US Politics

Donald Trump was scheduled to surrender to federal authorities in Washington on Thursday afternoon and enter a not guilty plea to charges that he conspired to defraud the United States among other crimes in seeking to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.The twice-impeached former president, who has now been indicted three times since leaving the White House, was expected to be booked and fingerprinted in the federal district court before being escorted to his arraignment, which has been set for 4pm.Trump was expected to make his first appearance in the case in person, according to people briefed on the matter, and to travel for the arraignment from his Bedminster club in New Jersey to Washington with his lawyers and several top campaign staffers.The initial appearance from Trump to enter a plea formally starts the months-long pre-trial process that will run into the timetable for his other criminal trials next year and the 2024 presidential race, where Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.The charges in Washington came in the second indictment brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, who previously charged Trump in June with retaining national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them.Trump has also been indicted in an unrelated case by the Manhattan district attorney, who charged him over hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. He is expected to be indicted a fourth time over 2020 election-related charges in Georgia.Thursday’s arraignment follows the release of a 45-page indictment alleging fundamentally that Trump convened fake slates of electors and sought “sham election investigations” from the justice department in order to obstruct the certification of the election result in an attempt to remain president.The indictment also listed six co-conspirators who were not charged in the indictment. While they were unnamed, the descriptions of five of the six matched those of the Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro as well as the former US justice department official Jeff Clark.Thursday’s hearing in the courthouse – just blocks from the Capitol building, where Trump’s efforts to reverse his election defeat to Joe Biden culminated in the January 6 riot – was expected to be overseen by US magistrate judge Moxila Upadhyaya.Magistrate judges typically handle the more routine or procedural aspects of court cases, such as arraignments, but the case itself has been assigned to US district court judge Tanya Chutkan, a former assistant public defender who was nominated to the bench by Barack Obama.In 2021, Chutkan was the judge who rejected Trump’s attempt to block the House January 6 select committee investigating the Capitol riot from gaining access to presidential records. “Presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president,” she wrote at the time. More

Trump’s latest pitch to supporters | Fiona Katauskas | Opinion | The Guardian More

The Orlando Magic NBA team has donated $50,000 to a super PAC supporting Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid.According to Federal Election Commission records, the Never Back Down super PAC received the donation made by the basketball team on 26 June. Further results showed the team making donations to other political causes in past years, with $500 going to Conservative Results in 2016, $2,000 to Maverick PAC USA in 2014 and another $500 to Linda Chapin for Congress in 2000.In an initial statement to Popular Information, a Magic spokesperson said: “We don’t comment publicly on political contributions.” However, in a later follow-up statement, a spokesperson clarified the donation, saying that the check was “dated/delivered on May 19”, five days before DeSantis declared his presidential bid.“This gift was given before governor DeSantis entered the presidential race. [It] was given as a Florida business in support of a Florida governor for the continued prosperity of Central Florida,” the spokesperson said.According to Never Back Down’s website, the super PAC describes itself as a “grassroots movement to elect governor Ron DeSantis for president in 2024”.The donation has drawn criticism online, particularly given the Magic’s claims of supporting “diversity, equity and inclusion all year long” and DeSantis’s culture wars in which he announced plans to block DEI programs in state colleges among other legislation targeting minority and marginalized groups including LGBTQ+ communities.The Orlando Magic team is under Amway North America, a multi-level marketing firm co-established by Richard DeVos, the late father-in-law of Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos.Over the years, the DeVos family has made multiple donations to conservative organizations. In 2006, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation made a $540,000 donation to Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based organization that opposes same-sex marriage and abortions, HuffPost reports. In 2008, Richard DeVos donated $100,000 to Florida4Marriage, a group that campaigned to add a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriages.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That’s just a sacred issue of respecting marriage,” Richard DeVos said in a 2009 interview in reference to his donation. More

