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      Justice Dept. Sues Arizona Over Voting Restrictions

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      It is the third time the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has sued a state over its voting laws.The Justice Department sued Arizona on Tuesday over a new state law requiring proof of citizenship to vote in a presidential election, saying the Republican-imposed restrictions are a “textbook violation” of federal law.It is the third time the department under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has challenged a state’s voting law and comes as Democratic leaders and voting rights groups have pressed Mr. Garland to act more decisively against measures that limit access to the ballot.Arizona’s law, which Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed in March, requires voters to prove their citizenship to vote in a presidential election, like showing a birth certificate or passport. It also mandates that newly registered voters provide a proof of address, which could disproportionately affect people with limited access to government-issued identification cards. Those include immigrants, students, older people, low-income voters and Native Americans.“Arizona has passed a law that turns the clock back by imposing unlawful and unnecessary requirements that would block eligible voters from the registration rolls for certain federal elections,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told reporters on Tuesday.Ms. Clarke said that by imposing what she described as “onerous” requisites, the law “constitutes a textbook violation” of the National Voter Registration Act, which makes it easier to register to vote. The department said the law also ran afoul of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in asking election officials to reject voter registration forms based on errors or omissions that are not relevant to a voter’s eligibility.As of March, 31,500 “federal only” voters could be prevented from voting in the next presidential election under the new requirements if state officials are unable to track down their information in time to validate their ballots.Some voting rights groups contend that the number of affected voters could be even greater. But even a few thousand fewer votes could be decisive in Arizona, one of the most closely contested battleground states: In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. defeated President Donald J. Trump in Arizona by about 10,000 votes.A spokesperson for Mr. Ducey did not immediately respond to requests for comment. When he signed the bill in March, Mr. Ducey said the law, expected to take effect in January, was “a balanced approach that honors Arizona’s history of making voting accessible without sacrificing security in our elections.”Arizona has been at the center of some of the most contentious battles over the 2020 election. Six months after the election, its Republican-led Senate authorized an outside review of the election in Maricopa County, an abnormal step that quickly devolved into a hotbed for conspiracy theorists. The state has also passed multiple laws that impose new restrictions to voting.Even before the Republican-controlled Legislature passed the measure, existing state law required all voters to provide proof of citizenship to vote in state elections. Federal voting registration forms still required voters to attest that they were citizens, but not to provide documentary proof.In 2013, the Supreme Court upheld that law but added that Arizona must accept the federal voter registration form for federal elections. That essentially created a bifurcated system in Arizona that would require documented proof of citizenship to vote in state elections but allow those simply registering with the federal voter registration form the ability to vote in federal elections.The new law could threaten the registrations of those voters, preventing tens of thousands of them from casting a ballot in presidential elections, voting rights groups contend.“There’s certainly going to be some people in Arizona that are not going to be able to vote under the proof-of-citizenship requirement,” said Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a former Justice Department lawyer.While the new law would have sprawling consequences for many groups, local election officials have noted that delivering documentary proof of citizenship can be especially hard among Native American populations, which were key to helping flip Arizona to Mr. Biden in 2020.“You may have folks who were born on reservations who may not have birth certificates, and therefore may find it very difficult to prove citizenship on paper somehow,” said Adrian Fontes, the former election administrator for Maricopa County and a current Democratic candidate for secretary of state. “Things of this nature have always been of great concern for election administrators in Arizona.”Shortly after taking office, Mr. Garland announced an expansion of the department’s civil rights division in response to a wave of laws introducing new voting restrictions after the 2020 election.In June 2021, the department sued Georgia over its sweeping new voting law that overhauled the state’s election administration and introduced a host of restrictions to voting in the state, especially voting by mail. In November, the department sued Texas over a provision limiting the assistance available to voters at the polls.Marc Elias, a Democratic elections lawyer who represented a group that filed a suit against Arizona earlier this year, said he was relieved to see the department follow through on Mr. Biden’s pledge last year to counter a threat from Republican-sponsored state laws he called the “most significant test to democracy” since the Civil War.“Adding the voice and authority of the United States is incredibly helpful to the fight for voting rights,” Mr. Elias said in an interview. More

