Evelyn Reynolds

The extent of the Biden administration’s shift at the United Nations security council on Monday should not be underestimated. The US is not only by far Israel’s most important ally and supplier of aid, but has provided it with stalwart diplomatic support. That it abstained instead of vetoing a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire – as it had previously done – was a major departure and leaves Israel looking extremely isolated, as Benjamin Netanyahu’s angry reaction showed.Yet the US has since done its best to talk down its decision, with officials insisting that there has been no change in policy and describing the resolution as non-binding. That is not the view of other security council members or the UN itself. António Guterres, the UN secretary general, wrote that it would be “unforgivable” to fail to implement the resolution, which also called for the unconditional release of hostages. But Israeli airstrikes have continued.The Biden administration is well aware that this war is ravaging its international standing: it is judged both complicit in the suffering in Gaza and ineffectual in its ability to restrain Israel’s conduct of the war. At home, it is costing the president vital Democratic support in an election year. But more Americans believe that Israel’s conduct of the war is acceptable than unacceptable, although there is a clear – and generational – divide.Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, has already said that he will invite Mr Netanyahu to speak before Congress. Though many in Israel fully understand the long-term damage the Israeli prime minister has done to his country’s interests as he fights for his own, there is no sign that US exasperation will speed his departure or moderate the conduct of this war.While the Biden administration treads gingerly, the humanitarian catastrophe gallops ahead in Gaza. The UN resolution stipulates a ceasefire for Ramadan – already half passed. More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s health authorities. Disease and starvation are claiming more lives as the most intense famine since the second world war takes hold – a famine entirely human-made by the destruction of so much of Gaza and the reduction of aid to a trickle. Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees central to relief efforts, has said that Israel has banned it from making aid deliveries in northern Gaza.Mr Biden has described the placing of conditions on US military aid as a “worthwhile thought”, but it does not appear to be one that he intends to translate into reality, though past administrations have threatened or imposed them. Recipients of arms must now give assurances that they abide by international law, but the US says it has “no evidence” that Israel is not in compliance. Many Democrats disagree.Canada has already announced that it is suspending further sales. The UK shifted from abstaining to supporting the ceasefire resolution on Monday, and David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has urged the Foreign Office to publish its formal legal advice on whether Israel is breaching international law in Gaza. The reality is, however, that 99% of Israel’s arms imports come from the US and Germany. Hand-wringing over humanitarian suffering is pointless when you continue to supply the weapons creating the disaster. Monday’s abstention was an important symbolic moment, but it appears that little will alter unless the US makes a substantive change.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

Joe Biden pledged that the US federal government will pay the full cost of rebuilding the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which collapsed before dawn on Tuesday after being struck by a massive cargo ship.“It’s my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge and I expect the Congress to support my effort,” the US president said.Asked why the government should pay and not Grace Ocean, the owners of the Singapore-registered ship, Biden said: “That could be, but we’re not going to wait for that to happen. We’re going to pay for it to get the bridge rebuilt and opened.”Authorities said six people were unaccounted for after the accident, which sent vehicles and eight construction workers into the Patapsco river.Jeffrey Pritzker, a senior executive at Brawner Builders, the employer of the construction workers, said on Tuesday afternoon that they were presumed dead, given the water’s depth and the length of time since the crash.Pritzker said the crew had been working in the middle of the bridge when it came apart. No bodies have been recovered.“This was so completely unforeseen,” Pritzker said. “We don’t know what else to say. We take such great pride in safety, and we have cones and signs and lights and barriers and flaggers. But we never foresaw that the bridge would collapse.”All 22 crewmembers onboard the Dali, the ship that struck the bridge, were reported safe.A reporter from the Baltimore Banner said that the half-dozen missing people were construction workers from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico who are in their 30s and 40s, with spouses and children.All of them came to the city for a better life, – not necessarily for themselves, but for the loved ones they left behind in their home countries, the Banner’s reporter wrote.