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      How Washington DC reacted to Trump’s latest indictment – video report

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      Democrats and some Republican opponents welcomed Donald Trump’s federal indictment on four charges relating to his alleged attempted election subversion, while the former president’s supporters rallied to his defence. Trump is now facing 78 criminal charges, including 40 federal counts in Florida over his retention of classified records, and 34 New York state counts over hush-money payments to the porn actor Stormy Daniels. Despite this, and the prospect of more charges over election subversion in Georgia, he is leading national Republican polling by more than 30 points and by wide margins in early voting states More

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      Donald Trump expects indictment ‘any day now’ in 2020 election subversion case – live

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      Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, said Hunter sought to create an “illusion of access” to his father Joe Biden to impress clients and business associates, but he insisted the then vice-president was never directly involved in any deals.The Republican-led House oversight committee conducted a more than-five hour interview with Archer as part of its expanding congressional inquiry into the Biden family businesses.The interview focused on the 2010s, when Hunter Biden sat on the board of the Ukraine energy company Burisma and his father was vice-president under President Barack Obama.Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers inside the closed-door interview said Archer testified that over the span of 10 years, Hunter Biden put his father on the phone around 20 times while in the company of associates but “never once spoke about any business dealings”, AP reported.Democratic Representative Dan Goldman told reporters that Archer testified that Hunter sold the “illusion of access” to his father and “tried to get credit for things that [Hunter] had nothing to do with”.But Republican representative Andy Biggs, who has co-sponsored legislation to impeach Biden, said Archer’s testimony implicated the president and quoted the witness as saying Burisma could not have survived without the “Biden brand”. He told reporters:
      I think we should do an impeachment inquiry.
      The Susan B Anthony List, the nation’s leading anti-abortion group, called Florida governor and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis’ failure to support federal abortion restrictions “unacceptable”.DeSantis signed into law a controversial six-week abortion ban in Florida in April. In a recent interview with Megyn Kelly, DeSantis was asked if he would support abortion bans at the federal level.He replied:
      I’ve been a pro-life governor. I’ll be a pro-life president and I’ll come down on the side of life.
      DeSantis added that he would “be a leader with the bully pulpit to help local communities and states advance the cause of life but he avoided answering if he would enact a federal abortion ban.In response, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America group, criticized DeSantis, saying that “a pro-life president has a duty to protect the lives of all Americans”.Dannenfelser said in a statement:
      Gov. DeSantis’s dismissal of this task is unacceptable to prolife voters. A consensus is already formed. Intensity for it is palpable and measurable.
      A super PAC backing Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr raised $6.47m in July, according to a press release from American Values 2024.The press release noted that American Values 2024 has received donations from both Democrats and Republicans, including the Trump mega donor Timothy Mellon, Democratic Party donor Abby Rockefeller, and Gavin de Becker, a security consultant close to Jeff Bezos.Mellon said in the press release:
      The fact that Kennedy gets so much bipartisan support tells me two things: that he’s the one candidate who can unite the country and root out corruption and that he’s the one Democrat who can win in the general election.
      The super PAC said it raised $6.47m in July, bringing its total fundraising for Kennedy to about $16.82m.About $5m of that haul came during his testimony in front of the House judiciary select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, according to the press release.Kennedy’s appearance before the House subcommittee on 20 July came days after he told reporters at a press dinner that Covid-19 had been “ethnically targeted” at Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people had greater immunity.The false claim was enthusiastically embraced by neo-Nazi groups, while being condemned by scientists and Jewish organizations.Donald Trump is demanding Republican support for impeaching Joe Biden over corruption allegations against Hunter Biden, the president’s surviving son.“Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democrat fraud should be immediately primaried and get out,” Trump told a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.Republicans hold the US House, where impeachment would start, by just five seats. GOP members in Democratic areas seem likely to suffer at the polls next year.“If they’re not willing to do it,” Trump said, “we’ve got a lot of good, tough Republicans around.
      People are going to run against ’em, and people are going to win. And they’re going to get my endorsement every single time. They’re going to win ’cause we win almost every race when we endorse.
      Factcheckers dispute that. Surveying the 2022 midterms, the New York Times said: “Mr Trump endorsed more than 250 candidates, and his 82% success rate is, on the surface, impressive. But the vast majority of those endorsements were of incumbents and heavy favorites to win.”The paper added:
      In the 36 most competitive House races … Mr Trump endorsed candidates in five contests. All five lost.
      Trump’s influence on key Senate races won by Democrats has been widely discussed.In Pennsylvania, Trump also called for conditioning aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia on White House cooperation with investigations of Hunter Biden. Trump’s own first impeachment was for withholding aid to Ukraine in an attempt to uncover dirt on the Bidens. Pundits noted the irony.“So much for denying the quid pro quo, as he did in 2019,” said Peter Baker, the Times’ chief White House correspondent.A month out from the first debate of the Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump’s domination of the field increases with each poll.On Monday, the first 2024 survey from the New York Times and Siena College put Trump at 54% support. His closest challenger, Ron DeSantis, was at 17%. No one else – including Mike Pence, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley – was higher than 3%.DeSantis’s hard-right campaign is widely seen to be out of fuel and on a glide path to destruction. Trump dominates early voting states and in national averages leads the Florida governor by more than 30 points.Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, is “ready to go” with indictments in her investigation of Trump’s election subversion. In Washington, the special counsel Jack Smith is expected to add charges regarding election subversion to 40 counts already filed over the former president’s retention of classified records.Trump already faces 34 criminal charges in New York over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels. Referring to Trump being ordered to pay $5m after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll, a judge recently said Carroll proved Trump raped her. Lawsuits over Trump’s business affairs continue.Heading for trials in primary season, Trump denies wrongdoing and claims political persecution. But his chaos-agent campaign, which he has said he will not abandon even if convicted and sentenced, does not just threaten the national peace. It threatens his own party.Joe Biden just decided to keep the US Space Command headquarters in Colorado, rather than move it Alabama, the Associated Press reports. And, surprising as it might seem, Biden’s decision may soon be caught up in the debate over abortion access.First, a recap: Donald Trump created Space Force in 2019, and near the end of his presidency ordered it moved from its temporary home in Colorado Springs, Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama. Biden has now reversed that decision, dealing a blow to the economy of a deeply Republican state whose senator Tommy Tuberville has lately been blocking hundreds of military promotions in protest of defense department policies intended to help service members obtain abortions.While there is no indication yet that Biden’s decision has anything to do with Tuberville’s blockade, the president has personally decried the senator’s campaign, calling it “ridiculous” and saying it threatens the military’s readiness.Here’s more on the decision, from the AP:
      The officials said Biden was convinced by the head of Space Command, Gen. James Dickinson, who argued that moving his headquarters now would jeopardize military readiness. Dickinson’s view, however, was in contrast to Air Force leadership, who studied the issue at length and determined that relocating to Huntsville, Alabama, was the right move.
      The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the decision ahead of the announcement.
      The president, they said, believes that keeping the command in Colorado Springs would avoid a disruption in readiness that the move would cause, particularly as the U.S. races to compete with China in space. And they said Biden firmly believes that maintaining stability will help the military be better able to respond in space over the next decade.
