US Politics

After the publication on Thursday of further revelations about a founder member who sexually harassed gay men, the anti-Trump conservative Lincoln Project acknowledged what it called a “central truth”: that John Weaver’s conduct was “appalling” and that he “abused” some who sought work with the group.But it also continued to deny mishandling the allegations. Responding to reports by the Associated Press, New York magazine, the New York Times and other outlets, the group said: “Recently published stories about the Lincoln Project are filled with inaccuracies, incorrect information, and reliant exclusively on anonymous sources.”The group also said it had retained “a best-in-class outside professional to review Mr Weaver’s tenure with the organisation and to establish both accountability and best practices going forward”, and would not comment further.On Thursday night, however, the group published on its Twitter feed private messages between a journalist and a founding member, the New Hampshire Republican Jennifer Horn.The Lincoln Project’s message said: “Earlier this evening, we became aware that Amanda Becker of The 19th news was preparing to publish a smear job on the Lincoln Project with the help of [Horn]. You hear a lot of talk about hit jobs in journalism, but rarely do you get to see their origin story. Enjoy.”Messages between Becker and Horn were attached. The messages were soon deleted. Horn, who denies the Lincoln Project’s contention that she left over a financial dispute, said she did not consent to have her messages published and alerted Twitter.Responding to the Lincoln Project’s complaint about the sourcing of reports about Weaver, Becker tweeted: “Sources discussing the inner workings of an organisation tend to be anonymous when interns to senior management sign NDAs at an organisation’s behest.”In its statement, the Lincoln Project said “any person who believes they are unable to talk about John Weaver publicly because they are bound by an NDA should contact the Lincoln Project for a release”. In an open letter provided to the New York Times, four former members of the group did so.Like other Lincoln Project founders including Rick Wilson, George Conway and Steve Schmidt, Weaver, 61, is a veteran of Republican politics, in his case having worked with John McCain and John Kasich among other prominent figures.He did not comment about the new reports about his behaviour towards young men. Earlier this year, he said in a statement: “The truth is that I’m gay. And that I have a wife and two kids who I love. My inability to reconcile those two truths has led to this agonising place.“To the men I made uncomfortable through my messages that I viewed as consensual mutual conversations at the time: I am truly sorry. They were inappropriate and it was because of my failings that this discomfort was brought on you.”He also said he would not return to the Project from medical leave.What the Lincoln Project knew of Weaver’s behaviour, and when it knew it, remains in dispute. The AP reported that founding member Ron Steslow was informed of allegations against Weaver last June, told the group’s legal counsel and advocated Weaver be removed. The Washington Blade, an LGBTQ+ news outlet, has reported other communications from last summer. Weaver went on leave in August.Weaver’s harassment of young men was first reported in January by the American Conservative; Scott Stedman, an independent reporter, and data analyst Garrett Herrin, who said they were harassed by Weaver; and Axios. At the end of the month, the New York Times published a detailed report.The Lincoln Project denied having known of the allegations for months. This week, Schmidt told the AP no “employee, intern, or contractors ever made an allegation of inappropriate communication about John Weaver that would have triggered an investigation by HR or by an outside employment counsel.“In other words, no human being ever made an allegation about any inappropriate sexualized communications about John Weaver ever.”Speaking to New York magazine, Schmidt said he had called Weaver and “said, ‘You need to know that this is out there. Is there anything that we need to know?’ He said, ‘No, it’s bullshit. It’s not true.’”Alex Johnson, a former intern who alleges harassment by Weaver, said: “I really wanted to believe everyone that they didn’t know the extent of it. They made it seem like this was out of the blue and there wasn’t even a baseline knowledge at all. This just seems like they were lying; it seems like they were not being truthful to me.”The AP report and others also contained details of Lincoln Project fundraising and fees paid to consulting firms owned by founding members. From the political right, the National Review, a longtime antagonist, responded with a stark headline: “Yes, the Lincoln Project Is an Ugly Grift.”Schmidt said: “We fully comply with the law. The Lincoln Project will be delighted to open its books for audit immediately after the Trump campaign and all affiliated Super Pacs do so.”Contacted by the Guardian on Friday, the 212th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, Wilson said no further comment would be issued while the review continued.Horn tweeted a picture of the 16th president, with a famous quote from his speech in 1860 at Cooper Union in New York – the venue where the Lincoln Project held its formal launch in February 2020.“[Let us] have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” More

Andrew Cuomo – New York’s governor who was once hailed the king of the US Covid-19 response – was facing fresh calls for his removal from office on Friday after new allegations emerged that he and senior staff covered up the extent of the virus deaths in the state’s nursing homes.