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      ‘A dangerous cancer’: fourth hearing revealed the human cost of Trump’s delusion

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      ‘A dangerous cancer’: fourth hearing revealed the human cost of Trump’s delusionThe ex-president’s attacks on officials to overturn the election resulted in them being harassed by his followers Donald Trump was the most powerful man in the world. But he was also a paranoid fantasist who did not care how his lies destroyed people’s lives.That was the picture of the former US president that came into focus with startling clarity at Tuesday’s hearing of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.January 6 hearings: state officials testify on Trump pressure to discredit electionRead moreDead people, shredded ballots and a USB drive that was in fact a ginger mint were all part of the delusional narrative of election fraud peddled by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani. They would have been as comical as flat-earthers but for the way they posed a danger to both individual citizens and American democracy.“The president’s lie was and is a dangerous cancer on the body politic,” committee member Adam Schiff said at the hearing into how Trump pressured state officials to overturn overturn results.It was worth remembering that Trump once boasted that he had passed a cognitive test by reciting the words, “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV,” in the right order. And that, according to the Washington Post, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his four-year presidency.Even on Tuesday, he was repeating the biggest lie of all. Just before the hearing he issued a statement claiming that witness Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, told him “the election was rigged and I won Arizona”.Bowers, a Republican who had wanted Trump to win the election, told the committee that this was false: “Anyone, anywhere, anytime I said the election was rigged, that would not be true.”Bowers also recalled a conversation with Giuliani and lawyer Jenna Ellis about allegations of voter fraud in Arizona. In a phrase that captured the president’s own mindset, Giuliani allegedly said: “We’ve got lots of theories but we just don’t have the evidence.”But the centerpiece of the big lie is Georgia, which Trump narrowly lost and which became his all-consuming obsession for wild conspiracy theories.The committee heard testimony from its secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and his deputy Gabe Sterling, who observed that competing against Trump’s false statements was like a “shovel trying to empty the ocean. I even had family members I had to argue with about some of these things.”The Cannon Caucus Room resounded with Trump’s own voice from a 67-minute phone call with Raffensperger in which the president claimed the people of Georgia “know” he won the state by hundreds of thousands of voters.Not true, Raffensperger told the committee definitively, explaining that Trump had “come up short”.One by one, Trump could be heard making ludicrous assertions without foundation. One by one, Raffensperger and Sterling calmly demolished them.The president was heard claiming that votes were “in what looked to be suitcases or trunks, suitcases but they weren’t in voter boxes”. Schiff asked: “Were they just the ordinary containers that are used by election workers?” Sterling testified: “They’re standard ballot carriers that allow for seals to be put on them so they’re tamper proof.”Trump went on during the call: “But they dropped a lot of votes in there late at night. You know that, Brad.” Raffensperger told the committee: “There were no additional ballots accepted after 7pm.”The president insisted: “The other thing, dead people. So dead people voted and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.”Raffensperger observed: “No, it’s not accurate … We found two dead people when I wrote my letter to Congress that’s dated January 6 and subsequent to that we found two more. That’s one, two, three, four people, not 4,000.”More sinister yet, Trump claimed that election workers had been shredding ballots, “a criminal offense” that could put Raffensperger at risk. “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”Raffensperger told the hearing: “What I knew is we didn’t have any votes to find.”Tuesday’s hearing spelled out how the big lie has caused hurt way beyond Washington on 6 January 2021. Trump told Raffensperger on the call: “When you talk about no criminality, I think it’s very dangerous for you to say that.”The Georgia secretary of state took this as a threat. And sure enough, his family was targeted by Trump supporters.