      House Republicans have announced an investigation into the deal reached between Hunter Biden and the justice department that would have seen the president’s son plead guilty to tax charges and enter a diversion agreement to resolve a gun charge.Biden was expected to formally accept the agreement with prosecutors during a federal court hearing in Delaware last week, but judge Maryellen Noreika objected to portions of the deal and ordered the two sides to renegotiate it and present it to her at a future date.Republicans have for years accused the president’s son of corruption, and since it was announced have called the plea agreement a “sweetheart deal”. In a letter to attorney general Merrick Garland, the Republican chairs of the House judiciary, ways and means and oversight committees demand a range of documents and explanations from the justice department.“The Department’s unusual plea and pretrial diversion agreements with Mr. Biden raise serious concerns — especially when combined with recent whistleblower allegations — that the Department has provided preferential treatment toward Mr. Biden in the course of its investigation and proposed resolution of his alleged criminal conduct,” the committee chairs write. Earlier this month, the House oversight committee heard from two Internal Revenue Service agents who claimed politicization of the Hunter Biden investigation, despite statements from the Donald Trump-appointed US attorney who led the case that he had the ultimate authority to bring charges.The letter marks the latest instance of the House GOP using the chamber’s powers to investigate the Biden administration. Since the start of the year, it has launched investigations into topics including the “weaponization” of the federal government under the Biden administration, and the state and federal prosecutions targeting Trump.A small group of progressive lawmakers led by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders on Monday urged the United States to bring lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry for its alleged efforts to sow doubt about the climate crisis.“The actions of ExxonMobil, Shell, and potentially other fossil fuel companies represent a clear violation of federal racketeering laws, truth in advertising laws, consumer protection laws, and potentially other laws, and the Department must act swiftly to hold them accountable for their unlawful actions,” reads the letter, which was also signed by Democratic senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.The letter, addressed to attorney general Merrick Garland, references the well-documented climate misinformation campaign waged over decades by oil and gas companies, and the dozens of lawsuits filed by states, municipalities, and the District of Columbia about that campaign.The letter was sent as swaths of the United States bake under sweltering temperatures. This summer’s record-breaking heatwaves in America and southern Europe, which have put tens of millions of people under heat advisories, would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change, according to a recent study by scientists at World Weather Attribution.The senators also implore the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission and other law enforcement agencies to file their own lawsuits against parties who participated in climate deception, and request a meeting with Garland.“The polluters must pay,” the senators wrote.Andy Biggs, a rightwing Republican member of the oversight committee, said Devon Archer revealed that Hunter Biden’s family name helped Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma’s business.That’s according to Punchbowl News:Fox News reports a unnamed source saying the same:It is unclear if Biden actually participated in the meetings, or just took the calls to speak with his son, as Democratic congressman Dan Goldman, who attended the interview with Archer, characterized the conversations.However, Punchbowl reports Biggs said Archer had no knowledge of an unverified bribery allegation against Joe and Hunter Biden that was reported to the FBI:Following the Republican-led House oversight committee’s interview with Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, a Democratic lawmaker on the committee downplayed the president involvement in his son’s business.Archer testified that Hunter would call up Joe Biden during business meetings in the period when they served on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma, but only for “casual conversation,” Democratic congressman and committee member Dan Goldman said, Punchbowl News reports.“The witness was very, very consistent, that none of those conversations ever had to do with any business dealings or transactions,” Goldman said, adding that Hunter and Joe Biden spoke frequently.“[Biden] says hello to someone that he sees his son with. What is he supposed to say? ‘Hi, son. No, I’m not gonna say hello to the other people at the table or the other people on the phone.’”Here’s more of Goldman’s comments to the press:Several Republican presidential candidates have vowed that, in the as-of-now unlikely scenario that they are elected to the White House next year, they would pardon Donald Trump. But as the Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas reports, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson is trying to distinguish himself by promising to do no such thing:Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson has said it is “inappropriate” for some of his fellow Republican presidential hopefuls to publicly discuss potentially pardoning Donald Trump, who is their party’s frontrunner for its 2024 nomination despite his mounting criminal charges.“Anybody who promises pardons during a presidential campaign is not serving our system of justice well,” Hutchinson said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “And it’s inappropriate.”The remarks from Hutchinson cut a stark contrast with comments from other Republicans in the running for the presidency, who said they would pardon Trump if they eventually defeated the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden.Nikki Haley, once South Carolina’s governor and the Trump White House’s United Nations ambassador, has said she would be inclined to pardon the former president if she won the election to help the country “move forward”.Former New York city police commissioner Bernard Kerik, a leading Trump ally, will meet with special counsel Jack Smith in the coming days as part of the federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Kerik’s attorney told CNN on Sunday that the special counsel’s office will meet with Kerik and his lawyers “in about a week” to discuss efforts taken by former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate potential election fraud in the wake of the 2020 election. He said:
      We have a meeting scheduled in about a week with the special counsel’s office to talk about a lot of the efforts that the Giuliani team was taking at the time to investigate fraud, and that’s really going to get into, you know, the core of whether they can charge somebody with having corrupt intent.
      The meeting will come after Kerik turned over thousands of pages of documents to the special counsel’s office connected to the debunked voter fraud claims made by Trump and Giuliani.In early 2020, Trump pardoned Kerik for crimes including tax fraud and lying to investigators, for which Kerik had been sentenced to four years in jail. Later that year, Kerik worked with Giuliani on attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, a push which culminated in the failed but deadly January 6 attack on Congress.Donald Trump said he expects he could be indicted “any day now” as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection.Smith has been looking into Trump’s efforts to remain in office following his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden. Federal prosecutors have assembled evidence to charge Trump with three crimes, the Guardian has reported: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and a statute that makes it unlawful to conspire to violate civil rights.Trump, posting to Truth Social on Monday, wrote:
      I assume that an Indictment from Deranged Jack Smith and his highly partisan gang of Thugs, pertaining to my “PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICALLY Speech, will be coming out any day now, as yet another attempt to cover up all of the bad news about bribes, payoffs, and extortion, coming from the Biden ‘camp.’ This seems to be the way they do it. ELECTION INTERFERENCE! PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT!
      Carlos De Oliveira, the Mar-a-Lago property manager and third co-defendant in the special counsel’s classified documents case, declined to answer questions as he left the Miami courthouse.De Oliveira was escorted by federal agents and his attorney, John Irving, who said it was time for the justice department “to put their money where their mouth is” after charging his client.De Oliveira was added as a third defendant in Donald Trump’s complicated classified documents indictment on Thursday. He faces charges such as trying to obstruct justice, concealing records and documents, and making false statements to the FBI.De Oliveira, 56, was a valet, maintenance worker and more recently a property manager at Trump’s resort, Mar-a-Lago, according to the superseding indictment. The indictment said De Oliveira helped Trump’s personal valet, Walt Nauta, move 30 boxes of documents, from Trump’s residence to a storage room, and asked the person responsible for surveillance at the resort to delete the footage on behalf of Trump. He was also accused of draining the resort pool to flood the rooms that contained surveillance footage.When the FBI discovered the documents at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Trump allegedly called De Oliveira and said he would get him an attorney.Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, made his first appearance in a Miami courtroom on Monday as part of the special counsel’s investigation into the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.During the roughly 10-minute hearing, De Oliveira, the third and newest co-defendant in Trump’s classified documents case, heard the charges against him and received pre-trial orders. He was unable to enter a plea because he had failed to secure local counsel.Chief Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres granted an extension request, and the arraignment is now scheduled to take place on 10 August at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida. De Oliveira was released on a $100,000 bond pending trial.De Oliveira was indicted on Thursday on four charges, including conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements to the FBI.Trump and his longtime valet, Walt Nauta, were charged in the classified documents case last month and face additional counts in the indictment that charged De Oliveira. Both Trump and Nauta have pleaded not guilty to the initial charges. More

