US Politics

‘American rebellion’: the lockdown protests that paved the way for the Capitol riots In this extract from his book The Storm Is Here, New Yorker writer Luke Mogelson follows rightwing militias in Michigan protesting Covid restrictions in 2020. It was a lesson in the attitudes that led to the US Capitol attack the following January

Read a Q&A with Luke Mogelson
It started in Michigan. On 15 April 2020, thousands of vehicles convoyed to Lansing and clogged the streets surrounding the state capitol for a protest that had been advertised as “Operation Gridlock”. Drivers leaned on their horns, men with guns got out and walked. Signs warned of revolt. Someone waved an upside-down American flag. Already – nine months before 6 January, seven months before the election, six weeks before a national uprising for police accountability and racial justice – there were a lot of them, and they were angry.Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic governor, had recently extended a stay-at-home order and imposed additional restrictions on commerce and recreation, obliging a long list of businesses to close. Around 30,000 Michiganders had tested positive for Covid-19 – the third-highest rate in the country, after New York and California – and almost 2,000 had died. Most of the cases, however, were concentrated in Detroit, and the predominantly rural residents at Operation Gridlock resented the blanket lockdown.On 30 April, with Whitmer holding firm as deaths continued to rise, they returned to Lansing. This time, more were armed and fewer stayed in their cars. Michigan is an open-carry state, and no law prohibited licensed owners from bringing loaded weapons inside the capitol. Men with assault rifles filled the rotunda and approached the barred doors of the legislature, squaring off against police. Others accessed the gallery that overlooked the senate. Dayna Polehanki, a Democrat from southern Michigan, tweeted a picture of a heavyset man with a mohawk and a long gun in a scabbard on his back. “Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us,” she wrote.The next day, a security guard in Flint [a town about 50 miles north-east of Lansing] turned away an unmasked customer from a Family Dollar. The customer returned with her husband, who shot the guard in the head. Later that week, a clerk in a Dollar Tree outside Detroit asked a man to don a mask. The man replied, “I’ll use this,” grabbed the clerk’s sleeve, and wiped his nose with it.By then, the movement that had begun with Operation Gridlock had spread to more than 30 states. In Kentucky, the governor was hanged in effigy outside the capitol; in North Carolina, a protester hauled a rocket launcher through downtown Raleigh; in California, a journalist covering an anti-lockdown demonstration was held at knifepoint; ahead of a rally in Salt Lake City, a man wrote on Facebook: “Bring your guns, the civil war starts Saturday… The time is now.”I was living in Paris in 2020, where, since late March, we had been permitted to go outside for a maximum of one hour per day, and to stray no farther than a kilometre from our homes. Most businesses were closed (except those “essential to the life of the nation”, such as bakeries and wine and cigarette shops). Few complained. I’d been a foreign correspondent for nearly a decade and during that time had not spent more than a few consecutive months in the US. The images of men in desert camo, flak jackets and ammo vests, carrying military-style carbines through American cities, portrayed a country I no longer recognised. One viral photograph struck me as particularly exotic. It showed a man with a shaved head and a blond beard, mid-scream, his gaping mouth inches away from two officers gazing stonily past him, in the capitol in Lansing. What accounted for such exquisite rage? And why was it so widely shared?In early May, I took an almost-empty flight to New York, then a slightly fuller one to Michigan. My first stop was Owosso, a small town on the banks of the Shiawassee River, in the bucolic middle of the state. I arrived at Karl Manke’s barbershop a little before 9am. The neon Open sign was dark; a crowd loitered in the parking lot. Spring had not yet made it to Owosso, and people sat in their trucks with the heaters running. Some, dressed in fatigues and packing sidearms, belonged to the Michigan Home Guard, a civilian militia.A week before, Manke, who was 77, had reopened his business in defiance of Governor Whitmer’s prohibition on “personal care services”. That Friday, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, had declared the barbershop an imminent danger to public health and dispatched state troopers to serve Manke with a cease-and-desist order. Over the weekend, Home Guardsmen had warned that they would not allow Manke to be arrested. Now it was Monday, and the folks in the parking lot had come to see whether Manke would show up.“He’s a national hero,” Michelle Gregoire, a 29-year-old school bus driver, mother of three, and Home Guard member, told me. She was 5ft 4in but hard to miss. Wearing a light fleece jacket emblazoned with Donald Trump’s name, she waved a Gadsden flag at the passing traffic. Car after car honked in support. Michelle had driven 90 miles, from her house in Battle Creek, to stand with her comrades. She’d been at Lansing’s capitol on 30 April, and did not regret what happened there. When I mentioned that officials were considering banning guns inside the statehouse, she laughed: “If they go through with that, they’re not gonna like the next rally.”Manke appeared at 9.30am, to cheers and applause. He had a white goatee and wore a blue satin smock, black-rimmed glasses, and a rubber bracelet with the words “When in Doubt, Pray”. He climbed the steps to the front door stiffly, his posture hunched. When the Open sign flickered on, people crowded inside. Manke had been cutting hair in town for half a century and at his current location since the 1980s. The phone was rotary, the clock analogue. An out-of-service gumball machine stood beside a row of chairs. Black-and-white photographs of Owosso occupied cluttered shelves alongside old radios and bric-a-brac. Also on display were flashy paperback copies of the 10 novels that Manke had written. Unintended Consequences featured an anti-abortion activist who “stands on his convictions”; Gone to Pot offered readers “a daring view into the underbelly of the 60s and 70s”.As Manke fastened a cape around the first customer’s neck, a man in foul-weather gear picked out a book and deposited a wad of bills in a wicker basket on the counter. “My father was a barber,” he told Manke. “He believed in everything you believe in. Freedom. We’re the last holdout in the world.” Manke nodded. “We did this in 1776, and we’re doing it again now.”Like the redbrick buildings and decorative parapets of Owosso’s historic downtown, there was something out of time about Manke. During several days that I would spend at the barbershop, I’d hear him offer countless customers and journalists subtle variations of the same stump speech. He’d lived under 14 presidents, survived the polio epidemic, and never witnessed such “government oppression”. Governor Whitmer was not his mother. He’d close his business when they dragged him out in handcuffs, or when he died, or when Jesus came – “whichever happens first”. “You’re getting a scoop,” he assured me when I introduced myself. “American rebellion.”Customers continued to arrive, and the phone did not stop ringing. Some people had travelled hundreds of miles. They left cards, bumper stickers, leaflets, brochures. A local TV crew squeezed into the shop, struggling to social-distance in the crush of waiting men, recording Manke with a boom mic as he sculpted yet another high-and-tight. Around noon, [rightwing political commentator and radio host] Glenn Beck called, live on air. “It’s hardly my country any more, in so many different ways,” Manke told him. “You remind me of my father,” Beck responded, with a wistful sigh.Manke seemed to remind everybody of something or someone that no longer existed. Hence the people with guns outside, ready to do violence on those who threatened what he represented. You could not have engineered a more quintessential paragon of that mythical era when America was great. One day at the barbershop, I was approached by a man clad from head to toe in hunting gear, missing several teeth. He hadn’t realised I was press. Manke had first come to the attention of the attorney general, the man informed me, because of a reporter from Detroit. He held out his arms to indicate the woman’s girth. “A big Black bitch.”In the 1950s, when Manke was in high school, Owosso was a “sundown town”: African Americans were not welcome. Like much of rural Michigan, it remained almost exclusively white. Detroit, an hour and a half to the south, was 80% Black. Because politics broke down along similar lines – less-populated counties voted Republican; urban centres, Democrat – partisan rancour in the state could often look like racial animus. While conservatives tended to ridicule any such interpretation as liberal cant, the pandemic