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A Chinese spy balloon gathered intelligence as it flew over sensitive military sites in the US, despite efforts by the Joe Biden White House to thwart its espionage mission, new reports suggest.China succeeded in flying the massive balloon over some military bases on multiple occasions and sent the information back to Beijing in real time, NBC News reported on Monday, citing two current senior US officials and one former high-level administrator. The balloon, which was the size of three school buses, was occasionally flown in a figure-eight formation over at least some of those sensitive sites before it was shot down in early February.“The intelligence China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel, rather than images,” NBC’s report cited the officials as saying.White House official John Kirby told reporters on Monday that he could not confirm NBC’s report, but said the US limited the balloon’s “ability to be able to collect anything additive”.He added that the US government was able to study and analyze the balloon while it was in US airspace, saying: “We gained some useful context.”The Pentagon said experts were still analyzing debris collected from the balloon after it was shot down on 4 February.“I could not confirm that there was real-time transmission from the balloon back to (China) at this time,” said Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh, adding, “that’s something we’re analyzing right now.”Beijing officials have vehemently denied that the balloon was a government intelligence-gathering asset, claiming that the US overreacted to what was an unmanned civilian vessel that had accidentally strayed off course. The balloon triggered a major national security incident and a diplomatic row, prompting the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to postpone a long-awaited visit to Beijing.Once the balloon’s existence became public, its flight was closely tracked as it glided from Alaska to Montana, where the US Department of Defence stores some nuclear assets at the Malmstrom air force base. The balloon sped up as China tried to get it out of American airspace as quickly as possible, according to the officials cited by NBC.The officials said that the Biden administration had limited China’s efforts to gather intelligence from sensitive sites by moving potential targets and by blocking the balloon’s ability to pick up and transmit electronic signals.The balloon spent a week flying over North America before a US warplane shot it down over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February.Biden’s administration played down the balloon’s capabilities at the time. But after it was shot down, the White House confirmed the vessel was carrying equipment capable of intercepting and geolocating communications. “It’s not a major breach,” Biden said after the balloon was destroyed. “It’s a violation of international law. It’s our airspace. And once it comes into our space, we can do what we want with it.”The debris is still being analysed by American security experts. China has deployed similar balloons to collect intelligence over 40 countries on five continents, the US government has claimed. More

CBS came under fire after devoting an interview on its flagship current affairs show, 60 Minutes, to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right pro-Trump congresswoman from Georgia who has espoused conspiracy theories and faced censure for threatening behaviour towards Democrats.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York progressive congresswoman among those threatened by Greene, told Semafor: “These kinds of extreme and really just unprecedented and dangerous notions are getting platforms, without much pushback or real kind of critical analysis.”Matthew Gertz, of the progressive watchdog Media Matters, told the same outlet: “Anyone who believes that the congresswoman from QAnon is serious about renouncing far-right radicalism and conspiracy theories should make me an offer on my Jewish space laser.”Greene memorably suggested California wildfires could be caused by solar technology connected to the Rothschild family, giving rise to the “Jewish space laser” meme.Gertz also pointed to Greene’s support of Donald Trump, who last week became the first former US president ever to be criminally indicted after a New York grand jury handed up charges against him.On Tuesday morning, Greene is set to address a protest in support of Trump outside the New York courthouse where the former president will be arraigned.Gertz said: “Less than 48 hours after CBS News gives her a mainstream platform to airbrush her image, Marjorie Taylor Greene will be rallying with Jack Posobiec of Pizzagate fame and the quasi-fascists of the New York Young Republican Club to defend Donald Trump from what she calls the ‘political persecution’ of a ‘Soros-backed’ district attorney.”Gertz also said Greene was “a rightwing extremist us[ing] a credulous mainstream press outlet”.Greene is part of a far-right group on which the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, relied to secure his position. In turn, McCarthy has restored Greene and other extremists to key committees.CBS titled its interview with Greene “From the far-right fringe to the Republican party’s front row”.