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      Alito ‘stunningly wrong’ that Senate can’t impose supreme court ethics rules

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      Senator Chris Murphy has dismissed claims by the supreme court justice, Samuel Alito, that the Senate has “no authority” to create a code of conduct for the court as “stunningly wrong”.The Connecticut Democrat made those remarks in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, adding that Alito “should know that more than anyone else because his seat on the supreme court exists only because of an act passed by Congress”.“It is Congress that establishes the number of justices on the supreme court,” Murphy said. “It is Congress that has passed in the past requirements for justices to disclose certain information, and so it is just wrong on the facts to say that Congress doesn’t have anything to do with the rules guiding the supreme court.”He continued: “It is even more disturbing that Alito feels the need to insert himself into a congressional debate.”Murphy’s comments came after the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Alito on Friday in which he said: “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it. No provision in the constitution gives them the authority to regulate the supreme court – period.”During his interview with State of the Union, Murphy went on to criticize the nine-member supreme court’s conservative supermajority. He accused Alito and the court’s other conservatives of seeing “themselves as politicians” rather than impartial jurists.“They just see themselves as a second legislative body that has just as much power and right to impose their political will on the country as Congress does,” Murphy said. “They are going to bend the law in order to impose their rightwing view of how the country should work on the rest of us.”In recent months, several of the supreme court’s conservative justices have found themselves in ethical controversy after reports emerged of their involvement in real estate transactions with Republican billionaire donors, discreet payments from Republican activists, millions of dollars’ worth of luxury trips and thousands of dollars in private school tuition.As a result, many Democrats have called for tighter ethics rules for the supreme court’s justices, who they say lack conduct rules that are comparable to other federal authorities.Earlier this month, the Senate judiciary committee approved legislation to impose tighter ethics rules on the supreme court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe legislation – which Republicans have adamantly opposed – has slim possibilities of passing in the Senate because it would require at least nine Republican votes. Nonetheless, Democrats say such a measure is a “crucial first step” in restoring public confidence in the nation’s highest court.Murphy said of the committee-approved measure: “It’s why we need to pass this commonsense ethics legislation to at least make sure we know that these guys aren’t in bed having their lifestyles paid for by conservative donors, as we have unfortunately seen in these latest revelations.” More