Federal prosecutors requested a hearing to inform Donald Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, about his lead lawyer’s potential conflicts of interest stemming from his defense work for at least three witnesses that could testify against Nauta and the former president in the classified documents case.The prosecutors made the request to US district court judge Aileen Cannon on Wednesday, explaining that Nauta’s lead lawyer, Stanley Woodward, represents two key Trump employees and formerly advised the Mar-a-Lago IT director, Yuscil Taveras, who is cooperating in the case.“All three of these witnesses may be witnesses for the government at trial, raising the possibility that Mr Woodward might be in the position of cross-examining past or current clients,” prosecutors wrote in the 11-page court filing. “These potential conflicts warrant a Garcia hearing.”At issue is Woodward’s prior representation of Taveras during the grand jury investigation earlier this year, when prosecutors concluded that Taveras had evidence that incriminated Nauta and had enough of his own legal exposure to warrant sending him a target letter.After Trump and Nauta were indicted in the classified documents case on 8 June, Taveras changed lawyers and swapped out Woodward, whose legal bills were being paid by Trump’s political action committee Save America, and retained a new lawyer on 5 July.In the weeks that followed, Taveras decided to share more evidence with prosecutors about how Nauta and Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira had asked him to delete surveillance footage – details that resulted last week in a superseding indictment against Trump, Nauta and De Oliveira.Trump and Nauta were charged last month in a sprawling indictment that outlined how Trump retained national security documents and obstructed the government’s efforts to retrieve them with the help of Nauta, who was seen moving boxes of documents on surveillance tapes, and lied to the FBI.The superseding indictment, filed in federal district court in Miami, added a new section titled “The Attempt to Delete Security Camera Footage” that described a scheme to wipe a server containing surveillance footage that showed boxes of classified documents being removed from the Mar-a-Lago storage room.The court filing said that Taveras told prosecutors he was unopposed to Woodward continuing to represent Nauta, but did not consent to Woodward using or disclosing his confidential deliberations in the course of defending Nauta.That would mean Woodward could face some limits in how vigorously he could defend Nauta at trial, since he might be obligated to stand down certain arguments he might have otherwise used to attack Taveras’s testimony during cross-examination.“An attorney’s cross-examination of a former or current client raises two principal dangers. First, the conflict may result in the attorney’s improper use or disclosure of the client’s confidences during the cross-examination. Second, the conflict may cause the attorney to pull his punches,” the filing said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWoodward could not immediately be reached for comment, but he has previously indicated he would file a motion in response.In their court filing, prosecutors added there could be additional conflicts for Woodward because out of the eight total witnesses who were ensnared by the grand jury investigation, the government intended to use at least two of them against Trump and Nauta at trial.The first witness “worked in the White House during Trump’s presidency and then subsequently worked for Trump’s post-presidential office in Florida” and the second “worked for Trump’s reelection campaign and worked for Trump’s political action committee after Trump’s presidency ended”.That raised the possibility of Woodward having multiple clients testifying against each other, and ultimately against Trump, with whom Nauta is said to be in an informal joint-defense agreement, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. More

