US Politics

Steve Bannon pleads not guilty to criminal contempt of CongressBannon faces a possible prison term and fines for refusing to cooperate with congressional investigation of the Capitol attack Steve Bannon has pleaded not guilty to two charges of criminal contempt of Congress, over his defiance of a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the deadly attack on the US Capitol.In documents filed on Wednesday, the rightwing gadfly, a former Trump campaign chair and White House strategist, waived his right to a formal reading of the indictment against him.Contempt of Congress is punishable by up to a year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. No one has been charged with it since 1983. Bannon faces one count for refusing to appear for a deposition before the House committee and a second for refusing to produce documents.He and other Trump aides summoned by the committee have invoked executive privilege, claiming communications with Donald Trump around the Capitol attack are protected by that constitutional dictum.But the Biden White House has declined to invoke executive privilege in most cases – and Bannon was not working for Trump at the time of the attack on the Capitol, on 6 January this year. Mark Meadows, then White House chief of staff, has also ignored the House committee.The attack on the Capitol followed a rally near the White House at which Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, which he falsely maintains was the result of electoral fraud.Five people died around the riot, including a police officer who died the next day and one rioter shot by law enforcement. About 140 officers were injured. Four later killed themselves.Trump was impeached for a second time, for inciting an insurrection. It was the most bipartisan impeachment ever, supported by 10 House Republicans. But only seven GOP senators found Trump guilty, ensuring his acquittal.Bannon is now represented by Bruce Schoen, a defense lawyer in Trump’s second impeachment trial. The judge in Bannon’s case is Carl Nichols – a Trump appointee.Bannon helped stoke “Stop the Steal” efforts which culminated in the rally near the White House and the attack on the Capitol. The House select committee is also investigating Bannon’s links to a “command centre” set up at the Willard Hotel, near the White House, in the days before the riot.The committee has noted a comment Bannon made on his podcast on 5 January: “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”Bannon, who has boasted of a communications strategy based on misinformation – or “flooding the zone with shit” – spoke to reporters outside court on Monday. His prosecution, he said, was a politically motivated attack by President Biden, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, and the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.TopicsUS Capitol attackSteve BannonUS politicsUS CongressnewsReuse this content More

US Capitol rioter who wore horned headdress sentenced to 41 monthsJacob Chansley, who wore a horned helmet and a fur hat, took part in the deadly attack by Trump followers A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced the US Capitol rioter nicknamed the “QAnon shaman” for his horned headdress to 41 months in prison for his role in the deadly 6 January attack by former President Donald Trump’s followers.Prosecutors had asked US district judge Royce Lamberth to impose a longer 51-month sentence on Jacob Chansley, who pleaded guilty in September to obstructing an official proceeding when he and thousands of others stormed the building in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s election.The sentence matches one imposed by a judge on a former mixed martial artist filmed punching a police officer, who was sentenced last week to 41 months in prison.Lamberth said he believed Chansley, who made a lengthy speech before he was sentenced, had done a lot to convince the court he is “on the right track”.Chansley’s attorneys asked the judge for a sentence of time served for their client, who has been detained since his January arrest. He appeared in court in a dark green prison jumpsuit, with a beard and shaved head.While in detention, Chansley was diagnosed by prison officials with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety. When he entered his guilty plea, Chansley said he was disappointed Trump had not pardoned him.Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives and acquitted by the Senate on a charge of inciting the 6 January riot for a fiery speech that preceded it, in which he told his followers to “fight like hell”.Four people died in the violence. A Capitol police officer who had been attacked by protesters died the day after the riot and four police officers who took part in the defense of the Capitol later took their own lives. About 140 police officers were injured.Defense lawyer Albert Watkins said the US Navy in 2006 had found Chansley suffered from personality disorder but nonetheless declared him “fit for duty”. TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS elections 2020Donald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

Republicans are ‘cracking and packing’ voters to secure minority ruleDavid DaleyThis partisan free-for-all could perpetuate Republican minority rule in Congress and state legislatures for the next decade – if not longer Salt Lake is the largest county in Utah, containing not only the state’s capital, Salt Lake City, but 40% of the state’s population. While Donald Trump carried the safely conservative state, Joe Biden defeated him in Salt Lake county, soundly, by 53% to 42.1%. Two different Democrats have captured a competitive congressional seat there over the last decade, most recently Ben McAdams, who defeated the incumbent Mia Love by fewer than 700 votes in 2018, then lost by less than a percentage point to Burgess Owens in 2020.Don’t expect a tight rematch next year. Utah’s new congressional map, approved by the state legislature this week, divides Salt Lake county into four pieces, attaching pieces to conservative rural counties hundreds of miles away. It ignores the recommendation of an independent commission established by initiative in 2018, and scatters voters here across four districts so