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      New Jersey congressman Donald Payne Jr dies aged 65

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      Donald Payne Jr, a US congressman from New Jersey, died on Wednesday, more than two weeks after a heart attack. He was 65.Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, paid tribute to his fellow Democrat, whom he called a friend and “steadfast champion for the people” of his state.“With his signature bow tie, big heart and tenacious spirit, Donald embodied the very best of public service,” Murphy said.“As a former union worker and toll collector, he deeply understood the struggles our working families face, and he fought valiantly to serve their needs, every single day.”Payne had a heart attack on 6 April. Taken to hospital in Newark, he did not regain consciousness.He was first elected to Congress in 2012, succeeding his father, Donald Payne Sr, the first Black congressman ever elected in New Jersey who also died in office.Reporting Payne Jr’s death, the New Jersey Globe said he had “checked all the boxes for support among progressive voters: he supported Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, racial justice, equal rights for all, reproductive freedom, public transportation, and free college tuition.”The paper also saluted Payne’s work to fund clean drinking water projects, with notable success in his own city, Newark, and his sponsorship of gun safety legislation.Among Payne’s fellow Democrats in Congress, Joe Neguse of Colorado said he was “devastated to learn of the passing of my dear friend and colleague … a giant, a true public servant whose kindness, good humor and commitment to his constituents knew no bounds”.Jasmine Crockett, from Texas, said Payne was “a progressive leader on transportation and infrastructure” and said: “I join his family, friends, and constituents in mourning a great man and fighter for the people of New Jersey.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Rev Al Sharpton, the New York-based civil rights leader, called Payne “my friend and brother for many years”.In his statement, Governor Murphy said: “It was my great honor to work side-by-side with Donald to build a stronger and fairer New Jersey, and we will hold his memory close to our hearts as we build upon the Payne family’s deep legacy of service in advocating for the communities they served so dearly.“Donald’s love will live on in the homes of his neighbors in Newark, who now have access to safe drinking water, and in the good-paying jobs he helped create for his brothers and sisters in labor. And it will live on in his wife Beatrice, and their three children, Donald III, Jack, and Yvonne, who were the pride of his life.“Our heartfelt prayers are with his family during this difficult time.” More

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      Biden and Trump clinch Pennsylvania primaries shortly after polls close

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      Joe Biden and Donald Trump both won their primaries in Pennsylvania shortly after polls closed.Pennsylvanians had gone to the polls on Tuesday to cast ballots in the state’s primary races – the results provide a window into where voters in the crucial battleground stand roughly six months out from the general election.Biden and Trump had already locked up their parties’ nominations, but Pennsylvania voters still had other options in the presidential primaries.With nearly 50% of the votes counted, Biden got 491,892 votes, or 94.4%, according to state election data. Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman who dropped out of the race, got 29,333 votes, or 5.6%.Trump got 268,670 votes, or 79.4%, with 33% of the votes counted, while Nikki Haley, who dropped out the race, got 70,648 votes, or 20.6%, data shows.Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, remained on the Pennsylvania ballot after dropping out of the race in March. Primary voting in the state is confined to registered Republicans, locking out the independent voters who favored her.Her results show that a number of Republicans continue to be unhappy with Trump, who is on trial on 34 criminal counts in New York.Biden faced challenges of his own in Pennsylvania, which he won in 2020 by about 80,000 votes, or 1.2 points. A group of progressive activists had run a campaign to encourage Democrats to write in “uncommitted” on Tuesday to protest against Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza. The effort, based on the similar Listen to Michigan campaign, hopes to get at least 40,000 Democrats to write in “uncommitted”, but it may take weeks to get those ballots counted.On Tuesday, voters had the economy and foreign policy on their minds as they cast their ballots.Karen Lau, a 70-year-old retired educator in Kingston, said she would be voting for Trump. She said Biden’s handling of the conflict in Gaza was a top issue. “Biden’s destroying our country,” she said. “The hypocrisy with Israel of saying one thing and meaning another with Biden.”Even though Trump has been quiet on what exactly he would do in Israel, Lau said she was convinced he would handle it better. “He’s always been a supporter of Israel,” she said, citing the Abraham accords and Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. “I just have a lot more trust in what he will do.”Lau, who is Jewish, added that she was “very concerned” with pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. “The rise of antisemitism is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime,” she said.Richard K, a 69-year-old retired security guard in Kingston who declined to give his last name, also said he was unbothered that Trump was not that much younger than Biden.“Trump plays golf when he can, he has a lot more energy,” he said. “Biden walks like an old man.” He also dismissed the criminal cases against Trump, calling them “election interference”.“If he wasn’t ahead, they wouldn’t be going after him,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden and Trump recently held events in Pennsylvania before the primary, underscoring the state’s pivotal role in the election. At a campaign stop last week in Scranton, where Biden was born, the president used the setting to contrast his vision for the country’s future with Trump’s.