US Politics

When Donald Trump was president, his lawyers repeatedly claimed that presidential immunity shielded him from civil litigation unrelated to his official duties, among other legal actions. Court after court rejected that position, with various judges ruling “no one is above the law” – though his numerous appeals delayed litigation.Trump is out of the White House, paving the way for legal action against him to continue in earnest. Here are some of the top legal proceedings involving Trump.Manhattan grand juryOn 25 May, the Washington Post reported that Manhattan prosecutors had “convened the grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict former president Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself, should prosecutors present the panel with criminal charges”.Vance’s office is exploring whether the valuation of any real estate in his company was gamed to cheat insurers or banks, and whether any value manipulation enabled illegal tax breaks. The New York attorney general has also intensified its inquiry from a civil investigation, saying: “We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA.”E Jean CarrollAdvice columnist E Jean Carroll, who has alleged that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s, sued him in November 2019 after he denied the allegations. Trump claimed that Carroll had fabricated the allegation to sell her book, and remarked: “She’s not my type.”The US Department of Justice, which is representing Trump, had claimed that he should be considered a regular federal employee and that his statements fell within the parameters of his employment. As such, the DoJ contended, Trump was protected by the “Federal Tort Claims Act” – meaning its lawyers could represent him.The judge in the case did not agree that Trump was a regular federal worker, nor that these statements were part of his work. The DoJ appealed against this ruling before Biden assumed office. Roberta Kaplan, who represents Carroll, said they are “confident” the appeals court will rule in their favor and that the case will ultimately be set for trial.Summer ZervosFormer Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos claimed in October 2016 that Trump groped her. Trump, who was on the campaign trail at the time of these allegations, said that her claims were false and fabricated. Zervos filed suit against him in 2017, saying his denials defamed her.Trump had tried to halt the case, citing presidential protection from the legal action. Trump’s legal team appealed to New York’s highest court after suffering prior legal defeats related to the immunity issue. On 30 March, the court ultimately rejected this appeal, saying “the issues presented have become moot” given that he is no longer president. This enables Zervos’s lawsuit to proceed.Georgia votingAccording to multiple reports, Georgia prosecutors are investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. Fani Willis, Fulton county district attorney, asked state officials to preserve documents, such as documentation involving Trump’s call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to “find” more ballots in his favor.The letter said that “particular care” needed to be “given to set aside and preserve those that may be evidence of attempts to influence the actions of persons who were administering that election”, Reuters quoted the 10 February correspondence as saying. More

Growing fissures in Democratic ranks were evident on Monday over West Virginia senator Joe Manchin’s public opposition to the For the People Act, a sweeping measure to protect voting rights that are under assault from Republicans in numerous states – and also his stance against scrapping the filibuster.The filibuster is the rule under which the Senate minority, currently the Republicans, has the power to thwart the majority’s will on most legislation.Manchin is a centrist Democrat, but one progressive congressman called him “the new Mitch McConnell”, for helping the Republican Senate leader in his quest to stop progress on the Democrats’ agenda at all costs.In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail on Sunday, Manchin said he opposed the For the People Act, or HR1, which currently has no Republican support in the Senate, because “partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy”.He also reiterated his support of the filibuster, under which 60 votes are needed to pass most legislation. The Senate is split 50-50 between the two parties and controlled by Democrats only through Kamala Harris’s casting vote as vice-president.Anger over Manchin’s stand was particularly fierce among African Americans, a key constituency in elections which gave Democrats control of the White House and Congress and subsequently a key target of Republican efforts to restrict ballot access in Florida, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere.Mondaire Jones, a New York congressman, referred to the era of racial segregation in the US south when he said: “Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”The writer Jemele Hill elaborated: “This is so on brand for this country. Record number of black voters show up to save this democracy, only for white supremacy to be upheld by a cowardly, power-hungry white dude. Joe Manchin is a clown.”Speaking to CNN on Monday, congressman Jamaal Bowman of New York called Manchin “the new Mitch McConnell”.“Mitch McConnell during [Barack] Obama’s presidency said he would do everything in his power to stop Obama,” he said.