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      Disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner retrying comeback

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      Anthony Weiner, the former congressman who suffered one of the most spectacular falls from grace in US politics after he was embroiled in a sexting scandal that some blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election, has formally initiated yet another attempt at a comeback.Weiner, 60, has officially registered as a candidate for a New York City council seat. The filing with the city’s campaign finance board, which was first reported by the New York Post’s Craig McCarthy, marks Weiner’s latest attempt to claw his way back into public office despite his scandal-laced past.The disgraced politician’s longstanding X account reposted news of the candidate filing on Tuesday with the comment: “Mr Moneybags over here.” The remark was an apparent ironic reference to the fact that he has so far recorded zero dollars in supporters’ donations for his campaign coffers.In recent weeks, Weiner has been dangling the possibility of an attempted return to public life in front of media outlets, including his own The Middle radio show on WABC. In a recent broadcast, he told his listeners that he still craved public service, addressing his sexual misdeeds, which culminated in him serving 18 months in prison for sexually messaging an underaged girl.He said on the show that “the things in my past, the things about my addiction, the things about my acting out, the things about my background – it’s a lot, it’s a lot. But we’re at a moment that we Democrats, we seem like we come into knife fights carrying library books all the time.”Weiner has been assailed by scandal since he crashed out of Congress in 2011 after 13 years representing New Yorkers. His downfall came amid a sexting scandal involving explicit messages sent to several women, as well as the underaged girl.He made his first comeback pitch in 2013, running for New York mayor, only to flame out again in a renewed scandal over sexual texts sent under the cover name Carlos Danger.But it was the inadvertent role that Weiner played in Clinton’s agonizing defeat when Donald Trump clinched his first presidency for which Weiner will be most remembered – unflatteringly so – by many Democrats. In 2016, federal prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Weiner’s exchange of lewd photos with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina.The inquiry became entangled with Clinton’s White House bid because Weiner’s then wife, Huma Abedin, was vice-chair of the Democratic nominee’s presidential campaign. In the course of the investigation into Weiner’s sexting, FBI agents found emails on his personal laptop that led them to reopen an investigation into a private email server used by Clinton.The investigation, reopened just days before the 2016 election, was rapidly concluded with no incriminating evidence found against Clinton. But the damage had been done as Trump took the decisive electoral college victory despite losing the popular vote.To this day, Weiner’s sexual misconduct is regarded by many in the Democratic party as a factor behind Clinton’s defeat – and hence Trump’s elevation to the White House, which he retook in the 5 November election against Kamala Harris after losing the 2020 race to Joe Biden.“Everyone deserves a second chance,” another candidate vying for the city council seat, Sarah Batchu, told the New Republic recently. “But this guy has had third, fourth and fifth chances.” More

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      Key US unit fighting disinformation abroad in jeopardy ahead of Trump return

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      The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a state department unit critical to combating foreign disinformation, will not receive a multi-year extension in the latest National Defense Authorization Act, putting its future operations in jeopardy.The next chapter of the GEC – which only addresses foreign influence operations outside the United States – now relies on Congress to come up with an extension some other way by 24 December, or the United States faces a potential gap in their international disinformation response capabilities.In response to the NDAA snub over the weekend, a state department spokesperson told the Guardian: “As our adversaries continue to ramp up their efforts globally, it’s counterintuitive – and dangerous – to weaken or worse yet dismantle, the US’s leadership in this critical mission.”The GEC is looking to be the latest institutional target to get hit by congressional Republicans, who have grown increasingly skeptical of the center and other US agencies for allegedly censoring conservative viewpoints. Last year, the Republican-led House judiciary committee labelled the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as “the nerve center” of the government’s social media censorship apparatus.The GEC has been instrumental in exposing significant disinformation campaigns in Latin America and Moldova, including a complex Russian operation in Africa called the “African Initiative” this year. This campaign sought to undermine US and western influence by spreading conspiracy theories about US-funded health programs through social media, websites and Telegram channels.Bipartisan supporters, including Chris Murphy, a Connecticut senator, and John Cornyn, a Texas senator, had proposed an amendment to extend the center’s mandate through 2031, but the effort ultimately failed to make it into the final NDAA text.Marco Rubio, a Florida senator, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, has long been vocal about his concerns about foreign influence operations by way of China and Russia. His office did not respond to a request for comment on whether it would back the state’s GEC entering a new era.Several prominent Republican lawmakers, including the outgoing House foreign affairs chair Michael McCaul, have criticized the GEC for allegedly overstepping its mandate. Those lawmakers argue that the center, through its connection with the UK-based Global Disinformation Index, has been complicit in labeling conservative media outlets as high-risk for spreading disinformation.“A win for free speech and Main Street America!” the House Committee on Small Business posted on X on Tuesday. “The shuttering of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center means there is one less way for unelected bureaucrats to violate Americans’ First Amendment rights.”According to the center’s own assessment, countries like China have invested “billions of dollars” to exert global information control through disinformation and propaganda. More