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      Where did it all go right for Biden? Facts blunt Republican attack lines

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      It was the word that the far right of the Republican party most wanted to hear. Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House of Representatives, said this week his colleagues’ investigations of Joe Biden are rising to the level of an “impeachment” inquiry.Republicans in Congress admit that they do not yet have any direct evidence of wrongdoing by the US president. But, critics say, there is a simple explanation why they would float the ultimate sanction: they need to put Biden’s character on trial because their case against his policies is falling apart.Heading into next year’s presidential election, Republicans have been readying a three-pronged attack: crime soaring in cities, chaos raging at the southern border and prices spiralling out of control everywhere. But each of these narratives is being disrupted by facts on the ground: crime is falling in most parts of the country, there is relative calm at the border and inflation is at a two-year low.“Republican talking points are having a really bad summer,” said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist. “The core attacks against Biden are evaporating. The economy is strong. Inflation’s down. The deficit’s down. The Washington Post called the border ‘eerily quiet’. We’ve seen murder rates have come down dramatically this year. He’s been competently managing foreign policy.”Inflation has been a millstone around Biden’s neck. Last year the prices of gas, food and most other goods and services surged by 9%, a 40-year high that took a toll on households. Some economists blamed Biden for pumping more money into the economy than it could handle with a $1.9tn coronavirus relief package. The president pointed to other causes such as global supply chain issues, the pandemic, stimulus from the Federal Reserve and the Russian war in Ukraine.But now inflation is down to 3%, lower than in any other major economy, while unemployment has been below 4% for the longest stretch in half a century. Consumer sentiment is at its highest point in two years, according to a survey by the University of Michigan, while both Federal Reserve staff and the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office now predict that America will avoid a recession.Crime, meanwhile, has been seen as a vulnerability for Democrats since the days of Republican Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign. Violent offences rose sharply in major cities during the coronavirus pandemic, loomed large during last year’s midterm elections and prompted a backlash against progressives pushing to “defund the police”.But a study of crime trends in 37 cities by the Council on Criminal Justice found that the number of murders in the first half of 2023 fell by 9.4% compared with the first half of 2022 (a decrease of 202 homicides in those cities). Gun assaults, robberies, burglaries and aggravated assaults were also down.Immigration is another quintessential line of attack for Republicans. There were dire predictions about what would happen when pandemic-era Title 42 restrictions were lifted in May. Yet last month, under a new rule that makes it harder to attain full asylum, illegal border crossings fell to the lowest level in more than two years and the issue quickly faded from the news agenda.Rosenberg added: “His argument for re-election has gotten much stronger over the last few months. It’s getting very unclear how the Republicans are going to go after his record as president and what it means is that you’re probably going to see in the short term a much more significant ratcheting up of attacks on him as a person or father and not as a president.”With the numbers trending in Biden’s direction, there may be greater incentive than ever for Republicans to focus instead on his age, his vice-president, Kamala Harris, his son Hunter Biden and the threat of impeachment over an alleged foreign bribery scheme for which they are yet to provide evidence. “Culture war” attacks around gender identity and “wokeness” could also intensify.Wendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, commented: “It’s not a coincidence that Kevin McCarthy is talking about impeachment. They thought they were going to have the economy. They thought they were going to have inflation … People have a generally decent opinion of Biden’s character so chipping away at that is a smart move if Trump is going to be your nominee.”Mocking the criticisms as “a fragmented grab-bag”, Andrew Bates, deputy press secretary at the White House, wrote in a memo on Wednesday: “At 8am, House Republicans are shouting something about drag queens (yeah, we don’t know); at 9am, it’s ‘Joe Biden’s still old and also he keeps outsmarting us’ (but actually); at 10am, it’s calling Ukraine a US adversary (we’re as confused as you are).“By the time 4 o’clock shows up, it’s a game of mad libs with bizarre conspiracies about the President’s family and then something about ‘wokeness’ (we keep asking them what ‘wokeness’ is, but then they leave the chat). Apparently, this clown carousel wasn’t weird enough. Now House Republicans are channeling their frustrated energy into a measured and purposeful urge to impeach … someone … somewhere … for something.”Republicans, however, deny the premise that they have already lost the battle of ideas. They contend that average hourly earnings (not adjusted for inflation) are now $33.58 and a gallon of gas costs $3.60, whereas in January 2021, when Trump left office, those figures were $29.92 and $2.39 respectively – meaning that a worker can afford less “gas for an hour of work” today than when Biden become president.Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, said this week: “No matter how many ways administration officials spin the numbers, folks who work for a living and manage a family budget know that ‘Bidenomics’ has made their lives harder. They know that prices have risen 16.6% since the president took office because they feel it every time they pay their bills.”In addition, America’s immigration crisis is far from resolved. House Republicans describe Biden’s border policy as cruel, inhumane and ineffective and say illicit drugs are flowing into the country. They are continuing with a drive to lay the groundwork to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, over the “illegal immigration crisis”.Crime, while falling, also remains above levels seen before the pandemic and protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Motor vehicle theft rose by 33.5% in the first half of the year. Recent history suggests that Republicans will not hesitate to highlight particularly horrific incidents to whip up fear.Whit Ayres, a political consultant and pollster, said of the policy areas: “They may be moving in the right direction but they still are major problems from the perspective of Republican voters as well as a number of independents. We are a long way from having the border under control.“We’re a long way from having inflation back at the rate we became used to for quite a while. And crime remains a very significant problem in lots of American cities. So while each of those may not be quite as bad as they were, they are still very significant problems and likely to remain so through the election.”Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, agreed that it was too soon to say whether Biden will keep winning on policy. “It’s quite easily possible that inflation pops up, that the border gets worse – June tends to be a low month anyway – what’s it going to look like in September and October? Crime has always been more of a local issue. The argument has points but it’s way overstated at this point in the cycle.”If it comes down to a communications war, Democrats are far from assured of victory. Biden’s claims of success over two and a half years have often not translated to opinion polls. His public approval rating remained at 40% in early July, close to the lowest levels of his presidency, according to Reuters/Ipsos. The president is trying to break through the media noise with a series of public events trumpeting “Bidenomics”.Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who has worked on several presidential campaigns, said: “There’s a lag time so it’s going to take a while for people to fully feel it in their own lives. Now, the good news for Biden is he’s got a while. There were points in 1983 where Democrats were salivating to run against [Ronald] Reagan and, by 1984, the impact of the economy was being felt by people and Reagan went on to win 49 states, which you can’t do any more because we’re living in a very polarised environment.”Democrats have long been criticised for lacking clear messaging and a sense of swagger even when the statistics are on their side. But Biden did prosecute a successful case against Republicans in last year’s midterms over abortion rights and the threat of Maga [Make America great again] extremism. A rematch against Trump could make the choice unusually stark.Schiller, the political scientist at Brown University, said: “It’s definitely clear the Democrats do not know how to benefit from their own success in terms of messaging. They’re historically bad at it with the exception of Bill Clinton.“But the intrinsic tendency for Americans, at least up until this point, to go with the status quo incumbent administration when things are pretty good because they fear change I think still holds. So how much advertising Democrats have to do is unclear because people know things are good and Donald Trump represents chaos.”Earlier this week Biden poked fun at Republicans over the threats.Speaking at a manufacturing plant in Auburn, Maine, the president said: “While there is more work ahead, earlier this week, the Washington Post suggested Republicans may have to find something else to criticise me for now that inflation is coming down. Maybe they’ll decide to impeach me because it’s coming down. I don’t know. I love that one.” More