“He’s also repeated that now, during the Biden presidency, by saying he would do everything in his power to stop President Biden. And now Joe Manchin is doing everything in his power to stop democracy and stop our work for the people, that work that the people sent us here to do.”Manchin has in fact voted with Biden most of the time so far, and has said he backs the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore ballot protections gutted by the US supreme court in 2013.Asked if it was fair to attack Manchin so stringently, Bowman said: “HR1 has popularity in West Virginia and across the country. Well over 65% of the American people support HR1, and well over 50% of Republicans support HR1.“The American people sent us to Washington to do a job. Just a few weeks ago, we had a bipartisan piece of legislation looking to form a commission to study the 6 January insurrection, the first attack on our Capitol since the War of 1812. It was a bipartisan piece of legislation, and it did not pass. Why? Because of the filibuster, and because the majority of Republicans are focused much more on obstruction.”A study by the Center for American Progress found that Republicans have used filibusters roughly twice as often as Democrats to stop legislation.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and New York Democrat, has said he will bring the For the People Act up for a vote this month. At the outset of a new legislative session on Monday, he appealed for Democrats to stick together.“I want to be clear that the next few weeks will be hard and will test our resolve as a Congress and a conference,” Schumer wrote to colleagues, as reported by the Hill. “The American people gave us a Democratic Senate to produce big and bold action on the major issues confronting us. And that is what we will do.”As the influential Punchbowl News put it on Monday morning, however: “Any legislative strategy that involves dumping the filibuster and then passing a bill is going to fail. That much is clear. If you don’t get that by now, we don’t know how to help you.”Unlike his fellow centrist and filibuster supporter, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Manchin voted for the 6 January commission, which would have investigated an event which Donald Trump incited in service of his lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” and he won, not Joe Biden.On Monday, Trump backed Manchin in his support for the filibuster, telling Fox Business: “It’s a very important thing. Otherwise you’re going to be packing the courts, you’re going to be doing all sorts of very bad things that were unthinkable.”The former president’s words were not without attendant irony.In July 2017, faced with the failure of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump famously tweeted against the filibuster rule: “Republican Senate must get rid of 60 vote NOW! It is killing the R Party, allows 8 Dems to control country. 200 Bills sit in Senate. A JOKE!”McConnell, then Senate majority leader, refused to budge. Now that he is the Senate minority leader, McConnell is still immovable. More

The United States’s reputation as the leading global power has suffered in France and Germany because of Washington’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed nearly 600,000 Americans, according to a new poll of views in 11 countries.On the eve of President Joe Biden’s trip to Europe, the survey by the German Marshall Fund and the Bertelsmann Foundation said he had not won back the standing of the United States as it was before Covid-19 struck. China’s reputation had risen slightly.According to US research papers released on 26 March, the United States under Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective strategy.“The first three months of the Biden administration have not affected French and German views of US influence in the world,” the study said.“These numbers are in line with the results of the 2020 survey, which had fallen by about 10 points from the pre-pandemic numbers, to the advantage of China.“That compares with the perception within the United States that US influence abroad has risen, the survey found.Biden embarks on his first European tour as president on Wednesday to attend G7, Nato and European Union summits. He faces the challenge of repairing transatlantic ties damaged by Trump, whose withdrawal from international agreements and sharp criticism of Nato undermined European faith in Washington.On his trip Biden, who defeated Trump in a November election and took office in January, will be putting to the test his “America is back” motto, with allies disillusioned during the Trump years looking for tangible, lasting action.Biden has spent most of his first four months in office focused on domestic issues and grappling with a deeply divided US Congress. The trip is his first outside the United States as president.Only 51% of Germans see the United States as a reliable partner, rising to 60% in France, 67% in Britain and 76% in Poland. Fewer than a quarter of Turks trust the United States. Most Americans regard the European Union as a reliable partner, the study said.A majority of respondents surveyed still think that the United States should be involved in the defence and security of Europe, except in Sweden, where views are divided, and Turkey.Conducted online between 29 March and 13 April, the survey sampled 1,000 adults in each of the 11 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. More

