US Politics

A federal appeals court has ruled that top House Republican Scott Perry’s text messages about efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were constitutionally protected and off-limits to prosecutors, according to the opinion in the case that was newly unsealed on Wednesday.The three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the DC circuit found that Perry’s communications with congressmen and staff were protected under the so-called speech or debate clause, which shields members of Congress from legal proceedings connected to their official duties.“These are quintessential legislative acts entitled to the privilege, and we vacate the district court’s judgment with respect to those communications and remand,” the appeals court ruled.It also concluded the lower court was wrong to decide that Perry’s communications only qualified for the speech or debate clause protection if the fact-finding had been authorized by an official body, like a congressional committee, saying some “informal” fact-finding would be privileged.The opinion – written by the Trump-nominated circuit judge Neomi Rao and joined by Greg Katsas, also nominated by Trump, and Karen Henderson, nominated by George HW Bush – marks a setback for the special counsel Jack Smith investigating efforts in 2020 to stop the peaceful transfer of power.Still, the appeals court determined that some information gathered by Perry during his informal fact-finding might not be protected. For messages to qualify for the privilege, the appeals court ruled, they must be “integral” or “essential” to the legislative work in question.It also rejected Perry’s categorical position that all of his messages, including to people not working in the executive or legislative branches, were privileged.“We disagree with the district court’s holding that informal fact-finding is never a legislative act. But we also reject Representative Perry’s proposition that informal fact-finding is always a legislative act,” the appeals court found.The ruling instructed the then chief US district judge Beryl Howell to reconsider her initial decision allowing prosecutors to access some of Perry’s phone, and apply their reasoning on a communication-by-communication basis for his messages with executive branch and non-congressional officials.The case now goes back to federal district court in Washington, unless prosecutors ask for an en banc rehearing of the matter before the full DC circuit. A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined to comment whether prosecutors would take that step.For around a year, prosecutors have sought to trawl through 2,200 messages and documents on Perry’s phone related to his involvement in Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat and to stop the January 6 congressional certification of the 2020 election results.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe FBI seized Perry’s phone last August pursuant to a court-authorized warrant, even before Smith was appointed special counsel, but sought a second warrant to search through his texts and emails with members of Congress, executive branch officials and other third-parties.The interest in Perry, the chairman of the powerful and ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus and one of Trump’s most ardent supporters on Capitol Hill, came because he introduced Trump to former justice department official Jeff Clark in 2020, according to people familiar with the matter.Clark subsequently became a central player in Trump’s efforts to decertify the election results in battleground states that he lost and infamously drafted a false memo saying the justice department was investigating election fraud in Georgia when it was not.That false memo, among other things, led to prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia, charging Clark alongside Trump and others on racketeering charges alleging that he violated state law in trying to overturn the election results. Clark has pleaded not guilty in that case.Perry was also involved in meetings with Trump at the White House in the weeks before the Capitol attack, including a strategy session with other Republican members of Congress on 21 December 2020, where they strategized ways to stop the certification from taking place. More

From 4h agoUtah’s US Senator Mitt Romney, who as the Republican nominee lost the 2012 presidential election to incumbent Barack Obama, has announced that he won’t seek a second term. He told the Washington Post it was time for a new generation to “step up” and “shape the world they’re going to live in”.Romney twice voted to impeach Donald Trump and the 76-year-old told the Post that he believed a second term, which would take him into his 80s, would be “less productive” than his work now.More to follow. Here’s the report.
Mitt Romney, the only Republican to vote to convict Trump in the 2020 impeachment trial, said he would not be seeking reelection as Utah senator. In an interview with the Washington Post, he offered harsh criticism of Joe Biden and his own party, which he said “is inclined to a populist demagogue message”.
A day after House speaker Kevin McCarthy announced a long-shot attempt to impeach Joe Biden, it became clear that Donald Trump has been in discussions with influential House Republicans to push the effort. Trump was in contact with Elise Stefanik, the third most senior Republican in the House of Representatives, and far-right representative Marjorie Taylor Greene in the lead-up to McCarthy’s announcement.
