US Politics

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterThe insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January believed they were acting on instructions from Donald Trump, House Democrats said on Thursday as they launched the final stretch of their arguments to convict Trump during his impeachment trial.Diana DeGette, a Democratic congresswoman from Colorado, played several video clips and pointed to legal documents in which the attackers said they were following Trump’s wishes. In one clip, protesters screamed at police that they had been invited to the Capitol by Trump“They didn’t shy away from their crimes, because they thought they were following orders from the commander-in-chief. And so they would not be punished,” she said. “They came because he told them to.”Congressman Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, walked senators through several instances in which Trump had encouraged and sanctioned violence by his supporters.Those examples included Trump’s repeated attacks on the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, last year.After Trump’s repeated attacks, his supporters, some heavily armed, invaded the Michigan state capitol in Lansing last April, which Raskin said was a “dress rehearsal” for what was to come on 6 January in Washington.Trump did not condemn the attack, Raskin noted, leading supporters to again storm the state capitol two weeks later. The dangerous consequences of Trump’s rhetoric would become clearest in October, the congressman alleged, when 13 men were charged in connection with a plot to kidnap Whitmer.“These tactics were road-tested,” Raskin said. “January 6 was a culmination of the president’s actions, not an aberration from them.”The argument rebuts the point, advanced by Trump’s lawyers in their impeachment briefs, that Trump’s speech during a rally near the White House on 6 January is protected by the first amendment to the US constitution, governing free speech, and that he does not bear responsibility for what the rioters chose to do afterwards.House Democrats were expected to focus on Donald Trump’s “lack of remorse” and the lasting damage of the 6 January attack on the US Capitol as they conclude their case for convicting Trump in the ongoing impeachment trial.The impeachment managers – House Democrats essentially serving as prosecutors – will continue to focus on Trump’s role in the attack as well as the deep toll and harm from it, according to senior aides.Their presentation on Thursday follows a day when Democrats repeatedly showed harrowing video of the 6 January attack, some of it never publicly seen before.The disturbing security camera footage and other video clips came as they laid out a meticulous case for how Trump deliberately fomented the violence on 6 January and then, once it began, abdicated his constitutional duty to protect the United States.The footage shown in the session in the Senate on Wednesday included a revelation that the Utah Republican senator Mitt Romney was extremely close to the mob overrunning the Capitol until he was tapped on the shoulder by the Capitol police officer Eugene Goodman and told to turn around.Other footage showed Daniel Hodges, another officer, yelling as he was crushed in a doorway – an image that visibly upset some of the senators watching the proceeding.Tommy Tuberville, a Republican senator from Alabama, also revealed on Wednesday that he had told Trump that his vice-president, Mike Pence, had been evacuated from the Senate chamber as the attack was ongoing.The disclosure was significant because it suggested Trump was aware Pence was in danger as he attacked him on Twitter on 6 January for not overturning the electoral college vote.The disclosure also supports the narrative from House impeachment managers that Trump violated his presidential oath by not doing anything to stop an attack on the US government.The Democrats remain unlikely to succeed in getting the Senate to convict Trump and bar him from holding future office. They need to get 17 Republican senators to vote for conviction, a high bar.Still, impeachment aides projected confidence it was one they could clear.Aides who worked on Trump’s first impeachment trial said there was a notable difference on Tuesday in how the senators responded.“It’s really hard to think of a moment from the first trial where all 100 senators sat at attention and were as rapt and challenged by the evidence as we saw yesterday,” an aide said.To support their argument that they can convince Republicans to vote for conviction, aides have pointed to the Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican who voted on Tuesday to proceed with the trial after voting not to do so last month.Other Republicans show no signs of budging. The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Trump, called the Wednesday presentation “offensive and absurd”. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said earlier this week there was nothing the impeachment managers could say to convince him the trial was constitutional.Once the impeachment managers wrap up their case, Trump’s lawyers will have a chance to begin their defense of the former president in full.That defense, likely to begin on Friday, did not get off to the strongest start on Tuesday when Bruce Castor, one of Trump’s attorneys, gave a meandering opening argument. Trump was reportedly furious with the presentation, although Castor has said the president was pleased.Trump’s team will have 16 hours to make their case, over two days, though they are not expected to use all of that time.It remains unclear whether witnesses will be called. If that is not the case the trial could end as soon as Sunday. More

