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      The revised indictment against Donald Trump is the last thing he needs right now | Lloyd Green

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      On Tuesday, Jack Smith, the special counsel, delivered a revised 36-page indictment, again charging Donald Trump with conspiring to subvert the final outcome of the 2020 election. How the courts treat the latest indictment remains to be seen. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito may again race to Trump’s rescue. But two weeks before the scheduled 10 September presidential debate, the American electorate and Donald Trump are again reminded that the Republican nominee stands in legal jeopardy. Then again, winning on 5 November may be the simplest way for him to avoid jail time.Already trailing in the polls, this is not good news for Trump, a candidate who has twice lost the popular vote. Without Joe Biden as a foil, his decline and age visibly grow. At 59, Kamala Harris is almost 20 years younger. All too often, Trump, 78, slurs his words and rambles. His dance moves remind folks of their elderly uncle.Trump already labors under a state court felony conviction in New York and a nine-figure pile of civil judgments. His personal liquidity and the future of his family business are in doubt. He must again deflect renewed allegations that he sought to thwart the will of the people and obstruct the outcome of a valid election. That costs more time and money.“Despite having lost, the Defendant – who was also the incumbent President – was determined to remain in power,” the indictment reads.“For more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.”For a guy who yammers about law and order, it’s a lousy look – as is his campaign’s physical altercation at Arlington national cemetery over its use as a prop in which Trump flashes a thumbs-up.Since Harris emerged as the Democrats’ standard-bearer, Trump is on the short end of a nine-point shift in the polls. This latest legal development will likely hinder his attempt to make up lost ground. If history matters, indictments have a way of doing just that.A veteran of George HW Bush’s losing re-election campaign, I remember Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary, being re-indicted just days before the 3 November 1992 election. In the run-up to that fateful Friday, the campaign had battled back into a statistical tie with Bill Clinton. The one-count re-indictment, however, derailed the campaign’s final gasp for momentum.Before the latest indictment, Harris already held an 11-point lead over Trump on the question of who is the more honest and trustworthy candidate. Expect Tuesday’s indictment to expand the gap, a development that he can ill afford.The map tells the story. According to Nate Silver, the polling guru, Harris has recaptured a lead in the electoral battlegrounds of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The website he founded, ABC’s 538, gives her nearly a three-in-five shot of winning. PredictIt, an online betting site, puts her chance at 55%.Nationally, House Democrats have improved their chances of retaking the chamber. Over in Texas, the senator Ted Cruz holds a mere two-point advantage over the representative Colin Allred, his Democratic opponent. The loathed incumbent senator is in trouble.This is not the future Trump and the Republicans envisioned after he walloped Biden in the debate. Even worse, this is not the endgame the Trump campaign anticipated. Rather, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles expected Sleepy Joe to hang on until the bitter end. Of all his unforced errors, Trump agreeing to an early debate may have been his most consequential. Lack of imagination can be fatal in politics and war.Adding insult to injury, the Harris campaign announced on Tuesday that Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, will sit for a joint interview to be aired this Thursday night on CNN. For days, the punditocracy repeatedly announced that without a media sit-down she would be unable to maintain her momentum.That box is about to be checked. Team Trump is on verge of losing another talking point.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBeyond that, the Harris-Walz interview falls on the eve of the upcoming Labor Day weekend, when most of the US is on the road, as opposed to being glued to their televisions. If the interview goes poorly for Harris, it is less likely to develop into a real-time disaster.The Trump re-indictment also serves to highlight Harris’s career as a local prosecutor and state attorney general. In this vein, a speech she delivered in late June in Atlanta sets the table for the final weeks of the campaign.“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women; fraudsters who ripped off consumers; cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she advised the crowd.“So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type. I know the type. And I have been dealing with people like him my entire career.”Meanwhile, her campaign coffers brim. Voter registration among Black women explodes. And Trump is left to hawk another round of digital trading cards.He is not enjoying a “brat summer”.

