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      Donald Trump braced for fourth criminal indictment – US politics live

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      From 3h agoGood morning, US politics blog readers. The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants, including the former president, this week.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day. The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week.Prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the Guardian reported today, citing sources.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      10.30am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will depart Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the White House.
      1pm: Biden and vice president Kamala Harris will have lunch.
      3pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief the press.
      The House and Senate are out.
      Donald Trump appeared to warn former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, against testifying before the Fulton County grand jury in the state’s 2020 election investigation.“I am reading reports that failed former Lt. Governor of Georgia, Jeff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury,” Trump posted on Truth Social today.Trump added:
      He shouldn’t. I barely know him but he was, right from the beginning of this Witch Hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the Election Fraud that took place in Georgia.
      His post came days after the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s January 6 case in Washington DC, warned against making “inflammatory statements” that could intimidate witnesses in that trial.Duncan confirmed he had been asked to testify before the grand jury on Tuesday hearing evidence of alleged meddling in the 2020 presidential election.“Republicans should never let honesty be mistaken for weakness,” Duncan tweeted.The US will send Ukraine a new military aid package worth around $200m, secretary of state Antony Blinken announced.The latest security aid package includes air defense munitions, artillery rounds, anti-armor capabilities, and additional mine-clearing equipment, according to the statement.For more updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine, please follow our live blog. After five years, the US attorney pursuing Hunter Biden has only been able to file tax and unlawful gun possession charges – and that shouldn’t change just because the prosecutor has been named special counsel in the case, the lawyer for the president’s son has said.“If anything changes from his conclusion … the question [that] should be asked [is] what infected the process that was not the facts and the law?” Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. Lowell also said: “There’s no new evidence to be found.“Only thing that will change is the scrutiny on some of the charges.”Lowell’s remarks came after the US attorney in Delaware who has been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, David Weiss, received an appointment on Thursday to become special counsel over the case.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has said Weiss told him days earlier that “in his judgment, his investigation [had] reached a stage at which he should continue his work as a special counsel, and he asked to be appointed”. Garland added that he granted the request of Weiss – who was appointed to his post by Joe Biden’s presidential successor Donald Trump – having concluded that it was “in the public interest” to do so.Yet Garland’s justification did little to dampen a political firestorm in Washington DC. Weiss’s probe into Biden’s son is set to continue on a track that is parallel to special counsel investigations into Trump – the Republican frontrunner to challenge Biden in the 2024 race for the White House – which have produced a multitude of criminal charges against him.Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign on Sunday evening tried to walk back on comments he made earlier in the day in support of a nationwide abortion restriction after the first three months of pregnancy.In an interview at the Iowa State Fair, Kennedy told NBC News that he believes “a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life”.Asked if he would sign a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks or 21 weeks of pregnancy if he were elected president, he said “yes, three months”.
      Once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child.
      But in a later statement, Kennedy’s campaign team said he had “misunderstood” the reporter’s questions, citing a “crowded” and “noisy” exhibit hall at the fair.The statement continued:
      Mr Kennedy’s position on abortion is that it is always the woman’s right to choose. He does not support legislation banning abortion.
      In response, NBC reporter Ali Vitali shared a transcript of the full exchange and said she asked her questions multiple times to make sure the presidential candidate understood the subject.Twice impeached and now arrested and indicted three times. Donald Trump faces serious criminal charges in New York, Florida and Washington over a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election, his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.As Trump prepares for those cases to go to trial, the former president is simultaneously reeling from a verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation toward writer E Jean Carroll. A New York jury awarded Carroll, who accused Trump of assaulting her in 1996, $5m in damages.And more criminal charges could be on the way for Trump in Georgia as early as this week.Here is where each case against Trump stands:Prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia have gathered evidence directly connecting members of the former president’s legal team to the voting system breach in Coffee County, according to a report.Prosecutors have taken a special interest in the breach of voting machines in Coffee county by Trump allies because of the brazen nature of the operation and the possibility that Trump was aware that his allies intended to covertly gain access to the machines.In a series of particularly notable incidents, forensics experts hired by Trump allies copied data from virtually every part of the voting system, which is used statewide in Georgia, before uploading them to a password-protected website that could be accessed by 2020 election deniers.Investigators are in possession of text messages and emails indicating the breach was a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software, CNN reported, citing sources.Six days before pro-Trump operatives gained unauthorized access to voting systems, the local elections official who allegedly helped facilitate the breach shared a “written invitation” to attorneys working for Trump, according to the report.Investigators have also probed the involvement of Trump’s then attorneys, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the sources said.Georgia former state senator Jen Jordan has been spotted at the Fulton County courthouse today, according to NBC.Jordan had been expected to testify before a grand jury as part of the Georgia prosecutor’s investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn his election loss in the state.The indictment that the Fulton County district attorney, Fanis Willis, may bring against Donald Trump as early as this week could be the most sprawling case against the former president in response to his efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election.“I think people are going to be surprised at the level of preparedness and the level of sophistication of the prosecution,” Clint Rucker, a former prosecutor in Fulton County, told AP.He added that he was not surprised the investigation has taken so long. While Willis is likely to let her team of prosecutors handle the trial, he said there was no question that she is calling the shots.
