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    Shared prayers and tears: how Lammy wooed JD Vance and the White House

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    It was famously something that Tony Blair did not do with George W Bush, or at least not something to which the then British prime minister wished to admit. But these are very different times.When the US vice-president, JD Vance, and his family join David Lammy at the foreign secretary’s grace and favour home in Kent at the start of their summer holiday in the UK, they are expected to deepen their relationship by praying together, it is understood.Within the grounds of Chevening lies the pretty 12th-century St Botolph’s church. It is Anglican but, security risks and denominational differences aside, it may present one option for a place to take communion, sources suggested.Vance is a Catholic and Lammy has described his faith as Anglo-Catholic. The two men previously took mass in Vance’s residence in Washington when the vice-president hosted Lammy and his family in March.The burgeoning relationship between the two men, freshly evidenced by word that they will spend time together before the Vances head to the Cotswolds, may surprise some.As a backbencher, Lammy described Donald Trump as “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”. Now, Trump is “someone that we can build a relationship with” and Vance is a “friend”.The philosophy behind Lammy’s foreign policy has been described as “progressive realism” – taking the world as it is and not as we might wish it to be.Sceptics might be temped to describe such a pivot in different terms but the outcomes were difficult to argue with, said Michael Martins, formerly a political specialist in the US embassy in London and founder of the consultancy firm Overton Advisory.“I think they have done a pretty good job and you can see it with some of the incoming tariff increases which have not affected the UK as they have with other trading partners, like Canada,” Martins said.“I think it is paying off. I think President Trump’s view on Putin and Russia has changed, is changing and softening, in a way that I think the British government has been pushing for. I think the dividends from the relationship building are starting to come.”Lammy, a touchy-feely sort of politician, targeted Vance for a full charm offensive early on, when Labour was in opposition and Trump’s re-election was far from certain, sources said. The then shadow foreign secretary had a significant obstacle to overcome: Lammy has been a friend of Barack Obama since they met at a 2005 gathering of Harvard Law School’s black alumni.Such was the love-in that Lammy’s wife, Nicola Green, an artist, was given “unprecedented access” to chronicle Obama’s 2008 campaign. It was this political and personal relationship that has been front and centre of every US newspaper profile of Lammy in recent times. “A Friend of Obama Who Could Soon Share the World Stage With Trump” was the New York Times headline last April.View image in fullscreenLammy had a further card to play. He has spoken about how Vance’s bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, bore parallels to his own story of growing up with a single mother and an absent, alcoholic father. Lammy has said Vance’s book “reduced me to tears”.“I said to JD: ‘Look, we’ve got different politics, but we’re both quite strong Christians and we both share quite a tough upbringing,’” Lammy said of an early meeting.He recently elaborated in an interview with the Guardian. During drinks with Vance and the deputy Labour leader, Angela Rayner, in the US ambassador’s residence at the time of the new pope’s inauguration, Lammy had an epiphany. It struck him that they were “not just working-class politicians, but people with dysfunctional childhoods”, he said. “I had this great sense that JD completely relates to me and he completely relates to Angela.”Donjeta Miftari, a former foreign policy adviser to Keir Starmer in Downing Street who is now a director at Hanbury Strategy, said: “David is an incredibly pragmatic person and he likes to take the world as it is. Frankly, you don’t have influence over which populations elect certain individuals in the country.”Lammy had had a gut feeling that the Republicans would win the White House back, she said, and he worked for “years, not months” on building the necessary relationships.“I’ve known him for a few years now, and I’d say that he is also, just on a personal level, one of the most empathetic and relational kind of MPs and politicians,” she said.“You know, in the early days of opposition and in government, I think he had a strong sense of where the US was going, and that is grounded in the fact that he studied out there, lived out there. He knows America well and it’s a big part of who he is.“So I think he sort of clocked basically that that is the direction in which the country was going so built these relationships well before they came to power in the US. And I think that gives it, like, extra kind of credibility and authenticity as well, because you’re not just calling them when you need them when you’re both in post. He’s an incredibly effective operator. Frankly, he’s quite good company as well, which always helps.”There will be a formal bilateral meeting between the two politicians before Vance’s wife, Usha, and their three children join Lammy, his wife and their children for the weekend. After their stay with the Lammys, the Vances are understood to be heading to a Cotswolds period property near Charlbury, about 12 miles (19km) north-west of Oxford.Martins, who was working in the US embassy at the time of Trump’s first state visit, said he recalled the delight that the president took in the pomp and ceremony. “I think vice-president Vance has to walk a bit of a delicate line,” he said. “Obviously he is angling for his own White House bid at the end of the Trump presidency. You know, I think he has to be careful not to appear as the primary recipient of international flattery.” More

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      Trump’s attempts at damage control on Epstein are just making things worse | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump’s evident panic over his intimate relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is a case study in damage control gone haywire. If he is trying to keep a scandal clandestine, Trump has instead shined a klieg light on it. His changeable diversions constantly call attention to what he wishes to remain hidden. His prevarications, projections and protests have scrambled his allies and set them against each other. His inability to remain silent on the subject makes him appear as twitchy as a suspect in the glare of a third-degree police interrogation.The supine Republican Congress abruptly adjourned for the summer to flee the incessant demands for the release of files in the possession of the Department of Justice. But three Republicans broke to vote with Democrats on the House oversight committee to demand the Epstein files. The speaker, Mike Johnson, abandoning his assigned role as a Trump echo chamber, blurted, “This is not a hoax,” directly contradicting Trump. Johnson’s plain statement prompted widespread jaw dropping.With every rattled excuse, Trump throws his administration into further chaos. His cabinet members are pitted against each other – the attorney general, Pam Bondi, versus the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, a pair of scorpions in a bottle.Trump has succeeded in driving Bondi from her regular perch on Fox News, as his reliable apologist, into virtual seclusion. She has reportedly engaged in a screaming match with the deputy director of the FBI, Dan Bongino, a former far-right talkshow jock who made his bones parroting that the Epstein files held the secrets of a vast conspiracy to blackmail deep state actors. After she issued a statement that there was no such “client list”, he apparently sulked at home, declining to come into the office, upset that his reputation was being sullied with his former Maga listeners. Bondi accused him of leaking unfavorable stories to the media that blamed her for the Maga backlash against her announcement. The manosphere bigmouth, sensitive about his hurt feelings, was in a tizzy, oh dear.