US Politics

US in ‘very active discussion’ with allies to ban import of Russian oilSecretary of state says Biden has convened a meeting of his National Security Council on the subject

Blinken vows to escalate sanctions on Russia
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the US and its allies are engaged in a “very active discussion” about banning the import of Russian oil and natural gas in a new escalation of sanctions in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine.Blinken vows to escalate sanctions on Russia but warns war could last ‘some time’Read moreThe US and western allies have until now held off on current energy supplies from Russia, in order to avoid blowback on their own economies, where inflation is already making prices of gasoline and other goods a problem.Earlier this week, the White House publicly rebuffed suggestions from lawmakers that the US ban Russian oil, which made up 3% of all the crude shipments that arrived in the US last year, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.But Europe is far more dependent, with an estimated 30% of oil and 39% of gas supplies coming from Russia.Blinken told CNN on Sunday morning that Joe Biden convened a meeting of his National Security Council on the subject the day before.“We are now talking to our European partners and allies to look in a coordinated way at the prospect of banning the import of Russian oil while making sure that there is still an appropriate supply of oil on world market,” said Blinken. “That’s a very active discussion as we speak.”Republicans and a growing number of Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, back the idea of a Russian oil import ban, arguing that Russia’s lucrative exports fund Putin’s war effort.“I’m all for that… ban the oil coming from Russia,” Pelosi said at her weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill on Thursday. But the White House has maintained that it doesn’t want to cause domestic fuel prices to rise.“We don’t have a strategic interest in reducing the global supply of energy,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said.Energy analysts have warned that there are limited options for maintaining oil supplies without Russian imports. OPEC Plus member countries, which include Russia, last week rejected increasing production , and global inventories of oil are low.Oil rose to $117 a barrel last week, the highest price since 2008. One option to maintain price stability, analysts have said, is to reduce demand – a process known to traders as “demand destruction.”On Sunday’s US TV talk shows, Florida senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, said he supported Biden’s resistance to issuing a Russian oil import ban so far. But he said the US could “phase that in pretty rapidly” using “reserves for the purposes of buffering that”.“We have more than enough ability in this country to produce enough oil to make up for the percentage that we buy from Russia,” Rubio said, adding that: “This notion that somehow banning Russian oil would raise prices on American consumers is an admission that this guy, that this killer, that this butcher, Vladimir Putin, has leverage over us.”“I think we have enough that we should produce more American oil and buy less Russian oil or none – actually, none at all,” Rubio added.But the issue of producing more oil in the US is a controversial one, with partisan battles over the role of government in using laws to curb greenhouse gas emissions and wean Americans off fossil fuels in the face of the climate crisis.TopicsBiden administrationOilAntony BlinkenUS politicsRussiaEuropenewsReuse this content More

Wave of House Democratic retirements stokes fears for party’s election prospectsThirty-one Democrats, a modern record, are stepping down as the party risks bleak midterms. But leaders say hope remains For the Michigan congresswoman Brenda Lawrence, it was a question from her husband: “When is our time?” For the North Carolina congressman David Price, it was the judgment that “the time has come” to step down.Some retiring Democrats have blamed the gridlock and dysfunction on Capitol Hill while others point to the redrawing of congressional maps. Still, others cite the rise of political extremism and the deteriorating relations between members of Congress, particularly in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. Announcing his decision to retire last year, the Wisconsin congressman, Ron Kind, was frank: “The truth is, I’ve run out of gas.” The decision not to seek re-election is both deeply personal and political. But as the party braces for a grueling midterm election in November, a rising number of House Democrats are opting not to return to Congress next year.On Monday, the Florida congressman Ted Deutch announced that he would not seek re-election, bringing the total number of Democratic departures from the House so far this cycle to 31.Biden bids to talk up ailing agenda after State of the Union draws mixed reviewsRead moreAmong them, eight Democrats are seeking other offices next year, like Tim Ryan of Ohio, who is running for the Senate, and Karen Bass of California, who is running to be the mayor of Los Angeles. Some retiring members are powerful veterans,such as Kentucky’s John Yarmuth, chair of the budget committee and Oregon’s Peter DeFazio, chair of the transportation and infrastructure committee. Others represent politically competitive districts, like Stephanie Murphy of Florida and Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona.It’s