      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

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      Swifties for Kamala rally raises nearly $140,000 for Harris

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      Taylor Swift has yet to publicly endorse a candidate, but some of her fanbase are already mobilizing for Kamala Harris. The Swifties for Kamala Coalition officially launched on Tuesday, raising more than $138,000 for the Democratic candidate in a virtual rally featuring Carole King and the senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand.Swift, who has no affiliation with the group, was not present on the Zoom call nor involved in the event. The group has amassed about 250 million followers on social media platforms since Joe Biden dropped out of the race in late July and endorsed the vice-president.More than 26,000 people joined the Zoom call on Tuesday, according to CNN.King was introduced as the self-proclaimed “original cat lady” and began her speech by praising Swift as “my musical and songwriting granddaughter”. Swift inducted King into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021 with a performance of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, calling her “the greatest songwriter of all time”.“I’m excited about Kamala, because so many people are excited about Kamala,” King said after rapping the chorus to Swift’s 2014 hit Shake It Off. “I have admired her, the idea that this happened, and the stars lined up, and Joe Biden did a really gracious, hard thing to do, and I’m so proud of him … But this is about you. This call is about you.”King provided attendees with advice for volunteering, such as phone banking and door knocking. “I’ve been a political activist for years. I’ve been a volunteer, I’ve been a door knocker, even as a famous person,” she said. “I’m telling you all this because if any of you are thinking of volunteering to be door knockers or phone callers, but you’re a little nervous about what you might say, please believe me: there is nothing to lose and everything to gain.”Each speaker, including the senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, the congressman Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, the congresswoman Becca Balint of Vermont and the chair of the North Carolina Democratic party, Anderson Clayton, named their favorite Swift song before their remarks. Warren picked the 10-minute version of All Too Well and her 2022 hit Karma. Warren also praised Swifties’ battle against Ticketmaster and summoned the “era of the first woman president”.“You are resilient, and you know how to take on bullies and you know how to be your most authentic, most joyful selves,” Warren said. “You come together hand-in-hand, friendship bracelets on your wrist, and you overcome pretty much anything that life throws at you. And that is what the Kamala Harris campaign is all about. It’s about standing up for what is right in the face of bullies, like Donald Trump.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Swift has yet to comment on the 2024 election, she did ultimately back the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020. But the group is not waiting for her endorsement. “We are not waiting on Taylor to show her support for Kamala Harris,” the group’s social media manager, Rohan Reagan, told Cosmopolitan in August. “We are doing this outside of her, using the platform of Swifties as a way to get people involved in the election. Taylor did throw her support toward Joe Biden during the 2020 election, so it is possible that she’ll show her support again. But Swifties for Kamala aren’t waiting for her to do that.” More

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      There’s a fair way to ensure third-party candidates don’t ‘spoil’ the US election | David Daley

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr has suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, in part because he did not want to be a spoiler across competitive swing states. The third-party “spoiler problem”, unfortunately, will not vanish with him.Three committed independents and third-party nominees remain: progressive activist Cornel West, Libertarian Chase Oliver, and Jill Stein of the Green party. They could still tip the balance: the White House looks likely to be won by the tiniest margins across just seven swing states, just as it was in 2016 and 2020.The next president should not be decided by whether Stein earns 0.4% in Michigan or 0.2%, or if Oliver claims 1.1% or 0.8% in Libertarian-friendly Georgia and Arizona. But under our current system, that’s very much possible.We need a modern fix that recognizes that third parties are here to stay, but also that a nation with a guiding principle of majority rule deserves winners who earn more than 50% of their fellow Americans’ votes. The best solution to the urgent “spoiler” problem – which we’ve been exhaustingly debating since Ross Perot’s run in 1992 – is ranked-choice voting (RCV).Two states – Maine and Alaska – have already adopted this common-sense, nonpartisan fix for fairer results and will vote for president this fall with RCV. Others should follow their lead. RCV has lots of benefits. But most crucially, by giving voters the power to rank the field, it fixes the spoiler effect that emerges in any race with more than two candidates.A RCV election works much like an instant runoff. If someone wins a majority of voters’ first choices, they win – like any other election. If not, the last-place finishers are eliminated, one by one, and their supporters’ second choices come into play to identify a majority winner.In other words, a Democrat in Michigan who wants a different approach in Gaza could feel free to rank West or Stein first, and Kamala Harris second. A Sun belt conservative who thinks the national debt grew too quickly under Trump could put Oliver first and the former president second. They could make their voice heard – without worrying that their vote would elect someone they fear could be worse on the issue most important to them.Currently, despite our political nuances and the increasing number of registered independents, the spoiler problem continues to be the prism through which every third-party run is considered. Kennedy never seemed likely to win, but pundits agonized for months over whether he drew more from Democrats or the Republican party. It’s no surprise that serious independent candidates or anti-Trump conservatives such as Larry Hogan and Chris Christie rejected entreaties to run this year, when such a run would be reduced to the question of who they’d “siphon” votes from.It’s too early to judge the effect that Kennedy’s exit will have on the race. His support had softened in recent weeks. Yet almost no matter how his supporters break, the most competitive states remain extremely close.As of 21 August, Harris leads Arizona by 1.2%, Pennsylvania by 1.6%, and North Carolina by 0.2%. Trump holds a lead of 0.8% in Georgia. Any of the remaining third-party candidates could easily exceed the margin of victory in competitive states. It’s not just Florida in 2000, when George W Bush carried the electoral college tipping-point by 537 votes, a margin far surpassed by Ralph Nader voters. In Wisconsin in 2020, the Libertarian Jo Jorgensen and conservative-leaning independents took more than twice as many votes as the margin between Joe Biden and Trump.It’s easy to imagine something similar this year, perhaps even an election night 2024 where the electoral college is knotted up. Harris and Trump each have 251 electoral votes. Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin remain too close to call, each separated by a handful of votes. A tense nation awaits the verdict.Wouldn’t the result have more legitimacy if everyone knew that the electoral votes in those states went to a winner with more than 50% of the vote?Kennedy might have left the scene, but third-party candidates are not going away. Nor should they be forced out. We can adjust to that reality, or we can dig in our heels, repeat this tired debate, blame Ralph Nader and Jill Stein for everything, forever, and – at a time when the country feels ever more polarized – risk electing a president without a majority in the decisive states, leaving us even more divided than we are now.There’s no silver bullet to everything that ails our civic spirit. Yet the road out of this toxicity might begin with embracing values that most of us hold dear: more individual choice is good, all of us should be heard and majorities must rule. Ranked-choice voting makes that possible.