“My email, my cell phone was doxxed and I was getting texts all over the country and then eventually my wife started getting texts. Hers typically came in as sexualized texts which were disgusting … They started going after her I think just to probably put pressure on me: ‘Why don’t you quit and walk away.’”He was far from alone.In a deposition, Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson talked about how her “stomach sunk” when she heard the sounds of protesters outside her home one night when she was putting her child to bed. She wondered if they had guns or were going to attack her house. “That was the scariest moment,” Benson said.But no story better illustrated the callousness of Trump’s assault than Georgia election workers Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, two African American women described by committee chairman Bennie Thompson as “unsung heroes” of democracy.Giuliani accused the pair of passing a USB drive to each other; Moss told the committee that her mother had actually been handing her a ginger mint. With astonishing cruelty, Trump was heard in a phone call describing Freeman as “a professional vote scammer and hustler”.It was false but it was the cue for an onslaught of racist hatred from Trump supporters. Moss, nervous and at times shaking, recalled: “A lot of threats wishing death upon me. Telling me that, you know, I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.”Moss, who left her position, added in wrenching testimony: “It’s turned my life upside down. I no longer give out my business card. I don’t transfer calls. I don’t want anyone knowing my name. I’ve gained about 60 pounds. I just don’t do nothing anymore. I don’t want to go anywhere. I second-guess everything that I do.”Her mother Ruby Freeman said in a deposition: “I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation. I’ve lost my sense of security – all because a group of people … scapegoat[ed] me and my daughter, Shaye, to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen.”At the end of his call to Raffensperger, Trump could be heard saying: “It takes a little while but let the truth comes out.”Now, finally, the truth is coming out, but not the one that occupies his fantasies.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpArizonaUS politicsGeorgiafeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘A dangerous cancer’: fourth hearing reveals how Trump’s big lie destroyed people’s lives

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      ‘A dangerous cancer’: fourth hearing reveals how Trump’s big lie destroyed people’s lives Former president’s attacks on state officials to overturn Biden’s election victory resulted in harassment and threats Donald Trump was the most powerful man in the world. But he was also a paranoid fantasist who did not care how his lies destroyed people’s lives.That was the picture of the former US president that came into focus with startling clarity at Tuesday’s hearing of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.January 6 hearings: state officials testify on Trump pressure to discredit electionRead moreDead people, shredded ballots and a USB drive that was in fact a ginger mint were all part of the delusional narrative of election fraud peddled by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani. They would have been as comical as flat-earthers but for the way they posed a danger to both individual citizens and American democracy.“The president’s lie was and is a dangerous cancer on the body politic,” committee member Adam Schiff said at the hearing into how Trump pressured state officials to overturn overturn results.It was worth remembering that Trump once boasted that he had passed a cognitive test by reciting the words, “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV,” in the right order. And that, according to the Washington Post, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his four-year presidency.Even on Tuesday, he was repeating the biggest lie of all. Just before the hearing he issued a statement claiming that witness Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, told him “the election was rigged and I won Arizona”.Bowers, a Republican who had wanted Trump to win the election, told the committee that this was false: “Anyone, anywhere, anytime I said the election was rigged, that would not be true.”Bowers also recalled a conversation with Giuliani and lawyer Jenna Ellis about allegations of voter fraud in Arizona. In a phrase that captured the president’s own mindset, Giuliani allegedly said: “We’ve got lots of theories but we just don’t have the evidence.”But the centerpiece of the big lie is Georgia, which Trump narrowly lost and which became his all-consuming obsession for wild conspiracy theories.The committee heard testimony from its secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and his deputy Gabe Sterling, who observed that competing against Trump’s false statements was like a “shovel trying to empty the ocean. I even had family members I had to argue with about some of these things.”The Cannon Caucus Room resounded with Trump’s own voice from a 67-minute phone call with Raffensperger in which the president claimed the people of Georgia “know” he won the state by hundreds of thousands of voters.Not true, Raffensperger told the committee definitively, explaining that Trump had “come up short”.One by one, Trump could be heard making