had created two new discrepancies that were hard to ignore. The first was that Covid-19 disproportionately affected Black communities, in Michigan as well as nationwide. The second was that the people mobilising against containment measures were overwhelmingly white.On 30 April, the state representative Sarah Anthony had watched from her office across the street as anti-lockdown protesters filled the capitol lawn. Anthony had been born and raised in Lansing. In 2012, at the age of 29, she’d become the youngest Black woman in America to serve as a county commissioner. Six years later, a landslide victory made her the first Black woman to represent Lansing in the state legislature. As Anthony walked from her office to the capitol, she had to navigate a heavily armed white mob. She noticed a Confederate flag.A man waved a fishing rod with a naked Barbie doll – brown-haired, like Governor Whitmer – dangling from a mini noose. Men screamed insults. A sign declared: tyrants get the rope. Anthony was in Lansing’s House of Representatives when the mob entered the building. “It just felt like, if they had come through that door, I would’ve been the first to go down,” she recalled. We were in the rotunda, where she had insisted on giving me a tour. Her eyes brightened above her mask as she pointed out the starspeckled oculus in the apex of the dome 160ft above us. “It’s designed to inspire,” Anthony explained. Her reverence for the building had made 30 April that much more unsettling. A sanctum had been violated – its meaning changed.The structure was an equally potent symbol for the people whose cries she’d heard on the other side of the door, however. On the eve of the rally, Michelle Gregoire, the school bus driver and Home Guard member, had visited the capitol. Wearing a neon safety vest scrawled with “Covid-1984”, she and two friends filming on their phones had climbed a marble staircase to the gallery in the House of Representatives. A sergeant at arms informed them that the legislature was not in session, the chamber closed. “This is our house,” responded one of them, striding past him and sitting on a bench. The chief sergeant at arms, David Dickson, arrived and grabbed the woman by her arm, attempting to remove her.“You are not allowed to touch me!” the woman howled. Dickson turned his attention to Michelle. When she also resisted, he dragged her into the hallway, through a pair of swinging doors. “Stay out,” he told her. That night, the women posted their footage on Facebook, with the caption: “We are living in NAZI Germany!!!” Many of the protesters at the capitol the next day had watched the clips, including the man with the shaved head and blond beard in the viral photograph. He was not accosting the two officers in the image, it turns out – he was shouting at Dickson, who stood behind them, outside the picture’s frame. “You gonna throw me around like you did that girl?” the man was shouting. Other protesters called Dickson and his colleagues “traitors” and “filthy rats”.I left several messages for Dickson at his office, but he never called me back. Eventually, I returned to the capitol and found him standing guard outside the legislature. His hair was starting to grey, and beneath his blazer his collared shirt strained a little at the midriff. In 1974, Dickson had become the first Black deputy in Eaton County. He’d gone on to serve for 25 years as an officer in Lansing. After some polite conversation, I asked whether he thought that any of the visceral acrimony directed at him on 30 April might have been connected to his skin colour and to that of the white women he’d ejected the day before. Dickson frowned. “I don’t play the race card,” he said. Given his deprecating tone, I wondered if he’d been dodging my calls out of concern that I would raise this question. It was a question you could not really help raising in Michigan. To what extent was the exquisite rage behind the anti-lockdown fervour white rage? Dickson had no interest in discussing it. Of his encounter with Michelle, he told me: “I didn’t sleep for weeks. You don’t feel good about those kinds of things.” For others, the answer to the question was self-evident. After 30 April, Sarah Anthony acquired a bulletproof vest. Though she was an optimist by nature, her outlook had dimmed. “People are angry about being unemployed, about having to close their businesses – I get that,” she said. “But there are elements, extremists, who are using this as an opportunity to ignite hate. Hate toward our governor, hate toward government, and also hate toward Black and brown people. These conditions are creating a perfect storm.”The 30 April protest had been organised by a few men on Facebook calling themselves the American Patriot Council. Two and a half weeks later, they held a second demonstration, in Grand Rapids, at a plaza known as Rosa Parks Circle. This time, there were no Confederate flags. On the periphery, dozens of armed white men in tactical apparel surveilled the plaza. A few held flags with the Roman numeral III – a reference to the dubious contention that only 3% of colonists fought the British, and a generic emblem signifying readiness to do the same against the US government. (Americans who displayed the symbol and embraced the mentality that it represented often identified as “Three Percenters”.) Some were Home Guard. Others belonged to the Michigan Liberty Militia, including the heavyset man with the mohawk whose picture Dayna Polehanki had tweeted from the senate floor. He wore a sleeveless shirt and a black vest laden with ammunition. A laminated badge read Security. His habit of pressing a small gadget embedded in his ear with his index and middle fingers felt like an imitation of something he had seen onscreen. He appeared to be having an excellent time.A general atmosphere of cheerful make-believe was accentuated by the presence and intense engagement of actual children. One of them, materialising suddenly, interrupted my conversation with a Home Guardsman: “Excuse me, what kinds of guns are those?”We looked down to find a 10-year-old boy with a businesslike expression.“This is an AK-47,” the Home Guardsman told him.“With a flashlight or a suppressor?”“That’s a suppressor. This is a flashlight with a green dot.”“What pistol is that?”“That is a Glock. A 9mm.”The boy seemed underwhelmed.“I’ve heard a lot of people say that,” he said.“Before you ever pick up a gun, you have to have your 100 hours of safety classes, right?” admonished the Home Guardsman, bristling a little.“I already have them.”The keynote speaker was Dar Leaf, a sheriff from nearby Barry County who had refused to enforce Governor Whitmer’s executive orders. Diminutive, plump and bespectacled, with a startling falsetto and an unruly mop of bright yellow hair, Leaf cut an unlikely figure in his uniform, the baggy brown trousers of which bunched around his ankles. Nevertheless, he promptly captivated his audience by inviting it to imagine an alternate version of the past – one in which Alabama officers, upholding the constitution, had not arrested Rosa Parks. To facilitate the thought experiment, Leaf channelled a hypothetical deputy boarding the bus on which Parks – in the real world – was detained. “Hey, Ms Parks,” said the sheriff, playing the part. “I’m gonna make sure nobody bothers you, and you can sit wherever you want.” The crowd cheered. “Thank you!” a white man cried out.In Alabama, during the 60s, sheriffs and deputies were often more ruthless than their municipal counterparts toward Black citizens. The sheriff Jim Clark led a horseback assault against peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, and habitually terrorised African Americans with a cattle prod that he wore on his belt. Dar Leaf, though, saw himself as heir to a different legacy. According to him, the weaponisation of law enforcement to suppress Black activism arose from the same infidelity to American principles of individual freedom that in our time defined the political left. “I got news for you,” Leaf said. “Rosa Parks was a rebel.”And then, for those minds not yet wrapped around what he was telling them: “Owosso has their little version of Rosa Parks, don’t they? Karl Manke!” The equivalence was all the more incredible given that Leaf belonged to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or CSPOA. The notion of the “constitutional sheriff” had been first promulgated by William Potter Gale, a Christian Identity minister from California. Christian Identity theology held that Europeans were the true descendants of the lost tribes of Israel; that Jews were the diabolic progeny of Eve and the serpent; and that all non-whites were subhuman “mud people”. In the 70s, Gale developed a movement of rural resistance to federal authority that expanded the model of white vigilantism in the south to a national scale, adding to the fear of Black integration the spectre of governmental infiltration by communists and Jews. He called his organisation Posse Comitatus, which is Latin for “power of the county”, and it recognised elected sheriffs as “the only legal law enforcement” in America. Posse Comitatus