US Politics

A key member of the legal team that sought to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump is defending herself against a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit by arguing that “no reasonable person” could have mistaken her wild claims about election fraud last November as statements of fact.In a motion to dismiss a complaint by the large US-based voting machine company Dominion, lawyers for Sidney Powell argued that elaborate conspiracies she laid out on television and radio last November while simultaneously suing to overturn election results in four states constituted legally protected first amendment speech.“No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” argued lawyers for Powell, a former federal prosecutor from Texas who caught Trump’s attention through her involvement in the defense of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.Powell falsely stated on television and in legal briefs that Dominion machines ran on technology that could switch votes away from Trump, technology she said had been invented in Venezuela to help steal elections for the late Hugo Chávez.Those lies were built on empty claims that apparently originated in anonymous comments on a pro-Trump blog, only to be amplified on a global scale by Trump himself in a 12 November tweet in which he wrote in part “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.”Citing lost business and reputational damage, Dominion filed a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against Powell and her colleague on Trump’s legal team, Rudy Giuliani. A Dominion employee separately sued the Trump campaign after receiving death threats.Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January in an effort to stop the certification of an election they considered invalid, killing a police officer in violent clashes in which four others died.But lawyers for Powell argued her false statements about election fraud in the months preceding the Capitol insurrection were unmistakably not presented as true facts.“It was clear to reasonable persons that Powell’s claims were her opinions and legal theories on a matter of utmost public concern,” her legal motion says. “Those members of the public who were interested in the controversy were free to, and did, review that evidence and reached their own conclusions – or awaited resolution of the matter by the courts before making up their minds.”The filing brought expressions of disbelief from Trump critics.“This is her defense. Wow,” tweeted the Republican representative Adam Kinzinger.“Bad argument!” tweeted Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen. “[Powell] should have gone with an insanity defense due to #TrumpDerangementSyndrome.”“Shorter Sidney Powell: suckers!” tweeted Charlie Sykes, an editor of the anti-Trump conservative publication the Bulwark.As Trump fought to reverse his election loss in November, the former president himself reportedly supported Powell’s claims in private – and trumpeted them in public, touting Powell two weeks after the election as a key part of “the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS”.Powell was publicly exiled from the Trump camp a week after that tweet, after she appeared at a news conference hosted by the Republican National Committee alongside Giuliani, whose hair dye memorably ran down his face, and Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis.The group was “an elite strike force team that is working on behalf of the president and the campaign”, Ellis announced.Then Powell faced the cameras and claimed to have identified “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States”.Aides reportedly told Trump that Powell was not helping, and Giuliani and Ellis issued a subsequent statement announcing, “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity.”But that did not prevent Powell from filing lawsuits the next week on Trump’s behalf in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin.In her defense against the Dominion defamation lawsuit, Powell argued that whatever “reasonable persons” thought of her wild claims, Dominion had failed to demonstrate that she herself thought them to be false as she spoke them – a key distinction in defamation cases.“In fact,” Powell’s motion reads, “she believed the allegations then and she believes them now.” More

Mitch McConnell, who was accused of laying waste to bipartisan co-operation in the Senate when he blocked a supreme court pick by Barack Obama then changed the rules to hurry through three picks for Donald Trump, has said that if Democrats do away with the filibuster, they will “turn the Senate into a sort of nuclear winter”.The Republican minority leader, who himself invoked the “nuclear option” to change the rule for supreme court justices in 2017, was speaking to the Ruthless podcast in an episode released on Tuesday.Eyeing major legislation on voting rights, gun control, infrastructure and more, Democrats who control the White House and Congress are pressuring leaders to reform or abolish the Senate filibuster rule, by which a minority of just 41 out of 100 senators is able to block most legislation.Joe Biden saw his $1.9tn coronavirus relief package pass earlier this month by budget reconciliation, a narrowly applied process that sidesteps the filibuster rule and allows for passage by a simple majority. He is reportedly considering further major steps by that route, although key priorities such as voting rights could not advance through reconciliation.But Biden has indicated he may be open to some change to the filibuster.McConnell is not.“I think if they destroy the essence of the Senate, the legislative filibuster, they will find a Senate that will not function,” said the Kentucky Republican, who took his own nuclear option six years after then Democratic majority leader Harry Reid made such a move on lower-court appointments and executive branch nominees, to bypass Republican obstruction.“It takes unanimous consent to turn the lights on here,” McConnell said. “And I think they would leave an angry 50 senators not interested in being cooperative on even the simplest things.”In 2010, McConnell famously said his chief aim was to ensure Obama was a one-term president. Under Trump, he resisted White House calls to scrap the filibuster.Democrats in the 50-50 Senate, which is controlled by the vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris, might well retort to McConnell that Republicans have shown precious little interest in co-operation on anything for many years. The Covid relief bill did not attract a single Republican vote.On Tuesday, in the immediate aftermath of a shooting in a Colorado supermarket that killed 10 and a week after shootings at spas near Atlanta killed eight, the Senate will hold a hearing on “Constitutional and Common Sense Steps to Reduce Gun Violence”. The House has passed gun control measures but without filibuster reform, any such steps seem impossible in the Senate.Republicans – and some Democrats, including the conservative Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has indicated he is open to some sort of reform – insist the filibuster protects the rights of the minority.McConnell said filibuster reform “may not be the panacea that they anticipate it would be. It could turn the Senate into sort of a nuclear winter, nor the aftermath of the so-called nuclear option is not a sustainable place”. More