      David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote More

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      Democrats can win this election by championing the working class | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      One of the most compelling speeches at last week’s Democratic national convention wasn’t followed by balloons. Delivered just a few hours before Kamala Harris’s primetime address, it came from a man with – until now, anyway – zero name recognition. John Russell is a mulleted tree-stump grinder turned activist journalist from rural Ohio. He seemed a bit of a misfit next to glamorous speakers like Oprah and the guy who played the president on Scandal. But on the final night in Chicago, Russell took the stage to give what my colleague Bhaskar Sunkara called “the most radical speech” in the convention’s history.His blistering remarks cut through the convention’s fever dream to deliver a necessary wake-up call. He warned about the working class’s political disillusionment. He demanded that Democrats reclaim their heritage as fearless defenders of labor. And he issued ambitious prescriptions for action on everything from a living wage to climate crisis. On that last issue, he reminded the gathered delegates that environmental degradation isn’t just a matter of coastal (elite) flooding, but of strip mining and poisoned water in flyover country. Perhaps most impressively, he spoke all this truth to power in only two minutes. As he said himself: “It is our moment to live up to. Let’s get after it.”This barn burner reminded the Democratic party that elevating voices like Russell’s for just one night in August won’t cut it: the Harris campaign needs to center heartland populism all the way through November.Such an emphasis has become even more imperative with JD Vance’s ascension to the No 2 spot on the Republican ticket. Though doughnuts may baffle him, this native son of Appalachia does have a knack for enticing Rust belt voters with a menu of faux-populist policies. From his support for unions to his endorsement of Lina Khan, the US Federal Trade Commission chair, Vance’s words make it seem like the only thing he despises more than cat ladies is corporations. But as Russell pointed out, Vance’s work for Peter Thiel and his fealty to Donald Trump prove his true loyalties lie with crypto miners, not coal miners.Authentic populists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can certainly counter-signal Vance’s siren song. Sanders, for his part, delivered a typically rousing address at the DNC, calling on his fellow Democratic leaders to “stand up to wealth and power and deliver justice for people at home and abroad”.The Democrats’ populist bench extends beyond elected officials, too. The night before Sanders’s remarks, Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president, appeared onstage in a red T-shirt that declared “Trump Is A Scab.” Though Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president, had made a tentative courtship of the right by speaking at the Republican convention in July, Fain affirmed that labor’s true home remains with the left.But no one can rebut the Hillbilly Elegist more effectively than on-the-ground Appalachians like Russell. He reports on heartland labor issues for a progressive news outlet called More Perfect Union, enabling him to connect with the very workers who could swing races up and down the ballot. A video that played before his convention remarks showed him meeting with construction workers in rural Tennessee. They had just joined a union for the first time, but it may have also been the first time they met a Democrat who shared their tribulations.And Russell isn’t the only self-described redneck trying to build a grassroots movement. Beth Howard, for example, is organizing other coal miners’ daughters in eastern Kentucky on behalf of a program called Showing Up For Racial Justice. It aims to mobilize predominantly white communities in the south to combat racism and classism alike. And in the Central time zone, Midwest Academy continues to pump out progressive organizers who know what’s the matter with Kansas and how to fix it. Founded 51 years ago to check a different surge of rightwing populism, Midwest Academy has become the training ground for blue activists in red states. Its graduates would make mighty canvassers for Harris.Joe Biden has made headway in reclaiming the working class as the Democratic base. He has declared himself the most pro-union president ever, and his legislative accomplishments undoubtedly make him the best ally to labor in the White House since at least Lyndon Johnson. Last year, More Perfect Union even helped connect Biden with striking autoworkers, opening the way for him to make history as the first president to join a picket line. Harris would do well to follow her boss’s lead and embrace John Russell and his fellow activists – not just as surrogates, but advisers.To paraphrase Russell, this is Harris’s moment to live up to – or live down.

