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    Hunter Biden asks Los Angeles judge to toss out $1.4m tax evasion case

    Attorneys representing Hunter Biden asked a US judge in Los Angeles to dismiss the criminal case accusing him of evading $1.4m in taxes, arguing that prosecutors bowed to political pressure from Republican lawmakers investigating his father, Joe Biden.Hunter’s lawyers appeared before the US district judge Mark Scarsi in federal court in Los Angeles on Wednesday to press several legal challenges to the charges, including an argument that he was selectively targeted by prosecutors in response to Republican criticism. The 54-year-old was not present in the courtroom.Hunter has pleaded not guilty to failing to pay $1.4m in taxes between 2016 and 2019, while spending millions of dollars on drugs, escorts, exotic cars and other big-ticket items. His lawyer has said he paid back the money in full.US district judge Mark Scarsi appeared to give a skeptical reception to dismissal request. At the hearing, Scarsi asked whether Hunter’s lawyers had any evidence that prosecutors had caved to pressure from Republicans, other than the fact that they filed charges after months of accusations by Republicans in Congress and Donald Trump that he had been treated leniently.“Do you have any evidence other than the timeline?” Scarsi asked Hunter’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell.Lowell acknowledged that “it’s a timeline, but it’s a juicy timeline.”Scarsi also voiced skepticism about Hunter’s defense team’s argument that prosecutors had been pressured by two Internal Revenue Service agents who went public last year with information about his tax returns.“How are they responsible for what’s in the indictment?” Scarsi asked.“I can’t make the connection that that’s why that happened,” Lowell said, later adding that: “It was those two agents that started the dominoes.”Leo Wise, one of the prosecutors on the case, said it was “patently absurd” that the agents had influenced prosecutors.The trial of the president’s youngest son is due to start in June, a few months before Americans vote in a November presidential election that looks set to be a close and deeply divisive contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.Hunter also faces a separate criminal case in federal court in Delaware over his alleged purchase of a handgun while he was using illegal drugs. He has pleaded not guilty and made similar arguments to dismiss the charges in that case.The special counsel David Weiss, who brought both cases, has accused Hunter Biden’s legal team of spreading “conspiracy theories” about the prosecution. He has said the justice department would not act at the direction of Republican lawmakers, who are pursuing an impeachment investigation into whether Joe Biden profited from his son’s activities. The inquiry has turned up no evidence that the president personally benefited.Hunter is also seeking to toss out the charges by arguing that Weiss, who has investigated him since 2019, was improperly appointed special counsel.Hunter’s defense team has also argued that the case is barred by an earlier plea deal the president’s son struck with prosecutors. The deal collapsed under questioning from a federal judge last year. Prosecutors have said it never took effect. More

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    State department official’s resignation highlights rifts over US Gaza policy

