US Politics

What lawsuits and investigations is Donald Trump facing?As FBI agents search Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort, here’s a recap of legal turmoil facing him on several fronts

FBI executes search warrant at Mar-a-Lago as Donald Trump says home ‘raided’ – live updates
Donald Trump said on Monday that FBI agents searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. While the search appears to be part of an investigation into Trump’s unlawful removal and destruction of White House records after his presidency, the businessman and politician is facing investigations and lawsuits on a number of fronts.Here’s a recap.Missing national records FBI searches Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago homeRead moreThe US National Archives and Records Administration (Nara) in February notified Congress that it had recovered about 15 boxes of White House documents from Trump’s Florida home, some of which contained classified materials.The US House of Representatives Oversight Committee at that time said it was expanding an investigation into Trump’s actions and asked the Archives to turn over additional information. Trump previously confirmed that he had agreed to return certain records to the Archives, calling it “an ordinary and routine process”.Attack on the US Capitol A congressional panel investigating the January 6 attack by Trump supporters on the US Capitol is working to build a case that he broke the law in trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat.Vice chair Liz Cheney has said the committee could make multiple referrals to the Justice Department seeking criminal charges against Trump, who accuses the panel of conducting a sham investigation.In a March court filing, the committee detailed Trump’s efforts to persuade Mike Pence to either reject slates of electors for Joe Biden, who won the election, or delay a congressional count of those votes.The committee cannot charge Trump with federal crimes. That decision must be made by the Justice Department, led by attorney general Merrick Garland. If the Justice Department brings charges, prosecutors’ main challenge will be proving that Trump acted with corrupt intent, experts said.Trump also could be charged with “seditious conspiracy”, a rarely used statute that makes it illegal to overthrow the US government by force, a charge that has already been levied against multiple participants in the assault. Wire fraud Democrats said in a June hearing of the January 6 committee that Trump, a Republican, raised some $250m from supporters to advance fraudulent claims in court that he won the election, but steered much of the money elsewhere.This raises the possibility that he could be charged with wire fraud, which prohibits obtaining money on “false or fraudulent pretenses”, legal experts said.Georgia election tamperingA special grand jury was selected in May to consider evidence in a Georgia prosecutor’s inquiry into Trump’s alleged efforts to influence the state’s 2020 election results.The investigation focuses in part on a phone call Trump made to Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Georgia secretary of state, on 2 January 2021.Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” the votes needed to overturn Trump’s election loss, according to an audio recording obtained by the Washington Post.Legal experts said Trump may have violated at least three Georgia criminal election laws: conspiracy to commit election fraud, criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, and intentional interference with performance of election duties.Trump could argue he was engaging in free speech and did not intend to influence the election.New York criminal inquiry Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has been investigating whether Trump’s family real estate company misrepresented the values of its properties to get favorable bank loans and lower tax bills.Two top lawyers who had been leading the investigation resigned in February, throwing the probe’s future into question, but Bragg’s office has said it is ongoing.New York attorney general civil inquiryLetitia James, the New York state attorney general, is conducting a civil investigation examining whether the Trump Organization inflated real estate values. Trump and two of his adult children, Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump, agreed to testify in the probe starting on 15 July.Trump has denied wrongdoing in both New York cases and described them as politically motivated. E Jean Carroll’s defamation caseE Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine writer, sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after the then-president denied her allegation that he raped her in the 1990s in a New York City department store. He accused her of lying to drum up sales for a book.The second circuit court of appeals in Manhattan is poised to rule on whether Carroll’s lawsuit should be dismissed.A lawyer for Trump has argued that he is protected by a federal law that makes government employees immune from defamation claims.Does a presidential run mean Trump can’t be prosecuted?No. Although the Justice Department has a decades-old policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted, there is no such protection for presidential candidates.TopicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsexplainersReuse this content More

On Joe Biden’s visit to flood-ravaged eastern Kentucky today he is not just viewing the effects through the lens of a disaster needing federal assistance but also through the lens of the climate crisis that is making events like this more intense, more common and more deadly, in America and around the world.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre addressed the issue in her media briefing aboard Air Force One en route to Lexington with the US president and first lady Jill Biden a little earlier.“The floods in Kentucky and extreme weather all around the country are yet another reminder of the intensifying and accelerating impacts of climate change and the urgent need to invest in making our communities more resilient to it,” she said.Kentucky was hit by massive flash flooding in the last two weeks that killed 37 people and caused mass destruction. The atypical rain storms followed eight months after tornadoes killed almost three times that many people in western Kentucky and many parts of the country are suffering record heatwaves, drought and wildfire after an extreme 2021 in the American west.Jean-Pierre of course emphasized the importance of the Senate vote yesterday to pass the historic climate action bill , which she called “so vital” alongside previous infrastructure legislation.“Over the long term, these investments will save lives, reduce costs and protect communities like the one we are visiting today,” she said. Biden is due to land in Kentucky about now.