Attorneys for Hunter Biden filed a civil lawsuit in federal court against Garrett Ziegler, a former Trump White House aide over his alleged role in publishing online a trove of emails and images obtained from one of Biden’s laptops.
The White House sent a letter to US news outlets, urging them to “scrutinize House Republicans’ demonstrably false claims” surrounding their impeachment inquiry into Biden. The memo, which was sent by Ian Sams, the White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, and addressed to editorial leadership at media organizations.
The federal judge overseeing Trump’s classified documents case issued a protective order pertaining to classified evidence in the case, according a court filing.
In the Georgia election subversion case, Trump waived his right to seek a speedy trial, according to a court filing. The move is in line with efforts he has taken in other cases to delay proceedings until after the November 2024 election.
Eugene Peltola Jr, the husband of the Democratic Alaska congresswoman Mary Sattler Peltola, has died in a plane accident, a spokesperson said.Read more:
A delegation of top tech leaders including Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman convened in Washington on Wednesday for the first of nine meetings with US senators to discuss the rise of artificial intelligence and how it should be regulated.Billed as an “AI safety forum,” the closed door meeting was organized by the Democratic senator Chuck Schumer who called it “one of the most important conversations of the year”. The forum comes as the federal government explores new and existing avenues to regulate AI.“It will be a meeting unlike any other that we have seen in the Senate in a very long time, perhaps ever: a coming together of top voices in business, civil rights, defense, research, labor, the arts, all together, in one room, having a much-needed conversation about how Congress can tackle AI,” Schumer said when announcing the forum.Several AI experts and other industry leaders are also in attendance, at the listening sessions, including Bill Gates; the Motion Picture Association CEO, Charles Rivkin; the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; the Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris; and Deborah Raji, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley.Some labor and civil liberties groups are also represented among the 22 attendees including Elizabeth Shuler, the president of the labor union AFL-CIO; Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers; Janet Murguía, the president of UnidosUS; and Maya Wiley, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights.While Schumer describes the meeting as “diverse”, the sessions have faced criticism for leaning heavily on the opinions of people who stand to benefit from AI technology. “Half of the people in the room represent industries that will profit off lax AI regulations,” said Caitlin Seeley George, a campaigns and managing director at Fight for the Future, a digital rights group.“People who are actually impacted by AI must have a seat at this table, including the vulnerable groups already being harmed by discriminatory use of AI right now,” George said. “Tech companies have been running the AI game long enough and we know where that takes us – biased algorithms that discriminate against Black and brown folks, immigrants, people with disabilities and other marginalized groups in banking, the job market, surveillance and policing.”Read more:As he steps away from the Senate, Mitt Romney is critical of both Democrats and Republicans.Here are some of the key quotes from his interview with the Washington Post at a glance:Romney, a vocal Trump critic, condemned the increasing shift to the extreme right in the Republican party, saying:
It’s pretty clear that the party is inclined to a populist demagogue message.
But he was also critical of Biden’s record:
Biden is unable to lead on important matters and Trump is unwilling to lead on important matters.
In what seemed to be a veiled dig at Biden and Trump’s age (80 and 77 respectively), Romney said he was stepping down to make way for a younger crop of leaders:
He called for a new generation to ‘step up [and] shape the world they’re going to live in’.
And Romney, who was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump in the 2020 impeachment trial, said he worried that his party had veered too far right, and lost touch with young voters:
I know that there are some in MAGA world who would like Republican rule, or authoritarian rule by Donald Trump. But I think they may be forgetting that the majority of people in America would not be voting for Donald J. Trump. The majority would probably be voting for the Democrats…
Young people care about climate change…They care about things that the MAGA Republicans don’t care about.