“No, no, she’s given us just a very quick briefing,” Trump said on 15 July about whether Bondi had told him his name was in the files. “I would say that, you know, these files were made up by [the former FBI director James] Comey, they were made up by [Barack] Obama, they were made up by the Biden administration.” The next day he posted on Truth Social that “Radical Left Democrats” and “the Fake News” were behind “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax”.A week later, on 23 July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Bondi had briefed Trump in May that his name appeared in the Epstein files. Which also raised the question: what did Elon Musk know and from whom did he know it when he tweeted in June that Trump’s name was in the files, a tweet he quickly deleted after he had played arsonist? Did Bondi and the FBI director, Kash Patel, inform him about Trump’s presence in the Epstein documents? Where else would he have gotten the idea?Into the death valley of parched alibis stepped Tulsi Gabbard to win Trump’s affection with a press conference orchestrated at the White House on the same day the Journal punctured Trump’s lie about Bondi briefing him on the Epstein files. Gabbard was there to expose a “treasonous conspiracy” of Obama administration officials who supposedly plotted to manufacture the “Russiagate” scandal that Putin sought to help Trump in the 2016 election, which was a fact. Her presentation was a farrago of falsehoods. She conflated Russian interference with false claims that Obama fabricated information about Russian hacking of voting machines and other fairytales. Gabbard also triumphantly unveiled a report that Hillary Clinton was on a “daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers”, which was sheer propaganda concocted by Russian intelligence long debunked as “objectively false” by the FBI.Gabbard’s performance unselfconsciously portrayed herself as a useful idiot for Russian spies. Trump was ecstatic. “She’s, like, hotter than everybody. She’s the hottest one in the room right now,” he said. He posted that the Democrats “are playing another Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax but, this time, under the guise of what we will call the Jeffrey Epstein SCAM”.Bondi was reportedly frustrated with Gabbard. Bondi had been given little warning that Gabbard’s work would be dumped in her lap “for criminal referral”, apparently in order to satisfy Trump’s appetite for revenge. Bondi had been the catalyst of the “client list” pseudo-scandal, claiming it was sitting on her desk. Always ready to gratify Trump’s whims, she was not prepared to be sideswiped by Gabbard. In the pursuit of Trump’s favor, one lackey lapped another.Bondi finessed the situation by appointing a special “strike force” to examine and undoubtedly dismiss yet again Trump’s attempt to blot out the conclusive official reports, from the Mueller report to the report by the Senate intelligence committee, chaired by then senator Marco Rubio, that had documented his campaign’s involvement with Russian agents in 2016. Bondi appeared to be seething in announcing the “strike force”, going out of her way to describe Gabbard as “my friend”. The grueling Trump cabinet dance marathon goes round and round until they drop.To demonstrate Obama’s supposed guilt, Trump posted an AI-generated video showing Obama forced to his knees and shackled in chains by federal agents before a seated and smiling Trump in the Oval Office to the soundtrack of the song YMCA. Trump apparently thinks that depicting himself as an enslaver, President Simon Legree, is a positive image that can deflect questions about his sexually predatory behavior and Epstein relationship.“He’s done criminal acts,” said Trump about Obama, and he mused, “There’s no question about it, but he has immunity. He owes me big.” Trump was referring to the supreme court’s ruling granting him “absolute” immunity for “official acts” that wound up relieving him of prosecution for the January 6 insurrection. As Trump explained it, he was responsible for the decision, at least through justices he had appointed, and Obama was indebted to him over “crimes” that Trump himself had made up to make the Epstein shadow disappear.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThen, after Trump tried the certain loser of a gambit of requesting the release of the Epstein grand jury material, which would almost certainly contain nothing new and was inevitably denied by the judge, he turned to another tactic. Suddenly, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, who had been Trump’s personal attorney in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial, in which Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, was sent racing to Tallahassee to interview Epstein’s imprisoned co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.No mere professional prosecutor would do for this high-level mission. Instead, in an unprecedented move, the deputy attorney general would conduct the interrogation. The case, in fact, was closed after Maxwell’s indictment for perjury, conviction for sex-trafficking minors and 20-year sentence. Yet Blanche stated, sloppily misspelling her first name in his haste, “If Ghislane Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.” He said that Maxwell can “finally say what really happened”, as if she would perhaps prove the existence of the fictional “client list” or some version of it to incriminate the enemies it contained, or clear Trump as a gentleman beyond reproach.Blanche’s remark seemed to dangle a pardon or clemency. Asked about the possibility, Trump said, “I’m allowed to do it.” Curiously, on 14 July, the solicitor general, D John Sauer, who was Trump’s lawyer in the presidential immunity case before the US court of appeals, had filed a brief to the supreme court opposing relief that Maxwell had requested. “From about 1994 to 2004, petitioner ‘coordinated, facilitated, and contributed to’ the multimillionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of numerous young women and underage girls,” Sauer wrote. She could not be exempt from her conviction on the basis of Epstein’s first trial agreement as she claimed; she had been fairly tried, convicted and the matter was closed.But the acceleration of the Epstein backlash apparently flipped the administration’s position. Now, Blanche gave Maxwell a grant of limited immunity. Her attorney, David O Markus, was a good friend of Blanche’s. In the Stormy Daniels hush-money case, he had offered Blanche the advice that he should impeach Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, as a witness against him, by characterizing him as “GLOAT” –the “Greatest Liar of All Time”. In 2024, Blanche appeared twice on Markus’s little-watched podcast. “I consider you a friend,” said Blanche.Blanche asked Maxwell over two days about 100 people, according to Markus. Who those people might be, what she was asked and what she said remain unknown. One wonders, for example, if Blanche inquired about her knowledge of Trump’s adventures in the dressing rooms of underaged models and beyond.One prominent model agent, quoted in a 2023 story