Amidst the flood damage, Joe Biden reiterated his commitment to Kentucky and seeing the areas impacted by the catastrophic flooding that has killed at least 37 set back to rights. “Everybody has an obligation to help. We have the capacity to do this. It’s not like it’s beyond our control,” Biden said. “The weather may be beyond our control for now, but it’s not beyond our control and I promise you, we’re staying, the federal government, along with the state and county and the city, we’re staying until everybody is back to where they were.”
Two years’ worth of text messages exchanged by right wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones have been turned over to the House select committee tasked with investigating the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, according to CNN. The texts had come out after Jones’ attorneys “messed up” and inadvertently sent the text messages to the plaintiffs’ attorney during a defamation trial in which Jones has been ordered to pay nearly $50m over his repeated claims that the deadly Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.
The Biden administration has pledged another $1bn in military aid for Ukraine, the largest promise of rockets, ammunition and other arms to Ukrainian forces. This brings the total US security assistance committed to Ukraine by the Biden administration to roughly $9bn since Russian troops invaded in February.
Rudy Giuliani, lawyer for Donald Trump, was caught in a lie when he tried to argue that he couldn’t travel to Atlanta to appear before a special grand jury investigating whether Trump and others illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 general election in Georgia. Giuliani said he couldn’t travel because of a medical procedure but Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, pulled up a tweet of his showing that he had gone to New Hampshire recently, as well as evidence that he had purchased airline tickets to Rome and Zurich that were meant for use between 22 July and 29 July, after his medical procedure.
The photos everyone is talking about today are the ones published by Axios purportedly backing up the claims that Donald Trump periodically blocked up White House and other drains by flushing documents.The photos show folded-up paper, marked with Trump’s telltale handwriting in his favored pen, a Sharpie, submerged at the bottom of various toilet bowls.Read more about it here:Photos suggest Trump blocked toilets with ripped-up White House documentsRead moreRon DeSantis, the governor of Florida who is widely seen as a potential leading Republican presidential contender, will campaign this month for Donald Trump-endorsed party candidates in key swing states for the 2024 White House race, Reuters is reporting.DeSantis, who is currently running for re-election in Florida, will speak at “Unite and Win” rallies on behalf of congressional and gubernatorial candidates in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio and Pennsylvania later this month, his campaign and rally organizer Turning Point Action said today.“He’s a wildly popular political figure and I think he can really make a difference for some of these candidates,” said Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point Action, which is the political arm of the conservative school campus group, Turning Point USA.Joe Biden promised the crowd he spoke to before a toppled building in Lost Creek, Kentucky that even with the at least 37 killed and the substantial flood damage, “we’re going to come back better than we were before”. “We’re the only country in the world that has come out of every major disaster stronger than we went into it,” Biden said. “We got clobbered going in, but we came out stronger. That’s the objective here: not just to get back to where we were, but to get back to better than where we were.” He said with the bipartisan infrastructure bill – the feather in his legislative agenda – “we have the wherewithal to do it now”. Biden said that because of the bill, now when crews are replacing damaged water lines, municipalities have the funds to also lay down high-speed Internet at the same time. “I don’t want any Kentuckian telling me you don’t have to do this for me,” Biden said. “Oh yes we do. You’re an American citizen. We never give up. We never stop. We never bow. We never bend. We just go forward and that’s what we’re going to do here. And you’re going to see.”Joe Biden has taken to the podium in Kentucky, where he is touring flooding damage from the catastrophic flooding that has killed at least 37 and displaced hundreds. “The people here in this community are not just Kentuckians, they’re Americans,” Biden said. “This happened in America. This is an American problem. Everybody has an obligation to help. We have the capacity to do this. It’s not like it’s beyond our control. The weather may be beyond our control for now, but it’s not beyond our control and I promise you, we’re staying, the federal government, along with the state and county and the city, we’re staying until everybody is back to where they were.” Rudy Giuliani was among the many allies of Donald Trump that were subpoenaed by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, in her investigation into whether Trump and others illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 general election in Georgia.A judge ordered Giuliani to appear before a special grand jury in Atlanta this month, and today he made an emergency motion to postpone his scheduled deposition. Rudy GIULIANI has made an emergency motion to postpone his scheduled Fulton County deposition. A hearing on his motion is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. pic.twitter.com/hltHbN2Odn— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 8, 2022
Giuliani’s excuse was that he had a recent medical procedure that left him uncleared to fly. He was willing to appear virtually and is prepared to testify, but the district attorney is insisting he appears in person. UPDATE Giuliani’s motion to delay his grand jury appearance seems to be medical — he says a recent procedure has left him uncleared to fly. He says he is prepared to testify and even willing to appear virtually but DA has insisted he appear in person. https://t.co/DAPhXqXDp7— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 8, 2022
