in two weeks’ time.Greene said she had not discussed her motion with the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump. But even without Trump’s involvement, it was the latest dramatic expression of House Republicans’ inability to govern themselves.McCarthy became speaker in January 2023, but only after 15 rounds of voting as the pro-Trump far right hauled him over the coals.In October, another far-right Republican, Matt Gaetz of Florida, used a concession won in that January battle by introducing a motion to vacate, ultimately gaining the support of seven colleagues (not including Greene) and achieving the first ever ejection of a speaker by his or her own party.The deeply religious Johnson succeeded McCarthy as a candidate acceptable to the far right, but only after more than three weeks as three members of Republican leadership – Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan and Tom Emmer – failed to gain sufficient support.Greene said on Friday there was “no time limit” on her new motion to vacate.“It doesn’t have to be forced, and throw the House into chaos. I don’t want to put any of our members in a difficult place like we were for three and a half weeks [in October]. We’re going to continue our committee work. We’re going to continue our investigations.”Greene has played a prominent role in one such investigation, an oversight committee attempt to impeach Joe Biden over alleged corruption involving his son – an effort that has descended into political farce.Johnson, meanwhile, must operate with a tiny majority – set to decrease yet further after Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin said he would quit in April – and a right wing as restive as ever. Friday’s shutdown-averting spending bill was the second the speaker has passed with Democratic support.Gaetz moved against McCarthy over the same issue but said on Friday he did not support Greene’s motion to remove Johnson.“If we vacated this speaker, we’d end up with a Democrat,” Gaetz said. “When I vacated the last one, I made a promise to the country that we would not end up with the Democrat speaker. And I was right. I couldn’t make that promise again.”Other rightwingers criticised Greene. Clay Higgins, from Louisiana, said: “I consider Marjorie Taylor Greene to be my friend. She’s still my friend. But she just made a big mistake … To think that one of our Republican colleagues would call for [Johnson’s] ouster right now … it’s abhorrent to me and I oppose it. I stand with Mike Johnson.”McCarthy lost the speaker’s gavel because Democrats chose not to come to his aid. Johnson appears more likely to keep Democrats onside.Tom Suozzi, a centrist Democrat from New York, told CNN: “It’s absurd [Johnson is] getting kicked for doing the right thing, keeping the government open. It has two-thirds support of the Congress and the idea that he would be kicked out by these jokers is absurd.”But Democratic support may come with a price. In alignment with Trump, Johnson has blocked aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia. On Friday, an unnamed Democrat told Politico: “If we get some Ukraine aid package, that might be part of a deal.”Raj Shah, a former Trump White House aide and Fox News executive now Johnson’s spokesperson, said: “Speaker Johnson always listens to the concerns of members, but is focused on governing.”Greene said Republican voters did not “want to see a Republican speaker that’s held in place by Democrats”. Asked if she thought a speakership fight was a good idea in an election year, she said: “Absolutely … because, dammit, I want to win that House, I want to win the White House, I want to win the Senate and I want to restore this country back to greatness again.”Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader, told reporters of Greene’s motion: “It’s a joke, she is an embarrassment. We will have a conversation about it soon.” More

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    Republican House majority goes from bad to worse as another lawmaker announces early leave – as it happened

    Republican congressman Mike Gallagher announced he will resign his seat on 19 April, further winnowing down the GOP’s already slim control of the House.Gallagher had earlier this year announced plans not to seek re-election, but now says he will leave his seat early, dropping the Republicans’ slim majority to 217 seats, with Democrats holding 213 seats. That means Republicans can only lose one member on votes that Democrats oppose unanimously.“After conversations with my family, I have made the decision to resign my position as a member of the House of Representatives for Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District, effective April 19, 2024,” Gallagher said in a surprise statement.He noted that he “worked closely with House Republican leadership on this timeline” and “my office will continue to operate and provide constituent services to the Eighth District for the remainder of the term.”The good news for Republican House speaker Mike Johnson is that his chamber managed to pass legislation to prevent a partial government shutdown that is set to begin at midnight. The bad news is that the bill was supported by more Democrats than Republicans, and rightwing congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene subsequently introduced a motion to kick him out of the speaker’s chair. Greene took issue with his approach to government spending, and specifically his collaboration with Democrats, but noted she viewed the motion as “a warning”, and did not say when she would call it up for a vote. House lawmakers are now heading out for a two-week recess, and the saga will likely continue after they return. As for the government shutdown threat, it’s now up to the Democratic-led Senate to pass the House’s bill, which Joe Biden says he will sign. They are expected to do that later today.Here’s what else happened today:
    Republican congressman Mike Gallagher announced he would leave Congress next month, dropping the GOP’s House majority down to just one seat.