The New York Post said it obtained a leaked recording of the governor’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, admitting to Democrats in private conversations this week that the administration withheld the true data because it feared the Department of Justice would use the figures to pursue complaints of state misconduct.
“Basically, we froze,” the newspaper said DeRosa told the lawmakers, referring to tweets from Donald Trump last August that she said turned the issue of New York’s nursing home deaths “into this giant political football”, and his calls for the justice department to investigate.
“We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation.”
On Friday, however, New York’s 14 Democratic state senators released a joint statement calling for the repeal of Cuomo’s emergency executive powers to deal with the pandemic. “While Covid-19 has tested the limits of our people and state … it is clear that the expanded emergency powers granted to the governor are no longer appropriate,” they wrote.
It emerged earlier this week that New York’s nursing home coronavirus death toll was far higher than Cuomo’s administration had initially admitted. New figures were released following a court order in response to a freedom of information request by the Empire Center for Public Policy showed a significant rise from about 9,000 to close to 15,000 once the previously omitted deaths of nursing home residents who died in hospitals were factored in.
“Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died,” Cuomo said at a news conference in January after New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, released a damning report stating nursing home deaths were 50% higher than his administration had claimed.
DeRosa’s admission added fuel to growing calls for Cuomo’s resignation, impeachment or removal from office, and on Friday the New York congressman Tom Reed said he would pursue legal action against the governor’s aide.
“I’m going to be looking at filing a personal criminal complaint against this individual today in local law enforcement offices as well as federal offices, because she needs to be arrested today,” he said in an interview with Fox Business.
Other Republicans were quick to attack Cuomo. “If the governor is involved, he should be immediately removed from office,” said Rob Ortt, state senator and minority leader, in a statement.
DeRosa’s admission, he said, “was the latest in a series of disturbing acts of corruption by his administration. Instead of apologizing or providing answers to the thousands of New York families who lost loved ones, the governor’s administration made apologies to politicians behind closed doors for the ‘political inconvenience’ this scandal has caused them.”
Nick Langworthy, the state GOP chair, said: “Andrew Cuomo has abused his power and destroyed the trust placed in the office of governor. Prosecution and impeachment discussions must begin right away,” according to Politico.
New York Democrats are also unhappy with Cuomo, who was on Friday scheduled to be in Washington DC to join a conference with Joe Biden on the Covid-19 American Rescue Plan.
“This is a betrayal of the public trust. There needs to be full accountability for what happened, and the legislature needs to reconsider its broad grant of emergency powers to the governor,” Andrew Gounardes, the Democratic state senator, said on Twitter.
Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the senate majority leader, was equally scathing. “Crucial information should never be withheld from entities that are empowered to pursue oversight,” she said in a statement. “Politics should not be part of this tragic pandemic and our responses to it must be led by policy, not politics.”
On Friday, DeRosa was attempting to downplay the situation, according to the New York Times, claiming that the administration had to temporarily shelve state legislators’ calls for greater transparency over the figures to prioritize demands from the justice department.
“We informed the houses [of the New York legislature] of this at the time. We were comprehensive and transparent in our responses to the DoJ and then had to immediately focus our resources on the second wave and vaccine rollout,” she said in a statement.
New York state had recorded a total Covid-19 death toll of 45,453 by Friday morning, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus database, second in the nation to California (46,022).
The New York health commissioner, Howard Zucker, told lawmakers this week that the number of nursing home residents who had died was 13,297, which rose to 15,049 with the inclusion of deaths from other assisted living or adult care facilities. More

Rare is the trial that takes place at the scene of the crime. Rarer still is the trial where the jurors are also witnesses to, if not victims of, that crime. Which means that the case of Donald Trump should be open and shut, a slam-dunk. Because those sitting in judgment saw the consequences of what Trump did on 6 January. They heard it. And, as security footage played during this week’s proceedings showed, they ran for their lives because of it.
And yet, most watching the second trial of Trump – only the fourth impeachment in US history – presume that it will end in his acquittal. They expect that fewer than 17 Republican senators will find the former president guilty of inciting an insurrection and so, lacking the required two-thirds majority, the verdict will be not guilty. Barring a late spasm of conscience by the senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, Trump will pronounce himself vindicated, the case against him a hoax and he will be free to run again in 2024 – and to loom over his party as its dominant presence at least until then.