The Fulton county district attorney’s office quickly countered with a tweet of Giuliani’s that showed he had traveled out of state – Giuliani said he had traveled to New Hampshire by car. But the district attorney also found evidence that he had purchased airline tickets to Rome and Zurich that were meant for use between 22 July and 29 July, after his medical procedure. The DA says it has obtained records that show Rudy purchased air travel tickets meant for use between July 22-29. They also included a tweet showing Giuliani had traveled (he says by car) to NH last week. https://t.co/y0HVyd3cZl pic.twitter.com/KkSKY1lsgo— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 8, 2022
Amazing. Giuliani said a recent heart procedure meant he couldn’t travel to ATL out of state …so the Fulton DA’s office found a tweet of Giuliani apparently traveling out of state. pic.twitter.com/LZONxwDxZz— stephen fowler (@stphnfwlr) August 8, 2022
CNN is reporting that two years’ worth of text messages exchanged by right wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones have been turned over to the House select committee tasked with investigating the 6 January attack on the US Capitol. News: The Alex Jones texts have been turned over to the 1/6 committee, I’m told. https://t.co/s1kQg6AT1g— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 8, 2022
During Jones’ defamation trial, in which Jones has been ordered to pay nearly $50m over his repeated claims that the deadly Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, an attorney for the plaintiffs revealed that Jones’ attorneys had “messed up” and inadvertently sent him the two years of text messages. The House select committee was immediately interested: Jones’ rhetoric is popular among those who swarmed the Capitol that day, and he was on the grounds in the lead-up to the attack, riling up the crowd. However, according to CNN, Jones claims he tried to prevent people at the Capitol from breaking the law, and has rejected any suggestion that he was involved in the planning of violence. “Well, we know that his behavior did incentivize some of the January 6 conduct and we want to know more about that,” congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who sits on the committee, told CNN this weekend. “We don’t know what we’ll find in the texts because we haven’t seen them. But we’ll look at it and learn more, I’m sure.” Jones’ attorney had asked the judge to order Mark Bankston, the attorney who represented the two Sandy Hook parents who successfully sued Jones, to destroy the texts and not transmit them to the House committee.“I’m not standing between you and Congress,” Judge Maya Guerra Gamble told Bankston. “That is not my job. I’m not going to do that.”The Biden administration has pledged another $1bn in military aid for Ukraine, the largest promise of rockets, ammunition and other arms to Ukrainian forces.This brings the total US security assistance committed to Ukraine by the Biden administration to roughly $9bn since Russian troops invaded in February.“At every stage of this conflict, we have been focused on getting the Ukrainians what they need, depending on the evolving conditions on the battlefield,” Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, said in announcing the new weapons shipment.New today: US announces another $1 billion military package for Ukraine including more ammo for HIMARS. And USAID announces $4.5 billion in economic aid to the Ukrainian government— Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews) August 8, 2022
Greetings all – Vivian Ho here, taking over the blog from Joanna Walters. Over in Kentucky, Joe Biden kicked off his tour of the catastrophic flooding that has killed at least 37 people with a briefing. Touring flood damage in eastern Kentucky – @POTUS participates in briefing at Marie Roberts Elementary School in Lost Creek KY. @AndyBeshearKY welcomes the group – confirms 37 Kentuckians have died in the storm. Adds there are still 2 missing people. pic.twitter.com/Wed6Bei500— Julia Benbrook (@JuliaBenbrook) August 8, 2022
Hello, live blog readers, with the climate crisis as a powerful undercurrent to Joe Biden’s visit to flood-ravaged eastern Kentucky today, we’ll bring you more news on that and all the developments, as they happen.My colleague Vivian Ho will take over the blog after this and keep you up to speed for the next few hours.Here’s where things stand.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre addressed the climate issues in her media briefing aboard Air Force One en route to Lexington with the US president earlier. “The floods in Kentucky and extreme weather all around the country are yet another reminder of the intensifying and accelerating impacts of climate change and the urgent need to invest in making our communities more resilient to it,” she said.
During his time in the Oval Office, Donald Trump wanted the Pentagon’s generals to be like Nazi Germany’s generals in the second world war, according to a book excerpt in the New Yorker. Peeks of Susan Glasser and Peter Baker’s new book The Divider have more on some of those screaming matches in the White House between the-then president and senior aides.
Joe Biden is visiting eastern Kentucky to tour areas inundated and families devastated by the terrible flooding a week ago that killed dozens of people. Biden is expected to make public remarks (around 2pm ET) as well as talking with relatives and officials in private, and he and the first lady will return to the White House this evening.
The US president said “I’m not worried, but I am concerned” about China’s aggression towards Taiwan in its live-fire military exercises that lasted for the last four days and menaced the island democracy, whose capital, Taipei, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi controversially visited early last week.