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      Trump picks Maga darling Harmeet Dhillon to lead civil rights cases at DoJ

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      Donald Trump picked Harmeet Dhillon, a Maga darling and ardent supporter, to lead civil rights cases at the US Department of Justice, a sign of major changes ahead in the agency’s priorities.Dhillon made her name in Maga circles by taking on culture-war cases as a San Francisco lawyer and became a fixture in rightwing media, appearing often on Fox shows. She has filed various lawsuits over election “integrity” issues and supported Trump’s quests to overturn results in 2020.In announcing Dhillon’s nomination, Trump cited a laundry list of cases she’s working on, including “taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers”.He also mentioned how Dhillon’s lawsuits on election law fought to “ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted”.“In her new role at the DOJ, Harmeet will be a tireless defender of our Constitutional Rights, and will enforce our Civil Rights and Election Laws FAIRLY and FIRMLY,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.“I’m extremely honored by President Trump’s nomination to assist with our nation’s civil rights agenda,” Dhillon wrote on Twitter/X after the nomination. “It has been my dream to be able to serve our great country, and I am so excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers led by @PamBondi. I cannot wait to get to work!”Trump previously announced Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida and a Trump defense attorney, as his pick to lead the justice department.As a lawyer in California, Dhillon has sued the University of California, Berkeley for its speech policies, represented rightwing undercover operation Project Veritas and the former Fox host Tucker Carlson, and filed lawsuits over pandemic restrictions. She served as a legal adviser to Trump in 2020 and ran to replace Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee in 2023, seeking to make the party organization more Trump-friendly. During the 2024 election, she was dispatched to Arizona by the Trump campaign, a decision that some saw as a sign the campaign was ready to make aggressive legal moves if needed to win there.She founded a legal non-profit, the Center for American Liberty, which uses the courts to go after violations of civil liberties and defend against the “coordinated assault on our civil liberties from corporations, politicians, socialist revolutionaries, and inept or biased government officials”, the organization’s website says.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA Guardian investigation in 2023 found that the non-profit paid Dhillon’s law firm, Dhillon Law Group, at least $1.32m, which experts said was “problematic”. The reporting also noted that Dhillon was paid a $120,000 salary from the non-profit for working two hours a week.Democracy Docket said Dhillon has emerged as “one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country”. It tracked Dhillon or other attorneys at her firms as being involved in more than a dozen lawsuits across the states that challenged voting rights, election processes or Trump’s eligibility for office. She defended Trump in the Colorado case challenging his ability to run for office because of the January 6 insurrection.“Democrats are conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history, right before our eyes, as government officials avert their eyes to the mockery of the constitution and our laws,” she said in late 2023 of efforts to keep Trump off the ballot. “This is a low point in American history.”Dhillon also faced hateful backlash from the far-right over her religion after appearing at the Republican convention in 2024. Dhillon, who is Sikh, gave a Sikh prayer at the convention, which some far-right figures called blasphemous. Before her rise in Trumpworld, she gained public attention for writing legal memos defending Sikhs who wore turbans from racial profiling after the 9/11 attacks. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s threat to the media: time to pass the Press Act