That fact alone should quash the temptation to regard the current proceedings, which could conclude this weekend, as a footnote to the Trump era, one to be safely tucked away in the history books. The reverse is true. The likely acquittal suggests the danger of Trump has far from passed: the threat he embodied remains live and active – and is now embedded deep inside the US body politic.
The Democratic members of the House of Representatives acting as prosecutors have laid out an unanswerable case. Vividly and with extensive use of video, they have reminded senators – and the watching public – of the vehemence and violence of the mob that stormed the Capitol last month, how Trump supporters attacked police officers, even using poles carrying the American flag to bludgeon those in uniform. They’ve shown how close the rioters came to finding elected officials, how they hunted them down marbled corridors and stone staircases, looking for “fucking traitors”. They had a gallows and noose ready.
Naturally, Republicans have bitten their lip and said how awful it all was – but have insisted none of it can be blamed on Trump. So the prosecution reminded them of Trump’s words on the day, telling the crowd within striking distance of Congress to head over there, “to show strength” and to “fight like hell”. Oh, but only “idiots” could take such language literally, say Trump’s defenders. Except those who sacked the Capitol took it very literally, filmed as they told the besieged police that they had been “invited” there by the president, that they were “fighting for Trump” at his urging. They believed they were following his explicit instructions.
The incitement was not confined to that speech, but began long before – and continued after – the rioting started. Trump whipped up the Washington crowd that bitter January day, but he’d been whipping up his supporters for nearly a year, telling them the 2020 election would be stolen, that the only way he could possibly lose would be if the contest was rigged. The big lie that drove the crowd to break down the doors and run riot was that Trump had won and Joe Biden had lost the election – that a contest that was, in fact, free and fair was instead fraudulent, despite 59 out of 60 claims of voter fraud being thrown out of courts across the US through lack of evidence. Their aim was to stop the formal certification ceremony, to “stop the steal” – as Trump had demanded they must for several months.
So much for incitement before the riot. Among the most shocking facts laid bare this week was that Trump’s incitement persisted even after the violence was under way. One of the former president’s most ardent supporters, Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, let slip that he had told Trump by phone that vice-president Mike Pence had had to be removed from the chamber for his own safety. And yet, minutes after that call, Trump tweeted an attack on Pence for failing to have “the courage” to thwart Biden’s victory, all but painting a target on the VP’s back.
Couple that with Trump’s failure to do anything to stop the violence once it had begun – the two-hour delay before sending backup for the police – and the picture is complete: a president who urged a murderous mob to overturn a democratic election by force, who watched them attempt it, who did nothing to stop it and even directed their anger towards specific, named targets. Put it this way, what more would a president have to do to be found guilty of inciting an insurrection?
Republicans have sought refuge in the first amendment, saying Trump’s words were protected by his right to free speech, or else that it’s improper to convict a president once he’s left office. Most legal scholars wave aside those arguments, but let’s not pretend Republicans’ objections are on legal grounds. They are not acting as sincere jurors, weighing the evidence in good faith. If they were, then three of them would not have met Trump’s legal team to discuss strategy on Thursday, in what is surely a rather novel reading of jury service.
No, the law is not driving these people to say Trump should be given a free pass for his crime. It is fear. They felt fear on 6 January, when some of them went on camera to beg Trump to call off his mob, but they feel a greater fear now. They fear the threat Trump made in his speech that day, when he told the crowd “we have to primary the hell out of the ones that don’t fight”. Republican senators fear internal party challenges from Trumpists in their states, and they fear a base that is now the obedient creature of Donald Trump. Their only way out, they think, is to acquit a man they surely know – must know – is guilty as charged.
The consequences are perilous. Most directly, Trump will be able to run again, and will be free to try the same trick anew – unleashing his shock troops to ensure his will is done. If Trump loses, say, the New Hampshire primary in 2024, what’s to prevent him urging his devotees to “stop the steal” once more? Even after Trump is gone, a grim precedent will exist. House Democrat Jamie Raskin was right to warn Republicans that acquittal would “set a new terrible standard for presidential misconduct”. When a future president doesn’t get their way, they can simply incite violence against the system they are pledged to defend.
