US Politics

Congress steps up fight to get guns out of domestic abusers’ handsThe reauthorization of the Violence Against Women act gives authorities new powers to crack down on domestic abusers with illegal guns Editor’s note: This story was produced by the non-profit newsroom Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Get email alerts on its investigations.State and local prosecutors and law enforcement across the US will have sweeping new powers to crack down on domestic abusers with illegal guns under a bipartisan deal approved by Congress.The measures, included in a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act – part of a $1.5tn spending bill passed Thursday night – come after an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting that was published in the Guardian and showed that domestic violence gun homicides leaped 58% over the last decade. Many of those victims were killed by abusers whose criminal histories prohibited them from possessing guns, Reveal found.A father used a ghost gun to kill his three daughters. It’s a sign of a growing crisisRead moreJoe Biden, who sponsored the first Violence Against Women Act almost 30 years ago, is expected to quickly sign the bill. The package includes domestic programs, military spending and $13.6bn in aid for Ukraine.Federal law bars felons and some people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from possessing firearms. But state and local law enforcement authorities, who handle most domestic violence cases, can’t enforce those federal laws and federal prosecutors haven’t prioritized them, so even egregious violations of gun bans often go unpunished. In addition, because federal law and most state statutes don’t address how to retrieve weapons from people who aren’t legally permitted to have them, gun bans are largely enforced on an honor system that relies on abusers to disarm themselves.Advocates and gun policy experts said Reveal’s reporting spurred lawmakers to break a partisan logjam.“The reporting definitely lit a fire for members of Congress to act on this issue,” said Marissa Edmund, senior policy analyst for gun violence prevention at the Center for American Progress.The investigation, which chronicled scores of people killed in domestic violence-related gun homicides in recent years, showed lawmakers “that these are lives that are lost and the pain of that loss extends to their families and communities and knowing that it was preventable. This is a huge win for survivors and advocates to close loopholes that allow some domestic abusers to access firearms.”“We’re closing gaps that exist between state and local and federal law enforcement,” Edmund added. “There will be more coordination on the state and federal level so abusers won’t have access to those firearms. It will save hundreds of lives.”The Violence Against Women Act has been reauthorized several times since it was first enacted in 1994, but the most recent update had been stalled in Congress since 2019. The new bill includes the highest funding level ever to support programs for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. It also includes broad provisions that address some of the law enforcement failures that Reveal highlighted in its reporting.One new provision empowers the US Department of Justice to appoint state, local, territorial and tribal prosecutors to serve as special assistant US attorneys to prosecute violations of federal firearms laws. Another aims to expand the reach of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the chief federal agency charged with enforcing the nation’s gun laws, by allowing the attorney general to deputize local and state law enforcement officers to act as ATF agents to investigate abusers who break federal firearms laws.To determine where those special prosecutors and law enforcement officers should focus, the legislation directs the justice department to identify at least 75 jurisdictions across the country where gun-related domestic violence is soaring and local authorities lack the resources to respond. The justice department will also establish contacts in every US attorney’s office and ATF field office to handle requests for assistance from state and local police about intimate partner violence cases involving suspects believed to have guns illegally.The updated act also instructs federal authorities to notify local law enforcement when felons and domestic abusers attempt to buy a gun illegally.The federal government doesn’t track the number of abusers who kill their intimate partners with illegal guns. As part of its investigation, Reveal tracked down at least 110 people across the US who were shot to death from 2017 through 2020 by abusers barred from possessing firearms, providing an unprecedented accounting of such killings. The pandemic has been an especially lethal period for abuse victims. Gun homicides involving intimate partners rose a stunning 25% in 2020 compared with the previous year, to the highest level in almost three decades.TopicsUS gun controlGuns and liesDomestic violenceGun crimeWomenBiden administrationUS CongressUS politicsReuse this content More

InterviewLincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new warMartin Pengelly The CNN analyst says the 16th president’s example can guide America through dark times – at home as well as abroadJohn Avlon has published a book about Abraham Lincoln and peace in a time of war. He sees the irony, of course.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead more“I’d like to think that sometimes I can look around corners,” says the CNN political analyst, a former editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast. “But I didn’t anticipate that Putin would invade Ukraine opposite the book.“But there is a foreign policy dimension to the book that is probably unexpected.”In Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, Avlon offers both narrative and analytical history. He retells and examines the end of the American civil war, Lincoln’s plans for reuniting his country, his assassination and how in the former slaveholding states Reconstruction was defeated and racism enshrined in law.He also considers how Lincoln’s ideas about reconciliation and rebuilding lived on, ultimately to influence the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after the second world war, and how the 16th president’s politics of “the golden rule” – treat others as you would have them treat you – offers a model for solving division at home and abroad.More than 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln, but Avlon’s arrives in an America still subject to the attentions of Donald Trump, while from Russia Vladimir Putin pitches Ukraine into war and the world into nuclear dread.“When people pick up a book about Abraham Lincoln now,” Avlon says, “I think the flow-through is [about how] we belatedly realised the dangers of taking democracy for granted, of embracing or encouraging these tribal divides, which can wreak havoc.“So, too, there’s a real danger at taking for granted the liberal democratic order that has preserved a high degree of peace and prosperity in Europe over the past 75 years.“… There are moments where we abruptly remember that defending democracy at home and abroad is a cause that can be as heroic as winning it in the first place, and no less urgent.“It gets back to, ‘Let us have faith that that right makes might’” – a key line from Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860 – “and the flip side of that is what’s being tested [by Russia]. There are people in the world who believe that might makes right.”‘Despotism taken pure’Lincoln said a famous thing about Russia in a letter in 1855, five years before his election as president.“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote to a friend, Joshua Speed. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal’. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes’. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics’.“When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”Other than that there isn’t much to go on, Russia-wise. But as Avlon points out, Lincoln was writing not just about the curse of slavery but about a domestic political threat: the Know Nothings, a nativist-populist party.The link between the Know Nothings and the Republican party of Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene has been made before, including by Avlon himself.“It’s obviously safe to say that Lincoln wouldn’t recognise today’s Republican party. His Republican party was the modern progressive party of its time, it was a big tent party, dedicated to overturning slavery.“I think, as you are trying to root Lincoln in the context of contemporary politics, you definitely need to go beneath the party label. And the fact that the Republican party now finds its base among the states of the former Confederacy is a clue … The labels may change but the song remains the same, to a distressing extent.“I was struck by what [Ulysses S] Grant said in 1875. And I checked that quote three times, because it seemed too on the nose: ‘If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.’”‘Our nation is not evenly divided’Many observers think a second American civil war is possible, along fault lines widened by a white supremacist far right which may see Putin and Putinism as a model for negating demographic change. Avlon, whose book has been well received in the political centre and on the never-Trump right, does not think civil war is imminent.“I thought Jamelle Bouie made a great point in a column a few weeks ago,” he says, “where he said, ‘Look, we don’t have structural issues like slavery.’“I do think that the current trend of polarisation, where politics becomes a matter of identity and the incentive structures move our politicians towards the extremes, rather than finding ways to work and reason together, is incredibly dangerous.“But first of all, if you look at the numbers, our nation is not evenly divided. We’re not a 50-50 nation on most issues. We’re 70-30 nation and many issues, whether it’s gay marriage, marijuana, [which] run through the country [with 70% support].“The section that believes the big lie [that Trump’s defeat was caused by voter fraud], they’re very loud. But they’re 30%, a super-majority of the Republican party. We often forget that a plurality of Americans are self-identified independents.‘What it means to be an American’: Abraham Lincoln and a nation dividedRead more“That does not diminish the danger to democracy when one party buys into a self-evident lie. Or when around a quarter of the country refuses to get vaccinated during a pandemic.“But you have to have faith in American democracy, when you look at history, because we have been through far worse before. Every generation faces great challenges. And if you’re overwhelmed by them, or pessimistic … that will not help solve them. You know, difficulty is the excuse that history never accepts.”Histories like his, Avlon says, can help readers “draw on the past to confront problems and then aim towards a better future”. His book aims “in part to give us perspective on our own problems. We’ve been through worse. We’ll get through this.“We need to be aware it’s dangerous to play with these tribal divisions for short-term political gain. And that we have an obligation to form the broadest coalition possible to defend democracy and our deepest values, which we forget sometimes.“Rooting things in the second founding and Lincoln, I think, can be clarifying and can help build that big tent again.”
Lincoln and the Fight for Peace is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
TopicsBooksHistory booksAbraham LincolnAmerican civil warUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