    At least two Democrats reportedly said they would not be on board with removing Johnson as speaker.
    Russia and China vetoed an attempt by the United States to win UN security council approval of a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
    Donald Trump has reportedly unveiled a new funding strategy that will see donations channeled to a group that is paying his substantial legal bills.
    Trump’s social media firm is going public after a shareholder voter, meaning the ex-president will soon be $3b richer.
    Georgia Republican congressman Mike Collins won a reputation for tweeting his way through the chaotic weeks following Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as House speaker in October, and has maintained his sense of humor as the GOP majority shrinks to one seat:That is, of course, a reference to the troubles Boeing has had with some of its planes lately.Meanwhile, Politico reports that soon-to-be-former congressman Mike Gallagher was recently sending his fellow lawmakers a certain book and cryptic note, both of which make a lot more sense now:Meanwhile, the government funding saga is far from over. The Senate must now approve the bill that the House passed earlier today. Politico reports that the chamber’s Democratic leader has invoked cloture on the measure, but that would only allow a vote on Sunday, and the government would partially shutdown at midnight tonight:In a speech on the Senate floor earlier today before the House passed the bill Schumer made clear he does not want that to happen:
    Democrats and Republicans have about thirteen hours to work together to make sure the government stays open. That’s not going to be easy. We will have to work together – and avoid unnecessary delays.
    This morning, the House will move first on the funding package, and as soon as they send us a bill, the Senate will spring into action. To my colleagues on both sides: let’s finish the job today. Let’s avoid even a weekend shutdown. Let’s finish the job of funding the government for the remainder of the fiscal year.
    There is no reason to delay. There is no reason to drag out this process. If Senators cooperate on a time agreement, if we prioritize working together – just as we did two weeks ago – I am optimistic we can succeed.
    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre offered well wishes to the Princess of Wales following her announcement that she has been diagnosed with cancer:We have a live blog covering that breaking story out of the UK, and you can read it here:Recall that Mike Johnson became House speaker after eight Republicans joined with every House Democrat to vote Kevin McCarthy out of the job.If Marjorie Taylor Greene could assemble a line up like that again, Johnson’s speakership would be at real risk. But CNN reports that at least two Democrats aren’t interested in playing along, perhaps signaling a broader shift in sentiment among the caucus.Virginia Democrat Abigail Spanberger indicates that if Johnson allowed a vote on aid to Israel and Ukraine, she’d be in favor of keeping him around:New York’s Tom Suozzi, who was not around in October, when McCarthy was booted, said he wouldn’t support the effort either:Asked at the ongoing White House press briefing about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to remove Mike Johnson as speaker of the House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre managed to simultaneously say nothing, and everything.“We’re just not going to speak to what’s going on with the leadership,” she said, at the tail end of a lengthy reply that amounted to a recitation of Joe Biden’s accomplishments.But Jean-Pierre could not resist making light of the latest troubles Republicans are having hanging on to Congress’s lower chamber.“I guess … get your popcorn, sit tight,” she said, as she concluded her answer.The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges of retaining classified documents disclosed that she had granted some requests by special counsel prosecutors to withhold discovery materials from the former president – but had reserved making a decision on others.In an eight-page order, US district judge Aileen Cannon wrote that she had allowed special counsel Jack Smith to substitute summaries or make redactions to two categories of classified documents that Trump was entitled to have access to through the discovery process.Cannon also disclosed that she had allowed prosecutors to entirely withhold a third category of documents neither “helpful nor relevant” to Trump’s defense theories – the legal standard to withhold discovery in national security cases – and reserved ruling on a fourth category of documents.Trump was indicted last year for retaining national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago club, under the Espionage Act, meaning the case is proceeding to trial under the complicated and sequential steps laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa.To