groups across the country were instructed to convene “Christian common-law grand juries”, indict public officials who violated the constitution, and “hang them by the neck”.Gale’s guidance on what offences merited such punishment was straightforward: any enforcement of federal tax regulations or of the Civil Rights Act. The CSPOA argued that county sheriffs retained supreme authority within their jurisdictions to interpret the law, and that their primary responsibility was to defend their constituents from state and federal overreach. In Grand Rapids, Sheriff Dar Leaf told the anti-lockdowners, “We’re looking at common-law grand juries. I’d like to see some indictments come out of that.” At the end of his speech, he called the Michigan Liberty Militia on to the stage. “This is our last home defence right here,” he said. Glancing at the heavyset man with the mohawk, Leaf added: “These guys have better equipment than I do. I’m lucky they got my back.”Later, while reviewing my videos from Rosa Parks Circle, I noticed a woman with a toothbrush moustache painted on her upper lip. Looking closer, I saw that she also wore a wig. It was brunette and wavy, intended to resemble Governor Whitmer’s hair. The woman wasn’t doing Hitler, in other words: she was doing Whitmer doing Hitler. She would probably have said that she was doing “Whitler”. While comparing pandemic measures to the atrocities of the Third Reich might have constituted its own kind of antisemitism, it also suggested how desperate many anti-lockdowners understood the situation to be. Nazis were a frequent topic of conversation in the barbershop – which, for Karl Manke’s supporters, represented a bulwark against the kind of creeping authoritarianism that had gradually engulfed Germany in the 1930s.Manke himself had a lot to say on the subject. His great-grandfather had immigrated from Germany, and Manke had grown up attending a Lutheran church with services in German. He often cited the victims of the Holocaust as a cautionary tale. “They would trade their liberty for security,” he told a customer one afternoon. “Because the Nazis said to them: ‘Get in these cattle cars, and we’re gonna take you to a nice, safe place. Just get in.’” “I would rather die than have the government tell me what to do,” the man in the chair responded. In mid-May, when Attorney General Nessel suspended his business licence, Manke exclaimed: “It’s tyrannical! I’m not getting in the cattle car!” But the longer I stayed in Michigan, the clearer it became that many anti-lockdowners sincerely placed mask mandates and concentration camps on the same continuum. “This has nothing to do with the virus,” a 68-year-old retiree told me outside the barbershop. “They want to take power away from the people, and they want to control us. We’re never gonna get our freedoms back from this if we don’t stop it now.” Given the stakes, violence was inevitable. “We’re a trigger pull away,” he said. “You’re gonna see it. We’re getting to the point where people have had enough.” We had to raise our voices to hear each other over a Christian family loudly singing hymns. But I had the sense that the retiree would have been yelling anyway. “You got storm troopers coming in here!” he shouted, referencing the officers who’d served Manke with a cease-and-desist order. “They weren’t cops, they were storm troopers! They deserve to wear the Nazi emblem on their sleeves.”When I went back inside, the phone was ringing. An anonymous caller wanted Manke to know that the national guard was on its way. “We need more people,” a customer in a pressed shirt announced. I’d met him earlier. A self-described “citizen scientist”, he’d given me a flier explaining that masks prevented the body from detoxifying and therefore did more harm than good. “If we get more people, we can stand them off,” he told Manke. “I would hope it’s a rumour,” Manke said. “Whatever it is, we could use more people.” “Well, if they come with a tank…”“Like Tiananmen Square!” the citizen scientist agreed. He lapsed into pensive silence, as if calculating how many people it would take to stand off a tank. Finally, a solution occurred to him: “The sheriff can stop them. The sheriff has the power to stop the National Guard, the federal government, everybody.”Someone looked up the number. Reaching a voice mail, the citizen scientist left a message: “Attention, sheriff. We need you over here at the barbershop. Please come here immediately to attend to a situation. We need your help here to defend our constitutional rights. Please hurry up.”After a while, it became apparent that neither the sheriff nor the national guard was coming. I went back outside. The family had stopped singing and was now reciting scripture. Psalm 2: “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?” The patriarch was joined by his son, daughter, and one-year-old grandson. “If there’s children, they won’t shoot tear gas,” he said. “That’s my hope, anyway – if we’re here, they back off.” “Who backs off?” I asked. “The Nazis.”TopicsUS Capitol attackThe ObserverUS politicsMichiganThe far rightPolitics booksextractsReuse this content More

Broken News review: fired Fox News editor has broadsides for both sidesChris Stirewalt helped call Arizona early and right, enraging Donald Trump. He has harsh words for the US media in general Late on 3 November 2020, Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden. In that moment, Rupert Murdoch’s US flagship upended Donald Trump’s re-election bid. Chris Stirewalt, a decade-long Fox News editor, was part of the team that put the state in the Democrat’s column. One insurrection and two months later, the network fired him.‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book saysRead moreFox called it a “restructuring”. Others, including Stirewalt, shared a different view: he and more than a dozen others had been sacrificed to mollify Trump, Republicans and Fox’s fanbase.“I got canned after very vocal and very online viewers – including the then-president of the United States – became furious,” Stirewalt writes.According to Stirewalt, viewer anger had bled on to Fox’s bottom line: “The high ratings born of a presidential coup attempt in the midst of a global pandemic were never going to be sustainable, but the decline was sharper than industry experts expected.”The suits in the Fox C-Suite and elected Republicans demanded scalps. But Stirewalt would have the last word.This past June, he appeared before the January 6 committee. Under oath, he testified that Biden won and Trump lost. He also accused the ex-president and his minions of seeking to “exploit” a systemic “anomaly”.Specifically, during the 2020 election, in states like Arizona where same-day votes were counted before mail-in ballots, Republicans appeared to lead early on election night.Generally, Democrats tended to vote by mail or before election day while Republicans appeared at the polls on election day itself. On the night, as the hours pass, an apparent Republican advantage may evaporate, leaving little but a red mirage – and enraged viewers.Stirewalt’s book is both a critique of the media and a rebuke of his former employer and Trump. He spares no one. The Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC and Joe Scarborough all fare poorly too.Substantively, he contends that much of the news business is about the pursuit of ratings. In part, the media inflames passions to monetize all that passes through its domain. No story is insignificant if it can double as clickbait.Stirewalt says Fox News failed to prepare Trump followers for the possibility that he would lose to Biden, a failure far beyond negligence. Fox News, he writes, stoked “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred”, in order to entice viewers to buy a $65 “Patriot” streaming service. These days, Fox is facing rather higher costs, battling defamation lawsuits arising from repeatedly airing Trump’s “big lie”.As for the Times, Stirewalt attacks the paper of record for using its 1619 Project, which casts American history in light of racism and slavery, as a vehicle to “upsell super-users from subscriptions to $35 books”. He also characterizes the 1619 Project as a “frontal assault on the idea of America’s founding as a new birth of freedom that it very plainly, if imperfectly was”.Stirewalt’s devotion to journalism spills on to the page. He places a premium on individual freedom and the classic liberal tradition. He is sympathetic to the intellectual underpinnings of liberalism and conservatism but casts a wary eye toward progressivism and nationalism. He takes both to task for fetishizing the collective will and distorting history.