“When I look at the economy, I don’t see it through the eyes of Mar-a-Lago, I see it through the eyes of Scranton,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s Florida resort home. “Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values: these are the competing visions for our economy that raise fundamental questions of fairness at the heart of this campaign.”Farther down the ballot, Pennsylvanians will cast votes in congressional primaries that will help determine control of the Senate and the House in November. In the Senate race, incumbent Bob Casey ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, while Dave McCormick was the sole candidate in the Republican primary.McCormick ran for Pennsylvania’s other Senate seat in 2022, but he lost the primary to the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who was later defeated by the Democrat John Fetterman in the general election. The Pennsylvania Senate race will probably be one of the most expensive in the country, as Casey reported having nearly $12m in cash on hand earlier this month while McCormick’s campaign has more than $6m in the bank. The Cook Political Report rates the race as “lean Democrat”.Several House races will provide additional clues about Pennsylvania voters’ leanings ahead of the general election. In the Pittsburgh-based 12th district, the progressive congresswoman and “Squad” member Summer Lee faces a challenge from local council member Bhavini Patel, who has attacked the incumbent over her support for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Moderate Pac, a group that supports centrist Democrats and is largely funded by the Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass, has spent more than $600,000 supporting Patel, and the race will be closely scrutinized as an early test for progressives facing primary challenges this year.In south-eastern Pennsylvania, the Republican representative Brian Fitzpatrick won his primary after attracting a threat from an anti-abortion activist, Mark Houck, who criticized the incumbent for being too centrist. In 2022, Fitzpatrick won re-election by 10 points in a district that Biden carried by 4.6 points two years earlier, according to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Cook rates the first district as “likely Republican” in the general election. Fitzpatrick will face Democrat Ashley Ehasz, who ran uncontested in the Democratic primary, in November.Elsewhere in the state, Ryan Mackenzie, a Republican state representative, won the seventh-district GOP primary, vying for the chance to face off against the Democratic incumbent Susan Wild. The Lehigh Valley district is considered a “toss-up” in the general election, per Cook’s ratings.In the 10th district, based around the city of Harrisburg, Democrat Janelle Stelson won the crowded Democratic primary. The former news anchor will face the Republican incumbent and former House freedom caucus chair Scott Perry. Cook rates Perry’s race as “lean Republican” in the general election.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Tulsi Gabbard repeats false Hillary Clinton ‘grooming’ claim in new book

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      Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman, has repeated a discredited claim about Hillary Clinton that previously saw Gabbard lodge then drop a $50m defamation suit in a new book published as she seeks to be named Donald Trump’s running mate for US president.Accusing Democrats of making up “a conspiracy theory that [Trump] was ‘colluding’ with the Russians to win the election” in 2016, Gabbard claims: “Hillary Clinton used a similar tactic against me when I ran for president in 2020, accusing me of being ‘groomed by the Russians’.”Gabbard ran for the Democratic nomination. Clinton did not accuse her of being “groomed by the Russians”.What Clinton said, in October 2019 and on a podcast hosted by the former Barack Obama adviser David Plouffe, was that she thought Republicans would encourage a third-party bid in 2020, aiming to syphon votes from the Democratic candidate in key states as Jill Stein, the Green candidate, and the Libertarian, Gary Johnson, did four years before.“They are also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said, “and I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.”Gabbard was then in the Democratic primary, though she never made any impact.Clinton continued: “She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. And, that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset. Totally. And so they know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee they’ll have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most need it.”Amid uproar, a spokesperson for Clinton said she had been referring to Gabbard and the Russians – saying “If the nesting doll fits”, thereby stoking media coverage in which Clinton’s remarks about “grooming” and “assets” were conflated.Clinton’s meaning was soon cleared up, but Gabbard seized on the “grooming” remark. She penned an op ed in the Wall Street Journal under a headline, I Can Defeat Trump and the Clinton Doctrine, that might now prove an awkward fit with her political ambitions.Later, after dropping out of the Democratic primary and endorsing Joe Biden, who she said had “a good heart” and would “help heal” a badly divided country, Gabbard sued Clinton for $50m over the “Russian asset” comment, rather than the remark about “grooming”. That lawsuit was dropped in May 2020.Four years on, Gabbard has completed a remarkable journey across the political aisle, from being seen as a rising Democratic star in the US House to hosting on Fox News and speaking at events including CPAC, a hard-right annual conference. Her book – For Love of Country: Why I Left the Democratic Party – will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.On the page, Gabbard presents a mix of memoir – from growing up in Hawaii to service in Iraq, from entering Congress to her failed presidential run – and pro-Trump screed. Light on detail and heavy on invective, the book includes excoriations of US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. It will hit shops, however, in the aftermath of the passage in Congress of billions of dollars in new Ukraine aid.Gabbard is widely reported to be a contender for Trump’s running mate in his rematch with Biden. In her book, she defends the 88-times criminally charged former president on many legal fronts.Her complaint about Clinton’s remarks about Russia seems designed to stir up familiar Trump campaign furies over Clinton and the investigation of Russian election interference in 2016, which US intelligence agreed was carried out in his support but which prompts Gabbard to write: “None of it was true.”She also accuses Democrats of planting evidence and stories with a compliant press, aided by a “deep state” consisting of “active and retired officials from within the justice department and other national security agencies”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe deep state conspiracy theory, which holds that a permanent government of operatives and bureaucrats exists to thwart populist leaders, is popular with Trump and followers notably including Liz Truss, a former UK prime minister. However, one of its chief creators and propagators, the Trump aide and ally Steve Bannon, has said it is “for nut cases”.Gabbard does not only repeat conspiracy theories in her book, but also makes elementary mistakes. In rehashing her inaccurate complaint about Clinton saying she was being “groomed” by Russia, she writes that Clinton was speaking to David Axelrod, also a former Obama advisor but the host of a separate podcast to Plouffe’s.Gabbard also claims that “the propaganda media repeated Clinton’s lies over and over, without ever asking for evidence or fact-checking her themselves”.In fact, Gabbard’s claims against Clinton were widely fact-checked or made the subject of article corrections.In October 2019 – months before Gabbard filed suit – the Washington Post, a leading exponent of the fact-checking form, said: “The initial news reports got it wrong, perhaps fueled by the ‘nesting doll’ comment, with many saying Clinton said the Russians were grooming Gabbard for a third-party bid.”Clinton, the paper added, “certainly said Gabbard was backed by Russian bots and even suggested she was a Russian asset”. But “within a 24-hour news cycle, Clinton’s staff made it clear she was talking about the GOP, not the Russians, eyeing Gabbard as a possible third-party candidate. A simple listen to the podcast confirmed that.“In other words, this was all cleared up 12 days before Gabbard published her [Wall Street Journal] article, making the inaccurate version of [the] ‘grooming’ statement the very first sentence. So there’s little excuse for getting this wrong.”The paper therefore awarded Gabbard three Pinocchios – denoting “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” – out of a possible four. More

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      The pro-Israel groups planning to spend millions in US elections

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      A handful of pro-Israel groups fund political campaigns in support of individual candidates in US elections, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), a powerful force in American politics. Before the 2024 election, Aipac plans to spend tens of millions of dollars against congressional candidates, primarily Democrats, whom it deems insufficiently supportive of Israel.Aipac and other pro-Israel lobby groups have recruited and supported challengers to a number of lawmakers and candidates – most notably members of the Squad, the group of progressive representatives who are particularly vocal in their criticism of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.The 2024 election will be bellwether of the enduring impact of these groups on US politics amid shifting US public opinion on Israel.What is Aipac?Aipac has its roots in the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs, which was founded by a lobbyist for the Israeli government in an attempt to manage the political fallout the Israeli army’s 1953 massacre of dozens of Palestinians, most of them children and women, in the West Bank village of Qibya.The organisation was renamed Aipac in 1959. It was not until financial support surged after the 1973 Yom Kippur war that it began to grow into the powerful Washington lobbyist group it is today.For many years, Aipac’s influence went largely unchallenged on Capitol Hill. The pressure group claimed to voice bipartisan support for Israel in Congress and worked to marginalise the relatively small number of critics there.Aipac’s annual conference typically involved a long rollcall of members of Congress who support the group. It has regularly galvanised almost every member of the US Senate to sign letters in support of Israeli policies, including several wars in Gaza.But the group’s once unchallenged influence in Washington has been diminished by its unwavering backing for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the past 15 years. It sided with him against President Barack Obama’s opposition to settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories and his nuclear deal with Iran.The liberal Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz has described Aipac as “the pro-Netanyahu, anti-Israel lobby”.“Effectively, the organization has become an operational wing of Netanyahu’s far-right government, one that peddles a false image of a liberal Israel in the United States and sells illusions to members of Congress,” it said.What has changed?Aipac traditionally endorsed candidates sympathetic to Israel as a signal for others to fund their campaigns. But in December 2021, the group for the first time in its 70-year history moved into direct financial support for individual political campaigns by launching a super political action committee, the United Democracy Project (UDP). A Super Pac is permitted to spend without restriction for or against candidates but cannot make direct donations to their campaigns.The move was prompted by alarm at the erosion of longstanding bipartisan support for Israel in the US. Opinion polls show younger Democrats have grown more critical of the deepening oppression of the Palestinians, including Jewish Americans, a trend that has only strengthened with the present war in Gaza.Aipac has grown increasingly concerned that the election of candidates critical of Israel could open the door to the conditioning of the US’s considerable military aid, erosion of Washington’s diplomatic protection on the international stage, and political pressure to establish a Palestinian state.So the UDP is working to block Democratic candidates critical of Israel at the first hurdle – the primaries – in an effort to shore up the claim that there is unswerving support for the Jewish state across Congress. It is also targeting progressive Democratic members of Congress who have pressed for a ceasefire in Gaza.What about other lobby groups?A number of smaller groups are working to the same end, principally the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI). It was founded five years ago by Mark Mellman, a Democratic political consultant. The DMFI’s board of directors includes Archie Gottesman, who also co-founded JewBelong, a group that has posted pink billboards in US cities in support of Israel including one that declared: ‘Trust Me. If Israel Wanted to Commit Genocide in Gaza, It Could’.Notably, the UDP has so far not waded into the campaign against Summer Lee in this year’s primary, despite spending more than $3m