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of the Nation, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has contributed to the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times. More

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      Harris and Walz to give first sit-down interview as Democratic ticket on CNN

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      Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will sit for their first interview as the Democratic ticket on Thursday, after weeks of demands from Republicans and members of the media for the nominees to open themselves up to questions.The interview, which will be conducted by CNN anchor Dana Bash from the battleground state of Georgia, is set for a primetime spot on CNN at 9pm ET.Despite a whirlwind of media coverage of the Harris campaign and a surge of support in the six weeks since Joe Biden ended his bid for re-election and endorsed her, the vice-president has yet to do a formal interview or hold a press conference.“There are a lot of questions that have been lingering out there for her to answer as we go into this fall campaign,” David Chalian, CNN’s political director, said after announcing the interview on the network Tuesday. “We have been waiting to see this next important hurdle for Kamala Harris and her campaign to jump,” Chalian added, noting that Harris and Walz successfully rallied the party, raised heaps of money, and pulled off the convention. “All of that is very scripted,” he said. “This is the first time she is going to take questions.”Harris laid out some broad policy agendas at the Democratic national convention last week, promising a middle class tax cut at home and a muscular foreign policy of standing up to Russia and North Korea. In recent weeks, Harris also shared some of the first glimpses into what her policy priorities might look like, including a proposal for $25,000 down-payment support programs for first-time home buyers and a call for cracking down on price-gouging companies.But while her campaign is busy spreading enthusiasm for her nomination, some details have been left scant. There still isn’t a dedicated policy page on the official campaign website and Harris has turned down interview requests, opting instead for less-risky campaign appearances and short conversations with pool reporters.“On the whole, Harris’s top communications aides are deeply skeptical, as Biden’s inner circle was, that doing big interviews with major TV networks or national newspapers offer much real upside when it comes to reaching swing voters,” Politico reported earlier this month, citing two unnamed people close to the campaign. An anonymous source claimed there is little incentive to change course: “She’s getting out exactly the message she wants to get out,” they said.Now, as time ticks down for Harris and Walz, the governor of Minnesota, to make their final appeal to anyone who might still be undecided, their campaign has embraced a slight shift in strategy.Harris and her opponent, Donald Trump, are scheduled to debate each other next month, even as a back-and-forth continues between the campaigns over what rules have been agreed.The dispute has centered on the issue of microphone muting, which Biden’s campaign made a condition of his decision to accept any debates this year. Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday that the parameters for the 10 September debate would be “the same as the last CNN Debate”, when both candidates’ microphones were muted except when it was their turn to speak.But Harris’s campaign said on Tuesday that specifics for the debate are still being worked out with the host, ABC News. A Harris spokesperson noted: “Both candidates have publicly made clear their willingness to debate with unmuted mics for the duration of the debate to fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates – but it appears Donald Trump is letting his handlers overrule him. Sad!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, the Democratic ticket will make good on its promise to do an interview.“Now is the opportunity to hear her ruminate aloud,” Chalian said, “with Dana asking her about her policy positions, her plans for the future, her plans for the country, in an unscripted setting – and, of course, to see the Democratic ticket interacting with each other.”The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this story More

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      Why is alleged predator Bill Clinton still welcome in the Democratic party? | Moira Donegan