ludicrous assertions without foundation. One by one, Raffensperger and Sterling calmly demolished them.The president was heard claiming that votes were “in what looked to be suitcases or trunks, suitcases but they weren’t in voter boxes”. Schiff asked: “Were they just the ordinary containers that are used by election workers?” Sterling testified: “They’re standard ballot carriers that allow for seals to be put on them so they’re tamper proof.”Trump went on during the call: “But they dropped a lot of votes in there late at night. You know that, Brad.” Raffensperger told the committee: “There were no additional ballots accepted after 7pm.”The president insisted: “The other thing, dead people. So dead people voted and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.”Raffensperger observed: “No, it’s not accurate … We found two dead people when I wrote my letter to Congress that’s dated January 6 and subsequent to that we found two more. That’s one, two, three, four people, not 4,000.”More sinister yet, Trump claimed that election workers had been shredding ballots, “a criminal offense” that could put Raffensperger at risk. “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”Raffensperger told the hearing: “What I knew is we didn’t have any votes to find.”Tuesday’s hearing spelled out how the big lie has caused hurt way beyond Washington on 6 January 2021. Trump told Raffensperger on the call: “When you talk about no criminality, I think it’s very dangerous for you to say that.”The Georgia secretary of state took this as a threat. And sure enough, his family was targeted by Trump supporters.“My email, my cell phone was doxxed and I was getting texts all over the country and then eventually my wife started getting texts. Hers typically came in as sexualized texts which were disgusting … They started going after her I think just to probably put pressure on me: ‘Why don’t you quit and walk away.’”He was far from alone.In a deposition, Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson talked about how her “stomach sunk” when she heard the sounds of protesters outside her home one night when she was putting her child to bed. She wondered if they had guns or were going to attack her house. “That was the scariest moment,” Benson said.But no story better illustrated the callousness of Trump’s assault than Georgia election workers Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, two African American women described by committee chairman Bennie Thompson as “unsung heroes” of democracy.Giuliani accused the pair of passing a USB drive to each other; Moss told the committee that her mother had actually been handing her a ginger mint. With astonishing cruelty, Trump was heard in a phone call describing Freeman as “a professional vote scammer and hustler”.It was false but it was the cue for an onslaught of racist hatred from Trump supporters. Moss, nervous and at times shaking, recalled: “A lot of threats wishing death upon me. Telling me that, you know, I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.”Moss, who left her position, added in wrenching testimony: “It’s turned my life upside down. I no longer give out my business card. I don’t transfer calls. I don’t want anyone knowing my name. I’ve gained about 60 pounds. I just don’t do nothing anymore. I don’t want to go anywhere. I second-guess everything that I do.”Her mother Ruby Freeman said in a deposition: “I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation. I’ve lost my sense of security – all because a group of people … scapegoat[ed] me and my daughter, Shaye, to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen.”At the end of his call to Raffensperger, Trump could be heard saying: “It takes a little while but let the truth comes out.”Now, finally, the truth is coming out, but not the one that occupies his fantasies.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpArizonaGeorgiaUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Giuliani told Arizona official ‘We just don’t have the evidence’ of voter fraud

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      Giuliani told Arizona official ‘We just don’t have the evidence’ of voter fraudFormer Trump lawyer acknowledged his efforts to overturn the election were based on mere ‘theories’, officials recall Attempting to overturn election results in service of Donald Trump’s lie about voter fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden, the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani told an Arizona official: “We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have the evidence.”January 6 hearings: state officials to testify about pressure from Trump to discredit electionRead moreThe Republican speaker of the Arizona house, Rusty Bowers, told the January 6 committee, “I don’t know if that was a gaffe. Or maybe he didn’t think through what he said. But both myself and … my counsel remember that specifically.”For the committee, staging a fourth public hearing, the California Democrat Adam Schiff asked: “He wanted you to have the legislature dismiss the Biden electors and replace them with Trump electors on the basis of these theories of fraud?”Bowers said: “He did not say in those exact words, but he did say that under Arizona law, according to what he understood, that would be allowed and that we needed to come into session to take care of that.”This, Bowers said, “initiated a discussion about … what I can legally and not legally do. I can’t go into session in Arizona unilaterally or on my sole prerogative.”In extensive questioning of his witness, Schiff asked if anyone at any time provided to Bowers “evidence of election fraud sufficient to affect the outcome of the presidential election in Arizona”.Bowers said, “No one provided me ever such evidence.”Biden won Arizona by about 10,000 votes, a margin slightly increased after a controversial review pursued by state Republicans.Bowers told the hearing that Giuliani, other Trump aides and the 45th president himself made him think of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, a classic novel of mob incompetence by the late New York journalist Jimmy Breslin.