a worrying trend for Democrats. Congressional retirements are often an early sign of a wave election – for the other party. In 2018, dozens of House Republicans did not seek re-election, including the then House majority leader, Paul Ryan. The party lost 41 seats that year, and Democrats gained control of the chamber, in an election cycle widely viewed as a referendum on Donald Trump.This year, the political winds are reversed. Republicans are trumpeting each retirement as a sign that Democrats’ hopes of keeping their majority are fading. “Their majority is doomed,” the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spokesman, Mike Berg, said recently. “Retire or lose.”Though many vacancies are in safely Democratic districts, the rush of retirements come as the party faces significant historical headwinds. The president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterm elections. And in the House, Democrats can only afford to lose a handful of seats before surrendering control. With Biden’s sagging approval ratings, Democrats’ agenda stalled, public discontent over the economy and inflation, and Republicans’ strong performance in a series of off-cycle elections, the political landscape looks grim for the party in power. Adding to the uncertainty is the once-a-decade redistricting process when a state’s congressional and legislative districts are redrawn.The House is often a reflection of the national American mood, which public opinion polls show is pessimistic. Voters are frustrated with their political leaders and the party is bracing for a backlash. In polling that asks voters which party they would support on an election day – as opposed to which congressional candidate – Republicans repeatedly hold the edge.In an interview, Price, 81, said his decision leave Congress after three decades was “mainly personal” and not circumstantial. During the Trump years, he said many long-serving Democrats postponed the decision to retire because they believed their experience was needed on Capitol Hill. Now they feel the time is right.Price’s new district is rated safely Democratic, and after a long redistricting battle, the North Carolina state supreme court recently approved congressional maps that are favorable to the party.“I would suggest they don’t bring out the champagne quite yet,” he said of Republicans. “This redistricting in our state and a lot of states is turning out not to be quite the windfall for them that they thought.”Though Democrats have fared far better than expected in the redistricting process, it was still a factor in some decisions to retire or seek another office.“The number of retirements is naturally higher in years that end in ‘two’ because those are redistricting cycles,” said Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.It’s been a brutal experience for some. Congressman Jim Cooper witnessed his reliably Democratic Nashville seat being carved up into three different districts that Trump would have easily won in 2020. He decried the move as “raw politics” and an effort to dilute the electoral power of Black voters.A day after the Tennessee legislature approved the map, Cooper announced his retirement from Congress, where he had served for more than three decades.“I explored every possible way, including lawsuits, to stop the gerrymandering and to win one of the three new congressional districts that now divide Nashville,” he said. “There’s no way, at least for me in this election cycle, but there may be a path for other worthy candidates.”John Rogers, a Republican pollster who was the executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee during the 2018 midterm elections cycle, says the retirements of powerful and long-serving Democrats is a strong sign that the party is bracing for defeat in November.“There are too many committee chairs retiring for this to be just about redistricting,” he said, adding that the prospect of losing a gavel or ending a lengthy career in the minoritywas unattractive to some politicians.Retirements deprive a party of the advantages that come with incumbency: fundraising, name recognition and a deep understanding of their constituency, factors that are especially critical in competitive seats.“Incumbency is not as valuable as it used to be,” said Kondik, author of The Long Red Thread: How Democratic Dominance Gave Way to Republican Advantage in US House Elections. “But open seats are generally harder to defend, particularly in a wave-style environment.”Clyburn: supreme court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson ‘beyond politics’Read moreNot since 1992 have so many House Democrats opted not to seek re-election. And with states still finalizing their congressional maps and candidate filing deadlines approaching, there might be more retirements to come.