Jonathan Freedland is joined by Prof Sarah Binder of the Brookings Institution and George Washington University to look at what has happened in the Senate trial proceedings so far, and what may be yet to come

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On Thursday, impeachment managers will conclude their prosecution of Donald Trump, arguing that he is guilty of “the most grievous constitutional crime ever committed” by a US president. Then Trump’s defence team will have up to 16 hours to make their rebuttal. How will senators vote, and when will we know whether the Senate chooses to convict the former president and disqualify him from ever running for office again? Jonathan puts these questions and more to an expert in congressional politics, Prof Sarah Binder. Send us your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

One side holds up a mirror to America in 2021. The other, not so much.The nine Democratic prosecutors at Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial are made up of men and women young and old with multiple racial and religious identities.But each day in the Senate chamber they are trying to persuade a caucus of 50 Republicans still dominated by ageing white men.The contrast is not obvious on television but striking to reporters in the press gallery who gaze down at the sea of faces – clad in masks because of the coronavirus pandemic – visible above wooden desks on a tiered semicircular platform.The impeachment managers – all of whom are lawyers – from the House of Representatives are led by Jamie Raskin, who is of Jewish heritage, and include Joaquín Castro, who is Latino, Ted Lieu, who is Asian American, and Joe Neguse and Stacey Plaskett, who are African American.Neguse, whose parents came to the US as refugees from Eritrea four decades ago, is the first African American member of Congress in Colorado’s history and, at 36, the youngest ever impeachment manager.Plaskett is also making history as the first non-voting delegate to the House to be an impeachment manager. She represents the US Virgin Islands, a territory that does not have a vote in Congress, meaning that she was not permitted to vote for Trump’s impeachment on the House floor.“Virgin Islanders are always looking for space to be part of this America and try to make it better, even without a vote,” Plaskett told the Associated Press. “I’m going to make sure that their voice and the voice of people from territories representing 4 million Americans – Puerto Rico and other places – are actually heard.”The multiracial lineup of prosecutors is all the more resonant because they are detailing the actions of a mob that included white nationalist groups and flaunted regalia such as the flag of the Confederacy, which fought a civil war to preserve slavery.And the rioters’ objective was to overturn an election that Trump lost specifically by nullifying votes cast by people of colour, most of which went to his opponent, Joe Biden.Kurt Bardella, a senior adviser at the Lincoln Project, a group that campaigned for Trump’s defeat, said: “I don’t think it should be lost on anyone that the prosecution of Donald Trump and his white nationalist allies is being conducted by a very diverse group of Democrats encompassing gender, ethnicity and even religion.”On Wednesday it fell to Plaskett to remind senators that when Trump was asked to condemn the Proud Boys and white supremacists, he said: “Stand back and stand by.” The group adopted that phrase as their official slogan and even created merchandise with it that they wore at his campaign rallies.She also recounted how, on September 11, 2001, she was a member of staff at the Capitol and she might have been dead if the fourth hijacked jet that day had plunged into the Capitol, as it was believed to have been planned, instead of being taken down by heroic passengers and crashing into a field in Pennsylvania. She drew a line from that day to 6 January 2021.“When I think of that and I think of these insurgents, these images, incited by our own president of the United States, attacking this Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election,” she said, enunciating each syllable, then pausing before adding, “our democracy, our republic.”In those days Plaskett was a Republican and later worked in the Department of Justice in the administration of George W Bush, converting to become a Democrat in 2008, and winning a place in Congress in 2014.She had studied in Washington DC, at Georgetown University as an undergraduate, then attended law school at American University, where Raskin was her law professor, which he noted in the Senate chamber on Wednesday was “a special point of pride” for him.At the trial, the juxtaposition of Plaskett – the only Black woman in the chamber now that Senator Kamala Harris has departed for the vice-presidency – delivering this evidence was inescapably potent.Bardella reflected: “When you’re talking about the Proud Boys being told to ‘stand back and stand by’, I think the articulation of that prosecution is made even more impactful and powerful when it’s being made by people of colour, by people who really represent symbolically the very thing that these people were protesting and trying to insurrect on January 6.