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      White House says Republicans have ‘zero credibility’ over Biden documents case – as it happened

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      Republicans are continuing to pressure Joe Biden over the classified documents found at his residence and former office, while Democrats are telling anyone who will listen that there are significant differences between the president’s case and that of Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the White House is demanding Kevin McCarthy release the details of agreements he made with conservative Republicans to win their support for his House speaker bid, arguing he has empowered extremists.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      The White House attempted to explain why it didn’t announce the discovery of classified documents in Biden’s possession when it was first made in November.
      Trump may be the big winner of the kerfuffle over Biden’s classified documents, especially if it undermines the investigation into the government secrets found at Mar-a-Lago.
      Daniel Goldman, who served as the Democrats’ lead prosecutor of Trump during his 2019 impeachment, will play a major role in defending Biden from the GOP’s investigation campaign.
      State Democratic parties are revolting against Biden’s plan to shake up the primary calendar for presidential nominations.
      George Santos lied his way into office, but he will nonetheless serve on committees in the House, McCarthy said.
      It’s going to be a tough couple of months for Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary who has become the subject of near-daily criticism from Republicans for his handling of the surge of migrants at the country’s southern border.The GOP has already vowed to call him repeatedly before the House, and will probably use the hearings as another cudgel against the Biden administration. Today, CNN reports that several top Republicans are ready to impeach the secretary – something that hasn’t happened to a cabinet secretary since 1876:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The House Judiciary Committee, which would have jurisdiction over an impeachment resolution, is prepared to move ahead with formal proceedings if there appears to be a consensus within the GOP conference, according to a GOP source directly familiar with the matter. The first impeachment resolution introduced by House Republicans already has picked up support, including from a member of the GOP leadership team.
      A GOP source said the first Judiciary Committee hearing on the border could come later this month or early February.
      One top chairman is already sounding supportive of the move, a sign of how the idea of impeaching President Joe Biden’s Cabinet secretary has moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the conference.
      ‘If anybody is a prime candidate for impeachment in this town, it’s Mayorkas,’ Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told CNN.But not all Republicans are on board, with several lawmakers worrying the public won’t see the need for the effort, which is sure to die in the Democratic-controlled Senate anyway. Here’s Republican Dusty Johnson’s thoughts on the matter, to CNN:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Clearly, the management of the Southern border has been incompetent … That is not the threshold in the Constitution for impeachment – it’s high crimes and misdemeanors. … I would want to think about the legal standard the Constitution has set out – and whether or not that’s been met.Mario Diaz-Balart was of a similar mind:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Has he been totally dishonest to people? Yes. Has he failed in his job miserably? Yes … Are those grounds for impeachment? I don’t know.For all the bombast of Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans in the House, keep this fact in mind: their margin of control is only four seats. If the party wants to maintain its grip on the chamber for the next two years, the GOP simply cannot afford to have any of their lawmakers leave office.That said, not all Republicans were happy with the deals that McCarthy cut to win the House speakership, and Puck reports that one lawmaker is particularly aggrieved over the Californian’s bargaining. That would be Vern Buchanan, who was passed over as chair of the tax-writing ways and means committee in favor of Jason Smith, an ally of the speaker.With no committee to helm, Puck reports that the 71-year-old Buchanan could decide that now’s the time to retire. According to their story, he already told McCarthy what he thought of his decision to promote Smith rather than himself on the House floor:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Just how angry was he? Well, a source on the House floor during the vote told me that while McCarthy was gaveling down the votes, Buchanan walked up to McCarthy and said, ‘You fucked me, I know it was you, you whipped against me.’ He then proceeded to chew out McCarthy’s deputy chief of staff for floor operations, John Leganski. It was shocking to see such fury from Buchanan, who’s known for being mild mannered. Indeed, I heard that the tirade was so heated that the Speaker’s security detail stepped in with a light touch. (McCarthy’s spokesperson Matt Sparks disputed this detail saying, ‘at no point did anyone have to step in.’ A spokesperson for Buchanan declined to comment.)The House hasn’t convened its committees yet, and thus Democrats and Republicans have taken their squabble over the investigations into Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s possession of classified material to the next logical venue: Twitter.Jim Jordan, chair of the House judiciary committee, fired the latest salvo by reiterating his latest talking points about the investigation into Biden’s documents:Why was President Trump’s home raided but not President Biden’s? Why did the FBI take pictures of President Trump’s so-called classified documents but not President Biden’s?Americans are tired of the double standard.— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) January 17, 2023
      To which Daniel Goldman, a Democrat who has lined up to be one of Biden’s chief defenders in the House and served as the lead counsel when Democrats impeached Trump in 2019, fired back:1) because Trump obstructed justice by failing to comply with a subpoena. Biden volunteered all docs. 2) It’s standard procedure for the FBI to photograph everything they find during a search warrant. In the future, feel free to reach out to me directly with your questions. https://t.co/05JVjbNCgI— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) January 17, 2023
      And before you “investigate the FBI” to obstruct their investigations into you and others, you might want to brush up on the FBI Manual of Investigative Operations and Guidelines (MIOG) so you don’t ask any more dumb questions.— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) January 17, 2023
      Arizona’s US senator Kyrsten Sinema, who recently left the Democratic party and declared herself an independent, drew political fire from critics Tuesday after defending her congressional chamber’s filibuster rule at Switzerland’s Davos World Economic Forum.Among other remarks Tuesday, Sinema reportedly said the Senate filibuster was the “basis of the productivity for some incredible achievements” in Congress during Joe Biden’s first two years in the White House.Both Democrats and Republicans have used the rule, which allows a relatively small group of senator to block action by the majority. Sinema outraged Democratic supporters before she left the party in December when she opposed filibuster reform to pave the way for the passage of voting rights legislation.A group named “Replace Sinema Because Arizona Deserves Better” on Tuesday issued a statement arguing that the first-term senator preferred to be at Davos rubbing elbows with “billionaires and Wall Street execs” as well as others belonging to the global elite rather than “doing her job” in her state or on Capitol Hill.Meanwhile, one journalist snapped and tweeted out a photograph of her appearing to speak warmly with former Donald Trump White House spokesperson Anthony Scaramucci and ex-US House speaker Paul Ryan, both figures in the Republican party. The tweet referred to both Ryan and Scaramucci – Republican figures and Democratic opponents – as “old pals”.Sinema, like centrist Democrat Joe Manchin (who was alongside her on stage at Davos), has often taken stands that undermined key Biden administration agenda items along with other left-leaning interests in the nation’s capital. Her defection from the party came shortly after Raphael Warnock’s victory over Republican challenger Herschel Walker in Georgia left the Democrats thinking they had a clear one-seat majority in the Senate.There has been no indication that Sinema will caucus with Republicans, and she has said she doesn’t intend to. Either way, when the Senate was split 50-50 for two years beginning in 2021, Vice-President Kamala Harris broke ties in the Democrats’ favor.The White House on Tuesday defended its public handling of revelations that classified documents were discovered at Joe Biden’s home and the president’s private office. In a call with reporters, White House spokesperson Ian Sams said the decision not to immediately inform the public of the discovery of sensitive records in November was “consistent with safeguarding the integrity of the investigation”.