US Politics

Social media made John Fetterman’s battle with mental depression last year even more difficult, the Democratic US senator from Pennsylvania said Sunday.Fetterman said the comments on social media about him and his family played a role in the depression which sent him to a hospital for six weeks in February. “It’s an accelerant, absolutely,” he said.The first-term senator added: “It’s just astonishing that so many people want to take the time to hop online and to say things to a stranger that never did anything to you – especially members of my family.”Fetterman’s blunt remarks about his depression, the resulting hospitalization, and the effect of social media came during an exclusive interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that the news program aired Sunday.In the pre-recorded conversation with Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, Fetterman said virtually everyone he knew advised him to stay off social media after he defeated Republican celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz for an open Senate seat in November of 2022.Fetterman – once the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and the ex-lieutenant governor of the state – triumphed despite vocal support for Oz from former president Donald Trump.Victory for Fetterman helped give his party control of the Senate and cemented him as a rising star among leftists. And Fetterman, 54, said he subsequently “made the mistake to check … out” social media commentary several weeks after defeating Oz.Fetterman said he felt how doing so palpably worsened the dread he experienced whenever he pondered being sworn in on 3 January 2023 – thoughts that accompanied a sudden weight loss and lack of physical energy to get out of bed at the time.“It wasn’t the things said … but it was the volume, just the, like, where is this coming from?” Fetterman said Sunday. “And it’s like, is this [what it] would be the rest of my life? Look what it’s done to me, and more importantly what has this done for my family?”Fetterman has previously said his depressive symptoms at the time prevented him from engaging in the usual banter or work discussions with his staff, and he began avoiding spending time with his wife, Gisele, and their three children.Ultimately, on 15 February, which was his son’s 14th birthday, Fetterman admitted himself into the Walter Reed medical center for clinical depression treatment.He remained there six weeks, which is longer than typical for inpatient treatment for depression. And the hospital stay also came after Fetterman suffered a stroke that he says nearly killed him during his Senate campaign. The earlier medical ordeal also required him to be hospitalized for a time, and Republicans pointed at the episode to argue that he was unfit for office.Fetterman told Welker in Sunday’s interview that he feared his time in politics was all but over after his mental health hospitalization.“I had assumed that would be the end of my career,” said Fetterman, who wore his usual uniform of a black hooded sweatshirt and matching shorts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Fetterman has won praise for being transparent about his mental health care, with experts saying it could inspire people who need similar aid to overcome their reluctance about seeking it out. He recently earned flattering news coverage by vowing to block the multibillion-dollar sale of US Steel to the Japanese company Nippon Steel, in no small part because Braddock is home to a major US Steel plant.Furthermore, he drew headlines by sending US senator Bob Menendez, who is facing federal corruption charges, a $200 Cameo message from George Santos, the expelled former congressman who is grappling with his own pending fraud-related criminal counts.Fetterman on Sunday pledged to continue discussing his bout with depression as long “as that conversation helps”.“It’s a risk that I wanted to take because I wanted to help people … know that I don’t want them to suffer the way … I’ve been,” Fetterman said.Additionally, Fetterman characterized his social media use as selective now that his depression has been in remission, and he encouraged viewers to consider adopting a similar approach.“I would just warn anybody … I’ve never noticed anyone to believe that their mental health has been supported by spending any kind of time on social media,” Fetterman said. “And if they do, I’d love to meet that person.” More

The re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 could “end American democracy as we know it”, according to three women who worked for him in the White House during his chaotic term in office.All three gave testimony to the US House committee investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat as well as the 6 January 6 Capitol attack staged by his supporters. And they warned in an unprecedented television interview on Sunday that time was short to prevent a second Trump administration in which they insist his behavior would be much worse.“People in general have short memories, and might forget the chaos of the Trump years,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary who resigned on the day of the deadly Capitol riot, said on ABC’s This Week.“They also might not just be paying attention to what he’s saying now – and the threat to democracy that exists. It does really concern me if he makes it to the general [election] that he could win. I’m still hopeful that we can defeat him in the primaries, but we’re running out of time.”Matthews was joined in the interview by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, a key witness against Trump during the House committee’s public hearings in 2022, and Alyssa Farah Griffin, his former communications director, who said she dreaded him returning to office.“Fundamentally, a second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly,” Griffin said.