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      One of the grim lessons of the #MeToo movement and its long backlash is this: whether someone finds a sexual abuse allegation credible largely depends on their pre-existing opinion of the man accused. When a woman comes forward with an account of a man’s mistreatment of her – be it humiliating boorishness, violent rape or any of the range of degradations and hurts that fall along the wide spectrum between – the listener’s response is fairly predictable. If they hate the accused man, they’ll believe his accuser. If they like him, they’ll say it’s bullshit.This rule holds, I am sorry to say, even for women who identify themselves as feminists. It held for Gloria Steinem, the famed feminist now in her 90s, who in 1998 defended Clinton amid his slew of sex scandals and abuse allegations in the pages of the New York Times, dismissing the allegations against him as trivial and making an unconvincing case that the offense she took at similar allegations against Clarence Thomas was different. It held true, most famously, for Bill Clinton’s wife, the liberal feminist icon Hillary Clinton, who has remained silently beside her husband throughout each of the allegations against him – and retained her feminist credibility despite her loyalty to an allegedly abusive man that I can only describe as canine.People who like Bill Clinton, or who find him convenient for their own goals, have a long history of underplaying the multiple allegations of sexual harassment and violence that he faces from at least four women. They say that Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who sued Bill Clinton for sexual harassment after the then governor brought her to his hotel room, propositioned her and exposed himself, is lying – even though Jones has multiple corroborating witnesses, and even though her story has not changed in more than 30 years.They say that Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says that Clinton raped her in a hotel room in 1978, when he was Arkansas attorney general, is lying, too – even though Broaddrick, like Jones, told multiple people of Clinton’s attack at the time.They say that Monica Lewinsky, the 22-year-old unpaid intern whom Clinton carried on an affair with in the White House when he was 49 and the most powerful person in the world, technically consented to the sex acts that Clinton asked her to do – an insistence that betrays a startlingly simple-minded and willfully obtuse understanding of sexual ethics.They echo Clinton’s denials of wrongdoing in all these cases, against all these women. That is, at least, what they say when they acknowledge the allegations about Bill Clinton’s conduct at all. Mostly, they ignore them – as Bill Clinton has, as his wife, Hillary Clinton has, and as Bill Clinton’s popular legacy seems to do.Bill Clinton’s supporters ignore his accusers because they can. These women’s dignity, their equality and their right to control their own bodies matter less to them than their esteem for Bill Clinton – less than whether he can deliver a few votes, make a zinger on television or look nice in a suit.On Wednesday night, the third night of the Democratic national convention, the whole party ignored these women when they gave Bill Clinton, a multiply accused alleged sexual harasser and rapist, a rousing welcome at Chicago’s United Center. The former president was given a prime-time speaking spot, trotted out like a prize and applauded like a hero.Are these people not embarrassed? Do they not, at least, take note of the hypocrisy involved? After all, the 2024 election is quickly shaping up to be about gender, with the boorish Trump, creepy, sex-obsessed JD Vance and the radically anti-choice Republican party turning the contest into a referendum on the status of women in American society. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee who will seek to become the nation’s first female president on election day, has taken on the mantle of the women’s struggle – not only in the symbolism of her candidacy, but in the tenor of her advocacy, in which she has championed the “freedom” of women to control their own bodies and lives.These are noble goals, ones that the Democrats can be proud of pursuing; but they are not commensurate with celebrations of an alleged rapist, with pomp and obsequiousness trotted out for a man who allegedly habitually sexually harassed women who worked for him and carried on an affair with an intern young enough to be his daughter. Sexual abuse, too, is hostile to women’s freedom – the freedom of women to live, work and participate in public without the threat of sexual force. This is a kind of gendered freedom that Bill Clinton has made it abundantly clear that he does not respect.The call for women’s freedom from rape, abuse and harassment has always been the least popular and most politically fraught feminist cause. Abortion has always had more appeal to male voters as a political issue. Misogynist men – in a tradition that extends from the Playboy founder (and alleged rapist) Hugh Hefner to Barstool Sports founder (and alleged perpetrator of sexual assault) Dave Portnoy to former president (and alleged rapist) Bill Clinton – have long supported abortion rights, in part because they understand abortion not as a matter of women’s fundamental freedom and dignity but as a matter of men’s increased sexual access to women and decreased responsibility for the resulting pregnancies.These prurient, sexually entitled misogynists are not all Republicans – rape, and its apologism, have always been bipartisan endeavors – but they are not the kind of voters that Democrats should be courting. A bargain in which women’s right to end a pregnancy is made in exchange for men’s right to rape, harass and abuse women is not an acceptable one. We can do better: we can reach for a version of America in which women are truly free and equal, endowed with all the bodily sovereignty, self-determination and sexual autonomy that men are. That’s not the world that Bill Clinton represents, and it’s not a world that a party that insists on celebrating him can deliver.Bill Clinton has been out of office for nearly three decades. In that time, his once-rosy status as a liberal hero has thankfully dimmed, even if his alleged history of sexual abuse has not played a sufficient role in the reassessment of his reputation. Liberals now rightly look back at Clinton’s crime bill with horror; his devastating cuts to the welfare system were punitive and cruel, hurting women and children the most. He modeled a vision of a conservative Democratic party, one less committed to its principles than in cynically trading them away for a chance at power.His vision of change has failed, and his political project has been revealed as morally bankrupt. It’s not clear that he can even deliver many votes; a large swath of the American electorate is now too young to remember much of his presidency, aside from the sex scandals. It’s time for Democrats to send the old man home. And to tell him to keep his hands to himself.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Democrats sue Georgia officials over election rules that could ‘invite chaos’