Joe Biden’s White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, has likened reporters from Fox News and other rightwing outlets to “representatives of the Russian and Chinese media asking questions directed by their government … propaganda pushers” to be treated with extreme caution.Psaki was speaking to CNN’s Reliable Sources in an interview broadcast on Sunday. Her relations with the media have been smoother – and her briefings more frequent – than any predecessor in the Trump administration. But clashes with reporters including Peter Doocy of Fox News have made headlines.Last week, one such interaction involved questions about Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser. Republicans and rightwing reporters have seized on the publication of emails sent by Fauci at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic.Asked by Doocy if Fauci should be “held accountable” for “saying one thing in email and then coming to this microphone and saying something else”, Psaki called Fauci “a renowned public servant” who has “overseen management of multiple global health crises”.“Attacks launched on him are certainly something we wouldn’t stand by,” she said, adding: “I am going to let Dr Fauci speak to his own defence about his emails from 17 months ago before this president even took office.”Doocy asked about US funding for Chinese research laboratories, a key part of Republican attacks on Fauci as the theory that Covid-19 escaped such a lab gains renewed attention.Psaki deflected the question.Doocy asked: “Can you imagine any circumstance where the president would ever fire him?”“No,” said Psaki, turning to another reporter, who she told: “Go ahead.”On CNN, Psaki said: “The things that get under my skin are when the premise of a question is based on inaccurate information, misleading information. That can be frustrating. I try not to show it too much, try not to let people see me sweat too much. But occasionally I have a moment of humanity.”Host Brian Stelter pointed out that most questions “based on falsehoods come from brands like Newsmax, which does sometimes get called on the briefing room. I know a lot of liberals don’t want Fox News to get called on. I think they should be, but … why do you call on Fox News and Newsmax?”Psaki said: “My point of view and more importantly, the president’s point of view, is that the story is not about me or a debate with news outlets. The story is about the plans of the administration and what we’re trying to project to the American people.“And when he pledged to govern for all Americans, that means talking to a range of outlets – liberal, conservative, people who have different areas of interest. So that’s exactly what I try to do every day.”Stelter asked why some viewers celebrate when the press secretary is seen to “shut down” a questioner such as Doocy.“I also have a responsibility not to allow the briefing room to become a forum for propaganda or a forum for pushing forward falsehoods or inaccurate information,” Psaki said.“My best preparation for that was actually serving as the state department spokesperson when there were representatives of the Russian and the Chinese media in the briefing room asking me questions that were directed by their government.“So we see that from time to time in the briefing room, not every single day at all, but I have a responsibility to the public to make sure they’re getting accurate information and the premises of questions that are propaganda-pushing are not giving them inaccurate information.”Psaki also defended the administration against criticism for holding only one presidential press conference – “That may be driven more by the media than it is by the American public” – and suggest some reporters’ “muscles have atrophied a little bit” when it comes to understanding the realities of governance.Fox News gleefully rounded up conservative criticism of the interview. Verdicts included “subservient, obsequious” and “bootlicking”.In his Reliable Sources email, Stelter said his goal had been “to talk big-picture … and to get personal, beyond the news-of-day questions that get asked at the briefings.” More

Joe Biden may be pressing for 2021 to be a transformational year in tackling the climate crisis, but Republicans arrayed in opposition to his agenda have dug in around a unifying rallying theme – that the fossil fuel industry should be protected at almost any cost.For many experts and environmentalists, the Republican stance is a shockingly retrograde move that flies in the face of efforts to fight global heating and resembles a head in the sand approach to the realities of a changing American economy.In a recent letter sent to John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, more than a dozen Republican state treasurers accused the administration of pressuring banks to not lend to coal, oil and gas companies, adding that such a move would “eliminate the fossil fuel industry in our country” in order to appease the US president’s “radical political preferences”.The letter raised the extraordinary possibility of Republican-led states penalizing banks that refuse to fund projects that worsen the climate crisis by pulling assets from them. Riley Moore, treasurer of the coal heartland state of West Virginia, said “undue pressure” was being put on banks by the Biden administration that could end financing of fossil fuels and “devastate West Virginia and put thousands of families out of work”.