protect against unnecessary disclosure of national security cases, under section 4 of Cipa, prosecutors can request to withhold certain classified documents from defendants.Cannon granted prosecutors’ requests to give Trump summaries of category 3 documents (classified documents related to a potential trial witness) and to keep away from Trump all documents in category 4 (classified documents which Cannon did not identify but wrote were not helpful or relevant to Trump).Cannon disclosed in her order that she had reserved ruling on some of the documents because they were tied up in a separate motion filed by Trump requesting additional discovery materials about bias within the US intelligence community that would help his defense.The concession was significant because it indicated Cannon had still not decided what to do with Trump’s sweeping request for more discovery, which Trump’s lawyers filed more than two months ago, and appears to increasingly be contributing to major delays in the case.Republican congressman Mike Gallagher announced he will resign his seat on 19 April, further winnowing down the GOP’s already slim control of the House.Gallagher had earlier this year announced plans not to seek re-election, but now says he will leave his seat early, dropping the Republicans’ slim majority to 217 seats, with Democrats holding 213 seats. That means Republicans can only lose one member on votes that Democrats oppose unanimously.“After conversations with my family, I have made the decision to resign my position as a member of the House of Representatives for Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District, effective April 19, 2024,” Gallagher said in a surprise statement.He noted that he “worked closely with House Republican leadership on this timeline” and “my office will continue to operate and provide constituent services to the Eighth District for the remainder of the term.”In the latest twist in the power struggle between the right-wing leaders of Texas and the federal government, a group of migrants got into a struggle with Texas National Guard troops under the control of the governor yesterday – while they were waiting to turn themselves in to federal border patrol agents to request asylum.In footage that dominated morning news TV in the US on Friday, ABC reported that border agents said that troops under state control were trying to corral and apprehend a group of migrants stuck behind one of Texas governor Greg Abbott’s razor wire fences in El Paso, which was installed as part of Abbott’s controversial Operation Lone Star program.The people were on US soil and the fence was on public land, ABC reported.Speaking to the El Paso Times, migrants said that Texas national guard soldiers were forcefully pushing them back behind the fencing in US territory. In a caption accompanying a video of the border unrest, Mexican journalist J Omar Ornelas wrote, “Hundreds of migrants were pushed south of the concertina wire in the middle of the night by Texas National Guard. Hours later they again breached the concertina and made a rush for the border wall in El Paso, Texas.”During the unrest, some migrants appeared to raise their hands in surrender while others ran to the federal border wall. Customs and Border Patrol later said the group had been moved elsewhere for processing.Earlier this week, Texas was thrust into a state of confusion after an appeals court blocked a controversial new state law that would allow local police to arrest anyone that they believe entered the US illegally – a jurisdiction typically granted to federal immigration authorities, not local police. The freeze came just hours after the US supreme court allowed the law to go into effect.The good news for Republican House speaker Mike Johnson is that his chamber managed to pass legislation to prevent a partial government shutdown that is set to begin at midnight. The bad news is that the bill was supported by more Democrats than Republicans, and rightwing congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene subsequently introduced a motion to kick him out of the speaker’s chair. Greene took issue with his approach to government spending, and specifically his collaboration with Democrats, but noted she viewed the motion as “a warning”, and did not say when she would call it up for a vote. House lawmakers are now heading out for a two-week recess, and the saga will likely continue after they return. As for the government shutdown threat, it’s now up to the Democratic-led Senate to pass the House’s bill, which Joe Biden says he will sign. They are expected to do that later today.Here’s what else is going on:
    Russia and China vetoed an attempt by the United States to win UN security council approval of a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
    Donald Trump has reportedly unveiled a new funding strategy that will see donations channeled to a group that is paying his substantial legal bills.