“We all witnessed him trying to steal a democratic election before and go into historic and unconstitutional lengths to do so. That just shows he’s willing to basically break every barrier to get into power and to stay into power.“What scares me as much as him and his retribution is the almost cult-like following he has, the threats, the harassment, the death threats that you get when he targets you, is really horrifying and has no place in our American discourse.”About two days before the interview aired, someone placed a fake emergency call to police that prompted armed officers to arrive at the home of Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, after she removed Trump from the state’s presidential primary under the US constitution’s insurrection clause. Bellows was not home when the attempted “swatting” call was made.Hutchinson, ex-aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, said voters needed to believe Trump when he said he would be a dictator on his first day back in the White House.“The fact that he feels that he needs to lean into being a dictator alone shows that he is a weak and feeble man,” she said.Matthews, meanwhile, said Trump had already signaled what his second administration would look like.“We don’t need to speculate because we already saw it play out,” she said.“To this day, he still doubles down on the fact that he thinks that the election was stolen and fraudulent. And his rhetoric has just gotten increasingly erratic. He’s literally called for things like doing away with parts of the constitution, [and] wanting to weaponize the department of justice to enact revenge on his political enemies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I knew that coming forward and speaking out against Donald Trump I could … face security threats, or death threats, online harassment. Despite all the personal sacrifice, I knew that ultimately it was the right thing to do. I just would encourage others to come forward because they’re running out of time in order to try to stop Trump from being in the Oval Office again.”The courage of the three women in speaking against Trump was a recurrent theme in the interview by This Week’s co-anchor Jonathan Karl. Martin and Hutchinson spoke of secret meetings in the basement of the Capitol with Liz Cheney, one of only two Republicans who sat on the House committee, and their loss of friendships with others in the Trump White House who felt the women had betrayed them.“There were critical parts of history that the public would not know if not for Cassidy Hutchinson,” Griffin said.“Other senior officials witnessed them, but did not come forward. They did not testify, whether it was credible threats about the attack on the Capitol, that people showing up that day were going to be armed, that there was a scheme to try to stop the vice-president certifying the election.“I credit these women who are younger than me and had not as senior of titles, and stepped forward. For me, I want to be able to look my future kids in the eye and say when history called, I did the right thing, and I had the courage to do it.“That matters to me more than any future job or power structure that might exist if he’s president again.” More

More than 300,000 people were on track to cross the US-Mexico border in December without authorization and are being processed by American immigration officials, a tally that sets the latest monthly record, according to government figures obtained by CBS.The number of crossings, averaging roughly 8,400 apprehensions a day by US border agents, comes amid urgent efforts by the Joe Biden White House to curb migrant flows that have become a domestic political liability for him as he seeks re-election in 2024.In the first 28 days of December, border agents processed nearly 235,000 people without permission crossed the southern border in between ports of entry, alongside 50,000 who entered the country under an appointment system. Included in that number were nearly 96,000 parents traveling together with their children.The previous monthly high in US-Mexico border crossings was in September, when the agency processed nearly 270,000.Earlier in December, the White House had hinted it may accept new limits on asylum seekers as well as an expansion of detention and deportation efforts – a potential reversal of immigration liberalizations announced early in Biden’s presidency.Mexico and Venezuela on Saturday announced that they had restarted repatriation flights of Venezuelans migrants in Mexico. That comes after a high-level meeting between US and Mexico officials aimed at curbing the flow while maintaining cross-border trade.Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last week that he had received a request from Biden to discuss the issue. “He was worried about the situation on the border because of the unprecedented number of migrants arriving at the border,” López Obrador later said, according to the Associated Press. “He called me, saying we had to look for a solution together.”A recent CBS poll found that immigration ranks second among concerns facing the country, behind inflation but ahead of concerns about the stability of the democratic system.According to government figures, most people who entered the US without permission are released with court notices, without any asylum screenings. The immigration court system, with fewer than 800 immigration judges, has a backlog of 3m pending cases – or 4,500 for each judge, and it may take three years to clear.A caravan of about 6,000 people was reportedly making its way north through Mexico toward the US, placing additional pressure on authorities. On Sunday’s political talkshows, the mayors of Chicago and Denver described the burden that the backlog of immigration cases was placing on their cities.Republican US senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CBS’s Face the Nation that “expedited removal [of migrants] is on the table” amid negotiations with Democrats for approval of an aid deal for Ukraine. Graham said he looks “at the border problems as a national security nightmare for America”.Later, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat, told CBS: “This is clearly an international and federal crisis that local governments are being asked to subsidize, and this is clearly unsustainable.