“However bad it is to serve in Congress, it’s worse to serve in the minority,” Kondik said, “particularly in the House.” Notably bucking the trend, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has announced her decision to run again, extinguishing speculation that she would retire at the end of the term. Pelosi was re-elected as speaker after agreeing to step down from the role by the end of 2022.The Republican retirements, though far fewer, are also telling.As of this week, 15 House Republicans have said they won’t run for re-election, with seven running for another office. Among them are more moderate members including Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and John Katko of New York, who have faced conservative backlash for voting to impeach Trump.Democrats argue that much could change before the November elections.The Covid-19 pandemic appears to be in retreat, and the economy remains strong, despite inflation. Biden has started to ramp up his travel around the country touting his legislative accomplishments. He has received rare bipartisan praise for his handling of the crisis in Ukraine and Democratic voters are excited about his nominee for the supreme court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is poised to become the first Black woman to serve on the bench after her confirmation hearings later this month. And Republicans, they say, will have to answer for Trump’s enduring control over their party and the fallout from the congressional investigation into the events of January 6, as well as for their efforts to restrict access to abortion and the ballot, issues Democrats believe will rally voters to their side this cycle.“Most midterms by their nature are referenda on a party of power,” said Ian Russell, a Democratic strategist and former national political director with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But he said that by embracing Trump’s lies about election fraud and refusing to sanction their most extreme members, Republicans are helping frame the election as a choice between “two parties with very different priorities, one of which is going to wind up in charge”.Last month, Lawrence, the Michigan congresswoman, surprised some of her colleagues when she announced that she would retire at the end of the term, after more than three decades in public service.“After four years of Donald Trump’s administration, Covid, January 6, it was a death by a million cuts,” she said in an interview.Lawrence, who represents a heavily Democratic district and is the only Black member of Michigan’s congressional delegation, said she “feels good” about her legacy and would continue to be active in her community in other ways: “I’m not going home to plant flowers.”She hopes her departure will make room for a new generation of Black lawmakers, who will bring fresh urgency to the battles over women’s reproductive rights, voting protections and police reform.“I came into Congress when we were in the minority,” she said. “But I came in with the intent to make a difference, and I hope that that continues to motivate American citizens to step up into public service – because there is work to do.”TopicsDemocratsUS CongressUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesfeaturesReuse this content More

Take Up Space review: the irresistible rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez The New York congresswoman is the subject of an admiring biographical portrait. Love her or not, her story is impressiveThis book should have been titled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez But Were Afraid to Ask.William Barr’s Trump book: self-serving narratives and tricky truths ignoredRead moreWhether you love her or loathe her, the former Sandy Ocasio has an irresistible story, told here in a brisk four-chapter narrative followed by brief sections on everything from a make-up video she made for Vogue to her evisceration of Mark Zuckerberg at a congressional hearing.The woman now known everywhere as AOC was born in the Bronx and lived there until her Puerto Rican-American parents moved her to Westchester to make sure she attended a decent public high school. A science nerd whose first ambition was to be a doctor, she dropped her pre-med major at Boston University and majored in economics and international relations. Like Pete Buttigieg, she did a brief stint as an intern for Ted Kennedy, but she didn’t enjoy it as much as he did.She spent her junior year in the African nation of Niger, where she had an unusual reaction to poverty. She decided Niger’s struggling citizens had “a level of enjoyment” that “just does not exist in American life”.In college she met Riley Roberts, a tall, smart, red-haired finance and sociology major who went from coffee house debating partner to boyfriend. Today he is a web developer and still her boyfriend, someone who tiptoes “through the public sphere, leaving little evidence of his presence”, according to the four-page section of Take Up Space which is devoted to him.AOC’s father, an architect, died of cancer while she was in college, leaving her mother struggling to hold on to their house. So after college her daughter came to New York and became a restaurant worker to make money and to be close to her mother.The striking-looking bartender who came out of nowhere to be elected to Congress three weeks after her 29th birthday was launched into politics by her brother Gabriel, who heard a group called Brand New Congress formed by Bernie Sanders supporters was looking for people to nominate anyone they thought should run in 2018.Pulled over to the side of the road in a rainstorm, Gabriel phoned his sister and asked if she wanted to run. Her reaction: “Eff it. Sure. Whatever.” So her brother, still sitting in his car, filled out the web form and hit “send”.Brand New Congress morphed into “Justice Democrats”, who had 10,000 nominations for candidates. Gradually, AOC became their favorite, not only because she was extremely smart but also because she was “really pretty”. That, Corbin Trent explained, is “like 20%, 50% of being on TV”. Trent became her communications director.The rigid leftwing ideology of Lisa Miller, who wrote the longest