“They are all hard-working, humble men.”The White House said Biden had spoken to federal, state and local officials as part of the continuing response to the collapse of the bridge.Those officials included Pete Buttigieg, the US secretary of transportation; Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland; the two Democratic US senators from Maryland, Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin; and the mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott.Moore told reporters the bridge, which was built in 1977, was “fully up to code” before being struck by the ship.Speaking from the Roosevelt Room in the White House, Biden said: “Everything so far indicates that this was a terrible accident. At this time, we have no other indication. No other reason to believe there’s any intentional act here.“I know every minute in that circumstance feels like a lifetime,” Biden added, in remarks aimed at people awaiting word on the missing.The search and rescue operation was “our top priority”, Biden said, adding: “We’re with you. We’re going to stay with you as long as it takes. You’re Maryland tough, you’re Baltimore strong.”Saying, “We’re not leaving until this job is done,” Biden said he would travel to Baltimore “as quickly as I can”.The president then left Washington for a campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina. Buttigieg was due to travel to Baltimore. More

How do you gaslight an entire nation about a war and then try to do the same to a superpower that is your ally? And how do you turn a just war into global isolation and widespread condemnation? Just ask Benjamin Netanyahu. He has the patent.Netanyahu has been deliberately and intently seeking a confrontation with the US ever since late October. The UN security council resolution 2728, demanding an “immediate ceasefire”, is just the latest pretext for this premeditated showdown. This may sound counterintuitive and imprudent to you, given that the two countries are close allies, given Israel’s heavy reliance on US military aid and its diplomatic umbrella, and particularly given President Biden’s sweeping and unwavering support for Israel since the 7 October catastrophe.But Netanyahu has two reasons to instigate such a confrontation. The first is pure gaslighting on a grand scale. He concocted a narrative that supposedly explains the war’s context and consequently absolves him from the responsibility and accountability he persistently refuses to assume. It also distracts from his stated policy of imploring Qatar to funnel more funds to Gaza to strengthen Hamas, all in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and render any political negotiations impossible.According to this narrative, 7 October was simply a debacle that could have been averted had the Israel Defense Forces and Shabak intelligence not failed. The bigger problem now, according to Netanyahu, is the possibility of a Palestinian state that the world, especially the US, has been trying to impose on Israel since the attack. According to this narrative, only a heroic Netanyahu can stand up to the US, defy an American president and prevent this travesty.Now of course it is impossible that a new Palestinian state could be “imposed” from outside. But this framing allows Netanyahu to placate his rightwing extremist coalition and partners, who have long opposed any form of Palestinian statehood. And it lets him make conflict with the US a focal point, rather than his own failures. It’s not about the Louis XIV wannabe prime minister. It never is.The second reason is more current and practical: the confrontation is about setting up Biden as the scapegoat for Netanyahu’s failure to achieve “total victory” or “the eradication of Hamas”, two fortune cookie-type slogans that he spews regularly.The security council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, adopted by 14 members with the US abstaining, puts Israel on a double collision course: with the UN security council but more critically, with the US. Netanyahu’s sanctimonious tantrums about how “surprised” he was and how the US abstention is a departure from policy that would prevent victory is mendacious. He was warned repeatedly by the Biden administration that this would be an inevitable outcome if he persisted with his endless recalcitrance, defiance and effective refusal to engage with the US, ostensibly Israel’s staunch ally and protector.When you ignore US requests, dismiss the president’s well-intentioned advice, inundate the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, with duplicitous spin, casually deride US plans and ideas for a reconfigured region, show crude intransigence by refusing to present a credible and coherent vision for postwar Gaza, hold a video call with Republican senators (a group that Netanyahu feels he is a life member of) and actively pursue an open confrontation with the administration, there’s a price to pay. Most recently, Blinken’s state department has warned Israel that it is increasingly isolated and is in danger of inflicting “generational damage” to its reputation and image.Had Israel seriously engaged with the US on any of the above issues, without necessarily agreeing to everything, it would have prevented this rift. The US has one long-running fundamental contention with Israel: the lack of a coherent political objective for the war, with which military means must be aligned. The US inquired time after time about Israel’s goals and got nothing but “topple Hamas”, which is a worthy goal, but does not address the “day after”.In respect of the security council, Israel will conveniently explain to itself that the resolution is not a big deal, that there is no imminent threat of sanctions and anyway, the UN was always and remains anti-Israeli. Perhaps. But that’s not the point. The resolution puts Israel in a very unpleasant