US Politics

Matt Gaetz, a prominent Republican in Congress and a close ally of Donald Trump, said on Tuesday he was being investigated by the justice department over a former relationship but denied any criminal wrongdoing.Gaetz, who represents parts of western Florida, told Axios that his lawyers were informed that he was the subject of an investigation “regarding sexual conduct with women” but that he was not a target of the inquiry. He denied that he ever had a relationship with any underage girls and said the allegations against him were “as searing as they are false”.A subject is conventionally thought of as someone whose actions fall within the scope of a criminal investigation, whereas a target is someone whom prosecutors have gathered evidence linking to a crime. But during the course of an investigation, a subject can become a target.His comments came shortly after the New York Times reported that Gaetz was under investigation by the justice department to determine if he violated federal sex trafficking laws and had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a 17-year-old, while paying her to travel with him.Gaetz claimed that the allegations were part of an extortion plot by a former justice department official, whom he did not name.“Over the past several weeks my family and I have been victims of an organized criminal extortion involving a former DoJ official seeking $25m while threatening to smear my name,” Gaetz said in a statement.Gaetz said his family had been cooperating with the FBI and said his father was wearing a recording device, at the FBI’s direction, “to catch these criminals”. He demanded the justice department release the recordings.“No part of the allegations against me are true, and the people pushing these lies are targets of the ongoing extortion investigation,” he said.The New York Times cited three people familiar with the matter, saying the scrutiny was part of a broader justice department investigation into one of his political allies, Joel Greenberg, a fellow Florida politician, who was indicted last summer on sex trafficking and other charges that he stalked a political opponent. A judge ordered the former tax collector back to jail this month for violating the conditions of his release.“I believe that there are people at the Department of Justice who are trying to criminalize my sexual conduct, you know, when I was a single guy,” Gaetz told Axios.“I have definitely, in my single days, provided for women I’ve dated,” Gaetz said. “You know, I’ve paid for flights, for hotel rooms. I’ve been, you know, generous as a partner. I think someone is trying to make that look criminal when it is not.”Gaetz has not been charged with a crime. The justice department did not immediately comment. More

The United States will speak out about human rights everywhere including in allies and at home, secretary of state Antony Blinken has vowed, turning a page from Donald Trump as he bemoaned deteriorations around the world.Presenting the state department’s first human rights report under President Joe Biden, the new top US diplomat took some of his most pointed, yet still veiled, swipes at the approach of the Trump administration.“Some have argued that it’s not worth it for the US to speak up forcefully for human rights – or that we should highlight abuse only in select countries, and only in a way that directly advances our national interests,” Blinken told reporters in clear reference to Trump’s approach.“But those people miss the point. Standing up for human rights everywhere is in America’s interests,” he said.“And the Biden-Harris administration will stand against human rights abuses wherever they occur, regardless of whether the perpetrators are adversaries or partners.”Blinken ordered the return of assessments in the annual report on countries’ records on access to reproductive health, which were removed under the staunchly anti-abortion Trump administration.Blinken also denounced a commission of his predecessor Mike Pompeo that aimed to redefine the US approach to human rights by giving preference to private property and religious freedom while downplaying reproductive and LGBTQ rights.During Pompeo’s time in office, the state department was aggressive in opposing references to reproductive and gender rights in UN and other multilateral documents.“There is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others,” Blinken said.In another shift in tone from Trump, Blinken said the United States acknowledged its own challenges, including “systemic racism.”“That’s what separates our democracy from autocracies: our ability and willingness to confront our own shortcomings out in the open, to pursue that more perfect union.”Blinken voiced alarm over abuses around the world including in China, again speaking of “genocide” being committed against the Uighur community.The report estimated that more than one million Uighurs and other members of mostly Muslim communities had been rounded up in internment camps in the western region of Xinjiang and that another two million are subjected to re-education training each day.“The trend lines on human rights continue to move in the wrong direction. We see evidence of that in every region of the world,” Blinken said.He said the Biden administration was prioritising coordination with allies, pointing to recent joint efforts over Xinjiang, China’s clampdown in Hong Kong and Russia’s alleged poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny.Blinken also voiced alarm over the Myanmar military’s deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, attacks on civilians in Syria and a campaign in Ethiopia’s Tigray that he has previously called ethnic cleansing.The report, written in dry, factual language, did not spare longstanding US allies.It pointed to allegations of unlawful killings and torture in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, quoting human rights groups that said Egypt is holding between 20,000 and 60,000 people chiefly due to their political beliefs.Biden earlier declassified US intelligence that found that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman authorised the gruesome killing of US-based writer Jamal Khashoggi.While the human rights report remained intact under Trump, the previous administration argued that rights were of lesser importance than other concerns with allies such as Saudi Arabia – a major oil producer and purchaser of US weapons that backed Trump’s hawkish line against Iran, whose record was also heavily scrutinized in the report.The latest report also detailed incidents in India under prime minister Narendra Modi, an increasingly close US ally.It quoted non-governmental groups as pointing to the use in India of “torture, mistreatment and arbitrary detention to obtain forced or false confessions” and quoted journalists as assessing that “press freedom declined” including through physical harassment of journalists, pressure on owners and frivolous lawsuits. More