“It’s the very notion of people of colour in roles of power and prominence that white nationalists rebelled against. At the heart of all of this is the systematic effort by the Republican party to disenfranchise voters of colour and to disqualify legal votes cast by people of colour in this country. That is at the epicentre of this entire conflict.”The impeachment managers have made a blistering start as they seek to demonstrate that Trump was “inciter-in-chief” of the deadly violence at the US Capitol. They have used the former president’s own rally speeches and tweets to show that he spent months pushing “the big lie” of a stolen election and urging his supporters to “fight like hell”.But it remains extremely unlikely that they will get the 17 Republican senators they need for a conviction. The trial is likely to be another case study in how far apart the two major parties have grown. Despite some notable gains among voters of colour last year, Republicans have only one Black senator: Tim Scott of South Carolina.LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said: “The diversity on the Democratic side is reflective of America: more inclusive, more diversity of thought. My grandmother used to say, the GOP [Grand Old Party] has built their castle on sinking sand. Their entire existence has been centred around white male privilege and lack of accountability for white men of means.“So the visual on their side shows it is not reflective of America, only a particularly elite class in America. The second distinction is the argument. Trump’s defence team haven’t even met the standard of mediocrity, in my opinion. They have been absolutely awful. I do think that’s indicative that white men have literally never had to fully defend themselves.” More

Progressive Democrats in Congress are calling for an overhaul of US sanctions on other nations which they argue have “catastrophic humanitarian consequences” on the global effort to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
In a letter to Joe Biden to be delivered on Thursday, 23 Democratic representatives and two senators, welcome a review of sanctions and their impact on the pandemic that the president launched soon after taking office.
But the signatories also urge the new administration to take a broader look at sanctions as a foreign policy tool, which they say America had imposed as “a knee jerk reaction” for too long. The letter signals the issue is likely to be at the heart of the foreign policy debate within the party in the Biden era.
The new administration has inherited a “maximum pressure” regime imposed by Donald Trump on Iran, as well as blanket sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba. It has already suspended a terrorist designation issued in the last days of Trump administration on the Houthis in Yemen, because of its impact on humanitarian aid deliveries.
Thursday’s letter, authored by congresswoman Ilhan Omar, congressman Jesús García, and senator Elizabeth Warren, points to the unintended consequences of secondary sanctions imposed on third country governments and companies for dealing with targeted governments. Often, risk-averse financial institutions are deterred from facilitating any transactions, even in humanitarian goods formally allowed by the sanctions.
“Existing protocols and licenses have proved woefully insufficient to meet the enormity of the challenges shared by people around the world in the face of the pandemic,” the Democrats say in the letter. “Even when licenses and humanitarian exemptions are available, moreover, there is a persistent problem of overcompliance, particularly from the financial sector. This has led to catastrophic humanitarian consequences in various parts of the world.”
Under a national security directive issued by Biden on his first full day in office, the secretaries of state, commerce and the treasury, in consultation with the health and human services secretary and the administrator of the US Agency for International Development, are to review US and multilateral sanctions to assess whether they are obstructing global responses to the pandemic.
Thursday’s letter represents a push for the review to encompass a radical rethink of sanctions, away from their use as a fix-all tool.
“Far too often and for far too long, sanctions have been imposed as a knee-jerk reaction without a measured and considered assessment of their impacts. Sanctions are easy to put in place, but notoriously difficult to lift,” the signatories argue.
“This is why we are asking for this release to be comprehensive, to see if these policies can be adjusted to make sure that they’re not specifically harming the people in these countries who are trying to survive…in a public health pandemic that is bringing about a financial crisis,” Omar told the Guardian.
Chad Brown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the nature of the pandemic meant that international cooperation, even with rivals and adversaries, was all the more in the national interest.