Still, the greatest danger is not in the future. It is clear and present. It is that one of the US’s two governing parties is poised to approve the notion that democracy can be overturned by force. By acquitting Trump, the Republicans will declare themselves no longer bound by the constitution or the rule of law or even reality, refusing to break from the lie that their party won an election that it lost. This poison is not confined to the extremities of the US body politic. It is now in its blood and in its heart.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

At a church-style rally in Arizona, the state Republican lawmaker Walter Blackman described his “perfect” legislative proposal: to prosecute women who have abortions for homicide alongside the doctors who provide them.Such a bill would be patently unconstitutional in the US – but for anti-abortion rights activists like Blackman that’s the point.“We are not going to amend this bill,” Blackman said in January. “This is a perfect bill. I just want to tell you that now.” Nine of Blackman’s colleagues signed on to the bill.The bill was just one of nine more Arizona bills designed to ban, restrict or undermine abortion rights – ranging from funding religious crisis pregnancy clinics which oppose abortion to banning abortion at six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant.“It’s nothing less than appalling,” said Dr Julia Kwatra, an obstetrician and gynecologist who has practiced in Scottsdale for 20 years. “This is just representing a full frontal assault on women’s healthcare in Arizona this legislative session.”But this slew of legislation is just one state’s effort to redefine reproductive rights in a year of Republican party schism. In other states across the US – from Florida to North Dakota – legislation from Republican lawmakers seeking to undermine abortion rights is on the move. For anti-abortion activists, the goal has long been to challenge the supreme court decision that gave pregnant people the right to abortion 48 years ago: the landmark Roe versus Wade.Each spring, especially in the last decade, Republicans have introduced restrictive abortion laws tailored to challenge that supreme court precedent by creating test cases. In 1973, Roe versus Wade provided women with a right to abortion up to the point the fetus can survive outside the womb, generally understood to be 24 weeks.Abortion restrictions investigate the outer limits of that right, by creating laws that provoke reproductive rights advocates to sue, and for courts to consider their legitimacy.“The more ambitious a restriction the court upholds, that will greenlight even more restrictions in the states,” said Mary Ziegler, a Florida State University law professor whose recent book, Abortion in America: A Legal History, tracked the history of the nation’s most important abortion cases.“What we’ve been seeing is not what anti-abortion lawmakers want, but it’s been tailored to what they think the supreme court wants,” said Ziegler.This effort is not meant to reflect the will of the majority of Americans, 77% of whom believe the supreme court should uphold Roe v Wade. The effort is meant to please a motivated, religious voter base, who have helped power Republican victories since the Reagan era. Trump played for the same “social conservatives” when vowing to appoint supreme court justices who would overturn Roe.But since Trump rose to power, exactly how to do that has become a vexing question for the Republican party. Grassroots extremists came to power alongside Donald Trump, making common cause with some evangelical Christians, and demanding immediate gratification in bills like Blackman’s.Bills that ban abortion, demand doctors perform the impossible and “reimplant” ectopic pregnancies, punish women and doctors under murder statutes and whose authors believe the fundamental legal principle of precedent should not apply to their cases have all shown up in state legislatures in the last couple years.Bans in recent sessions have been “extremely aggressive”, said Hillary Schneller, a senior staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, and who is now fighting a Mississippi law that could ban abortion at 15 weeks. The state has appealed to the supreme court.Recent bans have been, “saying the quiet part out loud – that they’re not just restriction abortion, they want to end access to abortion entirely”, said Schneller.Until recently, most slates of new bills avoided this type of exposure. Establishment anti-abortion groups, like the National Right to Life Committee, preferred calculated legal strategies designed to elicit maximum supreme court interest and minimum voter outrage.This year, since Trump lost re-election and the Republican party has split into warring factions, the spectrum of anti-abortion legislation has come to reflect that intra-party feud – a war between extremists and established anti-abortion strategists. In states like Mississippi, lawmakers have passed both kinds of legislation.More extreme members of the anti-abortion movement are “making bids to control strategy for their movement”, said Ziegler. Extremists have shown, “They have legislators in a way we would assume only people like the National Right to Life Committee would have,” she said.In Arizona, the architect of most of the state’s abortion restrictions over the last decade opposes Blackman’s bill. Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, told a local television station, “In the pro-life community, we love both the woman and her unborn child. Both are victims.”These bans don’t come out of nowhere. They are the result of a sustained campaign from anti-abortion politiciansArizona is in the process of turning from red to purple – recently sending two Democratic senators to Washington DC and helping flip the presidential election for Joe Biden. Kwatra said she views the huge number of new restrictions as a “last gasp” from the state Republican party.