‘Arsonists with keys to the firehouse’: once-obscure state races fuel fears for US democracyCandidates for secretary of state are raising huge sums after Trump’s lies shook 2020 election Last year, Brad Raffensperger was attracting national headlines for taking a stand against Donald Trump and his lies about the 2020 election.In a phone call that was quickly made public, Trump demanded that Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, “find” enough votes to deprive Joe Biden of a victory in the battleground state. Raffensperger refused to do so and won widespread praise for his courage.Raffensperger is paying for his actions in a way that reveals how his once obscure elected position is now at the center of a battle for the future of American democracy – and attracting all the big money and political heat that entails.This year, Raffensperger is facing a brutal primary race against a Trump-backed candidate, the US congressman Jody Hice, and trying to cling on to his job. Hice, who has said the 2020 results in Georgia would have been different if the race had been “fair”, has already raised more than twice as much money as Raffensperger.Hice’s impressive haul is partly thanks to the unusually high number of out-of-state donations that his campaign has attracted, as more Americans across the country zero in on secretary of state races.‘This should terrify the nation’: the Trump ally seeking to run Arizona’s electionsRead moreAnd Georgia is not unique. As Trump and his allies continue to spread the “big lie” of widespread fraud in the 2020 race, many voters are focusing their attention – and wallets – on the officials who oversee states’ elections.Secretary of state candidates in both parties are now posting substantial fundraising figures, intensifying concerns over how election administration has become a heated political issue in the US.Secretary of state races have historically attracted little notice and even less money. The winners of these elections assume rather bureaucratic roles, and their duties may include managing state records, overseeing the department of motor vehicles and keeping the state seal. But in many states, the secretary of state also serves – crucially – as the chief election official.In the weeks after the 2020 election, as Trump and his supporters falsely claimed the results had been tainted by fraud, secretaries of state in key battleground states became the target of intimidation and threats. Now the former president is using the power of his endorsement to wield influence in the races for those posts.While Trump did not endorse any candidates for secretary of state in 2020, he has already endorsed three in the 2022 cycle: Hice in Georgia, Mark Finchem in Arizona and Kristina Karamo in Michigan. All three candidates have embraced the lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election by allowing fraud to affect the results. Biden’s margin of victory in each of those states was less than three points, and their input could prove decisive in the next presidential election.“They are willing to overturn the will of the voters in order to choose the winner,” said Kim Rogers, executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. “It is disempowering, and it is akin to giving an arsonist keys to the firehouse.”Republicans and Democrats’ disparate concerns over election fairness have contributed to a significant increase in donations to secretary of state candidates.According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, donations for secretary of state races in six battleground states are three times higher than they were at this point in the last election cycle, in 2018, and eight times higher than the 2014 cycle. Fundraising has particularly increased in Arizona, Geor­gia and Michigan, which also happen to be the three states where Trump has issued an endorsement.“A lot more money is going to these once sleepy, bureaucratic races,” said Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s elections and government program. “The places that we’ve seen the biggest increase – which is basically Arizona, Georgia and Michigan – each of those places had some degree of nationally covered election controversy around 2020.”The Brennan Center analysis also indicated that out-of-state donations to secretary of state candidates are increasing at an even faster rate than overall donations. Finchem, who has called on the Arizona legislature to decertify the 2020 presidential results in three major counties, already has six times as many donors as every secretary of state candid­ate in the 2018 elec­tion combined. Two-thirds of those donors live outside Arizona.Democrats have taken note of Republican enthusiasm about secretary of state elections, and they are responding by ramping up their own fundraising.The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State and its partner groups raised a record $4.5m in 2021, compared with $1.5m raised during the entire 2018 cycle. The organization has said it is on track to meet its fundraising goal of $15m for the 2022 cycle, in part because of the increase in first-time individual donors. Other progressive groups, including End Citizens United and iVote, have pledged to spend tens of millions more on secretary of state races this year.“The engagement is at every single level. We have seen a massive increase in our email list and grassroots support,” Rogers said. Rogers believes Democratic activists are increasingly turning their attention to secretary of state races partly because they have been frustrated by the lack of progress at the federal level. Congressional Democrats have repeatedly tried to pass national voting rights legislation, which would reverse some of the voting restrictions enacted by 19 states last year, but Senate Republicans have successfully used the filibuster to defeat those bills.‘The testing ground’: how Republican state parties grow Trumpism 2.0Read more“I think there are a lot of activists who got involved in 2020 who fought incredibly hard for the federal voting rights legislation in 2021,” Rogers said. “When 50 Republicans blocked it yet again, folks were looking for a way to stay engaged and to continue the fight, and they shifted their assets into the states.”Republicans complain that Democrats are trying to alter election regulations to their benefit at both the federal and state levels. Andrew Romeo, communications director for the Republican State Leadership Committee, said Democrats were “ramping up their interest in secretary of state races because they see control of these offices as a way to change the rules to compensate for their inability to win elections”.Romeo’s group is an umbrella organization that promotes Republican candidates for state legislatures, state supreme courts and secretary of state offices, among other roles. The RSLC and its policy partner group raised $33.3m in 2021, exceeding their previous odd-year record by more than $14m.But to Democrats like Rogers, the outcome of secretary of state races in key battleground states represents nothing less than the fate of American democracy.“These folks want to rig the game, and they are out to do that,” Rogers said. Vandewalker fears that the increasingly dire messaging about secretary of state races will contribute to a political climate in which both parties distrust the outcome of elections.“Money and attention being paid to these races is not inherently a bad thing. The voters should be informed about these candidates,” Vandewalker said. But he adds, “that kind of rhetoric is extremely dangerous to voter confidence because of course one side or the other is going to win and is going to count the votes. And democracy counts on people accepting the result, even if their side doesn’t win.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsGeorgiafeaturesReuse this content More

One Damn Thing After Another review: Bill Barr’s self-serving screed Donald Trump’s attorney general wants you to know the bad stuff wasn’t his fault and the media and Democrats were nastyTake Bill Barr literally, but not too seriously. One day before his memoir was published, the former attorney general told NBC he would vote for Donald Trump for president in 2024, if Trump were the Republican nominee. For all Barr’s protestations about how the man was unsuited to the job, he continues to resist being banished from Trump’s garden.William Barr: Trump is full of bull – but I’ll vote for himRead moreSaid differently, Barr’s memoirs are best viewed as just one more installment of Trump-alumni performance art.As a read, One Damn Thing After Another delivers the expected. Barr gives Trump a thumbs-up for galvanizing the Republican white working-class base, satisfying social conservatives and meeting the demands of donors.At the same time, Barr lets us know suburbia came to find Trump offensive and insists that in the end, Trump crashed and burned despite Barr’s best efforts. Ultimately, like everyone else the 45th president ceased to find useful, Barr was simply spat out – a reality his memoir does at least acknowledge.The book is informative – to a point. As expected, Barr omits relevant facts and engages in score-settling. It’s a first-person tell-all, after all.Barr records the suicide in federal custody of Jeffrey Epstein, predator and friend of presidents Trump and Clinton. He makes no mention of the fact that his own father, Donald Barr, gave Epstein one of his first jobs, as a high-school math teacher at the Dalton school, a tony Manhattan establishment. Even then, former students have said, Epstein creeped out young women.Barr was attorney general for the first time under George HW Bush. In his book, he attacks Democrats and the media for their pursuit and coverage of “Iraqgate” and the US government’s extension of loan guarantees to Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the invasion of Kuwait. Barr singles out William Safire, the late Nixon speechwriter and New York Times columnist, for special condemnation.A Clinton administration investigation cleared Barr of legal wrongdoing – a fact he rightly emphasizes. But he neglects to mention that in October 1989, Bush signed National Security Directive 26, which effectively boosted Iraq as a counterbalance to Iran. From there, things didn’t exactly work out as planned. The president and his team overly emboldened Saddam. His unprovoked land grab was an unintended consequence of a policy pivot.Barr lets us know he grew up in a loving home, a product of a Catholic education, a player of the bagpipes. He attended the Horace Mann school in Riverdale, an affluent part of the Bronx. As Barr notes, the school was liberal and predominately Jewish.As a Columbia undergraduate, he stood against Vietnam war protesters. His antipathy toward the radical left is longstanding. He joined the Majority Coalition, a group of students and faculty members who defended the main administration building. As recorded by the late Diana Trilling, some rioters had no qualms about trashing the school, then demanding academic honors.Unstated by Barr is the operative campus divide, “Staten Island v Scarsdale”: conservative, often Catholic students from the blue-collar outer borough versus liberal, often Jewish students from the well-heeled suburbs. Though far from working class, Barr was firmly in the first camp.Barr came by his conservatism organically. His father served in the second world war. His older brother fought in Vietnam. In 1964, Barr helped his dad distribute campaign literature for Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated presidential campaign. Amid the turmoil of the 60s, Barr yearned for the stability of yesterday. He still does: he is a culture warrior in a Brooks Brothers suit.He takes shots at James Comey and Robert Mueller, key figures in the Russia investigation. Of course he does. He also takes aim at Lawrence Walsh, special counsel in Iran-Contra. Barr accuses Walsh, now dead, of torpedoing Bush’s campaign comeback in ’92 by filing election-eve charges against Casper Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary. Barr’s ire is understandable.But he also offers up a full-throated defense of his own decision to drop government charges against Michael Flynn, despite the Trump ally’s guilty plea to lying to the FBI and, later, demand for martial law. Furthermore, Barr says nary a word in response to the volley of criticism he earned from the federal bench.In spring 2020, Judge Reggie Walton, a George W Bush appointee, “seriously” questioned the attorney general’s integrity and credibility. To drive home the point, to describe Barr’s behavior over the Russia report, Walton deployed words like “distorted” and “misleading”.Emmett Sullivan scorned Barr’s legal gymnastics over Flynn. Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the government had to turn over a memorandum it relied upon in declining to prosecute Trump. Her take was lacerating. Not only had Barr been personally “disingenuous” by announcing his decision before Mueller’s report was released, Berman Jackson said, but the Department of Justice itself had been “disingenuous to this court”.Insurgency review: how Trump took over the Republican partyRead moreSuffice to say, Walton, Sullivan and Berman Jackson do not appear in Barr’s book.As luck would have it, though, Barr does take aim at Joe Biden for his stance on Russia. “Demonizing [Vladimir] Putin is not a foreign policy,” Barr writes, nor “the way grown-ups should think”.Really? Looks like Barr didn’t have an invasion of Ukraine on his bingo card. Trump’s admiration for Putin, of course, continues.As it turned out, Barr wasn’t alone in spilling his guts to NBC. In a letter to Lester Holt, its lead anchor, Trump wrote of his former attorney general: “He is groveling to the media, hoping to gain acceptance that he doesn’t deserve.”So true.
One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General is published in the US by HarperCollins
TopicsBooksWilliam BarrUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationRepublicansPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