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      Filthy Rich Politicians review: Matt Lewis skewers both sides of the aisle

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      When Covid began to ravage the US, Donald Trump lied through his teeth but Nancy Pelosi flaunted her assets. Trump repeatedly claimed the virus “would go away”. More than a million deaths followed. Pelosi, then House speaker, treated us to watching her eat $13-a-pint ice cream out of fridges that cost $24,000. Let them eat artisanal desserts?Forbes pegs Trump’s wealth at $2.5bn. Based on public filings, according to Matt Lewis in his new book, Filthy Rich Politicians, Pelosi and her husband’s net holdings are estimated to be north of $46m. In 2014, Trump lied when he said his tax returns would be forthcoming if and when he ran for office. In 2022, Pelosi successfully fought an attempt to ban members of Congress from trading stock. She, it was widely noted, does not trade stocks. But her husband does. Practically speaking, that is tantamount to a distinction with little difference.Despite it all, when Trump tore into Washington corruption, promising to “drain the swamp”, his message resonated. A congenital grifter, he knew what he was talking about.“Right now, your average member of the House is something like 12 times richer than the average American household,” Matt Lewis says. “And that, I believe, is contributing to the sense that the game is rigged.” More than half the members of Congress are millionaires.Lewis is a senior columnist at the Daily Beast and a former contributor to the Guardian. With his new book, he performs a valued public service, shining a searing light on the gap between the elites of both parties and the citizenry in whose name they claim to govern. Subtitled “The Swamp Creatures, Latte Liberals, and Ruling-Class Elites Cashing in on America”, Lewis’s book is breezy and readable. Better yet, it strafes them all. The Bidens and Clintons, the Trumps and Kushners, right and left – all get savaged.Looking right, Lewis mocks Steve Bannon and Ted Cruz for their faux populism, which he views as self-serving and destructive.“The very elites who seek to rule us also rile up the public to hate their fellow elites,” Lewis bitingly observes. “Although he claims to be a ‘Leninist’, Bannon is also ‘an alumnus of Harvard Business School, Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood.’”As for Cruz, he graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law. The husband of a Goldman Sachs managing director, he helped pave the way for making loans by a candidate to their own campaign a money-making proposition. In a 2022 decision, in a case between Cruz and the Federal Elections Commission, the US supreme court ruled that a $250,000 loan repayment limit violated the first amendment and Cruz’s free speech rights. In plain English: a deep-pocketed incumbent can now tack on a double-digit interest rate to a campaign loan, win re-election, then essentially collect a handsome side bet. As Lewis notes, Cruz was already no stranger to ethical flimflam.Lewis also graphically lays out how swank vacation sites are de rigueur destinations for campaign fundraisers and political retreats – being in Congress is now a portal to spas, tennis and haute cuisine – and how book writing has emerged as the vehicle of choice for members of Congress to evade honoraria restrictions.Lewis quotes Marco Rubio telling Fox News: “The day I got elected to the Senate I had over $100,000 still in student loans that I was able to pay off because I wrote a book.” In 2013, Rubio received an $800,000 advance. A decade later, he branded Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan “unfair”.This, remember, is the same Florida man who once exclaimed: “It’s amazing … I can call up a lobbyist at four in the morning and he’ll meet me anywhere with a bag of $40,000 in cash.” Like many in government, Rubio blurs the line between the personal and the public.Lewis also tags Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a member of the progressive “Squad” in the House, for cronyism amid the throes of Covid. At the time, she proposed legislation that would have canceled rent and mortgage payments while establishing a “fund to repay landlords for missed rent”. The bill went nowhere but as luck would have it, Squad members Ayana Pressley (Massachusetts) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) took in rental income as Covid blighted the land. In 2021, Pressley’s rental income surged by “up to $117,500”.As for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, perhaps the most visible Squad member, Lewis raps her for appearing at the 2021 Met gala wearing a backless gown emblazoned with the words “Tax the Rich”. AOC’s Devil Wears Prada moment, Lewis says, “underscores how far-removed today’s Democrats are from being the party of the working class”.It was not something Eleanor Roosevelt would have done.“Such stunts feed the sense that our public servants are indulging in hypocrisy and taking advantage of the system,” Lewis writes.Elsewhere, Lewis describes Greg Gianforte “allegedly body-slamming” Ben Jacobs, then of the Guardian, during a House campaign in Montana in 2018. Here, Lewis goes easy on Gianforte, who is now governor. Gianforte pleaded guilty, a fact Lewis acknowledges. With that plea, the Republican’s lack of self-control went beyond the realm of “alleged” and into established fact.Filthy Rich Politicians closes with a series of proposals to boost confidence in the system. Lewis calls for a ban on stock trading by members of Congress and their families, heightened transparency and increased congressional pay. The prospects for his proposals appear uncertain.Last week, Josh Hawley of Missouri – for whom, like Cruz and many other Republicans, Lewis’s wife has worked – and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York introduced the Ban Stock Trading for Government Officials Act. The public overwhelmingly supports the substance of the legislation. Whether Congress steps up remains to be seen.“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “They are different from you and me.”
      Filthy Rich Politicians is published in the US by Hachette More