In a keenly awaited memoir, Joe Biden’s son Hunter attacks Donald Trump as “a vile man with a vile mission” who plumbed “unprecedented depths” in last year’s US presidential election.Hunter, 51, is a lawyer and businessman who has been the focus of Republican bile ever since Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani sought information on his business dealings in Ukraine to use in the 2020 campaign.On the page, Biden insists he did nothing wrong in joining in April 2014 the board of Burisma, the gas company at the heart of the Ukraine affair. He dismisses the controversy as “remarkable for its epic banality”. But he says he would not do so again.He found the company’s role as a bulwark against Russian aggression under Vladimir Putin “inspiring”, though the five-figures a month fee was also a factor. Biden acknowledges that his famous surname was considered “gold” by Burisma. “To put it more bluntly,” he writes, “having a Biden on Burisma’s board was a loud and unmistakable fuck-you to Putin.”Giuliani’s search for dirt saw Trump impeached – and acquitted – for the first time. Republican attacks on Hunter Biden have continued, focusing on his business dealings and also his troubled personal life, including well-known struggles with drink and drug addiction and recently a decision to purchase a gun which became part of a domestic dispute.Biden’s memoir, Beautiful Things, deals with such personal issues as well as the deaths of his mother and sister in a car crash in 1973 and that of his older brother, Delaware attorney general Beau Biden, from brain cancer in 2015. The book will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Describing what it felt like to be in the eye of a political storm over business interests he says “sometimes” unavoidably coincided with his father’s work as vice-president to Barack Obama, Biden writes: “I became a proxy for Donald Trump’s fear that he wouldn’t be re-elected.“He pushed debunked conspiracy theories about work I did in Ukraine and China, even as his own children had pocketed millions in China and Russia and his former campaign manager [Paul Manafort] sat in a jail cell for laundering millions more from Ukraine.”He adds: “None of that matters in an up-is-down Orwellian political climate. Trump believed that if he could destroy me, and by extension my father, he could dispatch any candidate of decency from either party, all while diverting attention from his own corrupt behavior.”Insisting he is “not Billy Carter or Roger Clinton” – relations of previous presidents who proved magnets for media and opposition attention – Biden writes that he knows his surname has helped him in business. But, he adds, “I am not Eric Trump or Donald Trump Jr. I’ve worked for someone other than my father. I rose and fell on my own.”Biden criticises Trump for his efforts to attack his father on the debate stage last October, writing that Trump showed “trademark callousness” in playing “the only card he ever plays: attack”.Joe Biden defended Hunter then, saying he was proud of how he handled his struggles with addiction and telling viewers: “There’s a reason why [Trump is] bringing up all this malarkey. He doesn’t want to talk about the substantive issues. It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family.”Hunter Biden also criticises Trump allies, calling the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz a “troll”.The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, he writes, is a family friend from Joe Biden’s long service in the Senate who nonetheless “morph[ed] into a Trump lapdog right before my eyes, slandering me and my father in the coldest, most cynical, most self-serving ways.”In the book, Hunter offers some insights into the Biden family, including an occasion when his father sought to intervene in his addictions by bringing two counselors from a rehab centre to the family home in Delaware. When Hunter refused, Joe Biden “suddenly looked terrified” and chased him down the driveway, then grabbed him, hugged him and “cried for the longest time”.Hunter had a brief romantic relationship with Beau’s widow, Hallie, after Beau’s death. “Our relationship had begun as a mutually desperate grasping for love we both had lost, and its dissolution only deepened that tragedy,” he recalls. More