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      Fears of a press crackdown under Donald Trump’s second term deepened with his nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director – given his calls for retribution against journalists. Yet a rare chance to protect press freedom has emerged. The bipartisan Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (Press) Act, the strongest press freedom legislation in US history, is on the brink of a vote. While President-elect Trump has urged Republicans to block it, the Senate could still deliver it to Joe Biden before the lame-duck session ends in January.The Press Act would ban secret government demands for journalists’ communications from tech giants such as Google or Verizon and protect reporters from jail for refusing to reveal sources. For investigative reporters to do their jobs – holding government officials to account for corruption and wrongdoing – they need to be able to protect the confidentiality of their sources. With courts recently weakening already-imperilled “reporter’s privilege” protections, this bill would finally give journalists in the US federal protections comparable to those afforded to other relationships where confidentiality is paramount, such as lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, and spouses.The bill has something for both Democrats and Republicans to like. The Press Act’s broad and nonpartisan definition of “journalist” takes into account the modern media landscape: you don’t have to work full-time for a mainstream media organisation to be covered. Freelancers, independent reporters writing Substack newsletters and even journalists posting primarily to social networks such as X would be included. It protects right-leaning journalists just as much as anyone at the New York Times or the Guardian.It also has commonsense national security exceptions (like preventing a terrorist attack or an imminent threat of violence) without diluting the bill’s strong protections. It’s worth remembering that Democratic administrations have abused their powers to go after the first amendment rights of journalists just as much as Republicans. The Obama administration brought a record number of prosecutions against whistleblowers, and was implicated in several government spying scandals, including secretly targeting journalists at the Associated Press and Fox News.Even the Biden administration, before reversing course after public outrage, continued pursuing at least some of the surveillance orders against news outlets that the first Trump administration initiated. That’s why, in an age of extreme political polarisation, the Press Act is about as bipartisan as it gets. The House passed the bill early in 2024 unanimously, with several prominent Republicans publicly touting its importance. The bill also has powerful co-sponsors in the Senate, ranging from Democrats such as Ron Wyden and Dick Durbin, the judiciary committee chair, to Trump-supporting Republicans like Mike Lee and Lindsey Graham.Even the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson supports the bill, as he made clear in a recent interview he did with the former Fox News and CBS reporter Catherine Herridge, who was subpoenaed to reveal a source for a story she wrote several years ago. She was recently in front of the DC court of appeals, where her lawyers argued that forcing reporters to reveal their sources in court sends a chilling effect to countless others around the country. For the bill to pass, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, must make it a priority. The lame-duck session is only a few weeks long; if senators don’t act now, we may not have this opportunity for another decade or more.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      The Guardian view on the EU-Mercosur trade deal: another farmer flashpoint approaches | Letters