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe mayor placed blame on Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, whose administration is sending planes and buses of migrants to northern cities. Abbott, he said, “is determined to continue to sow seeds of chaos”.In the same conversation, the Denver mayor, Mike Johnston, said his city had received 35,000 migrants in December who had been successfully integrated. “What we don’t want is people arriving at two in the morning at a city and [at] county buildings with women and children outside in 10-degree weather and no support,” he said.Ohio congressman Mike Turner, chairman of the US House intelligence committee, told ABC’s This Week that White House action on the issue would have to come before he and his fellow Republicans moved on administration requests on Congress to approve a national security package that includes aid for Ukraine and Israel in their respective ongoing wars.“We have cities across the country who are having … huge impacts, who are calling on the administration to address it,” Turner added. More

Jonathan Jackson’s eyes brim with tears as he recalls the 1984 campaign of his father, Jesse, to become the United States’ first Black president. “To see my great-grandmother, who couldn’t read or write, vote,” the US congressman says, his voice faltering. “It let me see how meaningful it was to be able to vote.”Jackson is a lifelong political activist who has come to elected office late in the game. He was a spokesperson for the Rainbow Push Coalition, an international human and civil rights organisation founded by his father. In Chicago the younger Jackson fought against the closure of public schools and worked on false-confessions cases involving the police. More recently, he co-sponsored a House resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.Next month Jackson will turn 58 and mark his first year representing Illinois’s first congressional district in the House of Representatives. He stepped up after the Democratic congressman Bobby Rush, whom he calls “Uncle Bobby”, retired after three decades representing Chicago’s South Side.In an interview at his Washington office on Capitol Hill, Jackson – whose wife, Marilyn, leads the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky – admits that it had been the last thing on his mind until he took part in a radio show and was urged to run. “My parents were 80. The family’s been through a lot. I want to make Mom and Dad proud and so I jumped in there and it was a good uplift for them,” he says.Jackson’s parents, Jesse and Jacqueline Jackson, are veterans of the civil rights movement. Jesse witnessed Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, twice ran for president in the 1980s and is now living with Parkinson’s disease. (Jackson’s brother Jesse Jackson Jr served time in prison after pleading guilty to spending $750,000 in campaign money on personal items.)Jackson continues: “I have to talk with Dad every day. He’s a junkie for this stuff. He’s in a wheelchair and not moving around as fast but his mind is super sharp as he has challenges from Parkinson’s. He knows the terrain better than anyone I can imagine.”He describes serving in Congress as a “tremendous honour” that often yields “awe and wonderment”. But some days, he chuckles, “it feels like a bad high school that you’ve transferred into” and on others “you feel like you’re walking a tightrope over a pool of sharks without a safety net”.Jackson is a believer in God’s grace. He and his father were arrested outside the South African embassy in DC in 1986 while protesting against racial apartheid, and then again some 35 years later outside the supreme court while protesting for voting rights.One of six siblings, Jackson recalls the family home in Chicago always buzzing with activity and engagement with social causes. He says: “Our phone at the house would ring like a switchboard and my mother and father were both activists, if you will.“I remember the last time we saw President Nelson Mandela of South Africa and he could barely walk any more. He heard my father was in the country and asked him to come to visit him. My father came in the room. The president was trying to stand up and he hollered out to my father: ‘Freedom fighter!’“I would like to think that I come from the background of freedom fighters, not politicians of who’s dividing the pie, who gets what, when, where and how?”When Jesse Jackson first ran for president in 1984, Jonathan was 18 and able to vote for the first time. He was also a campaign surrogate and witness to the backlash from a nation resistant to the idea of a Black major-party nominee. He says: “We started registering the record amount of death threats and it was just insane.“The headlines: what does he want, can he run? Like, the audacity of being able to run? I remember one time we were in a motorcade coming down through from Washington to Virginia and they still had chain gangs out here on the highway, and to see those men stop and wave with pride, you realised it was a bigger issue.”Jesse won four contests and 18% of the popular vote, finishing third behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. Four years later, when he tried again, Jonathan finished college early so he could travel the country with his father.