A Polish writer faces a possible prison sentence for insulting President Andrzej Duda by calling him a “moron” over comments the latter made about Joe Biden’s US election victory.Jakub Żulczyk, the screenwriter behind the popular TV series Blinded by the Lights and Belfer, said prosecutors had charged him under an article in the criminal code for insulting the head of state in a Facebook post.“I am, I suspect, the first writer in this country in a very long time to be tried for what he wrote,” he said on Facebook.In his post on 7 November last year, Żulczyk commented on a curiously worded tweet in which Duda congratulated Biden for his “successful presidential campaign” but said he was waiting for “the nomination by the electoral college”.Duda, who is supported by the populist rightwing Law and Justice (Pis) party, was a close ally of Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, who unsuccessfully contested the election result.Aleksandra Skrzyniarz, a spokeswoman for Warsaw district prosecutors, told Polish news agency PAP on Monday that charges had been filed against a man, naming him only as “Jakub Z”.“The defendant was accused of committing an act of public insult on 7 November last year on a social networking website against the president of the Republic of Poland, by using a term commonly recognised as insulting,” the spokeswoman said.She added that the charge had been filed earlier this month and that the suspect had been questioned but “did not admit to committing the alleged act and gave explanations”.“He indicated that the statement constituted a critical assessment of the president’s actions,” she said.In his post, published in the days immediately after the 3 November election, Żulczyk said that “there is no such thing as ’nomination by the electoral college’”, adding that Biden’s confirmation as US president was “a mere formality”.“Andrzej Duda is a moron”, the post said.Poland has been criticised repeatedly over its different insult laws, including one law on offending religious feeling and another on insulting the flags of Poland or other countries. More