“Progressivism seeks to ameliorate the problems of humankind,” he writes “… but not necessarily within the framework of the American system or the humanistic concept of human rights.”By contrast, “nationalists believe that the appropriate aim of the federal government should always be the improvement of life for the greatest number of Americans, even when that comes at a cost to individual rights greater than a strict reading of the constitution would allow”.Steve Bannon, Sohrab Amari and JD Vance might disagree. Or not.Stirewalt also tackles the issue of the media and politicians being cowed by their bases. As Stirewalt sees it, the threat of the mob – real and virtual – leads people to avert their gaze from our national train wreck.He knocks “liberals who believe in free speech” but “look at their shoes when people are shouted down or fired for their beliefs”. Likewise, he takes to task those “seemingly normal members of Congress” who went “along with Trump’s efforts to steal a second term”.Not surprisingly, Stirewalt has little patience for performative politicians. He lumps together Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and pairs Marjorie Taylor Greene with Rashida Tlaib. He suggests such figures excel at triggering partisan outrage but lack Trump’s entertainment chops.Breaking History review: Jared Kushner’s dispiriting Trump bookRead more“They’re Showtime after 10pm,” Stirewalt cracks. “Trump was hardcore.”Stirewalt is unsparing in his takedown of Cruz. Broken News recalls the Texas senator’s groveling for Tucker Carlson, for referring to the January 6 insurrection as a “violent terrorist attack on the Capitol”. Cruz was a “quavery mass of regret and humiliation” on Carlson’s show, Stirewalt writes.Turning to Carlson, Stirewalt lets us know the Swanson frozen-food heir is loaded, yet at the same time rails against the “big, legacy media outlets”. There is a lot of cognitive dissonance in prime time. For good measure, Stirewalt reminds the reader that Carlson’s employer is a “multinational corporation led by an Australian billionaire who owns arguably the single most powerful news outlet in America”.Stirewalt offers no easy way out. He “urges us to question our own assumptions when consuming news” but does not assure us that doing so will actually lower the volume and temperature. He hopes we can see the other side of the political divide, but sounds uncertain. He provides plenty of food for thought.
Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back is published in the US by Hachette
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Interview‘The US could lose the right to vote within months’: Top official warns on threat to democracyLauren Gambino in Washington Jena Griswold urges Americans to pay attention to crucial but often overlooked races for secretary of stateColorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, is warning anyone who will listen that the fate of free and fair elections in the United States hangs in the balance in this November’s midterm contests.In many of the most competitive races for offices with authority over US elections, Republicans nominated candidates who have embraced or echoed Donald Trump’s myth of a stolen election in 2020.‘It’s an American issue’: can Georgia’s candidate for secretary of state save democracy?Read moreGriswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State (Dass) and is running for re-election, is urging Americans to pay attention to the once-sleepy down-ballot contests for secretary of state – lest they lose their democracy.“What we can expect from the extreme Republicans running across this country is to undermine free and fair elections for the American people, strip Americans of the right to vote, refuse to address security breaches and, unfortunately, be more beholden to Mar-a-Lago than the American people,” Griswold, 37, said in an interview with the Guardian.She added: “For us, we are trying to save democracy.”It’s a daunting task, especially in a political environment that has historically favored the party out of power in Washington. But the primary results so far have laid bare the stakes, she said: “The country could lose the right to vote in less than three months.”Having failed to overturn the 2020 vote, Trump and his loyalists are now strategically targeting positions that will play a critical role in supervising the next presidential election, turning many of the 27 secretary of state contests this year into expensive, partisan showdowns.If elected, Griswold fears that these Trump-backed candidates would weaponize their posts, either by sowing doubts about the results of an election their party loses – or by trying to subvert it outright.In Arizona, Mark Finchem, a prominent election denier who said he would not have certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state, is now the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Arizona. In Michigan, Kristina Karamo, who baselessly claimed to have witnessed voter fraud as an election observer in 2020, is the Republican party’s choice to be the state’s chief election official. And in Pennsylvania, where the governor appoints the secretary of state, the Republican gubernatorial nominee is Doug Mastriano, a far-right lawmaker who led the brazen attempt to reverse Biden’s victory in his state and chartered buses to the rally that preceded the Capitol riot.In November, Griswold will face Pam Anderson, a Republican former county clerk who prevailed in her party’s primary over an election conspiracy theoristindicted for tampering with election equipment. Anderson is running on a pledge to keep politics out of elections administration and analysts anticipate a competitive race.Campaigning across Colorado, Griswold said she sees signs that voters are attuned to the real risks posed by candidates with contempt for the democratic process. On several occasions recently she said voters have broken down in tears over the right to vote.“The stakes are really high but I also think people understand what’s at stake and that’s why you’re seeing this level of enthusiasm,” Griswold said.Underscoring the point, she emphasized the association’s growth. Before 2021, Dass had no full-time employees. It now has eight. And the group has already surpassed its fundraising goal for the cycle, amassing $16m so far – more than 10 times what it raised in the 2018 cycle.“There’s a huge amount of enthusiasm from Democratic donors and the grassroots,” she added. “But, I will say, the Republicans are also seeing a lot of enthusiasm.”Not long ago, secretaries of state operated in relative obscurity, toiling behind the scenes to complete all manner of bureaucratic duties. Chief among them in most – but not all – states was to ensure the smooth and safe administration of American elections. Many viewed the role as ministerial in nature, far removed from the partisan battles confronting other statewide offices.That changed in the tumultuous aftermath of the 2020 election. In his brazen attempt to seize a second term, Trump turned his attention to the guardians of state elections: secretaries of state, county clerks, election board members and other officials in battleground states. Falsely claiming the results had been tainted by fraud, he pressured them to reverse his defeat.The elections officials who stepped forward to resist the defeated president’s fantastical claims and defend the integrity of their elections quickly became the targets of harassment, intimidation and violent threats.Griswold was among the most prominent voices challenging Trump over his attacks on vote by mail, a fixture of Colorado elections. The confrontations made her a lightning rod on the Maga (Make America Great Again) right. Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, once, incredibly, accused her of murder, an outlandish claim he said was only an “analogy”.The effect is a near-daily torrent of threats, many violent and eerily “descriptive”.“It gets to the point where it is really hard to do your job when someone’s telling you over and over how they’re going to hang you,” she said.Threats of violence are an escalating problem across the spectrum of public life in America: from the White House down to local school boards. It is even worse for women and people of color.Since 2020, local election officials, the vast majority of whom are women, say political attacks, safety concerns and misinformation are driving them from public service at all levels.Griswold, who in 2018 became the youngest secretary of state in the country, worries about the “dampening effect” the toxic stream of abuse has on women in politics. In December, she spoke to a woman who wanted to run for the Colorado state legislature, but told her: “I have a six-year-old son. I see the threats against you and I can’t do it.”For that reason, Griswold said she pushed for more security for her office.“The threshold for us to get violent threats is much lower, so we experience things that a lot of people would never expect in this country,” she said.She continued: “The federal government needs to take this seriously. States need to take this seriously. And that’s one of the reasons why we need more women elected – to understand that it’s not hysteria to say, ‘I should have security because someone is telling me repeatedly that they’re going to come kill me.’”Despite Griswold’s efforts, Trump’s lies have gained purchase among conservative voters in her state.