uncompetitive and safely Republican that the non-partisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project graded it an F.It’s a similar story in Oklahoma, where the new Republican map cracks Oklahoma City into three different congressional districts, dismantling the competitive fifth district – captured in 2018 by a Democrat, Kendra Horn – and ensuring a big Republican advantage for every seat. The cartography needed to be more creative in New Hampshire, where Republicans took two competitive districts that have largely elected Democrats over the last 15 years and guaranteed themselves one by moving 75 towns and 365,000 people into a new district.The quiet evisceration of the few remaining competitive seats in conservative-leaning states has flown under the radar compared with greedier Republican gerrymanders in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia, where the estimated net of seven to 10 Republican seats would be enough to flip the US House of Representatives in 2022 and perhaps keep it in Republican hands for the next decade.Yet Republicans could reinforce their primacy through 2031 – and cut off an important road that helped Democrats retake the House in 2018 – by turning battleground seats into safe strongholds not only in Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City, but with creative cracking and packing of Democratic voters in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Little Rock, Omaha, Louisville, Nashville, Kansas City and Spartanburg.Nebraska’s second congressional district, for example, one of just 16 remaining “crossover” districts where the vote for the US House and president diverged, becomes slightly more Trumpy, trading suburbs close to Omaha for rural counties to the west. This district has national implications, as it is one of two nationwide that award presidential electors. The subtle shift matters; Biden carried this district by fewer than 23,000 votes.In Indiana’s fifth, Republicans locked in a map giving them a 7-2 advantage by shifting Democratic suburbs in Marion county into an adjacent Democratic district – packing the liberal voters into a single Indianapolis district. By reworking that seat, the Republican party pinned Democrats into two overwhelmingly Democratic districts, eliminated the last competitive seat that might have become closer over the next decade, and assured themselves 78% of the seats in a state Trump won in 2020 with 57%.​In Arkansas, where the new congressional map divides Black neighborhoods in Little Rock across multiple districts to ensure a partisan edge for Republicans, the Republican governor found the racial gerrymander so distasteful that he refused to sign it. (It became law anyway, without his signature.)Kansas has not yet introduced a new congressional map, but during the 2020 campaign, the state senate president vowed to gerrymander the state’s single Democratic member of Congress out of office if Republicans won a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature. They did.South Carolina, meanwhile, has slow-walked new maps and pushed the process into next year, most likely to narrow the window for litigation challenging the plan. Republicans are expected to reinforce the first district seat, won by a Democrat in 2018 by 4,000 votes, and then recaptured by the Republican challenger in 2020 by 5,500 votes.Democrats have done some gerrymanders of their own this cycle. It’s just that Republicans are better equipped to make gains. Oregon Democrats claimed the state’s new seat for themselves; that pickup will be mitigated by a new conservative seat nabbed by Republicans in Montana. Illinois Democrats added one liberal seat and eliminated a conservative seat; Ohio Republicans did the opposite move. Democrats might make a move on the last conservative seat in Maryland and look to gain two or three seats in New York; but that only counters Republican pickups in North Carolina – where new Republican maps will require Democrats to win by seven percentage points to have a shot at even half of the 14 congressional seats.The maps offer no additional gains for Democrats. Republicans still net seats in Texas, Georgia, Florida, New Hampshire and Kansas, in addition to likely gains in Tennessee and Kentucky, and sandbagging competitive seats in Utah, Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Carolina and Indiana. It shrinks the map dangerously for Democrats, at a time when Republicans need to win only five seats to capture the House. And it portends a future in which an election similar to 2020 – in which Democratic US House candidates won 4.6m more votes than Republicans – could place the House under Republican rule regardless of the people’s will.This partisan free-for-all could perpetuate Republican minority rule in Congress and state legislatures for the next decade, if not longer. Much of it was made possible by the gerrymanders of a decade ago, still providing Republican advantages in states like North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin. It has been enabled by the US supreme court, which closed the federal courthouses to partisan gerrymandering claims in 2019 and gave lawmakers a green light for ever more egregious redistricting schemes. These maps have been enacted by Republicans at the same time that they have blockaded congressional action on democracy reform and the Freedom to Vote Act that would end this anti-democratic behavior by all sides. And all of this could hasten a constitutional crisis in 2024 if a gerrymandered US House and gerrymandered state legislatures refuse to certify electors, or send multiple slates of electors, to Congress.When Utah’s governor refused entreaties to veto his state’s gerrymandered congressional maps, which effectively preclude competitive elections until at least 2032, he told voters that they should simply elect people who might be interested in fair maps next time around. Easy, right? Only how are they supposed to do that when the current legislators control the maps and draw themselves every advantage?Republican legislators are barricading themselves into castles of power and pulling up the drawbridge. It’s close to checkmate. Voters are running out of avenues – and time – to do anything to stop it.