“We understand that there’s a tension between the need to be cooperative with an ongoing DOJ investigation, and rightful demands for additional public information,” Sams said. “And so we’re trying to strike that balance.” He pointed reporters to a line in a statement released by the president’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer, after the discovery of additional documents, which stated that “regular ongoing public disclosures also pose the risk that, as further information develops, answers provided on this periodic basis may be incomplete.”The explanation did little to satisfy Republicans – or reporters – who have repeatedly pressed the White House on why it was not transparent with the public when the documents were first found at the president’s private Washington office on 2 November. On 2o December, Biden’s personal lawyers found “a small number of potential records bearing classified markings” in the garage of the president’s Delaware home. Five more pages of materials were found at his home on Thursday. ‘Rampant hypocrisy’After the first discovery two months ago, the White House said it “immediately”notified the National Archives and Records Administration, which then informed the US justice department.Sams repeated that the White House was cooperating with the investigation and would continue to do so, drawing a sharp distinction with the way Biden’s presidential predecessor Donald Trump handled sensitive documents. Trump refused to turn over troves of government documents that he took with him to his Mar-a-lago estate, even after being subpoenaed. Agents dispatched to his home to retrieve the materials, which Trump said he had the right to keep, and even argued without evidence that he had declassified. Sams accused Republicans of fomenting “faking outrage about disclosure and transparency” and “rampant hypocrisy.” ‘Fake outrage’He seized on comments by the newly installed Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, who has promised to aggressively investigate Biden’s handling of the documents. In a CNN interview this weekend, the Republican said: “At the end of the day, my biggest concern isn’t the classified documents, to be honest with you. My concern is there’s such a discrepancy between how President Trump was treated … versus Joe Biden.” Asked last year about Trump’s handling of the documents, Comer, Sams noted, said it “didn’t amount to a hill of beans.” “House Republicans lose credibility when they engage in fake outrage about an issue that they’re clearly pursuing only for partisan gain,” Sams said. Sams said the White House was reviewing “a few letters” from the House Oversight committee related to Biden’s retention of classified documents and will make a “determination about our response in due course.”Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has vowed to investigate both the classified documents found at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and at Joe Biden’s properties.But his sympathies were clearly with Trump. The Republican leader argued that the former president had been treated more harshly than Biden, which “just does not seem fair.”“This is why the American people get so upset and distrust their government when they see that the law is not applied equally,” he continued, accusing Biden of “hypocrisy” for not making the document discovery public before the November midterms.Here’s C-SPAN with his full comments:.@SpeakerMcCarthy (R-CA) on Biden and Trump documents probes: “It’s not a fair process when you equalize this out, and that is what is wrong with the system.” https://t.co/wY8OFxGe89 pic.twitter.com/FZ8vlO1aDZ— CSPAN (@cspan) January 17, 2023
      George Santos will be seated on committees in the House, even though the New York Republican admitted to lying about his qualifications for office, House speaker Kevin McCarthy said.While he did not say on which committees the freshman lawmaker will serve, the comment underscores that Republican leadership is disinclined to take any major steps to exclude Santos, who is facing an array of investigations into his admitted dishonesty on the campaign trail.Here are McCarthy’s comments, courtesy of C-Span:.@SpeakerMcCarthy (R-CA) on Rep. George Santos (R-NY): “He’ll get seated on committees.” https://t.co/77obCJittk pic.twitter.com/Oo2JIBf9Cc— CSPAN (@cspan) January 17, 2023
      Republicans are continuing to pressure Joe Biden over the classified documents found at his residence and former office, while Democrats are working to point out the significant differences between the president’s case and that of Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the White House is demanding Kevin McCarthy release the details of the agreements he made with conservative Republican to win their support for his House speaker bid.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Trump may be the big winner of the kerfuffle over Biden’s classified documents, as it undermines the investigation into the government secrets found at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
      The House Democrats’ lead prosecutor of Trump during his first impeachment will play a major role in defending Biden from the GOP’s investigation campaign.
      State Democratic parties are revolting against Biden’s plan to shake up the primary calendar for presidential nominations.
      In Florida, the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports that US authorities are turning back more and more migrants amid a surge in arrivals:Authorities in Florida have been turning back growing numbers of undocumented Cubans and Haitians arriving by sea in recent weeks as more attempt to seek haven in the US.Local US residents on jet skis have been helping some of the migrants who attempted to swim ashore after making arduous, life-threateningand days-long journeys in makeshift vessels.Joe Biden’s turn to the center over immigration comes as Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, attempts to plot his own strategy for handling a sensitive situation in the south of his state, calling out national guard troops in a hardline approach.US turns back growing number of undocumented people after arduous sea journeysRead moreTo the GOP, the White House’s demand for answers from Kevin McCarthy is little more than a distraction from the unfolding investigation into Joe Biden’s classified documents.Here’s Republican operative Matt Whitlock:The communications wizards at the Biden White House right now: https://t.co/dT9swCaPVc pic.twitter.com/hTKj4qIntv— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) January 17, 2023 More

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      Democratic plans to overhaul primary process hit a fresh snag

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      Democratic plans to overhaul primary process hit a fresh snagFor very different reasons, New Hampshire and Georgia remain obstacles to Joe Biden’s bid for equity The Democratic party’s rationale for shaking up its presidential primary process was fairly straightforward: the current system is dominated by two predominantly white states who vote first, giving people of color little say in choosing the potential next president.Facing fuming New Hampshire officials, however, and a Georgia Republican party happy to meddle in Democrats’ plans, the Joe Biden-led effort to make things more equitable now looks increasingly in peril.New Hampshire, which has held the first presidential primary for decades, is proving itself particularly unyielding, raising the prospect of a rogue vote taking place in the state.The Democratic National Committee (DNC) approved a new primary schedule in December 2022, which would see the most significant changes to the way a potential president is selected in decades.Iowa Republicans threaten to move caucuses if Democrats change scheduleRead moreUnder the new plan, Iowa – which holds its vote under a complex caucus system – and New Hampshire, the two states which have led off the voting since the modern-day presidential nominating process began in the 1970s, would be nudged down the calendar – with Iowa in particular punted way down the schedule, following a shambolic counting process in 2020.Instead, Democrats want South Carolina, a more racially diverse state than Iowa and New Hampshire, to have first say in whom the Democratic party should nominate for president. The proposal would see New Hampshire vote a week later, along with Nevada, while Georgia – another racially diverse state, and one which was crucial to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and Democrats’ successful holding of the Senate in 2022 – would go next.The plan hit a snag last week, however, when New Hampshire and Georgia asked for more time to meet the DNC’s requirements. The committee said it remained hopeful the new calendar would take effect in 2024, and it plans a full vote on the schedule next month, but it is clear that officials in New Hampshire and Georgia have other ideas.David Scanlan, who as New Hampshire’s secretary of state is in charge of selecting the date of the primary, suggested he would move the vote forward anyway.He told WMUR9: “I’m going to wait to set the date. There is a lot that can happen between now and next fall,” Scanlan said.