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      Anticipating the strong protectionist winds that will blow from Donald Trump’s White House, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has been responding by making her own economic weather. Last week, Ms von der Leyen flew to Montevideo, 5,000 miles south of Washington DC, to controversially conclude negotiations in one of the biggest free trade agreements in history. Twenty-five years in the making, the Mercosur trade deal opens up trade between the EU and a Latin American bloc of partners comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.In theory, the agreement promises a more open market of 700 million people for products ranging from Argentine beef to German cars. For European manufacturers, it would eliminate tariffs on a majority of goods. As Mr Trump threatens to impose heavy tariffs on Chinese and European exports, here was evidence, asserted Ms von der Leyen, “that openness and cooperation are the true engines of progress and prosperity”.This sunny analysis does not, however, tell the whole story. From an economic perspective, the Mercosur deal makes sense for Europe, offering an alternative market in the event of US tariffs and amid the continuing Chinese slowdown. It also deepens European connections with the global south, at a time when Beijing is doing the same in systematic fashion. But the political realities are treacherous: opposing Mercosur is a common cause celebre among European farmers, who fear being undercut by Latin American producers who are not subject to the same environmental standards.At the end of a year in which farmers’ protests have made headlines across the continent, and far-right parties have exploited rural resentment to attack the EU’s green transition, this is territory to be navigated with extreme care. The deal has yet to be ratified, and EU member states are split. Germany, desperate to shore up its export industry, is strongly in favour. France, whose farmers famously carry immense political clout, is implacably opposed. Serious reservations have been expressed by the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, Italy and Ireland.Less than a month after officially beginning her second term in office, Ms von der Leyen is taking a risk by pushing ahead at pace when such divisions exist. Approval of the trade part of the overall deal may be subject to a qualified majority vote, meaning that France would not be able to exercise its veto. That would be grist to Marine Le Pen’s mill, given that, in one recent poll, almost two-thirds of French citizens said they no longer had confidence in the EU. Meanwhile, the prospect of a disunited European front – with France and Germany at loggerheads – as Mr Trump enters the White House, is not an uplifting one.In the quarter of a century since the Mercosur negotiations began, the negative impacts of globalisation on particular European regions and economic sectors have driven a backlash that has benefited the far right. Trade deals are about politics as well as economics. To avoid the fallout of this deal overshadowing the economic gains, Brussels should make it a priority that losers from it are adequately compensated. Bypassing a necessary battle for hearts and minds, as the EU confronts new geopolitical challenges without and the rise of Eurosceptic nationalism within, is not a viable option.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      You can judge someone by their enemies. I write for the Guardian because it has all the right ones | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The year is 2050. The US government is run by President Elon Musk and his 690 children. Donald Trump, immortalized as an AI hologram, continues to send ALL CAPS tweets ALL THE TIME. The US has a special new relationship with the UK: the British Isles have been turned into a SpaceX rocket factory.In this brave new world, might is right. International human rights law doesn’t exist anymore. Journalists don’t exist either. Kash Patel, who Trump picked as his FBI director in 2024, promised to “come after people in the media” and he followed through. Now state news is piped directly into people’s brains via Musk’s proprietary microchips.I wish I could say this was all tongue-in-cheek, all completely fantastical. But it increasingly feels like we are marching towards a techno-authoritarian future. Over the past year we’ve seen norms shattered. We’ve seen what Amnesty International, along with many leading experts, have termed a genocide in Gaza, become horrifically normalized. We’ve seen international law dangerously undermined, an accelerated rollback of reproductive rights, and attacks on press freedom. We’ve seen book bans, and school curriculums warped by rightwing ideologues – with public schools in Florida teaching the “benefits” of slavery.As Trump, who has called the press “the enemy of the people”, readies himself for his “revenge” term, we’ve also seen his former critics scramble to kiss the ring. Two major (billionaire-owned) US newspapers refused to endorse a candidate in the US election, seemingly out of fear of getting on Trump’s wrong side. Anticipatory obedience, a term coined by the historian Timothy Snyder, is the phrase of the moment.At the Guardian we’re already practicing anticipatory disobedience. You can judge someone by their enemies – and the Guardian has lots of enemies in high places. The delightful Musk has described the Guardian as “the most insufferable newspaper on planet Earth” and “a laboriously vile propaganda machine”. (Propaganda, you see, is when you hold the most powerful people on earth to account.)As you may have guessed, this is where I ask you to support our work – which, because we are not owned by oligarchs, is only possible because of readers like you.I want you to know that I don’t make this request lightly. Over the past year, which has been the very worst year of my life, I have woken up every day to horrific, and seemingly never-ending, pictures of dead children in Gaza and felt utter despair. I have watched as Palestinians like me are dehumanized by many in the western media. The likes of the editorial board of the Washington Post argue that there should be two tiers of justice, and the ICC shouldn’t investigate war crimes against Palestinians. I have agonized over the role of journalism and asked myself again and again what the point of writing is. And I have, to be completely honest, felt frustrated by some of the Guardian’s own coverage of Gaza.But I wouldn’t still be writing for the Guardian if I didn’t believe it to be an essential force for good in the world; one which we simply can’t afford to lose. I write for the Guardian, and I’m asking for your support now, because there is no other media outlet with the global reach – and no paywall – that stands for progressive values in the way that the Guardian does. There is certainly no other comparable media outlet that would have let me write uncensored about Palestine in the way the Guardian has.And, of course, I write about other things as well: everything from woke chicken to feminism to vagina candles. One of the things I appreciate most about the Guardian is that although we do serious work, we don’t always take ourselves too seriously – there’s still room for humor. And in dark times, humor is not some sort of indulgence, it’s essential to getting by.As we head into a new year I hope you will consider supporting us. At the very least, please do join me in putting a very delicate middle finger up to all the Musks of the world, who would be ecstatic if the Guardian ceased to exist.You can make your contribution to the Guardian here. More

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      ‘Incredibly harmful’: why Trump’s FBI and DoJ picks scare civil liberties experts