Joe Biden is touring flood damage in eastern Kentucky with state governor Andy Beshear.The state’s lieutenant governor, Jacqueline Coleman, earlier told CNN that in one county, 50 bridges had been wrecked by the floods that have devastated the region in late July-early August.“The infrastructure needs are monumental,” she said.Coleman described the rains that hit the area.“It happened so fast and it happened overnight and that’s the reason folks were trapped in their homes,” she said, often in areas of mountainous terrain.Asked if, with the climate crisis, this kind of extreme weather is going to become the new normal, she remarked: “I hope this is not the new normal, for sure.”The 700-plus-page inflation reduction bill moving through the US Congress would steer significant new funds toward battling wildfires and extreme heat – climate change-related risks that are wreaking havoc across the country this summer, Reuters reports.The legislation, pared down from earlier versions, would direct approximately $370 billion toward a range of climate and energy initiatives, including renewable energy tax credits, backing for electric cars and heat pumps, and environmental justice..css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}This is going to, if passed, be the most action the United States has ever taken on climate. Will there be more that we need to do? Absolutely. But this is just so significant and [it’s] so important that we get this over the finish line,” said Christina DeConcini, director of government affairs at the World Resources Institute, a global research group.As drought-fueled wildfires spread out of control in the western United States, lawmakers want to direct about $2 billion toward hazardous fuels reduction.The money in the bill, formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act, could go toward measures like clearing brush through prescribed burns or mechanical thinning so when fires do occur they’re not as intense.The bill also earmarks funds to combat increasingly extreme heat as the United States – and much of the world – grapples with record-shattering and increasingly deadly temperatures this year.For example, there is $1.5 billion in grant funding through the US Forest Service for initiatives such as helping cities plant trees, which provide natural cooling and can improve air quality.The bill aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade through other spending on clean energy tax incentives and electric vehicle credits.Sponsors of the bill say more than $60 billion in measures included are directed toward “environmental justice” initiatives intended to help communities that have disproportionately borne the brunt of poor air quality and pollution.But that amount isn’t nearly enough, said Anthony Rogers-Wright, director of environmental justice at the nonprofit New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.You can read the full Reuters report here. More

US news website Axios agrees $525m sale to Cox EnterprisesAxios, whose founders launched site in 2016, to be taken over by legacy publisher that owns US regional newspapers For $525m, Axios – publisher of punchy, notated news briefs – is set to be acquired by Cox Enterprises, a legacy publisher that owns a series of US regional newspapers.The cash deal, announced Monday, is expected to close in the next few weeks and marks a significant moment in the growth of the news outlet, which was founded in 2016 by the same journalists who launched Politico in 2007.Axios said on its website that as part of the deal Cox will invest $25m in the company that would help it expand into 20 regional US markets and broaden its coverage.The Virginia company’s three co-founders – Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz – will hold stakes in the company and lead editorial as well as day-to-day business decisions.Cox, whose media portfolio includes the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Dayton Daily News, became an investor in Axios last year. Axios HQ, a communications software business, will become an independent company majority-owned by the Axios founders.Has the love affair between Trump and Fox News gone sour?Read moreOn its website, Axios said the deal was structured “to ensure investments will continue to flow into local news at a time when most commercial investors have abandoned local markets”.Axios chief executive Jim VandeHei said the deal was great for the company, its shareholders and journalism as an industry. “It allows us to think and operate generationally, with a like-minded partner – and build something great and durable that lives long after we are gone,” he said.Added Cox chairman and chief executive officer Alex Taylor: “Local watchdog journalism is so important to the health of any community, and no one is more focused on building that out nationally than Axios.”Last year, the German publishing giant Axel Springer acquired the Washington news site Politico for about $1bn. Axios had also been in talks to sell to Springer, but that deal fell through after a high-level editor at the Springer-owned tabloid Bild became embroiled in a sex scandal.Cox’s history in media dates back to 1898, when founder James Middleton Cox bought what is now the Dayton Daily News for $26,000. It eventually grew into one of the nation’s largest privately held companies before selling most of its media assets to Apollo Global Management in 2019.In comments to the New York Times, VandeHei said: “Hopefully, with Politico first, and Axios today, we have shown a way for serious journalism to thrive in the digital era. This country so desperately needs it.“The lesson of the digital era: chase fads, fantasy and clicks, you fade or famish. Chase a loyal audience with quality information, you can flourish,” he added.TopicsUS newsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Democrats celebrate as climate bill moves to House – and critics weigh in Bernie Sanders calls climate measures a ‘very modest step forward’ and Republicans denounce the bill altogether Democrats celebrated the much-delayed Senate passage of their healthcare and climate spending package, expressing hope that the bill’s approval could improve their prospects in the crucial midterm elections this November.The bill, formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act, passed the Senate on Sunday in a party-line vote of 51-50, with Vice-President Kamala Harris breaking the tie in the evenly divided chamber.Raucous applause broke out on the Senate floor after Harris announced the final tally, and Democrats continued their victory lap once the vote had concluded amid a belief that the bill will give Biden – and many Democrats – a record of significant achievement to campaign on.