US Politics

It was supposed to be the Republican party’s last stand, in a state where they had exercised near-absolute control for years, and they had every hope of putting up a good fight. Yet in the end, it wasn’t even close.Millions of dollars had poured into Wisconsin ahead of an election for a seat on the state supreme court, a hotly contested race between a liberal judge and one backed by moneyed rightwing interests. The stakes were high: Wisconsin’s state legislature has been gerrymandered out of competitiveness for more than a decade, for one thing, meaning that the state, which has a roughly even split between Democratic and Republican voters, had nevertheless become a grim experiment in one-party rule, with Republicans commanding a majority of statehouse seats despite receiving far fewer votes proportionally. Federal elections in Wisconsin seemed worryingly vulnerable, too: when Trump sued over his 2020 loss there, making spurious claims of election fraud, the Republican-controlled state supreme court ruled against him by only one vote.But most pressing was abortion. After the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision, the state was thrown into chaos when a wildly sexist law from 1849, banning all abortions, went back into effect. The law is poised to be challenged at the state supreme court, and the rights of half of the Wisconsin population could depend on who controls that court.One of the candidates in the judicial race, Janet Protasiewicz, was open about her beliefs: she frankly described herself as pro-choice. The other, Dan Kelly, brushed off questions about abortion. But he was backed by anti-choice groups, and had long been on the payroll of the Republican party, including in representing them in legal matters pertaining to their 2020 election denial.While Protasiewicz relied on small-dollar donations, Kelly raised plenty of money – much of it from large, out-of-state megadonor funds like the Richard Uihlein-backed Fair Courts America. But Protasiewicz blew him out of the park: she won with a lead of 10 percentage points. Voters’ top concern? Abortion rights.Protasiewicz’s blowout victory in Wisconsin came on the same day that another high-stakes political contest was playing out in New York: the arraignment of Donald Trump on charges of falsifying business records. True to form, Trump incited a chaotic, carnivalesque, and extremely tacky scene outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse as the charges were read against him. The media breathlessly followed every moment of the arraignment, with cable-news cameras even following his plane from Mar-a-Lago, his gaudy resort home in Palm Beach, up to New York.The arraignment has renewed attention on Trump, elevating him from the sideshow status that he has occupied for much of the Biden presidency back into the center of national attention. It has also made it seem much more likely – if still not inevitable – that he may become the Republican nominee. The party’s elite wants to ditch him, and his rivals for the nomination want to defeat him, but Trump still reigns in the hearts of Republican voters. He’s the one they’re comparing every other candidate to – and why settle for imitations when you can have the real thing?But Trump, still, represents a liability for the Republican party, even as he fulfills many of their voters’ most ardent desires and least honorable impulses. He’s a crooked buffoon, and he’s getting weirder and worse; outside of the Republican party itself, most voters don’t like him, don’t find him funny any more, don’t want to put up with his chaos, and don’t like what he’s done to their country.The Republican party, then, is like the dog that caught the car: it had its deepest desires fulfilled, in the form of the withdrawal of abortion rights in Dobbs, and in the form of a candidate who embodies its grievances, in Trump. Republicans got what they wanted. Now, they risk being destroyed by it.The Republican party today is messy, internally divided, filled with self-serving carnival-barkers like Trump and his descendants – George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz – more interested in garnering publicity for themselves than in securing electoral or policy victories for their party, and most of all, beholden to positions, most notably on abortion, that inflict untold suffering and are increasingly abhorrent to the average voter.Republicans propose sadistic abortion bans that are unpopular with voters, then reject amendments that would allow doctors to save women’s lives without fear of prosecution – making a self-righteous display of their own femicidal barbarity. They enact bans on transgender girls in sports and harness the full power of the state against trans student athletes – who number, in many states, fewer than a dozen.Although party elites periodically propose alternatives to Trump – Ron DeSantis this week, Glenn Youngkin the next – they as yet have no viable presidential candidates who seem able to mount a real challenge to the former president, a man whose legal liabilities are only going to worsen over the coming year, and whom voters already soundly rejected in 2020.But the party’s problems go beyond Trump and the extremist anti-choice regime that his judicial nominees have ushered in. The party has yielded to extremists in its base, placing candidates for office that range from the out of touch to the intensely creepy. Mehmet Oz, who ran for Senate in Pennsylvania last year, has the affect of a snake-oil salesman; Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel lackey who ran in Arizona, comes off as sinister. George Santos, a congressman from New York, seems to have lied about absolutely everything, possibly including his own name.These candidates are not accidents: they are who the Republican voters chose in their primaries, and who the Republican party has cultivated. This is the face that Republicans are putting forward to the country as they head into the 2024 cycle: cruel, creepy, and corrupt.Like the voters themselves, Republican party insiders don’t seem to have much interest in changing course. In January, just weeks after anger over abortion bans and disgust at the extremism of Republican candidates drove the party to a historically weak showing in the 2022 midterms, the Republican National Committee re-elected Ronna McDaniel, a Trump loyalist, for a fourth term as chair. As voters become more and more alienated from the party, Republicans seem serenely confident in their own losing strategy – or, at least, unwilling to change it. Like the Wisconsin supreme court race, the RNC contest became heated, with multiple factions hurling recriminations. But just as the liberal Protasiewicz had a blowout victory in her election, McDaniel’s victory in the RNC chair election was a landslide, too.