The indictment served on Donald Trump on Monday marks the beginning of a legal reckoning that is desperately required, if American democracy is to properly free itself from his malign, insidious influence. Mr Trump already faces multiple criminal charges relating to the retention of classified national security documents and the payment of hush money to a porn star. But the gravity of the four counts outlined by the special counsel, Jack Smith, is of a different order of magnitude.Mr Trump stands accused of conspiring, in office, to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Following Joe Biden’s victory, the indictment states, Mr Trump “knowingly” used false claims of electoral fraud in an attempt “to subvert the legitimate election results”. A bipartisan congressional committee report last year came to similar conclusions and provides much of the basis for the charges. But this represents the first major legal attempt to hold Mr Trump accountable for events leading up to and including the storming of the Capitol by a violent mob on 6 January 2021.The stakes could hardly be set higher. Democratic elections and the peaceful transfer of power are the cornerstones of the American republic. The testimony given to Congress indicates that Mr Trump used his authority to try to bully federal and state officials into supporting his claims that the election had been “stolen” from him. Repeatedly told that his assertions were baseless, he then mobilised a hostile crowd on 6 January to intimidate lawmakers charged with ratifying Mr Biden’s victory.It is inconceivable that Mr Trump should not be made to answer for actions that imperilled the constitutional and democratic functioning of the United States. The prosecutors’ case will hinge on their ability to prove that he knew his claims of a stolen election were bogus. But beyond the trial itself, it would be foolish to underestimate Mr Trump’s ability to turn even this situation to his own political advantage.The legal fronts on which Mr Trump is now engaged will drain his financial resources. But a narrative of victimhood and persecution has become, and will remain, the galvanising theme of his campaign. Two previous criminal indictments saw his poll ratings lift, helping him to establish a huge lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination for 2024. Whatever the evidence to the contrary, a sizable proportion of American voters will continue to back Mr Trump’s self-serving version of reality.One of the most dangerously polarising elections in US history thus looms as, over the next 15 months, Mr Trump uses political cunning to evade the legal net that is closing around him. Through his lawyers, he will do all he can to delay matters, hoping eventually to dictate the course of events from the White House. For his part, Mr Smith said on Monday that the justice department will seek “a speedy trial”.It is in the interests of American democracy, to which Mr Trump represents a clear and present danger, that the justice department gets its wish. A healthy body politic cannot allow its founding values and core principles to be trashed with apparent impunity. Prosecutors will need to proceed with care and be alert to the complex political dynamics. But this climactic reckoning in court needs to take place before Mr Trump gets the chance to besmirch the country’s highest office all over again. More

Barack Obama has reportedly warned Joe Biden about how strong a challenge Donald Trump will be in their second election battle in 2024, should Trump win the Republican nomination next year as expected.Polling now shows Trump and Biden closely matched for a second presidential contest.At a private White House lunch with Biden in June, Obama also “promised to do all he could to help the president get re-elected”, the Washington Post reported. Citing two sources familiar with the meeting, the Post said Biden welcomed the offer of help from the man under whom he was vice-president between 2009 and 2017.Biden, the newspaper said, “is eager to lock down promises of help from top Democrats, among whom Obama is easily the biggest star, for what is likely to be a hard-fought re-election race”.Trump faces unprecedented legal jeopardy including 78 criminal charges, over hush-money payments, retention of classified information and his attempt to overturn Biden’s election victory in 2020.He is expected also to face election subversion charges in Georgia but his grip on the Republican primary has only tightened with each legal reverse. In Republican polling, Trump enjoys leads of more than 30 points over his nearest rival, the hard-right governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.In 2020, Biden beat Trump by more than 7m ballots and conclusively in the electoral college, a result Trump refused to accept, stoking chaos culminating in the deadly US Capitol attack.Biden and Obama’s relationship has been the subject of widespread reporting and speculation, not least over whether Obama thought Biden should mount a third run for the Democratic nomination in 2020.As a US senator from Delaware, Biden crashed and burned in the primaries of 1988 and 2008, the latter won by Obama, 19 years Biden’s junior. The two men then formed an effective partnership through eight years in power.In 2020, as Biden sought to become the oldest ever president via a campaign based on the need to save “the soul of the nation” from Trump, Obama withheld his memoirs, potentially awkward for his vice-president, until the race was run. But he also long withheld his endorsement.After Biden overcame a rocky start to surge to the nomination, in large part with the support of African