in Variety, “Inside the Fashion World’s Dark Underbelly of Sexual and Financial Exploitation: ‘Modeling Agencies Are Like Pimps for Rich People,’” said that Trump was “certainly” a “fixture”. “I would see Donald Trump backstage at [Fashion Week home] Bryant Park, and I’m like, ‘Why is he standing there when there’s a 13-year-old changing?” In 1992, Trump got George Houraney, a Florida businessman, to sponsor a “calendar girl” competition with 28 young models who were flown to Mar-a-Lago. But there were reportedly only two guests. “It was him and Epstein,” Houraney said to the New York Times. “I said, ‘Donald, this is supposed to be a party with VIPs. You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein?’”One of those models, Karen Mulder, who had appeared on the cover of Vogue the year before and was considered among the most elite supermodels, described her experience with Trump and Epstein as “disgusting”, according to the Miami Herald.A year later, in 1993, Epstein brought a Sport Illustrated swimsuit model, Stacey Williams, to Trump Tower. She had met the future president at a Christmas party in 1992. “It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams told the Guardian. “The second he was in front of me,” she recounted to CNN in 2024, “he pulled me into him, and his hands were just on me and didn’t come off. And then the hands started moving, and they were on the, you know, on the side of my breasts, on my hips, back down to my butt, back up, sort of then, you know – they were just on me the whole time. And I froze. I couldn’t understand what was going on.” While Trump groped her, he kept talking to Epstein, and they were “looking at each other and smiling”.Markus said: “We haven’t spoken to the president or anybody about a pardon just yet.” Still, he added: “The president this morning said he had the power to do so. We hope he exercises that power in the right and just way.”The House oversight committee has subpoenaed Maxwell for a deposition on 11 August, but she has not decided yet whether to cooperate, her lawyer said.While Blanche hurried back to Washington, Trump appeared to have depleted his armory of conspiracy theories, at least for the moment. He tried a novel tack, his most audacious projection yet. “I’m not focused on conspiracy theories that you are,” he admonished the White House press corps. Then he made a remark that he had never made before, something contrary to his entire character, which underscored the depth of his anxiety. “Don’t,” he said, “talk about Trump.”But Trump quickly recovered from the tension of his momentary reticence, and on the evening of 26 July, from Scotland, where he was touring his golf courses, he posted that Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey and Al Sharpton should be prosecuted for their endorsement of Kamala Harris in exchange for payments of millions of dollars. “They should all be prosecuted!” he demanded. Though a bogus accusation, it accurately reflected Trump’s crudely transactional worldview. A few hours later, in the early morning of Sunday 27 July, he posted a Fox News clip of the rightwing talker Mark Levin, writing in capital letters: “THIS IS A MASSIVE OBAMA SCANDAL!”

      Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist and co-host of The Court of History podcast More

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      Sentence before verdict: Trump’s attack on Obama is straight out of Alice in Wonderland | Austin Sarat

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      Almost every American knows that in our legal system, people accused of crimes are presumed innocent. The burden is on the government to overcome that presumption and prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.Those simple but powerful maxims were once a source of national pride. They distinguished the United States from countries where government officials and political leaders branded the opponents guilty before they were charged with a crime or brought to trial.In Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, the Alice-in-Wonderland world of “sentence first-verdict afterwards” came to life in infamous show trials. Those trials lacked all the requisites of fairness. Evidence was manufactured to demonstrate the guilt of the regime’s enemies. Show trials told the story the government wanted told and were designed to signal that anyone, innocent or not, could be convicted of a crime against the state.So far, at least, this country has avoided Stalinesque show trials. But the logic of the show trial was very much on display this week in the Oval Office.In a now-familiar scene, during a meeting with the Philippines president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Donald Trump went off script. He turned a reporter’s question about the unfolding Jeffrey Epstein scandal into an occasion to say that former president Barack Obama had committed “treason” by interfering in the 2016 presidential election.“He’s guilty,” Trump asserted, “This was treason. This was every word you can think of.”Speaking after the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, released a report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, the president said: “Obama was trying to lead a coup. And it was with Hillary Clinton.”Republican congressmen and senators, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who investigated allegations of Obama’s involvement five years ago, found nothing to support them. But none of that mattered to the president on Tuesday.As Trump put it: “Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly.” Not hiding his motives, Trump said: “It’s time to start after what they did to me.”Guilt first. Charges, trials and other legal niceties come later.This is American justice, Trump-style. He wants no part of the long and storied tradition in which presidents kept an arms-length relationship with the justice department and did not interfere with its decisions about whether and whom to prosecute for crimes.What Trump said about Obama is, the New York Times notes, “a stark example of his campaign of retribution against an ever-growing list of enemies that has little analogue in American history”. Putting one of his predecessors on trial also would take some of the sting out of Trump’s own dubious distinction of being the only former president to have been convicted of a felony.Some may be tempted to write off the president’s latest Oval Office pronouncements as an unhinged rant or only an effort to distract attention from Trump’s Epstein troubles. But that would be a mistake.A recent article by the neuroscientist Tali Sharot and the law professor Cass Sunstein helps explain why. That article is titled: “Will We Habituate to the Decline of Democracy?”Sharot and Sunstein argue that the US is on the cusp of a dangerous moment in its political history. They say that we can understand why by turning to neuroscience, not to political science.Neuroscience teaches us that “people are less likely to respond to or even notice gradual changes. That is largely due to habituation, which is the brain’s tendency to react less and less to things that are constant or that change slowly.”In politics, “when democratic norms are violated repeatedly, people begin to adjust. The first time a president refuses to concede an election, it’s a crisis. The second time, it’s a controversy. By the third time, it may be just another headline. Each new breach of democratic principles … politicizing the justice system … feels less outrageous than the last.”Americans must resist that tendency. To do so, Sharot and Sunstein argue, we need “to see things not in light of the deterioration of recent years but in light of our best historical practices, our