“We have the luxury of just being patient and watching. We’ll see how the landscape develops and then at the right time we will announce the date of our primary.”Part of the issue is that New Hampshire has a law that states that the New Hampshire primary should be held on the second Tuesday in March, or “on a date selected by the secretary of state which is seven days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election”.The date of the primary has been moved forward several times over the years to preserve New Hampshire’s “first in the nation” status. In 2008, Michigan and Florida moved their primary dates forward, in defiance of the DNC’s official calendar, and party bosses reacted by cutting the number of delegates assigned to each state. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton agreed not to campaign in either state, although the issue would become contentious when the DNC later decided to grant Michigan and Florida delegates after all.But as well as being law, at least some of the furore is about a desire to cling on to the first-primary-in-the-nation status, said Dante Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire.“It’s really much more about political culture, and it’s about political elites really enjoying their moment in the spotlight,” Scala said.“They’re exceedingly protective; they’re exceedingly reluctant to give it up. They love the access that the primary brings in terms of access to candidates. Every party activist, Democratic or Republican, seemingly has a story to tell about their rubbing elbows with candidate X, or having a picture taken with such a person, all that sort of thing.”Democrats in New Hampshire have reacted angrily to the new plan. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, New Hampshire’s Democratic senators, skipped an annual congressional ball at the White House in December in protest, while Raymond Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic party, has described the plan as “unrealistic and unattainable”.In Georgia, the DNC faces a different problem. The state is led by Republicans, including Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who sets the primary date. Raffensberger has said he wants both primaries on the same day, and the Republican party has already said that its first four states will be in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.At the moment, the scheduling could be theoretical. Biden has indicated he will run in 2024, making it unlikely there would be a serious Democratic primary. But the party is also keen to shake up the schedule in 2028 and beyond – possibly with a different state order each election cycle – meaning New Hampshire’s days of going first could be doomed either way.Scala and Caitlin Jewitt, a political scientist at Virginia Tech university, said it was unlikely New Hampshire would back down, raising the prospect of an unwanted – by party leaders – first primary in 2024.Should that happen, the Democratic party could ask candidates not to campaign in New Hampshire, and not put their names on the ballot in the state. That would require the candidates to agree, but with the Republican primary taking place early in the state – something which will bring thousands of members of the media and national attention – it could be hard to resist.Jewitt said the DNC could also strip New Hampshire of its delegates, who cast votes for their chosen candidate at the party’s pre-presidential convention, effectively rendering the primary redundant.“That is supposed to be a punishment: you won’t have as much influence on the outcome, but it has never been very effective to stage because New Hampshire’s influence has never been that they have a large number of delegates and they can influence the outcome at the national convention.“Their influence has always been the media attention and the candidate attention and having this first-in-the-nation primary.”TopicsDemocratsUS politicsJoe BidenfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Biden honors Martin Luther King Jr with sermon: ‘His legacy shows us the way’

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      Biden honors Martin Luther King Jr with sermon: ‘His legacy shows us the way’ President gave sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and spoke about the need to protect democracy Joe Biden marked what would have been Martin Luther King Jr’s 94th birthday with a sermon on Sunday at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, celebrating the legacy of the civil rights leader while speaking about the urgent need to protect US democracy.There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald TrumpRead moreBiden said he was “humbled” to become the first sitting president to give the Sunday sermon at King’s church, also describing the experience as “intimidating”.“I believe Dr King’s life and legacy show us the way and we should pay attention,” Biden said. He later noted he was wearing rosary beads his son, Beau, wore as he died.“I doubt whether any of us would have thought during Dr King’s time that literally the institutional structures of this country might collapse, like we’re seeing in Brazil, we’re seeing in other parts of the world,” Biden said.In a sermon that lasted around 25 minutes, the president spoke about the continued need to protect democracy. Unlike some of his other speeches on the topic, Biden did not mention Donald Trump or Republicans directly.The GOP has embraced new voting restrictions, including in Georgia, and defended the former president’s role in the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.“Nothing is guaranteed in our democracy,” Biden said. “We know there’s a lot of work that has to continue on economic justice, civil rights, voting rights and protecting our democracy.”He praised Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who noted at a ceremony after she was confirmed it had taken just one generation in her family to go from segregation to the US supreme court.“Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the south who will do justly and love mercy,” Biden said, quoting King.Biden preached in Atlanta a little over a year after he gave a forceful speech calling for the Senate to get rid of the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation, in order to pass sweeping voting reforms.“I’m tired of being quiet,” the president said in that speech.A Democratic voting rights bill named after John Lewis, the late civil rights leader and Georgia congressman, would have made election day a national holiday, ensured access to early voting and mail-in ballots and enabled the justice department to intervene in states with a history of voter interference.But that effort collapsed when two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, refused to get rid of the filibuster. Sinema is now an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.Since then, there has been no federal action on voting rights. In March 2021, Biden issued an executive order telling federal agencies to do what they could do improve opportunities for voter registration.The speech also comes as the US supreme court considers a case that could significantly curtail Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that was one of the crowning achievements of King and other activists. A ruling is expected by June.Biden’s failure to bolster voting right protections, a central campaign pledge, is one of his biggest disappointments in office. The task is even steeper now Republicans control the House. In advance of Biden’s visit to Atlanta, White House officials said he was committed to advocating for meaningful voting rights action.