    A human rights official has resigned from the US state department over Gaza saying the Biden administration is flouting US law by continuing to arm Israel, and is hushing up evidence that the US had seen on Israeli human rights abuses.Annelle Sheline, said she had hoped to have an influence on policy by staying at her post in the Near Eastern section of the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, taking part in discussions, signing dissent cables and raising her concerns with her supervisor. But she had lost confidence she could do anything that would affect the flow of US arms to Israel.“The fundamental reason was – I no longer wanted to be affiliated with this administration,” Sheline told the Guardian. “I have a young daughter. She’s not yet two, but if some day in the future, she is learning about this and knows that I was at the state department and she asked me [about it] – I want to be able to tell her that I did what I could.”Sheline is only the second state department official to resign over US policy on the Gaza war (another official left the education department over the issue), but she said that many of her colleagues had told her they would resign if they could afford to lose their job, and had urged her to speak out about her reasons for quitting, rather than to leave quietly.View image in fullscreenThe 38-year-old, who studied the foreign policy of Arab governments for her doctorate, said the state department was aware of plenty of evidence that Israel was violating international law in its conduct of the Gaza war, and that the Biden administration was violating US law by continuing to supply weapons.She pointed in particular to the Leahy laws, which forbid assistance to foreign military units implicated in atrocities, and section 620 (I) of the Foreign Assistance Act, which states that no assistance should be given to any government which “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance”.On Monday, the state department said it had received assurances from Israel officials and “not found them to be in violation of international humanitarian law”. But Sheline said: “The law is clear here and we do have evidence. But the specifics are just not being followed.”The state department has said it is reviewing evidence of civilian harm under a mechanism established by the Biden administration last year, weeks before the Gaza war broke out, but Sheline said the results of those investigations would only be made public when the White House wanted them to be.“There are a lot of people working on this at State but at the end of the day, the public policy does have to be something that the White House signs off on,” Sheline said. “Until the White House is ready to take a different line, some of the other things happening in State are just not going to come out.”She said she believed administration policy was being driven by domestic political considerations, but argued that domestic politics were shifting on the issue, pointing to the significant “uncommitted” protest vote in the Democratic presidential primary election, and suggested that the Biden administration had misjudged the mood.“I do think the president’s view of Israel is deeply influenced by a generational divide,” she said. “I think it’s taken this administration a long time to realise that the previous political calculus on this, in terms of big donors, in terms of the Israel lobby, … is seeing a shift.”On Wednesday, Gallup published a new poll showing a significant drop in American public support for Israel’s conduct of the war, from 50% in November to 36% now, with 55% disapproving of Israel’s actions.Sheline credited this shift for helping lead to the US abstention on a UN security council resolution on Monday, allowing it to pass after the US vetoed three earlier draft texts over the nearly six months since the war started.“I am glad to see that slight shift, but it hasn’t really made any difference to the people in Gaza yet,” Sheline said. “So it’s really too little, too late.“Not only are these policies devastating the people of Gaza, but I think they’re also devastating the US image in the world,” she argued. “This administration came in promising to rebuild American diplomacy and America’s moral leadership after the Trump administration, but so many of these issues that the administration said were so important – including human rights – seem to be less important to this administration than the US-Israel relationship.” More

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    Alabama Democrat Marilyn Lands says voters ready for ‘change’ after surprise win – as it happened