highest ideals, and our highest aspirations”.In the realm of respect for the rule of law and the presumption of innocence, we can trace those practices, ideals and aspirations back to 1770, when John Adams, a patriot, practicing lawyer and later the second president of the United States, agreed to defend British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre.Adams did so because he believed that everyone, no matter how reprehensible their act, was entitled to a defense. That principle meant that people needed to learn to withhold judgment, to respect evidence and to hear both sides of a story before making up their minds.That was a valuable lesson for those who would later want to lead our constitutional republic, as well as for its citizens. The trial of the British soldiers turned out, as the author Christopher Klein writes, to be “the first time reasonable doubt had ever been used as a standard”.Fast forward to 1940, and the memorable speech of the attorney general, Robert Jackson, to a gathering of United States attorneys. What he said about their role might also be said about the president’s assertions about Obama.Jackson observed that US attorneys had “more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America”. A prosecutor, he explained, “can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations … The prosecutor can order arrests … and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial.”Sound familiar?The president is not a prosecutor, but since he has returned to power, President Trump has behaved and encouraged those in the justice department to ignore Jackson’s warnings that a prosecutor should focus on “cases that need to be prosecuted” rather than “people that he thinks he should get”. Targeting people, not crimes, means that the people prosecuted will be those who are “unpopular with the predominant or governing group” or are “attached to the wrong political views, or [are] personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself”.Jackson restated a long-cherished American ideal, namely that those with the power to ruin lives and reputations should seek “truth and not victims” and serve “the law and not factional purposes”.Since then, presidents of both parties, in even the most controversial cases and those involving allies or opponents, have heeded Jackson’s warnings. They have said nothing about pending cases, let alone announcing that it’s time “to go after” people.But no more. The justice department seems ready and willing to do the president’s bidding, even though there is no evidence that Obama did anything wrong in regard to the 2016 election. In addition, he may have immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he did in his official capacity.Trump’s attack on the “traitorous” Obama may be predictable. But it should not be acceptable to any of us.Sharot and Sunstein get it right when they say, “To avoid habituating ourselves to the torrent of President Trump’s assaults on democracy and the rule of law, we need to keep our best practices, ideals, and aspirations firmly in view what we’ve done.” We need “to compare what is happening today not to what happened yesterday or the day before, but to what we hope will happen tomorrow”.To get to that world, it is important to recall the words of John Adams and Robert Jackson and work to give them life again.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      Obama breaks silence on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ call to prosecute him

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      Barack Obama has broken his silence on calls from Donald Trump for him to be prosecuted by unequivocally rejecting his successor’s accusations that he tried to engineer a “coup” following Trump’s 2016 election victory by “manufacturing” evidence of Russian interference.Obama’s office took the unusual step of issuing an emphatic refutation after Trump told reporters that his predecessor had “[tried] to lead a coup” against him and was guilty of “treason” over intelligence assessments suggesting that Russia had intervened to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the campaign.“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” the statement said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”The statement went on to criticize claims made in an 11-page document released last week by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who said she was passing evidence of what she claimed was a “treasonous conspiracy” among Obama national security officials to the justice department, recommending their prosecution.“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,” it said.“These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”Obama’s response followed a fusillade of accusations by Trump in the White House as he was meeting the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the son of the country’s former autocratic president, who was ousted in a popular “people’s power revolution” in 1986.Asked by a reporter who should be the main target of the criminal investigation recommended in Gabbard’s report, Trump said: “Based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama. He started it, and Biden was there with him. And [James] Comey [the former FBI director] was there, and [James] Clapper [the former director of national intelligence], the whole group was there.“It was them, too, but the leader of the gang was President Obama, Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?”He went on: “This isn’t like evidence. This is like proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was sedatious [sic], that Obama … was trying to lead a coup, and it was with Hillary Clinton, with all these other people, but Obama headed it up.“He’s guilty. This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined.”Trump said Gabbard had told him she had “thousands of additional documents coming”.“It’s the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read. So you want to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense,” he said, in what appeared to be a coded appeal for supporters to drop their demands for the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex-trafficking charges.But the Gabbard report, which accused the Obama administration of forcing spy agencies to alter their conclusions, conflated and misrepresented different issues to discredit the intelligence community’s assessment in 2017 that Russia sought to simultaneously help Trump and damage Clinton.The assessment concluded that Russia did not engage in cyber-attacks against election infrastructure to change vote tallies, but found Moscow hacked and leaked documents from the Democratic National Committee to damage the Clinton campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Gabbard report used that first conclusion to suggest that a broader Russian influence operation did not occur, and cited Obama’s presidential daily brief in December 2016 that concluded there were no Russian hacks of election systems being pushed back as evidence of political interference in the assessment.Assertions of Russian interference were subsequently borne out in the report published by the special counsel Robert Mueller, in 2019, and the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report published the following year, led by Rubio, now secretary of state in Trump’s administration.A former CIA analyst and national intelligence officer, Fulton Armstrong, told the Guardian in an email that Gabbard’s paper “was obviously written with a pre-ordained conclusion”.“Even a quick read shows how the confusion between confidence and probability [over intelligence assessments] – even if not deliberate – leads to sloppiness and manipulation,” Armstrong said.“The bigger problem is that Tulsi’s paper is such shit. Her reference to ‘deep state officials’ is amateurish, silly, and undercuts the whole damned document.“She’s clever to use crappy precedents and confusion to make her case, but an issue like Russian manipulation of US elections, with so many analysts from diverse organizational cultures, is almost certainly going to leave enough offal on the floor that anyone who wanted to make a one-sided political slam job can find enough to fill an 11-page paper.” More