“I have a county that works behind bulletproof glass,” she said. “I have a county clerk who wears a bullet-proof vest. Much of their days are spent responding to conspiracy-fueled lawsuits and information requests intended to ‘gum up’ the system and bog down her office,” she added.And earlier this year, Tina Peters, a far-right county clerk in Colorado, was indicted on charges that she directed a breach of voting machines. The episode spurred Griswold to raise the alarm about “insider threats”.In Colorado’s June primary, Republican voters rejected Peters’ bid to be the state’s next secretary of state.Despite losing by nearly 15 percentage points, Peters claimed “fraud” had cost her the nomination and demanded a recount. The review, which Griswold called meritless and “based on conspiracies”, confirmed Peters’ loss.Republicans have accused Griswold of too often blurring the line between defending democracy and defending her seat. It’s a charge many elections officials are now grappling with: when they defend elections and push for reforms, they are often accused of partisanship.“We must reject that it is partisan to protect the right to vote. It’s not,” she said. “It’s the most American and democratic thing you can do.”As for her own election, Griswold said her record speaks for itself. Since the 2020 election, she has helped expand voting access and strengthen election security. Her office backed a slate of reforms that gives the Colorado secretary of state’s office the power to certify elections if local officials refuse to do so, guarding against a scenario that played out earlier this summer in New Mexico, when Republican officials refused to certify an election.The law also includes new protections against insider threats, making it a felony to compromise voting equipment or allow unauthorized access to the state’s voting systems, and stiffens the penalties for threatening election workers or “doxxing them” by publishing their personal information online. Another law passed earlier this year prohibits open-carry within 100 feet of a polling place.Four years ago, when Griswold first ran for the post, she never imagined the kind of challengers her office would face, among them “ensuring that democracy survived a pandemic and also a president of the United States trying to steal an election”.But for many secretaries of state, Griswold said the experience had only “further resolved our determination to not let people willing to destroy the country to win”.This year, Griswold said she is running with her eyes wide open to the peril facing American elections – and democracy – far beyond 2022.“The fight to try to take Americans’ freedoms, it won’t be over after the election – it won’t,” she said. “This is a long-term fight.”TopicsColoradoUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022DemocratsRepublicansUS elections 2020interviewsReuse this content More

US investigates fake heiress who infiltrated Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resortA Ukrainian woman posed as a Rothschild to gain access to the Florida resort, heightening fears over security lapses A second foreign national is being investigated by US authorities for gaining access to Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida resort which is at the center of an FBI probe over missing classified documents, heightening fears over security lapses both during and after his presidency.According to an article from the Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a Ukrainian woman posing as a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty is under bureau investigation after infiltrating the private members club under a false pretense.IRS to review security at facilities as threats from extremists increaseRead moreInna Yashchyshyn, 33, allegedly lied to members that she was a Rothschild heiress and mingled with Trump, US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and others at Mar-a-Lago functions.OCCRP, in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Gazette, reported that Yashchyshyn had demonstrated “the ease with which someone with a fake identity and shadowy background” could bypass security at Trump’s club.Earlier this month, the FBI obtained a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago as part of a criminal probe over the unauthorized retention of government secrets by Trump and his aides, who failed to return the documents in question despite repeated requests.On Saturday, Congress members Adam Schiff and Carolyn Maloney – respectively, the chairpersons for the House intelligence and oversight committees – said that the US intelligence director, Avril Haines, had confirmed that her subordinates, along with the Justice Department, would evaluate whether the improper storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago had risked or caused any damage to national security.The search came a month after the heads of the FBI and Britain’s domestic security service MI5 issued a sharp warning about systemic challenges posed to western economies and governments by Chinese espionage.Yashchyshyn – the daughter of an Illinois truck driver – maintained that she was a Rothschild heiress while holding a position as president of United Hearts of Mercy, founded by Florida-based Russian oligarch Valery Tarasenko in Canada in 2015.OCCRP and the Post-Gazette reported that “both the FBI’s office in Miami and the Sûreté du Québec provincial police in Canada have launched investigations that touch on her dealings”.While the FBI refused to comment, its Canadian counterpart confirmed that its major crimes unit launched an investigation into Yashchyshyn earlier this year.Word of the investigation into Yashchyshyn comes three years after a Chinese national approached a Secret Service agent outside Mar-a-Lago and claimed to be a member who wanted to use the pool. After passing the checkpoint, Yujing Zhang told a receptionist she was there to attend an event given by the United Nations Chinese American Association.But no such event was on the calendar, and agents later found that she was carrying two Chinese passports, $8,000 in cash, four cellphones, a laptop computer, an external hard drive, a thumb drive containing computer malware – but no swimsuit.She also claimed to speak English poorly, though agents later testified that Zhang spoke and read English well.Zhang was charged with making false statements to federal agents and illegally entering a restricted area. Zhang later received an eight-month prison sentence and was deported to China after being convicted of trespassing and lying to Secret Service agents.The security lapses at the club involving Zhang and Yashchyshyn for some called to mind an episode early in Trump’s presidency where he was talking with then-Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe on a patio about a response to a North Korea missile test while diners looked on.In a particularly stunning moment, a guest who snapped a picture of Trump and Abe later took a selfie with a military aide carrying the black leather satchel carrying the codes needed to launch a nuclear strike, which is nicknamed “the football”.“It’s unheard of,” a deputy national security adviser to Joe Biden in the Barack Obama White House said at the time. “These people operate behind the scenes. I don’t think this team has any appreciation about the vulnerabilities they are creating for themselves and how dangerous this is.”The Trump White House press secretary at the time, Sean Spicer, later insisted that no classified information was discussed and the leaders’ discussions were focused on the logistics of press statements they were to give.Abe, who left office in 2020, was assassinated while giving a campaign speech in the Japanese city of Nara last month in an unrelated case.New details into the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago emerged Friday when a heavily redacted affidavit justifying the search explained how investigators believed that highly sensitive national defense information and evidence of obstruction of justice were at the ex-president’s property.The document detailed how an FBI review of materials Trump had returned to the National Archives in May 2022 concluded that he had kept sensitive government secrets at Mar-a-Lago.The justice department said among the documents recovered by the National Archives, 184 had classification markings. Some were stamped “SI” for special intelligence, “HCS” for intelligence from human clandestine sources, and “NOFORN” for “Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals”.TopicsDonald TrumpMar-a-LagoFBIUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