    In an interview with Huntsville, Alabama broadcaster WHNT, the Democrat Marilyn Lands predicted better days ahead for the beleaguered party:Lands yesterday was elected to Alabama’s state house in a special election to fill a vacant seat previously held by the GOP, in a rare instance of Democrats making inroads in one of the most thoroughly Republican states in the country.Democrats are cheering Marilyn Lands, who managed to seize a state house seat from Republicans in deep-red Alabama, fuelled by her promises to protect IVF access and repeal the state’s abortion ban. To be clear: the party does not have the numbers to make either of those promises happen in a state thoroughly dominated by the GOP, but it’s nonetheless the latest instance of Joe Biden’s allies using concerns about reproductive rights to win elections in hostile territory. Meanwhile, in Texas, a federal appeals court maintained the block on a Republican-backed law that would allow state police to arrest suspected illegal border crossers. The legislation will probably remain on hold until either appeals judges or the US supreme court rules on its merits.Here’s what else happened:
    Israel wants to reschedule a meeting with US officials that it called off after Washington allowed a UN security council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza to pass.
    Disney ended its feud with allies of Republican governor Ron DeSantis, which erupted after the entertainment giant criticized the state’s so-called “don’t say gay” law.
    Kansas Republicans moved to force abortion providers to ask patients the reason why they are seeking the procedure, and probably have the votes to get around an expected veto by the Democratic governor, Laura Kelly.
    Donald Trump is under a new gag order in his hush-money case. But it does not apply to the presiding judge Juan Merchan, so the former president attacked him on his social media network this morning.
    Jeffrey Clark, a former justice department official indicted alongside Trump in Georgia for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election, pleaded the fifth at a hearing that could lead to him losing his law license in Washington DC.
    Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis says a settlement reached between Disney and his allies over who controls Walt Disney World’s governing district “vindicated” his administration’s policies:Here’s more on the end of the long-running squabble:Jeffrey Clark, the former justice department official who was indicted in Georgia alongside Donald Trump for allegedly trying to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory in the state, repeatedly declined to answer questions today at a hearing that could see him lose his law license in Washington DC, Politico reports.Clark repeatedly invoked the fifth amendment’s protecting against self incrimination in response to questions from DC Bar panel investigators, who rested their case after today’s hearing.Here’s more on that, from Politico:
    Clark’s decision to invoke his constitutional right against self-incrimination underscores the criminal jeopardy he faces in other ongoing legal proceedings. In Atlanta, he’s charged alongside Trump in an alleged racketeering conspiracy to corrupt the 2020 election, and in Washington DC, federal prosecutors identified him – but have not charged him – as one of Trump’s alleged co-conspirators in a scheme to seize power.
    “I will invoke the Fifth,” Clark said in response to a question about when he first met Trump. Clark also said the question was covered by attorney-client, law enforcement and executive privileges. “A veritable phalanx of privileges,” Clark added wryly as the exercise wore on.
    The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution protects Americans from being forced to provide testimony that may incriminate themselves in legal proceedings. For Clark, that’s particularly important as he faces a potential criminal trial in Georgia. His attorneys worried that forcing Clark to take the stand simply to invoke his Fifth Amendment right would drive headlines or embarrass Clark, but the DC Bar panel presiding over the hearing permitted investigators to pose several dozen questions to Clark.
    Clark himself grew combative as the questioning wore on, accusing the lead investigator, Hamilton Fox, of seeking to humiliate him on the stand by forcing him to repeatedly invoke the Fifth Amendment. His bristling prompted Merrill Hirsh, the chair of the panel presiding over the hearing, to admonish Clark not to argue with Fox or risk potentially waiving the privileges he invoked.
    Democrats nationwide are taking heart from Marilyn Lands’s victory in Alabama, seeing it as a validation of their strategy to make concerns over reproductive care access a centerpiece of their pitch to voters.But Lands’s election does not change the fundamental balance of power in Alabama, where the Republican party firmly controls the levers of power. All elected officials are members of the GOP, which has supermajorities in the state house and senate.Republican lawmakers in Alabama have lately spent their time passing laws restricting diversity and inclusion programs from being established at public schools and state agencies, and barring trans people from using public bathrooms that align with their gender identity at colleges and universities.They also moved quickly to pass legislation allowing in vitro fertilization care to continue after the state supreme court issued a ruling that forced fertility clinics to cancel appointments. Democrats supported that effort:Marilyn Lands’s victory yesterday in the special election for Alabama’s state house is probably the most exciting thing to happen for Democrats in the state since Doug Jones won a Senate seat in 2018.His victory came after multiple women alleged sexual assault or other inappropriate behavior by the Republican candidate, Roy Moore. In an interview last night with CNN, Jones, who was ousted from the Senate by the Republican Tommy Tuberville in the 2020 elections, described Lands’s win as “a huge deal”:In an interview with Huntsville, Alabama broadcaster WHNT, the Democrat Marilyn Lands predicted better days ahead for the beleaguered party:Lands yesterday was elected to Alabama’s state house in a special election to fill a vacant seat previously held by the GOP, in a rare instance of Democrats making inroads in one of the most thoroughly Republican states in the country.The recovery operation in Baltimore continues amid reports that a truck has been found amid the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key bridge.For more on the