“If the pandemic is raging anywhere, the emergence of variants means that nowhere is truly safe,” Brown said. “That even includes the countries the United States may find challenging for geopolitical reasons.” More

On 6 January, Jackie Speier was one of scores of members of Congress threatened by the mob of violent Trump supporters and white supremacists who stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the results of the presidential election.Along with her peers, she was told to wear a gas mask and ordered to lie prostrate on the marble floor as the baying crowd pounded on the chamber door and the sound of gunfire rent the air. The terror of that day induced in her a flashback, to the events that brought her into politics in the first place when she lay bleeding from five gunshot wounds in the Guyana jungle, not knowing whether she would live or die.It was 18 November 1978, and she had travelled to Guyana as part of a congressional investigation into the Jonestown settlement and its cult leader, Jim Jones. The fact-finding group of 24 were ambushed by cult members on a jungle airstrip; the congressman for whom Speier then worked, Leo Ryan, and four others were murdered.Speier, shot five times and left for dead, had to wait 22 hours for help to arrive. She told herself as she lay on the tarmac that if she survived the ordeal she would devote herself to public service.That devotion, born of her bullet wounds, can be traced in a direct line from the Jonestown massacre, through the insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January, to her renewed efforts today to protect the United States from the threat of violent extremism. She is determined to strengthen safeguards against cults – whether of the Jonestown or Donald Trump variety and the white supremacist sedition he unleashed.“Jim Jones was a religious cult leader, Donald Trump is a political cult leader,” Speier told the Guardian. “As a victim of violence and of a cult leader, I am sensitive to conduct that smacks of that. We have got to be wary of anyone who can have such control over people that they lose their ability to think independently.”Speier stood for her first election soon after the Jonestown massacre. Since 2008 the Democratic congresswoman has represented most of the district in California that her gunned-down mentor, Ryan, served before his death.The formative experience that gave rise to her political career gives Speier an unusually sharp perspective on the danger posed by the Capitol insurrection. She thinks of it as “groupthink”, saying that “when the groupthink is about overthrowing the government, then we’ve got a serious problem.”Since 6 January, Speier has used her political muscle as a member of the House armed services and intelligence committees to press for urgent reforms designed to shore up protections against white supremacist and extremist violence. Last month she wrote to Joe Biden and his newly confirmed defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, calling for a “new sense of urgency” following the “appalling events at the Capitol”.In her letter, Speier told the president and defense secretary that she had become “increasingly alarmed” about the connections between violent extremist groups and military personnel. She warned them that current efforts to contain the problem were “insufficient to the threat from these extremist movements”.In her Guardian interview, Speier said that the current crisis of white supremacy and the military has been brewing for many years. “I thought it was urgent a year ago when I held a hearing on violent extremism in the military and was astonished at the number of service members who are recruited in part because of their training to these extremist groups.”She added: “It’s not as though we haven’t been given a heads-up.”A recent analysis by CNN of the first 150 people to be arrested for participating in the Capitol insurrection found that at least 21 had military experience. Some were still serving, and eight were former marines with elite training in the art of warfare.Speier said that such training spelled trouble for the nation. “With military training you become skilled at the use of lethal weapons and to ambush and gain control. The training is important to fight our enemies, but now it is being used as a recruitment tool for organisations engaged in violent extremism.”The congresswoman pointed to the case of retired Lieutenant Colonel Larry Brock who has been charged with unlawful entry and disorderly conduct at the Capitol. She said: “An Air Force Academy graduate was identified in his early life as an excellent military leader who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and here he is on the Senate floor holding zip-tie handcuffs.”Prosecutors said Brock’s handcuffs were intended to take hostages.Following the 2020 hearing that Speier convened as chair of the military personnel subcommittee, she proposed the creation of a standalone offense of violent extremism under the uniform code of military justice. The Pentagon supported the idea, but it was squashed at the insistence of Trump and with resistance from Republicans in the US Senate.Donald Trump had a code