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      Democrats sued Georgia state election officials on Monday, alleging new rules that could allow local officials to delay certification of November’s presidential results were illegal.The lawsuit was filed in the superior court of Fulton county by local Georgia Democratic politicians, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic party of Georgia. It says the rules approved by the Republican-controlled Georgia state election board this month were intended to give individual county election officials the ability to delay or cancel the certification of votes.The lawsuit says the new rules “introduce substantial uncertainty in the post-election process and – if interpreted as their drafters have suggested – invite chaos by establishing new processes at odds with existing statutory duties”.The Georgia secretary of state’s office, which oversees the board, did not respond to requests for comment.Last week, the five-member Georgia election board, which includes three conservative members championed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, voted 3-2 to empower county election board members to investigate any discrepancies between the number of cast ballots and the number of voters in each precinct before certification.Such mismatches are not uncommon and are not typically evidence of fraud, according to voting rights advocates, who say that rule could permit individual board members to intentionally delay approval of the results.The board has also in recent weeks approved a separate rule that county election boards conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into any irregularities before certifying the results. The rule did not define “reasonable” or set a particular deadline for completing the inquiry.The Democrats’ lawsuit says it is established law that it is the responsibility of the judicial system, not individual county election officials, to resolve allegations of voter fraud.The former president has falsely claimed for years that the 2020 election was rigged by fraud.His infamous January 2021 phone call in which he asked Georgia’s top election official, Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to sway the outcome helped lead to Trump’s pending indictment on state charges.Voter fraud in the US is vanishingly rare, research shows.Trump faces Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, in the 5 November election. Polls show a close race, with Georgia among seven states likely to determine the outcome. More

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      Special counsel appeals dismissal of Trump classified documents case; Harris endorsed by former Republican staffers – live