disaster, and the effort to get the economically vital port of Baltimore back up and running, follow our live blog:The White House media briefing is under way in the west wing now, with the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, just introducing the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, who’s appearing as the guest today to talk about the bridge disaster in Baltimore.Buttigieg paid tribute to the six workers who are missing and presumed dead after the bridge collapse, and the two workers who survived, one badly injured, who were all repairing the bridge’s road surface “while we all slept”, he said.Buttigieg said that the port will be reopened as soon as possible.The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the bridge’s collapse, with Buttigieg saying that the bridge, which was completed in the 1970s, was not build to withstand an impact from the size of container ship that operates these days and which hit the bridge strut in the early hours of Tuesday morning, leading to the entire bridge’s collapse, closing the port for all traffic.Guardian US has a dedicated live blog covering all the developments in the Baltimore bridge disaster and you can follow that news here.Israel has asked to reschedule a meeting with US officials to discuss its military plans in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, a US official said on Wednesday, days after the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, abruptly scrapped the planned talks, Reuters reports.Netanyahu called off a planned visit to Washington by a senior Israeli delegation after the US allowed passage of a Gaza ceasefire resolution at the United Nations on Monday, in a move that appeared to reflect growing US frustration with the Israeli premier.US officials said the Biden administration was perplexed by the Israeli cancellation and considered it an overreaction to the security council resolution, insisting there had been no change in policy.On Wednesday, a US official said Netanyahu’s office “has said they’d like to reschedule the meeting dedicated to Rafah. We are now working with them to set a convenient date.”Netanyahu is considering sending a delegation for a White House meeting on Rafah as early as next week but the scheduling is still being worked out, an Israeli official in Washington told Reuters on condition of anonymity.There was no immediate comment from the Israeli prime minister’s office. The planned talks are expected to focus on Israel’s threatened offensive in Rafah, the last relatively safe haven for Palestinian civilians in Gaza.The White House said last week it intended to share with Israeli officials alternatives for eliminating the Palestinian militant group Hamas without a ground offensive in Rafah that Washington says would be a “disaster”.The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, will travel to France and Belgium next week, a state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, told reporters on Wednesday, Reuters reports.Blinken will meet with the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, and the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, while in Brussels for a Nato meeting, Miller said at a regular news briefing.Meanwhile, the state department does not think hostage talks with Israel and Hamas are over, Miller said, adding that Washington thinks there is an ability to continue to pursue the release of hostages.He also said “we do” when asked if the department believed a limited military campaign in Rafah, in the south of Gaza, can take out remaining commanders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.Hamas controls the territory and led the attack on southern Israel on 7 October last year in which more than 1,200 people were massacred and more than 240 people were taken hostage into Gaza, with more than 100 remaining captive at this time.Democrats are cheering Marilyn Lands, who managed to seize a state house seat from Republicans in deep-red Alabama, fueled by her promises to protect IVF access and repeal the state’s abortion ban. To be clear: the party does not have the numbers to make either of those promises happen in a state thoroughly dominated by the GOP, but it’s nonetheless the latest instance of Joe Biden’s allies using concerns about reproductive rights to win elections in hostile territory. Meanwhile, in Texas, a federal appeals court maintained the block on a Republican-backed law that would allow state police to arrest suspected illegal border crossers. The legislation will probably remain on hold until either appeals judges or the US supreme court rules on its merits.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
    Disney ended its feud with allies of Republican governor Ron DeSantis, which erupted after the entertainment giant criticized the state’s so-called “don’t say gay” law.
    Kansas Republicans moved to force abortion providers to ask patients the reason they are seeking the procedure, and probably have the votes to get around an expected veto by the Democratic governor, Laura Kelly.
    Donald Trump is under a new gag order in his hush-money case. But it does not apply to the presiding judge Juan Merchan, so the former president attacked him on his social media network this morning.
    Apparently in some kind of foul mood, Donald Trump also insulted his one-time ally Ronna McDaniel following her hiring from NBC yesterday, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:Donald Trump mocked the former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ronna McDaniel, for her firing by NBC days after being hired as a political analyst.“Wow!” the former president and presumptive Republican nominee, who ejected McDaniel from the RNC in favour of his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, wrote on his Truth Social platform.“Ronna McDaniel got fired by Fake News NBC. She only lasted two days, and this after McDaniel went out of her way to say what they wanted to hear. It leaves her in a very strange place, it’s called NEVER NEVERLAND, and it’s not a place you want to be.”McDaniel’s hiring was announced by NBC last Friday. Interviewed on Meet the Press on Sunday, she disavowed Trump’s lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election but also claimed there were electoral “problems” in battleground states.Protests from on-air talent and an NBC union group also concerned McDaniel’s combative relations with the press in seven years as RNC chair, a period coinciding with Trump’s takeover of the Republican party. On Tuesday evening McDaniel was gone – giving her a four-day NBC career, not the two claimed by Trump. More