Texas has branded itself as an aggressive and litigious arm of the Republican party for years – a rightwing David up against the Democratic Goliath.So, when Democrat Joe Biden took over the Oval Office in January, the state’s conservative leaders were already raring for a knock-down, drag-out brawl.“I promise my fellow Texans and Americans that I will fight against the many unconstitutional and illegal actions that the new administration will take, challenge federal overreach that infringes on Texans’ rights, and serve as a major check against the administration’s lawlessness,” the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, tweeted on Biden’s inauguration day.Just two days later, Texas filed the first major lawsuit against Biden’s administration, successfully blocking a 100-day deportation moratorium that the governor, Greg Abbott, chided as an “attempt to grant blanket amnesty” to immigrants.Far from a one-off burst of hostility, that incendiary case marked a return to Texas politicians’ tried and true playbook of weaponizing the courts to derail progressive policies, a tactic that’s proven surprisingly potent amid ideological warfare with the feds.“They’ve been successful at, like, causing uncertainty,” said Katie Keith, associate research professor for the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. “And making a mess of things that I think other folks feel are otherwise settled.”The state’s leadership leaned heavily on the judiciary under Barack Obama’s administration, which they sued at least 48 times, the Texas Tribune reported, tackling issues as disparate and all-encompassing as immigration, environmental regulations and voting rights.Then, in the aftermath of last year’s presidential election, Paxton went so far as to challenge 20m votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in a far-fetched attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat. And right now, Texas is spearheading yet another existential threat to the Affordable Care Act in the supreme court, even as Biden urges the justices to preserve Obama’s signature healthcare law.Because of the high stakes, these cases often capture national attention, and Texas’s ambitious current and former attorneys general have shown a willingness to trade resources and time for newspaper quotes and TV interviews. The court battles give key players such as Paxton a platform “to demonstrate that they are fighters and they’re looking out for their voters”, said Keith E Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University.“These kinds of lawsuits have become very high-profile events” and allow those involved to “grandstand and send a political message to constituents about all the hard work you’re doing to oppose the administration that they don’t like”, Whittington said.Texas’s judicial activism is part of a larger partisan gambit that’s been going on for years. Politicians undo or delay federal policies they find unfavorable or overreaching, while strategically framing the narrative in the press.“They are good opportunities to really try to influence the messaging about how particular policies or particular laws are understood, and what the potential problems with them are,” Whittington said.Both Republicans and Democrats play the game: when Trump occupied the Oval Office, blue strongholds such as California raced to the courts as a first line of defense from federal decisions that jeopardized their more liberal agendas. Now that Biden is the commander-in-chief, Republicans are naturally starting to do the same, with Texas apparently leading the charge.“If the goal is to win, then certainly that affects the kind of cases you bring forward, what kinds of legal arguments you can make, how carefully you have to prepare for them,” Whittington said.“If the goal instead is to get media attention and score political points – and excite voters and donors – you don’t necessarily need to win. You just need to be able to highlight the issue and get public attention. And sometimes you can get that with pretty bad legal arguments.”Texas has garnered a reputation for its casual relationship to sound legal judgment, with cases ranging from potentially successful to downright bogus. When, for example, Paxton tried to overturn the 2020 election results in the supreme court, a legion of lawyers and former elected officials banded together to decry his “unprecedented argument” that made “a mockery of federalism and separation of powers”.“The case … was clearly without merit, and it is difficult to understand why anybody in the attorney general’s office would have thought otherwise,” said Lisa Marshall Manheim, an associate professor at the University of Washington School of Law.Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor, similarly derided the state’s challenge to the ACA, calling it “galactically stupid” in an interview with the Texas Tribune.But instead of giving Texas and others a slap on the wrist, federal courts have almost encouraged them by issuing nationwide injunctions that hamstring entire policies as long as cases stay tied up. That stalling strategy can sometimes hand state governments a de facto victory, even if they eventually lose.“There’s a world in which all these specious arguments, everything else, could really be discouraged by the courts,” Keith said. That’s definitely not happening in Texas, where she described the bench as “extraordinarily conservative and ideological”, allowing “these lawsuits to go further than most of us think they should”.It’s one thing to “forum shop”, seeking out courts that could be more amenable to your case. Paxton, however, can seemingly “judge shop”. Between 2015 and 2018, almost half of Texas’s suits against the federal government in district courts ended up in Judge Reed O’Connor’ courtroom, the Texas Tribune reported. A conservative favorite aligned with the Texas Republican senator John Cornyn, O’Connor has handed the state victory after victory – including striking down the ACA.“The law is still standing, but it’s been bruised and battered, right?” Keith said. So “why wouldn’t they sort of use a similar playbook for other issues?”Because of the implications nationwide, millions of Americans are watching these lawsuits play out – not to witness a bitter contest between two parties, but to anxiously await a referendum on their futures.“They’re people’s real rights and real livelihoods and just real lived realities that are sort of hanging in the balance,” Keith said. “It’s sort of frustrating to watch these cycles go in and out, because you know that they do affect real people.” More

Marty Walsh has been confirmed as the next US labor secretary, bringing Joe Biden’s cabinet a step nearer to completion.
The Senate voted 68-29 to confirm the Democrat, currently the mayor of Boston.
Aside from Walsh, there are a few finishing touches left for Biden’s cabinet-level appointees. The Senate has yet to confirm Eric Lander as Biden’s top science adviser, and the White House still hasn’t named anyone to head his budget office, after Neera Tanden withdrew her nomination amid controversy. The White House is facing pressure from lawmakers on Capitol Hill to name Shalanda Young, the current nominee for deputy budget director, to the top role. Biden’s cabinet may be nearly complete but the work of building his administration is just beginning, as the president still has hundreds of key presidential appointments to make to fill out the federal government.
Biden has about 1,250 federal positions that require Senate confirmation, ranging from the head of the obscure Railroad Retirement Board to more urgent department positions such as assistant and deputy secretaries. Of the 790 being tracked by the Partnership for Public Service, a non-partisan good-government group, 23 appointees have been confirmed by the Senate, 39 are being considered by the Senate, and 466 positions have no named nominee.