‘Time has run out’: UN fails to reach agreement to protect marine lifeThis fifth round of discussions was meant to establish a UN Ocean Treaty that would protect biodiversity in international waters The latest round of talks at the United Nations aimed at securing protections for marine life in international waters that cover half the planet ended without agreement Saturday.The fifth round of discussions, which began two weeks ago, were designed to establish a UN Ocean Treaty that would set rules for protecting biodiversity in two-thirds of the world’s oceanic areas that lie outside territorial waters.Time running out to protect world’s oceans, conservationists say as UN treaty talks stallRead moreBut UN members failed to agree on how to share benefits from marine life, establish protected areas, or to prevent human activity with life on the high seas.“Although we did make excellent progress, we still do need a little bit more time to progress towards the finish line,” UN oceans ambassador Rena Lee said, according to Agence France-Presse.Many hoped that the New York session, which began on 15 August, would ultimately produce an agreed treaty text on “the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction”.But environmental campaigners, who noted that discussions had been continuing on and off for 15 years, expressed disappointment and blamed wealthy countries, including the US, of being too slow to compromise.Among the issues holding up the treaty is agreement on a process for creating protected areas as well as environmental impact assessments.“While progress has been made, particularly on ocean sanctuaries, members of the High Ambition Coalition and countries like the USA have moved too slowly to find compromises, despite their commitments,” said Laura Meller of Greenpeace’s Protect the Oceans campaign.Meller said that some groups, like the Pacific islands and the Caribbean group, had pushed to complete the agreement. But countries in the global north had only started working to reach compromises in the final days of negotiations, she said.“Time has run out,” Meller added. “Further delay means ocean destruction. We are sad and disappointed. While countries continue to talk, the oceans and all those who rely on them will suffer.”Greenpeace had warned Thursday that treaty talks were on the brink of failure because of the greed of countries in the High Ambition Coalition and others such as the US and Canada. At issue, the group said, was prioritizing hypothetical future profits from Marine Genetics Resources over protecting the oceans.Meller also said that Russia had blocked negotiations, refusing to engage in the treaty process and in attempts at compromise with the European Union “on a wide range of issues”.Monica Medina, the assistant US secretary of state, said her country remained committed to the goal of protecting at least 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030. “We cannot let the tides and currents push us back,” Medina said. “We must keep going.”Unless the UN general assembly schedules a special emergency session to conclude negotiations, talks will not automatically resume until next year.If the body fails to do so, Greenpeace warned that “it will be challenging to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030 – the 30×30 target that scientists say is the minimum needed to give the oceans space to recover”.The failure to reach an agreement comes after world leaders at the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon in July vowed to do everything in their power to save the seas. But despite uplifting calls to action in the closing statement, no clear commitments emerged.“While it’s disappointing that the treaty wasn’t finalized during the past two weeks of negotiations, we remain encouraged by the progress that was made,” said Liz Karan of the NGO Pew Charitable Trusts of the latest round of talks.Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press contributed reporting.TopicsUnited NationsOceansNew YorkUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

The affidavit as released is of course full of redactions, across its 38 pages. But it reveals some interesting nuggets about the search, including that the Department of Justice and FBI had “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction” would be found at Mar-a-Lago.In another interesting section … the affidavit says that on 9 February 2022, the DoJ leaned that a preliminary review of 15 boxes taken to Mar-a-Lago “indicated that they contained ‘newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and post-presidential records, and ‘a lot of classified records’.“Of most significant concern was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified.”The affidavit reproduces a Trump statement after the issue became public, and then … is extensively redacted. The redacted passage is a chronological retelling of how the issue developed. The next significant un-redacted passage contains the news that Trump’s own notes were included in the materials in question. It reads as follows:“From May 16-18, 2022, FBI agents conducted a preliminary review of the FIFTEEN BOXES provided to NARA and identified documents with classification markings in fourteen of the FIFTEEN BOXES. A preliminary triage of the documents with classification markings revealed the following approximate numbers: 184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET. Further, the FBI agents observed markings reflecting the following compartments/dissemination controls: HCS, FISA, ORCON, NOFORN, and SI.“Based on my training and experience, I know that documents classified at these levels typically contain NDI. Several of the documents also contained what appears to be FPOTUS’s [Trump’s] handwritten notes.Closing summaryIt has been a day of drama as the redacted affidavit explaining why the FBI chose to raid Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was finally published to an eagerly awaiting world. It wasn’t exactly a damp squib. The document – much of which was blanked out – detailed the huge numbers of secret documents squirreled away and security risks they posed.But due to the large numbers of redactions there was no explosive new line, though one thing does seem certain: this FBI investigation is just getting started and has a long long way to go.Here’s what else happened today:
Amy Coney Barrett was in the news via a Guardian US scoop showing that a faith group she has been closely associated with places huge emphasis on female obedience.
Joe Biden and his administration stood by his calling out of the Republican politicians as behaving like semi-fascists. The move drew ire from the rightwing party.
Washington is to follow the path of its fellow west coast state California and pursue the eventual ban of sales of new gasoline-powered cars.
A Jim Crow-era provision of the Mississippi constitution designed to disfranchise Black voters is constitutional, a federal appellate court ruled.
Dow drops 1,000 pointsThe Guardian’s Dominic Rushe writes here that there has been a steep drop on Wall Street in response to the latest forecasts on the economy from Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell.A 1,000 plus point drop is hardly a catastrophe but it is definitely a nasty fall.Dominic writes: US stock markets nosedived on Friday after Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, warned of “pain” ahead as the central bank struggles to bring down inflation from a 40-year high.Powell’s highly anticipated speech was more hawkish than had been expected, with the Fed chair pledging to do all he could to end rising prices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost just over 1,000 points, 3%, the S&P fell 3.3% and the Nasdaq dropped almost 4%.Speaking at the Kansas City Fed’s annual meeting of the world’s central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Powell said the Fed’s “overarching focus right now is to bring inflation back down”.Read more:Dow plunges 1,000 points after Fed chief Powell warns of inflation ‘pain’Read moreNikki Haley for 2024?The former UN ambassador under Donald Trump is often mentioned as a potential 2024 candidate and someone who could – potentially – straddle the two disparate and often bitterly feuding worlds of Trump and non-Trump Republicans.That sees Haley frequently seek to a perform a difficult dance between courting her old bosses’ favor, but also trying not to seem too close to him.Politico has the details of some of the people donating to her political future and it makes interesting reading of a long list of Republican stalwarts.The report says: “Many of the GOP’s biggest donors are among those who funneled anonymous contributions to former U.N ambassador Nikki Haley’s nonprofit as she lays the groundwork for a prospective 2024 presidential bid, according to previously unreported tax documents obtained by Politico.Haley’s nonprofit policy advocacy group, Stand For America, Inc, has received major donations from people including New York hedge fund manager Paul Singer, investor Stanley Druckenmiller, and Miriam Adelson and her late husband, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Internal Revenue Service filings reveal.The roster of supporters who gave undisclosed donations in 2019 also includes Suzanne Youngkin, the wife of Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, himself a possible presidential contender; former Pennsylvania Senate candidate and hedge fund executive David McCormick; and Vivek and Lakshmi Garipalli, members of a New Jersey family that has donated large sums to Democrats – but which gave Haley’s organization $1 million.”Fascist or not?It might have seemed an odd question even just a few years ago, but Joe Biden’s speech on Thursday night has put the word “fascism” squarely into mainstream American political discourse.His accusations that modern Republicans were behaving like semi-fascists certainty triggered questions to his top press spokesperson. The Biden administration – understandably – is standing behind the phrase.Reuters captures the scene:The actions of some Republicans allied to former President Donald Trump fit the definition of fascism, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Friday, a day after President Joe Biden said they edged toward “semi-fascism.”