“It’s literally all men on deck” and “assault from every direction”, said Kwatra, adding that as more than 14,000 Arizonans have died of Covid-19, “our legislature is focused on taking voting rights away and healthcare rights away from women”.One bill being championed in both Arizona and South Carolina is a “fetal heartbeat bill” that would ban abortion before most women know they are pregnant, without exemptions for rape or incest. As of 2019, nine other states had done the same.Actually a misnomer, “fetal heartbeat bills” use the detection of “cardiac activity” in an embryo (the stage of development before a fetus) as early as six weeks. At that stage, embryos have a pulse, but not a fully developed heart to power a circulatory system. This kind of restriction would outlaw the vast majority of abortions.The author of that bill is Janet Porter, an evangelical Christian based in Ohio. Alongside her anti-abortion advocacy, she is fiercely anti-gay, and promotes the baseless idea that the election was stolen from Trump.In one interview in late January, she said Biden’s inauguration had the mood of a funeral. “Maybe that’s what it feels like to steal an election, and you know you’re not there rightfully so,” Porter said.Her interviewer concurred: “I do believe God wanted Donald Trump to be re-elected, I think it was God’s will, yet sometimes in this fallen world the devil wins.”Meanwhile, establishment groups like NRLC have pushed to ban specific procedures, such as dilation and evacuation, and to restrict abortion to earlier and earlier in pregnancy – such as in 15 weeks in Mississippi.By banning specific procedures, which are not well understood by lawmakers or the public, anti-abortion advocates may see fewer objections to their efforts while still significantly eroding rights. A Kentucky version of the dilation and evacuation ban could come before the supreme court this session (just 4% of abortions overall).Problematically, abortion rights advocates view extreme bills – such as Blackman’s – as providing political cover for potentially more damaging establishment bills.“These bans don’t come out of nowhere. They are the result of a very sustained campaign from anti-abortion politicians,” said Schneller.In 2021, with a new Democratic presidential administration, not all efforts are focused exclusively on defending reproductive rights. The Biden administration rolled back several funding restrictions for reproductive health counseling domestically and abroad.The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has sued the US Food and Drug Administration to end in-person dispensing requirements for medication abortions during the pandemic, which the professional association has said are not medically justified.In Oregon, a bill would require the state to examine whether specific healthcare mergers reduce access to reproductive rights. In Arizona, advocates are fighting to allow birth control to be dispensed without a prescription.“We know how to decrease the abortion rate, while at the same time improving women’s healthcare,” said Kwatra. “We need to take care of women in all their complicated ways … which is really not hard to do.” More

Before Josh Hawley became known as a leader of the attempt to overturn the 2020 election in the US Congress, he was remembered by former students and staff at St Paul’s, the elite British school for boys where he spent a year teaching, as an aloof, rightwing political obsessive who had made himself popcorn to watch the US invasion of Iraq.The Republican senator from Missouri has been the target of ire of millions of Americans after he became the first senator to say he would object to election results. Ultimately, 146 congressional Republicans joined the rightwing lawmaker in seeking to block votes from Pennsylvania and Arizona from being counted, an extraordinary move that was seen as stoking the flames of a pro-Trump mob who attacked the US Capitol.Before the assault, Hawley was photographed walking past the crowd and raising his fist in salute to them.While Hawley has painted himself as a man of the “American heartland”, and has expressed contempt for what he says is the US’s liberal “elite”, the graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School, who once clerked for the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, spent a year in suburban London in 2002, at the top all-boys private school St Paul’s that dates back to 1509.An examination of Hawley’s time there by the London-based magazine the Fence, found Hawley was not the first choice to serve as a “Colet fellow” at the prestigious private school, a role reserved for Ivy League graduates.But Hawley persuaded the interview board with what some called his intellectual rigor and drive.Hawley taught A-Level politics jointly with Rob Jones, a leftwing former policeman who was described fondly when he left in the school magazine as “able to create a fearsome reputation, but is also worshipped by his students. There cannot be many who have their own Facebook appreciation society.”The teaching style of the pair, former pupils said, was combative, with it apparent that Jones was on the left and Hawley on the right. “Rob had him take some lessons, he would sit with the boys and throw grenades every so often,” said one.Jack, a former student who is himself now a teacher, explained further: “Jones and Hawley would sit on opposite sides of the classroom. We’d get these photocopies of, you know, excerpts from Nietzsche or Marx or John Locke, for ideologies, given them in advance and told to highlight them. Then it was a debate, a discussion, about what conservatives think about society, is nationalism inherently aggressive, and so on and so on.