Attorneys for Hunter Biden filed a civil lawsuit in federal court against Garrett Ziegler, a former Trump White House aide over his alleged role in publishing online a trove of emails and images obtained from one of Biden’s laptops.The 13-page suit, filed in federal court in California, accuses Ziegler of improperly “accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging computer data that they do not own” in violation of the state’s computer fraud laws.The lawsuit describes in detail how Ziegler and 10 additional unnamed defendants allegedly obtained data belonging to Hunter Biden and disseminated “tens of thousands of emails, thousands of photos, and dozens of videos and recordings” on the internet, ABC News reported.Ziegler, a former aide to White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, has emerged as one of the Biden family’s most outspoken critics. Navarro himself has been convicted of contempt of Congress after he refused to cooperate with an investigation of the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol.The suit reads:
Garrett Ziegler is a zealot who has waged a sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign against [Hunter Biden] and the entire Biden family for more than two years. While Defendant Ziegler is entitled to his extremist and counterfactual opinions, he has no right to engage in illegal activities to advance his right-wing agenda.
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has continued his running-against-Trump-but-not-really campaign with a speech at the former US president’s favourite Washington thinktank.The biotech entrepreneur, who made a splash at the first Republican debate last month, praised Trump several times during remarks at the America First Policy Institute, which spun out of the Trump administration. He also gave a shout out to Matt Gaetz, a congressman from Florida who endorsed Trump for 2024 and was among the guests.Ramaswamy declared his wildly unrealistic plan to slash a million government jobs if elected. In a turbo charged version of Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “deconstruction of the administrative state”, he would reduce the federal employee headcount by 75%, rescind a majority of federal regulations and shut down government agencies including the Department of Education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.The candidate theatrically tore down posters supposedly showing “myths” to reveal supposed “truths” about a president’s power to take such action – an argument rejected by legal experts. “Do we want incremental reform or do we want revolution?” the candidate asked.
I stand on the side of a revival of those 1776 ideals, on the side of yes, we created a government accountable to the people, not the other way around.
Democrats reacted to the plans with scorn. The Democratic National Committee said in a press release:
Ramaswamy’s not the only MAGA Republican running for president who wants to gut support for federal law enforcement and public education as the GOP hopefuls continue racing to be the most extreme candidate in the field.
Here’s more from that Washington Post interview with Mitt Romney, in which the Republican Utah senator announced he would seek reelection in 2024.Asked how he sees a 2024 election rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Romney said “it could go either way” but that “so much can happen between now and then”. He added that talk by the centrist group No Labels of mounting a third party candidacy would be a mistake and only help to reelect Trump.Romney said he doubted the criminal charges pending against Trump, saying he believe people “don’t respond to old news”. Instead, he believed the investigation of Hunter Biden has the potential for political impact that could harm the president.Former vice president Mike Pence, who has been campaigning in Iowa, was forced to backtrack on earlier comments after House speaker Kevin McCarthy announced he would open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden without a floor vote.On Monday, Pence said he did not think an impeachment inquiry should “ever” be started unilaterally, as he praised McCarthy because he made it clear that if there is to be an impeachment inquiry, he would submit that to a vote on the floor of the Congress”, NBC reported.Less than two days after he made those comments, Pence told a reporter he would have “preferred” a vote on an inquiry but would defer to House Republicans, the Hill reported. He said:
I want to respect Speaker McCarthy’s authority and decision to be able to initiate an impeachment inquiry. The American people have a right to know whether or not President Biden or his family personally profited during his time serving as Vice President.
Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the US House, announced on Tuesday he is launching a formal impeachment inquiry into president Joe Biden – despite resistance from Republicans in the House and Senate, where an impeachment vote would almost certainly fail.The order comes as McCarthy faces mounting pressure from some far-right members of his chamber, who have threatened to tank his deal to avert a government shutdown by the end of the month if he does not meet their list of demands.According to McCarthy, findings from Republican-led investigations over the summer recess revealed “a culture of corruption”, and that Biden lied about his lack of involvement and knowledge of his family’s overseas business dealings.McCarthy said during a brief press conference at the US Capitol on Tuesday:
These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption. And they warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives.