Judge blocks Texas from investigating parents of transgender childrenThe halt follows an ACLU lawsuit that accused Greg Abbott of trampling ‘on the constitutional rights of transgender children’ A Texas judge has temporarily blocked the state from investigating parents who provide their transgender children with gender-affirming medical treatments, following a hearing in which one state inspector said they were told to pursue parents even when they did not think abuse had occurred.The temporary halt, issued by a district court judge on Friday, follows a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who the organization accused of trampling “on the constitutional rights of transgender children, their parents, and professionals who provide vital care to transgender children”.‘When a child tells you who they are, believe them’: the psychologist taking on Texas’ anti-trans policiesRead moreJudge Amy Clark Meachum held a hearing on Friday as she considered a request to temporarily block Abbot’s order. Randa Mulanax, an employee of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), was the first witness to testify.Mulanax said that she has resigned from the department because of concerns about the directive, and said cases involving gender confirming care were being treated differently than others. Mulanax said her agency did not give workers the option to determine a reported case of child abuse involving a transgender child was “priority none” status, meaning it did not merit investigation.“We had to be investigating these cases,” Mulanax testified, adding that she has handed in her resignation notice because she believes the directive is “unethical”.Such investigations could remove trans children from families and jail parents who provide them with procedures.The hearing is part of pushback by LGBTQ+ groups against conservative politicians’ proposals in dozens of US states to criminalize gender-affirming procedures for trans youth in the run up to midterm elections.Abbott ordered doctors, nurses and teachers to report such care or face criminal penalties.The ACLU asked Meachum to impose a statewide injunction on investigations by the DFPS into what the civil rights group said was “medically necessary gender-affirming care”.Meachum last week temporarily blocked an investigation into the parents of a 16-year-old transgender girl, saying it would make them the subject of “an unfounded child abuse investigation”.Opponents of gender-transitioning procedures say minors are too young to make life-altering decisions about their bodies. Advocates argue that it is crucial care that has been politically weaponized, impacting the mental health of trans youth who suffer a disproportionately high rate of suicide.More than 60 major US businesses, including Apple and Johnson & Johnson, signed their names to an advertisement that ran in Texas on Friday opposing Abbott’s directive, saying “discrimination is bad for business”.The DFPS has opened nine child welfare inquiries subject to Abbott’s directive, a spokesman said.Megan Mooney, a clinical psychologist, said the governor’s directive has caused “outright panic” among mental health professionals and families of transgender youth.“Parents are terrified that [child protective services] is going to come and question their children, or take them away,” Mooney testified. “Mental health professionals are scared that we’re either violating our standards and professional codes of conduct, or in violation of the law.”TopicsTexasLGBT rightsUS politicsLaw (US)Children’s healthnewsReuse this content More