“I would describe that experience as sitting in the cockpit of American history, that we saw all these things happening and we saw it on the news the next day. By 88, you realised this was 20 years after the Rev Martin Luther King’s assassination and how much pride my father had in trying to move King’s dream for political empowerment, justice, economic empowerment forward,” Jackson said.This time Jesse won 13 contests and 29% of the popular vote but still came in behind Michael Dukakis for the nomination. At the 1988 Democratic national convention, he shared a stage with Rosa Parks, whom he introduced as the “mother of the civil rights movement”. Jackson muses that he must find a photograph of that moment so he can put it up in his office.“It wasn’t a political campaign. It was a more of a moral crusade and, from that, we’re so grateful to see President Obama win and Mrs Harris become vice-president and [Raphael] Warnock become a US senator from Georgia and that tipped the balance of power to save the democracy again.”Jesse also channeled energy into social justice and freelance diplomacy, risking friction with US officials by inserting himself into fraught global hotspots. Jackson was at his father’s side during negotiations with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad for the release of the captured US navy lieutenant Robert Goodman, and with Fidel Castro for the release of 22 Americans held in Cuba.“When we went to visit Saddam Hussein and they were talking about the weapons of mass destruction and the human shields, we didn’t have the portfolio of the United States government. We didn’t have a ranking member or chairmanship or United States military, went over there with just a Bible and some imams and rabbis,” Jackson says.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I believe in the faith community. I’ve seen it work and that’s been at the core. It’s not been politics. It’s been faith that had us travel around the world in some dangerous places with God’s grace.”This philosophy informs Jackson’s decision to sign on as an original co-sponsor of a House resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A member of the House foreign affairs committee, he had visited Israel a month before the 7 October attack by Hamas. During a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, he posed a question about a reciprocal visa waiver programme but found the prime minister evasive.“I can see that he’s a blame shifter. He will not answer the question,” he says. “He took the time to answer all the other questions but not that. I’ve never seen him seek a two-state solution in all these many years … I’ve seen him court Hamas, not wanting the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] to have influence over the Gaza territories.“I know his involvement in this territory over the years and so my basic frame of reference on asking for a ceasefire is not to seek revenge. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will leave you blind and snaggletoothed. You’ve got to break the cycle of pain.”The world was aligned in sympathy for Israel but Israel has squandered that opportunity, Jackson argues: “What happened to Israel was horrific and it was brutal. It was a massacre, disgraceful, and there was so much goodwill and I said, this man is going to mess this up. It’s just not in him. He’s a one-string guitar. The only tool he has is a hammer and he’s not a peacemaker.”The Hamas attack signified failures of both intelligence and diplomacy, Jackson argues, but going forward there are lessons to learn from countries such as South Africa and Rwanda in seeking reconciliation: “After 400 years, African Americans have never been told to pick up arms, to seek any sort of reparations or any sort of vengeance.“We’ve been taught reconciliation, so my position was clear morally from my cultural point of view: to seek reconciliation and that starts now. The spirit of Rev Martin Luther King that peace is not the absence of noise, peace is the presence of justice. The Scripture that stayed on my mind was: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.’ Peace is possible if you seek it and I have not seen Mr Netanyahu seek peace.”The elder Jackson served in the Senate from 1991 to 1997 as a shadow delegate for the District of Columbia but never quite lost his outsider status. It would be understandable if his son were still breaking in life in Congress like a pair of new shoes. But when asked about Joe Biden’s handling of the war – seen by many on the left as ostentatiously pro-Israel and lacking empathy for Palestinians – Jackson is deftly on-message.“President Biden is doing a tremendous job,” he says. “Like any of us in office, we have regrets. I don’t know what his will be at the end of the day, but I know he would like to see an alternative option.“These people are now almost defenceless, certainly the babies, so I want the humanitarian aid to flow. Intelligence is what is needed now more than bombs to find these people. If you … agree that the Palestinian people are being held hostage and you agree that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, you don’t kill the hostage by going after the hostage taker.”Jackson’s Illinois district includes an area known as Little Palestine. In October he attended the funeral of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy stabbed 26 times by his family’s landlord because he was Muslim, according to police. For Jackson, such concerns are more pressing than whether Biden stands to lose Arab American votes in the 2024 presidential election.“I get a call almost every other day when one of these bombs goes on the pain that someone is suffering because of a family’s relative has died. I get a call once a week from someone that’s still in Gaza trying to get on a state department list, so I can’t think about November and who’s voting for calling the state department and other agencies to try and still get people out,” he says.Opinion polls show Biden struggling among African American voters after his efforts to pass racial justice and voting rights legislation stalled in Congress. Jackson comments simply: “Some parts of his record will rival that of LBJ [the former president Lyndon Baines Johnson]. I am proud of his work. Let me leave it with, there’s a lot has been done and there’s a lot more to do.”Then he bursts out laughing.What of his father, who was born in the Jim Crow era and lived to see Obama assume the mantle of first Black president – only to see a backward lurch to Trump and white nationalism?“We are eternally optimistic. There are so many stories of progress and hope. Although this is very dangerous, we’ve not been here: two speakers to turn over in one year; we went 20 days without one of our three branches functioning. We saw a violent insurrection happen here and all of the insurrectionists have not been prosecuted. So he’s very concerned about the fragility of our democracy. We’ve never been here before.” More