Many of the allegations center on the president’s son, Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, during his father’s term as vice-president. Republicans allege that Joe Biden improperly benefited from his son’s foreign connections but, after several months, have produced no evidence. Watchdog groups say Republicans do not actually have evidence to back up their claims.McCarthy previously indicated an impeachment inquiry “would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House and not through a declaration by one person”, in a statement to rightwing Breitbart News earlier this month. But he declared the launch of an impeachment probe just a week and a half later, without a House floor vote, which likely means he does not have the support.GOP presidential hopeful Mike Pence was heckled during a campaign stop in Iowa earlier this week by a man who yelled:
Get the fuck out of our country and the fuck out of Iowa!
“Thank you,” the former vice president responded, before addressing the others in attendance.
I’m going to put him down as a ‘maybe’.
Utah Republican senator Mitt Romney is the sixth incumbent senator to announce plans to retire after the end of the term in 2025, AP reported.He joins Republican senator Mike Braun of Indiana, as well as Democrats Tom Carper of Delaware, Ben Cardin of Maryland, Dianne Feinstein of California and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.Romney, who ran as the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee, became the first US senator in history to vote to convict a president of their own party in an impeachment trial. He was the only Republican to vote against Donald Trump in his first impeachment and one of seven to vote to convict him in the second. Romney has also been an outspoken critic of Joe Biden.Romney’s decision to retire effectively surrenders his senate seat to a GOP successor who could be more closely aligned with Trump and the hardline conservative politics of Utah’s other senator, Mike Lee, Reuters reported.Utah senator Mitt Romney, who told the Washington Post he will not be seeking reelection in 2024, also announced his intentions in a video statement posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.Romney, a former Republican presidential candidate and governor of Massachusetts, said it was “time for a new generation of leaders”.The 76-year-old said:
At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-80s. Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in.
Romney said neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump are leading their parties to confront issues on deficits and debt, and took aim at Trump for calling global warming “a hoax”.
The next generation of leaders must take America to the next stage of global leadership. While I’m not running for re election, I’m not retiring from the fight. I’ll be your United States senator until January of 2025. I will keep working on these and other issues and I’ll advance our state’s numerous priorities. I look forward to working with you and with folks across our state and nation in that endeavour. It really is a profound honour to serve Utah and the country. More

When the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, announced an impeachment inquiry into President Biden on Tuesday, he subverted the normal procedures for doing so. Typically, the House would have to vote on whether to open an informal impeachment investigation: McCarthy just announced it, unilaterally, calling a press conference to say he was “instructing” the House to open such an inquiry.Maybe the procedures don’t matter, as the optics, more than the substance, seem to be the point of the impeachment. Faced with electoral prospects that have been deeply compromised by the massive political backlash following the reversal of Roe v Wade and the almost comically superlative corruption of the likely Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump – who has now been criminally indicted four times – Republicans need to create a stench around Biden comparable to the one that follows Trump, and increasingly all the other candidates who appear with an R next to their names on the ballot. The impeachment inquiry, then, can be understood as congressional Republicans’ effort, ahead of the 2024 election, to throw a stink bomb.Another appropriate metaphor might be herding cats. McCarthy’s announcement of an impeachment inquiry came as far-right members of his coalition in the so-called House freedom caucus – most visibly Matt Gaetz of Florida, the congressman who was investigated for sex trafficking of minors but ultimately not charged – have increasingly made it clear that such an inquiry will be a precondition of their cooperation in upcoming budget negotiations that threaten to shut down the federal government at the end of the month.With the cooperation and guidance of Trump, these members have held the budget hostage in order to demand an inquiry – and, thanks to rule changes that McCarthy had to make in order to secure the speakership after a humiliating 15 rounds of leadership votes, the far right is able to threaten his own position, too. The impeachment inquiry, then, is the result of a weak speaker who cannot control his caucus, presiding over a deeply divided party that is in thrall to a vindictive and chaotic right flank. McCarthy looks a bit like a circus monkey, dancing on command: it’s the only way he can keep his job.But