“I’m really confident that the Inflation Reduction Act will endure as one of the defining feats of the 21st century,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said at a press conference after the bill’s passage. “To do small things with 50 votes is rough. To pass such a major piece of legislation – with only 50 votes, an intransigent Republican minority, a caucus running from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin – wow.”Democrats’ work is not quite done though. The Senate-approved bill now heads to the House, which must pass the legislation before it can go to Joe Biden’s desk. The House is scheduled to return from its recess on Friday to take up the bill, and Democratic leaders have expressed confidence that it will pass.“The House will return and move swiftly to send this bill to the president’s desk – proudly building a healthier, cleaner, fairer future for all Americans,” the Democratic speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said in a statement.Democrats hope the bill’s passage could also help them persuade voters to keep them in control of Congress in November, when every House seat and 34 Senate seats will be up for grabs. So far, Democrats’ prospects in the midterm elections have appeared grim, as Republicans are heavily favored to regain control of the House of Representatives.Asked on Monday morning whether he believed the bill’s approval would benefit Democrats running in November, Biden said, “Do I expect it to help? Yes, I do. It’s going to immediately help.”Biden pointed to some of the bill’s healthcare provisions, including capping Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket prescription costs at $2,000 a year, to argue that the legislation would provide concrete assistance to millions of Americans. But that policy will not go into effect until 2025, and Biden acknowledged that some of the bill’s most important provisions will take time to kick in.That delayed implementation could prove detrimental to Democratic candidates trying to make a pitch to voters about how the party has made the most of its control of the White House and Congress.Despite its name, the bill is also not expected to provide immediate relief to Americans struggling under the weight of record-high inflation. According to a report issued by Moody’s Analytics, the bill will “modestly reduce inflation over the 10-year budget horizon”.Republicans accused Democrats of ramming through a partisan bill that failed to address voters’ top concerns, as polls show most Americans believe the economy is getting worse.“Democrats have proven over and over they simply do not care about middle-class families’ priorities,” the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said after the bill’s passage. “They have spent 18 months proving that. They just spent hundreds of billions of dollars to prove it again.”Republicans’ talking points were echoed by a surprising voice on Sunday: Bernie Sanders. The progressive senator expressed concern that the bill would do little to help working Americans, after he unsuccessfully pushed amendments to the bill that would have expanded its healthcare and financial assistance provisions.“It’s a very modest step forward,” Sanders told MSNBC. “Bottom line is, I’m going to support the bill because given the crisis of climate change, the environmental community says this is a step forward. It doesn’t go anywhere near as far as it should. It is a step forward.”Democrats have championed the bill’s environmental provisions, which mark America’s most significant legislative effort yet to address the climate crisis. Experts estimate that the climate policies in the spending package will slash US greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels. That accomplishment will bring the US within striking distance of Biden’s goal to cut emissions in half by the end of the decade, which scientists say must be achieved to avoid climate disaster.To win the support of the centrist senator Joe Manchin, the bill also includes controversial proposals to expand oil and gas development on federal lands, which have sparked outcry among some climate activists. But the bill’s defenders say the climate benefits of the legislation far outweigh the costs.As the spending package moves to the House, Pelosi has the weighty task of keeping her entire caucus in line to ensure the bill’s passage. Given Democrats’ narrow majority in the lower chamber, Pelosi can afford to lose only a few votes and still get the bill passed. It seems like Pelosi will have the votes she needs, after moderates and progressives alike endorsed the package, so Biden could be reaching for his bill-signing pen by the end of the week.TopicsUS politicsDemocratsClimate crisisUS SenateHouse of RepresentativesUS domestic policynewsReuse this content More

Photos suggest Trump blocked toilets with ripped-up White House documentsImages published ahead of new book on 45th presidency offer possible evidence of violations of Presidential Records Act Claims that Donald Trump periodically blocked up White House and other drains with wads of paper appear to be borne out in photographs leaked ahead of the publication of a new account of the 45th presidency.US House to investigate whether Trump broke law in handling of documentsRead moreOn Monday, Axios published photos of folded-up paper, marked with Trump’s telltale handwriting, using his favored pen, a Sharpie, submerged at the bottom of various toilet bowls.The photographs were released in advance of the publication of Confidence Man, a book by the Trump White House correspondent for the New York Times, Maggie Haberman, set for October.Trump, described by Axios as “a notorious destroyer of Oval Office documents”, was the alleged flusher. But photographs of presidential White House toilet document dumps are possible evidence of a violation of the Presidential Records Act.According to Haberman, the disposals occurred multiple times at the White House, and on at least two foreign trips. Most words are illegible, but one name that is clearly visible is that of the New York Republican congresswoman and potential 2024 running mate Elise Stefanik.