section of this book, sometimes leads her into statements directly contradicted by AOC’s success. Miller writes that the “facts of Ocasio-Cortez’s life” made her both an “impossible candidate” and “the kind of American whose hopes for any social mobility had been crushed by a rigged system perpetuated by officials elected to represent the people’s interests”.In real life, the facts of AOC’s Cinderella story made her the perfect candidate to take on Joseph Crowley, the Democratic boss who held the House seat she was going after – and AOC turned out to be the least “crushed” person in America.As she learned at a political boot camp organized by Justice Democrats, nothing was more important than “telling an authentic believable personal story”– and no one was better at doing that than she was.As a Black Lives Matter activist, Kim Balderas, noticed in 2017, AOC spoke like an organizer. That made Balderas realize “she’s not coming to play. She is coming to fight”. Outspent in the primary by Crowley, $4.5m to $550,000, AOC still managed to crush him with 57% of the vote.One secret to her success was Twitter. The month she won the primary she had 30,000 followers. Four weeks later she had 500,000. The number now hovers closer to 13 million. A 10-page section of the book describes her “art of the dunk”, including diagrams of her most successful exchanges, including one in which Laura Ingraham accused her of wearing $14,000 worth of clothes for a Vanity Fair photo shoot.“I don’t know if you’ve been in a photo shoot Laura,” AOC replied, “but you don’t keep the clothes.”She added: “The whole ‘she wore clothes in a magazine’, let’s pretend they’re hers’ gimmick is the classic Republican strategy of ‘let’s willfully act stupid, and if the public doesn’t take our performance stupidity seriously then we’ll claim bias’.”But her very best exchange is also the strongest evidence that the now 31-year old two term congresswoman has grown into a national treasure – and an interlocutor who almost always manages to have the last word.In “The Zuckerberg Grilling” section of the book, she interrogates the Facebook founder at a congressional hearing shortly after his company announced it would not fact-check political ads.She asked: “Would I be able to run advertisements on Facebook targeting Republicans in primaries saying they voted for the Green New Deal? … I’m just trying to understand the bounds here, what’s fair game.”“I don’t know the answer to that off the top of my head,” said the flustered Zuckerberg. “I think probably …”AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colourRead moreAOC: “So you don’t know if I’ll be able to do that.”Zuckerberg: “I think probably.”AOC followed up by asking how Facebook had chosen the Daily Caller, “a publication well documented with ties to white supremacists”, as an “official fact-checker for Facebook”.Zuckerberg said the Daily Caller had been chosen by “an independent organization called the Independent Fact-Checking Network”.AOC: “So you would say that white-supremacist-tied publications meet a rigorous standard for fact-checking? Thank you.”
Take Up Space: the Unprecedented AOC is published in the US by Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster
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This time McConnell holds few cards to stop Biden’s supreme court pick Ketanji Brown Jackson can expect little support from across the aisle but Republicans are wary of overreach before midtermsThe photograph is a study in contrasts. On the left, standing stiffly and staring glumly, is Mitch McConnell, 80, the Republican minority leader in the Senate accused of committing professional fouls when confronting judicial confirmations.On the right, at a slightly awkward distance from McConnell, is Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, chosen by a Democratic president to be the first Black woman on the US supreme court, smiling warmly at the camera, her posture more relaxed than the senator’s.Clyburn: supreme court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson ‘beyond politics’Read moreThis was one stop for Jackson this week when she began courting senators from both sides of the aisle ahead of nomination hearings that start on 21 March before a vote in the full chamber.For McConnell, who blocked President Barack Obama’s 2016 nominee Merrick Garland then oversaw the confirmation of three conservative justices under President Donald Trump, there are few options this time. Democrats can confirm Jackson without Republicans in a Senate that is divided 50-50 and where Vice-President Kamala Harris wields the tiebreaker vote.Experts predict that Republicans will use the process to score some political points – just as Democrats did in 2020 when they were powerless to block Amy Coney Barrett’s ascent to the court – but ultimately they will not resort entirely to scorched earth tactics.McConnell and colleagues know that Jackson is replacing a fellow liberal, the retiring Stephen Breyer, and so will not change the 6-3 conservative majority on the court. They are also aware that opinion polls suggest a thumping Republican victory in November’s midterm elections and do not want to risk an overreach that might change that trajectory.