what exactly do House Republicans intend to impeach Joe Biden for? It’s not clear. House investigations into Biden have been ongoing for the past nine months, since Republicans took a narrow majority in the chamber, and so far they have not uncovered any notable misconduct by the president.The accusations against Biden are imprecise: it is noted that his son Hunter had some business dealings that seem unsavory, and that Biden may have been merged on to a call regarding one of these, though it’s not clear exactly what Republicans accuse him of doing on the call. Hunter Biden had a laptop with embarrassing material on it, and this is also supposed to indicate corruption on the part of the president, though Republicans never point to what the laptop specifically revealed about Biden himself.When pressed, sometimes Republicans will say that it is their own inquiries which have been targeted with wrongdoing, accusing Biden of interfering in investigations of his son. But this claim, too, has been discredited.At the press conference designed to maximize attention to the inquiry, McCarthy said that the House’s investigations, though they had turned up no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden himself, had “painted a picture of a culture of corruption” around the Biden family. This is what the House’s new impeachment inquiry into Biden amounts to: not an actual accusation of malfeasance by the president so much as a supposedly very serious investigation of a bad vibe.Biden’s great crime, if he can be said to have committed one, is in having fathered a sleazeball. Hunter Biden has long been beset by addictions and self-destructive behaviors that he has not been willing or able to confront. He is accused of misdemeanor tax violations; once, when filling out a background check form to buy a handgun, he was asked whether he did drugs, and said no when the answer was yes. He fathered a child in Arkansas with a woman he then denied knowing, and sought to keep from having to acknowledge paternity; a DNA test proved the little girl was his daughter. His laptop was filled with pictures of him doing drugs and having sex, images which the right has gleefully published in acts of politically motivated revenge porn.Like a lot of famous men’s sons, Hunter seems content to make money by trading on his family name rather than cultivating his own talents. None of this reflects well on him. But none of it is particularly unique, either. Much of Hunter Biden’s poor character could also fairly be attributed to other children of privilege, other scions of the idle rich – including not a few Republican members of Congress.But it is Joe Biden, not Hunter, who is running for president, and it is Biden, not Hunter, whom the Republicans are truly eager to hurt. The new impeachment inquiry will give House Republicans subpoena power and an excuse to pursue their political agenda against Biden without any need for a pretext of legislative business.It will be a cudgel used to try and create the false impression that Biden’s misdeeds, if any, are equal to Trump’s, something like a re-do of the tedious and ultimately disastrous Hillary Clinton email server faux-controversy. Both federal law enforcement and the political media fell for that trick hook, line and sinker in 2016, allowing their desire to appear impartial to supersede their obligation to tell the truth.We don’t have to do that this time. This time, we can say the facts as they are plain: that Donald Trump is a singularly corrupt figure, that the Republican party is controlled by extremists, and that this new impeachment effort is an inquiry in search of a subject, a pretext and a fishing expedition. There simply is no equivalence between the ways that Trump routinely abuses his power and the misdeeds of any other politician. No number of press conferences will change that.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the US House, announced on Tuesday he is launching a formal impeachment inquiry into president Joe Biden – despite resistance from Republicans in the House and Senate, where an impeachment vote would almost certainly fail.The order comes as McCarthy faces mounting pressure from some far-right members of his chamber, who have threatened to tank his deal to avert a government shutdown by the end of the month if he does not meet their list of demands.Here’s what you need to know.Why is McCarthy launching the impeachment inquiry?According to McCarthy, findings from Republican-led investigations over the summer recess revealed “a culture of corruption”, and that Biden lied about his lack of involvement and knowledge of his family’s overseas business dealings.