“The president will speak on a number of issues at the church, including how important it is that we have access to our democracy,” senior adviser Keisha Lance Bottoms said.Bottoms, who was mayor of Atlanta from 2018 to 2022, also said “you can’t come to Atlanta and not acknowledge the role that the civil rights movement and Dr King played in where we are in the history of our country”.This is a delicate moment for Biden. On Thursday the attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced the appointment of a special counsel to investigate how Biden handled classified documents after leaving the vice-presidency in 2017. The White House on Saturday revealed that additional classified records were found at Biden’s home near Wilmington, Delaware.Biden was invited to Ebenezer, where King was co-pastor from 1960 until he was assassinated in 1968, by Senator Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor. Like many battleground state Democrats in 2022, Warnock kept his distance from Biden as the the president’s approval rating lagged. But with Biden beginning to turn his attention to an expected 2024 re-election effort, Georgia can expect plenty of attention.Warnock told ABC’s This Week: “I’m honored to present the president of the United States there where he will deliver the message and where he will sit in the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr, Georgia’s greatest son, arguably the greatest American, who reminds us that we are tied in a single garment of destiny, that this is not about Democrat and Republican, red, yellow, brown, black and white. We’re all in it together.”In 2020, Biden won Georgia as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Black votes made up much of the Democratic electorate. Turning out Black voters in those states will be essential to Biden’s 2024 hopes.The White House has tried to promote Biden’s agenda in minority communities, citing efforts to encourage states to take equity into account under the $1tn infrastructure bill. The administration also has acted to end sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses, scrapping a policy widely seen as racist.The administration highlights Biden’s work to diversify the judiciary, including his appointment of Jackson as the first Black woman on the supreme court and the confirmation of 11 Black women judges to federal appeals courts – more than under all previous presidents.King fueled passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Members of his family attended Biden’s sermon. The president planned to be in Washington on Monday, to speak at the National Action Network’s annual breakfast, held on the MLK holiday.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS voting rightsUS politicsCivil rights movementMartin Luther KingRacenewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans accuse Biden of hypocrisy over classified documents discoveries

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      Republicans accuse Biden of hypocrisy over classified documents discoveriesHouse oversight chair requests Delaware visitor logs as Democrats stress difference from Trump classified records case Republicans pounced on the discovery on Saturday of more classified documents at Joe Biden’s residence, accusing the president of hypocrisy and questioning why the records were not brought to light earlier.There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald TrumpRead moreBiden lawyers have discovered at least 20 classified documents at his residence outside Wilmington, Delaware, and at an office in Washington used after he left the Obama administration, in which he was vice-president.It is not yet clear what exactly the documents are, but Biden lawyers have said they immediately turned over the documents to the National Archives. This week, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed a special counsel, former US attorney Robert Hur, to look into the matter.The materials are already a political headache for Biden. When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to obtain classified material the former president kept, Biden said: “How could that possibly happen? How anyone could be that irresponsible?”On Sunday, Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, told ABC’s This Week: “It just just reminds me of that old adage, ‘If you live in a glass house don’t throw stones.’ And I think President Biden was caught throwing stones.”James Comer of Kentucky, the new chair of the House oversight committee, told CNN’s State of the Union: “While he was doing this, he knew very well that he himself had possession of classified documents so the hypocrisy here is great.”There is no evidence Biden was aware he had the documents. His lawyers have said they were misplaced.Comer also noted Biden’s attorneys discovered the classified material on 2 November, days before the midterm elections, and questioned why the discovery hadn’t been made public earlier.“Why didn’t we hear about this on 2 November, when the first batch of classified documents were discovered?” he said.Comer has requested visitor logs for Biden’s Delaware residence from January 2021 to the present as well as additional communications about the search for documents, CNN reported.Marc Short, who was chief of staff to Mike Pence in the Trump administration, told NBC’s Meet the Press: “Why’d they hold it? Why didn’t anybody talk about it? Is it because of the midterm elections they didn’t want to interfere with?”Even though two special counsels are looking into how both Trump and Biden handled classified material, there are key differences between the cases.Trump had hundreds of classified files and rebuffed government efforts to return them. The White House has said the 20 or so Biden documents were inadvertently misplaced and turned over as soon as they were discovered.Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, told CNN: “We were delighted to learn that the president’s lawyers, the moment they found out about the documents that day, turned them over to the National Archives, and ultimately to the Department of Justice.“That is a very different posture than what we saw with Donald Trump. He was fighting for a period of more than eight months to not turn over hundreds of missing documents that the archives was asking about.“There are some people who are trying to compare having a government document that should no longer be in your possession to inciting a violent insurrection against the government of the United States,” Raskin added, referring to the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress Trump incited after losing the 2020 election to Biden.“And those are obviously completely different things. That’s apples and oranges.”The California Democrat Adam Schiff, the former chair of the House intelligence committee, praised the appointment of a special counsel in the Biden matter and said he wanted Congress to do its own intelligence assessment of the Biden and Trump materials.But Debbie Stabenow, a Democratic senator from Michigan, acknowledged that the discovery of additional documents on Saturday was “certainly embarrassing” and that Republicans would use it as a distraction.“It’s embarrassing that you would find a small number of documents, certainly not on purpose,” she told NBC.Biden’s lawyers, she said “don’t think [this] is the right thing and they have been moving to correct it … it’s one of those moments that obviously they wish hadn’t happened.“But what I’m most concerned about, this is the kind of things that the Republicans love.”TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS national securityRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      The Fight of His Life review: Joe Biden, White House winner

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      ReviewThe Fight of His Life review: Joe Biden, White House winner Chris Whipple’s assured account of the president’s first two years in power after beating Trump is fascinating and timely“Maybe we don’t suck as much as people thought.”That was the email the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, sent to Chris Whipple at 1.16am after the 2022 midterms, as it became clear Democrats were likely to hold the Senate and lose far fewer seats in the House than almost every reporter predicted.Whipple’s inside look at Joe Biden’s White House is a ringing confirmation of Klain’s judgment. Though Whipple’s friendships within the Washington press corps prevent him from saying so, this is a book-length rebuke of the incompetence of legions of reporters who have persistently underestimated this extraordinary president.A crucial reason for Democrats’ midterm success was Biden’s instinct to emphasize the importance of reproductive rights and the Republican threat to democracy. Reporters derided him, insisting voters only cared about the price of gas. And yet, as Whipple writes, “exit polls showed that both concern for democracy and a backlash against the supreme court’s Dobbs decision had been winning issues”.How will Biden handle a hostile Republican House and what does it mean for 2024?Read moreThe brilliant and likable Klain began his career clerking for Byron White, John F Kennedy’s only appointee to the supreme court. Klain is the second-most important character in this book, after Biden. He was a great source with many great stories to