Supreme court justice Clarence Thomas must recuse himself from ruling on Donald Trump’s eligibility for the 2024 presidential election, a prominent Democrat said Sunday, warning that the leading Republican candidate is seeking to become a “political martyr” as he pursues a second presidency.Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin was speaking ahead of the nation’s highest court stepping in to adjudicate recent state rulings in Maine and Colorado that struck the former president from the general election primaries under the US constitution’s 14th amendment insurrection clause.Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, a hard right conservative, was a vocal proponent of Trump’s big lie that his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden was fraudulent, should stand down ahead of the supreme court hearing the case, Raskin argued. Trump’s legal challenges could begin as early as Tuesday.Raskin led the push for Trump’s second impeachment following the deadly January 6 riot that the ex-president’s supporters staged at the US Capitol.“Anybody looking at this in any kind of dispassionate, reasonable way would say if your wife was involved in the big lie in claiming that Donald Trump had actually won the presidential election, had been agitating for that and participating in the events leading up to January 6, that you shouldn’t be participating,” Raskin told CNN’s State of the Union.“He absolutely should recuse himself. The question is, what do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself?”Raskin also cautioned that Trump, the runaway favorite in the Republican primary, would inevitably try to overturn the 2024 election if he were to lose again.“If he’s allowed to stay on the ballot, despite his clear incitement of an insurrection and attempt to overturn the results in the 2020 election, and if he loses to Joe Biden as he almost certainly would … he will feel himself a martyr and he will try to overturn the election result again,” said Raskin, who also served on the special House committee which investigated the January 6 attack.“So I don’t think we can run scared from Donald Trump. We’ve got to enforce our constitution.”Allies of Trump, and almost all of his primary challengers, have argued that the separate decisions in Maine and Colorado to disbar him were politically motivated. On Thursday, in an interview on Fox News, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis said the action in Maine “opens Pandora’s box”.Even Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who has accused Trump of “intolerance towards everyone”, was critical of the decision. “It makes him a martyr,” he told CNN last week. “He’s very good at playing, ‘poor me, poor me’, he’s very good at complaining. But stuff like this should be decided by the voters of the US, it should not be decided by the courts.”New Hampshire’s Republican governor Chris Sununu was another jumping to Trump’s defense on Sunday, telling State of the Union that he believed the insurrection argument used by Maine’s secretary of state Shenna Bellows and Colorado’s supreme court to remove the former president were bogus.“If there was any validity about keeping Trump off the ballot, you’d see 48 other states trying to do the same thing,” said Sununu, who has endorsed Haley for the Republican nomination.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I think it is very politically motivated by the Maine secretary of state, Trump should be on the ballot [and] everybody just hopes that the supreme court gets involved and overturns what Maine and Colorado are trying to do.”Sununu also claimed, boldly, that Haley will defeat Trump in New Hampshire’s 23 January primary. An opinion poll just before Christmas placed the former South Carolina governor just four points behind Trump in the state.“Chris Christie isn’t going to make up 30 points in the next three weeks. Nikki Haley can make up five or 10 points and give Trump that defeat that no one thought was possible, and I think that’s very likely to happen,” he said.He did, however, concede that Haley’s failure to identify slavery as a cause of the civil war, which forced her into some furious back-pedaling in recent days, was a mistake.“If you have to clarify an answer, you know, ‘Gee, I guess I should have answered that differently, let’s go clear it up’, so yeah, sure” it was a mistake, he said. More