“I was very clear when laying out and defining what MAGA Republicans have done and you look at the definition of fascism and you think about what they’re doing in attacking our democracy. … That is what that is. It is very clear,” Jean-Pierre told a press briefing.MAGA refers to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Fascism is a political philosophy that exalts nation and often race above the individual and supports an autocratic government led by a dictatorial leader involving the forced suppression of opposition, U.S. dictionary Merriam-Webster says.In response to Biden’s Thursday evening comments that Trump-allied Republicans embraced violence and hatred, and edged toward “semi-fascism,” the Republican National Committee called the remarks “despicable.”A key questionWashington Post columnist Helaine Olen seems to have hit the nail on the head with a very simple tweet. Answers on a postcard please… no redactions.What’s the innocent explanation for Trump keeping all these classified documents?— Helaine Olen (@helaineolen) August 26, 2022
Arizona judge strikes blow against election fairness skepticsIn just one of many such scenes playing out in courts across the US, Republicans who believe Donald Trump’s unfounded claims of a stolen election and a fraudulent US voting process have suffered a set back.An Arizona judge has refused to require that Arizona officials count ballots by hand in November, dismissing a lawsuit filed by Republican nominees for governor and secretary of state based on false claims of problems with vote-counting machines.AP has more: Kari Lake, who is running for governor, and Mark Finchem, a secretary of state candidate, won their GOP primaries after aggressively promoting the narrative that the 2020 election was marred by fraud or widespread irregularities.Their lawsuit repeated unfounded allegations about the security of machines that count votes. They relied in part on testimony from Donald Trump supporters who led a discredited review of the election in Maricopa County, including Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, who oversaw the effort described by supporters as a “forensic audit.”U.S. District Judge John Tuchi ruled that Lake and Finchem failed to show any realistic likelihood of harm and that their lawsuit must be brought in state, not federal, court. He also ruled that it is too close to the election to upend the process.“The 2022 Midterm Elections are set to take place on November 8,” Tuchi wrote. “In the meantime, Plaintiffs request a complete overhaul of Arizona’s election procedures.”Various reactions have been pouring out online over the affidavit. Virginia Democratic senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee said:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}“It appears, based on the affidavit unsealed this morning, that among the improperly handled documents at Mar-a-Lago were some of our most sensitive intelligence * which is one reason the Senate Intelligence Committee has requested, on a bipartisan basis, a damage assessment of any national security threat posed by the mishandling of this information. The Department of Justice investigation must be allowed to proceed without interference.” Meanwhile, North Carolina Republican Representative Dan Bishop said: “So much for transparency,” tweeting alongside a photo of redacted sections of the affidavit. Bishop is a member of the House of Representatives Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. echoed similar sentiments online, tweeting a photo of the redacted affidavit with the caption, “Well this really clears things up.” Well this really clears things up. pic.twitter.com/6S2FxIQtSi— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) August 26, 2022
Nina Lakhani and Oliver Milman report…Taking on the fossil fuel industry in West Virginia was always going to be a David v Goliath type battle, but after years of protests, lobbying and lawsuits, 68-year-old Becky Crabtree thought the community-led resistance had beaten the Mountain Valley pipeline (MVP) in a fair fight.So when news broke earlier in August that the state’s fossil-fuel friendly senator Joe Manchin had resurrected the pipeline, Crabtree, a high school science teacher who teaches students about the climate crisis, felt “numb”.Manchin, a conservative Democrat who receives more campaign financing from the fossil fuel industry – including pipeline companies – than any other lawmaker in Congress, had agreed to back his party’s historic climate legislation before the crucial midterm elections. But only after he negotiated a side-deal to fast-track the MVP.“It’s the unfairness that makes me so angry. It’s a deal with the devil,” said Crabtree, 68, who owns a 30-acre sheep farm in Lindside, Monroe county.Full story:‘It’s a deal with the devil’: outrage in Appalachia over Manchin’s ‘vile’ pipeline plan Read moreWhite House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has just finished briefing the media and taking questions and she was asked about Joe Biden’s remarks at a fundraiser last night where he referred to the “MAGA Republican philosophy” as akin to “semi-fascism”.Asked to explain what the US president meant by that remark, Jean-Pierre said of right-wing Republicans: “He was very powerful last night. When it comes to ‘MAGA Republicans’, when it comes to the extreme, ultra wing of the Republicans, they are attacking democracy, they are taking away rights and freedoms, they are using threats of violence, taking away voting rights, and he [Biden] called it what it is … and what many would argue, historians would agree with us on.”“He believes that presidents should be the strongest voice for democracy,” she added.Jean-Pierre also strove to differentiate between what she referred to as “traditional, conservative” Republicans and the [Trumpist] “Make America Great Again” rightwing loyalists to the former president.A quick recap, blog readers, it’s been a dramatic morning and there will be plenty more news over the coming few hours. But for now, here’s where things stand:
Donald Trump has released a statement about the release of the government affidavit that underpinned the search of his Mar-a-Lago club and residence in Florida earlier this month. He posted it on Truth Social, his struggling social media platform that he created after being banned by Twitter.
The US Department of Justice and the FBI had “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction” would be found at Mar-a-Lago when it sought a warrant to search the property, the affidavit notes.
The affidavit is replete with details that would provide “a roadmap” for anyone intent on obstructing the investigation.
The affidavit reminds us of the context of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, thus: “The government is conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records.”
While the public waited for the affidavit to be released, we also noted that Joe Biden called the “MAGA Republican” philosophy “semi-fascism” last night, based on the anti-democratic efforts of the more extreme wing of the GOP that hews unfailingly to Trump.
We have Donald Trump’s reaction, on Truth Social, the social media platform he set up after being kicked off Twitter over the Capitol attack….css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Affidavit heavily redacted!!! Nothing mentioned on “Nuclear,” a total public relations subterfuge by the FBI & DOJ, or our close working relationship regarding document turnover – WE GAVE THEM MUCH. Judge Bruce Reinhart should NEVER have allowed the Break-In of my home. He recused himself two months ago from one of my cases based on his animosity and hatred of your favorite President, me. What changed? Why hasn’t he recused himself on this case? Obama must be very proud of him right now!To unpick:
“Nuclear” – it has been reported that some of the materials kept at Mar-a-Lago concerned nuclear weapons. And some concerned Emmanuel Macron, which, by the by, might interest Liz Truss. But anyway…
“Break-in” – nope. Warrant duly served, etc, which is why we’re here.
“Obama must be very proud” of the judge … we may all remember John Roberts, the chief justice of the supreme court, rebuking Trump for referring to “Obama judges”, etc. We may also all remember Trump’s pride at having installed a huge number of judges himself, including three on Roberts’ court. In short – judges are not meant to act politically but they are politically appointed. And so on.
Of Judge Reinhart: he made a donation to Barack Obama in 2008. He also donated to Republicans, if not Donald J Trump.