and precarious place to be for a country, let alone a democracy and a US ally. The more critical and consequential arena is US-Israel relations. Their deterioration under Netanyahu has been well documented over the past year, but the security council resolution represents a new low.Since around January time, the US has negatively revised its assessment of Israel under Netanyahu. He does not behave as an ally, he has accrued a debilitating credibility deficit over the years on a multitude of issues, and he has intentionally failed to come up with a plan for postwar Gaza – to the point where he is now seriously suspected in Washington of prolonging the war for his own political survival antics. The current showdown over the security council resolution widens the rift to the point that it is impossible to see how the trajectory will change as long as Netanyahu is in power.At the moment, the US has three points of disagreement with Israel regarding the details of the prosecution of the war: the notion that Israel is impeding humanitarian aid; the number of civilian non-combatant deaths; and a possible military invasion of Rafah, on the southern tip of Gaza. These differences could have been resolved had Netanyahu and Biden had a working, honest and good-faith relationship. They do not. In fact, Netanyahu has a track record of confrontations and frequent spats with US administrations, from George HW Bush through to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and now Biden. His – unsuccessful, it must be added – meddling in US politics is also a familiar trait of his since the 1990s.The current state of relations is close to an inflection point, and could go in one of two directions: either Netanyahu is ousted or leaves or loses an election, or the US will be convinced that the bilateral ecosystem has faltered and warrants a major reassessment of relations. Under Netanyahu, Israel has reached the point at which its very value as an ally is being questioned. It took the US some time, but it finally seems to realise a simple fact: Israel may be an ally, but Netanyahu most certainly is not.
Alon Pinkas served as Israel’s consul general in New York from 2000 to 2004. He is now a columnist for Haaretz
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

Joe Biden had some good news on Tuesday as polling showed him gaining on Donald Trump in six battleground states, seven months before the presidential election. In response, one leading Democratic strategist said the “Biden bump is real”.According to Bloomberg News and Morning Consult, Biden now leads Trump by a point in Wisconsin, having trailed by four last month, and is tied in Pennsylvania, where Trump had a six-point lead last month. The two candidates were also tied in Michigan.In other states likely to decide the presidential election in November, Trump was ahead in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. Only Georgia, however, showed an increased lead for the presumptive Republican nominee.Biden was due to campaign in North Carolina on Tuesday.Trailing Biden in fundraising, Trump had no campaign events scheduled.The former president did appear in public on Monday, in New York in connection with his criminal trial on 34 charges concerning hush-money payments to an adult film star and a civil fraud case in which he must post a $175m bond while appealing a $454m judgment.Trump also faces 14 criminal charges related to election subversion and 40 arising from his retention of classified information. He posted a $92m bond in a civil defamation suit arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.On Monday, a Biden campaign spokesperson called Trump “weak and desperate – both as a man and a candidate”, adding: “His campaign can’t raise money, he is uninterested in campaigning outside his country club, and every time he opens his mouth, he pushes moderate and suburban voters away with his dangerous agenda.”The Biden campaign did not comment on the Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll.Jason Miller, a Trump campaign spokesperson, pointed to Trump’s 47%-43% lead across the seven swing states, telling Bloomberg: “Polling continues to show that voters are sick of Joe Biden’s crushing inflation, porous southern border and his insane EV mandate that will kill the US auto industry.”For Biden, worrying signs also included a majority of voters with a positive view of Nikki Haley, Trump’s last Republican challenger who has not endorsed him, saying they would vote for Trump in November.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEncouraging signs for the president included emerging positivity on economic conditions and many voters saying they had recently seen more positive news about Biden, particularly after his combative State of the Union address.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and commentator, said: “[The] election is clearly changing now, moving towards Biden: 10 recent national polls show Biden leading, he’s up one now in [the] Economist poll average, Harris this week finds Biden gaining four, this new Bloomberg/MC polling also finds significant movement towards Biden.“Biden bump is real.”In the Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll, around half of Biden voters said they were determined to stop Trump.Eli Yokley, US politics analyst for Morning Consult, told Bloomberg: “Negative energy motivates people. And the people who are supporting Joe Biden today are much more likely to express that negative energy that energised his 2020 campaign.” More