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

The title of Governor Ron DeSantis’s book, which he is zealously promoting across the nation, is less important than the subtitle. The Courage to Be Free is a forgettable title shared by a volume by actor and gun rights activist Charlton Heston. But the subtitle, Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, unlocks DeSantis’s national ambitions.While former US president Donald Trump labours under the frayed slogan of “Make America great again”, DeSantis is building a case to “Make America Florida” – a phrase that appears on caps, flags and other merchandise.The governor argues that he has made glorious summer in the Sunshine state. If and when he announces a run for US president in 2024, he will claim that he can repeat the formula in state after state across the US. Florida, his theory goes, is an incubator of conservative ideas that work.He dangles a carrot to Republicans who, weary of Trump’s losing streak, are seeking a saviour. DeSantis writes that when he was elected in 2018, there were nearly 300,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Florida; by October 2022, there were more than 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats.“What Florida has done is establish a blueprint for governance that has produced tangible results while serving as a rebuke to the entrenched elites who have driven our nation into the ground,” DeSantis writes in The Courage to Be Free.But the governor’s critics question whether his fixation on culture wars (“Florida is where woke goes to die!”) is quite as popular as it seems. They also contend that, with numerous climatic, economic and social problems, Florida is not quite the paradise that DeSantis likes to portray.“What it is is a blueprint for is people who want to abuse their power in order to target people who disagree with them politically,” said Maxwell Frost, the youngest member of Congress, who represents a Florida district. “That’s what we’ve seen from someone like Governor DeSantis.“What we’re exporting out of Florida is fascism. For him to sit there and say, ‘Oh, yeah, my bill on banning trans kids from talking about who they are is now equated to a top education system,’ it’s just a bunch of bullshit, to be honest. Most Floridians hopefully will see through that.”DeSantis, 44, as governor of the third most populous state has imposed limits on how race and sexuality can be taught in schools, forcing some teachers to remove books from their libraries. He has also banned transgender girls from school sports, redrawn the state’s political maps to favour Republicans, attacked Disney and other businesses that disagree with his ideology, and cracked down on Black Lives Matter protests.Then there was the coronavirus pandemic. The governor mostly followed guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the early months, closing Florida’s beaches, bars and schools. But he pivoted in early 2021, reopening schools before other states and banning face mask and vaccine mandates in businesses and government. When the media questioned his approach, he hit back pugnaciously to the delight of a base that revels in “owning the libs”.DeSantis claimed vindication last year when he smashed fundraising records and won re-election by nearly 20 percentage points in what used to be a swing state, albeit against a weak candidate from a disorganised Democratic party. Republicans saw hope that DeSantis has cracked the code for a party that has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.The party now enjoys a supermajority in the Florida state legislature and is pushing issues such as telling teachers which pronouns they can use for students, making guns more available and easier to carry, keeping immigrants who are in the country illegally out of the state and criminalising some drag shows.Republicans argue that DeSantis’s agenda explains why Florida ranks number one in the nation for net in-migration. About 319,000 people moved there last year, according to an analysis of census data by the National Association of Realtors, while California lost the most residents, with 343,000 departing.Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican party, said: “You’re seeing people leave other states that have completely opposite ideology and political positions and policy positions. California, New York – everyone’s leaving those states and everyone’s flocking to our state. That validates the claim that Florida is a working model. If it was a cellphone, it would probably be the Apple iPhone. Everyone wants it, everyone’s buying it and everyone’s gravitating towards it.”Part of the attraction, Ziegler claims, is DeSantis’s “pro-freedom” approach to the pandemic, which allowed businesses and tourism to bounce back more quickly than elsewhere, and his support for what Republicans frame as “parents’ rights”.