A fake emergency call to police resulted in officers responding Friday night to the home of Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, just a day after she removed Donald Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot under the US constitution’s insurrection clause.She becomes the latest elected politician to become a target of swatting, which involves making a phone call to emergency services with the intent that a large first responder presence, including Swat teams, will show up at a residence.Bellows was not home when the swatting call was made, and responding officers found nothing suspicious.Suspects in swatting cases are being arrested and charged as states contemplate stronger penalties.Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was the target of a swatting attempt at her Georgia residence on Christmas morning, the Republican representative and local police said.A man in New York called the Georgia suicide hotline claiming he had shot his girlfriend at Greene’s home and was going to kill himself. Police said investigators were working to identify the caller and build a criminal case.Another New York man was sentenced in August to three months in prison for making threatening phone calls to Greene’s office in Washington DC.While the Maine department of public safety did not share a suspected motive for the swatting attempt against Bellows, she had no doubts it stemmed from her decision to remove Trump from the ballot as he seeks a second presidency in 2024. The swatting attempt came after a conservative activist posted her home address on social media.“And it was posted in anger and with violent intent by those who have been extending threatening communications toward me, my family and my office,” Bellows told the Associated Press in a phone call Saturday.A call was made to emergency services from an unknown man saying he had broken into a house in Manchester, according to the Maine public safety department.The address the man gave was Bellows’s home. Bellows and her husband were away for the holiday weekend. Maine state police responded to what the public safety department said ultimately turned out to be a swatting call.Police conducted an exterior sweep of the house and then checked inside at Bellows’s request. Nothing suspicious was found, and police continue to investigate.“The Maine state police is working with our law enforcement partners to provide special attention to any and all appropriate locations,” the public safety statement said.Bellows said the intimidation factors won’t work: “Here’s what I’m not doing differently. I’m doing my job to uphold the constitution, the rule of law.”Beyond Bellows and Greene, other high-profile politicians who have been swatting call targets include US senator Rick Scott of Florida, Boston mayor Michelle Wu and Ohio attorney general Dave Yost.The Trump campaign said it would appeal Bellows’s decision to Maine’s state courts, and Bellows suspended her ruling until that court system rules on the case.The Colorado supreme court earlier this month removed Trump from that state’s ballot, a decision that also was stayed until the US supreme court decides whether he would be barred under the insurrection clause, a civil war-era provision which prohibits those who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office. More

When Donald Trump was indicted in multiple criminal cases this summer, the conventional wisdom was that the former US president could spend vast amounts of time during the height of the 2024 presidential campaign stuck in courtrooms for back-to-back trials in New York, Florida and Washington.But the reality is that with the federal 2020 election interference case on hold pending appeals, and repeated delays pushing the classified documents case behind schedule by several months, for instance, Trump may find himself in courtrooms far less than expected.Trump has pleaded not guilty in his criminal cases: plotting to overturn the 2020 election in Washington, retaining national defense information and obstructing justice in Florida, conspiring to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, and paying hush money to an adult film star in New York.The US district judge Tanya Chutkan, overseeing the federal election case, set a trial date for March 2024. And with her clear determination to keep that date – including warning that she could even move it forward – the case was widely seen as the one to take place before next year’s election.(There has been no trial date set in Georgia, though the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has proposed an August start, while there has been uncertainty over whether the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg would put his case on hold should a federal trial happen.)That was until the US supreme court became entangled in the case in two major ways this month, in a development that could have far-reaching implications for the timing and for the eventual outcome of the trial.First, the court declined to decide the question of whether Trump could dismiss the charges on presidential immunity grounds before the US court of appeals for the DC circuit had issued its own ruling, remanding the case back to what could kickstart a lengthy appeals process.The supreme court then became entangled in a second way when, two days later, it agreed to review whether an obstruction statute that prosecutors have used against Capitol attack rioters – but formed two of the four charges against Trump – could be used in relation to January 6.Separately, the supreme court is almost certain to take up Trump’s expected appeal against the Colorado supreme court disqualifying him from being on the ballot for the state Republican primary under the 14th amendment, after finding that Trump “engaged” in insurrection.Depending on how quickly the court schedules oral arguments, how quickly it issues rulings and what decisions it ultimately makes, the timing and scope of the special counsel’s case against Trump could be dramatically altered just months before voters choose whether to give him a second term.