for talking to these groupsNow she plans to reintroduce the proposal into this year’s National Defense Authorization Act. “Sometimes people have to be hit over the head before they recognize that there’s an issue, and certainly January 6 has been that two-by-four on the head,” she said.Under the existing military code, service members have to be “active” participants in an extremist group to be disciplined. Speier’s panel heard of an air force officer who was engaged with Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group that recruits on US college campuses.Even after a formal investigation, the officer was allowed to continue military service. “So you’ve got a problem with lackadaisical enforcement of a law that allows you to be a participant in a white supremacist group, you just can’t be an ‘active’ participant.”A Military Times poll last year found that a third of all serving troops, rising to more than half of black and other minority service members, said they had witnessed white nationalism within the ranks. Dozens of active-duty and veteran military service members have been arrested in recent years in connection with terrorist plots and murders.Last July an air force sergeant linked to the anti-government boogaloo movement was charged with murdering a federal security officer in Oakland, California.Speier is urging Biden to use his executive powers to identify white supremacy and extremism as a specific threat within the military. She also wants him to sign an executive order that would ensure that all military recruits and those seeking top security clearances are screened for signs of violent extremist activity on their social media accounts.“It’s astonishing to me that we have to be pulled kicking and screaming into the 21st century as it relates to how social media has become a tool for these violent fringe organizations.”Speier said that all these measures were needed urgently even before 6 January. Trump’s open dialogue with extremist organizations had supercharged the need for action, she said.“Donald Trump had a code for talking to these groups. ‘There’s good people on both sides,’ ‘We love you,’ ‘You’re special.’ He recognized that they were valuable to him, and they recognized that he could amplify their recruiting. It was a toxic brew of personal gain, and it put at risk the entire democracy of this country.” More

Their travel documents were meticulous, and security checks showed no red flags. “Your case looks great,” an apologetic American consular officer told Hedieh Elkhlasi’s parents at the US embassy in Armenia. “But because of the executive order, I just can’t print a visa for Iranians.”The rejection was one of tens of thousands issued by US embassies across the world over the four years since Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, the first of several attempts to enforce a policy that became notorious as the “Muslim ban”. Legal challenges chipped away at some of the restrictions, but travel bans on citizens from more than a dozen mostly-Muslim majority countries survived – until they were scrapped by President Joe Biden in one of his first acts in office.It was the end of a cruel regime of policies that did nothing to make Americans safer, according to national security experts. Instead, it cut US citizens off from their friends and families, upended educations and careers, and tarnished the reputation of a country that, despite its misadventures in the Islamic world, was still a magnet for ambitious and successful Muslim migrants.Many are now preparing to apply for visas again, hoping Biden’s election will turn the page on a dark era of American history. Some are still wary, wondering if the xenophobia that birthed the Muslim ban will linger long after the order has been scrapped.Of the estimated 42,000 people whose visa applications were turned down as a result of the ban, most were Iranians. Elkhlasi, 30, was born in Tehran but became an American citizen only months before Trump was elected. It felt as if the country to which she had sworn allegiance had turned on her, she says.“I became a US citizen to defend the US and to do whatever it took to count this is as my country,” she says. “But this country was not allowing my parents to even come and visit me, to see my new house. I was heartbroken.”Three weeks before the first ban came into place, Shawki Ahmed’s wife and three children had interviewed for their US citizenship applications at the American embassy in Cairo. The second-generation Yemeni American, a member of the NYPD, had been trying to get his family to the country since the eruption of Yemen’s civil war in 2014.The Trump order threw the process into chaos, he says. “It took two-and-a-half years to sort out: legal fees, I wrote the embassy, used lawyers – nothing.”It became clear the hurdle was not a matter of documents or security tests – it was simply who they were.