“I can’t tell you how many parents have moved here from other states because they want their kids in school not shut down, not to have masks forced on them, not to have a vaccine forced on them,” he said.Critics of DeSantis present a very different version, noting that Florida has long been a magnet because of its sunny weather and lack of state income tax. The pandemic, and the rise of remote working, made it especially attractive to people fleeing expensive big cities such as New York. (The trend may be temporary: latest census data shows that Manhattan’s population grew last year.)Speaking from Sarasota, Ziegler also defended DeSantis’s controversial policies on the teaching of US racial history. “From my standpoint, I can tell you we learned about the injustices of slavery. We learned about the heroic efforts of Harriet Tubman or Dr Martin Luther King Jr,” he said. “That is far different than the critical race theory, where they’re trying to point out that everyone in society is oppressed or an oppressor or that just the colour of your skin is going to make you biased and hateful.”This is a misrepresentation of critical race theory, which examines the ways in which racism was embedded into American law and other modern institutions, maintaining the dominance of white people. It is not typically taught in public schools.Progressives dispute the assertion that DeSantis’s focus on hot-button culture war issues is working.“He’s selling a blueprint for hate and bigotry,” said Brandon Wolf, press secretary of the LGBTQ+ rights organisation Equality Florida and a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. “Ron DeSantis is being honest about one thing and that is that he is trying to sell the snake oil of his authoritarian tactics in Florida to the rest of the country.”Wolf pointed out that, beneath the veneer of prosperity that the governor projects, there are plenty of shadows in the state. A haven for retirees, Florida has the worst long-term care for elderly people among all 50 states, according to the American Association of Retired Persons. It is among 10 states that have refused to expand Medicaid, a public health insurance programme for people with low income, under the Affordable Care Act. It ranks 16th worst for healthcare among the 50 states, says the Commonwealth Fund, a grant-making foundation that supports independent healthcare research.Meanwhile the cost of living is spiralling. Norada Real Estate Investments found that Florida home values have risen by 80% over the past five years. The cost of home insurance is rising fast as the market struggles to deal with stronger hurricanes and more intense rainstorms due to the climate crisis.“Leaning into the culture war issues was successful for him and the challenge that I pose to that is ask any everyday Floridian: what are the top five things keeping them up at night? I guarantee you, they’re not going to say someone in a wig reading Red Fish Blue Fish at the library,” Wolf said.“The question of has Florida been wildly successful is best posed to people who are kept up at night by the cost of housing, the potential for dangerous storms,” he added. “You just ask them if Florida feels like the most successful and freest state in the nation.”Education is another such example. While DeSantis has created political theatre around pandemic measures and racial and sexual identity, the state faces a severe shortage of teachers in its long-underfunded public schools. Florida ranked 49th in the country for average teacher pay in 2020, according to the National Education Association.Tim Canova, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale and a former congressional candidate, said: “Teachers are underpaid, understaffed, the curriculums are dictated centrally on down, whether it’s Common Core federal standards or from the state in Tallahassee.“It’s a miserable job for teachers. They don’t have much autonomy. They’ve got big class sizes. They don’t get paid much. They’ve got to constantly fill out reports about their teaching. It’s a problem that’s way beyond Florida but the schools in Florida have been weak for a long time.”Research by Data for Progress, a progressive polling firm and advocacy group, also raises questions about the viability of DeSantis’s hard-right policies beyond Florida’s borders, with independent voters across the country largely siding with Democrats on culture war issues.A survey of 1,252 likely voters nationally from 17 to 20 March found that 41% support and 50% oppose mandating K-12 libraries to immediately remove and review books flagged as inappropriate; 37% support and 47% oppose eliminating college diversity, equity and inclusion programmes; 39% support and 46% oppose banning college majors and minors in critical race theory.Danielle Deiseroth, interim executive director of Data for Progress, said: “Most Americans might agree that they like Florida’s weather. They certainly don’t like policies being put forward by Governor DeSantis and Florida lawmakers, especially on some of these culture war issues that have been dominating, especially on rightwing news media.”“In terms of DeSantis positioning himself for a potential presidential run in ’24, which seems all but certain at this point, these extreme policies are going to alienate a lot of voters right off the bat,” she said. “Women in particular were one of the groups most opposed to many of these policies.”Last year’s midterm election results appear to support this view as far-right Republicans underperformed among female voters, in part because of their extreme positions on issues such as abortion after the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. DeSantis is expected to sign a six-week abortion ban, even though polls show that a majority of Floridians oppose it.DeSantis critic Rick Wilson, a fifth-generation Floridian and Republican strategist, has been involved in more than 30 political campaigns in the state, and co-founded the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. Based in the state capital, Tallahassee, Wilson is sceptical of the notion that Florida could be the laboratory of ideas for a Republican revival.Recalling Texas governor Rick Perry’s failed presidential campaign, he said: “Perry came out and said, ‘I did all these conservative things, I’m the champion, I could make Washington work like Texas.’ That was his biggest line and it fell flatter than a pancake. That was also Jeb Bush’s argument: ‘I was Florida’s most conservative governor, I accomplished all these amazing conservative reforms.’”Far from a blueprint for America, Wilson describes Florida as “the Petri dish of bad ideas”. He added: “There is a slowly emerging theme among some conservatives I’ve been talking to of ‘I wish he’d do more about tax cuts and less about book banning, and talk more about smaller government and less about using government to punish people.’“In Maga world, that authoritarian stuff sells pretty well. But again, you can’t out-Trump Trump.”That authoritarian streak alarms activists who say DeSantis and his allies have pushed voter suppression bills to marginalise people of colour. His Florida model, they argue, would pose a fundamental threat to civil rights if exported elsewhere.Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of Equal Ground, a Black-led civic engagement organisation, said: “It is not a state where people of colour, particularly Black people who have been on the other end as targets of his attacks, are feeling like this is a model for success, freedom or liberation.“If you are invested in a world that is seeded in white supremacy, hate and racist policies, then it is absolutely the perfect blueprint for the rest of the nation.” More

Donald Trump “has a penchant for engaging in reckless and self-destructive behavior” and is facing a serious threat of a federal indictment over his handling of classified documents and his supporters’ deadly January 6 attack on the US capitol, his former attorney general William Barr said on Sunday.“He’s dug himself a hole on the documents and also on the January 6 stuff,” Barr said of the former president during an interview on ABC’s This Week. “That was reckless behavior that was destined to end up being investigated. So it doesn’t surprise me that he has all these legal problems.”A US justice department special counsel, Jack Smith, is investigating whether Trump obstructed an inquiry into his handling of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.Smith is also investigating Trump’s role in the January 6 attack. Trump told a mob of his supporters to “fight like hell” that day as Congress prepared to certify his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, and many of them then stormed the US Capitol in an assault that has been linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of police officers who defended the building and were traumatized.One of Trump’s lawyers, Jim Trusty, also appeared on several Sunday television programs to defend the former president. He said during an appearance on ABC’s This Week he was 100% certain Trump did not have classified documents in his possession, despite federal investigators’ assertions to the contrary.Barr, who has sought to rehabilitate his public image after serving as one of Trump’s closest allies, also attacked the one criminal case opened against the former president, which is contained in charges filed by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.Trump faces 34 felony charges related to allegations he falsified business records to cover up hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016, which Bragg’s office maintains was part of a plot to either get around state and federal election laws or to deceive tax authorities.“I found what’s been put out very opaque,” Barr said on This Week. “And I think if [Bragg] has a good case he would specify exactly what his case is, but he’s trying to hide the ball.”Trusty also pushed back on the charges.“It is an absurd situation and multiple prosecutors passed by this,” he said. Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance has said his office was asked to “stand down” on the charges by federal prosecutors who opted against pursuing a case against Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrusty also called the Manhattan grand jury indictment against Trump a “rancid ham sandwich”, a phrase that alluded to the folksy colloquialism that grand jury indictments imply little about a person’s guilt or innocence because prosecutors “could indict a ham sandwich” if they wanted to.In addition to the special counsel and Manhattan prosecutors, Trump also faces potential criminal charges in Georgia, where prosecutors are examining whether he violated state law by attempting to overturn the election.A civil trial is also scheduled to begin in New York on 25 April on allegations that Trump sexually assaulted and defamed E Jean Carroll, a former magazine columnist, in late 1995 or 1996. It’s not known whether Trump will testify in the case, and he could face considerable political damage if he’s found to be liable over Carroll’s claims. More

Donald Trump appeared angry and shaken during his arraignment in Manhattan criminal court on Tuesday, but he had brushed off the moment by the weekend, contending that the indictment and other legal troubles would carry him to the 2024 Republican nomination, people close to him said.With his status as a criminal defendant subjecting him to the structures of the judicial process, the former president is playing an increasingly high-stakes game to inextricably tie his legal strategy to his political gameplan as he seeks to recapture the Oval Office next year.Trump’s wager is that using his legal troubles as a campaign issue will harden support from his base and Republican elected officials, and that support could undercut or falsely delegitimize prosecutions in Georgia or by the US justice department in other various criminal investigations.The approach may or may not work, and Trump’s advisers acknowledge that campaigning on his personal legal issues