As boneheaded corporate decisions go, the one by NBC News to bring on Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor is right up there.Whatever twisted purpose hiring the former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairperson was meant to accomplish has been lost. That may have been gaining access to Republican bigwigs, sending a cynical message of ideological diversity or boosting ratings.Instead, the network has badly damaged its reputation and credibility. The hire makes a statement that, for this major US news organization, there are no consequences – rather, a juicy reward – for public figures who continually lie to the press and citizens. Her contract is reportedly worth $300,000.Hiring McDaniel – a powerful election denialist who joined then president Donald Trump in pressuring voting officials not to certify the 2020 election – was like putting a standing chyron on the NBC Nightly News: “Lying is rewarded here.”Of course, some commentators defended it, like Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who praised McDaniel’s “insider’s perspective”. He was shot down on Twitter/X by the scholar Norman Ornstein: “This is not about somebody with alternative views. It’s about a serial liar who intimidated election workers, tried to alter the election results in 2020 and has behaved in an utterly despicable fashion.”Social media memes also rose to the moment: Ronna McDaniel as politics commentator? Why not bring in OJ Simpson to host a show on preventing domestic violence, or hire Vladimir Putin as a Ukraine war commentator? How about a regular show for Ginni Thomas, the insurrection cheerleader married to a corrupt US supreme court justice?After four days of embarrassing news stories about the hire and its backlash, and some feeble efforts at damage control, it’s clear that the network should reverse course and ditch McDaniel or – depending on the terms of her contract – keep her entirely off the air. And that goes not just for the left-leaning MSNBC cable channel, but for the mainstream NBC News shows as well.And that’s not enough.The brass at NBC News needs to take stronger action in a statement – and a brief televised appearance by a top network executive or news leader – that affirms the commitment to covering politics truthfully and rigorously. It could appear once at the top of the nightly news and once on, let’s say, Morning Joe and Meet the Press.Then, go further. Prove that commitment in the network’s presidential campaign coverage. How? By using extreme care in giving a platform and a megaphone to proven liars, including the former president, and by providing sustained coverage about the stakes of the election, not just the horserace.Kristen Welker made a good start on Sunday’s Meet the Press, which she hosts. In a news interview recorded weeks before McDaniels’ hire, Welker respectfully but tenaciously grilled the former RNC chair.Insisting that she hasn’t really changed, McDaniel told Welker that she now acknowledges that Joe Biden won the election fair and square. Welker – perhaps channelling one of her predecessors, Tim Russert – wisely went to the tape, specifically McDaniel’s words to Chris Wallace in 2023: “I don’t think he won it fair.”McDaniel infamously joined Trump in a phone call pressuring two Michigan canvassers not to certify the election results; and her RNC led the charge to censure Republican members of Congress Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House of Representatives January 6 investigation. All while disparaging the media.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs Chuck Todd of NBC put it: “Many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”Todd, on Sunday’s Meet the Press, said he thought NBC owed Welker an apology for putting her in an impossible position. And Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, called in his newsletter, Stop the Presses, for the network to apologize to the public.These apologies would be welcome, but the main thing is to acknowledge the error in judgment and make sure that no habitual liars or enemies of democracy – whether paid or unpaid – get to blather their way to November’s election.Truth-telling in the media always matters. It matters intensely right now, as American democracy teeters on the brink.NBC should affirm that core mission. In so doing, the network could earn itself a lot of goodwill and recover from this blunder. All while doing the right thing.After all, it’s one thing to screw up. It’s another to dig your heels in.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “tried to disassemble our democracy” by supporting Donald Trump’s electoral fraud lies and should not be given such a media role, a leading historian said amid uproar over the appointment.“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn’t believe that framework should exist at all,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and author of On Tyranny, told MSNBC, part of the network now employing McDaniel.On Friday, NBC announced it had hired the former RNC chair and the network’s senior vice-president for politics, Carrie Budoff Brown, said that McDaniel would contribute her analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.“What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who … tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system,” Synder said.“And so … what NBC is doing is saying, ‘Well, [it] could be that in ‘24 our entire system will break down. Could be we’ll have an authoritarian leader. Oh, but look, we’ve made this adjustment in advance because we’ve brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down.’