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    Democrat wins election in conservative Alabama after focus on abortion and IVF

    An Alabama Democrat who campaigned against the state’s near-total abortion ban has won a special election to the state legislature, a stark signal that reproductive rights is a potent issue for Democratic candidates, even in the deep south.Marilyn Lands won the state house seat on Tuesday, defeating Teddy Powell, a Republican, by 63% to 37%. Lands, a licensed professional counselor, previously ran for the seat in 2022 and lost by 7% to David Cole, a Republican who resigned last year after pleading guilty to voter fraud.Lands made Alabama’s abortion ban and access to contraception and in vitro fertilization central to her campaign, speaking openly about her own previous abortion experience in a TV ad that featured her saying that it was “shameful that today women have fewer freedoms than I had two decades ago”.Lands said that her win sent a clear message in the wake of Alabama’s near-total abortion ban, which came into effect after the US supreme court struck down Roe v Wade in 2022. In February, there was also a highly controversial state supreme court decision that threatened the use of IVF.“This is a giant step forward for Alabama, this is a victory tonight for women, for families, for Alabama in general,” Lands told WHNT News 19 in the wake of her win.“It feels like it’s the start of a change here,” she added of the state’s politics. “I think we are ready for something different, we are tired of Alabama being 49th and 50th in all the key metrics. We can do better, we are better and I want to make that happen.”Lands said she would work to overturn Alabama’s abortion law, one of the most stringent in the US, which outlaws abortion at any stage of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest. It is only permitted in situations where the life of the pregnant person is in danger.“Today, Alabama women and families sent a clear message that will be heard in Montgomery and across the nation,” she said in a statement. “Our legislature must repeal Alabama’s no-exceptions abortion ban, fully restore access to IVF, and protect the right to contraception.”The special election does little to tip the balance of power in conservative Alabama, with Republicans holding a commanding 75 to 27 advantage over Democrats in the state house.However, Democrats have hailed the victory as a further sign that restricting access to abortion has proved electorally damaging to Republicans, particularly in the sort of seat contested by Lands. The Democrat won in the state’s 10th district, which comprises parts of Huntsville and Madison, a relatively affluent and educated area of northern Alabama only narrowly carried by Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.“This special election is a harbinger of things to come – Republicans across the country have been put on notice that there are consequences to attacks on IVF – from the bluest blue state to the reddest red, voters are choosing to fight for their fundamental freedoms by electing Democrats across the country,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, in a statement sent to Politico. More

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    Kari Lake won’t contest claims she defamed Arizona election official