“Fairly quickly it was known … you know, Hawley, he’s the conservative one, he’s the rightwing guy. But then, as I say, he didn’t hide it in discussions. He was forthright about defending his views even at that stage.”The ex-pupil added that Hawley was clearly highly intelligent. “I’m sad to see some of the things he’s saying now, the people he’s aligning with, and the simplistic, glib phrases he’s coming out with, but he’s a serious thinker and he was seriously impressive even back then. And everyone could see it. I think that’s why Jones was happy for him to take such a big load of the teaching, as it was very apparent that this was a very impressive young person,” he said.Hawley, who left comments on pupil’s essays in green ink, “could be quite tough at some points”, according to Jack.“It was a great incentive to work hard and try and do better and see, gosh, would I be capable of writing an essay that wouldn’t be scrawled all over or, you know, would at least get some positive feedback. So, yeah, that was really the first time at St Paul’s where I really loved the education. And I did very well in A-Level politics because I was so, what’s the word – these lessons were exhilarating. And that inspired me to keep going with politics, and he had a lot to do with that,” Jack said.But not all of Hawley’s former pupils were as kind. “He ran my Oxbridge preparation classes. He’s useless, I didn’t get in,” remarked one graduate of Durham University.The reading material set by the young American teacher spoke to his Christian faith, with the devout Hawley setting Paul’s letter to the Romans as Oxbridge reading. In politics, Hawley also went beyond the syllabus to teach John Rawls, Michael Sandel, John Locke, Thomas Paine and other classic works of studying American democracy.More than anything, the prevailing impression left by Hawley on one pupil seems to be that of a politics wonk. “He was really, really into American political logistics. It was around the time of the 2004 election, or run-up to it, and he had his postal voting pack with him and was so proud and protective of it,” he said.Such was his tidiness – or “creepily American” appearance – that the best nickname his pupils could devise was “The All-American Hero”.“He looked like somebody who’s going to be president. If you imagined what a 22-year-old would look like before they became president, he was the figure. Can’t typecast better than that,” added one former charge.But what did his colleagues make of him? In a now-deleted tweet, Mike Sacks, a former Colet fellow who arrived two years after Hawley, said that a teacher asked him: “You’re not a fascist like that Joshua Hawley, are you?”Another described him as “too rightwing and Christian for my sensibilities”, but it seems Hawley did little to help himself in becoming friendly with the staff.“He made a point to keep himself aloof. My take on that is that he had an attitude that he was better, and that the sort of mingling and socializing was just below him, and not something he’d engage in. There were lots of opportunities to spend time together, either in the staff room or at drinks down at the pub – and he doesn’t drink, or he didn’t drink, let me put it that way. He’d never once go to the pub. Not once,” the ex-colleague said.Another former teacher, who says Hawley took an instant dislike to him, recalls an unfriendly Sunday morning encounter with Hawley at a bus stop, where he stayed wordless for 20 minutes as Hawley clutched a huge Bible full of colored ribbons to mark bits of scripture, off to an evangelical gathering.With few social appearances, staff actually remember little of Hawley, though one remembered incident seems striking.“The only anecdote I remember about him in the staff room is he made himself popcorn to watch the news coverage of the Iraq invasion. You know, shock and awe. […] Holding forth about how this is a good military move, and it’s a show of American strength. He was very hawkish,” a teacher recalled.“The common room is, I think, a bit more liberal – he really felt they weren’t quite as aligned with some of his morals. This kind of came across as him making his mark – maybe he was hamming it up a bit to make his point. But it’s not like popcorn was usual in the staff room. We are, after all, in London – we have tea and coffee, not exactly popcorn. He was quite excited about that kind of military endeavor. That was a funny, bizarre kind of moment,” the teacher added.Hawley’s connections to St Paul’s persisted after he left, attending a dinner celebrating the school’s 500th anniversary on 4 April 2009 at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and posing for a photograph with other former Colet fellows and the then High master, Dr Martin Stephen.But the events of attack on the Capitol on 6 January have changed St Paul’s attitude to their former employee.A spokesperson for the school said: “Like people the world over St Paul’s has been shocked by the scenes taking place in America and those resisting the delivery of the legitimate election process. Our records show Josh Hawley came over from the United States for 10 months as a postgraduate intern 18 years ago. We are relieved that democratic process is now prevailing in the US Capitol.” More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterA desk in the US Senate was notably empty for chunks of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial on Wednesday.Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, was instead lounging in the upstairs public gallery with a pile of documents. He explained to CNN: “I’m sitting up there A, because it’s a little less claustrophobic than on the floor, but B, I’ve also got a straight shot,” – a reference to his seating location that also conjured an unfortunate image.But some critics would suggest that Hawley’s rightful place is in the dock, along with his colleague Ted Cruz of Texas and others who unabashedly endorsed Trump’s assault on democracy.This week’s trial necessarily has a narrow focus on the ex-president but that means little scrutiny of Hawley, who was photographed saluting Trump supporters with a raised fist hours before the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January.The Kansas City Star newspaper in his home state wrote in an editorial: “No one other than President Donald Trump himself is more responsible for Wednesday’s coup attempt at the US Capitol than one Joshua David Hawley, the 41-year-old junior senator from Missouri, who put out a fundraising appeal while the siege was under way.”Undeterred by the deadly violence, Hawley and Cruz were prominent among eight senators and 139 representatives who objected to certifying Joe Biden’s electoral college win. Both faced calls to resign. Yet now they get a say in whether Trump should be held accountable for his actions.Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state and first lady, tweeted on Thursday: “If Senate Republicans fail to convict Donald Trump, it won’t be because the facts were with him or his lawyers mounted a competent defense. It will be because the jury includes his co-conspirators.”In detailing how Trump’s tweets and rally speeches fuelled false claims of election fraud and spurred supporters to “fight like hell”, the House impeachment managers have been careful not to dwell on how Hawley, Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Ron Johnson and Rand Paul were among the senators who enabled and amplified those same incendiary lies.It is a pragmatic choice by prosecutors who need some 17 Republican senators to join all 50 Democrats to secure the two-thirds majority required for Trump’s conviction – still something of a mission impossible.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, said: “It’s one of the great ironies of this trial, and one of the reasons why the Senate Republicans will not convict Trump, that most of these Senate Republicans have been Trump’s accomplices. If they convicted Trump, they would have to convict themselves.”To an outside spectator, the stripped-of-context prosecution case might imply that Trump was imbued with superpowers that enabled him to singlehandedly summon, assemble and incite the mob when, in reality, he was lifted by an ecosystem of Republican politicians, conservative media personalities, social media platforms and far-right extremists.Walsh added: “Donald Trump is on trial. He’s the one who originated the big lie, the stolen election lie, but why the hell isn’t [Fox News host] Sean Hannity on trial? Why isn’t Ted Cruz on trial? Why isn’t [congressman] Kevin McCarthy, [congressman] Jim Jordan, [radio host] Rush Limbaugh? I mean, anybody over the last eight months in any position of power or influence who spread the big lie is every bit as culpable as Donald Trump.”For their part, Hawley and Cruz will not necessarily escape scot-free. Both men are facing an investigation from the Senate ethics committee over their conduct before the siege and leadership of the Senate challenge to the electoral college vote. Bob Casey, a Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, told CNN that the pair should face censure as a “bare minimum”.Other Republicans could still face a backlash from donors and voters for their complicity. Last November Graham, a Trump loyalist, called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who alleges that the senator seemed to suggest he find a way to throw out ballots that had been lawfully cast; Graham denies this was his intention.The senator from South Carolina tweeted about the trial on Wednesday night: “The ‘Not Guilty’ vote is growing after today. I think most Republicans found the presentation by the House Managers offensive and absurd.”Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, refused to acknowledge Biden’s victory until it was certified by the electoral college in mid-December. He has twice voted that the impeachment trial is unconstitutional because Trump is now a private citizen but, according to media reports, continues to keep an open mind as to his final verdict. More

A US Republican congressman accidentally turned the political world upside down when he appeared with his face flipped the wrong way during a video call for a House of Representatives committee hearing.
Days after a Texan lawyer presented in court with a kitten filter instead of his face, Minnesota representative Tom Emmer made his own unusual video call debut.
The congressman was speaking about job security during the House financial services committee meeting when the chairwoman Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, interjected.
“Will the gentleman suspend? I’m sorry … Mr Emmer? Are you OK?” she asked above the suppressed laughter from colleagues.
Another participant clarified: “You’re upside down, Tom.”
Emmer replied: “I don’t know how to fix that.”
Other lawmakers immediately compared the incident with the cat filter, with one commenting: “It’s like the cat,” while another said it was already “going viral”.
And as organisations struggle with a world turned upside by the pandemic, another attendee asked whether Emmer’s appearance might have been a statement: “Is this a metaphor?”
The issue was quickly resolved and Emmer appeared right side up, to the sounds of cheering from those in attendance.
“I appreciate your patience, Madam Chair,” Emmer said. “I don’t know what happened, it just came out this way. I turned it off and I turned it back on.”