Recent crimes against Asian Americans have sparked fresh debate over the nation’s gun laws, but Biden has yet to nominate anyone to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. And the wave of migrants at the border is underscoring major challenges in enforcing immigration and asylum laws. Biden hasn’t nominated anyone to head the three key agencies in charge of much of their implementation: Customs and Border Protection; US Citizenship and Immigration Services; and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Asked last week about those vacancies, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said they were “all important agencies” but offered no timeline for naming nominees.
There are also key vacancies at the Department of Health and Human Services that will play a significant role in addressing the coronavirus pandemic. Biden has named Chiquita Brooks-LaSure to be the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but it is unclear whom he will choose to head the Food and Drug Administration, which plays an important role in approving vaccines and treatments for the pandemic.
The pace of filling the positions has been hamstrung from the start because of what Biden’s team say was a lack of cooperation from Trump administration officials throughout the transition. Democrats privately acknowledge that Trump’s second impeachment trial also slowed down the process.
Biden’s cabinet picks have included several historic firsts, including Deb Haaland, who was confirmed last week as the first Native American interior secretary, Lloyd Austin, the first African American to lead the Pentagon, and Pete Buttigieg, who became the first openly LGBTQ+ cabinet secretary when he was confirmed as transportation secretary. More

Donald Trump advanced his quest on Monday to purge elected Republicans who refused to go along with his attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election, announcing an endorsement in Georgia in an effort to unseat a key election official.

The secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, infuriated Trump last year by refusing a point-blank request to fake the presidential election result in Georgia.
Jody Hice, a Republican member of Congress who supported Trump’s effort to overturn Joe Biden’s win, announced on Monday he would challenge Raffensperger in a summer 2022 primary. Trump endorsed Hice immediately.
“Unlike the current Georgia secretary of state, Jody leads out front with integrity,” Trump said in a statement that repeated his false claims of election fraud and declared his “complete and total endorsement” of Hice.
Two months out of office, Trump has begun an effort to flex his influence with core Republican voters who will decide the party’s nominations in thousands of races across the country next year.
Trump boasted of the effort in an appearance on a podcast hosted by a Fox News contributor, The Truth with Lisa Boothe.
“The fact that I give somebody an endorsement has meant the difference between a victory and a massive defeat,” he said. “They’re all going to win and they’re going to win big.”
Trump has shown a high success rate with endorsements in Republican primaries. He has repeatedly endorsed losing candidates in general election contests, however – including both Georgia US Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who were beaten by Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in January, tipping the Senate to Democratic control.
Some Republicans fear Trump’s intervention in primary elections could produce extreme nominees who might be relatively weak in general election contests.
Other Republicans high on Trump’s hitlist include the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, and Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, the only Republican senator up for re-election in 2022 to vote to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial.
Raffensperger is the most prominent elected official to be targeted by Trump so far with an endorsement of a challenger. In a phone call after the election, Trump told Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” so he could win the state, which no Republican presidential candidate had lost in three decades.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump told Raffensperger in a call Raffensperger recorded. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”

In an interview with the Guardian about his decision to defend the election result, Raffensperger said he voted for Trump but would not help him steal the election.
“I’m a conservative Republican. Yes, I wanted President Trump to win,” he said. “But as secretary of state we have to do our job. I’m gonna walk that fine, straight, line with integrity. I think that integrity still matters.”
Since being banned from his longtime social media megaphone, Twitter, for spreading election lies, Trump has tried new methods for getting messages out, in the form of statements e-blasted to reporters – and now, podcast appearances.
Trump told Boothe the new format was better than Twitter.
“We’re sending out releases, they’re getting picked up much better than any tweet,” he said. “When I put out a statement, it’s much more elegant than a tweet, and I think it gets picked up better.” More