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      Into the Bright Sunshine: how Hubert Humphrey joined the civil rights fight

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      Seventy-five years ago this month, at a fractious Philadelphia convention, Hubert Humphrey delivered a famous challenge: “The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”In a new book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, Samuel G Freedman helps explain the influences and experiences that led Humphrey, then a 37-year-old midwestern mayor, to take on segregationists in his own party.Humphrey won passage of a bold civil rights platform, triggering southern delegates to nominate Strom Thurmond as a “Dixiecrat” candidate for president. The same year, Humphrey won a race for Senate from Minnesota, launching a national career that culminated in his nomination for president, and defeat by Richard Nixon, in 1968.Freedman describes how Humphrey, who was born in South Dakota, saw Jim Crow up close as a graduate student at Louisiana State University.“Given the deliberate and scrupulous erasure of Black people from LSU, it required not flagrant bigotry but mere passivity for a white student to accept segregation as something like natural law,” Freedman writes. “Humphrey’s eyes were already too open for such obliviousness.”A sociology professor and German émigré, Rudolf Heberle, had a particularly important role in shaping Humphrey’s outlook. As Freedman recounts: “The Nazis’ regime of murderous extremism came to power, in Heberle’s analysis, not by a coup from the armed fringe but thanks to ‘mass support … from middle layers of society’. Reasonable people were entirely capable of acting in morally unreasonable ways and rationalizing away their actions. Heberle had seen and heard it during his fieldwork.”Heberle was suggesting that “the Jew in Germany was the Black in America”.After LSU, Humphrey returned to Minneapolis, where two locals – one Jewish, one Black – helped stiffen his resolve: Sam Scheiner, an attorney who led the Minnesota Jewish Council, and Cecil Newman, founder of the Minneapolis Spokesman newspaper.“There were people from throughout [Humphrey’s] life who recognized something in him – skills, yes, but something larger, a kind of destiny – more than he recognized it in himself,” Freedman writes. “He was their vessel and their voice, the vessel in which to pour their passion for a more just America and the voice to amplify that passion insistently enough to affect a nation whose soul was very much at stake.”Minneapolis’s track record on race has been in the news again. Last month, the US justice department said the 2020 police murder of George Floyd was part of a “pattern or practice” of excessive force and unlawful discrimination against African Americans.Nearly 80 years earlier, Humphrey tried to combat racism and antisemitism in the city.Minneapolis was infamous for antisemitism. In the 1930s, Freedman points out, a homegrown fascist group, the Silver Legion of America, called for “returning American Blacks to slavery and disenfranchising, segregating and finally sterilizing American Jews”. In 1946, the editor of the Nation, Carey McWilliams, called the city “the capital of antisemites”.After running for mayor in 1943, Humphrey mounted another run in 1945. In the year American soldiers defeated Hitler’s forces in Europe, gangs attacked and robbed Jews in Minneapolis, sometimes yelling “Heil, Hitler!” Local leaders were ineffective. But Humphrey, Freedman writes, “plainly shared the Jewish community’s belief that the problem went way deeper than mere hoodlums. For the first time in Minneapolis’s decades-long history of racism and antisemitism, a political candidate was placing those issues at the center of a campaign.”Humphrey offered a five-point plan, including the creation of an organization to combat bigotry. He won. Two months into his term, he was confronted with the wrongful arrest of two Black women. Newman, the Black newspaper publisher, called Humphrey at home. The mayor ordered the women released and the charges dropped.Later, Humphrey won passage of an anti-discrimination law and established a council on human relations, to investigate discrimination against racial and religious minorities. For his efforts, he faced an assassination attempt and threats from Nazis. But Humphrey turned the city around.“Minneapolis stood as virtually the only city in America where a wronged job applicant could count on the government as an ally,” Freedman writes.Humphrey used such work as a springboard, championing civil rights for the nation.“My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late,” he said at the 1948 convention, adding: “This is the issue of the 20th century.”In a 2010 documentary, Hubert H Humphrey: The Art of the Possible, former president Jimmy Carter, who was 23 when Humphrey spoke in Philadelphia, called the speech “earth-shattering, expressing condemnation of the racial segregation that had been in existence ever since the end of the civil war. And he was the only one that was courageous enough to do so”.When Humphrey got to Washington, he found himself ostracized by southern Democrats who dominated the Senate. As he recalled, “After all, I had been the destroyer of the Democratic party, the enemy of the south. Hubert Humphrey, the [N-word] lover.’ … I never felt so lonesome and so unwanted in all my life as I did in those first few weeks and months.”But he continued to champion equal rights, an effort that culminated, as majority whip, with breaking a southern filibuster to help win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Humphrey became vice-president, to Lyndon Johnson, then ran for president himself. But “for the rest of his life,” Freedman writes, he “kept the tally sheet on which he had marked the senators’ vote on cloture, the procedure that ended the filibuster and brought the bill to its successful enactment.”
      Into the Bright Sunshine is published in the US by Oxford University Press
      Frederic J Frommer is the author of books including You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals More