“She’s gained her national celebrity,” it said, “some say notoriety, with a sharp tongue and some pretty radical views like her proposal for a national divorce where red and blue states would go their separate ways. But she has managed in just two years in Congress to accumulate real power, landing on important committees, and influencing the direction of Republican policies.”The interview took place before news of Trump’s indictment. Much criticism of CBS centered on a passage in which Lesley Stahl, the interviewer, asked why Greene called Democrats paedophiles.Stahl said: “The Democrats are a party of paedophiles?”Greene said: “I would definitely say so. They support grooming children.”“They are not paedophiles,” Stahl said. “Why would you say that?”Greene said: “Democrats support – even Joe Biden, the president himself, supports children being sexualised and having transgender surgeries. Sexualising children is what paedophiles do to children.”Stahl said: “Wow. OK. But my question really is, ‘Can’t you fight for what you believe in without all that name-calling and without the personal attacks?’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGreene said: “Well, I would ask the same question to the other side, because all they’ve done is call me names and insult me non-stop since I’ve been here, Lesley. They call me racist. They call me … antisemitic, which is not true. I’m not calling anyone names. I’m calling out the truth, basically.”Stahl said: “Paedophile?”Greene said: “Paedophi– call it what it is.”Greene also claimed not to have called the Parkland school shooting a “false flag” operation or to have threatened Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker.The CNN columnist Dean Obeidallah noted: “Stahl didn’t mention Greene spoke at a white nationalist event a year ago while a member of Congress or her extreme anti-Muslim views and her defense of January 6 rioters.”David Corn, DC bureau chief for Mother Jones, wrote: “It’s a failure on CBS and Stahl’s part to give [Greene] such an unimpeded platform to spread such garbage.”CBS did not comment.The network did receive support from public figures.The Parkland school shooting survivor and campaigner for gun reform David Hogg, who has been harassed by Greene, said he was “glad 60 minutes gave Marjorie Taylor Greene airtime. It’s important to interview one of the main leaders of the Republican party so the American people know everything and I mean everything they support. Including denying school shootings.”Asked how she thought the interview had gone, Greene told Semafor: “I thought it was pretty good.” More

The best reason for arraigning Donald Trump in New York this week is that he is guilty. It is possible that the jury might agree and he might go quietly to jail, thus being unable to return to the White House were he to be elected. That is a good reason, but it does not make it a wise one.American justice is not political but it can be highly politicised. We won’t know until Tuesday afternoon what exactly Trump has been indicted on, but many assume he will face charges of falsely concealing “hush money” paid to the former adult film actor Stormy Daniels. The case was brought by an elected Democratic district attorney, Alvin Bragg. It comes more than six years after the alleged offence occurred, and at the start of Trump’s campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination for president. At the very least, this does not look coincidental.Most observers had reached the view that Trump the politician was over the hill. His rallies were tired and his speeches meandering. New Republican hopefuls for 2024 were on the horizon, notably Florida’s Ron DeSantis and former vice-president Mike Pence, both of whom have publicly criticised Trump for refusing to concede the 2020 election. Continued reports of his many misdemeanours would surely lead Republicans to accept his days were over.Legal analysis of this week’s case against Trump suggests there are serious obstacles in the way of his ending up in prison. A law professor and former prosecutor, Jeffrey Bellin, has pointed out that falsifying accounts can have numerous mitigating factors. Any judge and jury, even in New York, will be aware of the political perils of jailing an ex-president, not least for crimes ostensibly less awful than those for which President Nixon was excused. Were Trump to be on trial for interfering in the Georgia poll or inciting a riotous assault on the Capitol, it might be different. But Republicans find it hard to disagree with Trump’s claim that the New York case is a witch-hunt that amounts to “political persecution and electoral interference”.Meanwhile, Trump’s team have treated the indictment as the best adrenaline boost a populist could ask for. It has given them a platform, an enemy and a cause. They even planned T-shirts with Trump’s mugshot on them. The Republican party’s belief in its hero might have waned, but now Pence and DeSantis have had to declare the trial “outrageous” and “un-American”, while the party’s leaders in Congress lined up to decry the “injustice”. This includes those who outspokenly opposed Trump’s challenge to his 2020 defeat.Public opinion has vindicated this second coming. YouGov reports 57% of Republicans are now for Trump, against just 31% for DeSantis. A Harvard CAPs/Harris poll has Trump four points ahead even of Biden. The roughly third of American voters