“In the obstruction case, limiting the application of the obstruction statute – as the court has previously done – could knock out or impact that same charge in the indictment,” said former House counsel and current defense lawyer Stanley Brand, whose firm Brand Woodward has also represented January 6 defendants.The wild card, Brand added, was with the Colorado decision. “A ruling by the court on whether January 6 constituted an insurrection under the 14th amendment could similarly cast a shadow on allegations in the indictment,” he said.The worst-case outcome for the special counsel is that the federal election case remains frozen for weeks while the DC circuit considers the immunity question, Trump secures additional delay by seeking a rehearing before the full circuit, and then rules against the use of the obstruction statute.There is the possibility that the supreme court gives the special counsel its best outcome, where it takes the immunity claim quickly should the DC circuit rule against Trump, preserving the March trial date, and decides the obstruction statute is not being used too broadly and applies to Trump.But the uncertainty over two central parts of the special counsel’s election interference case now has a direct impact on whether Trump will spend more of his 2024 campaign in court, or on the trail.ImmunityThe US supreme court’s first entanglement was with Trump’s foremost defense to charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election results: that the indictment should be dismissed because he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution for actions related to his “official duties” as president.The special counsel Jack Smith on Saturday issued a court filing in which his team said no one, not even presidents, were above the law. Smith’s argument suggested that, as president, Trump should be held to an even higher standard to protect the electoral process and reiterated that Trump engaged in “illegal acts to remain in power despite losing an election”.On Friday, the court declined to grant certiorari, remanding the matter back to the DC circuit to decide in a move that could carry profound consequences for the viability of the March trial.Even if the three-judge panel at the DC circuit – Florence Pan, Michelle Childs and Karen Henderson – rules against Trump quickly, Trump can then ask the full appeals court to rehear the case en banc, and then has 90 days to lodge his final appeal to the supreme court.The now-cemented potential for delay was laid out by the special counsel’s supreme court litigator and former solicitor general Michael Dreeben.“The court of appeals’ expedited briefing and argument schedule does not assure an appellate decision that will give this court adequate time to grant review, receive briefing, hold argument, and resolve this case in advance of the scheduled trial date,” Dreeben wrote in the government’s brief.Trump has also made no secret that his overarching legal strategy, for all of his criminal cases, is to pursue procedural delays. If the cases do not go to trial before next year’s election and he wins a second term, then he could direct his handpicked attorney general to drop all of the charges.And even if the case did go to trial before November, the people said, Trump’s preference would have been for the trial to take place as close as possible to the election because it would have given his 2024 campaign ammunition to miscast the criminal case against him as political in nature.ObstructionThe supreme court is also set to consider next year whether federal prosecutors can charge January 6 riot defendants with a statute that makes it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding of Congress, which also formed the basis of two out of the four charges against Trump.The case involves Joseph Fischer, who was charged with obstruction for assaulting police officers during the riot, which he sought to dismiss, arguing the obstruction statute passed under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in response to the Enron scandal, had to do with document or evidence tampering.The US district judge Carl Nichols, who presided in the case, interpreted the statute as requiring prosecutors to show that the defendant took some action with respect to a document or record and did not apply to Fischer as he assaulted police officers at the Capitol.But a split three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the DC circuit reversed the decision, deciding that obstruction applied more broadly and encompassed impeding any official proceeding. Fischer, and two other January 6 defendants, appealed to the supreme court to resolve the issue.If the supreme court decides that section 1512 of title 18 of the US criminal code was being used too broadly, that could cripple part of the case against Trump as the special counsel looks to draw a line at trial from the former president’s January 6 speech to the violence.“The court’s grant of certiorari in the Fischer case over over the solicitor general’s objection may foretell trouble for the government’s use of the statute,” Brand said.And if the court strikes down the use of the obstruction statute because it disliked the way prosecutors were using general conspiracy statutes for specific crimes, like it did with Jeffrey Skilling in the Enron scandal, it could undercut the remaining general conspiracy statutes used in the indictment against Trump, Brand added. More

Banning TikTok in the US seemed almost inevitable at the start of 2023. The previous year saw a trickle of legislative actions against the short-form video app, after dozens of individual states barred TikTok from government devices in late 2022 over security concerns. At the top of the new year, the US House followed suit, and four universities blocked TikTok from campus wifi.The movement to prohibit TikTok grew into a flash flood by spring. CEO Shou Zi Chew was called before Congress for brutal questioning in March. By April – with support from the White House (and Joe Biden’s predecessor) – it seemed a federal ban of the app was not just possible, but imminent.But now, as quickly as the deluge arrived, it has petered out – with the US Senate commerce committee confirming in December it would not be taking up TikTok-related legislation before the end of the year. With the final word from the Senate, 2023 became the year Congress forgot to ban TikTok.