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      Special counsel Jack Smith, in a court filing on Monday, urged a federal appeals court to revive the criminal case accusing Donald Trump of retaining classified documents after it was dismissed by US district court judge Aileen Cannon last month.“Congress has bestowed on the Attorney General, like the heads of many Executive Departments, broad authority to structure the agency he leads to carry out the responsibilities imposed on him by law,” Smith’s team wrote.
      The district court’s contrary view conflicts with an otherwise unbroken course of decisions, including by the Supreme Court, that the Attorney General has such authority, and it is at odds with widespread and longstanding appointment practices in the Department of Justice and across the government.
      Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan congresswoman and leading progressive Democrat, criticized the Democratic national convention for denying a speaking slot for a Palestinian American on the main stage last week.Tlaib, who is the sole Palestinian American member of Congress, told Zeteo in a statement:
      It’s hard not to feel invisible as a Palestinian-American. Our trauma and pain feel unseen and ignored by both parties. One party uses our identity as a slur, and the other refuses to hear from us. Where is the shared humanity? Ignoring us won’t stop the genocide.
      The uncommitted national movement, who represent hundreds of thousands of anti-war protest votes from the primary season, staged a multi-day sit-in protest outside the United Center in Chicago where the Democratic convention was being held, after the DNC told the group it would not get a speaker on the main stage.The family of the Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October, spoke on the convention stage on Wednesday, which the uncommitted movement supported.Tlaib, who did not attend the convention, said the lineup showed that the DNC “made it clear with their speakers that they value Israeli children more than Palestinian children.”Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman who endorsed Donald Trump on Monday, served in the military in Iraq and ran for president in the Democratic primary in 2020.Gabbard quit the Democratic party two years later and has become a fixture at conservative conferences and in rightwing media.Addressing a National Guard Association conference in Detroit, Michigan, where the former president was speaking, Gabbard, who represented Hawaii in Congress and is a former vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee, accused Kamala Harris of retaliating against political opponents, undermining civil liberties and weaponising the US’s institutions against both Trump and herself.Recently Gabbard has been helping Trump prepare for next month’s televised presidential debate against Harris. In 2020 she took Harris to taskon the debate stage over her record as a prosecutor – a clip that still circulates in rightwing media.Her announcement comes a day after Robert F Kennedy Jr, scion of a Democratic dynasty, suspended his own White House bid and threw his weight behind Trump. Elon Musk, who describes himself as “historically a moderate Democrat”, is also backing Trump.The judge overseeing the Arizona “fake electors” case involving a scheme by Republican allies of Donald Trump to overturn his loss in the state during the 2020 presidential election has set a trial date of 5 January 2026.Trump allies including the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani will stand trial on charges they conspired to subvert Arizona’s presidential election results.If you type in NeverWalz.com in your browser, the page that appears probably doesn’t look like what you expected from a webpage donning a slogan against Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and the current vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic party.“Trump is a convicted felon. Let’s vote for adults,” the webpage reads. “Try being joyful instead of an asshole.”After just a few seconds on the webpage, users are automatically redirected to KamalaHarris.com, the official website for Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign.The slogan “Never Walz” is indeed anti-Walz, and was seen recently plastered on a booth set up by an group against Walzt, Action 4 Liberty, at the Minnesota state fair. The group was seen handing out fliers and selling merchandise that criticizes Walz.But, it appears that the group did not secure a website domain for the “Never Walz” slogan, leaving it available for someone else to buy and use.As of Monday, the website domain NeverWalz.com is being used to criticize Donald Trump and then quickly redirects viewers to the Harris campaign website.The Arizona Police Association (APA) announced its endorsement of Democrat Ruben Gallego in the state’s Senate race, despite backing Republican Kari Lake in her gubernatorial bid last cycle.Gallego “understands the complexities of modern policing in American society today”, the group’s president Justin Harris said in a statement posted to Twitter/X.
      The APA does not take our endorsements lightly; we recognize the importance of having a U.S. senator that can bring people together to improve society for all. We believe congressman Gallego will be that U.S. Senator.
      The group publicly threw its support behind Donald Trump just days ago during a rally in Glendale.A messy Michigan Republican party gathering this weekend to nominate candidates for office illustrated the diminished sway of two high-profile Michigan election deniers and highlighted longstanding divisions within the party.Matthew DePerno, who faces charges for allegedly assisting in a scheme to improperly access voting machines in the wake of the 2020 election, withdrew from the race for Michigan’s top court hours before the state party convention. In a statement, DePerno said that instead of running for state supreme court, he would “use my knowledge about how elections work to get Republicans elected”.DePerno, a rightwing attorney from Kalamazoo, Michigan, was a vocal proponent of Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in Michigan after Trump lost in 2020 to Joe Biden, appearing on rightwing media to promote the claims of widespread fraud and helping fund Arizona’s sham election audit. DePerno ran for Michigan attorney general in 2022 but lost decisively to Dana Nessel – whose office has charged him for his role in allegedly tampering with voting machines.In 2023, he lost his bid to chair the state party to Kristina Karamo – an outspoken elections conspiracy theorist who was ousted from her role earlier this year amid accusations that she had mismanaged the party’s already dwindling finances.During the convention, Karamo faced a more dramatic setback of her own when she was escorted from the venue by police officers. Karamo reportedly entered with an all-access pass, which was revoked during the convention.The US district judge Aileen Cannon threw out the classified documents case against Donald Trump last month after concluding that Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.Smith’s team appealed to the 11th US circuit court of appeals, arguing that Cannon’s decision was “at odds with widespread and longstanding appointment practices in the Department of Justice and across the government”.It is unclear how long the appeals court’s decision could take, but even if it overturns Cannon’s dismissal there is no chance of a trial before the November presidential election, according to AP.If elected, Trump could then appoint an attorney general who would dismiss the case.The special counsel Jack Smith has urged an appeals court to reinstate his office’s classified documents case against Donald Trump after it was dismissed by a judge last month.At least five Secret Service agents have been placed on leave after the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July.The action is reportedly the latest consequence of the security failings surrounding the 13 July shooting, when a 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, opened fire on Trump as he spoke at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump was wounded after a bullet grazed his right ear. One rally-goer, Corey Comperatore, was killed in the shooting while two others were seriously injured. Crooks was later shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.The agents who were placed on leave work at the Secret Service’s Pittsburgh field office, which was responsible for coordinating security at the rally along with local law enforcement, according to Real Clear Politics, which broke the story. They include the head of the Pittsburgh office.The officers concerned are believed to have been put on administrative leave, which usually involves being taken off operational duties while still receiving a full salary. They are expected to report to the office and may be given paperwork duties.Donald Trump, in his remarks to the National Guard Association of the United States, made reference to “if there is a debate”.In a Truth Social post last night, Trump cast doubt on whether he would participate in a scheduled debate with Kamala Harris next month, claiming that the network that had agreed to host it was “biased” against him.Donald Trump, speaking to the National Guard Association of the United States, pledged to create a “Space National Guard” if he is elected back to the Oval Office.Trump said launching space force in 2019 was one of his proudest achievements in his first term, adding:
      The time has come to create a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the US space force.
      More than 200 former Republican staffers who worked for former president George W Bush, and senators John McCain and Mitt Romney, have signed a letter endorsing vice-president Kamala Harris for president.The letter, obtained and published by USA Today reads in part:
      Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.
      At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.
      Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies.
      We can’t let that happen.
      When endorsing Donald Trump for president, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic Hawaii congresswoman who is also an Iraq war veteran, told the crowd at the National Guard Association’s conference that she believes that Trump has a better understanding of the “grave responsibility” that a president bears “for every single one of our lives.”Gabbard praised the former president and said that during his first term, Trump “exercised the courage that we expect from our Commander in Chief,” and exhausted “all measures of diplomacy, having the courage to meet with adversaries, dictators, allies and partners alike in the pursuit of peace.”Tulsi Gabbard has just formally endorsed former president Donald Trump for president.Gabbard left the Democratic party in 2022, after her 2020 run for president and it was recently reported that she has been helping Trump prepare for next month’s presidential debate against Kamala Harris.Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic Hawaii congresswoman, has just been introduced on stage by former president Donald Trump at the National Guard Association of the United States Conference in Detroit, Michigan.“She’s a special person” Trump said of Gabbard. “She’s got great common sense, great spirit, she loves our country and she loves the people in this room.”Donald Trump is about to appear at the National Guard Association of the United States Conference in Detroit, Michigan.Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic Hawaii congresswoman, is expected to formally endorse Trump’s presidential bid at the event, CNN reported earlier today, citing a source.Donald Trump has appeared to undercut his campaign’s position on a scheduled televised debate with Kamala Harris by declaring he would prefer to have the microphones on when it was not their turn to speak.