who had remained loyal to him now agree with DeSantis: the Democratic party has “[weaponised] the legal system to advance a political agenda”. As one southern churchgoer said with a smile when asked if she would still support Trump after the Stormy Daniels revelations: “We are all sinners, aren’t we?”Trump’s political appeal has been built on promoting a boisterous self-confidence in defence of the huddled masses of “middle America” against the so-called liberal elites of New York and Washington. He contrasts “ordinary Americans” with the college-educated, media-driven, woke-obsessed lefties of the east coast and big government. He cries: “I am your warrior. I am your justice.” An ill-defined “they” are said to have stolen the 2020 presidential election and they mean to steal the next one. To Trump his trial is “straight out of the Stalinist Russian horror show”.Democrats must now hope they can damage him on the stage of a high-profile legal theatre as they have not done before the court of public opinion. The strategy must be to see him exploit the trial sufficiently to see off the potentially more electable DeSantis but not enough to win a second contest against Joe Biden. In other words, they are reckoning on 18 months of personalised political viciousness, while the outside world struggles with the twin horrors of global trade wars and an escalating conflict in Ukraine.The one salutary message to liberals of all stripes is that it is dangerous in any democracy to dismiss out of hand large numbers of those with whom they disagree. They will nurse their grievances unheard in provincial haunts far from the capital until, sooner or later, they find someone to sympathise with them, someone to listen.This applies in Europe as in the US. As the psephologist Matthew Goodwin has pointed out, if Britain’s Labour party is to hold on to its lead it must beware of capture by groups such as those Trump derides: the graduates, the government-employed, the capital city-oriented. They made it “even easier for Nigel Farage, the Brexiteers, and then Boris to speak loudly and clearly to their instinctive desire for a more communitarian, nation-first brand of politics”. This brand has not gone away and remains the biggest threat to Keir Starmer. He need not agree with them, but he must listen.A large number of Americans clearly like and trust Donald Trump. They appear to do so more than they trust a New York judge. This is alarming. It has presented not just the US, but the entire western political community with a potential crisis of leadership.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More

One weekend in late March, McKenzie Schroeder offered to drive her friend across the Wisconsin border into Illinois to get an abortion. Abortion has been illegal in Wisconsin since June, when the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, reviving the state’s 1849 near-total abortion ban.“If you’ve never been in that situation, you can never understand how a woman feels if they’re pregnant and don’t know what to do,” said Schroeder, 30, who lives in Sun Prairie and works for a property management company and as a waitress. “I don’t think that any human being on the face of the earth should control what I do with my body.”Wisconsin’s abortion law has divided voters in the state, who next week could pave the way for getting rid of the ban entirely in the most consequential election of 2023.At stake on 4 April is control of the Wisconsin supreme court, which will ultimately decide the fate of the 1849 ban (a challenge is already working its way through state courts). The seven-member supreme court will probably hear consequential cases over voting disputes ahead of the 2024 election in Wisconsin, a key presidential battleground. The outcome of the election could determine whether Wisconsin’s state legislative districts last for another decade or are replaced. Republicans drew the lines and the districts are so heavily distorted in their favor that it is essentially impossible for Democrats to ever take control of the legislature.That perfect storm of issues has caused a record amount of money – about $30m – to flood the race. Daniel Kelly, a conservative, and Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal, are vying to replace the retiring conservative justice Patience Roggensack. Conservatives currently have a 4-3 majority on the state court, so whoever wins the race will determine control of the bench.During the first days of early voting, which began on 21 March, people at the polls across the state cited abortion and voting rights as well as fair elections as key concerns going into election day. Voters also described crime, a subject that has dominated political ads, as a top concern. The homicide rate in Milwaukee’s, Wisconsin’s largest city, rose by 11% in 2022 from the year before, but overall violent crime and other serious offenses dropped by 7%.“My number one is abortion,” said Pauline Tanem, a retired foundry worker in Oak Creek. Concerns about democracy and voting rights also informed her support for Protasiewicz. She said she was motivated by “anything that has to do with voting, and not limiting voting”, noting that early voting at her polling place closed before 5pm. “People usually work until five.”Barry Burden, a political science professor who closely follows races in Wisconsin and directs the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that voters seem to be most interested in a small number of issues.