to defeat her in 2022. Instead the Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass has stepped up as the largest funder of a Pac called Moderate Pac to support Lee’s primary opponent, Bhavini Patel. It is running ads saying that Lee’s criticisms of Biden amount to support for Donald Trump even though Yass himself is a Trump supporter.A more moderate pro-Israel group, J Street, was founded in 2007 to counter Aipac’s unflinching support for rightwing governments. J Street established a Pac to support candidates who back a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. But it has raised only about $4m so far this election cycle.Who are they targeting and how?Aipac plans to spend $100m this year against congressional candidates, primarily Democrats, and members of Congress critical of Israel. So far the UDP has raised more than $49m, according to its most recent Federal Election Commission filings.The bulk of that money has yet to be spent but the UDP has already thrown millions of dollars into political advertising targeted against candidates critical of Israel, but which focuses on other issues and fails to make clear that it is funded by a pro-Israel group. Critics have accused Aipac of attempting to intimidate candidates into avoiding criticism of Israel by implicitly threatening to fund campaigns against them.Among those expected to be targeted by pro-Israel groups are members of the the Squad, including Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who are thought to be vulnerable to political attacks over issues unrelated to their criticisms of the war in Gaza.Who is funding these campaigns?The leading donors to the UDP are Republicans seeking to influence Democratic primaries.The single largest donor is the conservative Ukrainian American billionaire co-founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, who gave $5m. Koum also donated to the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s Super Pac.Other donors include the financier, Jonathan Jacobson, who gave $2.5m to the UDP toward the end of last year although for many years his political donations were directed to the Republican National Committee and the party’s US Senate campaigns. The Israeli-born entrepreneur David Zalik gave the UDP $2m. He has also donated to Republican campaigns in Georgia.The Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus, who was one of the largest donors to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and who continues to back him financially, gave $1m to the UDP, as did the hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who has given millions of dollars to Republican political causes over the years.Donations to the UDP are separate from tens of millions of dollars in pledges made directly to Aipac in the wake of the 7 October attacks by Hamas as the public relations battle intensified over Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza and a surging number of Palestinian civilian deaths.Top donors to the DMFI include Deborah Simon, the daughter of the billionaire businessman and movie producer Mel Simon, who gave $1m. She regularly donates to Democratic causes and Jewish organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League.Sam Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency billionaire who is serving 25 years for fraud, gave $250,000 to DMFI during the 2022 midterm elections. The group has been forced to return the money.Other major DMFI donors are closely tied to Aipac such as Stacy Schusterman, who has given more than $1m, and the venture capitalist Gary Lauder.How has the present war in Gaza changed the equation?The conflict has strengthened the hand of Israel’s critics within the Democratic party as polls show rising sympathy for the Palestinians. That in turn has made Aipac’s financial backing a potential liability for some Israel-supporting Democratic candidates.Aipac was already on the defensive after endorsing the 2022 campaigns of dozens of Republican members of Congress who tried to block President Biden’s presidential victory.Aipac defended the move by claiming that backing for the Jewish state overrides other issues and that it was “no moment for the pro-Israel movement to become selective about its friends”.“When we launched our political action committee last year, we decided that we would base decisions about political contributions on only one thing: whether a political candidate supports the US-Israel relationship,” it said. More

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      A progressive congresswoman made history in 2022. Can a billionaire stop her re-election?

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      The US representative Summer Lee greeted a cheering crowd of a couple of hundred supporters at the Pittsburgh teachers’ union headquarters on Sunday, with two days left until her Democratic primary.Lee, who made history in 2022 when she became the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania, predicted that voters would send a resounding message on Tuesday about the resilience of the progressive movement. To underscore that point, Lee was joined at the rally by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, another member of the progressive “Squad” in the House.“Everybody in the country is waiting to see whether or not we can have a reflective democracy,” Lee said. “So we are going to fight in western Pennsylvania, and on Tuesday, we’re going send a message to every dark-money billionaire, whoever they are: that your influence is no longer welcome in our democracy.”The boisterous rally marked an impressive show of support for a politician who eked out the narrowest of primary victories two years ago, after facing an onslaught of negative advertising from pro-Israel groups. This time around, many progressives expected the same groups to target Lee again, given her consistent and vocal support for a ceasefire in Gaza.But those groups have chosen to stay out of Lee’s primary this year, a decision that the congresswoman’s allies credit to her popularity with constituents and the government funding she has brought to her western Pennsylvania district.Despite the pro-Israel lobby’s absence, at least one Super Pac, financially backed by the Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass, has gotten involved in Lee’s primary to support her opponent, the local council member Bhavini Patel. If Lee is successful on Tuesday, her victory could provide a roadmap for other progressive candidates who are bracing for a wave of pro-Israel money in their own primaries this cycle due to their criticism of the Israeli government and their outrage over the rising death toll in Gaza.