Joe Biden has announced a “trailblazing” set of federal judicial nominees, 11 picks including three Black women.Ketanji Brown Jackson, a US district judge, was nominated on Tuesday to replace attorney general Merrick Garland on the influential US appeals court for the District of Columbia circuit.In 2016, Garland was nominated for the supreme court by Barack Obama but blocked from even receiving a hearing by Republicans determined to fill the vacancy themselves.It was a hugely dramatic gambit by then Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, as he set out to transform the federal judiciary. With McConnell’s help, Donald Trump was able to do so.On the campaign trail last year, Biden pledged to name the first Black woman to the supreme court. Jackson, who regularly clashed with the Trump administration, now moves into that spotlight. Many liberals are eyeing retirement for Stephen Breyer, at 82 the oldest member of the court, for whom Jackson once clerked.When she was sworn in as a district judge, in May 2013, Breyer delivered the oath.“She sees things from different points of view,” he said, “and she sees somebody else’s point of view and understands it.”In December, Biden asked senators for a diverse slate of possible judicial picks.“We are particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench,” he said, “including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys and those who represent Americans in every walk of life.”His first picks, which the Washington Post called “the largest and earliest batch … by a new administration in decades”, also include the first Muslim named to a district court, Zahid Quraishi, a New Jersey judge.Biden also named Candace Jackson-Akiwumi for the Chicago-based seventh circuit and Tiffany Cunningham for the federal circuit in Washington.Among other appointments, Florence Pan will if confirmed be the first Asian American woman on the DC district court, while Lydia Griggsby will be the first black woman on the Maryland district court.Judge Rupa Ranga Puttagunta, a Washington DC local judge of Indian ancestry, is nominated for DC superior court.Carl Tobias, Williams chair in Law at Richmond University, said the president had delivered on his promise and chosen “an incredible group of people”.“There is diversity along a number of lines, ethnicity, gender, I assume sexual orientation and experiential diversity in terms of former federal public defenders or criminal defense lawyers as opposed to big, firm, lawyers and federal prosecutors,” he said.“Biden made promises both on the campaign trail and since being elected that he wants to rebalance the bench, which was unbalanced in terms of ideology with the appellate appointments that Trump made.“The question is how quickly they can be confirmed and how many more similar nominees he will bring forward. There are seven vacancies now on the appeals courts, 61 on the district court, and I think he’s committed to bringing forward many more very similar nominees.”In a statement to the Post, Biden said: “This trailblazing slate of nominees draws from the very best and brightest minds of the American legal profession.“Each is deeply qualified and prepared to deliver justice faithfully under our constitution and impartially to the American people – and together they represent the broad diversity of background, experience and perspective that makes our nation strong.”Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group, praised Biden’s choices.“Today’s nominees embody the demographic and professional diversity and forward-thinking that will ensure justice is served to the American people when they enter a courtroom,” the group’s president, Nan Aron, said in a statement.Referring to recent battles over picks for cabinet posts and other administration positions, she added: “We have already seen Senate Republicans’ willingness to maliciously smear Biden’s nominees, particularly targeting those who are not white men. We will not abide their callous attacks. Today’s nominees, and the many more outstanding jurists to come, will be confirmed.”Nomination hearings could begin in April. Biden and the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, have work to do.McConnell and Trump placed three justices on the supreme court, giving it a 6-3 conservative majority. But the extensive reshaping of the judiciary below the highest court could be their most lasting legacy.Observers have noted, for example, that though punitive voting rights restrictions being passed in Republican-led states are being challenged in court, the judiciary that will hear such cases is heavily staffed with conservatives.McConnell was proud of his ruthlessness, telling Fox News there was one reason so many vacancies were left for Trump to fill.“I’ll tell you why,” he said, in December 2019. “I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”Last April, he told an interviewer his “motto for the year is leave no vacancy behind”.Biden, Tobias said, will have paid attention.“I think Obama had one person on 17 March, but then it was very slow the first year, and Biden was vice-president. He and his people have learned from that, that you have to move very expeditiously,” he said.“I expect to see other similar packages sooner rather than later and [Biden is] watching the 2022 election because [Democrats] can lose the Senate.”Trump’s success contributed to his strength at the polls. In 2019, Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law, told the Guardian: “Not all conservatives are happy with a lot of things Trump has done, but on judges he’s killing it. It’s an across-the-board success that we’ve seen in this area.”Tobias, and others, saw Biden’s picks on Tuesday as the first steps in redressing the balance. More

New York’s beleaguered governor, Andrew Cuomo, faces further allegations that his administration provided preferential treatment to members of his inner circle after seven people with knowledge of coronavirus testing practices in the state came forward with new details of a so-called “VIP” testing program.