“This is a tragic parody,” he said.Bowers described harassment he and his family suffered. Another witness, Shaye Moss, a former Georgia elections worker, described threats and harassment dealt to her, her mother and her grandmother.Schiff said: “Your proud service as an election worker took a dramatic turn on the day that Rudy Giuliani publicised video of you and your mother counting ballots on election night.”Schiff played footage from a Georgia state senate hearing in which Giuliani said Moss and her mother were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine”.Giuliani claimed it was “obvious to anyone who’s a criminal investigator or prosecutor, they are engaged in surreptitious illegal activity”, and said the women’s places of work and homes “should have been searched for evidence” of voter fraud.What Giuliani said was a “USB port”, Moss said, was in fact “a ginger mint”.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS elections 2020Rudy GiulianiDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansArizonanewsReuse this content More

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      Jan. 6 Hearing Will Highlight Trump’s Pressure Campaign on State Officials

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      The House committee investigating the Capitol attack will also underscore the vitriol and suffering that election workers endured because of President Donald J. Trump’s lies.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Tuesday plans to detail President Donald J. Trump’s personal involvement in a pressure campaign on state officials to subvert the will of the voters as well as an audacious scheme to put forward false slates of electors in seven states to keep him in power.At its fourth hearing this month, scheduled for 1 p.m., the committee will seek to demonstrate what has been a repeated point of emphasis for the panel: that Mr. Trump knew — or should have known — that his lies about a stolen election, and the plans he pursued to stay in office, were wrong, but that he pushed ahead with them anyway.The committee also plans to highlight, in potentially emotional testimony, the vitriol and the death threats that election workers endured because of Mr. Trump’s lies.“We will show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the panel, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”“We will also again show evidence about what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme,” he continued. “And we will show courageous state officials who stood up and said they wouldn’t go along with this plan to either call legislatures back into session or decertify the results for Joe Biden.”Mr. Schiff, who will play a key role in Tuesday’s hearing, told The Los Angeles Times that the panel would release new information about the deep involvement of Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff. Among that evidence, Mr. Schiff said, will be text messages revealing that Mr. Meadows wanted to send autographed “Make America Great Again” hats to people conducting an audit of the Georgia election.The hearing’s first witness will be Rusty Bowers, a Republican who is the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives. Mr. Bowers withstood pressure to overturn his state’s election from Mr. Trump; Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer; and even Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.Mr. Bowers will describe the pressure campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies, according to a committee aide. He will also describe the harassment he endured before and after Jan. 6, and its impact on his family, the aide said.The Jan. 6 committee plans to release new information about Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to a member of the panel.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe panel will then hear testimony from Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office, who were pressed to overturn their state’s election results. In a phone call, Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to put the state in his column and vaguely threatened him with “a criminal offense.”Finally, the committee will hear from Shaye Moss, a Georgia election worker who was the target of a right-wing smear campaign.Ms. Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, both of whom processed ballots in Atlanta during the 2020 election for the Fulton County elections board, filed a defamation lawsuit against The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing conspiratorial website that published dozens of false stories about them. The stories described the two women as “crooked Democrats” and claimed that they “pulled out suitcases full of ballots and began counting those ballots without election monitors in the room.”Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman also sued Mr. Giuliani, saying that he “bears substantial and outsized responsibility for the campaign of partisan character assassination” that they faced.Investigations conducted by the Georgia secretary of state’s office found no wrongdoing by the two women.Shaye Moss, a Fulton County election worker, scanned mail-in ballots in Atlanta during Georgia’s primary elections in June 2020. Ms. Moss and her mother later became targets of a right-wing smear campaign.Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressThe pressure campaign on state officials came as the Trump campaign was organizing false slates of electors in seven swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. The committee and federal prosecutors have been investigating how those slates were used by Mr. Trump’s allies in an attempt to disrupt the normal workings of Congress’s certification of the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.The fourth hearing comes as the committee continues to build its case against Mr. Trump, laying out evidence of how he spread lies about the election results, then raised hundreds of millions of dollars off those lies, and how he tried to stay in office by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject legitimate electoral votes.A fifth hearing planned for Thursday will dig into Mr. Trump’s attempts to intervene into the workings of the Justice Department, including exploring the possibility of firing the acting attorney general for not going along with his plans.The committee is continuing to gather evidence as it holds its hearings. The panel recently sent a letter to Ms. Thomas, who goes by the nickname of Ginni, asking to interview her about her communications with John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who advised Mr. Trump on how to overturn the election, and later unsuccessfully sought a pardon.“We believe you may have information concerning John Eastman’s plans and activities relevant to our investigation,” the panel wrote to Ms. Thomas in a letter obtained by The New York Times.As the committee explores how Mr. Trump’s lies sparked death threats against election workers, one member of the panel revealed on Sunday some of the vitriol he had endured. The lawmaker, Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, posted to Twitter a letter that threatened the murder of his family.“This threat that came in, it was mailed to my house,” Mr. Kinzinger said on ABC’s “This Week,” adding: “We got it a couple of days ago and it threatens to execute me, as well as my wife and 5-month-old child. We’ve never seen or had anything like that.” More

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      Outrage at pay hike for Phoenix police under investigation over use of force

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      Outrage at pay hike for Phoenix police under investigation over use of forceCommunity advocates say money should be spend tackling city’s extreme heat, homelessness and mental health crises A bumper pay hike for Phoenix police has been condemned by community advocates who argue the money should be spent tackling the city’s extreme heat, homelessness and mental health crises.At a heated city council meeting on Wednesday, several public speakers questioned the $19.8m salary windfall given the continuing Department of Justice investigation into the city police department over allegations of excessive use of force, retaliation against Black Lives Matter protesters, discriminatory policing and inappropriate treatment of homeless and disabled people.The federal investigation was launched by attorney general Merrick Garland in August 2021 amid mounting evidence of disproportionate use of violence against people of color and rising rates of police shootings.“There is such a crisis of poverty and unhoused people in the city, yet every year more money goes to a police department which is fundamentally corrupt, under investigation and which has shown no changes in the culture from when they arrested protesters on false charges,” said resident Christopher Martinez.But city officials argued that the salary bumps, which range from 20 to 67%, will help recruit and retain officers to the beleaguered department and improve policing. It was approved by the Democratic led city council by eight votes to one.