David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote
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The fake news sites pushing Republicans’ critical race theory scare Local sites in Virginia published tens of thousands of conservative-skewed articles, many of them misleading or wrong, in the past 11 months Rightwing operatives in the US are using a huge network of fake local news sites to target crucial state elections, with the sites publishing tens of thousands of conservative-skewed articles on politically charged subjects, many of them misleading or wrong, over the past 11 months.An investigation by Popular Information, an online newsletter founded by journalist Judd Legum, found that in Virginia 28 sites, each purporting to be local news outlets and all owned by the same company, published almost 5,000 articles about critical race theory in schools.CRT is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. It is not taught in Virginia schools. But the idea of CRT has become an inflammatory call to arms, or at least to the ballot box, among the right wing.The Virginia sites published the articles, many of which addressed spurious Republican claims about CRT threatening to dominate school curriculums, as the gubernatorial race in the state loomed.Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, triumphed over Terry McAuliffe in the 3 November election, after he exploited concerns over teaching about race and promised to ban CRT from classrooms.The Virginia “local news” sites, which include the Central Virginia Times and the Fredericksburg Leader, are run by Metric Media, an organization that operates more than 1,300 “community news sites” across the US and is linked to Locality Labs, both of which are overseen by Brian Timpone.In 2020 the New York Times revealed that the two companies, along with others involved in publishing the sites, “have received at least $1.7m from Republican political campaigns and conservative groups”. The Times reported that conservative organizations were able to “order” articles from news websites owned by Metric Media and its affiliates attacking Democratic political candidates.Metric Media and Brian Timpone did not respond to requests for comment. Between January and November 2021, the 28 Virginia Metric Media sites published 4,657 articles about critical race theory in schools, Popular Information found.Many of those stories were automated, referencing an online pledge to “refuse to lie to young people about US history and current events” – described by Metric Media as a pledge by educators to teach CRT. But there is no evidence on the website for the pledge that the people who have signed it are teachers.Signees must list their city and state, and Metric Media appears to use an automated system to generate articles based on whether anyone has signed from a town or city covered by a Metric Media news outlet.That system enables the Central Shenandoah News, which theoretically covers the area in north-west of Virginia, to run regular articles based on the same source. Last week, it ran the following two pieces:No new teachers in Harrisonburg sign pledge on Nov. 2 to teach Critical Race TheoryNo new teachers in Harrisonburg sign pledge on Nov. 1 to teach Critical Race TheoryThe Central Shenandoah News has run the same version of the Harrisonburg article since August, including almost daily since the beginning of October. It has also regurgitated the format for nearby Staunton.Timpone is an ex-journalist with a track record of operating dubious news organizations. Timpone’s predecessor to Locality Labs was a company called Journatic, which saw a licensing contract with the Chicago Tribune torn up after it published plagiarized articles and made up quotes and fake names for its writers.Popular Information found that as well as targeting Virginia with anti-CRT articles, Metric Media has also ramped up the tactic in other states with looming governor elections.News sites owned by the company have published 11,988 anti-CRT articles in Florida over the past 11 months, 10,096 articles in Texas, and 6,262 in Ohio. Sites claiming to represent New Hampshire have published 2,162 anti-CRT articles.Legum said he found no evidence that any of the Media Metric sites have significant traffic or readership: “But I don’t really think that’s the purpose,” he said.“I think that it’s more the idea of injecting something into the political conversation and giving it a more credible sheen than if you were just to put it out as an advocacy group or something like that.”After one of the “news sites” covers a candidate or political group, that person or organization can use quotes or cite favorable coverage from the related article. Quotes from an outlet like the Central Shenandoah News could be used for online ads, tv ads, or political mail-outs.In Virginia, Youngkin won the governorship by a little more than 60,000 votes. The fake news sites might not win an election by themselves, but in a tight race, every little bit helps.“I think that they could have a meaningful impact. Not because necessarily they’re going to influence that many voters, but because elections are decided at the margins,” Legum said.“So I don’t think it necessarily will reach that many people, but I do think it can make a meaningful difference, and it’s one of the things in the toolkit that could make a difference.”TopicsVirginiaRaceUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Trump’s attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 US election was ultimately thwarted, but through efforts at state level to elect loyalists to key positions, the stage is set for a repeat showing in 2024