The individuals, who spoke anonymously to the Washington Post, described several instances of preferential treatment offered to family and friends of the governor, including his brother, the TV presenter Chris Cuomo, and his brother-in-law, the fashion designer Kenneth Cole.
Cuomo has come under sustained pressure to resign following several allegations of sexual misconduct. The governor has vowed to remain in his position as the state attorney general investigates.
Cuomo is also under pressure over his handling of Covid figures in nursing homes.
The allegations include that during the early days of the pandemic when testing was scarce in New York, health officials fast-tracked testing for those labelled “inner circles”, “specials” or “criticals” and kept a separate testing priority database for about 100 individuals at one of New York’s first Covid-19 response hubs.
According to two sources who spoke to the Post, a senior state physician also tasked with coordinating testing at nursing homes was dispatched to Chris Cuomo’s house in the Hamptons on a number of occasions to conduct testing during visits that took hours.
One nurse alleged that fast-track testing offered to Cole was then driven by state troopers to a testing facility in the state capital, Albany, in order to get results as quickly as possible.
One of the nurses recalled staff being instructed to prepare for members of Cuomo’s inner circle arriving for testing at one state testing site.
“I remember them being like, ‘They’re coming, they’re coming,’” the nurse told the Post, describing how staff announced when members of the Cuomo family arrived. “And they would say, ‘Have the state trooper ready … have it ready to go to Wadsworth.’ There was a lot of anxiety over those samples getting to the right place.”
The nurse added: “They were treated like royalty. I didn’t understand why they were able to jump the line.”
A spokesman for Cuomo refuted the allegations.
“There was no ‘VIP’ program as the Washington Post describes – when priority was given, it was to nurses, guardsmen, state workers and other government officials central to the pandemic response and those they were in direct contact with, as well as individuals believed to have been exposed to Covid who had the capability to spread it further and impact vital operations.”
A spokesperson for Cole did not respond to the allegations. A CNN spokesperson said it would not comment on employee’s medical care.
The latest set of allegations follow reporting by the Albany Times-Union and the Post that first uncovered the alleged scheme. More

Donald Trump has launched a new website celebrating his time as US president that includes a very selective retelling of the history of his time in office.45office.com is billed as a platform for his supporters to stay in touch and a place where Trump will continue his “America first” campaign.The centrepiece of the site is an 885-word history of the Trump presidency, listing the achievements of what it describes as “the most extraordinary political movement in history”.In a hyperbolic opening paragraph, it says he dethroned political dynasties, defeated “the Washington establishment” and “overcame virtually every entrenched power structure”.The history does, however, omit several significant moments from Trump’s presidency.On the economy, the site says: “President Trump ushered in a period of unprecedented economic growth, job creation, soaring wages, and booming incomes.” Trump frequently described his administration as building “the greatest economy in the history of our country”, a claim repeatedly debunked. It also fails to note that during the pandemic last year the US economy suffered one of its worst financial crashes.The US recorded the world’s largest coronavirus death toll on Trump’s watch, but the website describes his handling of the pandemic as a success, saying: “When the coronavirus plague arrived from China, afflicting every nation around the globe, President Trump acted early and decisively.” It neglects to mention that Trump had in fact described coronavirus as a problem that’s “going to go away” five times in March 2020, even as case numbers rose.Also absent is that Trump became the first US president in history to twice face impeachment trials in Congress. And that he was the first US president in over one hundred years to lose the popular vote twice. Hillary Clinton secured 2.8m more votes than Trump in 2016, and Joe Biden’s 2020 margin of victory was even larger, at 7m votes.Nor does it mention that he became the first major world leader to be banned from social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter while in office after they deemed he had used their sites to cite an insurrection. The Capitol riot, which led to the loss of five lives, also does not warrant a mention.The website’s homepage boasts that “the office of Donald J Trump is committed to preserving the magnificent legacy of the Trump administration, while at the same time advancing the America first agenda”.It also promises that “through civic engagement and public activism, the office of Donald J Trump will strive to inform, educate, and inspire Americans from all walks of life as we seek to build a truly great American future”.Trump retains significant influence over the Republican party despite his loss in the 2020 election and has hinted at a possible presidential run in 2024. He has also started actively backing Republican candidates who may be able to unseat fellow party members Trump feels were disloyal to him by failing to back his baseless claims of election fraud last year.In an interview with Fox News this month, Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign spokesperson, said that following his bans from Twitter and Facebook, Trump would launch his own social media platform in the next few months. More

The 46th US president took office promising a more welcoming immigration policy. But Republicans are calling a new wave of migrants at the southern border a ‘crisis’ and demanding he addresses it

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When Joe Biden assumed the presidency earlier this year, he inherited an immigration policy from Donald Trump that was punitive and often criticised as excessively cruel. The 45th US president had unsuccessfully attempted to build a wall across the entire southern border and vilified migrants as “invaders”. The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani tells Anushka Asthana that what she witnessed on the border in Texas was a steady influx of desperate people fleeing poverty, drought and violence. Many were families escaping together to what they hoped would be a new start. But despite the new rhetoric from the White House and a relaxation of some of the harshest measures, migrants are still being detained and many sent straight back across the border. Washington bureau chief David Smith describes the pressure Biden is under to respond to the issue. Democrats have called the situation a challenge and problem. Republicans have rushed to describe it as the first crisis and disaster of the new president’s term. Officials say the number of people caught attempting to cross the US-Mexico border is on pace to hit its highest level for 20 years. More