“These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption. And they warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives,” McCarthy said during a brief press conference at the US Capitol on Tuesday.Many of the allegations center on the president’s son, Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, during his father’s term as vice-president. Republicans allege that Joe Biden improperly benefited from his son’s foreign connections but, after several months, have produced no evidence. Watchdog groups say Republicans do not actually have evidence to back up their claims.McCarthy previously indicated an impeachment inquiry “would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House and not through a declaration by one person”, in a statement to rightwing Breitbart News earlier this month. But he declared the launch of an impeachment probe just a week and a half later, without a House floor vote, which likely means he does not have the support.What happens now?McCarthy has directed the chairs of three House committees – judiciary, oversight and ways and means – to lead the impeachment probe.Each of the committees have held hearings related to alleged crimes committed by the Biden family, and the chairs earlier launched a joint investigation into the Department of Justice claiming “misconduct” in its investigation of Hunter Biden for tax evasion and illegally possessing a gun.The White House sent a letter to news outlets on Wednesday urging members of the media to ramp up scrutiny of House Republicans’ “demonstrably false claims”.Where do the Republican investigations into Biden stand?After months of investigations, Republicans have failed to produce evidence that President Biden committed any crimes, according to the White House, which on Tuesday called the impeachment inquiry “extreme politics at its worst”.A watchdog group found that the house oversight committee investigation into Biden’s family, led by its chair, James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, has been “eight months of abject failure”. Comer overhyped allegations of bribery and corruption without evidence, according to a report by the Congressional Integrity Project released Monday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDo all Republicans support impeachment?Republicans in the House are split over the impeachment inquiry, with some supporting McCarthy’s decision with others publicly expressing their opposition.Don Bacon of Nebraska said on Tuesday he opposed the impeachment inquiry, saying McCarthy should hold a vote because there is currently no evidence suggesting Biden committed a crime.Ken Buck of Colorado, a member of the House freedom caucus, said in an interview on MSNBC days before McCarthy ordered the impeachment inquiry that “evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor … doesn’t exist right now”.Buck’s statement clashes with those of Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a fellow freedom caucus member who has trumpeted an impeachment vote, and of Matt Gaetz of Florida, who called the impeachment inquiry a “baby step”.Donald Trump has also been outspoken about impeaching Biden and reportedly supported Republican impeachment efforts from behind the scenes ahead of McCarthy’s announcement.Senate Republicans remained largely ambivalent on whether they supported the House’s impeachment inquiry, according to Politico, with some saying they hoped it would help McCarthy secure enough votes to avoid a government shutdown.Is impeachment likely to prevail?It’s unlikely. Impeachment would require a simple majority vote in the House, where it would likely struggle to garner enough support, before it went to the Senate.The Senate, where Democrats hold a slim majority, requires a two-thirds vote to convict. More

The court battle between the US justice department and Google has entered its second day, as the United States government seeks to prove that the tech behemoth illegally leveraged its power to maintain a monopoly over internet search engines. The trial is a major test of antitrust law and could have far-reaching implications for the tech industry and for how people engage with the internet.The question at the heart of the trial is whether Google’s place as the search engine for most Americans is the result of anti-competitive practices that gave internet users no other choice but to use its services.On the first day of the trial, attorneys for the justice department and the dozens of states that have joined in the suit accused Google of shutting out competition through billion-dollar agreements with companies such as Apple and Samsung.The justice department lawyer Kenneth Dintzer alleged Google spends $10bn a year in deals to ensure it is the default search engine on devices such as the iPhone, effectively blocking meaningful competition and positioning Google as the gatekeeper of the internet.“They knew these agreements crossed antitrust lines,” Dintzer said.Google’s opening statement gave a window into how the company and its lead attorney, John Schmidtlein, plan to defend against the accusations. Schmidtlein argued that Google has achieved its dominance over online search – the government estimates it holds about a 90% market share – because it is simply a better product than alternatives such as Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Consumers are free to switch default settings with “a few easy clicks” and use other search engines if they please, Schmidtlein told the court on Tuesday.The justice department called its first witness, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian. Over the course of two hours, Dintzer presented Varian with internal memos and documents dating back to the 2000s that showed him discussing how search defaults could be strategically important. One internal communication from Varian warned over antitrust issues that “we should be careful about what we say in both public and private”.On Wednesday, the justice department called the former Google executive Chris Barton, who had worked in partnerships and was an employee from 2004 to 2011. The department questioned Barton about the value of those partnerships in establishing dominance over the market.