American voters, Obama helped drive home his success.Tensions have reportedly remained. For one striking example, the authors Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns described, in their book This Will Not Pass, how Biden, now 80, told one adviser: “I am confident that Barack is not happy with the coverage of this administration as more transformative than his.”Among major challenges, Biden has faced the Covid pandemic, strong economic headwinds, a US body politic under attack from Trump’s extremist Republican party, and the need to marshal global support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. Despite widely acknowledged successes, his popularity ratings remain stubbornly low.Eric Schultz, an Obama adviser, did not comment to the Post about the June lunch.“We place a huge emphasis on finding creative ways to reach new audiences, especially tools that can be directly tied to voter mobilization or volunteer activations,” Schultz told the paper. “We are deliberate in picking our moments because our objective is to move the needle.”A Biden campaign spokesperson, TJ Ducklo, said: “President Biden is grateful for [Obama’s] unwavering support, and looks forward to once again campaigning side-by-side … to win in 2024 and finish the job for the American people.” More

A jury imposed the death penalty on a man who spewed antisemitic hate before fatally shooting 11 worshippers at a synagogue in the heart of the Jewish community of Pittsburgh.Robert Bowers, a truck driver now 50 years old, perpetrated the deadliest attack on Jews in US history on 27 October 2018. Entering the Tree of Life synagogue, he opened fire with an AR-15 rifle, shooting everyone he could find in a mass murder clearly motivated by religious hatred.Bowers raved on social media about his hatred of Jewish people – using a slur for Jewish people some 400 times on a social media platform favored by the far right – and remains proud that he killed Jews.“Do not be numb to it. Remember what it means. This defendant targeted people solely because of the faith that they chose,” Eric Olshan, US attorney for the western district of Pennsylvania, said during the court case.In federal capital cases, a unanimous vote by jurors in a separate penalty phase is required to sentence a defendant to death. The judge cannot reject the jury’s vote. If jurors are unable to reach a unanimous decision, the offender is instead sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release.On Wednesday, the same jury that convicted Bowers on 63 criminal counts recommended he be put to death. A judge was due to formally impose sentence later.The family of 97-year-old Rose Mallinger, who was killed in the attack, and her daughter, Andrea Wedner, who was wounded, thanked the jurors, saying “a measure of justice has been served”.“Returning a sentence of death is not a decision that comes easy, but we must hold accountable those who wish to commit such terrible acts of antisemitism, hate and violence,” the family said in a statement.Victims’ families were divided on whether Bowers should be sentenced to death.As described by the Death Penalty Information Center, “the New Light and Dor Hadash congregations, including Rabbi Jonathan Perlman, who was wounded in the attack, and Miri Rabinowitz, whose husband was killed, urged [US attorney general Merrick] Garland to forego the death penalty and instead seek a life sentence.”On Wednesday a statement from Stephen Cohen and Barbara Caplan, co-presidents of New Light Congregation, which lost three members in Bowers’ attack, said: “Many of our members prefer that the shooter spend the rest of his life in prison, questioning whether we should seek vengeance or revenge against him or whether his death would ‘make up’ for the lost lives.”But the congregation as a whole, Cohen and Caplan wrote, “agrees with the government’s position that no one may murder innocent individuals simply because of their religion … New Light Congregation accepts the jury’s decision and believes that, as a society, we need to take a stand that this act requires the ultimate penalty under the law.”Bowers’ lead defense attorney, Judy Clarke, declined comment.Attorneys for Bowers argued that he has schizophrenia, a serious brain disorder with symptoms including delusions and hallucinations, and that he attacked the synagogue out of a delusional belief that Jews were helping to bring about a genocide of white people by coming to the aid of refugees and immigrants. The defense also presented evidence of a difficult childhood.Olshan disputed the diagnosis of schizophrenia, asserting Bowers was not suffering psychosis but had chosen to believe white supremacist rhetoric. Acknowledging there was no question Bowers had been a depressed, neglected child, Olshan downplayed its significance, noting Bowers held jobs, paid bills and was an otherwise functioning adult.“He was not a child, he was a grown man. He was responsible for his actions, not his family and things that happened decades earlier. He was, he is responsible for his actions,” Olshan said.Prosecutors presented witnesses and evidence to show Bowers carefully planned the attack and deliberately targeted vulnerable elderly worshippers.Seven people were wounded, including five police officers. Bowers was shot three times before surrendering when he ran out of ammunition.Under Donald Trump, the federal government restarted executions and oversaw a rush of cases, with 13 executions in his final months in the White House.No federal death sentences have been carried out under Joe Biden, who said during his campaign he would end the practice but who has not taken steps to do so once in power. More

