US Politics

Ilhan Omar airs death threat and presses Republicans on ‘anti-Muslim hatred’Democrat urges House Republican leaders to act after Lauren Boebert ‘jihad squad’ controversy03:46The US politician Ilhan Omar played a harrowing death threat left recently on her voicemail, as she implored House Republican leaders to do more to tamp down “anti-Muslim hatred” in their ranks and “hold those who perpetuate it accountable”.The Democratic Minnesota representative, one of only a handful of Muslim members of Congress, has been the subject of repeated attacks by conservative pundits and some Republicans in Congress, which she says have led to an increase in the number of death threats she receives.Recently a video of the first-term Colorado representative Lauren Boebert calling Omar a member of the “jihad squad” and likening her to a bomb-carrying terrorist went viral.“When a sitting member of Congress calls a colleague a member of the ‘jihad squad’ and falsifies a story to suggest I will blow up the Capitol, it is not just an attack on me but on millions of American Muslims across the country,” Omar said during a news conference on Tuesday. “We cannot pretend this hate speech from leading politicians doesn’t have real consequences.”She then played the voicemail, laden with profanity, racial epithets and a threat to “take you off the face of this fucking Earth”, which she said was among hundreds of such messages she has reported since joining Congress. Omar said the voicemail was left for her after Boebert released another video on Monday criticising her.In the grainy recording, a man can be heard saying: “You will not be living much longer, bitch,” and that “we the people are rising up”. He calls Omar a “traitor” and says she will stand trial before a military tribunal.Omar said: “It is time for the Republican party to actually do something to confront anti-Muslim hatred in its ranks and hold those who perpetuate it accountable.”Boebert’s remarks were the latest example of a Republican lawmaker making a personal attack against another member of Congress, an unsettling trend that has gone largely unchecked by House Republican leaders.A video posted to Facebook last week showed Boebert speaking at an event and describing an interaction with Omar – an interaction that Omar maintains never happened.In the video, Boebert claims that a Capitol police officer approached her with “fret on his face” shortly before she stepped into a House elevator and the doors closed. “I look to my left and there she is, Ilhan Omar. And I said: ‘Well, she doesn’t have a backpack. We should be fine,’” Boebert says with a laugh.Omar called on the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Republican minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to “take appropriate action”. But so far McCarthy, who is in line to become Speaker if Republicans retake the majority next year, has been reluctant to police members of his caucus whose views often closely align with those of the party’s base.Boebert initially took steps to ease the situation, apologising last week “to anyone in the Muslim community I offended”. But after declining to apologise directly to Omar during a tense phone call on Monday, which Omar abruptly ended, Boebert again went on the attack.“Rejecting an apology and hanging up on someone is part of cancel culture 101 and a pillar of the Democrat party,” Boebert said in an Instagram video.So far, McCarthy is taking her side. When asked on Tuesday what he would do if Democrats tried to censure Boebert, McCarthy said: “After she apologised personally and publicly? I’d vote against it.”TopicsIlhan OmarDemocratsRepublicansHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Republicans boost benefits for workers who quit over vaccine mandatesCritics say decision from legislatures in four states in effect pays people for not getting vaccinated Some Republican states are expanding unemployment benefits for employees who have been fired or quit over vaccine mandates, a move critics say in effect pays people for not getting vaccinated.Celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz set to run for US Senate as RepublicanRead moreFour states – Iowa, Tennessee, Florida, and Kansas – have changed their rules on unemployment to include people who have been terminated or who have chosen to leave their jobs because of their employers’ vaccine policies.The partisan divide is striking, Anne Paxton, staff attorney and policy director for the Unemployment Law Project in Washington state, told the Guardian. “It’s very hard to regard this particular move as being based on anything much more than political reasons.”The development also comes as the new Omicron variant has emerged, triggering concern that the strain could already be inside the US. If so, it would likely see a new spike in infections in America.There are 30 states with Republican-led legislatures that could follow suit. “I would be very surprised if it stopped at this four,” Paxton said. Missouri is contemplating similar laws, while states like Maryland are considering “mitigating factors” around unemployment and vaccine rules.Some Democrat states, on the other hand, have said that leaving a job because of mandates will disqualify former employees from these benefits unless they have demonstrated exemptions.