“That Mr Trump was discarding documents this way was not widely known within the West Wing, but some aides were aware of the habit, which he engaged in repeatedly,” Haberman writes, according to the outlet.“It was an extension of Trump’s term-long habit of ripping up documents that were supposed to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act.”In the forthcoming book, Haberman, whose reporting often drew angry reactions from Trump, also reveals that she was told that the ex-president has maintained contact with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.Letters from Kim – once described by Trump as “love letters” – were among 15 boxes of documents, letters, gifts and mementoes that turned up at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate a year after he left office.According to an earlier Axios report, Haberman’s account of the Trump presidency is the one that “Trump fears most”. Several advisers are unhappy with his decision to talk to the reporter but concluded that he couldn’t help himself – despite once calling her a “maggot”.“You have to be pretty desperate to sell books if pictures of paper in a toilet bowl is part of your promotional plan,” a Trump spokesperson, Taylor Budowich, told Axios in advance of Monday’s report.“We know … there’s enough people willing to fabricate stories like this in order to impress the media class – a media class who is willing to run with anything, as long as it anti-Trump,” Budowich added.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Trump wanted Pentagon generals to be like second world war Nazis, book saysEx-president complained to John Kelly ‘why can’t you be like the German generals?’ according to excerpt from the New Yorker During his time in the Oval Office, Donald Trump wanted the Pentagon’s generals to be like Nazi Germany’s generals in the second world war, according to a book excerpt in the New Yorker.In an exchange with his former White House chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, Trump reportedly complained: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”Kelly asked which generals, prompting Trump to reply: “The German generals in World War II.”According to the excerpt published by the New Yorker from The Divider: Trump in the White House, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, an incredulous Kelly pointed out that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was almost assassinated by one of his own generals.“No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” Trump replied, apparently unaware of Claus von Stauffenberg’s plot in July 1944 to kill Hitler with a bomb inside his Wolf’s Lair field headquarters.Kelly reportedly told Trump that there were no American generals who observe total loyalty to a president. Instead, they swear, like all military personnel, to “support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”.The stunning back-and-forth came during a dispute touched off by Trump’s admiration for military parades, gleaned in part by personally observing Bastille Day celebrations thrown in France by that country’s president, Emmanuel Macron.Trump stubbornly wanted a similar military parade to mark the Fourth of July independence day holiday. But his cabinet staff was less enthusiastic, and it became a point of contention.According to the excerpt, a French general overseeing the 2017 Bastille Day parade in Paris turned to one of his American counterparts in Trump’s delegation and said: “You are going to be doing this next year.” The idea was seeded.Trump, on his return to Washington, hatched a plan for the “biggest, grandest military parade ever for the Fourth of July”. But the plans went down badly with Trump’s cabinet staff.“I’d rather swallow acid,” the defense secretary and former Marine Corps general, James Mattis, is reported to have said, offering that a similarly grandiose military parade was unfeasible in part because of the cost and the fear that tanks would tear up the streets of Washington.But Trump was already formulating his vision, telling Kelly: “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn’t look good for me.”According to the publication, the subject came up repeatedly. With each pushback, Trump’s admiration for the military advisers which he used to fawningly refer to as “my generals” cooled.In one exchange involving Kelly and Paul Selva, then vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Trump appeared surprised that the former military men were not supportive.Selva, who had grown up in António de Oliveira Salazar’s Portuguese dictatorship, informed Trump that “parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.” He added: “It’s not who we are.”“So, you don’t like the idea?” Trump responded.“No,” Selva said. “It’s what dictators do.”In a statement to the magazine, Trump said: “These were very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system.”TopicsDonald TrumpSecond world warUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Biden can still stop Trump, and Trumpism – if he can find a bold plan and moral visionRobert ReichThe US president has been struggling and his divisive rival still has the Republican party in his grip. But there are reasons for hope Will Joe Biden be re-elected in 2024? With his current approval rating in the cellar, most pundits assume he will be toast by the next presidential election. At 81, he would also be the oldest person ever elected president, slightly exceeding the typical American’s lifespan.So, the conventional thinking goes, Biden will be demolished by Donald Trump (or a Trump surrogate such as the Texas senator Ted Cruz or the Florida governor Ron DeSantis), thereby subjecting the US and the world to an even crazier authoritarian than Trump 1.0.But that’s way too simplistic. In reality, Biden’s current approval rating isn’t much different from Ronald Reagan’s about this point in his presidency when he was grappling with inflation and the inevitable buyer’s remorse that voters feel a year and a half into a presidency. Two and a half years later, Reagan had won 49 states in his re-election bid against Walter Mondale. (Reagan was then 73, just short of the typical American’s lifespan at the time.)Trump’s popularity has plummeted since the 2020 election – a casualty not just of most Americans’ outrage at his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and his role in the January 6 insurrection, but also of the poor showing (and terrifyingcharacteristics) of many of his endorsees in recent Republican primaries. The televised hearings by Congress’s select committee investigating January 6 have also reduced Trump’s standing with most voters.Meanwhile, Biden is scoring some legislative victories, including a major bill to subsidise semiconductor chip making in the US. And now, following a hard won Senate vote at the weekend, Biden has substantial bragging rights over a much larger bill to slow climate change, lower the cost of prescription drugs and make health insurance more affordable.