“If a bank or lending institution says it is going to do something that could cause significant economic harm to our state … then I need to take that into account when I consider what banks we do business with,” Moore, who has assets of about $18bn under his purview, told the Guardian. “If they are going to attack our industries, jobs, economy and way of life, then I am going to fight back.”The shunning of banks in this way would almost certainly face a hefty legal response but the threat is just the latest eye-catching Republican gambit aimed at propping up a fossil fuel industry that will have to be radically pared back if the US is to slash its planet-heating emissions in half this decade, as Biden has vowed.In Louisiana, Republicans have embarked upon a quixotic and probably doomed attempt to make the state a “fossil fuel sanctuary” jurisdiction that does not follow federal pollution rules.In Texas, the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has instructed his agencies to challenge the “hostile attack” launched by Biden against the state’s oil and gas industries while Republicans in Wyoming have even set up a legal fund to sue other states that refuse to take its coal.The messaging appears to be filtering down to the Republican electorate, with new polling by Yale showing support for clean energy among GOP voters has dropped dramatically over the past 18 months.The stone age didn’t end for the lack of stones and the oil age won’t end for the lack of oil.But critics say Republicans are engaged in a futile attempt to resurrect an economic vision more at home in the 1950s, rather than deal with a contemporary reality where the plummeting cost of wind and solar is propelling record growth in renewables and a cavalcade of countries are striving to cut emissions to net zero and, in the case of some including the UK and Germany, completely eliminate coal.“We are seeing desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, to squeeze one more drop of oil or lump of coal out of the ground before this transition,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University. “They are looking to go back to a prior time, but the trend if absolutely clear. The stone age didn’t end for the lack of stones and the oil age won’t end for the lack of oil.”The Republican backlash is characterized by a large dose of political posturing, according to Wagner. “If you have aspirations of higher office in some states, you just want to signal you will sue those hippie liberals,” he said. “These are delay tactics and some of them are very ham-fisted.”The US emerged from the second world war with more than half a million coalminers but this workforce has since dwindled to barely 40,000 people, amid mass automation and utilities switching to cheap sources of gas. Large quantities of jobs are set to be created in renewable energy, but some places built upon fossil fuels risk being left behind.Biden has proposed a huge infrastructure plan which would, the president says, help retrain and retool regions of the US long economically dependent upon mining and drilling. The administration has promised a glut of high-paying jobs in expanding the clean energy sector and plugging abandoned oil and gas wells, all while avoiding the current ruinous health impacts of air pollution and conditions like black lung.But unions have expressed wariness over this transition, with Republicans also highly skeptical. The promise to retrain miners is a “patronizing pipe dream of the liberal elites completely devoid from reality”, said Moore, who added that previous promises of renewable energy jobs have not materialized. “And now they are trying to sell us on the same failed idea again.”However the shift to cleaner energy happens, it’s clear the transition is under way – last year renewable energy consumption eclipsed coal for the first time in 130 years and US government projections show renewables’ overall share doubling by the middle of the century. A key question is whether the completion of this switch will be delayed long enough to risk triggering the worst impacts of disastrous global heating.“The Republican response is predictable and pathetic. It is from a very old playbook,” said Judith Enck, who was a regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency under Barack Obama. “The party will cling to fossil fuels to the bitter end. It’s so sad because so many Republican voters are damaged by climate change, if you look at deaths from the heat or wildfires we are seeing in California. But the party right now is just completely beholden to the fossil fuel industry.” More

A US public health expert has warned that though cases of Covid-19 are at their lowest rates for months and much of the country is returning to normal life, young Americans are still “a vulnerable host” for the coronavirus.Dr Richina Bicette, associate medical director at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told CNN children were now accounting for nearly 25% of US cases.“As adults get vaccinated and become more protected and immune,” she said, “the virus is still in the community looking for a vulnerable host and pediatric patients fit that description.”Children aged 12 and above are eligible to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, one of three in US use. Federal authorities will this week debate extending vaccines to children aged 11 and under.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data shows that 52% of the US population over the age of 12 has had at least one vaccine dose and 42% is fully protected.The Biden administration wants 70% of US adults to have received at least one shot by 4 July. A range of incentives are being offered.Deaths in the US have slowed drastically, the toll a little under 590,000. But with virus variants causing problems as other countries reopen, experts have voiced concern over slowing rates of vaccination, particularly in Republican states.On Sunday the Republican governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union.Mississippi is 50th and last among states in vaccinations, with 30% of residents fully protected and 40.5% aged 12 and older having received at least one dose, according to the CDC. The states with the highest vaccination rates are Vermont (80.6% – with a Republican governor, Phil Scott), Hawaii (78.6%) and Massachusetts (76.8%).