“Abortion is the dominating issue,” he said. “And redistricting and other voting matters are not far behind. Everything else is far down the list.”In an interview with the Guardian, Protasiewicz pointed to abortion as a defining issue of the election, but refrained from calling it the most important one. She has campaigned heavily on her support for a woman’s right to choose, though she has said she would decide abortion issues based on existing law.“I think that people are very interested in whether or not they have a right to make their own reproductive healthcare choices,” she said. “I’d be hard pressed to say that it’s a referendum on abortion, but it’s certainly an issue that concerns people.”During the race, Kelly has refrained from voicing his opinions on abortion rights, although in a since-deleted blogpost he referred to pro-choice organizations and politicians as promoting “sexual libertinism”. He has been endorsed by three anti-abortion groups in Wisconsin. (Kelly’s campaign did not respond to requests for an interview.)Political advertising has saturated the airwaves. Protasiewicz has raised a staggering $10m, while both sides have been supported by significant outside spending. The anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony has reported spending $2m on the race in support of Kelly, while the advocacy arm of Planned Parenthood has contributed at least $1m in support of Protasiewicz.“Political ads are, in my opinion, an unnecessary evil,” said Steve Scheuer, an insurance adjuster from Oconomowoc, a heavily Republican city in Waukesha county. “I think there’s a lot of money spent on that that’s wasted.” Scheuer and his wife, Heather, who works as a secretary at a local Lutheran church, said they were unpersuaded by television advertisements and pointed to abortion as the issue driving their support for Kelly.“We are against abortion,” said Heather Scheuer, who said the issue was a long-term concern and closely tied to her religious beliefs. “They are human beings at conception. That’s what we believe in 100%.”Omar Ward, a 26-year-old canvasser with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), said voting rights were particularly important to him. Ward, who is from Milwaukee, had his voting rights restored after four years when the state expunged a felony from his record in 2022. His first time casting a ballot since then was in the supreme court primary in February.While canvassing in Milwaukee and Racine, Ward said he heard more about abortion rights and crime than other issues. “Nobody feels like they should have to go all the way to Chicago to make a decision on their body and wellbeing,” he said. “And on both sides, whether they’re Democrat or Republican, everybody wants the crime to come down.”During the candidates’ only debate, which was televised on 22 March, Kelly and Protasiewicz clashed repeatedly over abortion and safety – with Kelly casting his opponent as soft on crime.Protasiewicz told the Guardian she wanted to push back on that characterization, given “that’s what I’ve spent my entire career doing, you know, holding people accountable”. More

Having just been discharged from a hospital which treated him for mental depression for six weeks, the US senator from Pennsylvania John Fetterman has said he is committed “to start making up [for] any lost time”.“My aspiration is to take my son to the restaurant that we were supposed to go [to] during his birthday but couldn’t because I had checked myself in for depression,” the first-term Democratic senator said in an interview with CBS News that was aired Sunday. “And being the kind of dad, the kind of husband and the kind of senator that Pennsylvania deserves.”Fetterman’s remarks to CBS were recorded days before Friday’s announcement that he had been discharged from Washington DC’s Walter Reed medical center after a hospitalization of more than a month. He spoke frankly in the interview about the circumstances that convinced him to seek inpatient treatment for depression.In November, the 53-year-old former mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and ex-state lieutenant governor known for wearing shorts and hooded sweatshirts defeated Republican celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz for an open Senate seat. Fetterman’s victory over Oz – who was endorsed by former president Donald Trump – helped give the Democrats control of the upper congressional chamber by a margin of 51 seats to 49, firmly establishing his status as a rising star in his party.But during the campaign, Fetterman – who is also known for his imposing, 6ft 8in physical frame – had suffered a stroke that he says nearly killed him. The medical ordeal required him to be hospitalized for a time, which Republicans tried to use to argue that he was unfit for office.Medical experts say that as many as a third of stroke patients later develop symptoms of mental depression, with which Fetterman had already privately struggled for years.Then, those around Fetterman noticed that he seemed to be emotionally miserable when he was sworn in on 3 January. He said he had stopped eating in the preceding weeks, had been losing weight and was struggling to find the energy to get out of bed, too. He also was no longer engaging in the usual banter or work discussions with his staff and had been avoiding spending time with his wife, Gisele, and their three children, who are between the ages of eight and 14.