“So, yeah, I think this is pretty bad.”On Sunday, days after joining the network, McDaniel said on the Meet the Press that Biden won “fair and square” and said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse”.But McDaniel also claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [elections in battleground states] in 2020” and said she had supported Trump’s election fraud lies as a way of “taking one for the whole team” .That stoked an on-air protest from Chuck Todd, a former Meet the Press host. On Monday, MSNBC hosts including Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Nicole Wallace, to whom Snyder spoke, also condemned the McDaniel hire. The day also saw a protest from a union group representing NBC News staff.McDaniel and NBC did not comment.Snyder, who has written for the Guardian, said: “If you are going to be on American media, you should be somebody who believes there is something called truth, there are things called facts and you can pursue them. You shouldn’t be someone who has over and over and over again pushed the idea of fake news, educated Americans away from the facts, away from belief in the facts.”Describing such work by McDaniel, the anti-Trump conservative ex-congresswoman Liz Cheney said that as RNC chair, McDaniel “facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel became RNC chair in January 2017. In that role, she defended Trump through his scandal-ridden presidency; his refusal to accept his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress; and through his surge to another presidential nomination despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties and regularly admitting to authoritarian ambitions.Despite such support, Trump last month pushed McDaniel out of the RNC, to be replaced by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.Snyder said: “If we’re going to be putting people on the news who have participated in an attempt to overthrow the system, then we have to ask at the very beginning, ‘Why did you do that? Why is that legitimate?’ And we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why is it that we are taking this step to bring people into the middle of our discussion?’“So my two red lines are, you should be somebody who’s at least trying for the facts, and you shouldn’t be somebody who has taken part in an attempt to undo the system, which is what we’re talking about here. We shouldn’t mince words about it.” More

Having been elected against no opposition despite prior charges of child molestation, the chief medical examiner of a south-east Louisiana community with more than a quarter-million residents took office Monday, poised to deliver on a pledge to eliminate an agency program that has helped collect key evidence in cases of sexual assault.Dr Christopher Tape, 53, is expected to ultimately face an effort from voters to subject him to a recall election and force him from office, the top local government official in St Tammany parish has told the outlet, which exposed the new coroner’s criminal history.But that drive to remove Tape must clear a relatively high procedural threshold now that he’s in place at the parish – or county, in Louisiana parlance – coroner’s office.Tape was indicted in New Mexico in 2002 on charges that he sexually assaulted his then girlfriend’s daughter, who was seven at the time, as local TV station WWL Louisiana first reported in February. A court in that state later found prosecutors took too long between arresting and indicting Tape – who was a medical school student at the time – and tossed the charges, saying his constitutional right to a speedy trial had been unduly compromised.Eventually, Tape landed work at the St Tammany coroner’s office – which primarily handles investigations of deaths in the parish with a population of about 270,000 but also offers a range of other services, including mental health commitments and sexual assault nurse examinations.Tape in August signed up to run to take over the $11m dollar office, and the incumbent – Dr Charles Preston – declined to seek re-election. No one else came forward as a candidate, meaning Tape was automatically elected to succeed Preston.But the transition from Preston to Tape in an office that is roughly 50 miles (80 km) north of New Orleans has been anything but smooth.First, in October, Preston fired Tape, accusing the latter man of improperly disclosing medical test results and violating their office’s confidentiality policies, as the local news site Nola.com reported.Then, on 11 February, WWL Louisiana investigative reporter David Hammer not only revealed that a technicality had spared Tape from being tried on six charges of child sexual assault in New Mexico, WWL also uncovered how Tape in 2022 had struck an out-of-court settlement with a 26-year-old employee at his private forensic pathology practice who alleged that he made unwanted sexual advances toward her.All of St Tammany’s top elected officials subsequently demanded that Tape resign without beginning his four-year term, which began at midnight Monday. But he made it clear he had no intention of satisfying those demands.In fact, four days before his term kicked off, Tape announced that – after he took over – the coroner’s office would no longer provide its sexual assault nurse examiner (Sane) program. He said local hospitals instead would be responsible for the service, which involved collecting evidence that was vital for the prosecution of sexual assault crimes, as Nola.com reported.Tape’s policy shift ignited a fresh outcry. The office’s Sane program worked with sexual assault survivors in a region that