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      Tulsi Gabbard calls for Obama to be prosecuted over 2016 election claims

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      Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.She said Obama and senior officials in his administration had “[laid] the groundwork for … a years-long coup” against Trump after his victory over Hillary Clinton by “manufacturing intelligence” to suggest that Russia had tried to influence the election. That included using a dossier prepared by a British intelligence analyst, Christopher Steele, that they knew to be unreliable, Gabbard claimed.The post-election intelligence estimates contrasted with findings reached before the election, which indicated that Russia probably was not trying to interfere.In extraordinary comments calling for prosecutions, she added: “The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.“Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.“No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. The American people’s faith and trust in our democratic republic and therefore the future of our nation depends on it.”Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress, said she was passing documents supporting her case to the justice department. They included a partially redacted intelligence community assessment from the Obama administration on cyber threats to the 2016 election and a series of previously classified memos, including some from the office of James Clapper, who served as Obama’s director of national intelligence.Clapper is one of several officials named by Gabbard as apparently implicated in the supposed conspiracy. Others include John Brennan, the former CIA director, John Kerry, the then secretary of state, Susan Rice, the national security adviser at the time, Andrew McCabe, the then deputy FBI director, who later fell foul of Trump, and Obama himself.View image in fullscreenThe attempt to return the spotlight back to the Russia investigation – long derided by Trump as a “hoax” – comes as the US president finds himself in the maelstrom of the lingering scandal over the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 while awaiting prosecution on sex-trafficking charges.The Trump administration has come under mounting pressure from the president’s make America great again (Maga) base to release files on the case, including a supposed list of Epstein’s influential clients.Trump, in response, has variously dismissed the existence of such files or said they were invented by Obama and members of his administration, including James Comey, the former FBI director, and Joe Biden, vice-president in the Obama administration.Commentary accompanying a series of Obama-era memos published by Gabbard’s office uses terms characteristic of Trump and his most ardent supporters to paint an alleged conspiracy to discredit his 2016 win.Following a meeting on 9 December 2016 of Obama’s most senior national security team, the document – entitled the Russia Hoax – says: “Deep State officials in the IC [intelligence community] begin leaking blatantly false intelligence to the Washington Post … claiming that Russia used “cyber means” to influence “the outcome of the election.“Later that evening, another leak to the Washington Post falsely alleges that the CIA “concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened” in the election to help President Trump.”On 6 January the following year, the document continues: “The Obama administration shares the unclassified ICA [intelligence community assessment] with the public. It falsely alleges, based in part on ‘further information’ that had ‘come to light’ since the election, that Putin directed an effort to help President Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. This ‘further information’ is later confirmed to be the Steele dossier.”The assessment “suppressed” previous pre-election assessments that Russia lacked the intent or means to successfully hack the poll, Gabbard’s report alleges.The Steele dossier, which contained salacious details of “kompromat” allegedly held by Russian intelligence on Trump, formed part of the basis for a lengthy investigation conducted by Robert Mueller, who was appointed as special counsel into the Russia affair. Mueller’s subsequent report concluded that Russia interfered “in sweeping and systematic fashion” in the election campaign but “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated” with the Russian government’s activities.Gabbard’s nomination as national intelligence director was one of Trump’s most contentious. It drew criticism because of her lack of previous intelligence experience, having never even served on a congressional committee on the subject, and a track record of supportive comments about Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and repeating Kremlin talking points on the war with Ukraine. More

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      Obama’s former press secretary recalls ‘emotional’ mood in White House after Trump win

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      The hardest day on the job for the White House press secretary for most of Barack Obama’s second term was right after Donald Trump was first elected president, he recently revealed during a fireside chat at a journalism convention.Speaking at the 2025 National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) conference in Chicago, Josh Earnest said it was grueling for the Obama administration to realize it would have to follow through on promises of a peaceful transfer of power despite spending the 2016 election cycle offering dire warnings “about what could or would happen if Donald Trump were given the keys to the Oval Office”.Those warnings stemmed in part from intelligence assessments that the US’s longtime geopolitical adversary Russia had interfered in the race in which Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Earnest said the Obama administration suddenly found itself needing to defend the validity of those assessments while saying it would peacefully transfer over the nuclear launch codes – and other levers of power – to Trump.“Did [Obama] not mean how dangerous [Trump] could be?” Earnest asked rhetorically, referring to some of the questions he and fellow administration officials faced while briefing journalists at the time. “It was a tough message.”The remarks on Wednesday from Earnest – who was Obama’s press secretary from 2014 to 2017 – also offered a first-hand peek into the somber mood at the White House after Trump defeated Clinton. Like many, Earnest “was very surprised”. “I did not think he was going to win,” he said.Many Obama communications staffers were visibly demoralized, and Earnest said he and his aides decided to convene them, talk about Trump’s victory and try to refocus them for the final two months in office.During that conversation, Obama summoned Earnest to go over the logistics of a nationally televised speech he was planning to give in the White House’s Rose Garden. Earnest recalled Obama asking how it was going with the staff that morning – to which he replied that they were “emotional”.Obama then asked an assistant to call the staff into the Oval Office. He stood in front of the Resolute Desk near his vice-president, Joe Biden, who would later succeed Trump in the White House – and gave them an early version of the speech he ultimately delivered that day.