tell, and Whipple has a special fondness for White House chiefs of staff, the subject of one of his previous volumes.One of many mini-scoops in the book is a description of a Zoom meeting Klain had, a month before Biden’s inauguration, with 18 former chiefs of staff, including George W Bush’s Josh Bolten, who in 2016 tried unsuccessfully to get all former Republican chiefs to declare Donald Trump unfit to be president. Dick Cheney and James Baker refused to do so.At the end of Biden’s first year in office, Klain hailed “the most successful first year of any president ever. We passed more legislation than any president in his first year” – including the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. “We created more jobs than any president in his first year” and – least noted – “we got more federal judges confirmed than any president since Nixon.”Which was all the more astonishing with a 50-50 Senate and a slim House majority. Sixty years ago, to enact Medicare and the rest of the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson needed huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.In 2022, long after everyone assumed the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin had killed it, the Build Back Better bill came roaring back to life as the Inflation Reduction Act. To corral Manchin, the administration had to give up on an extension of the child tax credit and throw in a pipeline. But in return there was a $391bn investment in energy and fighting the climate crisis.A big reason Biden struggled in the polls was a decision that required more political courage than anything his three predecessors did: withdrawal from Afghanistan.Biden understood the folly of the war back in 2009, when generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus begged Barack Obama for a troop surge even after Petraeus acknowledged that the Afghan government was a “criminal syndicate”.According to Bob Woodward, then Vice-President Biden went to the heart of the matter: “If the government’s a criminal syndicate a year from now, how will troops make a difference?”Woodward reported that Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, was the only other clear-eyed adviser, explaining: “All the contractors for development projects pay the Taliban for protection and use of roads, so American and coalition dollars help finance the Taliban. And with more development, higher traffic on roads and more troops, the Taliban would make more money.”Obama approved a surge of 40,000 troops anyway.Whipple adopts the conventional wisdom about the Afghanistan withdrawal, calling it “a whole-of-government failure” in which “everyone got nearly everything exactly wrong”. He assumes an orderly withdrawal was possible without a reliable Afghan fighting force – an idea for which I have never seen any serious evidence.But unlike other commentators, Whipple at least includes some of the real reasons for the chaos, including a decision driven by Stephen Miller. The leading xenophobe in the Trump White House was determined to destroy the special immigrant visa program, the only way Afghans who worked for the US could come here. In 2020, Trump virtually closed the program, creating a backlog of 17,000 applicants. One of Whipple’s sources described the attitude of the Trump administration this way: it felt America “wasn’t ready to have a lot of hook-nosed, brown-skinned Muslims … coming into this country”.Leon Panetta, a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations always quick to jump on CNN to attack his former bosses, compared Biden’s handling of the withdrawal to John F Kennedy’s disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.To Whipple, Klain shoots back: “Joe Biden didn’t pay a trillion dollars to these people to be trained to be the army. He wasn’t out there saying for years, as Leon was, that we had built a viable fighting force. Leon favored the war. Leon oversaw the training of the Afghan army … if this was Biden’s Bay of Pigs, it was Leon’s army that lost the fight.”Trump’s political fate may have been decided – by a Georgia grand juryRead moreWhipple makes one other point about Afghanistan. “As an operational success,” the evacuation “ranked with the Berlin airlift.” In 17 days and 387 sorties, the US evacuated 124,000 people.One of the largest sections of Whipple’s book describes Biden’s prescience about Vladimir Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, and the extraordinary efforts the Biden administration has made to unite Nato and send weapons to Kyiv.Even Panetta was impressed.“This war in Ukraine has really strengthened Joe Biden’s image as a world leader,” he said. “His confrontation with Putin is going to determine what the hell his legacy is going to be as president. I think it’s that big a deal.”
      The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House is published in the US by Scribner
      TopicsBooksJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansDonald TrumpreviewsReuse this content More

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      There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald Trump

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      There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald TrumpBiden’s retention of classified papers is different from the Mar-a-Lago case, but it is a big setback for his administration The discovery of government secrets at two locations associated with Joe Biden appears to have produced one big political winner: Donald Trump.The White House was in rare crisis mode last week as it emerged that lawyers for Biden had found classified material at his thinktank in Washington DC and home in Delaware. At an unusually contentious press briefing, one TV correspondent dubbed the affair “garage-gate”.The justice department appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents from his time as vice-president. It was a rare setback for an administration that promised to be transparent and scandal-free. It also complicated an investigation into Trump over an ostensibly similar matter.‘It’s going to be dirty’: Republicans gear up for attack on Hunter BidenRead moreAnother special counsel is already examining the ex-president’s retention of top secret papers at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate and club. Although the situations are very different, the nuances and subtleties are likely to be lost in the court of public opinion.“This may be pure sloppiness on Biden’s part or the Biden team’s part but it doesn’t matter,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “In the public mind, now they will say, ‘Well, a pox on both your houses. You’re both guilty. Shame on you both.’ It’s over.”The issue could become a continuing political headache for Biden, Sabato added. “It’s just a real distraction. It was totally unnecessary. Every White House makes mistakes and this is a big one they made.”Despite superficial similarities, the two cases are like chalk and cheese. In January last year the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trump’s home, telling justice department officials they contained “a lot” of classified material.In August, after prolonged resistance from Trump’s associates to requests and even a justice department subpoena, FBI agents took about 33 boxes and containers of 11,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago, including roughly 100 with classification markings found in a storage room and an office. The FBI warrant showed it was investigating crimes including the wilful retention of national defence information and efforts to obstruct a federal investigation.The Biden papers are far less voluminous. First it emerged that a “small number” with classified markings had been found in November in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center thinktank in Washington.Speaking to reporters on Tuesday in Mexico City, the president claimed that he was surprised when he was informed about them. His lawyers “did what they should have done” when they immediately alerted the National Archives, he said. “I don’t know what’s in the documents.”Then came news that a second batch of classified documents had been discovered in the garage at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and one additional classified page was found in his personal library there. Again, his lawyers informed the archives.Biden’s offence is seen by analysts as significantly less grave than his predecessor’s. Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia, said: “Given what we know now, it seems that there is a difference in kind, rather than degree, between Trump’s case and Biden’s case.Classified documents: how do the Trump and Biden cases differ?Read more“For example, quantitatively and qualitatively, Trump’s cavalier and even intentional misconduct regarding the documents, especially those related to national security, appears substantially more egregious than Biden’s apparent neglectful behaviour in not safeguarding certain documents.”Even so, the White House refused to disclose the content and exact number of the Biden records, how they arrived at his thinktank and home , why they stayed there and why the administration waited more than two months to acknowledge their discovery.The questions deepened on Saturday when the White House lawyer Richard Sauber revealed that a total of six pages of classified documents had been found in Biden’s personal library in Wilmington; the administration had previously said only a single page came to light there and insisted that the search was “complete”.White House reporters, who have endured lean times since the wildly norm-busting Trump presidency, have seized on the day-by-day revelations like hungry lions. In the kind of confrontation seldom seen over the past two years, Peter Doocy of the conservative Fox News network asked Biden bluntly: “Classified material next to your Corvette: what were you thinking?”The president replied: “I’m going to get a chance to speak on all this, God willing, soon, but as I said earlier this week, people – and, by the way, my Corvette is in a locked garage. OK? So, it’s not like they’re sitting out in the street.”Merrick Garland, the attorney general, selected Robert Hur, a Trump-appointed former US attorney, to investigate the matter. Many legal commentators suggested that a special counsel would not normally have been warranted but the move reflected Garland’s sensitivity to the unique political dynamics.Trump himself seized on the news, seeking to use it to undermine the investigation into his actions. “It’s over,” he told conservative talk radio host Mark Levin. “When all of these documents started coming out and Biden had them, it really changed the complexion and the intensity that they were showing to me because, you know, what they did is – I don’t say far worse, I did nothing wrong – what they did is not good. What they did is bad.”In reality, the twist is unlikely to affect the justice department’s decision making with regard to charging Trump. But it could make a criminal case a harder sell to voters, fuelling the scepticism of congressional Republicans and others who have doubted the basis for a viable prosecution.Jay Town, who served as US attorney in the northern district of Alabama during the Trump administration, told the Associated Press: “I don’t think that it impacts Trump’s legal calculus at all, but it certainly does impact the political narrative going forward. To the extent that the political narrative is a consideration, it does make it harder to bring charges against former President Trump as it relates to the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago.”Joe Biden may have broken the Espionage Act. It’s so broad that you may have, too | Trevor TimmRead moreThe drama is unfolding just after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives eager to target the federal government with accusations of politically motivated prosecutions. On Friday, Jim Jordan, chair of the House judiciary committee, announced an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, particularly what the justice department knew about the matter.Republicans are also well practised in the political art of false equivalence and “whataboutism”. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, allegations that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia were effectively neutralised by a controversy over rival Hillary Clinton’s private email server.The week’s events dealt an unexpected blow to Biden as approval ratings were rising, inflation was slowing and Republicans had just endured a chaotic election for House speaker. They also threw a lifeline to Trump, whose 2024 presidential election campaign made a wretched start. But he still faces myriad investigations into his business affairs and his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.TopicsJoe BidenThe ObserverDonald TrumpRepublicansDemocratsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Democrats plan defense as Republicans ramp up investigations into president and Hunter Biden – as it happened

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      Republicans on the House judiciary committee have announced their own investigation of the classified documents found at Joe Biden’s home and former office, sending a letter to the attorney general, Merrick Garland, demanding details of the inquiry.“We are conducting oversight of the Justice Department’s actions with respect to former Vice President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, including the apparently unauthorized possession of classified material at a Washington, D.C. private office and in the garage of his Wilmington, Delaware residence. On January 12, 2023, you appointed Robert Hur as Special Counsel to investigate these matters. The circumstances of this appointment raise fundamental oversight questions that the Committee routinely examines. We expect your complete cooperation with our inquiry,” the committee’s chair Jim Jordan along with congressman Mike Johnson said in a letter.The letter notes that the documents were first discovered just before the midterm elections in November, and accuses the justice department of departing “from how it acted in similar circumstances,” notable the inquiry into government secrets found at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The committee members demand Garland turn over an array of documents related to the Biden investigation by 27 January.The investigation is the second to be announced by the House GOP since reports of the documents’ discovery first emerged this week. The other is being pursued by James Comer of the oversight committee, who is playing a major role in the Republicans’ campaign of investigations against the White House.Donald Trump’s organization was fined $1.6m by a judge after being convicted of tax fraud charges, but the Manhattan district attorney hinted that’s not the end of his investigation into the former president’s businesses. Meanwhile in Washington, House Republicans demanded more information about the classified documents found at Joe Biden’s home and former office, while the top Senate Democrat said special counsel Robert Hur should be allowed to look into the matter without interference.Here’s what happened today:
      Biden doesn’t trust his Secret Service detail, according to a new book about his presidency.
      Treasury secretary Janet Yellen warned the US government will soon hit its debt limit, and could run out of money by June.
      Special counsel Jack Smith wants to talk to two people hired by Trump’s attorneys to look for any secret materials in his possession.
      Congress will convene for the annual State of the Union address on 7 February.
      Who is George Santos really? Two Daily Beast reporters try to get to the bottom of the fabulist congressman’s saga in an interview with the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast.
      Last week, the much-talked-about George Santos of New York was sworn into the House. The Democrats and even some Republicans think he should have resigned after he admitted to lying about a lot of things during his campaign.So who is the real George Santos? How likely is it that he’ll see out his full term in office? And does his success tell us more about the state of US politics than it does an individual’s misgivings? Jonathan Freedland and Will Bredderman of the Daily Beast discuss the man behind the lies on the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast:Politics Weekly AmericaCan George Santos outrun his lies? Politics Weekly AmericaSorry your browser does not support audio – but you can download here and listen https://audio.guim.co.uk/2020/05/05-61553-gnl.fw.200505.jf.ch7DW.mp300:00:0000:29:31Attorney general Merrick Garland has asked Robert Hur to handle the investigation into Biden’s classified documents, putting a justice department veteran whose most recent government service was as a Donald Trump-appointed US attorney in a role that could upend his presidency.Semafor reports that Democrats remember his work as US attorney for Maryland fondly. “He handled himself with real professionalism when he was U.S. attorney in Maryland,” the state’s Democratic senator Ben Cardin said, while Jamie Raskin, a House Democrat from the state and noted Trump foe, said Hur had a “good reputation.”Rod Rosenstein, who was deputy attorney general under Trump, said Hur was his “point person” for dealing with one of the men the former president liked least: Robert Mueller, the special counsel who led the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.The House armed services committee is also requesting details about the classified documents found in Joe Biden’s possession.The committee’s Republican chair Mike Rogers earlier this week wrote to two defense officials requesting details on what the documents contained, and how they had been handled.You can read the letter below:Read the full letter here ⬇️https://t.co/Y98CJppa8M pic.twitter.com/7Yz5uCZqdV— Armed Services GOP (@HASCRepublicans) January 12, 2023