“It would be difficult for the Republicans to stop it and a very strong, aggressive effort to block her confirmation could be perceived as being racially motivated,” said Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School. “They’re already in a favorable position for the midterm elections and the last thing they want to do is erode that by getting accused of being racist at this time. So they should just stay out of the way.”But that will not necessarily prevent some Republicans using racist dog whistles to rile up the Trump base, as they have before.At a confirmation hearing last November, for example, the Republican senator John Kennedy told Kazakh-born Saule Omarova, nominee for comptroller of the currency: “I don’t mean any disrespect: I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.” She replied: “Senator, I’m not a communist.”Fallone commented: “There are certainly going to be the Republican loose cannons but the question would be whether one of the more mainstream Republicans slips up and makes a comment that’s perceived as racist.”There was an early preview of the potential for bigotry this week when, after Biden championed Jackson in his State of the Union address as “one of our nation’s top legal minds”, Tucker Carlson, an influential host on the conservative Fox News network, remarked: “It might be time for Joe Biden to let us know what Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT score was.”LSAT is the Law School Admission Test. Critics noted that Carlson never made a similar demand for the LSAT scores of white justices appointed by Trump.Jackson has served since last year on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit after eight years as a federal district judge in Washington and worked earlier as a supreme court clerk for Breyer. She is related by marriage to the former House speaker Paul Ryan, now a board member at the parent company of Fox News.Democrats hope to confirm her before the Easter recess starts on 11 April. She was accompanied this week by Doug Jones, a civil rights lawyer and former senator from Alabama. After a 40-minute meeting, the Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, told reporters: “She deserves support from the other side of the aisle, and I am hopeful that a good number of Republicans will vote for her, given who she is.”But McConnell has raised questions about Jackson’s short record as an appellate judge, which includes only two opinions so far. “I am troubled by the combination of this slim appellate record and the intensity of Judge Jackson’s far-left, dark-money fan club,” the senator from Kentucky said.It was a clue that the days when supreme court justices were confirmed with more than 90 bipartisan votes are long gone and that most Republicans are likely to oppose Jackson, despite her receiving support from the Fraternal Order of Police and former judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans.Even so, few predict a bareknuckle fight that will dominate national headlines like the confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh, who faced allegations of sexual misconduct from his teenage years.Christopher Kang, co-founder and chief counsel of the progressive pressure group Demand Justice, said: “They have nothing to turn it into a battle over. At the end of the day, Republicans still control a supermajority of the supreme court so the substantive stakes are not there for them.“There’s nothing in Judge Jackson’s record that they could turn into a rallying cry on their side either so I do think that it will be a somewhat muted battle. Or perhaps, as too often seen with women of color who are judicial nominees, unfortunately it may end up devolving into some racist and misogynist attacks. But it won’t be based on her record at all.”Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina were the only Republicans to vote to confirm Jackson to the appeals court last year. While Collins appears open to voting for Jackson again, Murkowski has said her previous vote did not mean she would be supportive this time. Graham had advocated for a different candidate from his home state, federal judge Michelle Childs, and expressed disappointment that she was not Biden’s pick.But, along with rightwing media, some outside advocacy conservative organisations are attacking Jackson’s nomination.The Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) has launched a $2.5m campaign trying to make the case that a “liberal dark money network” helped get Biden elected, pressured Breyer to retire and is now seeking to replace him with “a rubber stamp for their unpopular and far-left political agenda”.Curt Levey, president of the conservative Committee for Justice, said: “The strategy on our side is not to really try to stop her but to try to make some larger points. I think JCN is making a point about dark money groups pressuring Biden to choose the most progressive of the three choices [the other frontrunners were Childs and California supreme court justice Leondra Kruger].”Levey’s own group does not see it as worthwhile to spend money on TV adverts, however. “We can be effective on those larger points but I don’t think there’s any amount of commercials you could run that would stop her from being confirmed.”It is a pragmatic view shared by John Cornyn, a Republican member of the Senate judiciary committee, who is due to meet Jackson on 10 March and does not expect surprises. He told reporters: “She’s not new to us. Given the fact that she’s not going to change the ideological balance on the court … we all have a pretty good idea what the outcome is likely to be.”TopicsKetanji Brown JacksonUS supreme courtUS SenateRepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