included four parishes other than St Tammany. Louisiana state lawmakers told Nola.com that the hospitals affected by Tape’s change were “not prepared to do this right off the bat”, especially ones in certain rural parts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“To throw this in their lap without any real notice – it’s insane,” one of those lawmakers, state senator Patrick McMath, said to Nola.com.St Tammany parish president Mike Cooper has told WWL it is widely expected that voters will quickly try to recall Tape. Though Cooper anticipated most – if not all – of St Tammany’s elected officials would support the recall effort, getting such a measure on a ballot would legally require the certified signature of 37,000 locally registered voters, or 20% of the parish’s electorate.Gathering that many valid signatures, however, is somewhat of “a heavy lift”, state House member Jay Galle separately told WWL. And Galle said he would consult his fellow state legislators to explore whether there was some kind of way through the lawmaking process “to provide some way to find a different coroner for St Tammany parish”.Tape nonetheless reported to work as Sunday turned into Monday. And after being sworn in, at a news conference he said he would not step down. He defended his decision to discontinue the Sane program, saying he was protecting local taxpayers from financing examinations for residents of other parishes.Furthermore, he denied being an abuser.“I don’t know what people want me to do,” Tape said. “It’s innocent until proven guilty. Do you not believe in that?” More

Election officials across the US are facing an onslaught of unfounded hostility for “dutifully and reliably doing their jobs”, the head of a federal taskforce set up to protect the election community from violent threats said on Monday.John Keller, who leads the day-to-day efforts of the election threats taskforce, based in Washington, told reporters that the wave of violent threats – unleashed by Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen – amounted to an attack “on the very foundation of our democracy – our elections”.He said that the US had entered a “new era” in which the election community “is scapegoated, targeted and attacked”.On Monday, the taskforce, founded in June 2021, secured its 10th sentence of a perpetrator of violent threats against an election official.Speaking in Phoenix, Arizona, after the sentencing, Keller said robust public scrutiny of government authority and officials was “desirable and necessary”. But he added: “Death threats are not debate; death threats are not first-amendment protected speech. Death threats are condemnable criminal acts that will be met with the full force of the Department of Justice.”Monday’s sentencing at a federal district court in Phoenix saw Joshua Russell of Bucyrus, Ohio, given 30 months in prison. He had pleaded guilty to one count of making a threatening communication across state lines.According to court documents, between August and November 2022 Russell recorded three threatening voicemails on the phone of Katie Hobbs, the current Democratic governor of Arizona. At the time she was Arizona’s secretary of state, its top election administrator.In his voicemails, Russell accused Hobbs of committing election fraud in Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election which Joe Biden won in Arizona by about 10,000 votes. He called her a communist, a traitor, and “an enemy of the United States”.“You better put your [expletive] affairs in order, ‘cos your days are extremely numbered. America’s coming for you, and you will pay with your life.”In a November voicemail, Russell said: “A war is coming for you. The entire nation is coming for you. And we will stop, at no end, until you are in the ground.”Russell was the second sentenced this month for threatening Hobbs when she was Arizona’s secretary of state. Earlier this month, James Clark from Massachusetts was sentenced to three and half years in prison for threatening to detonate explosives he claimed to have planted in her personal space.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKeller, who is the principal deputy chief of the public integrity section of the DoJ’s criminal division, said the taskforce was working with state and local law enforcement to stop the onslaught as Arizona and the country approaches November’s presidential election. He said: “This behavior is insidious, with potentially grave consequences for individual victims and for the institution of election administration as a whole.”Arizona, which has been a critical battleground state in recent presidential contests, has become the ground zero of threats against election officials in the US. Seven of the 16 cases that have been prosecuted nationally under the election threats taskforce were targeted on the state, especially on Maricopa county, the largest constituency, which covers Phoenix.In the wake of the attacks, there has been a severe shortage of election officials who have quit after they and, in some cases, their families have been violently threatened. Twelve out of the 15 counties in the state have lost at least one of their two top election administrators since Trump launched his attack on democracy in 2020.Gary Restaino, US attorney for Arizona, said the common denominator of the cases handled by the taskforce was “election denialists announcing an intent to violently punish those who they believe have wronged them”.He said: “There’s no constitutional right to vigilantism. Let these cases be a lesson not to take the rule of law into one’s own hands.” More