“Partisanship continues to be a sharp dividing line in vaccine attitudes,” the Kaiser Family Foundation reported in October, with 90% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans saying they have gotten at least one dose.Only 5% of unvaccinated workers said they have left a job over mandates, and unemployment is dropping swiftly across the country.Unemployment benefits are not equivalent to full-time wages, Dorit Reiss, professor of law at UC Hastings College of the Law, pointed out. But rules like these may form an incentive against vaccination.“It’s like offering a financial benefit for not vaccinating,” Reiss told the Guardian. “If the person would not get unemployment benefits if they refused to wash their hands at work and were fired over that, they should be treated the same way.”Unemployment law in the United States is governed partly by federal law, but states have latitude to set their own requirements or restrictions, Paxton said.Typically, when employees are fired or they quit because of a business’s policies they aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits, unless they have an exemption for established religious or moral objections, or medical reasons.“Benefits are for people who are unemployed through no fault of their own,” Paxton said. But the interpretation of fault can vary.And in recent weeks, the Republican leaders of these states have signed bills protecting benefits around vaccination mandates, essentially liberalizing unemployment rules around vaccines in conservative states.If states want to change the rules around unemployment benefits for those who clash with employers’ policies, they should change the rules for everyone, Reiss said.“They should pass a law that’s broader that says, ‘Anyone who’s fired for cause gets unemployment benefits anyway.’ And that’s fine. That’s a value judgment, and states can make it,” Reiss said. But “limiting it to vaccines alone, it’s sending a message that vaccines are not important, and that’s a bad message.”There were already marked differences along partisan lines in how states handle unemployment benefits.“The blue states tend to be more generous in their eligibility rules,” Paxton said. “They tend to have higher benefits. And the red states have a tendency to be on the stingy side.”In Florida, for instance, the maximum benefit is set at $275 a week, which is lower than the weekly minimum in Washington.Many Republican-led states also opted to end federal unemployment assistance earlier this year.“They were not trying to help people who were jobless in that respect,” Paxton said. “So it’s hard to take this very seriously as a substantive, well-thought-out policy move in these four states.” Instead, she said, the decision seems to be less about unemployment policy and more about political tools “to aggravate the partisan divide,” Paxton said.Nine states have introduced restrictions on the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for businesses with more than 100 employees and for federal agencies and contractors.Tennessee and Montana have banned private employers from mandating the vaccines, and seven other states have introduced wide-ranging restrictions on mandates, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy. After Florida restricted the rules, for instance, Disney World halted its employee vaccination requirements.When it comes to ending the pandemic, Reiss said, working around mandates like these is “going to make it substantially harder”.TopicsUS politicsCoronavirusRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

Trump tested positive for Covid few days before Biden debate, chief of staff says in new bookMark Meadows makes stunning admission in new memoir obtained by Guardian, saying a second test returned negative Donald Trump tested positive for Covid-19 three days before his first debate against Joe Biden, the former president’s fourth and last chief of staff has revealed in a new book.Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to testify before Capitol attack committeeRead moreMark Meadows also writes that though he knew each candidate was required “to test negative for the virus within seventy two hours of the start time … Nothing was going to stop [Trump] from going out there”.Trump, Meadows says in the book, returned a negative result from a different test shortly after the positive.Nonetheless, the stunning revelation of an unreported positive test follows a year of speculation about whether Trump, then 74 years old, had the potentially deadly virus when he faced Biden, 77, in Cleveland on 29 September – and what danger that might have presented.Trump announced he had Covid on 2 October. The White House said he announced that result within an hour of receiving it. He went to hospital later that day.Meadows’ memoir, The Chief’s Chief, will be published next week by All Seasons Press, a conservative outlet. The Guardian obtained a copy on Tuesday – the day Meadows reversed course and said he would cooperate with the House committee investigating the deadly Capitol attack of 6 January.Meadows says Trump’s positive result on 26 September was a shock to a White House which had just staged a triumphant Rose Garden ceremony for supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett – an occasion now widely considered to have been a Covid super-spreader event.Despite the president looking “a little tired” and suspecting a “slight cold”, Meadows says he was “content” that Trump travelled that evening to a rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania.But as Marine One lifted off, Meadows writes, the White House doctor called.“Stop the president from leaving,” Meadows says Sean Conley told him. “He just tested positive for Covid.”It wasn’t possible to stop Trump but when he called from Air Force One, his chief of staff gave him the news.“Mr President,” Meadows said, “I’ve got some bad news. You’ve tested positive for Covid-19.”Trump’s reply, the devout Christian writes, “rhyme[d] with ‘Oh spit, you’ve gotta be trucking lidding me’.”Meadows writes of his surprise that such a “massive germaphobe” could have contracted Covid, given precautions including “buckets of hand sanitiser” and “hardly [seeing] anyone who ha[d]n’t been rigorously tested”.Meadows says the positive test had been done with an old model kit. He told Trump the test would be repeated with “the Binax system, and that we were hoping the first test was a false positive”.After “a brief but tense wait”, Meadows called back with news of the negative test. He could “almost hear the collective ‘Thank God’ that echoed through the cabin”, he writes.Meadows says Trump took that call as “full permission to press on as if nothing had happened”. His chief of staff, however, “instructed everyone in his immediate circle to treat him as if he was positive” throughout the Pennsylvania trip.“I didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks,” Meadows writes, “but I also didn’t want to alarm the public if there was nothing to worry about – which according to the new, much more accurate test, there was not.”Meadows writes that audience members at the rally “would never have known that anything was amiss”.The public, however, was not told of the president’s tests.On Sunday 27 September, the first day between the tests and the debate, Meadows says Trump did little – except playing golf in Virginia and staging an event for military families at which he “spoke about the value of sacrifice”.Trump later said he might have been infected at that event, thanks to people “within an inch of my face sometimes, they want to hug me and they want to kiss me. And they do. And frankly, I’m not telling them to back up.”In his book, Meadows does not mention that Trump also held a press conference indoors, in the White House briefing room, the same day.On Monday 28 September, Trump staged an event at which he talked with business leaders and looked inside “the cab of a new truck”. He also held a Rose Garden press conference “on the work we had all been doing to combat Covid-19”.“Somewhat ironically, considering his circumstances”, Meadows writes, Trump spoke about a new testing strategy “supposed to give quicker, more accurate readings about whether someone was positive or not.”The White House had still not told the public Trump tested positive and then negative two days before.On debate day, 29 September, Meadows says, Trump looked slightly better – “emphasis on the word slightly”.“His face, for the most part at least, had regained its usual light bronze hue, and the gravel in his voice was gone. But the dark circles under his eyes had deepened. As we walked into the venue around five o’clock in the evening, I could tell that he was moving more slowly than usual. He walked like he was carrying a little extra weight on his back.”Trump called aides hours before Capitol riot to discuss how to stop Biden victoryRead moreTrump gave a furious and controversial performance, continually hectoring Biden to the point the Democrat pleaded: “Will you shut up, man? This is so unpresidential.”The host, Chris Wallace of Fox News, later said Trump was not tested before the debate because he arrived late. Organisers, Wallace said, relied on the honor system.The White House had not said Trump had tested positive and negative three days before.Three days later, on 2 October, Trump announced by tweet that he and his wife, Melania Trump, were positive.That evening, Meadows helped Trump make his way to hospital. During his stay, Meadows helped orchestrate stunts meant to show the president was in good health. Trump recovered, but it has been reported that his case of Covid was much more serious than the White House ever let on.TopicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationCoronavirusUS politicsJoe BidenUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

Celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz set to run for US Senate as RepublicanOz, upbraided in 2015 over promotion of ‘quack treatments’ for financial gain, planning to run for Pat Toomey’s Pennsylvania seat Dr Mehmet Oz, the celebrity heart surgeon best known as the host of TV’s Dr Oz Show, is planning to run for Pennsylvania’s open US Senate seat as a Republican, according to two people familiar with his plans.Top doctors urge Columbia to sever ties with Dr Oz over ‘quack treatments’Read moreShould Oz run, he would bring unrivaled name recognition and wealth to a race expected to be among the nation’s most competitive and could determine control of the Senate next year.Oz became a household name after gaining fame as a guest on Oprah Winfrey’s show.He has also experienced controversy, notably when in 2015 a group of prominent American physicians called on Columbia University medical school to sever its links with Oz for “an egregious lack of integrity” over the promotion of “quack treatments” not supported by scientific evidence, “in the interest of personal financial gain”.Subjected to a grilling by senators, Oz offered to “drain the swamp” of marketers he said were illegally using his words and name.In 2016, Oz hosted Donald Trump on his TV show as the businessman ran for the White House.Oz was later appointed to a White House Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, alongside appointees including the New England Patriots coach, Bill Belichick, bodybuilder and former Incredible Hulk actor Lou Ferrigno, New York Yankees legend Mariano Rivera and the football star Herschel Walker.Walker is now a Trump-endorsed candidate for Senate in Georgia.Oz may also have to explain why he isn’t running in New Jersey, where he has lived for two decades before voting in Pennsylvania elections this year by an absentee ballot registered to his in-laws’ address in suburban Philadelphia.Oz’s longtime home is above the Hudson river in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, overlooking Manhattan, where he films his TV show and practices medicine.If he runs he will enter a Republican field resetting with an influx of candidates, after Sean Parnell, the candidate endorsed by Trump, dropped out, denying allegations of domestic abuse.Oz, 61, has told associates and Republicans in Pennsylvania of his plans, according to the people who spoke to the AP. One was told directly while the other was briefed on a separate conversation. Both spoke on condition of anonymity. Publicly, Oz has only said through a spokesperson that he has received encouragement to run.The announcement could come on Tuesday night on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, which Hannity previewed by saying Oz “has a huge announcement. Hint: think midterm election.”Pennsylvania put Joe Biden over the top in last year’s presidential election. His one-point victory put the swing state back in Democratic hands after Trump won it even more narrowly in 2016.TopicsRepublicansUS politicsPennsylvanianewsReuse this content More

Trump called aides hours before Capitol riot to discuss how to stop Biden victory Sources tell Guardian Trump pressed lieutenants at Willard hotel in Washington about ways to delay certification of election resultHours before the deadly attack on the US Capitol this year, Donald Trump made several calls from the White House to top lieutenants at the Willard hotel in Washington and talked about ways to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win from taking place on 6 January.Trump challenges media and Democrats to debate his electoral fraud lieRead moreThe former president first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his largely ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term.But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January, and delay the certification process to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.The former president’s remarks came as part of strategy discussions he had from the White House with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification.Multiple sources, speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, described Trump’s involvement in the effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election.Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard. The conversations also show Trump’s thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack and halted Biden’s certification, until it was later ratified by Congress.The former president’s call to the Willard hotel about stopping Biden’s certification is increasingly a central focus of the House select committee’s investigation into the Capitol attack, as it raises the specter of a possible connection between Trump and the insurrection.Several Trump lawyers at the Willard that night deny Trump sought to stop the certification of Biden’s election win. They say they only considered delaying Biden’s certification at the request of state legislators because of voter fraud.The former president made several calls to the lieutenants at