    Trump’s social media firm is going public after a shareholder voter, meaning the ex-president will soon be $3b richer.
    Republican House speaker Mike Johnson has issued an upbeat statement on the government funding measure, saying it enacted some conservative policies and was the best-case scenario for the GOP, considering Democrats control the Senate and White House.“House Republicans achieved conservative policy wins, rejected extreme Democrat proposals, and imposed substantial cuts while significantly strengthening national defense. The process was also an important step in breaking the omnibus muscle memory and represents the best achievable outcome in a divided government,” the speaker said.He did not comment on the motion to remove him as the House’s leader, which was filed by rightwing lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene.Marjorie Taylor Greene has tweeted an image of her resolution to remove fellow Republican Mike Johnson as speaker:It does not appear to be privileged, meaning it does not have to be voted on before lawmakers depart for their two-week recess, which they are scheduled to do later today.Asked earlier about her timeline for the removal push, Greene said the motion is “filed but it’s not voted on. It only gets voted on until I call it to the floor for a vote.”She did not say when she will do that.Marjorie Taylor Greene listed a ream of grievances against Mike Johnson, much of which centered on his approach to funding the government.She noted that, since become speaker in late October, he allowed votes on short-term measures to keep the government open, and gave lawmakers less than 72 hours to consider the just-passed legislation to prevent a partial shutdown that would have begun at midnight.Greene did not like any of that:
    This is a betrayal of the American people. This is a betrayal of Republican voters. And the bill that we were forced to vote on forced Republicans to choose between funding to pay our soldiers and, in doing so, funding late-term abortion. This bill was basically a dream and a wish list for Democrats and for the White House. It was completely led by Chuck Schumer, not our Republican speaker of the House, not our conference, and we weren’t even allowed to put amendments to the floor to have a chance to make changes to the bill.
    Speaking to reporters outside the Capitol, rightwing Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene confirmed she has filed a motion to remove Mike Johnson as House speaker, but described it as “a warning” rather than an attempt to boot him.The Georgia lawmaker cited Johnson’s approach to funding the government, and criticized him for working with Democrats.“I filed a motion to vacate today, but it’s more of a warning and a pink slip,” she said. “I do not wish to inflict pain on our conference and to throw the House in chaos, but this is basically a warning and it’s time for us to go through the process, take our time and find a new speaker of the house that will stand with Republicans and our Republican majority instead of standing with the Democrats.”We have yet to hear rightwing Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene explain why she wants to remove Mike Johnson as speaker of the House.But it may have something to do with his cooperation with Democrats to prevent a partial government shutdown. More Democrats than Republicans supported the just-passed $1.2tn funding measure that authorizes spending in federal departments where it has not already been approved:Rightwing lawmakers have made clear that Republican leadership should not work with Democrats. In fact, it was a similar scenario that led to Kevin McCarthy’s removal as House speaker in October. He struck a deal with the Democratic minority to prevent a shutdown, and days later was out of the job:The House has approved a $1.2tn government funding bill that will prevent a partial shutdown, with 286 votes in favor against 134 opposed.The Senate is expected to vote on the bill later today, and Joe Biden has said he will sign it. More

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    Republican House majority to shrink as Mike Gallagher steps down

    The Republican majority in the US House of Representatives is set to dwindle further with the early exit of Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, once a rising star of the party.A former US marine who twice deployed to Iraq, Gallagher, 40, is a relatively moderate voice in party at the mercy of the far right.He had already announced his decision to retire but in a statement on Friday he said: “After conversations with my family, I have made the decision to resign my position … effective 19 April. I’ve worked closely with House Republican leadership on this timeline.”The announcement came shortly after Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, an extremist even in a party held hostage by its far right, responded