“Pittsburgh is the first one up. Tuesday is the first of the rest of these races. So, Pittsburgh, what you’re doing on Tuesday is sending a message to the country,” Ocasio-Cortez said. Addressing mega-donors like Yass, she added: “Your money isn’t good here any more.”A notable absenceWhen Lee first ran for Congress in 2022, her record as a two-term state legislator did little to assuage the concerns of establishment Democrats. A number of local groups, including the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, lined up behind Lee’s opponent, the Pittsburgh attorney Steve Irwin.Most consequentially, United Democracy Project, a Super Pac affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), entered the race to boost Irwin’s campaign. According to OpenSecrets, UDP spent a total of $3.3m against Lee and another $660,000 in support of Irwin, flooding the airwaves with ads accusing Lee of threatening Joe Biden’s policy agenda.Lee won her race by less than 1,000 votes, or 0.9 points, and her victory provided a shot in the arm for progressives’ fight against Aipac and its affiliates, which spent nearly $50m across the entire 2022 cycle to boost pro-Israel candidates.View image in fullscreenThis year, Aipac and its affiliates reportedly plan to spend twice as much money, $100m, across the election cycle. Progressive leaders expected that Lee’s primary would serve as an early test of messaging strategies for “Squad” members facing primary challenges and targeted by Aipac.Surprisingly, UDP and the group Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), both of which spent heavily in Lee’s 2022 primary, appear to have opted out. According to reporting by the Intercept, Aipac contacted two prominent Pittsburgh Democrats to inquire if they would consider running against Lee. Both of them declined. (UDP did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.) Mark Mellman, the founder of DMFI, recently told Semafor that the group had determined Lee simply wasn’t as vulnerable as other “Squad” members this year and thus wasn’t worth the investment.Lee’s allies credit her electoral strength to the work she has done in Congress. As Lee’s campaign frequently touts in ads, she has helped bring more than $1.2bn to her district in the form of infrastructure projects, clean water initiatives and housing grants.“Summer is a very popular politician. She represents this district incredibly well,” said Jodi Hirsh, a 48-year-old Lee campaign volunteer and longtime Pittsburgh resident. “People who may be not up to speed on all the other socially progressive, social justice-oriented things that many of us care about do know that she’s helped them fundamentally from a constituent services perspective.”That work appears to have paid dividends with fellow Democratic leaders as well. In February, the Allegheny County Democratic Committee endorsed Lee for the first time, and she has received the backing of prominent liberal groups like the League of Conservation Voters and Planned Parenthood Action Fund as well as an array of local labor unions.“That balance of being able to build a progressive vision while delivering every day for your constituents is the progressive movement through and through,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, a progressive Pac.Lee’s supporters argue that her work for constituents and her progressive views on issues like abortion access, the climate crisis and economic inequality have played a larger role in the primary race than the war in Gaza. But when voters do bring up the war, they often voice agreement with Lee’s calls for a ceasefire, allies say.Polling does indeed suggest widespread support for the ceasefire campaign. According to an Economist/YouGov survey conducted this month, 65% of US adults – including 80% of Democrats – support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.“This is a race where the president, the party have just continued to move towards [Lee] over time,” said Nicholas Gavio, mid-Atlantic communications director for the Working Families party. “All the polling shows that Summer’s position and the position of a lot of the [‘Squad’ members] is the position of Democratic party voters.”Despite polls consistently reflecting mounting criticism of Israel’s airstrike campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, Patel has continued to attack Lee over her views on the war. In a statement to the Guardian, Patel said Lee’s criticism of the Israeli government “hits at a deeper level” considering Pittsburgh’s dark history of antisemitic violence. In 2018, a gunman attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in the city’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, killing 11 people in the deadliest anti-Jewish attack in US history.“As fringe extremist Summer Lee has locked arms with people trying to weaken President Biden over the last few weeks, we have seen an outpouring of support from voters energized by the possibility of a pro-Biden Democrat representing them in Congress,” Patel said.Eva Borgwardt, a spokesperson for IfNotNow, traveled to Pittsburgh from New York to knock on doors for Lee’s campaign on Saturday. She firmly rejected Patel’s framing. (IfNotNow, a group of Jewish activists advocating for Palestinian rights, has also endorsed Lee.)“Summer’s vision of Jewish safety, I think, is the thing that we as a Jewish community need – especially right now,” Borgwardt said. “She’s resisting this false narrative of Palestinian and Jewish safety being pitted against each other.”That argument may be resonating with many Americans, but Patel has found at least one ardent proponent of her viewpoint: Jeffrey Yass.‘Kick some Yass’The ad opens with the ominous warning that “our rights are under attack”. The video then switches from images of the deadly January 6 insurrection to clips of Lee withholding applause during Biden’s State of the Union address last month.“We need a representative who will work with President Biden, and that’s Bhavini Patel,” the ad concludes. The narrator then notes that the group Moderate Pac is responsible for the ad.Moderate Pac’s stated aim is to “support Democratic policymakers who champion sensible fiscal and economic policies”, but recent FEC filings show its largest donor is Yass, who has given tens of millions to Republicans in recent years. According to OpenSecrets, Yass has already given more than $46m to conservative causes and candidates for 2024, making him the largest individual donor of this election cycle so far. (Previous reporting also suggested Yass was one of the major donors to a rightwing Israeli group that supported the proposal of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for judicial overhaul, but more recent accounts have cast doubt upon that connection.)View image in fullscreenYass has been named as a potential treasury secretary if Trump wins re-election, and the company that he co-founded was recently in the headlines for its involvement in a lucrative merger with the former president’s media company.