      Donald Trump told reporters on Monday that he’d “rather have it probably on, but the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted” amid a reported impasse between the Kamala Harris and Trump campaigns over the conditions of next month’s debate.

      Trump, in a Truth Social post on Sunday, threatened to pull out of the 10 September debate with Harris, hurling a trademark “fake news” slur at ABC News.

      Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has now raised $540m for its election battle against Trump. The campaign said it saw a surge of donations during last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago where Harris and her vice-presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, accepted their nominations.

      Elizabeth Warren said on Sunday that “American women are not stupid” enough to believe JD Vance’s promise that Trump would veto any nationwide abortion ban passed by Congress if Trump is elected again to the Oval Office.

      Kerry Kennedy, the sister of Robert F Kennedy Jr, said on Sunday she was “disgusted” by his decision to drop out and endorse Trump’s presidential bid. Max Kennedy, her brother, also condemned his sibling’s endorsement of Trump.

      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris issued statements on Monday marking the third anniversary of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Donald Trump visited Arlington national cemetery in Virginia on Monday to take part in a wreath laying ceremony as he seeks to tie Harris to the chaotic US pullout and attack at Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate that killed 13 American soldiers.

      Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic Hawaii congresswoman, is expected to formally endorse Donald Trump’s presidential bid today at his event in Detroit, Michigan, according to a report.

      A judge in Arizona will hear arguments on Monday in the “fake electors” case involving a scheme by Republican allies of Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the state during the 2020 presidential election. More