Attached to the affidavit is a letter from lawyers for Donald Trump, complaining of unfair treatment and asserting a president’s “absolute authority to declassify documents” – both features of his response to the search and the claims of his supporters in Republican ranks and on the right of the US media.The letter, signed by M Evan Corcoran of Silverman Thompson Slutkin White, begins:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Public trust in the government is low. At such times, adherence to the rules and long-standing policies is essential. President Donald J Trump is a leader of the Republican Party. The Department of Justice (DOJ), as part of the Executive Branch, is under the control of a President from the opposite party. It is critical, given that dynamic, that every effort is made to ensure that actions by DOJ that may touch upon the former President, or his close associates, do not involve politics.”I refer you back to President Joe Biden’s comment to reporters before the affidavit was filed today, when asked if he thought national security might have been compromised at Mar-a-Lago while Trump was storing classified documents there:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}We’ll let the justice department determine that.”The lawyers’ letter conforms to Trump’s worldview, that attorneys general and the Department of Justice exist to serve presidents politically. Biden’s answer speaks for generally accepted wisdom, which is that the DoJ does not exist for that purpose and is in fact independent of any White House or administration. More

The FBI’s Mar-a-Lago affidavit paints an unsettling portrait of TrumpLloyd GreenAccording to the affidavit, the government previously found in Trump’s possession 184 documents marked ‘classified’, 67 marked ‘confidential’, 92 marked ‘secret’, and 25 ‘top secret’ Donald Trump is a life-long teetotaler. But at this moment, he may want to re-consider his commitment to sobriety.Early on Friday afternoon, a heavily redacted version of the much-vaunted FBI affidavit went public. It did not paint a flattering portrait of the 45th president or his environs.“[P]robable cause exists to believe that evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed … will be found at the premises,” it read. Prison times under the statutes cited in the affidavit run the gamut from three to 20 years, depending on the specific offense.Redacted Trump Mar-a-Lago affidavit released: five key takeawaysRead moreSection 793 addresses defense information and section 1519 is directed at the “destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy.” Section 2071 speaks to the “concealment, removal, or mutilation” of documents.For Trump, a candidate and incumbent who made “lock her up” a rallying cry, the latest developments make him look ridiculous. And that is being generous.These developments also place an unwelcome millstone around the neck of the Republicans – who pride themselves on law, order and national security – as the US careens toward its midterm elections.Despite being heavily redacted, the affidavit says plenty. Mar-a-Lago had become a storage facility for documents that Trump should never have transported when he exited the White House. Unfortunately, he believed the mantra of Louis XIV, France’s Sun King: “L’état, c’est moi.”In May 2022, according to the affidavit, the government found in Trump’s possession 184 documents marked “classified”; 67 marked “confidential”; 92 marked “secret”; and 25 marked “top secret.” But Trump’s nightmare doesn’t end there.FBI agents “observed markings reflecting” human intelligence sources and other highly sensitive intelligence categories, the affidavit says. Trump, an ex-reality show host, makes Hillary Clinton look almost fastidious.Or as Trump framed things on social media, “WE GAVE THEM MUCH.” To be sure, he did not say, “WE GAVE THEM ALL.” Here, it is a distinction with real world significance.As the affidavit hit the docket, reports emerged of a woman posing as a member of the Rothschild family playing golf with Trump and Lindsey Graham while ingratiating herself with Trump’s supporters. Talk about synchronicity.The incidents are under active investigation in the US and Canada. Her alleged real identity is Inna Yashchyshyn, a Russian-speaking immigrant from Ukraine.This latest episode stands as a cross between Maria Butina and Inventing Anna. Life imitates life. History can be repetitive. One thing is clear, security is not a primary concern for Trump.Meanwhile, the clock ticks down for Merrick Garland, the attorney general, and Trump. Under justice department practice, politically sensitive prosecutions cannot be launched within 60 days of an election.As a result, Labor Day in early September marks a cut-off for indicting Trump until after November’s congressional contests. Two related questions are “if and when” Trump declares his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.One way or another, the former guy will appear on this fall’s ballot. Beyond that, the release of the redacted affidavit raises the issue of disclosure of a non-redacted version by the Biden administration to the senior members of Congress, the so-called Gang of Eight.By law, the Speaker of the House, the House minority leader, the Senate’s majority and minority leaders, together with the chairs and ranking minority members of the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress are entitled to be briefed on covert actions.They have reportedly requested relevant information.To be sure, the FBI frowns on briefing Congress on open investigations. Here, however, the barn door is wide open. The horse has bolted. Indeed, it was Trump who publicized the court-approved search.The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell has reported that the “[s]ourcing and information the FBI would’ve needed to pinpoint those locations with such confidence, suggests [that] there are people close to the former president potentially cooperating with this investigation”.Can you say, “GoodFellas and Henry Hill”? In other words, the walls around Trump may be closing. A man with few friends, he may need someone he can talk to without furthering a conspiracy or paying $1,000 an hour.Signs are not encouraging. Earlier this week, Jared Kushner, whose own father received a Trump pardon, scrambled to distance himself from Ivanka’s dad.Asked by Fox News about Trump’s handling of classified material, Kushner demurred. “Like I said, I’m not familiar with what was in the boxes,” he answered. “But I think President Trump, he, uh, he governed in a very peculiar way and when he had his documents, I’m assuming he did what he thought was appropriate.”And if Trump can’t count on his son-in-law to deliver something other than a potpourri of word salad, who can he trust?
Lloyd Green served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
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Redacted Trump Mar-a-Lago affidavit released: five key takeawaysAffidavit, unsealed by federal magistrate judge Bruce Reinhart, offers new details on probable cause and FBI sources The FBI sought to search Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after it found probable cause that highly sensitive national defense information and evidence of obstruction of justice existed there, according to a redacted version of the affidavit that got federal agents a warrant to search the former president’s property.The affidavit – partially redacted by the justice department to protect details about the criminal investigation into Trump’s unauthorized retention of government secrets – offered several new details about the investigation that a top official has said remains in its “early stages”.FBI sought national defense documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, affidavit showsRead moreHere are five takeaways from the affidavit, in which the justice department also said the FBI had “not yet identified all potential criminal confederates” and “not located all evidence related to its investigation”:New details on the probable causeForemost in the affidavit: the justice department had good reason to believe there were crimes being committed in specific areas of Mar-a-Lago, including Trump’s home, the foyer to his residence known as Pine Hall, his “45 Office” and a storage facility, among other locations.The affidavit did not offer an indication about potential charges against the 45th and former president of the US, but it did mention the FBI believed that “evidence of obstruction” would be found at the premises – indicating a wider investigation than just the government’s efforts to recover sensitive documents.New details on the FBI’s sourcesSpeculation has swirled for weeks around Trump and his team about how the FBI knew about the location of his safe and specific rooms where sensitive documents remained, and the justice department appeared to offer a glimpse into where that information might have originated.The justice department said in the legal memo explaining its redactions to the affidavit that it was seeking to protect “a significant number of civilian witnesses” – the first such reference surrounding its sources – as well as other FBI and US government personnel.Classification is irrelevantAround the discussion in the affidavit about classified or declassified materials being retained by Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the justice department noted that classification does not matter for violations of the Espionage Act or statutes concerning the removal of official documents.The justice department explained in a footnote that the law criminalizes “the unlawful retention of information related to the national defense” that could harm the United States or aid an adversary, regardless of whether the document is classified or declassified.FBI’s underlying basis for concernAs part of the justification for seeking a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, the affidavit detailed how an FBI review of materials Trump had returned to the National Archives in May 2022 demonstrated a track record of keeping some of the US government’s most sensitive secrets at Mar-a-Lago.The justice department said among the documents recovered by the National Archives, 184 had classification markings. Some also had markings denoting “SI” for special intelligence, “HCS” for intelligence from human clandestine sources, and “NOFORN” for “Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals”.Storage room to be securedSome people close to Trump have tried to suggest that they were surprised that the justice department considered the storage room as inadequate to keep boxes of classified information because officials had supposedly only asked for a “stronger lock” to the door, which was installed.However, the affidavit made no mention of a lock. In fact, it showed the justice department told Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran in June that Mar-a-Lago was not authorized to store classified information and asked the room be preserved in its condition until further notice – suggesting it was already the subject of an investigation.TopicsUS newsUS politicsDonald TrumpMar-a-LagonewsReuse this content More