“You couldn’t write it up in a movie to be more absurd than to have the man who bailed out Donald Trump’s social media company spending money to write ads about a Democratic member of Congress not being Democrat enough,” Andrabi said.Moderate Pac has now spent more than $600,000 on independent expenditures to promote Patel’s campaign, filings show.A constellation of progressive groups, including Justice Democrats and the Working Families party, have come to Lee’s assistance, pouring more than $700,000 into the race. And Lee herself has proven a much more successful fundraiser than Patel, as the incumbent has raised four times as much money as her challenger. According to FEC filings, Lee has raised $2.3m to Patel’s $602,000.Lee has even leaned into Yass’s involvement in the primary to motivate her donors. The subject line of one recent fundraising email read, “Are YOU ready to kick some YASS?” Hirsh said that Yass’s financial assistance had become a liability for Patel with Democratic primary voters.“Here’s someone parading around as a ‘good Democrat’, ‘a centrist Democrat’, ‘a moderate Democrat’, who is almost entirely funded by a Maga [“Make America great again”] Republican who supported an insurrection, who’s destroying our public schools, who does not believe in the right to abortion,” Hirsh said. “All of the things that we want our Democratic representatives to support, this person is opposed to. That does not belong in our Democratic primary.”For that reason, Andrabi believes that other progressive candidates can still learn many lessons from Lee’s campaign.“Aipac and DMFI aren’t in Summer’s race. But you know, choose your Super Pac funded by Republican billionaires. It’s the same model across the country,” he said. “What we’re seeing is Republican billionaires using Super Pacs as vehicles to spend in Democratic primaries against mostly Black and brown progressives.”If Lee wins on Tuesday, her ability to mobilize progressive voters in Pennsylvania could prove crucial in November, as Biden tries to win the battleground state against Trump.Andrabi said: “There’s no one who is a greater threat to Donald Trump and far-right extremism than a Black woman who not only stands up for progressive values but also expands the electorate and ensures that all marginalized people have a voice in a state like Pennsylvania.” More

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      Jury selection completed for Trump hush-money trial; man sets himself on fire outside courthouse – live

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      After days of jury selection, the court has finally chosen all 12 jurors and 6 alternate jurors who will decide the fate of Donald Trump in his historic criminal trial.The selection of all 18 jurors came not without setbacks, as judge Juan Merchan dismissed two seated jurors earlier this week over identity and credibility concerns.With the jury bench now full, the trial is expected to move towards opening statements next week.Donald Trump has yet again decried the proceedings in New York as a “witch hunt”, a term the former president has returned to repeatedly to describe his legal troubles.“This is really a concerted witch hunt, very simple,” Trump said to reporters on Friday afternoon after the trial wrapped for the day.The former president complained of his treatment in New York, criticizing the judges who heard his earlier New York civil fraud trial and defamation case, and describing the hush money trial as an “outrage” designed to hurt his campaign for the White House.Trump has routinely used his legal troubles to rally supporters and spread conspiracy theories.Reuters has more details about the 12 jurors and six alternates who have been selected in Trump’s hush money trial, which will be the first criminal trial in history of a former US presidentThere are seven men and five women on the jury. They are mostly employed in white-collar professions and the jury includes two corporate lawyers, a software engineer, a speech therapist and an English teacher. Most are not native New Yorkers, and instead hail from across the United States and countries such as Ireland and Lebanon.The Guardian has more information on the jury:Here is where the day stands:
      After days of jury selection, the court has finally chosen all 12 jurors and 6 alternate jurors who will decide the fate of Donald Trump in his historic criminal trial. The selection of all 18 jurors came not without setbacks, as judge Juan Merchan dismissed two seated jurors earlier this week over identity and credibility concerns.
      Judge Juan Merchan told Donald Trump’s defense team – which has repeatedly challenged and re-challenged rulings he has made – to stop trying to have another bite at the apple. “At this point, what’s happened is defense is literally targeting individual decisions, one by one by one by one, and filing pre-motion letters,” Merchan said, adding that opening statements are going to happen on Monday morning.
      The prosecutors previously submitted documents indicating that they wanted to ask Donald Trump about a variety of trials should he testify, to challenge his credibility as a witness. These include sexual assault accuser E. Jean Carroll’s defamation cases against him. As the hearing progressed, Trump’s attorney Emil Bove said that asking Trump about the verdict in Carroll’s cases on cross-examination would be “unacceptable.”
      A man set himself on fire outside the Manhattan criminal court where Donald Trump’s criminal trial was under way. The man has been identified as Maxwell Azarello who was born in 1987. According to his driver’s license, he is from St Augustine, Florida.
      Maxwell Azarello has been described as a “conspiracy theorist” by police and had pamphlets on scene which police described as “propaganda-based.” He is in critical condition at Weill Cornell’s burn unit.
      House Democrats came to the rescue of Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker, in a rare move for a committee that normally votes along party lines, in order to save the Ukraine aid legislation from rightwing rebels. Johnson now looks set to push forward this weekend on a $95bn aid bill for Kyiv, Israel, Taiwan and other allies, which has stalled in the House after passing the Senate.