      When she says stuff like, ‘We’re ready to go,’ that’s not being braggadocious’. It’s her saying pretty much to anybody who’s interested, ‘Look, we’re ready.’
      The synopsis for a Fani Willis biopic would probably go something like this:
      In Fulton county, the first Black woman to serve as district attorney takes on an unlikely case. Willis grew up attending court with her father, a defense attorney and Black Panther. Now, she sits on the opposite side of the courtroom, hoping to indict a former president who sought to overturn election results and often espoused white supremacist rhetoric while doing so.
      The film’s montage would pull from real life, depicting a determined, unflappable Willis relentlessly poring over documents, leading her team through the long work hours and security risks that come with bringing an indictment against an often inflammatory former president, even as national attention on the case reached a groundswell.We’d watch her face racist threats and unsubstantiated rumors of misconduct, but she’d refuse to back down from the task at hand. She’d advocate for what she believed to be right even when it wasn’t popular. She’d appear in press conferences and in media interviews delivering stern soundbites such as: “Lady justice is actually blind. This is the reality. If you come into my community and you commit a crime, you deserve to be held responsible.”According to some of Willis’s colleagues who have worked with her over more than 20 years, all of this would be an accurate depiction of the district attorney.Defense attorney Brian Steel has known Willis her entire career and says she’s both “extremely honest” and “extremely hard working”. Atlanta NAACP president Gerald Griggs described her as “transparent”, a “zealous advocate for the state” and the “best trial attorney” in the Fulton county district attorney’s office. He said:
      What you see on TV is authentic to who she really is.
      Read the Guardian’s full profile of Willis here. The district attorney’s office in Georgia has spent more than two years investigating whether Donald Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, including impaneling a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”.From his Bedminster club in New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers, the former president unleashed a wave of personal attacks against Willis ahead of what would be his fourth indictment after most recently being charged by special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to subvert the 2020 election.Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Willis was “racist” and treated gang members with “kid gloves” – two accusations without any merit, especially given her office last week prosecuted members of the PDE gang in Atlanta with a Rico charge and street gang terrorism.In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies kicked off an aggressive pressure campaign in an attempt to overturn the election results in six swing states where certified results declared Joe Biden the winner.Nowhere was the effort more acute than in Georgia, which became the consuming focus of the former president and his allies, according to a Washington Post report today. Those close to Trump pushed state officials to identify fraud that would cast Biden’s victory in doubt, it writes.
      In the process, they personally targeted individual election workers with false claims of cheating, unleashing waves of threats, and amplified conspiracy theories about rigged machines that persist today. In the end, after Trump sought to use every lever of power to overturn the results, top state Republicans stood in his way, refusing to buckle under the pressure.
      Some of the most fantastical claims of fraud came directly from Trump and his allies, “who amplified baseless accusations on conservative media and unleashed new waves of outlandish tips from rank-and-file Republicans”.The former president’s accusations also turned election workers in Georgia and other states into targets of harassment and threats.
      They spread false claims that thousands of mail ballots should be discarded because of questionable signatures, that a mother-daughter team of election workers in Atlanta had triple-tallied counterfeit votes, that voting machines had been programmed to flip votes from one candidate to another.
      For the purposes of the Trump case, prosecutors in Georgia will be required to show an “interrelated pattern of activity by and through the [public] office” predicated on at least two “qualifying” or predicate crimes drawn from a list of specific statutes.The prosecutors on the Trump case have developed evidence of a pattern of racketeering activity that could lead to a Rico charge based on predicates of influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the Guardian has previously reported.Among the election law charges that prosecutors have been examining: criminal solicitation to commit election fraud through seeking a public or political officer to fail to perform duties and seeking to destroy, deface or delay the delivery of ballots; and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The prosecutors have also developed evidence for the previously unreported state election law charges of intentional interference with performance of election duties, the people said, as well as general criminal solicitation, which is not part of the Georgia election law statutes.In anticipation of charges against Donald Trump and his allies related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, local law enforcement last week started to increase security around the building that contains the Fulton county district attorney’s office and Georgia superior court, closing off roads and installing temporary barricades.The district attorney, Fani Willis, had instructed most of her staff to work remotely through the first weeks of August as a safety precaution, and the public area inside the building for days has been taken over by deputies from the Fulton county sheriff’s office.Good morning, US politics blog readers. The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants, including the former president, this week.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day. The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week.Prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the Guardian reported today, citing sources.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      10.30am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will depart Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the White House.
      1pm: Biden and vice president Kamala Harris will have lunch.
      3pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief the press.
      The House and Senate are out. More