“The whole thing about depression is that, objectively, you may have won [the Senate seat] – but depression can absolutely convince you that you actually lost,” Fetterman said in the interview on Sunday. “And that’s exactly what happened. And that was the start of a downward spiral.”Gisele Barreto Fetterman told CBS that she initially had a hard time understanding what her husband could be depressed about. “He just became a senator, he’s married to me, he has amazing kids and he’s still depressed? And I think the outside would look and say, ‘How does this happen?’”But she said she read as much as she could about depression and learned that the very nature of the complex condition means it “does not make sense, right? It’s not rational.”Fetterman checked into the Walter Reed medical center for clinical depression treatment on 15 February, which was the day of his son’s 14th birthday and marked a week after his having been briefly hospitalized for feeling lightheaded.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Democrat’s most recent hospitalization drew some political fire from the Republican side of the aisle, which has continued casting aspersions about his physical fitness.Yet while a hospital stay of six weeks is longer than is typical for inpatient treatment for depression, many others have praised Fetterman for publicly disclosing that he had sought care. They said Fetterman’s choice could inspire people who need help and are scared to get it to overcome their reluctance.“My message right now isn’t political,” Fetterman said in Sunday’s interview. “I’m just somebody that’s suffering from depression.”Fetterman was back home on Sunday and, according to his office, intended to return to Capitol Hill for when the Senate was scheduled to resume its work on 17 April. Democrats are counting on Fetterman to provide them with votes for some nominations in the chamber that they have been struggling to ratify without him. More

Donald Trump has told advisers and associates in recent days that he is prepared to escalate attacks against the Manhattan prosecutor who resurrected the criminal prosecution into his hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 now that a grand jury has indicted him.The former president has vowed to people close to him that he wants to go on the offensive and – in a private moment over the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida that demonstrates his gathering resolve – remarked using more colorful language that it was time to “rough ’em up”.Trump had already signaled that he would go after the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, weeks before the grand jury handed up an indictment against him on Thursday, saying in pugilistic posts on Truth Social that the prosecution was purely political and falsely accusing Bragg of being a psychopath.But the latest charged language reflects Trump’s determination to double down on those attacks as he returns to his time-tested playbook of going after prosecutors, especially when faced with legal trouble that he knows he cannot avoid, people close to him said.The episode at Mar-a-Lago came on the sidelines of strategy meetings Trump had with advisers and associates about how to respond to the indictment from a legal and political standpoint, sessions which were described by two sources close to the former president.The case centers on $130,000 that Trump paid to Daniels through his former lawyer Michael Cohen in the final days of the 2016 campaign. Trump later reimbursed Cohen with $35,000 checks, which were recorded as legal expenses. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal tax evasion and campaign-finance violation charges.With the indictment under seal until Trump’s scheduled arraignment on Tuesday, the exact charges remained unclear on Sunday, though they are expected to include the falsification of business records and additional charges that elevate what would otherwise be a misdemeanor to a felony.Trump was initially caught off-guard by the indictment and spent the following 24 hours absorbing the news that was relayed to him by several of his top advisers. Later, at one point, Trump repeated to himself almost incredulously that prosecutors had actually charged him.The shock had dissipated by the weekend, when Trump’s tone changed and he told his team that he wanted to attack the case and fight the prosecutors. He steadfastly contends he did nothing illegal and won’t accept a plea deal that would force him to admit culpability.The ex-president’s pugnacious tone has only accelerated in recent days with a series of critical posts about New York state supreme court justice Juan Merchan, to whom the case has apparently been allotted after he presided over a separate matter involving the Trump Organization last year.On his Truth Social platform, Trump said Merchan had “railroaded” Allen Weisselberg, the former chief executive of the Trump Organization, who on Sunday was in the middle of serving a 100-day sentence in the Rikers Island jail complex after pleading guilty to tax fraud charges in that case.Referencing Merchan, Trump said: “The Judge ‘assigned’ to my Witch Hunt Case, a ‘Case’ that has NEVER BEEN CHARGED BEFORE, HATES ME”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has also since pivoted his focus to seeing how he can benefit politically from the indictment, the sources said, and he was encouraged that it had boosted his poll numbers over potential rivals for the Republican nomination who found themselves forced to come to his defense against Bragg, a Democrat.With a grim fixation on having a mug shot taken, Trump has asked whether his team could print it on T-shirts that could serve as a rallying motif for his supporters – an idea that his advisers have been particularly enthusiastic about.Trump also spent the weekend reviewing a Yahoo news poll that showed him leading Florida governor Ron DeSantis, whom he considers his closest rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, 57% to 31% in a hypothetical one-on-one contest. The poll also found Trump was attracting the majority of support, at 52%, when pitted against a wider, 10-candidate field.The polling illustrated the perilous dance for DeSantis and Trump’s other challengers, who have so far struggled to find a way to defend the ex-president strongly enough to ensure the support of his core base in the Republican party without undercutting their pitch as being worthy successors to him.Trump’s advisers observed over the weekend that DeSantis had struggled in that test when his only response to the indictment was to snap back in line behind the former president, calling the case “the weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda”. More

Sitting justices of the US supreme court felt “tricked” and used by Donald Trump when the then president assured them a White House celebration of the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh would not be overtly political, then used the event to harangue those who questioned Kavanaugh’s fitness to sit on the court.“Most of the justices sat stone faced” as Trump spoke at the ceremonial swearing-in, the CNN correspondent Joan Biskupic writes in a new book, Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court’s Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences.“Some justices told me later that they were sorry they had gone.”Biskupic, senior supreme court analyst for CNN, adds: “To varying degrees, the justices felt tricked, made to participate in a political exercise at a time when they were trying to prove themselves impartial guardians of justice, rather than tools of Republican interests.”Nine Black Robes will be published in the US on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.Published excerpts have covered key issues on the court including the controversial treatment of staff for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal justice who died in September 2020 and was swiftly replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, an arch-conservative; rulings on gay rights; and the 2022 Dobbs vs Jackson decision that removed the federal right to abortion.The appointment of Coney Barrett – jammed through before the election by the same Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, who previously held open a seat for a year and through an election in order to fill it with a conservative – tilted the court 6-3 to the right.Joe Biden has made the historic appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the court, but he has not altered that 6-3 balance.Kavanaugh was Trump’s second appointment, replacing the retiring Anthony Kennedy, a conservative for a conservative.Accused of drunken behaviour and sexual assault while a high school student, Kavanaugh, a former George W Bush administration aide, was narrowly confirmed in an atmosphere of deeply partisan rancour.On 8 October 2018, Trump staged his celebration.Saying “what happened to the Kavanaugh family violates every notion of fairness, decency and due process”, Trump falsely claimed Kavanaugh had been “proven innocent” of the claims against him.As Biskupic writes: “There had been no trial, not even much of an investigation of [Professor Christine Blasey] Ford’s accusations. But as with so many of Trump’s assertions, the truth did not matter to him or … his supporters.”Biskupic notes that among the “stone faced” justices at the White House, Clarence Thomas, the senior conservative, was “conspicuously enthusiastic, alone applaud[ing] heartily after Kavanaugh spoke”.She adds: “A Department of Justice spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, later described Thomas as ‘the life of the party’ at the event.”Thomas is the subject of controversy centering on the activities of his wife, the far-right activist Ginni Thomas.Ginni Thomas has been shown to have lobbied state lawmakers as part of Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat and to have attended an event in Washington on January 6, prior to the deadly attack on Congress by Trump supporters.In January 2022, Clarence Thomas was the only supreme court justice to say Trump should not have to give records to the House January 6 committee. Such records turned out to include texts between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff.In congressional testimony released last December, Ginni Thomas said she was “certain [she] never spoke with” her husband “about any of the challenges to the 2020 election”.She also claimed Clarence Thomas was “uninterested in politics”. More