A day after Wisconsin supreme court justice Janet Protasiewicz took office, flipping control of the court to liberals, a coalition of legal groups in Wisconsin has filed suit to challenge the state’s electoral maps. It alleges that the state’s maps are gerrymandered and unconstitutional and aims to correct the partisan advantage Republican lawmakers have maintained in Wisconsin’s electoral maps for more than a decade.The complaint alleges that Wisconsin’s maps deny voters “equal protection and free association” rights and violate Wisconsin’s constitution, which calls for districts to consist of contiguous geographical territory.The lawsuit, filed at the state supreme court, asks the state to redraw the electoral maps for the state senate and assembly before the 2024 elections. The case also requests that state senators not up for reelection face a special election in 2024 after new maps have been drawn.If the court rules that Wisconsin’s maps are unconstitutional, Law Forward, a left-leaning law firm and one of the groups filing the lawsuit, “would be willing” to propose new maps, said Jeff Mandell, the group’s founder.States are tasked with redrawing their electoral maps every 10 years. In Wisconsin, the state legislature is responsible for drawing the legislative lines that shape political control of the state.In 2011, Republican lawmakers gathered behind the closed doors of a Madison law firm across the street from the state capitol, redrawing the state’s electoral maps and shifting millions of voters into new districts. The resulting maps, which were quickly signed into law by the former Republican governor Scott Walker, nearly guaranteed Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.“In 2011, the legislature engaged in the most extreme version of gerrymandering that we possibly have ever seen,” said Mark Gaber, who manages redistricting litigation with Campaign Legal Center, one of the organizations signing onto the complaint. “The 2011 Republican legislature ensured that Wisconsin voters would never be able to change their minds.”A decade later, on 15 April 2022, the Wisconsin supreme court ruled in a 4-3 decision to adopt Republican lawmakers’ new maps, which further entrenched the party’s advantage in the state.In statewide contests, Wisconsin elections are typically competitive – the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, won the 2018 gubernatorial election by 1.1 percentage points, and was re-elected in 2022 by 3.4 percentage points. Presidential contests have been decided by similarly narrow margins in the last decade. In the state assembly and senate, though, Republicans have maintained large majorities since 2011. Currently, Republicans hold a majority in the assembly and a supermajority in the state senate.The legal groups filed the lawsuit on behalf of 19 voters, among them Denise Sweet, an Anishinaabe poet and Native Vote Manager with Wisconsin Conservation Voters, and Rebecca Clarke, a county supervisor from Sheboygan county. They argue that Wisconsin’s maps deprive their communities and constituencies of representation in the state legislature.In a statement, Evers called the complaint “great news for our democracy and for the people of our state whose demands for fair maps and a nonpartisan redistricting process have gone repeatedly ignored by their legislators for years”.Protasiewicz, who was sworn in to the supreme court on Tuesday after winning a closely watched election on 4 April, has criticized Wisconsin’s legislative maps as unfair and campaigned on the issue. In an interview with the Capital Times, the Madison newspaper, Protasiewicz said she “would enjoy taking a fresh look at the gerrymandering question”.This complaint is the first major voting rights case for Wisconsin’s new liberal majority on supreme court, which could decide more elections-related cases ahead of the 2024 elections.Wisconsin voters have tried to challenge the state’s gerrymander in the federal courts in the past. In a 2018 case brought by 12 Wisconsin voters, the US supreme court ruled that the court could not weigh in on the plaintiff’s claim that the entire map was gerrymandered, asking the plaintiffs to return with a case focusing on specific districts. In a separate ruling in 2019, the court ruled that partisan gerrymandering could not be adjudicated by federal courts. More