      Needless to say, this is turning into a headache for Democrats in Congress.The party has been on a roll lately, doing much better in the November midterms than expected and then being gifted with Republican disarray in the House and a surprisingly quiet presidential campaign from Donald Trump.Now, they’re back to playing defense after Joe Biden was found to be doing something similar to what has gotten Trump into so much trouble: possessing classified documents. There are substantial differences to the two cases, but party leaders nonetheless are being called upon to answer for their president.“It’s much too early to tell,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer today replied on CNN, when asked if he believes Biden broke the law. “I think president Biden has handled this correctly. He’s fully cooperated with the prosecutors … it’s total contrast to president Trump, who stonewalled for a whole year.”With special prosecutors looking into both men’s cases, Schumer called for patience. “We should let it play out, we don’t have to push them in any direction or try to influence them,” he said. “Let the special prosecutors do their job,” Schumer said, adding that he supports the appointment of Robert Hur to that role in the Biden case.You can watch the full interview here:Republicans on the House judiciary committee have announced their own investigation of the classified documents found at Joe Biden’s home and former office, sending a letter to the attorney general, Merrick Garland, demanding details of the inquiry.“We are conducting oversight of the Justice Department’s actions with respect to former Vice President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, including the apparently unauthorized possession of classified material at a Washington, D.C. private office and in the garage of his Wilmington, Delaware residence. On January 12, 2023, you appointed Robert Hur as Special Counsel to investigate these matters. The circumstances of this appointment raise fundamental oversight questions that the Committee routinely examines. We expect your complete cooperation with our inquiry,” the committee’s chair Jim Jordan along with congressman Mike Johnson said in a letter.The letter notes that the documents were first discovered just before the midterm elections in November, and accuses the justice department of departing “from how it acted in similar circumstances,” notable the inquiry into government secrets found at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The committee members demand Garland turn over an array of documents related to the Biden investigation by 27 January.The investigation is the second to be announced by the House GOP since reports of the documents’ discovery first emerged this week. The other is being pursued by James Comer of the oversight committee, who is playing a major role in the Republicans’ campaign of investigations against the White House.Joe Biden will make the annual State of the Union speech on 7 February, after the president accepted a formal invitation from House speaker Kevin McCarthy:It is my solemn obligation to invite the president to speak before a Joint Session of Congress on February 7th so that he may fulfill his duty under the Constitution to report on the state of the union. pic.twitter.com/YBmzLxs3Iz— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) January 13, 2023
      In a statement confirming his attendance, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre struck a bipartisan tone. “The President is grateful for and accepts Speaker McCarthy’s prompt invitation to address the peoples’ representatives in Congress,” she said. “He looks forward to speaking with Republicans, Democrats, and the country about how we can work together to continue building an economy that works from the bottom up and the middle out, keep boosting our competitiveness in the world, keep the American people safe, and bring the country together.”Looping back to Donald Trump’s legal troubles, here’s a little more about the situation in New York and beyond.The Trump Organization’s sentencing doesn’t end Trump’s battle with Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who said the sentencing “closes this important chapter of our ongoing investigation into the former president and his businesses. We now move on to the next chapter,” the Associated Press writes.Bragg, in office for little more than a year, inherited the Trump Organization case and the investigation into the former president from his predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr.At the same time, New York attorney general Letitia James is suing Trump and the Trump Organization, alleging they misled banks and others about the value of its many assets, including golf courses and skyscrapers – a practice she dubbed the “art of the steal” – a parody of Trump’s long-ago bestselling ghostwritten book about getting rich The Art of the Deal.James, a Democrat, is asking a court to ban Trump and his three eldest children from running any New York-based company and is seeking to fine them at least $250 million. A judge has set an October trial date and appointed a monitor for the company while the case is pending.Trump faces several other legal challenges as he ramps up his presidential campaign.A special grand jury in Atlanta has investigated whether Trump and his allies committed any crimes while trying to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.Last month, the House January 6 committee voted to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department for Trump’s role in sparking the violent insurrection at the US Capitol. The FBI is also investigating Trump’s storage of classified documents.During last year’s Trump Org trial, assistant district attorney Joshua Steinglass told jurors that Trump himself had a role in the fraud scheme, showing them a lease that the Republican signed himself for now-convicted finance chief Allen Weisselberg’s perk apartment that was kept off the tax books.“Mr Trump is explicitly sanctioning tax fraud,” Steinglass argued.Joe Biden this weekend will become the first sitting US president to speak at a Sunday service at Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, Georgia, where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was a pastor.Biden is expected to address the ongoing struggle to protect voting rights in the US, despite his failure a year ago to persuade Congress to pass key related legislation, to the exasperation of activists and organizers, especially in Georgia and the south.At the White House press briefing ongoing now, former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, now senior adviser for public engagement at the White House, talked of the importance of the president’s visit this Sunday, ahead of Martin Luther King Day, the federal holiday that marks the birthday of the assassinated icon.She said that there was “more work to do” to protect democracy and acknowledged that the Biden administration’s two pieces of voting rights legislation have not made it through Congress.She noted that Biden has been invited to the church by Georgia’s recently re-elected Democratic senator Raphael Warnock, who is a pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist church. The church was also regularly attended by the late congressman and lifelong civil rights activist John Lewis.Biden will meet members of King’s family and leaders of the civil rights movement in Atlanta during his visit on Sunday and Monday.Lance Bottoms joined White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who pointed out that she and the former mayor are examples of “Black women who have broken barriers” on the shoulders of the civil rights movement.Donald Trump’s organization was fined $1.6m by a judge after being convicted of tax fraud charges, but the Manhattan district attorney hinted that’s not the end of his investigation into the former president’s businesses. Meanwhile in Washington, the Treasury secretary warned the US government will hit its legal borrowing limit on Thursday and could default in the summer, unless Congress acts to increase it. Republicans controlling the House have said they won’t cooperate unless government spending is cut, ensuring this is going to turn into a big fight at some point.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Joe Biden doesn’t trust his Secret Service detail, according to a new book about his presidency.
      The top House Republican government watchdog is trying to link his investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings with the inquiry into classified documents found at the president’s properties.
      Special counsel Jack Smith wants to talk to two people hired by Trump’s attorneys to look for any secret materials in his possession.