“A lot of the momentum that was gained after the initial flurry of attention has faded,” said David Greene, a civil liberties attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “It seems now like the idea of a ban was being pushed more so to make political points and less as a serious effort to legislate.”Lots of legislation, little actionThe political war over TikTok centered on allegations that its China-based parent company, ByteDance, could collect sensitive user data and censor content that goes against the demands of the Chinese Communist party.TikTok, which has more than 150 million users in the United States, denies it improperly uses US data and has emphasized its billion-dollar efforts to store that information on servers outside its home country. Reports have cast doubt on the veracity of some of TikTok’s assertions about user data. The company declined to comment on a potential federal ban.With distress over the influence of social media giants mounting for years, and tensions with China high after the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon hovering over the US in February 2023, attacks on TikTok became more politically viable for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Legislative efforts ensued, and intensified.The House foreign affairs committee voted in March along party lines on a bill aimed at TikTok that Democrats said would require the administration to effectively ban the app and other subsidiaries of ByteDance. The US treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) in March demanded that TikTok’s Chinese owners sell off the app or face the possibility of a ban. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, and more than two dozen other senators in April sponsored legislation – backed by the White House – that would give the administration new powers to ban TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they pose national security threats.But none of these laws ever made it to a vote, and many have stalled entirely as lawmakers turned their attention to the boom in artificial intelligence. Warner told Reuters in December that the bill he authored has faced intensive lobbying from TikTok and had little chance of survival. “There is going to be pushback on both ends of the political spectrum,” he said.The Montana effectMontana passed a total statewide ban on TikTok in May, to start on 1 January 2024, setting the stage for a federal one. That momentum for a nationwide prohibition ebbed, however, when a US judge last week blocked the legislation from going into effect – a move that TikTok applauded.“We are pleased the judge rejected this unconstitutional law and hundreds of thousands of Montanans can continue to express themselves, earn a living, and find community on TikTok,” the company’s statement reads.In a preliminary injunction blocking the ban, US district judge Donald Molloy said the law “oversteps state power and infringes on the constitutional rights of users”. The closely watched decision indicated that broader bans are unlikely to be successful.“The Montana court blocking the effort to ban TikTok not only threw a wet blanket on any federal efforts to do the same, but sent a clear message to every lawmaker that banning an app is a violation of the first amendment,” said Carl Szabo, general counsel at the freedom of speech advocacy group NetChoice, of which TikTok is a member.The EFF’s Greene, who also watched the Montana case closely, echoed that the results proved what many free speech advocates have long argued: a broad ban of an app is not viable under US law.“This confirmed what most people assumed, which is that what is being suggested is blatantly not possible,” he said. “Free speech regulation requires really, really precise tailoring to avoid banning more speech than necessary. And a total ban on an app simply does not do that.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPolitical discussions around the ban also exposed a need for comprehensive privacy legislation, Greene said. The same politicians raising concerns about the Chinese government collecting data had done little to address companies like Meta collecting similar reams of data in the US.“The ideas that were floated were legally problematic and belied a real, sincere interest in addressing privacy harms,” he said. “I think that can cause anyone to question whether they really cared about users.”Election year fearsMeanwhile, some analysts think Congress and the White House are unlikely to even attempt to ban TikTok in 2024, an election year, given the app’s popularity with young voters.Joe Biden’s re-election campaign team has been reportedly debating whether to join TikTok, on which the president does not currently have an official page, to attempt to reach more young voters. Nearly half of people between 18 and 30 in the US use TikTok, and 32% of users in that age group say they regularly consume news there. To date, Vivek Ramaswamy is the only Republican candidate to join the app, a move which has elicited lashings from his opponents in multiple debates.“The same lawmakers calling for a ban are going to need to pivot to online platforms like TikTok for their upcoming get-out-the-vote efforts,” said Szabo. “To cut off a major avenue of reaching voters during an election year doesn’t make political sense.”Even as interest in banning TikTok wanes – politically and among voters – the efforts are not entirely dead. Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, told Reuters she is still working on legislation and in talks with federal agencies, noting that the Senate held a secure briefing on concerns about foreign influence by way of social media last month.Even as the interest and political power to fuel a TikTok ban wanes, social networks are going to be under the magnifying glass in the coming year, said Szabo.“As we go into 2024, I will say that control of speech on the internet is going to be even more heated, as lawmakers try to control what people can say about their campaigns,” he said. “I would also expect to see those very same politicians using the platform to raise money and to get out the vote.”Reuters contributed reporting More