the Willard the night before 6 January. He phoned the lawyers and the non-lawyers separately, as Giuliani did not want non-lawyers to participate on legal calls and jeopardise attorney-client privilege.Trump’s call to the lieutenants came a day after Eastman, a late addition to the Trump legal team, outlined at a 4 January meeting at the White House how he thought Pence could usurp his role in order to stop Biden’s certification from happening at the joint session.At the meeting, which was held in the Oval Office and attended by Trump, Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short and his legal counsel Greg Jacob, Eastman presented a memo that detailed how Pence could insert himself into the certification and delay the process.The memo outlined several ways for Pence to commandeer his role at the joint session, including throwing the election to the House, or adjourning the session to give states time to send slates of electors for Trump on the basis of election fraud – Eastman’s preference.Then– acting attorney general Jeff Rosen and his predecessor, Bill Barr, who had both been appointed by Trump, had already determined there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the 2020 election.Eastman told the Guardian last month that the memo only presented scenarios and was not intended as advice. “The advice I gave the vice-president very explicitly was that I did not think he had the authority simply to declare which electors to count,” Eastman said.Trump seized on the memo – first reported by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril – and pushed Pence to adopt the schemes, which some of the other lieutenants at the Willard later told Trump were legitimate ways to flip the election.But Pence resisted Trump’s entreaties, and told him in the Oval Office the next day that Trump should count him out of whatever plans he had to subvert the results of the 2020 election at the joint session, because he did not intend to take part.Trump was furious at Pence for refusing to do him a final favor when, in the critical moment underpinning the effort to reinstall Trump as president, he phoned lieutenants at the Willard sometime between the late evening on 5 January and the early hours of 6 January.From the White House, Trump made several calls to lieutenants, including Giuliani, Eastman, Epshteyn and Bannon, who were huddled in suites complete with espresso machines and Cokes in a mini-fridge in the north-west corner of the hotel.On the calls, the former president first recounted what had transpired in the Oval Office meeting with Pence, informing Bannon and the lawyers at the Willard that his vice-president appeared ready to abandon him at the joint session in several hours’ time.“He’s arrogant,” Trump, for instance, told Bannon of Pence – his own way of communicating that Pence was unlikely to play ball – in an exchange reported in Peril and confirmed by the Guardian.But on at least one of those calls, Trump also sought from the lawyers at the Willard ways to stop the joint session to ensure Biden would not be certified as president on 6 January, as part of a wider discussion about buying time to get states to send Trump electors.The fallback that Trump and his lieutenants appeared to settle on was to cajole Republican members of Congress to raise enough objections so that even without Pence adjourning the joint session, the certification process would be delayed for states to send Trump slates.It was not clear whether Trump discussed on the call about the prospect of stopping Biden’s certification by any means if Pence refused to insert himself into the process, but the former president is said to have enjoyed watching the insurrection unfold from the dining room.But the fact that Trump considered ways to stop the joint session may help to explain why he was so reluctant to call off the rioters and why Republican senator Ben Sasse told conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt that he heard Trump seemed “delighted” about the attack.The lead Trump lawyer at the Willard, Giuliani, appearing to follow that fallback plan, called at least one Republican senator later that same evening, asking him to help keep Congress adjourned and stall the joint session beyond 6 January.In a voicemail recorded at about 7pm on 6 January, and reported by the Dispatch, Giuliani implored Republican senator Tommy Tuberville to object to 10 states Biden won once Congress reconvened at 8pm, a process that would have concluded 15 hours later, close to 7 January.“The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow – ideally until the end of tomorrow,” Giuliani said.A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment on this account of Trump’s call. Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment. Eastman, Epshteyn and Bannon declined to comment. Trump made several calls the day before the Capitol attack from both the White House residence, his preferred place to work, as well as the West Wing, but it was not certain from which location he phoned his top lieutenants at the Willard.Capitol attack: Schiff says Mark Meadows contempt decision imminent Read moreThe White House residence and its Yellow Oval Room – a Trump favorite – is significant since communications there, including from a desk phone, are not automatically memorialized in records sent to the National Archives after the end of an administration.But even if Trump called his lieutenants from the West Wing, the select committee may not be able to fully uncover the extent of his involvement in the events of 6 January, unless House investigators secure testimony from individuals with knowledge of the calls.That difficulty arises since calls from the White House are not necessarily recorded, and call detail records that the select committee is suing to pry free from the National Archives over Trump’s objections about executive privilege, only show the destination of the calls.House select committee investigators last week opened a new line of inquiry into activities at the Willard hotel, just across the street from the White House, issuing subpoenas to Eastman and former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik, an assistant to Giuliani.The chairman of the select committee, Bennie Thompson, said in a statement that the panel was pursuing the Trump officials at the Willard to uncover “every detail about their efforts to overturn the election, including who they were talking to in the White House and in Congress”.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Omar and Boebert have ‘unproductive’ call after anti-Muslim remarksIlhan Omar says she ended the call after Lauren Boebert ‘doubled down on her rhetoric’ Ilhan Omar said she had an “unproductive” call with Lauren Boebert on Monday regarding the Colorado rightwinger’s Islamophobic comments that she made towards the Minnesota Democrat last week.In a new statement released on Monday, Omar said she “graciously accepted a call from Rep. Lauren Boebert in the hope of receiving a direct apology for falsely claiming she met me in an elevator, suggesting I was a terrorist, and for a history of anti-Muslim hate”.Trump’s ‘fact-free’ approach caused briefing challenges, CIA report saysRead moreOmar added: “She instead doubled down on her rhetoric and I decided to end the unproductive call. I believe in engaging with those we disagree with respectfully, but not when that disagreement is rooted in outright bigotry and hate.”Over Thanksgiving break, Boebert made anti-Muslim remarks about Omar to an audience in her home district, saying: “Actually I have an Ilhan story for you … So the other night on the House floor was not my first ‘Jihad Squad’ moment.”“So I was getting into an elevator with one of my staffers. You know, we’re leaving the Capitol and we’re going back to my office and we get an elevator and I see a Capitol police officer running to the elevator. I see fret all over his face, and he’s reaching, and the door’s shutting, like I can’t open it, like what’s happening. I look to my left, and there she is. Ilhan Omar.“And I said, ‘Well, she doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine.’”The audience laughed and applauded.“We only had one floor to go,” Boebert continued. “I said, ‘Oh look, the Jihad Squad decided show up for work today.’”She was referring to the “Squad”, a group of leftwing Democrats. Boebert, an extremist figure on the Trumpist wing of the party has also used the term on the floor of the House.Boebert apologized on Twitter on Friday, saying: “I apologize to anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment about Rep. Omar,” adding that she had reached out to Omar’s office to speak with her directly.On Monday, Boebert posted a video on Instagram, recapping her conversation with Omar. “As a strong, Christian woman who values faith deeply, I never want anything I say to offend someone’s religion. So I told her that. Even after I put out a public statement … she said that she still wanted a public apology because what I had done wasn’t good enough,” she said.Boebert went on to add that she refused to make a public apology directly to the Minnesota representative and instead demanded Omar apologize for her “anti-American, antisemitic, anti-police rhetoric. And then Representative Omar hung up on me.”In her statement on Monday, Omar demanded the Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, “actually hold his party accountable” and accused the Republican party of having “mainstreamed bigotry and hatred”.That call has been echoed by other senior Democrats, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who issued a joint statement over the weekend that read: “Racism and bigotry of any form, including Islamophobia, must always be called out, confronted and condemned in any place it is found.”There is probably little chance of Republicans taking action against Boebert, given her popularity with the base and the firm grip that Trump has on the party as speculation over the former president’s 2024 White House ambitions continues to run wild.TopicsIlhan OmarUS politicsnewsReuse this content More