to the passage of a Democrat-backed funding bill by filing a motion to remove Mike Johnson, the speaker from Louisiana.Allies said Gallagher was pushed to the exit by such behaviour, according to Politico, particularly the right’s ejection of Johnson’s predecessor as speaker, Kevin McCarthy, last October.Friday was also the last day in Congress for Ken Buck of Colorado, a rightwinger nonetheless disillusioned by intra-party chaos who also chose to bring forward his intended retirement.After Buck’s departure, Republicans will control the House 218-213. Once Gallagher is gone, Johnson will only be able to afford to lose one vote if Democrats hold together.Under Wisconsin elections law, Gallagher’s seat will not be contested until November.On Friday, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the majority leader, told reporters: “It’s tough, but it’s tough with a five-seat majority, it’s tough with a two-seat majority, one is going to be the same. We all have to work together. We’re all going to have to unite if we’re going get some things done.”In a caucus dominated from without by Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, that seems highly unlikely.Last month, Gallagher was one of three House Republicans who voted against the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, an effort widely seen not to meet the threshold for charges of high crimes and misdemeanours but meant to boost Republican messaging on immigration in an election year.Mayorkas will almost certainly escape conviction and removal by the Democratic-held Senate.Soon after voting against the Mayorkas impeachment, Gallagher announced his plan to retire.“Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career and, trust me, Congress is no place to grow old,” he said. “And so, with a heavy heart, I have decided not to run for re-election.”On Friday, Gallagher cited his work chairing a select committee on China and said “four terms serving north-east Wisconsin in Congress has been the honour of a lifetime and strengthened my conviction that America is the greatest country in the history of the world”. More

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    In defying Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu is exposing the limits of US power | Jonathan Freedland

    The pictures out of Gaza get more harrowing with each passing day. After months of witnessing civilians grieving for loved ones killed by bombs, now we see children desperate to eat – victims of what the aid agencies and experts are united in calling an imminent “man-made” famine. What matters most about these images is their depiction of a continuing horror inflicted on the people of Gaza. But they also reveal something that could have lasting implications for Israelis and Palestinians, for Americans and for the entire world. What they show, indeed what they advertise, is the weakness of the president of the United States.Joe Biden and his most senior lieutenants have been urging Israel to increase the flow of food aid into Gaza for months, in ever more insistent terms. This week the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, cited the finding of a UN-backed agency that the threat of hunger now confronted “100% of the population of Gaza”,adding that this was the first time that body had issued such a warning. Earlier this month, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, told Israel it needed to do whatever it took to get humanitarian aid into Gaza: “No excuses.” The Biden administration is all but banging the table and demanding Israel act.A week ago, it seemed to have had an effect. The Israel Defense Forces announced what was billed as a “dramatic pivot”, promising that it would “flood” Gaza with food supplies. But there’s precious little sign of it. An additional crossing has been opened, the so-called 96th gate, allowing a few more trucks to go in, but nothing on the scale that is required to avert disaster – or mitigate the disaster already unfolding. For all the talk of a pivot, there is still “a series of impediments, blockages, restrictions … on lorries carrying the most basic humanitarian aid”, David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee said this week. He noted the way that Israel’s ban on “dual use” items, those things that could be used as weapons if they fell into the hands of Hamas, means that even the inclusion of a simple pair of scissors for a clinic can result in an entire truckful of aid being turned back.To repeat, the victims of this are the 2.2 million people of Gaza, who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. But it represents a severe problem, or several, for Biden too. The most obvious is that he is in a re-election year, seeking to reassemble the coalition that brought him victory in 2020. Back then, a crucial constituency was the young, with voters under 30 favouring Biden over Donald Trump by 25 points. Now