that appeal to Republican primary voters could backfire in a general election where independent voters might recoil at re-electing a former president who is charged with 34 felonies.But the benefits to Trump of using for campaign purposes his indictment over hush money allegedly paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 has been readily apparent, providing him with a boost across all areas: in polling, in fundraising and in wall-to-wall media coverage.The person most hurt by the indictment, his advisers contend, was his expected rival for the Republican nomination: the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who was forced to come to Trump’s defense and still fell behind him in multiple polls, which suggested a trend rather than an outlier result.In a recent Yahoo news poll, Trump was beating DeSantis 57% to 31% in a hypothetical one-to-one contest and was attracting majority support, at 52%, when pitted against a wider, 10-candidate field including DeSantis as well as the UN ambassador in the Trump administration, Nikki Haley.Trump improved his lead over DeSantis in internal polling by McLaughlin and Associates, which surveyed 1,000 likely 2024 general election voters and found Trump would beat DeSantis 63% to 30%, improving his lead from January when he was at 52% and DeSantis at 40%.Trump’s allies also noted the indictment snapped Republican members of Congress into line, with House judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan sending a flurry of subpoenas to the Manhattan district attorney’s office to get confidential information about the case against him.And Trump received a boost in fundraising, with his campaign claiming it raised more than $12m in donations in the week after the indictment. Roughly a third was from first-time donors, though the actual figure won’t be available for confirmation for several weeks.Whether the political pressure – as well as the personal attacks on prosecutors that Trump has vowed to launch – works to dissuade prosecutors is less clear. In Georgia, prosecutors expect to charge Trump and dozens of others over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in that state, a person familiar with the matter said.But if Trump cannot actually stave off prosecutions, then the next best outcome for him is to at least raise suspicions among voters across the country that the cases are politically motivated, his advisers have suggested in conversations with his legal team.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven beyond the major news events like Trump’s indictment or his arraignment in the New York hush money case, advisers and associates have discussed for weeks about how tying the legal strategy to the political strategy remains a winning formula, if only in the short term.At least one Trump associate noted that the former president was a “guilty pleasure” for everyone in the political ecosystem, describing how Trump-related developments give Democrats an issue to rail against and Republicans an issue to rally behind, and boost ratings for cable news outlets.The wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s arraignment – including helicopter shots following Trump boarding his plane from his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort to New York and speedboats dogging his motorcade as it drove down FDR Drive in Manhattan – increased ratings for every major TV network.On the evening after the arraignment, Fox News topped 6.4 million viewers on Tucker Carlson’s show. MSNBC hit 2.8 million viewers and CNN peaked at 2.2 million viewers for their special coverage, exceeding their top-rated shows in the first quarter of 2023, which had respectively hauled in 3.3 million, 1.4 million and 0.6 million viewers.The Trump team has been watching cable news viewership closely. Last month, when Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he mocked an aide for talking to CNN because of its recent ratings dip and later laughed at how TV networks would hire a speedboat “only for Trump”. More

While Donald Trump launches verbal attacks against the prosecutor and judge overseeing his criminal charges in connection with hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, an attorney for the former US president has said his main focus is on legal maneuvers aiming to get the case dismissed long before a trial jury is ever seated.Jim Trusty appeared on Sunday on ABC’s This Week and argued that “there’s a lot to play with” when examining whether New York state prosecutors waited too long to secure an indictment against Trump and if the ex-president intended to commit any crimes with the payments at the center of the case.The payments were made at the height of the 2016 White House race which Trump won, and Trusty also reiterated questions that his side has previously asked about whether Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office should be able to apply “federal election law into a New York case”.“The motions to dismiss have to be a priority because they amputate this miscarriage of justice early on,” Trusty said to show host Jonathan Karl. “And I think you’ll see some very robust motions.”In his remarks to Karl, Trusty also doubled down on questions already floated by his side about whether Trump could get a fair trial in Manhattan. The New York City borough voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Democrat who defeated Trusty’s client in the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden, after all.However, though Trusty said Manhattan is “a real stronghold of liberalism, of activism, and that infects the whole process”, he suggested pretrial dismissal motions citing statutes of limitation and an alleged lack of criminal intent are almost certain to come before one that might seek a change of trial venue.A state grand jury in Manhattan on 30 March handed up 34 felony charges of falsifying business records to cover up $130,000 in payments meant to keep Daniels quiet about claims of an extramarital sexual encounter in what Bragg’s office maintains was a conspiracy to influence the race Trump won over Hillary Clinton. Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges on Tuesday.The Daniels payments have already led to one conviction, in federal court: that of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Cohen, in that case, said he paid Daniels at the behest of Trump and was reimbursed by the then president during his time in the Oval Office. Prosecutors alleged that those payments were falsely classified as legal expenses as part of a conspiracy for Trump to get around state and federal election laws or to deceive tax authorities.Cohen pleaded guilty to federal crimes stemming from the hush money payments, resulting in a three-year prison sentence as well as the loss of his law license.Trusty on Sunday called Cohen “a convicted perjurer with an ax to grind” but said it would be ineffective to attack his credibility in a motion at this stage. He also suggested that Trump’s political rhetoric about Bragg being a “failed district attorney” and a “criminal” and about the judge to whom the case was allotted, Juan Merchan, being “a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife” was unlikely to be reflected in some of his side’s upcoming legalese.“It was pointing [out] that they have a bias, that they have a political interest that is contrary to President Trump,” Trusty said about comments that prompted Merchan to issue a warning against any statements that were “likely to incite violence or civil unrest”.Trusty added: “There’s kind of a political lane and a legal lane. I’m in the legal lane. I’m not going to worry too much or be able to control the politics of the moment.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Trusty didn’t elaborate on his statute of limitation mention, New York law gives prosecutors five years to charge felony falsification of business records. The last alleged false record in the indictment is from December 2017, more than five years before Bragg obtained the charges against Trump.It’s unclear how Bragg’s office might try to defend against such a line of attack. But in other settings, lawyers confronted with a motion to dismiss based on a statute of limitation often argue that steps taken to conceal the alleged wrongdoing should result in prolonging – if not entirely suspending – any relevant charging or filing deadlines.Meanwhile, Trusty’s comment about applying “federal election law into a New York case” seemed to refer to Bragg’s decision to indict the former president over payments during a federal election although the US justice department prosecutors who secured Cohen’s conviction passed on charging Trump. The justice department’s decision against charging Trump does not amount to a finding of innocence for the former president, though it remains to be seen whether Bragg’s office has enough evidence to eventually secure a conviction.Trump’s next court date in the case that made him the first former US president to be criminally charged is 4 December. But Trusty said the public should not be surprised if some of the possible motions that he discussed were filed well ahead of that date.If Trump were to eventually be found guilty as accused, it is possible that he would face up to four years in prison, the director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center recently told the resource website factcheck.org. Yet it is also possible that Trump would not be at risk for anything more than probation, fines and community service because he was charged as a first-time offender, Columbia University law school professor John C Coffee Jr said to factcheck.org.Despite the case in Merchan’s courtroom, Trump is widely considered to be the frontrunner to land the Republican presidential nomination for the 2024 election. More

Two Tennessee state lawmakers who were expelled from the legislature after partaking in a gun control protest outside the chamber to which they were elected have called the move an unprecedented act of political retaliation as well as an “attempt to crucify democracy”.During an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Easter Sunday, Justin Jones said his and Justin Pearson’s removals from the Tennessee house of representatives would “not go on unchallenged”.“The Tennessee house Republicans’ attempt to crucify democracy has instead resurrected a movement led by young people to restore our democracy,” said Jones, who – like Pearson – is a Democrat.Pearson echoed Jones’s sentiments, which seemed to evoke the imagery of Easter, when Christians mark the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion.“The reality is an institution filled with people who are more concerned about supporting [gun access advocates] than it is protecting the [free expression] right to children and teenagers to be able to come to the capitol and advocate for gun violence prevention laws,” Pearson said to Chuck Todd, the host of Meet the Press.Jones and Pearson were ousted from the Republican-controlled Tennessee house after a vote on Thursday prompted by the two Black, first-year lawmakers’ roles in a gun control protest held outside the chamber days after a shooting at a school in Nashville killed three nine-year-old students and three staffers.Jones condemned his and Pearson’s ousting from posts to which they were democratically elected, saying: “This attack against us is hurting all people in our state.”“Even though it is disproportionately impacting Black and brown communities, this is hurting poor white people,” Jones added. “Their attack on democracy hurts all of us.”During the interview, Pearson pushed back against the Republican Tennessee house speaker, Cameron Sexton, who called the youth-led rally for gun control at the state capitol an “insurrection”.