“We have to remember that we’re actually all on one team,” part of that speech read. “We are Americans first. We’re patriots first. We all want what’s best for this country.”As Earnest noted, Obama’s official White House photographer, Pete Souza, captured the scene with his camera. He recalled how it was the first time many people in the room that day had been in the Oval Office.“It was very poignant,” Earnest told the chat’s host, the ABC7 Chicago news anchor Tanja Babich.One of Earnest’s most vocal critics in the aftermath of Trump’s victory was the president-elect himself. Trump called Earnest a “foolish guy” at a December 2016 rally.“He is so bad – the way he delivers a message,” Trump said of Earnest after the latter defended the US intelligence community’s assessment of Russia’s interference.Earnest has been a top spokesperson for United Airlines at the company’s Chicago headquarters since 2018. He spent some time being a media pundit early during the first of Trump’s two presidencies. But Earnest told Babich he did not find it “particularly fulfilling” given the way Trump’s unpredictable, chaotic style of governing can often disorient news outlets.“The questions could all be boiled down to, ‘Isn’t this outrageous what Trump is doing?” Earnest said. “And it became about finding different ways to say, ‘Yes.’“I wasn’t doing journalism. I was doing commentary. And it was pretty close to entertainment.” More

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      If leaders stay silent, the US won’t survive Trump’s next 100 days | Robert Reich

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      We have witnessed the first 100 days of the odious Trump regime.The US constitution is in peril. Civil and human rights are being trampled upon. The economy is in disarray.At this rate, we will not make it through the second 100 days.Federal judges in more than 120 cases so far have sought to stop Trump – judges appointed by Republicans as well as Democrats, some appointed by Trump himself – but the regime is either ignoring or appealing their orders. It has even arrested a municipal judge in Milwaukee amid a case involving an undocumented defendant.Recently, Judge J Harvie Wilkinson III of the court of appeals for the fourth circuit – an eminent conservative Reagan appointee who is revered by the Federalist Society – issued a scathing rebuke to the Trump regime. In response to its assertion that it can abduct residents of the US and put them into foreign prisons without due process, Wilkinson wrote:
      If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.
      Wilkinson’s fears are already being realized. Ice recently deported three US citizens – aged two, four and seven – when their mothers were deported to Honduras. One of the children, who has stage 4 cancer, was sent out of the US without medication or consultation with doctors.Meanwhile, the regime continues to attack all the independent institutions in this country that have traditionally served as buffers against tyranny – universities, non-profits, lawyers and law firms, the media, science and researchers, libraries and museums, the civil service and independent agencies – threatening them with extermination or loss of funding if they do not submit to its oversight and demands.Trump has even instructed the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, the platform that handles the fundraising for almost all Democratic candidates and the issues Democrats support.Meanwhile, Trump is actively destroying the economy. His proposed tariffs are already raising prices. His attacks on the Fed chief, Jerome Powell, are causing tremors around the world.Trump wants total power, even at the cost of our democracy and economy.His polls are plummeting yet many Americans are still in denial. “He’s getting things done!” some say. “He’s tough and strong!”Every American with any shred of authority must loudly and boldly explain the danger we are in.A few Democratic members and progressives in Congress (Bernie Sanders, AOC, Cory Booker, Chris Van Hollen, Chris Murphy) have expressed outrage, but most seem oddly quiet. Granted, they have no direct power to stop what is occurring but they cannot and must not appear to acquiesce. They need to be heard, every day – protesting, demanding, resisting, refusing.Barack Obama has spoken up at least once, to his credit, but where is my old boss, Bill Clinton? Where is George W Bush? Where are their former vice-presidents – Al Gore and Dick Cheney? Where are their former cabinet members? They all must be heard, too.What about Republican members of Congress? Are none willing to stand up against what is occurring? And what of Republican governors and state legislators? If there were ever a time for courage and integrity, it is now. Their silence is inexcusable.Over 400 university presidents have finally issued a letter opposing “the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education”. Good. Now they must speak out against the overreach endangering all of American democracy.Hundreds of law firms have joined a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the law firm Perkins Coie’s appeal of the regime’s demands. Fine. Now, they along with the American Bar Association and every major law school must sound the alarm about Trump’s vindictive and abusive use of the justice department.America’s religious leaders have a moral obligation to speak out. They have a spiritual duty to their congregations and to themselves to make their voices heard.The leaders of American business – starting with Jamie Dimon, the chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who in normal times has assumed the role of spokesperson for American business – have been conspicuously silent. Of course they fear Trump’s retribution. Of course they hope for a huge tax cut. But these hardly excuse their seeming assent to the destruction of American democracy.We have witnessed what can happen in just the first 100 days. I’m not at all sure we can wait until the 2026 midterm elections and hope that Democrats take back at least one chamber of Congress. At the rate this regime is wreaking havoc, too much damage will have been done by then.The nation is tottering on the edge of dictatorship.We are no longer Democrats or Republicans. We are either patriots fighting the regime or we are complicit in its tyranny. There is no middle ground.Soon, I fear, the regime will openly defy the supreme court. Americans must be mobilized into such a huge wave of anger and disgust that members of the House are compelled to impeach Trump (for the third time) and enough senators are moved to finally convict him.Then this shameful chapter of American history will end.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Obama condemns Trump’s $2.3bn Harvard funding freeze as ‘unlawful and ham-handed’ – US politics live

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      Good morning and welcome to our US politics blog.Former US president Barack Obama has condemned the education department for freezing $2.3bn in federal funds to Harvard University after the elite college rejected a list of demands from the White House.In some of his most vocal criticism of this Trump administration, Obama praised Harvard, the country’s oldest university, for setting an example for other higher education institutions to reject federal overreach into its governance practices.He wrote in a post on X:
      Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.