    Kari Lake signaled on Tuesday that she will not contest claims that she lied about a top Arizona election official and defamed him, a significant legal concession from the Arizona Republican who has become one of the country’s most prominent election deniers.Stephen Richer, the top election official in Maricopa county, sued Lake, her campaign and an aligned Pac last year after she lost her gubernatorial bid and repeatedly lied about him. Lake, who is now running for the US Senate, falsely accused him of injecting 300,000 illegal votes into machines and intentionally misprinting ballots so they would be rejected by ballot tabulators.Richer said the claims turned the lives of him and his family “upside down” and made them “the targets of threats of violence, even death”. He asked a jury to award compensatory and punitive damages and wants Lake and her team to remove all false information about him from the internet.In a court filing on Tuesday, Lake essentially conceded she won’t try to prove that her claims were true or that she had a reasonable basis to believe they were. Instead, she asked a Maricopa county judge to quickly set a hearing for a “default judgment” against her and move to hold a hearing to determine what damages, if any, she should have to pay. Lake is still requesting the empaneling of a jury to resolve any factual disputes around the damages issues.Richer and lawyers for Protect Democracy, a non-profit organization representing him, said Lake’s filing was essentially a surrender and claimed victory. “After months of doubling down and defending their lies across Arizona, in the media, and on social media, when push came to shove, the defendants decided to completely back down and concede that their lies were just that: lies,” Richer said in a statement.Lake denied she had conceded anything.“I didn’t surrender, I simply cut-to-the-chase. We filed papers demanding a hearing in 30 days for Stephen to prove how my words harmed him. I am ready to go to court now, Stephen. Are you?” she wrote in a Twitter post.In her filing, her lawyers suggested they would use the damages proceedings to dive into Richer’s medical history and political funding. Her lawyers also wrote that her request for a default judgment did not concede anything about damages because Richer had not been specific enough in his complaint about how any damages he suffered were traceable to her.“Defendants request a jury to adjudicate any factual disputes. It is often said that defaulting admits the allegations in the operative complaint. This is a misnomer,” her lawyers wrote.Lake’s filing is the latest development as several groups have turned to defamation lawsuits as a tool to try to hold those who spread misinformation accountable for their lies. The voting equipment vendor Dominion settled with Fox for $787.5m last year. Rudy Giuliani was ordered to pay $148.1m to two Georgia election workers. Giuliani, who received a default judgment order in his case after declining to turn over evidence, has claimed bankruptcy and has yet to pay the workers.Earlier this year, the far-right outlet Project Veritas admitted it falsely accused a US postal worker of fraud during the 2020 election as part of a defamation suit settlement. The postal worker was also represented by Protect Democracy.Lake’s filing came right before the case entered the discovery phase – the process during which parties exchange potentially relevant evidence, including emails and other documents in their possession. In other defamation cases, information obtained in discovery has led to humiliating public disclosures, including revelations that key Fox News talent knew claims about the election being stolen were false.Daniel Maynard, a lawyer who is helping represent Richer, maintained in a statement that by permitting a judgment to be entered against her, Lake is conceding that she intentionally lied about Richer’s actions in the 2022 election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“These types of unwarranted attacks on our public servants need to stop,” he said. “Those who run for public office and lose need to learn to accept defeat with grace rather than falsely attacking those who administer our elections.”Lee Levine, a longtime first amendment lawyer, said it was not unheard of for a defendant to concede liability in a defamation case in order to focus on damages. Such a strategy may prevent the jury from hearing inflammatory information about how the defendant knew the information was false and make the case a more “antiseptic” discussion of how much money the plaintiff is owed. “From a PR perspective, it’s changing the narrative,” he said.Still, Levine added, it was a risky strategy to solely focus on damages.“If the plaintiff is claiming injury to reputation, they should be allowed to put on reputation witnesses to talk about how their reputation was injured,” he said. “So somebody can talk about the devastation of what was said, they believe what was said, why they thought less of the plaintiff as a result, and all the ways they were influenced by the defamation. And then, of course, family members would testify about the extreme emotional stress that the plaintiff suffered.”RonNell Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah, said Lake may have chosen to ask for default judgment, despite appearing to have a legal advantage, to avoid an expensive defamation suit and having to turn over potentially embarrassing discovery to the plaintiffs in the case.“As a free speech matter, the deck was stacked in Kari Lake’s favor in a case like this. She would have been litigating under the most defendant-generous standard in the world,” she said. “The plaintiff suing her would bear all of the heavy burden of proving not only that she lied but that she did so deliberately or with reckless disregard for the truth. A defendant who was confident that the things they’d said were true might not be expected to concede the case.” More

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    Trump mocks ex-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel for being fired by NBC