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Cast your mind back to last November and the US presidential election. Donald Trump initially claimed victory and then, over the subsequent days as postal votes came in, it became clear he wasn’t in fact close to winning. Within five days, the election was called for Joe Biden. Trump had joined that unenvied club: the one-term presidents. But as the Guardian US chief reporter, Ed Pilkington, tells Michael Safi, Trump didn’t let the matter lie. Instead, he’s been touring the country and rallying his supporters with speeches pushing the conspiracy theory that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. And while he’s been doing this, his supporters have been busy at state and local level challenging incumbents in elected roles who oversee state election counts. The very people Trump tried and failed to convince last time around to endorse his claim to victory. More

What happens when a congressman threatens a colleague with violence?Robert ReichThe US is experiencing increasingly virulent politics and violent political threats. Sometimes, it’s elected officials who foment or encourage violence Last week, Arizona Representative Paul Gosar posted on Twitter and Instagram a photoshopped animated cartoon in which he assassinates Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacks President Joe Biden.Gosar says it “symbolizes the battle for the soul of America” when Congress takes up the president’s economic package, which he said includes immigration provisions he opposes.Gosar represents Arizona’s 4th congressional district. Until 2012, a dear friend of mine, Gabrielle Giffords, represented Arizona’s 8th congressional district.I got to know Gabby shortly before she entered politics as a member of the Arizona state house of representatives in 2001. She then became the youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona senate and then, in 2006, the third woman in history to be elected to represent Arizona in the US House of Representatives.On 8 January 2011, during a public gathering outside a Safeway grocery store in Casa Adobes, Arizona, Gabby was shot in the head by a man firing a 9mm pistol with a 33-round magazine.He hit 19 people and killed six, among them federal judge John Roll and a nine-year-old girl, Christina-Taylor Green. The shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was detained by bystanders until he was taken into police custody. Eventually, after facing more than 50 federal criminal charges, Loughner pleaded guilty to 19 of them to avoid a death sentence.Gabby was evacuated to the University Medical Center of Tucson in critical condition. By the time I was able to see her the following week, she could say a few words. But even now, a decade later – after the most intense and courageous personal effort at rehabilitation I have ever witnessed – she continues to struggle with language and has lost half her vision in both eyes. Gabby resigned from Congress in 2012.Why did Loughner try to assassinate her? No one will ever know for sure. Authorities found in his safe an envelope that bore the handwritten words “Giffords”, “My assassination” and “I planned ahead.” By all accounts, including his own, he was growing increasingly delusional. He had amplified on his social media accounts several extremist rightwing tropes.In March 2010, 10 months before the shooting, former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin had posted a map of 20 congressional districts she and John McCain won in 2008 but whose representatives in Congress had voted in favor of the Affordable Care Act. The map marked each district with a set of crosshairs. Palin promoted the map by tweeting “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD.” One of those crosshairs targeted Gabby.Although no direct connection was ever established between Palin’s map and Gabby’s shooting, surely Palin’s violent rhetoric contributed to a climate of political violence in America in which a delusional man would mark Gabby for assassination. Gabby herself had expressed concern about Palin’s map.Just as surely, Palin’s inflammatory post was a step toward increasingly violent political rhetoric on the way to Donald Trump and the insurrection of 6 January.Last Friday a group of House Democrats introduced a resolution to censure Gosar for posting his video. The motion was introduced by Representative Jackie Speier, co-chair of the Democratic women’s caucus, and nine other lawmakers. “For that Member to post such a video on his official Instagram account and use his official congressional resources in the House of Representatives to further violence against elected officials goes beyond the pale,” the group said. “As the events of January 6th have shown, such vicious and vulgar messaging can and does foment actual violence.”The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, has so far been silent on Gosar’s video. The group of House Democrats who introduced the resolution condemned McCarthy’s silence, calling it “tacit approval and just as dangerous”.America is experiencing increasingly virulent politics and violent political threats. The New York Times reports that at a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” he said, as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a “fair” question.According to the Times, violent threats against lawmakers are on track to double this year. Republicans who break party ranks and defy Trump have come to expect death threats – often incited by their own colleagues, who have denounced them as traitors.Unless those at the highest levels of government who foment or encourage violence – or who remain conspicuously silent as others do – are held accountable, no one in political life will be safe.Censure is not enough for Gosar. He should be expelled from the House.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezOpinionViolence against women and girlsRepublicansUS politicscommentReuse this content More