it’s a dead heat. To be sure, there are several factors to explain that shift, but one of them is younger Americans’ outrage at the plight of Gaza.The threat to re-election is illustrated most sharply in the battleground state of Michigan, home to 200,000 Arab-Americans who are similarly appalled, with many unequivocal that they will not vote for Biden, even if that risks the return of Trump – with all that implies for the US and the world. That number is more than enough to tip the state from Democrat to Republican in November. “If the election were held tomorrow, I think Biden would lose Michigan,” veteran Republican strategist Mike Murphy told me on the Unholy podcast this week. For Biden, “this is a pain point”.US support for Israel in this context would be a headache for any Democratic president, but Israel’s willingness to defy its most important ally presses especially on Biden. For one thing, the upside of his great age is supposed to be his experience in foreign affairs and especially his personal relationships with fellow world leaders. He likes to say he has known every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir and that he’s dealt with Netanyahu for decades. Critics reply: a fat lot of good it’s done you.And that is the heart of the matter. For most of Israel’s history, it’s been taken as read that a clear objection from a US president is enough to make an Israeli prime minister change course. A shake of the head from Dwight Eisenhower brought an end to the Suez war of 1956. A phone call from Ronald Reagan ended the Israeli bombardment of west Beirut in 1982. In 1991, George HW Bush pushed a reluctant Likud prime minister to attend the Madrid peace conference, by withholding $10bn in loan guarantees.Biden has repeatedly made his displeasure known, and yet Netanyahu does not budge. It’s making the US look weak and for Biden especially, that’s deadly. “The subtext of the whole Republican campaign is that the world’s out of control and Biden’s not in command,” David Axelrod, former senior adviser to Barack Obama, told me on Unholy . “That’s basically their argument, and they use age as a surrogate for weakness.” Every time Netanyahu seems to be “punking” Biden, says Axelrod, it makes things worse.Plenty of Israeli analysts suggest that appearances are deceptive. In their view, Netanyahu is making a great show of thumbing his nose at Biden, because he is in an undeclared election campaign and defiance of Washington plays well with his base, but in reality he is much more compliant. In this reading, Team Netanyahu’s talk of a ground operation in Rafah – where nearly 1.5 million Palestinians are crammed together, most having fled Israeli bombardment – is just talk. Yes, the Israeli PM likes to threaten a Rafah invasion, to put pressure on Hamas and to have a bargaining chip with the Americans, but he is hardly acting like a man committed to doing it. Amos Harel, much-respected defence analyst for the Haaretz newspaper, notes that there are only three and a half IDF brigades currently in Gaza, compared with 28 at the height of hostilities. “Netanyahu is in a campaign, and for the time being at least, ‘Rafah’ is just a slogan,” he told me.Let’s hope that’s right, and a Rafah operation is more rhetorical than real. That does not address Israel’s foot-dragging on aid, which Netanyahu is clearly in no hurry to end, in part because his ultranationalist coalition partners believe sending food to Gaza is tantamount to aiding the Hamas enemy.That leaves Biden with two options. His preferred outcome is a breakthrough in the talks in Qatar, which would see both a release of some of the hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October and a pause in fighting, allowing aid to flow in. But Netanyahu fears such a pause, which would hasten the day of reckoning for his role in leaving Israel’s southern communities so badly exposed six months ago to Hamas – whether that reckoning is at the hands of the electorate or a commission of inquiry. He prefers to play for time, ideally until November, when Netanyahu hopes to say goodbye to Biden and welcome back Trump.The alternative for Biden is tougher. Last month, he issued a new protocol, demanding those countries that receive US arms affirm in writing that they abide by international law, including on humanitarian aid. If the US doesn’t certify that declaration, all arms sales stop immediately. In Israel’s case, the deadline for certification is Sunday.Joe Biden does not want to be the man who stopped arming Israel, not least because that would leave the country vulnerable to the mighty arsenal of Hezbollah just across the northern border with Lebanon. His administration is split on the move and he may well deem it too much. But he does need to see food flood into Gaza, right away. He has tried asking Netanyahu nicely. Now he needs to get tough.
    Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More