    Donald Trump mocked the former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ronna McDaniel, for her firing by NBC days after being hired as a political analyst.“Wow!” the former president and presumptive Republican nominee, who ejected McDaniel from the RNC in favour of his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, wrote on his Truth Social platform.“Ronna McDaniel got fired by Fake News NBC. She only lasted two days, and this after McDaniel went out of her way to say what they wanted to hear. It leaves her in a very strange place, it’s called NEVER NEVERLAND, and it’s not a place you want to be.”McDaniel’s hiring was announced by NBC last Friday. Interviewed on Meet the Press on Sunday, she disavowed Trump’s lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election but also claimed there were electoral “problems” in battleground states.Protests from on-air talent and an NBC union group also concerned McDaniel’s combative relations with the press in seven years as RNC chair, a period coinciding with Trump’s takeover of the Republican party. On Tuesday evening McDaniel was gone – giving her a four-day NBC career, not the two claimed by Trump.Cesar Conde, chair of NBCUniversal News, told staff: “No organisation, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned. Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”Trump said: “These Radical Left Lunatics are CRAZY, and the top people at NBC ARE WEAK. They were BROKEN and EMBARRASSED by LOW RATINGS, HIGHLY OVERPAID, ‘TALENT.’ BRING BACK FREE AND FAIR PRESS.”Other rightwingers, and media figures, cried foul too.Hugh Hewitt, a talkshow host, told Fox News: “I have never seen anything this brutal since I got started in media in 1990.“Ronna is going to sue everyone who defamed her, for breach of contract, for intentional infliction of mental distress. They are going to sue for the destruction of her business opportunities that come from being on TV. I think they made a terrible decision, and they allowed the MSNBC bleed to take over their network.”On NewsNation, the former Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera accused the MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow of “malignant wokeism”, saying: “God did not anoint her the arbiter of who was appropriate for her network to hire or what their point of view is.”Liberal retorts concerned the chief issue cited by Maddow, Chuck Todd, Jen Psaki, Joy Reid, Nicole Wallace and other hosts: McDaniel’s support for Trump’s election subversion, including direct involvement in his attempt to nullify Biden’s win in Michigan.“Ronna McDaniel’s desperate attempt to whitewash her record as an election-denying Maga enabler was an insult to independent journalism and to any American who values the truth,” Alex Floyd, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Fortunately, much like her and Donald Trump’s conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, she failed. It’s embarrassing that anyone would try to give McDaniel and her lies a soapbox after she spent years demonstrating such a blatant disregard for the truth, not to mention our entire democratic system. Proven liars who put loyalty to a political demagogue over our democracy have no place in politics – or in the media.”McDaniel did not comment. Politico reported that she was considering legal options and expected to be paid in full for her reported $600,000 two-year deal, which would in effect net her $500 a second for her Meet the Press interview.A “person close to McDaniel” was quoted as saying: “The part that pisses me off most about this is not necessarily that [NBC executives] folded: it’s [that] they allowed their talent to drag Ronna through the mud and make it seem like they were innocent bystanders.”For NBC executives, the pain may not be over. Though Semafor reported a senior Republican aide as saying “No one really cares about Ronna”, her firing has handed her party a potent campaign issue.Semafor also reported anger among NBC staffers.“Political reporters here didn’t take part in the backlash, nor did they get to give input on the hire,” an unnamed journalist was quoted as saying. “But they’ll be the ones who have to pick up the pieces with sources dismayed with the organisation.” More

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    RNC asks job applicants if they believe 2020 election was stolen in ‘litmus test’

    A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee and Donald Trump did not deny a Washington Post report that said prospective RNC employees are being asked if they believe the 2020 election was stolen, constituting a “litmus test” as the 2024 election approaches.“Candidates who worked on the frontline in battleground states or are currently in states where fraud allegations have been prevalent were asked about their work experience,” Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for the RNC and Trump, said in a statement.“We want experienced staff with meaningful views on how elections are won and lost and real experience-based opinions about what happens in the trenches.”Trump has pursued his stolen election lie through his conclusive defeat by Biden; his attempts to overturn results in key states; his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress; his resulting impeachment and acquittal; his attempts to delay or avoid trial on four federal and 10 state criminal charges concerning election subversion; and his surge to a third successive presidential nomination.He extended control over the RNC last month with the replacement of Ronna McDaniel by new co-chairs, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Michael Whatley, a loyalist from North Carolina.Lara Trump told NBC on Tuesday the RNC was “past” disputing the 2020 election, adding: “The past is the past and unfortunately we had to learn a couple of hard lessons in 2020.”But the Post said Trump aides were now asking election lie questions as they assess which former staffers will be rehired, as the presidential election grinds into gear.Other questions for prospective hires focused on “election integrity” in the 2024 contest, the Post said.Speaking to the Post, an unnamed prospective employee said two top Trump advisers posed the question directly, asking: “Was the 2020 election stolen?”Two unnamed sources said questions were left open-ended.“But if you say the election wasn’t stolen, do you really think you’re going to get hired?” a former RNC employee was quoted as saying.CNN said it confirmed the Post report, saying sources described the 2020 question “as unusual for a job interview” but saw it as a way of “questioning their loyalty to Donald Trump”. Alvarez repeated her non-denial to CNN.Doug Heye, a former RNC communications director, told the Post it was not unusual for staff to be expected to “back the candidate up and go along with the worldview”.But Bill Kristol, anti-Trump conservative commentator, said prospective hires would now have “no excuse for wanting to work [at the RNC] in 2024”, given its open embrace of Trump’s election lie. More