Through notes passed under cell doors with string and conversations whispered through air ducts, death row prisoners in Indiana are debating whether Joe Biden will fulfill his campaign promise to halt federal executions.Biden hasn’t spoken publicly about capital punishment since taking office four days after the Trump administration executed the last of 13 inmates at the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, where federal death row inmates are held.That six-month run of executions cut the unit from around 63 to 50. Biden’s campaign website said he would work to end federal executions, but he has not specified how.On Monday the supreme court added to potential challenges confronting Biden on the matter, when it said it would consider reinstating the death sentence for the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.The justices agreed to hear an appeal filed by the Trump administration. The initial prosecution and decision to seek a death sentence was made by the Obama administration, in which Biden was vice-president.In emails with the Associated Press through a prison-monitored system they access in the two hours a day they are let out of their 12ft by 7ft cells, four death row inmates said Biden’s silence has them on edge, wondering if political calculations will lead him to back away from commuting their sentences to life or endorsing legislation striking capital punishment from US statutes.“There’s not a day that goes by that we’re not scanning the news for hints of when or if the Biden administration will take meaningful action to implement his promises,” said Rejon Taylor, 36, who was sentenced to death in 2008 for killing an Atlanta restaurant owner.Everyone on federal death row was convicted of killing someone, victims often suffering brutal deaths. The dead included children, bank workers and prison guards. One inmate, Dylann Roof, killed nine Black members of a South Carolina church during Bible study in 2015. Many Americans believe death is right for such crimes.Views of capital punishment, though, are shifting. One report found people of color overrepresented on death row nationwide. Some 40% of federal death row inmates are Black, compared with about 13% of the US population. Support for the death penalty has waned and fewer executions are carried out. Virginia recently voted to abolish it.The prisoners expressed relief at Donald Trump’s departure after he presided over more federal executions than any president in 130 years. The fear that guards will appear at cell doors to say the warden needed to speak to them – dreaded words that mean an execution is scheduled – has receded.They described death row as a close-knit community. All said they were reeling from seeing friends escorted away for execution by lethal injection.“When it’s quiet here, which it often is, you’ll hear someone say, ‘Damn, I can’t believe they’re gone!’ We all know what they are referencing,” said Daniel Troya, sentenced in 2009 in the drug-related killings of a Florida man, his wife and their two children.The federal executions during the coronavirus pandemic were likely super-spreader events. In December, 70% of the inmates had Covid-19, some possibly infected via the air ducts through which they communicate.The AP attended all 13 executions. Five of the first six inmates executed were white. Six of the last seven were Black, including Dustin Higgs, the final inmate put to death, on 16 January for ordering the killing of three Maryland women.Memories of speaking to Higgs just before his execution still pain Sherman Fields, who is on death row in the killing of his girlfriend.“He kept saying he’s innocent and he didn’t want to die,” Fields, 46, said. “He’s my friend. It was very hard.”The easiest step for Biden would be to simply instruct the justice department not to carry out executions, though that would leave the door open for a future president to resume them. Inmates know Biden, while a senator, played a key role in passing a 1994 crime bill that increased federal crimes for which someone could be put to death.“I don’t trust Biden,” Troya said. “He set the rules to get us all here in the first place.” More

Tom Reed, a Republican congressman from western New York who was accused last week of rubbing a female lobbyist’s back and unhooking her bra without her consent in 2017, apologized to the woman on Sunday and announced he will not run for re-election next year.Reed, 49, said the incident involving Nicolette Davis occurred “at a time in my life in which I was struggling”. He said he entered treatment that year as he was “powerless over alcohol”.Reed apologized to his wife and children and to Davis and said he planned “to dedicate my time and attention to making amends for my past actions”.First elected to Congress in 2010, Reed was among the members of Congress calling for the resignation of the Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, over sexual harassment allegations. In late February, Reed said he was seriously considering running against Cuomo next year.Reed said on Sunday he would not seek any elective office in 2022.The announcement came two days after the Washington Post reported the allegations from Davis, who was 25 and a lobbyist for the insurer Aflac when she said Reed, seated next to her at a Minneapolis bar, unhooked her bra from outside her blouse and moved his hand to her thigh.“A drunk congressman is rubbing my back,” she texted a co-worker at Aflac that evening, adding later: “HELP HELP.”Reed released a statement Friday saying: “This account of my actions is not accurate.”In his statement on Sunday he said: “In reflection, my personal depiction of this event is irrelevant. Simply put, my behavior caused her pain, showed her disrespect and was unprofessional. I was wrong, I am sorry, and I take full responsibility.”A former mayor of Corning, New York, Reed is co-chair of the House bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. He voted against impeaching former president Donald Trump in January but voted in favor of certifying the election of Joe Biden. More