“As we recognized the opportunity for search on mobile phones, we began to build a product team,” Barton said, according to Reuters.As with the first day of the trial, the government has tried to show that Google saw the importance early on of making deals and securing its position as the default search engine on devices. The documents and witnesses it has brought up have so far been from over a decade ago, when the government says Google was first beginning to forge agreements that helped it monopolize search.The justice department has also alleged that Google was aware of possible antitrust violations and has consciously tried to obscure its actions. The government presented a document in court from an internal Google presentation on antitrust, which warned employees to avoid mentioning “market share” or “dominance”.The trial is set to last 10 weeks and feature numerous witnesses, as well as internal Google documents that the justice department hopes will show that monopolizing search has long been a top priority at the company. Judge Amit Mehta will decide the case, and there is no jury in the trial. More

Donald Trump has been in discussions with influential House Republicans over the party’s long-shot attempt to impeach Joe Biden over unproven corruption allegations relating to his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.Trump was in contact with Elise Stefanik, the third most senior Republican in the House of Representatives, ahead of Tuesday’s announcement of an official impeachment inquiry by the speaker, Kevin McCarthy, Politico reported.The news outlet said Trump and Stefanik have been speaking weekly, and talked again shortly after the announcement was made.“I speak to President Trump a lot, I spoke to him today,” Stefanik, from New York, told reporters.Stefanik has been at the fore in Republican moves to push ahead with impeachment hearings despite the lack of evidence that Biden committed wrongdoing, let alone the “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” required under the US constitution.The New Yorker has been flagged as a possible vice-presidential running mate for Trump should he win the Republican nomination to face Biden next year.Trump has also been reaching out to the hard right of the party, which has been waging a fierce pressure campaign to force McCarthy into calling an impeachment inquiry by threatening a government shutdown over federal spending levels.Politico revealed that the former president dined with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extreme rightwing representative from Georgia, at his New Jersey golf club two nights before McCarthy’s announcement.Greene told the New York Times she briefed Trump on her vision for an impeachment inquiry. She said she told him she hoped it would be “long and excruciatingly painful for Joe Biden”.Trump’s behind-the-scenes lobbying of prominent House Republicans tallies with his increasingly shrill public calls for impeachment. The twice impeached former president posted on Truth Social last month: “Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US.”Trump was impeached first for seeking dirt on opponents in Ukraine, then for inciting the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021. Retaining sufficient Republican support in the Senate, he was acquitted both times.News of Trump’s interventions is likely to stoke White House complaints that the impeachment inquiry is merely designed to damage Biden’s approval ratings as the 2024 presidential election gets under way. A White House spokesperson denounced the investigation as “extreme politics at its worst”.McCarthy is also facing blowback over his decision to convene an inquiry without a vote of the full House, in a sharp reversal of his previous public statements.In 2019 he wrote to the then House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, arguing that if she went ahead with the impeachment inquiry that led to Trump’s first impeachment relating to Ukraine the process would be “completely devoid of any merit or legitimacy”.McCarthy repeated his pledge to hold a formal impeachment inquiry only in the outcome of a full House vote as recently as this month, in an interview with Breitbart.McCarthy’s U-turn in his decision to proceed with an investigation without a vote appears to have been motivated by the tight spot he finds himself in.On the one hand, he is facing an increasingly militant hard-right group including Greene that is holding him hostage over raising the debt ceiling to avoid a government shutdown.On the other, several House Republicans have spoken publicly about their skepticism over an impeachment inquiry, citing the absence of credible evidence of Biden’s wrongdoing. They include staunch conservatives such as Ken Buck of Colorado, who has called Greene’s intense desire to impeach Biden “absurd”.“The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence linking President Biden, if there’s evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor, that doesn’t exist right now,” Buck told MSNBC on Sunday. More

Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, pitching the then conservative US supreme court nominee into huge controversy, will release a memoir next year that she sees as a call for people to speak out about wrongdoing.Publisher St Martin’s Press said Ford’s book would share “riveting new details about the lead-up” to her Senate testimony and “its overwhelming aftermath”, including receiving death threats and being unable to live in her home.The publisher also said Ford would discuss “how people unknown to her around the world restored her faith in humanity”. The book, to be called One Way Back, will be published in March.In a statement, Ford said: “I never thought of myself as a survivor, a whistleblower, or an activist before the events in 2018.“But now, what I and this book can offer is a call to all the other people who might not have chosen those roles for themselves, but who choose to do what’s right. Sometimes you don’t speak out because you are a natural disrupter. You do it to cause a ripple that might one day become a wave.”Kavanaugh, a former Republican operative, was the second of Donald Trump’s three nominees to the supreme court, tilting the court decisively in favor of conservatives and leading to rightwing rulings including the removal of the right to abortion.Ford is a professor at Palo Alto University and Stanford University School of Medicine.In September 2018, she told the Senate judiciary committee Kavanuagh sexually assaulted her at a high-school party in the 1980s.He pinned her on a bed, she said, pressing his hand over her mouth while trying to remove her clothes.In prepared testimony, Ford said: “I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help … I thought Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”Ford escaped when a friend of Kavanaugh jumped on the bed, she said, famously telling senators: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two. They’re having fun at my expense.”The assault, Ford said, “drastically altered my life. For a very long time, I was too afraid and ashamed to tell anyone the details”. She told “very few friends” and her husband, she added.Kavanaugh angrily denied the accusation, and others about alleged drunken behaviour which roiled confirmation proceedings in a way not seen since the scandal over Clarence Thomas’s alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill, in 1991.Backed by Republicans on the committee vociferously including the then chair, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Kavanaugh was confirmed to the court by 50 votes to 48. Only one Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, declined to support him. More

US inflation in August rose for the first time since June 2022, rising to 3.7% as a sharp increase in energy prices pushed prices up toward the end of the summer.Growth in prices still remains far below the decades-high inflation rates that were seen last summer, when the rate peaked at 9.1% in June. Still, an increase in inflation means the US economy is further from the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2% and will probably make officials consider pushing interest rates up later this year.The price of energy commodities, including gas and oil, jumped up 10.5% over the last month, according to the latest Consumer Price Index data, which measures the prices of a basket of goods and services. Gas prices ticked up in August as Russia and Saudi Arabia continued aggressive cuts in supply, bringing the price of crude oil to 10-month high at $91 a barrel. Higher gas prices accounted for more than half of the increase in the overall inflation rate.Meanwhile core inflation, which measures the price of goods and services minus the volatile energy and food industries, actually decreased in August to 4.3%, down from 4.7% in July, reflecting the impact higher energy prices are having on the overall inflation rate.Even with the decrease in core inflation, which has been higher and going down at a slower rate than the 12-month inflation rate, inflation still remains far above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%.Though price decreases have been seen in used cars and medical care services over the last few months, home prices have hit a near-record high in June, keeping core inflation stubbornly high. The median home price hit $413,80, the second-highest price ever, according to the National Association of Realtors. Home prices cooled slightly to $406,700 in July, but home prices still remain 7.3% higher than a year earlier.Even with inflation slightly up, the Fed is on track to keep interest rates the same at their next board meeting on 20 September. Economists say the Fed has had a pause planned for the meeting for a while as many officials say the economy has yet to feel the full effects of interest rates, which are at a 22-year high at 5.25% to 5.5%.But as the health of the economy continues to be hard to pin down – job growth has remained relatively stable even amid high interest rates, but inflation is still far from 2% – the Fed could still raise interest rates at future meetings. Future interest rate increases could introduce more volatility to the US economy, and potentially trigger a recession, though the Fed’s mission to bring down inflation has yet to bear dramatic consequences.The Fed chair, Jerome Powell, said last month that officials were aware of the precarity, saying they will “proceed carefully” as they decide what to do with interest rates. Powell has said the overall decline in inflation has been a “welcome development”, but it still remains high.“We are prepared to raise rates further if appropriate, and intend to hold policy at a restrictive level until we are confident that inflation is moving sustainably down toward our objective,” he said. More