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    Trump got some good financial news this week. But there’s a dark side | Margaret Sullivan

    Donald Trump has had an encouraging day or two on the money front.On Monday, a New York appeals panel lowered – to a mere $175m – the amount the former president needs to cough up as he challenges the huge judgment against him in his civil fraud case. It’s not clear whether Trump can obtain such a bond – he has another week or so to try. He couldn’t raise an earlier, much higher sum, but this seems much more likely.That means it’s possible that he can avoid having liens put on his buildings (his “babies”, as he called them). Welcome news in Trump World.Then, on Tuesday, his media startup had a wildly successful stock market debut as a public company. Since Trump owns 60% of Trump Media & Technology (which owns Truth Social), his stake is now worth more than $5bn, the Washington Post reported.That development gave him a big status boost: Bloomberg put him, for the first time, on to its list of the 500 richest people. Still, there’s a hitch; he can’t sell his shares for six months. So the windfall doesn’t help with his immediate challenges.Meanwhile, Trump keeps singing the blues. He even indirectly compared his troubles to someone else with a large following, praising as “beautiful” this message from a fan: “It’s ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you.”I don’t feel concerned for Trump who, after all, is responsible for his thorny situation, despite his claims of victimhood.But I do worry about America’s national security amid Trump’s financial ups and downs, because they make way for influence-peddling and mischief.One reason is that major shareholders in Trump Media won’t be forced to publicly and immediately disclose their stakes. That’s potential trouble since we know that Trump’s businesses got millions from foreign governments and officials while he was president.As Noah Bookbinder, who heads the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Post, it’s been obvious for years that he’s open to such influence.“This seems like an opportunity that is tailor-made for that,” Bookbinder said.In other words, Trump is – as always – on the make. And his sheer heft of his legal and financial baggage makes that propensity much more dangerous.Trump’s situation creates “an unprecedented opportunity to buy influence with a leading presidential candidate and a sitting president should he be re-elected”, the non-profit organization wrote in an analysis last month.Without suggesting any malfeasance, I’ll note one example of overlapping interests: a Republican mega-donor, the billionaire Jeff Yass, was the biggest institutional shareholder of the shell company that merged with Trump’s social media company, according to the New York Times.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYass’s firm is also a major investor in the parent company of TikTok; the House of Representatives just passed a bill that would force that Chinese parent company either to sell its popular video app or see it banned in the US.Despite Trump’s reprieves in recent days, there’s no end in sight for his financial or legal woes. And that’s problematic, not just for him but for the nation.One reason he is so desperate to be elected again is that he sees the presidency as a marvelous opportunity to line his pockets. Or – if absolutely necessary – to pay his debts, though that’s never his first choice.Meanwhile, his chatter gets more unhinged every day.Referring to one all-caps rant that began with “CROOKED POLS!!!” and ended with “WITCH HUNT!”, his former rival Hillary Clinton posed a simple question: “Does this sound like a man who should have access to nuclear codes again?”As the former secretary of state knows all too well, the answer is clear.
    Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More