In 1972, the former Black Panther was facing the death penalty. Five decades after the campaign for her release went global, she still believes people are the ‘motors of history’by More

Trump’s private schedule reveals no plans for him to join 6 January marchEx-president said he would join crowd to US Capitol but his schedule indicates he deliberately lied to his supporters Donald Trump was aware long before he took the stage at the “Save America” rally on 6 January that he would not march to the Capitol to protest the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win, according to his White House private schedule from that day.William Barr’s Trump book: self-serving narratives and tricky truths ignoredRead moreThe former president started his nearly 75-minute long speech at the Ellipse by saying he would go with the crowd to the Capitol, and then repeated that promise when he said he would walk with them down Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol.But Trump’s private schedule – released by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack in a filing on Wednesday – shows Trump must have known that there were no plans for him to join such a march, and that he was being taken back to the White House.The newly-released private schedule indicates Trump deliberately lied to his supporters, raising the spectre that he made a promise he had no intention of honoring so that they would descend on the Capitol and disrupt Congress from certifying Biden as president.It is a significant revelation that could bolster the select committee’s claim in the filing that Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States by seeking to obstruct a lawful function of the government by deceitful or dishonest means.“Trump telling the crowd that he would join them at the Capitol was incendiary in that they thought that their field marshal would be there,” said Ryan Goodman, a former special counsel at the Department of Defense. “It is further evidence that Trump knew he was inciting an already highly volatile situation.”The former president’s private schedule may also support a parallel civil suit brought by the Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell, a former House impeachment manager, that Trump prompted the Capitol attack through his comments in his speech.“Trump directly incited the violence at the Capitol that followed and then watched approvingly as the building was overrun,” the lawsuit said. “The horrific events of January 6 were a direct and foreseeable consequence of the Defendants’ unlawful actions.”Trump’s private schedule for that day indicated the former president was to travel directly from the White House to the Ellipse, speak at the “Save America” rally there, and then immediately return to the White House once his speech had concluded.The former president was running late on 6 January, but the timestamp on the document reads 11.22am – roughly half an hour before he started to speak at the rally at 11.50am – meaning he must have known before he took to the stage that he was not going to the Capitol.Trump’s promises are significant as they served as one of the primary motivations for his supporters to march to the Capitol alongside militia groups like the Oath Keepers, and were used by far-right activists like Alex Jones to encourage the crowd along the route.Indeed, testimony in federal prosecutions of rioters charged in connection to the Capitol attack suggest Trump’s promises that he would walk with them to the Capitol was the proximate cause for them to also walk up to Congress before the march descended into a riot.An analysis of cellphone data published by the New York Times also reveals that many of Trump’s supporters who marched from the rally to the Capitol went down Pennsylvania Avenue as he had suggested, a more circuitous route than walking up the National Mall.Crucially, Trump made the false promises that led the crowd to go to the Capitol in spite of being told by the Secret Service days before the situation was too volatile for them to guarantee his security if he joined them, according to a source familiar with the matter.That raises the prospect that the former president encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol, on a premise he knew to be false, in the hope that the security situation he had been told was volatile would lead to some event that would stop Biden’s certification.But regardless of what he agreed with the Secret Service, his private schedule from just before the speech indicates Trump deliberately and repeatedly lied to the crowd about his intentions in a way that could leave him vulnerable to criminal or civil charges.The former president’s private schedule came as part of court filings submitted by the select committee seeking to challenge former Trump lawyer John Eastman’s claim that thousands of emails demanded by the panel are protected by attorney-client privilege.The select committee said in its filing that it believed the privilege asserted over the records were not applicable because of the so-called crime-fraud exception, arguing Eastman was involved in potentially illegal efforts by Trump to overturn the 2020 election.TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesnewsReuse this content More

Outcry after US senator Lindsey Graham suggests Putin’s assassinationThe Republican senator doubled down on his Thursday comments as lawmakers on the right and left react with dismay and outrage” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer” data-ignore=”global-link-styling” >Reuse this content More