Emmer recognised the comparisons with the Texan lawyer, Rod Ponton, having retweeted his video with a caption referencing Ponton’s now immortal words: “I am not a cat.”

Tom Emmer
(@RepTomEmmer)
I am not a cat. pic.twitter.com/d4lhQd0sJ4

February 10, 2021 More

It was “a little terrifying”, Eleanor Roosevelt told the Associated Press about her husband Franklin’s inauguration as US president in 1933. “The crowds were so tremendous. And you felt that they would do anything – if only someone would tell them what to do.”The ability of leaders to turns crowds into mobs and bend them to their will has been a constant in history and was a focus of the third day of former US president Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate on Thursday.Video clips showed how the mob on 6 January built an unstoppable momentum, with Trump supporters feeding off each other’s energy and feeling emboldened to act in ways as a collective that many might have hesitated to do as individuals.Their allegiance to Trump carried echoes of cultists, religious fanatics or 1980s English football hooligans – blind devotion to one man or tribe unleashing irrational passions and the belief that anything is permitted.What the trial could not dwell on was the complex psychological, sociological and cultural threads of why these people came to be seduced by a demagogue so that they were ready to “fight for Trump”, brand the police “traitors” and desecrate a temple of US democracy.Nor could it investigate America’s historical fascination with violence, from the massacres of Native Americans to the slavery of Africans, from school shootings to the death penalty, from foreign wars to the assassinations of four US presidents.And the House impeachment managers said little about the complicity of rightwing media, social media platforms or Republican politicians, some of whom were sitting in the Senate chamber itself.Their focus is not on the collaborators but Trump himself and how he spent years fueling a climate of violence, sowing distrust in election integrity and manipulating the emotions of Americans who were then willing to walk on hot coals on his behalf.“January 6 was not some unexpected radical break from his normal law-abiding and peaceful disposition,” said lead manager Jamie Raskin. “This was his essential MO. He knew that egged on by his tweets, his lies and his promise of a ‘wild’ time in Washington to guarantee his grip on power, his most extreme followers would show up bright and early, ready to attack, ready to engage in violence, ready to ‘fight like hell’ for their hero.”Screams resounded in the ornate Senate chamber as the trial again considered audio and video evidence from the assault on the Capitol as well as clinical documents. In an indictment, one invader said: “DC. Trump wants all able-bodied Patriots to come.” In a criminal complaint, Bruno Cua was quoted as saying: “President Trump is calling us to FIGHT!” and “This isn’t a joke.”Samuel Fisher, arrested in connection with the siege, wrote on his website: “Trump just needs to fire the bat signal … deputize patriots … and then the pain comes.”There was a video in which one rioter said to another as they entered a congressional office: “He’ll be happy – what do you mean, we’re fighting for Trump.” Social media footage caught people shouting: “We were invited here!”And after the insurrection, estate agent Jenna Ryan told CBS News: “I thought I was following my president. I thought I was following what we were called to do.” Another told the New York Times: “We wait and take orders from our president.”Congresswoman Diana DeGette told the Senate: “Their own statements before, during and after the attack make clear the attack was done for Donald Trump at his instructions and to fulfill his wishes.“They truly believed that the whole intrusion was at the president’s orders. This was not a hidden crime. The president told them to be there, so they actually believed they would face no punishment.”The mob repeated language they heard from Trump such as “fight like hell” and “stop the steal”, DeGette added. “They came because he told them to. And they did stop our proceedings – temporarily – because he told them to.”But after the riot, she continued, Jacob Chansley, who infamously wore furs and a horned headdress in the Capitol building, expressed regret and said he felt “duped” by Trump – a hint of awakening to his otherwise extraordinary power of mind control.The prosecutors went on to put the riot in the context of Trump’s repeated comments condoning and glorifying violence and praising “both sides” after the 2017 outbreak at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.Raskin said: “There’s a pattern staring us in the face. When Donald Trump tells the crowd as he did on January 6 to fight like hell or you won’t have a country any more, he meant for them to fight like hell.”Earlier this week, Trump’s bumbling defense lawyers argued that the real motivation of the trial is stop him running for president again. The Democratic House impeachment managers have been careful to mostly avoid this topic lest it make the charge of partisanship too easy.But Raskin went there on Thursday, asking senators whether they honestly believe Trump would not incite more violence if he occupied the White House again. “Would you bet the lives of more police officers on that?” he demanded. “Would you bet the safety of your family on that? Would you bet the future of your democracy on that?“If he gets back into office and it happens again, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.” More