      His comments came after Harvard decided to fight the White House’s demands that it crack down on alleged antisemitism and civil rights violations. It is the first major US university to defy pressure from the White House to change its policies.In a letter to Harvard on Friday, the administration called for broad government and leadership reforms, a requirement that Harvard institute what it calls “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies as well as conduct an audit of the study body, faculty and leadership on their views about diversity.The demands, which are an update from an earlier letter, also call for a ban on face masks, which appeared to target pro-Palestinian protesters; close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes”; and pressured the university to stop recognizing or funding “any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment”.The administration also demanded that Harvard cooperate with federal immigration authorities.Harvard’s president said in a letter that the university would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and to limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Alan Garber, the university president, wrote, adding that Harvard had taken extensive reforms to address antisemitism.The department of education announced in March that it had opened an investigation into 60 colleges and universities for alleged “anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination”. It came after protests against Israel’s war on Gaza were put on across campuses last year, demonstrations that many Republicans framed as antisemitic.Harvard’s response to the White House’s demands was in sharp contrast to the approach taken by Columbia University, the epicentre of last year’s protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza.The Trump administration cut $400m in grants to the private New York school, accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students from harassment. The school caved in to demands and responded by agreeing to reform student disciplinary procedures and hiring 36 officers to expand its security team.Stay with us throughout the day as we have more reaction to this story and many others.Hugo Lowell is a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Guardian covering Donald Trump and the Justice DepartmentThe Trump administration on Monday misrepresented a US supreme court decision that compelled it to return a man wrongly deported to El Salvador, using tortured readings of the order to justify taking no actions to secure his release.The supreme court last week unanimously ordered the administration to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego García, who was supposed to have been protected from deportation to El Salvador regardless of whether he was a member of the MS-13 gang.But at an Oval Office meeting between Trump and El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, Trump deferred to officials who gave extraordinary readings of the supreme court order and claimed the US was powerless to return Abrego García to US soil.“The ruling solely stated that if this individual at El Salvador’s sole discretion was sent back to our country, we could deport him a second time,” said Trump’s policy chief Stephen Miller, about an order that, in fact, upheld a lower court’s directive to return Abrego García…The remarks at the Oval Office meeting marked an escalation in the Trump administration’s attempts to claim uncertainty with court orders to avoid having to take actions it dislikes. In Abrego García’s case, officials appeared to manufacture uncertainty in particularly blatant fashion.And the fact that the US is paying El Salvador to detain deportees it sends to the notorious Cecot prison undercut the notion that the administration lacked the power to return Abrego García into US custody.The case started when Abrego García was detained by police in 2019 in Maryland, outside a Home Depot, with several other men, and asked about a murder. He denied knowledge of a crime and repeatedly denied that he was part of a gang.Abrego García was subsequently put in immigration proceedings, where officials argued they believed he was part of the MS-13 gang in New York based on his Chicago Bulls gear and on the word of a confidential informant.The case went before a US immigration judge, who suggested that Abrego García could be a member of MS-13 and agreed to a deportation order but shielded him from being sent to El Salvador because he was likely to face persecution there by a local gang.The Trump administration did not appeal against that decision, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has since said in a court filing that Abrego García’s deportation to El Salvador was an “administrative error”. The supreme court also called his removal illegal.You can read the full story here:One of China’s lead officials overseeing Hong Kong has condemned punitive US tariffs on China as “shameless” and attacked American “hillbillies” amid a continuing trade war between Beijing and Washington that has caused turmoil in global markets.Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office, said Hong Kong has never levied taxes on imports and that the US enjoyed a $272 bn trade surplus in the city over the past decade.US President Donald Trump has increased the levies imposed on China to 145%, while Beijing has set a retaliatory 125 percent toll on American imports – a move not followed by Hong Kong.Imposing tariffs on the city is “hegemonic and shameless in the extreme”, and shows that the US does not want Hong Kong to thrive, Baolong said in a pre-recorded speech at an event to mark the 10th iteration of China’s annual national security education day.He said the US “is the greatest culprit in undermining Hong Kong’s human rights, freedom, rule of law, prosperity and stability.”“It is not after our tariffs – it wants to take our lives,” Baolong was quoted as saying.He added that the sweeping US tariffs would not shake the determination of Beijing and Hong Kong governments and that “victory must belong to the great Chinese people”.“Let those American ’hillbillies’ wail before the 5,000-year-old civilisation of the Chinese nation” he said, adding that anyone seeking to bring China into poverty was an “enemy”.Hong Kong is a former British colony that became a special administrative region of China in 1997. In theory, it is governed under a system known as “one country, two systems”, a constitutional arrangement that promised Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy and rights protections.But it is widely seen to have reneged on the deal, crushing pro-democracy protests and imposing a national security law in 2020 – targeting secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces – which has in effect silenced opposition voices among Hong Kong’s once-vibrant civil society.Hong Kong is subject to the high US tariffs imposed on China as it is no longer considered a separate trading entity by Washington so means is not entitled to favourable trading terms anymore. Trump ended Hong Kong’s preferential trade status following China’s security crackdown on Hong Kong in 2020.As my colleague Martin Belam reports in our UK politics live blog, JD Vance has said the US is optimistic it can negotiate a “great” trade deal with the UK.In an interview with online outlet Unherd, the US vice president told Sohrab Ahmari:
      We’re certainly working very hard with Keir Starmer’s government. The president really loves the UK. He loved the queen. He admires and loves the king. It is a very important relationship. And he’s a businessman and has a number of important business relationships in [the UK].