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      White House rules out Joe Biden pardon for son Hunter

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      Joe Biden will not pardon his son Hunter on tax- and gun-related charges, the White House said on Thursday.At a briefing, the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, was asked: “From a presidential perspective, is there any possibility that the president would end up pardoning his son?”“No,” Jean-Pierre replied.Pressed, she said: “I just said no. I answered.”In court in Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday, Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to two tax charges, both misdemeanours. He had been expected to plead guilty as part of a deal with federal prosecutors also including a pre-trial diversion program on the guns charge, a felony.In the event, a question from the judge about the scope of the deal led to its delay.Republicans claim Hunter Biden’s business affairs, and personal problems including public struggles with addiction, show Joe Biden to be corrupt and worthy of impeachment.Rightwingers have long cried foul over the younger Biden’s treatment by federal authorities.The pardon power is established in article 2 of the US constitution, which says the president “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment”.The use of the pardon power has become increasingly controversial, presidents including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump having bestowed pardons and acts of clemency on donors and supporters.Trump was widely reported to have considered whether he could pardon himself, on issues including alleged collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 election.Trump also reportedly explored the idea of giving pre-emptive pardons to family members, another step he did not ultimately take.Now, Trump faces 71 criminal indictments and the prospect of more. As he seeks the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, most observers expect his lawyers to seek to draw out such legal battles in the hope he or another Republican in the White House will seize the pardon power.State-level indictments, however, are not subject to presidential pardons. In New York, Trump faces 34 criminal charges over hush-money payments to a porn star during the 2016 election. In Georgia, he is expected to be indicted over his election subversion in 2020.On Wednesday, Jean-Pierre told reporters Hunter Biden was “a private citizen”, and called his legal problems “a personal matter for him”.“As we have said, the president [and] the first lady, they love their son, and they support him as he continues to rebuild his life. This case was handled independently, as all of you know, by the justice department under the leadership of a prosecutor appointed by the former president.”Biden has used the pardon power sparingly, focusing largely on convictions for offenses relating to drugs.In four years in office, Trump issued 143 pardons and 94 commutations. Many were highly controversial, including pardons for his advisers Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort.The Pew Research Center, however, points out that an analysis of justice department data shows Trump “used his executive clemency power less frequently than nearly every other president since the turn of the 20th century”. More

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      Hunter Biden pleads not guilty to tax and gun charges amid uncertainty over previous plea agreement – as it happened