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      By tapping two combative ultra-loyalists to run the FBI and the justice department, Donald Trump has sparked fears they will pursue the president-elect’s calls for “revenge” against his political foes and sack officials who Trump demonizes as “deep state” opponents, say ex-justice department prosecutors.Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, who Trump has nominated to run the FBI and Department of Justice, respectively, have been unswerving loyalists to Trump for years, promoting Trump’s false claims that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was due to fraud.Patel was a top lawyer on the House intelligence panel under rightwing member Devin Nunes for part of Trump’s first term and then held a few posts in the Trump administration including at the national security council advising the president.Bondi, a recent corporate lobbyist and an ex-Florida attorney general, defended Trump during his first impeachment and was active on the campaign trail during the late stages of his 2024 run.Patel and Bondi have each echoed Trump’s calls for taking revenge against key Democrats and officials, including ones who pursued criminal charges against Trump for his aggressive efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat and his role in inflaming the January 6 attack on the Capitol that led to five deaths.Trump has lavished praise on both picks, calling Patel a “brilliant lawyer” and “advocate for truth”, while hailing Bondi as “loyal” and “qualified”. But critics say their rhetoric and threats are “incredibly harmful to public trust” in the two agencies undermining the integrity of the FBI and justice department, and potentially spurring violence.Patel promised last year on Steve Bannon’s show to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections”.Patel, 44, who last year published a “deep state” enemies list as part of a book, added:“We’re going to come after you … Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”At the end of his first term as Trump scrambled aggressively to block Biden’s win, he briefly tried to install Patel as number two at the FBI or the CIA for support, but the idea died when the then attorney general, Bill Barr, vowed “over my dead body”.Meanwhile, Bondi, 59, told Fox News last year that when Trump wins “you know what’s going to happen: the Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state … they were hiding in the shadows.”Bondi added: “But now, they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated, and the House needs to be cleaned out. Because now we know who most of them are; there’s a record of it, and we can clean house next turn. And that’s what has to happen.”Fears about the two nominees were compounded by Trump’s comments on Meet the Press on Sunday when he said he wouldn’t tell the justice department to prosecute his political enemies, but added threateningly that the House members on the panel that investigated the January 6 insurrection “should go to jail”.Ex-justice department prosecutors worry that Trump’s two picks will exact retribution against Trump foes, undermining the independence of both the justice department and the FBI and damaging the rule of law.“The rhetoric of Bondi and Patel is incredibly harmful to public trust in our government institutions and the reputations of individual public servants,” said Barbara McQuade, a former top prosecutor in eastern Michigan who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. “There’s absolutely no public evidence of wrongdoing to ‘rig’ the 2020 election.“Pledges to prosecute the prosecutors and investigate the investigators based on the complete absence of evidence is reckless because even if investigations do not materialize, unhinged members of the public will hear these bombastic accusations as a call to action.”Similarly, the former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich said: “Bondi and Patel are election deniers, in the face of the adjudication of more than 60 cases rejecting claims of election fraud in 2020. This is alarming.“Members of the Senate judiciary committee have a duty to explore the basis of those often-repeated beliefs. If Bondi and Patel maintain that the election was stolen, they either are liars – and lying under oath is a crime – or they are so detached from reality that they shouldn’t be trusted to run a two-person convenience store, much less the DoJ and the FBI.”The former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman likens Trump’s nominees to his heavy reliance in his real estate career on Roy Cohn, the late mafia lawyer and chief counsel to rightwing senator Joseph McCarthy.“Still casting about for a Roy Cohn replacement, Trump has gone to people like Bondi and Patel whose loyalty comes from their utter dependence on his favor,” Richman said.Richman added: “But their lack of experience with the agencies he wants them to lead promises a rocky road ahead, both for them and the agencies.”Richman noted: “Presidents can pardon and otherwise kill cases and his loyal minions can disrupt agency operations, but I suspect they will soon be railing at what they call ‘resistance’ and what everyone else calls rule-following.”Such concerns about both nominees have been reinforced by their eager echoing of Trump’s conspiratorial obsession of going after “deep state” foes, as well as their old ties to Trump and backgrounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPatel, who lacks experience leading an agency, shares Trump’s obsession and vindictiveness towards political critics and the press who Trump has branded an “enemy of the people”.Last year in his book Government Gangsters, Patel went further in an appendix where he included 60 “members of the Executive Branch Deep State” that consisted largely of top Democrats and Trump critics. Patel also wrote that Trump “must fire the top ranks of the FBI”.“Then, all those who manipulated evidence, hid exculpatory information, or in any way abused their authority for political ends must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Patel said.Patel’s incendiary comments and writings could lead to confirmation problems by the US Senate during hearings. Chris Wray, who Trump appointed as director after firing James Comey in 2017 and who Trump has often criticized, has three years left in his 10-year term, so he would have to resign or be fired to make way for Patel.“Kash Patel is manifestly unqualified,” said the ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “Given his intemperate support for retribution against the deep state and Trump’s political ‘foes’, he is temperamentally unqualified for the job.”While Bondi is an equally staunch Trump loyalist, she is expected to have fewer confirmation problems. Trump tapped her for the post within hours of his first candidate for AG, the ex-Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, dropping out after serious allegations arose of sexual misconduct that led to a House ethics inquiry while he was in office.Still, Bondi’s vociferous election denialism and attacks on the so-called “deep state” represent a sharp break historically with the rhetoric of attorneys general which critics are raising strong fears about.After Trump’s defeat in 2020, Bondi co-chaired the law and justice section at the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute, which has supplied a few of Trump’s new picks, including billionaire Linda McMahon for education secretary.Bondi also spent several years as a lobbyist for the powerhouse Florida firm led by the Republican fundraiser Brian Ballard, where her clients included Amazon, General Motors, and the government of Qatar.Often seen as a political operator, Bondi has ties to Trump that go back further and have raised some red flags. When Bondi was Florida’s attorney general in 2013, Trump donated $25,000 to a Pac backing her re-election. The donation’s timing drew scrutiny given that Bondi’s spokesperson told a newspaper just days before the donation that the AG’s office was reviewing a class-action lawsuit by New York which had been filed against Trump University for fraud.Veteran prosecutors warn that if the Senate confirms Bondi and Patel they could create a climate for violence against Trump’s foes.“I’m more worried about threats, harassment and political violence than I am in the success of baseless investigations,” McQuade said. “Bondi and Patel will be unable to get bogus charges past a grand jury, a judge or a trial jury, but someone who believes this deep state nonsense could decide to take matters into their own hands.”Looking ahead, Bromwich stressed too that if Patel and Bondi pursued baseless inquiries, they could boomerang.“Lawyers and investigators who willingly participate in the pursuit of a revenge and retribution agenda risk losing not only the respect of their peers but their future livelihoods. In particular, lawyers who initiate investigations and pursue prosecutions without factual predicates risk being the subject of ethics complaints and the loss of their law licenses.” More