“I believe the vaccine works,” Reeves said. “I believe it’s safe. I believe it’s effective. I took my first dose in January, as did my wife, on TV live, and I have encouraged Mississippians to do the same.“But I also want to point out that President Biden’s goals for 4 July or otherwise are arbitrary to say the least.”Reeves said his focus was on providing “quality care” for people with Covid-19 – and trumpeted a steep decline in hospitalisations.“At our peak, we had 1,444 individuals in the hospital,” he said. “Today, we have 131. We’re down 90%. At our peak, we had 2,400 cases per day over a seven-day period. Over the last seven days, we have had barely 800 cases in total.“And so, for that entire year period, the goalpost was, let’s reduce the number of cases. And we have been successful at doing that. The question is, why?“We have had a million Mississippians that have gotten the vaccine, but we have also had 320,000 Mississippians that have tested positive for the virus. Many people believe that somewhere between four and five times more people have gotten the virus that have not tested [positive].“And so we have got probably a million or so Mississippians that have natural immunity. And because of that, there is very, very, very little virus in our state. But we’re still working to get the vaccine distributed, and hope we will continue to do so.”Asked if he was worried unvaccinated Mississippians could be “sitting ducks” to any surge involving a virus variant, Reeves avoided the question, complaining instead about political clashes with Biden officials.Host Jake Tapper changed tack, saying: “You seem to be arguing everybody should get vaccinated, and yet it’s not that big a deal that not everybody’s getting vaccinated. And those seem to be in conflict.”He then asked if Reeves would agree that Mississippians should go get vaccinated.“I would absolutely agree,” Reeves said. “I think that all Mississippians and all Americans should go get vaccinated, because I think it’s safe, I think it’s effective and I think it’s one way to continue to drive down the numbers.” More

Idaho’s rightward political lurch has immersed the state’s Republicans in a political civil war that now extends all the way from the grassroots to the executive mansion.In late May, the state’s Republican governor, Brad Little, angrily revoked an executive order banning mask mandates in the state that had been put in place by his own militia-supporting lieutenant governor during a period when she was deputizing for him. Janice McGeachin had ordered that Idaho cities and counties revoke mask orders, playing into a widespread fear among the far right that basic health measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic are a sign of an over-reaching government. Little then called McGeachin’s action “tyranny” and a “stunt” and scuppered it after it had been in place for just a day.But observers say the bizarre fight is symptomatic of a much wider problem in Idaho and the rest of America.They fear that the political dynamics in Idaho – where far-right actors have won recruits and political momentum through uncompromising refusal to comply with public health measures – may presage a worrying direction of conservative politics in the country as a whole.“Political moderates around the country need to pay more attention to what is happening here,” said Mike Satz, executive director of the Idaho97 project, which was founded last year to combat misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic.“Idaho used to follow broader trends, but now it is in the vanguard of extremist activity,” Satz added.Political moderates around the country need to pay more attention to what is happening hereThe mask ban was put in place by McGeachin, a businesswoman who previously spent 10 years as a state representative for a rural district in the state’s far east. Idaho had no statewide mask ban measures in place, but McGeachin’s move was an attempt to prevent cities and counties addressing the pandemic with emergency measures by themselves.The lieutenant governor won election in 2018 after squeaking through a crowded five-way Republican primary earlier that year. Since then she has won praise from the far right and drawn concern from more moderate Republicans over her associations with the Three Percenter militia movement.During her vice-gubernatorial run, a member of her security detail sported a Three Percenter tattoo, and McGeachin refused to answer media questions about security staffing. On another occasion in 2019, she posted to Facebook a picture of herself with members of the Real Three Percenters group, who were protesting on behalf of Todd Engel, who was sentenced in the previous year to 14 years in a federal prison over his role in a 2014 armed standoff with federal agents at Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada.Just weeks later, McGeachin led armed protesters, including Three Percenters, through an impromptu oath which appeared to be intended to swear them in as state militia.Recently McGeachin, while appearing as a guest on the podcast of Southern Poverty Law Center-listed extremist David Horowitz, said that the federal US government did not rightfully own any public lands in Idaho, which make up about 60% of the state’s total area.