“I’m a police officer, my father came to this country in 1959, we are law-abiding tax-paying citizens, we’re not dependent on welfare,” Ahmed, 40, says. “But apparently Trump decided those things don’t matter just because of our last name – because we are Muslim.”In Gaziantep, Syrian national Aya Shayah had more riding on the US presidential election than most. Her son, Hisham, requires surgery on his ear that a specialist in Los Angeles can complete six months faster than doctors in Turkey. She had visited her sister in the US a few times since 2013. Visiting Myrtle Beach in South Carolina was “like a movie”, the Syrian national recalls. “People running, and kites in the sky, and dog walking, it was so nice to see that.”She filled out an application to renew her visa in 2016, just before Trump won office. “It was a very long application, they literally wanted every detail of my life from about age five,” Shayah says. “And after all that, there was a six-month silence, and then they rejected me.”With Syrians now allowed to visit, and her sister pregnant again, she will try to return. “Now Trump is gone, I am applying for us again and I hope we will get it, I am feeling positive about it,” Shayah says.Elkhlasi followed the presidential race from London, where she moved after two years of lobbying to allow her parents to enter the US, efforts that she says left her questioning if she could ever really be American. “The ban felt very personal,” she says. “It got me mad, I was in a depression phase. I wondered, ‘Are Americans always going to think of me differently?’”It was the reaction of her colleagues and friends in California to the Muslim ban that gave her faith, she says. “They said they were sorry, that they didn’t know how to apologise – even though it wasn’t their fault. But it made me feel better. It changed my feelings about America, and that’s the only reason I want to give it another try.”Ahmed’s family was stranded abroad for almost three years. “It was very costly emotionally,” he says. “My kids were out of school for close to a year, it was very hard on them; they wanted to know what they had done wrong to be cut off from home and their dad. My mother was sick in Cairo and I couldn’t bring her to America for treatment.”In October 2019, he finally managed to get them to the US, but knows that tens of thousands of others in similar situations had no such luck. “People in the community are definitely joyful that Trump has gone and the ban has been lifted,” he says. “We feel like democracy has been restored. This is the America my father came to: immigrant America is the real America.” More

Joe Biden is taking a hands-off approach to the second impeachment of Donald Trump.As the Senate moves forward with impeaching the 45th president a second time, the current president has opted to steer clear of involving himself too closely in the proceedings.During a White House press briefing this week Jen Psaki, the Biden administration’s press secretary, was pressed on whether Biden would weigh in on the impeachment.“Well, first, the president himself would tell you that we keep him pretty busy, and he has a full schedule this week, which we will continue to keep you abreast of” Psaki said.Psaki went on to say that Biden’s schedule includes a visit to the Department of Defense, meetings with business leaders, governors and mayors, and a heavy focus on a Covid relief plan seen as vital to the nation’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic.“So he … I think it’s clear from his schedule, and from his intention, he will not spend too much time watching the proceedings,” Psaki continued. “He will remain closely in touch with [House] Speaker Pelosi, Leader [Chuck] Schumer, a range of officials on the Hill about his plan. And that’s exactly what they want him to do, is to remain focused on that.“And he will leave the pace and the process and the mechanics of the impeachment proceedings up to members of Congress.”Instead, Biden officials and the president himself are stressing that their focus is on passing a large Covid relief bill. What Congress does is up to Congress, they argue.Biden echoed Psaki’s remarks during an appearance in front of the press while meeting with business leaders. He said he would not be watching the trial.“I am not,” Biden said when asked if he was watching the impeachment proceedings. “Look, I told you before: I have a job. My job is to keep people … we’ve already lost over 450,000 people. We’re going to lose a whole lot more if we don’t act, and act decisively and quickly.”Biden continued: “A lot of families are food insecure. They’re in trouble. That’s my job. The Senate has their job; they’re about to begin it. I’m sure they’re going to conduct themselves well. And that’s all I’m going to have to say about impeachment.”The political calculationbehind this hands-off approach to Trump’s impeachment trial is that there’s not much to be gained by Biden speaking out. Even though the Senate voted that impeaching Trump a second time is constitutional, his actual conviction is still a long shot. It’s unlikely anything Biden did say would sway the requisite number of Republicans needed to successfully convict Trump and thereby bar him from ever running for office again.Though, despite his current silence, Biden has previously weighed in on the necessity of impeaching Trump for his involvement in inciting a mob to attack the Capitol on January. In January Biden told CNN “I think it has to happen.” More