      The US government will hit the legal limit on how much debt it can carry on 19 January, but it should have enough money to operate until at least early June, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen said Friday.“I am writing to inform you that beginning on Thursday, January 19, 2023, the outstanding debt of the United States is projected to reach the statutory limit. Once the limit is reached, Treasury will need to start taking certain extraordinary measures to prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations,” the secretary wrote in a letter to Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy.“While Treasury is not currently able to provide an estimate of how long extraordinary measures will enable us to continue to pay the government’s obligations, it is unlikely that cash and extraordinary measures will be exhausted before early June.”Republicans in the House have signaled they won’t agree to increase the debt ceiling unless the Biden administration and its Democratic allies in Congress agree to reduce spending, though it remains unclear what areas of the budget the GOP wants to cut. Raising the borrowing limit is one of the few pieces of leverage House Republicans have over the Democrats, but the strategy is not without risks. A failure to increase the ceiling could lead to the United States defaulting on its debt for the first time in its history, likely with serious consequences for the economy.The Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee is attempting to make two alleged scandals into one: the investigation of classified materials found at Joe Biden’s properties, and their inquiry into his son Hunter Biden’s business activities.The committee’s chair James Comer has sent the White House a new demand for information about whether Hunter had access to the garage at Joe Biden’s Delaware residence where it was revealed yesterday some classified material was found:🚨 @RepJamesComer presses the White House about classified docs stashed at Biden’s Wilmington home.We have docs revealing this address appeared on Hunter’s driver’s license as recently as 2018, the same time he was cutting deals with foreign adversaries.Time for answers. pic.twitter.com/663qG3REm4— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) January 13, 2023
      Even before Biden took office, Republicans have been trying to find evidence of corruption in Hunter Biden’s business dealings, and of his father’s involvement. They have had mixed results in doing that, but this week’s revelations that classified materials were found at Biden’s residence and an office he once used in Washington DC have given them new material to attack his administration. Yesterday, the justice department appointed a special counsel to look into the matter.The trial of members of the Proud Boys militia group over their involvement in the January 6 insurrection is continuing in Washington DC, today with testimony from a Capitol police officer.Thomas Loyd’s testimony contains fresh reminders of the violence that day, as Politico reports:Radio transmissions show Capiotl Police leaders pleading with officers to get off the inaugural stage scaffolding, worried it was going to collapse. “If they’re going to lock the capitol down, we can’t be up here when they breach,” someone yells.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) January 13, 2023
      “They’re coming and we can’t stop them from breaching,” someone else says on the radio, as police were overwhelmed near the lower west terrace. There were repeated concerns about lack of “hard gear” for officers to defend themselves.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) January 13, 2023
      Joe Biden doesn’t trust his Secret Service detail, fearing that some of them remain loyal to Donald Trump, Vox reports, citing a new book about his presidency.“The Fight of His Life” by Chris Whipple chronicles the past two years of Biden’s presidency from a positive perspective, according to Vox, and in particular shows the degree to which he loathes his predecessor. Biden, for instance, believes the White House’s Resolute desk was “tainted” by Trump’s use and unsuccessfully asked to swap it out for one used by Democratic icon Franklin D Roosevelt.When it comes to the Secret Service, he minds what he says around them, believing that agents harbor sympathies for the former president. He also thinks they lied about an incident where his dog Major bit an agent. Reached by Vox, the White House wouldn’t comment directly on the book’s content. More

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      ‘He’s a coward’: Lucas Kunce on his Senate run – and Hawley running away

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      Interview‘He’s a coward’: Lucas Kunce on his Senate run – and Hawley running away Martin Pengelly in New York Missouri Democrat mounting a second bid for US Senate hammers the Republican incumbent over his actions on January 6Announcing his second bid for US Senate in Missouri, Lucas Kunce needed to hit the ground running. He did so by running an ad targeting the Republican he hopes to defeat, Josh Hawley, for running away from the January 6 rioters he encouraged.Republican Josh Hawley fled January 6 rioters – and Twitter ran with itRead moreThe ad appeared on the second anniversary of the deadly attack on the US Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters. On 6 January 2021, before the mob broke in, Hawley was photographed raising his fist in its direction. The House January 6 committee showed what happened after rioters breached the walls: the senator ran for cover.Hawley has insisted he is “not gonna run” from his political opponents. But Kunce’s ad, showing a fleeing man in a ripped suit, entitled simply Running, attracted national attention.A self-described populist in the midwestern tradition of President Harry S Truman, Kunce told the Guardian the ad “goes back to the reasons why I’ve run the campaign.“What I want to do is change who has power in this country, and take some back for everyday people. Folks in Missouri, they’re tired of career politicians like Josh Hawley just doing things for power for themselves and not caring about Missouri and not caring about the country.“And so that’s why we launched on January 6. It was a seminal moment where Josh Hawley showed he only cares about power for himself. He doesn’t stand for anything. He gets out there when he thinks it’s gonna get him some sort of political power, he’s raising his fist, he’s ‘rah-rah-ing’ the crowd, trying to incite them to do things. And then the second things get real, he’s getting out the back door, running as fast as he can to get away. It shows what a fraud and a coward he is.”Kunce is a military veteran who also worked on international arms control. In his new ad, as in conversation, he takes aim at Hawley’s contention that America has forgotten what it means to be a man, an argument the senator will make at length in May with a book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.Kunce said: “As a marine who ran missions in Iraq, deployed to Afghanistan twice, if any of us had shown that type of cowardice [that Hawley showed on January 6], we would have been court martialed.“Missourians deserve better than someone who’s just going to run. They deserve someone who’s gonna stand for them, fight for them, and that’s what I’m gonna do.”The Hawley campaign responded to the Kunce ad by wielding the most obvious attack line back: Kunce has lost once in Missouri already.An adviser said: “We welcome this desperate woke activist to yet another political race. He just barely finished losing his last one. Maybe he’s running in the wrong state.”Kunce said Hawley’s camp was “obviously worried” because the senator, though thought to be eyeing the Republican presidential nomination, “has never had to run after showing everybody what a fraud and a coward he is. Now he’s got to deal with that.”In Missouri in 2022, the Democratic primary decided who would run for an open Senate seat as the Republican Roy Blunt retired. Kunce lost to Trudy Busch Valentine, a member of the Anheuser-Busch brewing dynasty who was then beaten by Eric Schmitt, the Republican attorney general, in the general election.Asked what he learned, Kunce said he had “shown people that no matter how hard it is, I’m not going to take money from the wrong folks. I’m only going to owe the people that took care of my family, everyday Missourians.“We took no money from corporate Pacs, no federal lobbyists, no big pharma, no big fossil fuel executives. The list is pretty long. And we did that because we want to show that in America everyday people, an everyday person like me, who doesn’t come from connections, doesn’t come from money, can get elected and can do it without corrupting themselves. It’s an uphill battle, but I think it’s worth it.“Josh Hawley does understand that when he got elected, he took millions of dollars from banks who wanted to control him. His dad was the president of the bank, he had all sorts of connections. And we provide a very good contrast to that.”01:08Kunce raised more than $5m in 2022 but Valentine, who would ultimately spend more than $16m of her own money, won comfortably. Kunce said: “What we learned in the primary was that money is critical in this political environment. And so we had to figure out a way to raise money without selling out.”Josh Hawley’s schooldays: ‘He made popcorn to watch the Iraq invasion’Read moreHe says “we did that. By the end, we had a record-breaking grassroots fundraising operation. And the beautiful thing is that all that work we did last time, none of it’s gone. The people are still there behind us. We’re growing it out even more, so we’re going to be very formidable this time. We have an operation that can run us all the way through November [2024].” In most minds, Missouri is a solidly red state. Asked why he thinks a Democrat can win there, Kunce cited recent ballot measures including “expanding Medicaid, increasing the minimum wage $5 over the federal level, passing medical and then recreational legalisation of marijuana, overturning right to work” anti-union laws.These, he said, were all “things that Josh Hawley did not stand for, that I do stand for. And … Missourians are willing in those situations to flip their vote.“In 2016, probably the reddest year of all time in Missouri, Donald Trump won here by 17 points. But the Democratic US Senate candidate, Jason Kander, he came within three points of winning.“I think we’re trending in the right direction. We just need to be able to capture the energy of everyday people trying to take back power for themselves, which clearly is my mission, and which we’ll be able to do.”TopicsUS SenateUS CongressUS elections 2024US politicsDemocratsMissouriinterviewsReuse this content More