“I don’t view that the federal government owns the land in Idaho, my view is that the land of Idaho belongs to the state of Idaho,” McGeachin told Horowitz, echoing the views expressed by the likes of fellow Idahoan Ammon Bundy, who led the armed occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refuge in 2016.Even in a deep red state, until recently such associations and positions may have ruled McGeachin out as a serious contender for the governorship.But Jaclyn Kettler, a political scientist at Boise State University, located in the state’s capital, said that over the last year, “battles over mask mandates have underlined divisions within the Republican party”.She says that the divisions are long-standing, and partly related to the party’s lock on statewide offices and the legislature in a state which has not elected a Democratic governor for more than 30 years, and has returned large majorities for every Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon’s run in 1968.“When you have a majority for so long, it can lead to internal divisions and factions,”, Kettler said, and adds that the recent successes of conservative Republican candidates in winning primaries, elections or re-election has “shifted the legislature and the party to the right”.Satz, the Idaho97 director, says that this rightward move means that the election of McGeachin, who has positioned herself as the hard right’s tribune, is now a possibility.“Before 2018, no one thought that there was a realistic chance of her becoming lieutenant governor, but here we are,” Satz added.In the last year, and particularly in 2021, what has boosted McGeachin’s status among conservatives has been her support of protests against mask and lockdown orders, which have included direct criticisms of Little’s efforts to rein the virus in, and mandates introduced by local governments.Satz says that a range of far right actors have exploited grassroots angst about Covid measures, including McGeachin, legislators like Heather Scott, Dorothy Moon and Chad Christensen and far-right actors like Bundy, and members of Christ Church, based in the Idaho college town of Moscow.According to Satz these increasingly “violent and aggressive” protests came about in a slow boil. While there were only sparse, fringe protests at the outset of the pandemic, racial justice protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd brought armed rightwing counter-protesters into the streets. That included in the North Idaho town of Coeur D’Alene, where dozens of heavily armed men began facing off with relatively small Black Lives Matter protest groups in June 2020.Satz said that these counter-protests began to bleed into anti-mask protests, and later ones against Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, which many Republicans and those on the far right falsely believe was stolen by the Democrats. “It’s all the same people,” he said of the composition of the various rightwing protests movements.Consistent promoters of protests include Bundy, who began early on in the pandemic to characterize mask mandates and lockdowns as affronts to liberty.As early as March 2020, Bundy was fronting meetings in his current home city of Emmett, Idaho, calling on people to reject mask orders. By April, he was rallying followers to the defense of arrested anti-vaxxers, and was a prominent participant in anti lockdown marches on the state capitol, some of which were organized in part by the dark money group the Idaho Freedom Foundation. Last August, Bundy was arrested multiple times while leading a maskless protest against Covid measures in the Idaho state house. .Despite being banned from the state house after his arrests, Bundy himself has now filed to run for governor in Idaho in 2022.Bundy also had a hand in making the tone of anti-mask protests more aggressive from December 2020 on. In that month, protesters succeeded in shutting down a meeting of public health officials who had convened to discuss a mandate in the Boise region to address then-surging cases of Covid-19.That protest included members of Bundy’s People’s Rights group. Bundy has reportedly encouraged members, who include a wide range of far-right activists in Idaho and beyond, to engage in weapons and ham radio training sessions in 10-person cells in order to defend themselves in an armed conflict with government, which Bundy has hinted is an inevitability.Now, People’s Rights-linked farmers have purchased land along the Klamath River in Oregon to protest against drought-related reductions in irrigation allowances to farmers.Amy Herzfeld-Copple monitors extremism and other threats in Idaho and beyond for progressive non-profit the Western States Center. In an email, she wrote that “both Bundy and McGeachin have exploited pandemic anxiety and instability over the last year to build political power and attract attention for disrupting democratic norms”.Herzfeld-Copple added that “they each have long histories of engaging with paramilitaries, encouraging political violence, courting bigoted groups”, and that “there’s a real danger that their campaigns will embolden extremist movements”.In March 2021, again in Coeur D’Alene, protesters, with the support of McGeachin and North Idaho Republican legislators including Scott and Moon, burned masks outside a health center. Statewide, Satz says, different elements of the far right are “working together in ways we haven’t seen before”.“They’re using Covid and becoming more aggressive and more focused. The extreme right are gaining power in Idaho, but we don’t think it will stop here,” Satz said. More