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      From 4h agoThe president’s son had been expected to formally agree with federal prosecutors on a resolution to two tax charges and one gun charge brought against him. Instead, he pleaded not guilty to the counts, after a judge raised issues with the deal.Here’s the New York Times with an explanation of the surprise turn of events:
      Judge Maryellen Noreika has delayed a decision on whether to accept the plea agreement between federal prosecutors and Hunter Biden — demanding that the two sides make changes in the deal clarifying her role and insert language that limits the broad immunity from prosecution offered to Biden on his business dealings. Biden’s lawyers estimated it would take about two weeks.
      After a grueling three-hour hearing, Hunter Biden entered a plea of not guilty on the tax charges, which he will reverse if the two sides redo their agreement to the judge’s satisfaction.
      This blog has closed. Read more about the Hunter Biden story here:Hunter Biden went to a federal courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware to formally accept an agreement with prosecutors, which was expected to resolve the long-running investigations into his conduct. But in a surprise move, the presiding judge turned down the deal and ordered the two parties to make changes, delaying the resolution of the case. It was also revealed that federal investigators are continuing a separate inquiry into his business activities – a fact welcomed by the GOP, which has been looking to prove that Joe Biden and his son are corrupt. Back in Washington DC, Republican lawmakers aggressively questioned homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who may soon be the target of impeachment, while elsewhere, lawmakers tried to determine if the US government has found evidence of aliens.Here’s what else happened today:
      Mayorkas defended his handling of the southern border from criticism by the GOP, saying his security strategy “is working”.
      The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates to their highest level in 22 years in their ongoing campaign to stop inflation.
      Rudy Giuliani admitted that statements he made about two Georgia election workers alleging they perpetrated fraud in the 2020 election were false.
      At the last minute, a top House Republican tried to derail the plea agreement federal prosecutors reached with Hunter Biden.
      Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, briefly appeared unable to speak at a press conference. He had suffered a concussion in April.
      As chair of the House oversight committee, James Comer has led the campaign of investigations into Joe Biden’s administration, and particularly his son Hunter Biden.In a statement released after the surprise in today’s court hearing, which resulted in a federal judge rejecting, for now, a plea deal between Hunter and federal prosecutors, Comer said the agreement should be taken off the table for good:
      Today District Judge Noreika did the right thing by refusing to rubberstamp Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal. But let’s be clear: Hunter’s sweetheart plea deal belongs in the trash. Last week we heard from two credible IRS whistleblowers about the Department of Justice’s politicization and misconduct in the Biden criminal investigation. Today, the Department of Justice revealed Hunter Biden is under investigation for being a foreign agent.
      The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly has more on today’s developments in Hunter Biden’s long-running legal troubles:Reporters on the scene shared more details about the health scare involving Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican.CNN says an aide to the leader downplayed the difficulty he suddenly experienced in speaking to the press earlier today, nothing he later took their questions:Senate Republican conference chair John Barrasso later said he was “concerned” about McConnell, but did not think his health was deteriorating:We have just passed hour five of homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s appearance before the House judiciary committee, where, as the Guardian’s Mary Yang and Joan E Greve report, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly made clear they believe he is failing at his job and should be impeached. Here is their rundown of the hearing so far:Republican lawmakers grilled Alejandro Mayorkas, the embattled US secretary of homeland security, during a House judiciary committee oversight hearing on Wednesday.Mayorkas, who has been the target of a GOP-led congressional investigation over his handling of the US-Mexico border, faced a series of tough questions regarding his tenure as head of the department, which broadly oversees US immigration and border policies. The hearing came as some House Republicans have threatened to impeach Mayorkas, the first Latino and immigrant to head the Department of Homeland Security, over his alleged mismanagement of the border.Mayorkas offered a pre-emptive rebuttal to Republicans’ attacks in his opening statement, noting that unlawful crossings at the southern border have decreased by more than half compared with the peak before the end of the pandemic-era policy known as Title 42.The health of senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is back under scrutiny after an alarming moment during a Republican press conference this afternoon in which he abruptly stopped speaking and had to be led away.Video of the incident was posted to Twitter by NBC congressional reporter Frank Thorp, who said the Kentucky senator, 81, “appeared to be unable to restart talking”.McConnell was hospitalized in April after suffering concussion when he tripped and fell during a private dinner at a hotel in Washington DC. In 2019, he tripped and fell at his home in Kentucky, suffering a shoulder fracture.Thorp said that McConnell was led off by his friend and colleague John Barrasso, Republican senator for Wyoming, and later returned to watch the conclusion of the press conference.Asked what had happened, McConnell reportedly said: “I’m fine”.The US Federal Reserve raised interest rates to a 22-year high on Wednesday as it continued its fight against rising inflation, my colleague Dominic Rushe writes.The decision to increase rates by a quarter-percentage point to a range of 5.25% to 5.5% comes after the Fed paused its rate-rising cycle last month.US inflation has now declined for 12 straight months and is currently running at an annual rate of 3%, down from over 9% in June last year. The Fed has raised rates from near zero in an attempt to cool the economy and bring prices down.The US economy has remained robust despite the 11 rate rises the Fed has now implemented – its most aggressive rate-rising cycle in 40 years. Hiring has slowed but remains strong and the unemployment rate is still close to a record low.Read the full report here:Republicans are very pleased that a federal judge rejected Hunter Biden’s plea deal today.Here’s the view from an attorney for the GOP-controlled House committee that made a last-minute attempt to disrupt the deal:The Biden administration has generally avoided the topic of Hunter Biden, and at her ongoing briefing to reporters, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre preempted all questions about the president’s son:The president’s son had been expected to formally agree with federal prosecutors on a resolution to two tax charges and one gun charge brought against him. Instead, he pleaded not guilty to the counts, after a judge raised issues with the deal.Here’s the New York Times with an explanation of the surprise turn of events:
      Judge Maryellen Noreika has delayed a decision on whether to accept the plea agreement between federal prosecutors and Hunter Biden — demanding that the two sides make changes in the deal clarifying her role and insert language that limits the broad immunity from prosecution offered to Biden on his business dealings. Biden’s lawyers estimated it would take about two weeks.
      After a grueling three-hour hearing, Hunter Biden entered a plea of not guilty on the tax charges, which he will reverse if the two sides redo their agreement to the judge’s satisfaction.
      Hunter Biden has pleaded not guilty to federal tax and gun charges, after a plea deal that was intended to resolve the allegations fell apart in court, Reuters reports.The plea came after the federal judge presiding over the hearing in Wilmington, Delaware said she needed more time to evaluate the deal reached by the president’s son with prosecutors. Prior to the hearing, Biden had agreed to admit guilt to the tax charges, and avoid the gun charge as long as he satisfied certain conditions as part of the deal with the government. More