​The president ​has also been getting kudos for the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaida successor to Osama bin Laden, in a spectacularly discreet US drone strike that resulted in no other casualties.Yet a basic problem ​remains ​for Biden. ​The Democratic party he knew when he was elected to the Senate 50 years ago, from blue-collar, working-class Delaware, is not the Democratic party that elected him in 2020. It’s now largely composed of young adults, college-educated voters and people of colour.In the intervening years, many working-class white voters who were once loyal Democrats joined the Republican party. As their wages stagnated and their jobs grew insecure, the Republican party skilfully and cynically channelled their economic frustrations into animus toward immigrants, Black people and Latinos, LGBTQ people, and “coastal elites” who want to control guns and permit abortions.These so-called culture wars have served to distract such voters from the brute fact that the Republican party has zero ideas to reverse the economic trends that left the working class behind.The wars have also distracted attention from the near record shares of national income and wealth that have shifted to the top; as well as the Republicans’ role in tax cuts on the wealthy, their attacks on labour unions and refusals to support social benefits that have become standard in most other advanced nations (such as paid sick and family leave, universal healthcare and generous unemployment insurance).During his 36 years in the Senate, followed by eight as Barack Obama’s vice-president, Biden surely became aware of the loss of these working-class voters. And he must have known of the Democrats’ failure to reverse the trends that left them behind and regain their loyalty.Democratic administrations expanded public health insurance, to be sure. But they also embraced global trade and financial deregulation, took a hands-off approach to corporate mergers, bailed out Wall Street and gave corporations free rein to bash labour unions (reducing the unionised portion of the private-sector workforce during the past half century from a third to 6%). It was a huge error – politically, economically and, one might even say, morally.What accounted for this error? I saw it up close: the Democratic party’s growing dependence on campaign money from big corporations, Wall Street and wealthy Americans – whose “donations” to both parties soared.Bill Clinton styled himself a “new Democrat” who would govern from above the old political divides – “triangulate”, in the parlance of his pollster, Dick Morris. In practice, he auctioned off the White House’s Lincoln bedroom to the highest bidders, made Wall Street’s Robert Rubin his chief economic adviser, advocated and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, opened the US to Chinese exports and cleared the way for Wall Street to gamble.Obama brought into his administration even more Wall Street alumni and made Larry Summers his chief economic adviser. Obama promptly bailed out the banks when their gambling threatened the entire economy, but asked nothing of them in return. Millions of Americans lost their homes, jobs and savings, yet not a single top Wall Street official went to jail.Small wonder that by 2016 two political outsiders gave dramatic expression to the populist bitterness that had been growing – Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. At the time, they even spoke the same language – complaining of a “rigged system” and a corrupt political establishment, and promising fundamental change.Biden saw all this unfold. He came to publicly regret his vote to ease banking rules. He never celebrated the virtue of free markets. He has been far closer to organised labour and more comfortable with non-college working-class voters than either Clinton or Obama. “I am a union man, period,” he has repeatedly said.He’s no free trader, either. Biden proposed relocating supply chains for pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and medical supplies to the US, and imposing tax penalties on companies that relocate jobs abroad and credits for those that bring them home. He has kept in place most of the trade restrictions that Trump placed on China.During the 2020 presidential campaign Biden was billed as a “centrist” seeking bipartisan solutions. But he had big, non-centrist ambitions. Seeking to be a “transformative” president, he openly sought a New Deal-style presidency. Once in office, he proposed the largest social agenda in recent American history.That Biden failed to get much of this agenda passed in his first term was due less to his own inadequacies than to the Democrats’ razor-thin congressional majorities, and the party’s own compromised position within the power structure of the US.But Biden’s and the Democrats’ deepest challenge was, and continues to be, voters’ distrust of the system. All political and economic systems depend fundamentally on people’s trust that its processes are free from bias and its outcomes are fair. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him has contributed to the distrust but is not responsible for it. Only about a third of Americans believe him.The real source of distrust is the same force that ushered Trump into the White House in 2016: four decades of near stagnant wages, widening inequality, a shrinking middle class, ever more concentrated wealth at the top and growing corruption in the form of campaign cash from the wealthy and corporations.If Democrats retain control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections (possible but unlikely, given the usual pattern in which the party in control loses it), Biden could still become a transformative president in the last two years of his first term if he focuses like a laser on reversing these trends. Even if Democrats do not hold on to Congress, Biden could be a moral voice for why these trends must be reversed and the system transformed. It is the president’s best hope for being re-elected in 2024.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley
TopicsUS elections 2024OpinionUS politicsJoe BidenDonald TrumpcommentReuse this content More

If Democrats want votes, they should rain fury on union-busting corporationsHamilton NolanWe supposedly have the most pro-union US president of our lifetimes. Let’s see him act like it In June, workers at a Chipotle restaurant in Augusta, Maine, became the first in the company’s history to file for a union election. Less than a month later, the company closed the store. In shutting down a location that was set to unionize, Chipotle was keeping company with Starbucks, which has suddenly undertaken a campaign to shut down several unionizing locations from coast to coast due to “safety” issues, and the health food company Amy’s Kitchen, which last month closed an entire factory in California where workers were organizing. It is, of course, impossible to “prove” that these companies closed these locations to try to crush the union drives, in the same sense that it is impossible to prove that a schoolyard bully meant to punch you in the face: he claims that he was merely punching the air while you happened to walk in front of his fist. Who’s to say what’s true in such a murky situation?Delta flights attendants race to unionize: ‘We’re the people behind the profits’Read morePlausible deniability aside, this is an extremely serious problem. Not just for the underpaid, overworked employees at all of these low-wage jobs, desperately hanging on to financial survival by their fingernails, but for all of us. America is mired in a half-century-long crisis of rising inequality that has been fueled, above all, by the combined erosion of labor power and the growth of the power of capital. The American dream enjoyed by the lucky baby-boom generation – buying a home and sending your kids to college on one income – is dead and gone, replaced by a thin crust of the rich sitting atop a huge swamp of once-middle-class jobs that no longer offer enough to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.The power of workers relative to the power of the investment class must be rebalanced. Rebuilding the power of unions is the only way out of this trap, unless you are credulous enough to believe that we will all be rescued by the sudden radicalization of the tax policymakers on the House ways and means committee. If you ever want to live in a country where the American dream is more than a cruel, tantalizing joke, you have a stake in the revival of organized labor.So when you see a big company closing down operations because workers there want to unionize, you should be pissed. Such coldhearted retaliation against people exercising a fundamental right on the job goes to the very heart of how we got all this inequality in the first place. It is meant not just to derail one union drive, but to strike fear in all the other workers who see it happen: if you ask for what you’re worth, this could happen to you. Shut up and eat your gruel, and be happy that the kindly billionaire CEO is allowing you to earn enough not to starve today. Even if you don’t work at a fast-food outlet or a factory, this should enrage you, as a human being. It is an assault on human dignity.America’s convoluted and hostile labor laws actually do allow a business to shut down in response to unionization, unless (and this is important) the company is doing so in order to scare its remaining employees out of unionizing – in other words, exactly what big employers like Chipotle and Starbucks would be doing by closing stores where workers have organized, as workers at many other stores across the country looked on. (Government regulators have not yet ruled on the legality of the recent closures by those companies.) Unfortunately, the evil, high-priced union-busting attorneys these companies hire are well aware that the gears of justice in labor law grind so slowly that even on the off chance that they were found to have closed the stores illegally, it would be far too late for it to mean anything to the workers who were laid off and forced to go find other jobs. The scary, unsubtle message to the company’s workforce would have already been sent.That’s why this stuff is not really a question of law, but of power. The working class, galvanized by the near-death experience of the pandemic, is busily organizing in new industries across the country; the labor movement today is as energized as it has been in two generations. Corporate America is determined to stop this. In the mid-1950s, one in three Americans was a union member; today, that figure is one in 10. Companies know that their ability to extract excess profits will go down as union density goes up. This is going to be a hard, nasty fight. As all of those recently laid-off Chipotle and Starbucks and Amy’s Kitchen workers know, it already is.It is also a golden opportunity for a Democratic party that has spent the last six years wringing its hands about losing working-class voters to the pseudo-populist (and racist) appeal of Trumpism. Want to get working people enthusiastic about Democrats again? Then the Democrats should help working people. National Democratic politicians should be holding press conferences decrying the greedy chief executives closing these stores just because workers tried to stand up for themselves. Joe Biden should be screaming his head off about billionaire Starbucks chief Howard Schultz’s disgusting union-busting at the same volume that Ron DeSantis is blathering about “woke corporations”.Republicans are insincere ghouls who want to harvest working-class votes while their policies stab working-class people in the back – but Democrats are ceding the terrain to these scumbags by failing to match their fervor. We don’t need our politicians making anodyne statements about how unions are nice. We need a rain of zeal and fury emanating from Washington, to terrify companies away from closing down their union stores with threats of merciless retributions from the state.History shows that organized labor thrives when it has the government’s support, and suffers without it. We are supposedly living under the most pro-union president of our lifetimes. So? Let’s hear some damn fire, man. The only reason companies feel so free to abuse their workers is that they don’t believe anyone will make them pay for it.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York
TopicsDemocratsOpinionUS unionsUS politicsJoe BidenStarbuckscommentReuse this content More