“It’s that type of language, it’s that type of political ideology that is destructive to our democracy,” Pearson said. “And what ends up happening is the perpetuation of systems of injustice like patriarchy, like white supremacy that lead to the expulsion of two of the youngest Black lawmakers in Tennessee.”He went on to describe the work environment in the house as “toxic … where you have people who make comments about hanging you on a tree … as a form of capital punishment”.The remarks seemed to allude to one of the most common ways that white supremacists historically lynched Black people, particularly in the US south. In February, a Republican state lawmaker suggested adding “hanging by a tree” to a bill concerning methods of execution in Tennessee.“They’re really sending signals that you don’t belong here,” Pearson said, adding: “It’s about us not belonging in the institution because they are afraid of the changes that are happening in our society and the voices that are being elevated.”Jones described his and Pearson’s expulsions as a result of a “system of political hubris … an attempt to silence our districts, predominantly Black and brown districts who no longer have representation”.He added that when he and Pearson went outside the statehouse to support the gun control protests, their voting machines were turned off so they could not be able to vote on the chamber floor.“The speaker … runs the capitol like it’s his private palace and so there is no democracy in Tennessee,” Jones said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe expulsion of the two Black Democrats have prompted nationwide outcry.Tennessee’s state legislature opted against expelling a Republican representative accused of sexual misconduct in 2019. Those the body had previously expelled included one lawmaker accused of spending federal nursing school grant money on a wedding and another who allegedly had improper sexual contact with more than 20 women in four years in office.Joe Biden called the expulsions “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent”.“Three kids and three officials gunned down in yet another mass shooting,” the president said. “And what are GOP officials focused on? Punishing lawmakers who joined thousands of peaceful protesters calling for action.”A third Democrat, Gloria Johnson, also joined in on the calls for increased gun control and narrowly avoided expulsion by one vote. Johnson is a white woman, and she has said she believes she was spared only because of her race.County commissions in the districts Jones and Pearson were elected to represent are now tasked with picking their replacements to serve in the newly vacant seats until special elections can be held. Jones and Pearson remain eligible to run in those special elections and could also possibly be appointed by the county commissions to stay in their seats until those contests, though the commissions have reportedly been facing Republican political pressure to choose interim replacements.After the deadly shootings at the Covenant school in Nashville on 27 March, the US Senate’s chaplain, Barry C Black, called on federal lawmakers to offer more than just platitudes after deadly mass shootings.Last month, Black opened the legislative session by asking senators to move beyond “thoughts and prayers” – words that critics say are used by opponents of substantial gun control to deflect the responsibility to take action after mass killings.Black on Sunday told CBS’s Face the Nation: “I have been hearing, ‘You have my thoughts and prayers’ … But I also know that there comes a time when action is required.” More

The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday there was “an extraordinary amount of precedent” for the Joe Biden White House to ignore a Friday court ruling suspending federal approval of a drug used in medication abortion.Those remarks from the Democratic US House member quickly prompted a threat by the Texas Republican congressman Tony Gonzales to defund certain programs under the federal agency which oversees medication approvals if Biden’s administration did as Ocasio-Cortez suggested.The Biden administration has already said it plans to appeal a Friday ruling from Texas-based federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a conservative appointed by the Donald Trump White House, that blocked the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the drug mifepristone. The FDA approved the drug in 2000, a move that is now being challenged by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group.In urging the Biden administration to decline to enforce the ruling, Ocasio-Cortez noted that the Trump administration had ignored court rulings on immigration issues. She also pointed out that there was a contradicting ruling from a federal judge in Washington state on Friday which blocked the FDA from taking any action to limit access to the drug, virtually ensuring that the US supreme court would settle the matter at some point.“There is an extraordinary amount of precedent for this … The Trump administration also did this very thing. This has happened before,” she said during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.“The courts rely on the legitimacy of their rulings. And when they make a mockery of our system, a mockery of our democracy and a mockery of our law, as what we just saw happen in this mifepristone ruling, then I believe that the executive branch, and we know that the executive branch has enforcement discretion, especially in light of a contradicting ruling coming out of Washington.”CNN host Dana Bash said Ocasio-Cortez was offering a “pretty stunning position” and pressed the congresswoman on whether the Biden administration should ignore the ruling if the US supreme court eventually upheld Kacsmaryk’s decision.