“You’re not twiddling your thumbs, you’re doing really important work out there and it is fair that our compensation reflects what we are doing,” said Mayor Kate Gallego.Councilman Carlos Garcia, the lone vote against the pay hikes, said: “We’re embarrassed weekly on the nightly news, we pay out millions in lawsuits [against the police]. “We continue to prioritize and fund this department and then expect them to do things that they’re simply not trained for, and the results have unfortunately been loss of life.”In one recent incident, Caleb Blair, a 19-year-old Black homeless man who was showing signs associated with heat stroke and possible intoxication, died in police custody last Friday during the season’s first extreme heat wave. According to local reports, Blair was rolling around the ground partially dressed after being asked to leave a convenience store where he had sought relief from the scorching 112F (44C) heat.According to his family, who spoke to Phoenix New Times, Blair was addicted to fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. Substance use played a role in 60% of last year’s record heat death toll.The police have said Blair was “showing signs of impairment” but did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about why he was handcuffed. An internal critical incident inquiry is expected to provide video and audio footage of the fatal incident on 10 June. The medical examiner’s investigation is continuing.Of the country’s 10 largest forces, Phoenix police department ranks number one for use of deadly force, according to analysis by Mapping Police Violence. Police shootings hit record levels in 2018 in Phoenix, the country’s fifth biggest city, topping New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.The department, which has a budget of $850m, has hundreds of vacancies.TopicsArizonaUS policingUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Ginni Thomas pressed 29 lawmakers in bid to overturn Trump loss, emails show

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      Ginni Thomas pressed 29 lawmakers in bid to overturn Trump loss, emails showWife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas accused of ‘undermining democracy’ after Washington Post revelation Ginni Thomas, the wife of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, was accused of “undermining democracy” after it emerged that she emailed 29 Republican lawmakers in Arizona in her effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.As America watched Capitol attack testimony, Fox News gave an alternate realityRead moreThe Washington Post had previously reported that Ginni Thomas sent emails pressuring two Arizona Republicans to reject Biden’s win and choose their own electors.On Friday, the paper said Ginni Thomas emailed 29 individuals.Thomas’s involvement in Trump’s attempt to overturn his election defeat, including events around the deadly Capitol attack, has been widely reported.That has focused attention on her husband, a stringent conservative who has not recused himself from election-related cases.When Trump tried to deny the House January 6 committee access to White House records, Thomas was the only justice to side with the former president. Texts from Ginni Thomas to Trump’s chief of staff were subsequently revealed.Supreme court justices govern themselves in ethical matters. Activists and some Democratic politicians have therefore called for Thomas to resign or be impeached.Only one supreme court justice has been impeached: Samuel Chase in 1805. He survived. But Chase was accused of “tending to prostitute the high judicial character with which he was invested, to the low purpose of an electioneering partisan” – a charge with strong echoes in the case of Clarence and Ginni Thomas.The Post said that on 9 November, two days after the election was called for Biden, Ginni Thomas used “FreeRoots, an online platform intended to make it easy to send pre-written emails to multiple elected officials”, to send identical messages to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven state senators.The emails urged the Republicans to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure” and “fight back against fraud”.On 13 December, the day before electoral college votes were cast, Thomas emailed 22 members of the Arizona House and one senator.That message said: “Before you choose your state’s electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead.” It also “linked to a video of a man urging lawmakers to ‘put things right’ and ‘not give in to cowardice’.”Proven fraud in the 2020 election is vanishingly rare. Regardless, Arizona Republicans pursued a controversial audit – which increased Biden’s margin of victory.Ginni Thomas did not comment on the new Post report. Nor did the supreme court. Thomas has said her activism does not clash with her husband’s work.Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or Crew, said: “We’ve now learned that Ginni Thomas’s role in pushing officials to overturn the 2020 election was significantly greater than we knew.“Justice Thomas’s failure to recuse on cases about the 2020 election looks worse and worse. This undermines democracy.”Pointing to Ginni Thomas’s position on the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board, to which she was appointed by Trump, Crew said: “Friendly reminder that Ginni Thomas has a government position and absolutely should not.”News of the Arizona emails emerged in the aftermath of a dramatic primetime hearing staged by the House committee investigating January 6. Responding to the hearing, Trump repeated his lie about electoral fraud.Amid growing calls for a criminal indictment against Trump, Wajahat Ali, a columnist and senior fellow at the Western States Center, which works to strengthen democracy, tweeted: “Democrats should aggressively put pressure on Clarence and Ginni Thomas.“You have an extremist conservative duo working the courts and the rightwing activist machine to overturn our free and fair election.”TopicsUS elections 2020RepublicansUS supreme courtLaw (US)Clarence ThomasArizonaDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More