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      Without proof, top Trump adviser accuses January 6 committee of destroying evidence – as it happened

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      Jason Miller, a top adviser to Donald Trump, went on CNN earlier today to defend the president-elect’s assertion that the bipartisan House committee tasked with investigating the January 6 insurrection destroyed evidence.Trump used that claim to then argue that the lawmakers who took part in the investigation should go to jail. The assertion appears factually wobbly, since the committee’s report and its evidence remains easily accessible online.Asked in the CNN interview if Trump would have Kash Patel, his nominee to lead the FBI, go after the committee members, Miller responded:
      I do have to take issue with saying that the select committee didn’t go and destroy records. They have wiped everything out …
      Other committees have looked through and said that those records are gone, that they don’t exist, that they’re not there. Even Republicans who are now in charge have said that those records are gone, that they’re not there. So I would completely take issue with that. We’re going to have to agree to disagree, but they got rid of it.
      But he seemed to moderate Trump’s comments slightly, arguing that the president-elect expects Patel and Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, “to apply the law equally”:
      He wants everyone who he puts into key positions of leadership, again, whether that’s Pam Bondi as the AG, Kash Patel, the FBI, or anybody else, to apply the law equally to everybody. Now, that means, if you’re somebody who’s committed some very serious crimes, who’s committed very serious felonies, who’s, for example, leaked confidential information, in direct violation of laws that are in place, well, then, obviously, that sets you up for different things …
      But as far as the politics aspect, if you listen to the entire interview with President Trump, he said he’s going to leave that up to the law enforcement agents in charge, including Pam Bondi and Kash Patel.
      Donald Trump this weekend made clear he would pardon rioters facing charges or convicted of involvement in January 6, while saying members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the violence “should go to jail”. That prompted a response from its vice-chair, Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who rejected his criticism, saying: “Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power.” Meanwhile, the supreme court turned aside an effort by Trump’s attorneys to lift the gag order imposed on him in his hush-money case.Here’s what else happened today:

      Jason Miller, a top adviser to Trump, said the House committee that investigated January 6 destroyed evidence, but provided no proof for his claim. He also slightly walked back Trump’s quip that the lawmakers involved should be jailed.

      Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator, said the January 6 committee members do not “have a reason to be afraid now”, but that their work is worth of investigating.

      Jim Clyburn, a veteran Democratic congressman, warned that Trump’s comments should be taken seriously, adding that they were reminiscent of the rhetoric that led to the rise of Jim Crow.

      Two senators proposed a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on supreme court justices, but it faces long odds.

      Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican who will chair the Senate judiciary committee next year, sent the FBI director and his deputy a letter saying they should resign for not cooperating with Congress and politicizing the bureau.
      Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary is back on Capitol Hill for more meetings with Republican senators, including Joni Ernst, whose views on him are seen as vital to his chances of confirmation.Ernst, a combat veteran and sexual assault survivor, has signaled hesitance with confirming Hegseth, after reports emerged of his excessive drinking and poor treatment of women, including a sexual assault allegation.Hegseth and Ernst met again today, but it wasn’t clear if the senator had made up her mind about Trump’s Pentagon pick. As he left her office, Hegseth said that it was a “very good meeting”, but little else.Chuck Grassley, the long-serving Iowa senator who will chair the chamber’s judiciary committee next year, has called for the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and his deputy to resign, saying they politicized the agency and refused to cooperate with him.Should Wray and his deputy FBI director, Paul Abbate, heed Grassley’s call, it would clear the way for Senate Republicans to confirm the former defense official Kash Patel to the job. Patel has drawn concern for calling for the imprisonment of journalists and vowing to radically downsize the FBI.In a letter sent to Wray, Grassley wrote:
      Rather than turn over a new leaf at the FBI, you’ve continued to read from the old playbook of weaponization, double standards, and a relentless game of hide-and-seek with the Congress. As your tenure as FBI director comes to an end, I want to take this opportunity to tell you where you went wrong, for the benefit of the bureau and that of your successor.
      Grassley went on to criticize Wray and Abbate for not being forthcoming enough on a range of matters, including sexual harassment claims made by female FBI employees, the vetting of evacuees from Afghanistan, and its agents’ search of Mar-a-Lago for classified materials Donald Trump was accused of hiding there.Grassley concludes:
      For the good of the country, it’s time for you and your deputy to move on to the next chapter in your lives. I’ve spent my career fighting for transparency, and I’ve always called out those in government who have fought against it. For the public record, I must do so once again now. I therefore must express my vote of no confidence in your continued leadership of the FBI. President-elect Trump has already announced his intention to nominate a candidate to replace you, and the Senate will carefully consider that choice. For my part, I’ve also seen enough, and hope your respective successors will learn from these failures.
      If they do not step down, Trump has the power to fire them.In his interview with NBC, Donald Trump also mulled putting his health secretary nominee, Robert F Kennedy Jr, in charge of researching the very vaccines he has pushed conspiracy theories against. Here’s more, from the Guardian’s Robert Tait:Donald Trump has said Robert F Kennedy Jr, his nominee for health secretary, may investigate a supposed link between vaccines and autism – despite a consensus among the medical establishment debunking any such connection.In a wide-ranging interview with NBC, the US president-elect claimed an investigation was justified by the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses among American children over the past 25 years.“When you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said after the interviewer, Kristen Welker, asked him if he wanted to see some vaccines eliminated – a position for which Kennedy has argued.“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one out of every 36 children in the US were diagnosed with autism in 2020, compared with one in 150 in 2000.Kennedy, a noted vaccine sceptic, has repeatedly peddled discredited theories that the conditions is caused by childhood vaccinations.“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he said in a 2023 Fox News interview in which he called for more vaccine testing.“We should have the same kind of testing place or control trials that we have for other every other medication. Vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing control trials, so that there’s no way that anybody can tell the risk profile of those products, or even the relative benefits of those products before they’re mandated. We should have that kind of testing.”Jason Miller, a top adviser to Donald Trump, went on CNN earlier today to defend the president-elect’s assertion that the bipartisan House committee tasked with investigating the January 6 insurrection destroyed evidence.Trump used that claim to then argue that the lawmakers who took part in the investigation should go to jail. The assertion appears factually wobbly, since the committee’s report and its evidence remains easily accessible online.Asked in the CNN interview if Trump would have Kash Patel, his nominee to lead the FBI, go after the committee members, Miller responded:
      I do have to take issue with saying that the select committee didn’t go and destroy records. They have wiped everything out …
      Other committees have looked through and said that those records are gone, that they don’t exist, that they’re not there. Even Republicans who are now in charge have said that those records are gone, that they’re not there. So I would completely take issue with that. We’re going to have to agree to disagree, but they got rid of it.
      But he seemed to moderate Trump’s comments slightly, arguing that the president-elect expects Patel and Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, “to apply the law equally”:
      He wants everyone who he puts into key positions of leadership, again, whether that’s Pam Bondi as the AG, Kash Patel, the FBI, or anybody else, to apply the law equally to everybody. Now, that means, if you’re somebody who’s committed some very serious crimes, who’s committed very serious felonies, who’s, for example, leaked confidential information, in direct violation of laws that are in place, well, then, obviously, that sets you up for different things …
      But as far as the politics aspect, if you listen to the entire interview with President Trump, he said he’s going to leave that up to the law enforcement agents in charge, including Pam Bondi and Kash Patel.
      The idea is not new. Similar bills, like the Supreme Court Tenure Establishment and Retirement Modernization Act of 2023, which was introduced in the US house of representatives and has more than 60 co-sponsors, also calls for 18-year terms for supreme court justices and the establishment of a process for the president to appoint a new justice every two years.Another bill introduced this year by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, called the Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act, also called for overhauling the supreme court. But unlike the amendment proposed by Welch and Manchin, this would not limit their terms, but rather the total number of justices, allowing for expanding the court from nine to 15.The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law says supreme court justices are getting appointed at younger ages and living longer than they used to, which means they are sitting on the court longer than usual.Donald Trump appointed more justices during his first term than Barack Obama or George W Bush did during each of their two-term presidencies respectively.About two-thirds of Americans support imposing term limits on the members of the nation’s highest court, according to the results of the the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey released in September.Although Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who co-authored the proposed amendment to limit the supreme court justice terms with Welch, is seen as an obstructionist by Democrats, this latest proposal is a popular idea within the party.The progressive House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last year said: “We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach and abuse of power in the supreme court [that] has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy.“And in the process, they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.”Manchin left the party in May and registered as an independent after criticism for pushing against Joe Biden’s ambitious legislative goals, like those related to tackling the climate crisis or taxing the wealthy.Senator Pete Welch of Vermont took to X to announce his amendment to impose term limits on supreme court justices. He wrote:
      No other major democracy in the world gives lifetime seats to judges who sit on their highest court. It leads to divisive confirmation processes and reduced trust from the public.
      Donald Trump this weekend made clear he would pardon rioters facing charges or convicted of involvement in January 6, while saying members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the violence “should go to jail”. That prompted a response from its vice-chair, Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who rejected his criticism, saying: “Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power”. Meanwhile, the supreme court turned aside an effort by Trump’s attorneys to lift the gag order imposed on him in his hush-money case.Here’s what else has happened today so far:

      Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator, said the January 6 committee members do not “have a reason to be afraid now”, but that their work is worth of investigating.

      Jim Clyburn, a veteran Democratic congressman, warned that Trump’s comments should be taken seriously, adding that they were reminiscent of the rhetoric that led to the rise of Jim Crow.

      Two senators proposed a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on supreme court justices, but it faces long odds.
      The Democratic senator Peter Welch and independent senator Joe Manchin have proposed a constitutional amendment that would impose term limits on supreme court justices, saying such a move is necessary to restore faith in the nation’s highest court.“The current lifetime appointment structure is broken and fuels polarizing confirmation battles and political posturing that has eroded public confidence in the highest court in our land. Our amendment maintains that there shall never be more than nine justices and would gradually create regular vacancies on the Court, allowing the President to appoint a new justice every two years with the advice and consent of the United States Senate,” said Manchin, who is weeks away from concluding his 14 years of representing West Virginia.The senators cited one of many surveys that found dismal approval ratings for the court, where conservatives have a six-justice supermajority and liberals a three-justice minority. Welch, a recent arrival in the chamber who represents Vermont, said:
      Taking action to restore public trust in our nation’s most powerful Court is as urgent as it is necessary. Setting term limits for Supreme Court Justices will cut down on political gamesmanship, and is commonsense reform supported by a majority of Americans.
      Here’s how their proposal would work:
      The amendment would institute nonrenewable, 18-year terms for new U.S. Supreme Court Justices, with a new term starting every two years …
      The proposed amendment would not adjust the tenure of sitting Justices, but rather institute a transition period to maintain regular vacancies as current Justices retire. During that period, 18-year terms will begin every two years, regardless of when a current Justice leaves the bench. Once a current Justice retires, the newly appointed Justice will serve out the remainder of the next open 18-year term. The amendment would not change the overall number of Justices on the Court.
      It’s unlikely the idea will go far, particularly with Republicans in January assuming the majority in the chamber tasked with confirming the president’s appointments to the supreme court.It’s also proven difficult to win ratification of constitutional amendments. None has been approved since 1992, and the process typically requires the approval of supermajorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as the legislatures in three-fourths of states.Police in Pennsylvania are reportedly questioning a man in connection with the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, in New York City last week.News of Thompson’s murder was greeted with sympathy and cheers on some corners of social media, particularly from people who are critical of the insurer’s treatment of its customers. Over the weekend, the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reacted to that sentiment by saying it is a sign that the US healthcare system needs real reform. Here’s more:
      Progressive congressperson Ro Khanna has sympathy for the murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson – yet at the same time is not surprised that the killing reignited a national dialogue about inequities in the US healthcare system, he said in an interview on Sunday.
      ‘It was horrific,’ the California Democrat said on ABC This Week with respect to the slaying of Thompson, whose survivors include his widow and two sons ages 16 and 19. ‘I mean, this is a father we’re talking about – of two children, and … there is no justification for violence.
      ‘But the outpouring afterwards has not surprised me.’
      Khanna told the show’s host, Martha Raddatz, that he agreed with fellow liberal and US senator Bernie Sanders when he wrote recently on social media: ‘We waste hundreds of billions a year on health care administrative expenses that make insurance CEOs and wealthy stockholders incredibly rich while 85 million Americans go uninsured or underinsured. Health care is a human right. We need Medicare for all.
      ‘After years, Sanders is winning this debate,’ Khanna said, referring to the Vermont senator’s support for a single-payer national health insurance system seen in other wealthy democracies. More