      But I think it’s much deeper than that. There’s a real cultural affinity. And of course, fundamentally America is an Anglo country. I think there’s a good chance that, yes, we’ll come to a great agreement that’s in the best interest of both countries.
      Unlike China, Britain was spared the most punitive treatment in Trump’s initial tariff announcement on 2 April, but British imports in the US still incur a 10% charge while its steel and car sectors incur a rate of 25%.The UK government has been hopeful of a deal to exempt the UK from Trump’s tariffs.The UK’s chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will aim to continue negotiations for an economic deal with the US later this month when she travels to Washington to attend the International Monetary Fund’s spring meetings with other finance ministers. You can read more about Vance’s comments today in this article by my colleague Rachel Hall.South Korea has announced plans to invest an additional $4.9bn in the country’s semiconductor industry, citing “growing uncertainty” over US tariffs.“An aggressive fiscal investment plan has been devised to help local firms navigate mounting challenges in the global semiconductor race,” the finance ministry said.“To foster a dynamic, private sector-led ecosystem for semiconductor innovation and growth, the government will increase its investment in the sector from 26 trillion won ($18.2bn) to 33 trillion won,” the ministry added.Semiconductors are tiny chips that power just about everything, including computers, mobile phones and cars. They are central to the global economy. The UK, the US, Europe and China rely heavily on Taiwan for semiconductors.But South Korea – Asia’s fourth largest economy – is also a major exporter to the US and concerns about the semiconductor sector have hit the Seoul-listed shares of the world’s largest memory chip maker Samsung, and largest memory chip supplier SK Hynix.The statement of extra investment from South Korea’s finance ministry comes after the Trump administration launched investigations into imports of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors on national security grounds.These industries – so far exempt from the 10% US import charges that began on 5 April – may face tariffs after the probes are complete.US President Donald Trump has directed the US commerce department to conduct a three-week investigation into the imports, during which time public comments on the issue will be heard before a decision is made.Trump said on Sunday he would be announcing a tariff rate on imported semiconductors over the next week, adding that there would be flexibility with some companies in the sector.On 2 April, Trump announced sweeping tariffs on global trading partners, including the 25 percent on South Korean goods, before backtracking and suspending their implementation for 90 days.Even so, “duties targeting specific sectors such as semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, remain on the horizon”, finance minister Choi Sang-mok said during a meeting.“This grace period offers a crucial window to strengthen the competitiveness of South Korean companies amid intensifying global trade tensions,” he added.Good morning and welcome to our US politics blog.Former US president Barack Obama has condemned the education department for freezing $2.3bn in federal funds to Harvard University after the elite college rejected a list of demands from the White House.In some of his most vocal criticism of this Trump administration, Obama praised Harvard, the country’s oldest university, for setting an example for other higher education institutions to reject federal overreach into its governance practices.He wrote in a post on X:
      Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.
      His comments came after Harvard decided to fight the White House’s demands that it crack down on alleged antisemitism and civil rights violations. It is the first major US university to defy pressure from the White House to change its policies.In a letter to Harvard on Friday, the administration called for broad government and leadership reforms, a requirement that Harvard institute what it calls “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies as well as conduct an audit of the study body, faculty and leadership on their views about diversity.The demands, which are an update from an earlier letter, also call for a ban on face masks, which appeared to target pro-Palestinian protesters; close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes”; and pressured the university to stop recognizing or funding “any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment”.The administration also demanded that Harvard cooperate with federal immigration authorities.Harvard’s president said in a letter that the university would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and to limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Alan Garber, the university president, wrote, adding that Harvard had taken extensive reforms to address antisemitism.The department of education announced in March that it had opened an investigation into 60 colleges and universities for alleged “anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination”. It came after protests against Israel’s war on Gaza were put on across campuses last year, demonstrations that many Republicans framed as antisemitic.Harvard’s response to the White House’s demands was in sharp contrast to the approach taken by Columbia University, the epicentre of last year’s protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza.The Trump administration cut $400m in grants to the private New York school, accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students from harassment. The school caved in to demands and responded by agreeing to reform student disciplinary procedures and hiring 36 officers to expand its security team.Stay with us throughout the day as we have more reaction to this story and many others. More