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2.15pm EST

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Texas court deals fresh blow to abortion rights

1.54pm EST

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Interim summary

12.59pm EST

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Biden to House Democrats: November midterms are the ‘most important in modern history’

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Biden: Russia would pay a ‘severe price’ for use of chemical weapons

10.37am EST

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Biden: US and allies to deny ‘most favored nation’ status to Russia

10.02am EST

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Pelosi: US will seek to end normal trade relations with Russia

9.31am EST

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Harris: US commitment to Nato’s article 5 ‘ironclad’

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10.37am EST

10:37

Biden: US and allies to deny ‘most favored nation’ status to Russia

Joe Biden has announced that the US was moving to revoke Russia’s “most favored nation status” in coordination with allies.
Revoking Russia’s permanent normal trade relations will “make it harder for Russia to business with the United States”. He said the US was “taking the first steps” to ban imports of Russian vodka, seafood and diamonds.
Biden thanked Pelosi for pushing the US to take this action, and for holding off on a measure in Congress until he “could line up all of our key allies.”
“Putin is the aggressor and Putin must pay a price,” he said.
He also detailed other economic sanctions the US has taken to destabilize the Russian economy and squeeze Putin and those around him.
Biden said the US and its allies were targeting an expanded list of Russian oligarchs,and ramping up efforts to capture their “ ill-begotten gains.”
“They support Putin. They steal from the Russian people and they seek to hide their money in our countries,” Biden said, emphasizing one of the most popular aspects of the west’s crackdown on Russia. “They’re part of that kleptocracy that exists in Moscow and they must share in the pain of these sanctions.”
In addition to seizing their “superyachts” and vacation homes, Biden said the US was also banning the export of luxury luxury goods to Russia, calling it the latest, but “not the last step we’re going to take.”

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at 10.59am EST

4.52pm EST

16:52

State department spokesman Ned Price denounced Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, for downplaying the strike on a maternity hospital during a security council meeting convened by Moscow earlier today.
“This was a brutal strike against a maternity hospital that killed innocent Ukrainians,” he said.

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State Deptartment spokesperson Ned Price calls out Russian Ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebenzya for peddling misinformation at the Security Council:“This was a brutal strike against a maternity hospital that killed innocent Ukrainians.” pic.twitter.com/W38FHUNxNV

March 11, 2022

4.43pm EST

16:43

The Senate confirmed George Tsunis to be the US ambassador to Greece on Friday.

Senate Press Gallery
(@SenatePress)
The #Senate confirmed by voice vote: Executive Calendar #782 George J. Tsunis to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to Greece.

March 11, 2022

Earlier this year, The Guardian’s David Smith wrote about Biden’s nomination of Tsunis, a hotel developer and Democratic donor with no diplomatic experience. Tsunis was previously nominated by Obama to be the ambassador to Norway. It did not go well, per Smith’s report.

On that occasion Tsunis was Barack Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Norway. Bumbling and ill-prepared, he admitted that he had never been to Norway and referred to the country as having a president when, as a constitutional monarchy, it does not.

4.18pm EST

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Martin Pengelly

At an Oval Office meeting with the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in 2017, Donald Trump asked his national security adviser if US troops were in Donbas, territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists, which Vladimir Putin last month used as pretext for a full and bloody invasion. More

Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017, ex-ambassador says in bookMarie Yovanovitch, who was fired by Trump in 2019, reveals details of then president’s Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian counterpart At an Oval Office meeting with the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in 2017, Donald Trump asked his national security adviser if US troops were in Donbas, territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists, which Vladimir Putin last month used as pretext for a full and bloody invasion.Describing the meeting in a new book, the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, writes: “An affirmative answer to that question would have meant that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia.”Likelihood of criminal charges against Trump rising, experts sayRead moreYovanovitch adds: “I pondered whether it was better to interpret Trump’s question as suggesting that the commander-in-chief thought it possible that US troops were fighting Russia-led forces, or instead as an indicator that the president wasn’t clear which country was on the other side of the war against Ukraine.“Either way, it was disconcerting that he did not seem to know where we had our troops – his troops – deployed. I could only imagine what the Ukrainians were thinking.”Trump fired Yovanovitch in 2019, amid attempts to withhold military aid to Ukraine in return for political dirt on Joe Biden and other rivals, an affair which fueled Trump’s first impeachment.Yovanovitch describes the Trump-Poroshenko meeting in Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir, which will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.The book comes three weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which followed years of proxy warfare in the east of the country.Yovanovitch also writes that Trump told Poroshenko Ukraine “was a corrupt country, which he knew because a Ukrainian friend at Mar-a-Lago had told him”.Trump, she says, also said: “Crimea was Russian, as the locals spoke Russian”.Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, a move never recognized by the international community. Yovanovitch writes that Trump’s words were “surprising enough to hear from one head of state to another” but Trump topped them by asking his national security adviser, HR McMaster, whether US troops were in Donbas.“Everyone kept a poker face on,” she writes.Echoing descriptions of Trump’s favored working techniques by multiple close aides, Yovanovitch says Poroshenko deployed “visual aids, which Trump really liked” as he “ably pushed back” and made his case for support.Poroshenko requested the inclusion of Javelin anti-tank missiles in a package of security aid. Trump seemed open to the idea, Yovanovitch writes. In 2019, however, news broke of his attempt to withhold military aid and secure dirt on Biden.Yovanovitch’s book comes as Poroshenko’s successor, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, leads his country’s fight against Russian invaders, his forces using US-supplied Javelins and other weapons sent by allies.The Poroshenko meeting was brief and forms a small part of a book which tells Yovanovitch’s story of machinations involving Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, which led to her firing and Trump’s impeachment.But her description of the meeting echoes others by sources including John Bolton, McMaster’s successor as national security adviser, which have shown Trump risking embarrassment and mishap when one-on-one with world leaders.Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, recently revealed that Trump risked disaster in an early meeting with his counterpart Reuven Rivlin, when he praised the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and criticized Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli prime minister, for being unwilling to seek peace.Trump’s comments “knocked everyone off their chairs”, Friedman wrote.Participants in the meeting with Poroshenko appear to have stayed seated.Yovanovitch writes that she sensed “Trump had come into the meeting viewing Ukraine as a ‘loser’ country, smaller and weaker than Russia”, only to be “a little surprised by Poroshenko”, who was “as physically imposing as Trump” and who was also “a billionaire businessman”.After the meeting, Trump said Ukraine was “a place that everybody’s been reading about”. Poroshenko told reporters he was “satisfied with the results of the negotiations”, and said the two leaders discussed military and technical cooperation.Yovanovitch “hoped that Poroshenko had created the kind of favorable impression that would make Trump rethink his views of Ukraine and its importance to our strategic interests”.However, she adds, “Trump’s obsequiousness toward Putin was a frequent and continuing cause for concern”.In 2018, Trump staged an infamous summit with Putin in Helsinki at which the two men spoke in private for close to two hours. Trump’s “toadying up” to Putin at the press conference which followed, Yovanovitch writes, made her lose her appetite.“When the Ukrainian media called,” she writes, “… we took the opportunity to reinforce the point that US policy was to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression”.Five years on from Trump’s meeting with Poroshenko, with Ukraine in a fight for its existence, Trump seems not entirely to have shed his suspicion that US troops could be in the country – a step the Biden administration has made clear will not be taken, given the potentially huge cost of confrontation with Russia.Last month, Trump appeared to misunderstand a Fox News host, to the extent of believing Americans troops had landed in Ukraine.“You shouldn’t be saying that, because you and everybody else shouldn’t know about it,” the former president said, seemingly mistaking reports of Russian troop movements for US ones. “They should do that secretly, not be doing that through the great Laura Ingraham.”“No, those are the Russians,” Ingraham corrected him.“Oh, I thought you said that we were sending people in,” Trump said. “That’ll be next.”TopicsBooksPolitics booksUS politicsDonald TrumpUkraineCrimeaRussianewsReuse this content More

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