      Court has ended for the day. It will resume on Monday when opening statements are expected to take place.Judge Juan Merchan is telling Donald Trump’s defense team – which has repeatedly challenged and re-challenged rulings he has made – to stop trying to have another bite at the apple.“At this point, what’s happened is defense is literally targeting individual decisions, one by one by one by one, and filing pre-motion letters,” Merchan said.“As the people suggested a minute ago, that has to end. There comes a point when you accept my rulings,” Merchan said, adding that proceedings were not going to be bogged down.“We’re going to have opening statements Monday morning,” Merchan said, “This trial is starting.”The prosecutors previously submitted documents indicating that they wanted to ask Donald Trump about a variety of trials should he testify, to challenge his credibility as a witness.These include sexual assault accuser E. Jean Carroll’s defamation cases against him. As the hearing progressed, Trump’s attorney Emil Bove said that asking Trump about the verdict in Carroll’s cases on cross-examination would be “unacceptable.”Bove, who reiterated Trump’s denial of Carroll’s claim and said it “very much did not happen,” said the allegations were “too far back in time” to be used in any potential challenge to Trump’s credibility.Moreover, Bove argued, “To bring up Ms Carroll’s allegations at this trial sort of pushes the salaciousness on to another level. This is a case about documents.”The prosecution insisted: “That’s critical, critical evidence that the jury ought to be able to consider…if he testifies.”Right now, the prosecution and defense are squaring off over what Donald Trump could be asked by prosecutors during cross-examination if he took the witness stand.“We do have a vehicle identified that’s connected to him. We’re currently searching that car,” police said. “We do not believe this was targeting any particular person or a particular group. We just right now labelled him as a sort of conspiracy theorist and we’ll go from there but the investigation will continue,” police added.“All of his social media is going to be scrubbed. Obviously we didn’t know him prior to this incident,” police said.Police added, “As of right now, he’s very critical. His condition is not good” and went on to say that they did not see any criminal history of Maxwell Azarello in New York.Police also said Maxwell Azarello did not breach security protocols but noted, “Of course we’re going to review our security protocols.”“We’ll talk with our federal partners and we’ll make decisions if we need to tighten up security. Maybe we’ll shut down the park. That is something that will determine once we talk with all our partners,” police added.Speaking about the pamphlets found at the scene, police said that the “pamphlets seem to be propaganda-based, almost like a conspiracy theory type of pamphlets.”Police added that they spoke to Maxwell Azarello’s family members who said that they were unaware “that he was even in New York.”Police also said they believe Azarello arrived in New York “some time earlier in the week.”NYPD is now briefing the press about the man who is in the Weill Cornell burn unit in critical condition. The man has been identified as Maxwell Azarello who was born in 1987. According to his driver’s license, he is from St Augustine, Florida.According to police, the accelerant that was used “appears to be some kind of alcohol-based substance that’s used for cleaning.”New York police is set to deliver a press conference soon on the latest incident outside the courthouse involving the man who appeared to have set himself on fire.We will bring you the latest updates.“Court officers rushed to aid the man, one of the was injured” from smoke inhalation, a court official said. The injured officer was taken to the hospital.Court will continue as scheduled. More

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      US House pushes ahead with $95bn foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan

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      The US House pushed ahead on Friday with a $95bn foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and humanitarian support after Democrats came to the rescue of Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker.A coalition of lawmakers helped the legislation clear a procedural hurdle to reach final votes this weekend, as Friday morning’s vote followed a rare move late on Thursday for a House committee that normally votes along party lines.The dramatic action took place on Capitol Hill on Thursday night in order to save the Ukraine aid legislation from rightwing rebels.On Friday morning Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, warned that if US aid was further delayed for Ukraine “there is a real risk it will arrive too late” to help the grinding resistance to Russia’s invasion.Then the House voted on the procedure agreed the night before, again producing a seldom-seen outcome in the typically hyper-partisan chamber, with Democrats helping Johnson’s plan advance by 316 votes to 94.Johnson now looks set to push forward this weekend on the package for Kyiv, Israel, Taiwan and other allies, which had stalled in the House after passing the Senate. This despite a firestorm of protest from hardline Republicans that could lead to an attempt to oust him.The House is expected to vote on Saturday on the aid legislation that provides $61bn for the conflict in Ukraine, including $23bn to replenish US weapons, $26bn for Israel, including $9.1bn for humanitarian needs, and $8.12bn for the Indo-Pacific. If passed, it would then go back to the Senate.The aid legislation is the latest in a series of must-pass bipartisan measures that Johnson has helped shepherd through Congress, including two huge spending bills and a controversial reauthorization of federal surveillance programs.Republicans hold a narrow House majority, 218-213 , a margin so scant that Mike Gallagher is postponing his mid-session retirement, originally set for Friday, so the Republican representative can be present to vote for the bill.On Thursday night, the four Democrats on the House rules committee voted with five Republicans to advance the aid package that Johnson has devised, agreeing procedures.The rules committee would normally be a safely partisan affair for the Republican majority, but Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Chip Roy of Texas, all on the far right, are voting against advancing the bill, prompting Democrats to step in to save it.Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker, put them on the committee to placate the far-right contingent of his caucus in the House.Johnson has won praise from Republican centrists and even Democrats by taking the line that he is doing “the right thing” on the aid legislation even if it brings challenges to his position from his own party, which has the power very easily to force a vote to oust him.Johnson got a boost from Donald Trump last week when they held an event together at the former president’s residence in Florida and, again, on Thursday when Trump made a post on social media that did not actively oppose aid for Ukraine.Trump appeared to warm to the idea after having dinner with Andrzej Duda, Poland’s far-right president, in New York on Tuesday, with Poland very wary about the power of an emboldened neighbor Russia to threaten eastern Europe.Friday’s vote was a victory for the strategy Johnson set in motion this week after he agonized for two months over the aid legislation. He had to spend the past 24 hours making the rounds on conservative media working to salvage support.The current package is similar to a measure that passed the Democratic-majority Senate in February and which Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell and Hakeem Jeffries had been pushing for a House vote since then.In addition to the aid for allies, the package includes a provision to transfer frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, and sanctions targeting Hamas and Iran – and to force China’s ByteDance to sell social media platform TikTok or face a ban in the US.Schumer on Friday told senators to be prepared to return this weekend if the package passes the House and goes back to the Senate. If passed by the upper chamber, it must go to the US president’s desk before becoming law.Some conservative lawmakers oppose more aid to Ukraine, while some progressive Democrats are reluctant on more Israel aid, given the slaughter and famine in Gaza.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      ‘This is a violent attack against women’: Florida Senate candidate seeks to channel abortion outrage

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      A round table on abortion rights, hosted by Florida’s Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, has only just begun, and already she finds herself comforting a woman in tears with a very personal story to tell.The woman is from Colombia, and speaks softly in Spanish as she tells the intimate gathering of the Miami-Dade Hispanic Democratic Caucus about the distressing decision her daughter had to make to terminate a pregnancy after learning the fetus was not developing.“In Colombia, which tends to be a very conservative country, she was glad supportive medical professionals were there for her daughter in the decision, and grateful she had access to good-quality healthcare for it,” said Mucarsel-Powell.“It was traumatic and painful, but at least they could rely on that healthcare. I’m just seeing outrage, from men and women, that here, families are faced with having to live in a state where you will not be able to get that care, because most women don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks.”She was referring to the ruling by Florida’s supreme court earlier this month that will allow a six-week abortion ban, with few exceptions for rape or incest, to take effect on 1 May. It will end the state’s position as a bulwark of access to the procedure in the south-eastern US.Yet it has also acted as rocket fuel to the campaign of Mucarsel-Powell, an Ecuador-born former congresswoman and mother of two daughters. She seized on the issue to launch a statewide Freedom Tour championing the protection of abortion rights and exposing the “unapologetic and proud” support for the ban on the part of her opponent in November, the incumbent Republican senator Rick Scott.View image in fullscreenThe Hispanic Caucus event in Coral Gables was only the third of the tour, but Mucarsel-Powell said it was already clear that abortion is a “top-of-mind” issue galvanizing voters, as it is in other Republican-controlled states that have curtailed reproductive rights since the US supreme court ended almost 50 years of federal protections with its 2022 reversal of Roe v Wade.On Monday, her campaign announced it had raised over $3.5m in the first quarter of the year, with more than 5,300 new donors since the supreme court ruling. And Democrats across Florida are also sensing wind in their sails as opposition to the ban, as well as support for a court-approved ballot initiative that could enshrine access to the procedure in the state’s constitution, hardens.“This is a violent attack against women, because it is fundamental for us to make that decision on our own, with our healthcare provider, with our families, with our faith,” Mucarsel-Powell told the Guardian in an interview following the round table.“This is about protecting privacy, protecting healthcare for women, making sure that there’s no government interference, especially from extreme politicians like Rick Scott. I can tell you what people are thinking about this, and that it’s affecting women living in the state of Florida that were sent home when they thought they were having a miscarriage, and they weren’t able to get that healthcare.“And then they got very ill, and almost died because they didn’t receive that healthcare. So this is a top-of-mind issue, like so many other issues, but we’ll see in November how voters decide what are going to be their priorities. I think they’re going to make things very clear.”View image in fullscreenAlso clear is Mucarsel-Powell’s disdain for Scott, who she believes is vulnerable in November as he defends the seat he narrowly won from the incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson in 2018 by only 10,000 votes from 8.2m cast.“If he goes back to the Senate, he will push for a national abortion ban,” she said. “His true agenda includes signing away women’s reproductive rights and trying to control their bodies.“And he knows he will have to answer for his support of Florida’s ban in November. The choice is going to be very clear for voters, they know who I am, they know what I stand for, and who and what Rick Scott isn’t.An Emerson College poll this week showed that 42% of Florida voters planned to vote for the constitutional amendment that would overturn the Florida ban, far short of the 60% it would need to pass.Yet Mucarsel-Powell sees hope in the 32% who say they are still unsure. “A lot of people don’t know that this amendment is on the ballot, so the movement that has been created and has built this infrastructure on the ground is ready to make sure that everyone knows this is an issue,” she said.“The work is happening, it will continue to happen, and I think in November, the majority of Floridians will know that they have a choice. I believe they’re going to come out and vote for freedom.” More