“I think one of the things that we need to examine is the grounds of that ruling,” she said. “But I do not believe that the courts have the authority … over the FDA that [Kacsmaryk] just asserted. And I do believe that it creates a crisis. Should the supreme court do that, it would essentially institute a national abortion ban.”During a later appearance on State of the Union, Gonzales told Bash that there would be consequences if the Biden administration ignored the ruling.“The House Republicans have the power of the purse,” Gonzales said. “And if the administration wants to not live up to this ruling, then we’re gonna have a problem. And it may become a point where House Republicans on the appropriations side have to defund FDA programs that don’t make sense.”Bash also asked the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, whether ignoring the ruling was “off the table”. Becerra declined to say specifically what the administration would do if appellate courts, including the supreme court, upheld the decision.“Everything is on the table,” he said on CNN. “We want the courts to overturn this reckless decision.” More

A large cache of what appear to be classified Pentagon documents circulating on social media channels is becoming a growing source of anxiety for US intelligence agencies, as numerous allies have been forced into denials over the purported leaks.Half a dozen photographs of printed classified documents, mostly pertaining to the state of the Ukraine war as of the beginning of March, started to be shared on Russian Telegram channels in the middle of last week, even though research by open-source intelligence organisation Bellingcat suggests they made the rounds on niche gaming image boards several weeks earlier.On Friday, a further batch of more than 100 Pentagon documents was being shared on Twitter, seemingly revealing confidential information that US spy agencies had obtained, not just about Russia and its war of aggression against Kyiv, but also about supposed allies such as Israel and South Korea.While at least some of the images from the first leak appeared crudely doctored, the authenticity of the latest batch has not been immediately questioned. The New York Times described the leak as “a nightmare for the Five Eyes” – the intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.On Sunday, the office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a statement in which it firmly rejected a claim made in one of the leaked documents: that the Israeli foreign intelligence agency had encouraged its staff and Israeli citizens to participate in March’s wave of anti-government protests across the country.“The Mossad and its serving senior personnel have not engaged in the issue of the demonstrations at all and are dedicated to the value of service to the state that has guided the Mossad since its founding,” the statement read.The leaked document, labelled top secret, said that in February, senior Mossad officials “advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest the new Israeli government’s proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli government, according to signals intelligence”.While the Mossad’s purpose is not defined by law, the spy agency is not meant to wade into domestic political matters.Government officials in South Korea, meanwhile, said on Sunday they were aware that another leaked document suggested that US intelligence had spied on its allies in Seoul, and were planning to “have necessary consultations with the US side” over issues raised by the leak.At least two of the leaked Pentagon documents, based at least in part on intercepted foreign intelligence communications, describe South Korean concern over US pressure to aid Ukraine in its defensive effort against Russia, with the former foreign minister Yi Mun-hui expressing concern that artillery shells requested by Washington for its own use could ultimately end up in Kyiv’s hands.South Korea’s longstanding official policy is to not provide lethal weapons to countries at war. The South Korean presidential official, speaking to reporters, declined to respond further to questions about US spying or to confirm any details from the leaked documents.While potentially embarrassing for the Pentagon, the leaked documents also paint a flattering portrait of the US’s ability to penetrate Russian military planning, including the internal plans of the notorious Wagner mercenary group.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe leaked documents show the mercenary outfit’s ambition to operate in African states as well as Haiti, and that it had hatched plans to source arms covertly from Nato member Turkey.In early February, Wagner personnel “met with Turkish contacts to purchase weapons and equipment from Turkey”, one of the reports states, suggesting that Mali could act as a proxy buyer. Wagner is known to have set up a sizeable operation in the west African state, and one of the leaked documents claims the mercenary group has 1,645 fighters in the country.On Saturday evening, France’s defence ministry denied that there were French soldiers in Ukraine, as allegedly revealed in one of the leaked documents that circulated on social media in the middle of last week.“There are no French forces engaged in operation in Ukraine,” said a spokesperson for the minister of the armed forces, Sébastien Lecornu. “The documents cited do not come from the French armies. We do not comment on documents whose source is uncertain.”The first batch of leaked Pentagon documents contained charts and details about anticipated weapons deliveries, battalion strengths and losses on the battlefield. One slide suggested that a small contingent of less than 100 special operations personnel from Nato members France, America, Britain and Latvia were active in Ukraine.Some of the circulated documents have been obviously digitally altered to understate US estimates of Russian troops killed and Russian vehicles and fighter jets destroyed. Kyiv has said the leaked files contain “fictitious information”.The US Department of Justice said it has opened an investigation into the apparent leaks, but declined to comment further. More