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      Biden choice of economic adviser shows focus on education ahead of 2024 bid

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      Joe Biden is tapping C Kirabo Jackson, a labor economist whose research advocates robust public spending on schools, to fill out the president’s three-member Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), according to a White House official.The selection suggests public education will be a key area of focus for Biden’s brain-trust ahead of a 2024 re-election bid expected to turn on the strength of the economy. The position does not require Senate confirmation.Jackson, who will take a leave from Northwestern University, where the professor focused on economics, education and public policy, is best known for research on what draws good teachers to certain schools as well as other data showing that raising school spending increases students’ future wages.The US unemployment rate is at 3.5%, and the economy grew at a 2.4% rate last quarter. Meanwhile, consumer prices are rising at a 3.2% annual clip.While the Biden administration sees those numbers as a positive sign of a move to steadier momentum with slower growth and inflation, voters are largely dissatisfied with Biden’s handling of the economy, creating a challenge for his economic policymakers.Biden has argued that more US government investment in early childhood education programs like preschool for three- and four-year-olds would lift wages and decrease poverty, views that agree with some of Jackson’s own research.But the president’s efforts to dramatically increase such funding have consistently failed to win sufficient support in Congress.Jackson’s pick also comes as the Biden administration is thinking through how to boost lagging educational performance since the Covid-19 pandemic.Lengthy public school closures, staffing shortages and other issues during the pandemic are believed to have contributed to the sharp declines registered in US children’s reading and mathematics test scores since 2020.Cecilia Rouse, the Princeton University economist who used to be Biden’s CEA chair, said Jackson’s work would be critical given the country’s biggest long-term economic challenges, including an ageing workforce, declining fertility rates, a lack of childcare and learning loss.“Coming out of this pandemic, one of the big consequences that we will be addressing for some time is the learning loss,” she said. The choice of Jackson “may signal that the administration is looking for creative ways to address what can be a huge loss in human capital for this country for quite some time”. More

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      The year that broke US politics: what 1968 can tell us about 2024

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      Spiritual messages made the Rev Billy Graham famous, but it was a different sort of message that he transmitted to Lyndon B Johnson in September 1968. Earlier that tumultuous year, the president announced on live television that he would not run for re-election. The race to succeed him pitted the current vice-president, Hubert H Humphrey, against a previous VP, Richard Nixon. An anti-establishment third-party candidate, George Wallace, a segregationist former governor of Alabama, was attracting unexpected support, amid backlash to Johnson’s Great Society reforms.Graham’s message to Johnson came from Nixon and contained an unorthodox proposal. If elected, Nixon offered to make a variety of conciliatory gestures to Johnson, from avoiding criticism to meeting him for consultations, even crediting him with a role in ending the Vietnam war, once it was finally over.This is one of many revelations in a new book, The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968, by Luke Nichter, a professor of history at Chapman University in California.In sum, Graham promised “everything Nixon could do to give LBJ a place in history”, Nichter marvels. “Imagine something like that leaking out. It’s incredible.”It also continued some surprisingly conciliatory behind-the-scenes behavior between ostensible rivals, much of it mediated by Graham. In his diary, the evangelist quoted Johnson: “I don’t always agree with [Nixon] but I respect him for his tremendous ability.” Graham asked if he could let Nixon know. LBJ said yes. The incumbent was hardly as supportive to his own vice-president. As Humphrey said: “I’ve eaten so much of Johnson’s shit in this job that I’ve grown to like the taste of it.”The 1968 election unfolded during a year of seemingly endless challenges. In Vietnam, the Tet offensive convinced many Americans of the futility of the war. On 1 March, Johnson stunned the public by dropping out of the race. On 4 April, Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis. On 6 June, another assassination rocked America: the New York senator and Democratic presidential contender Robert F Kennedy, whose brother, President John F Kennedy, had been killed just five years before, was shot dead at an LA hotel. Race riots erupted, from Newark to Detroit and Washington. At the Democratic national convention in Chicago, demonstrators and cops squared off.Yet in his 15 chapters, Nichter manages to upend conventional wisdom.“This is a lesson about the essence of history itself,” he says. “It’s never really over.”As Nichter explains, the traditional 1968 narrative posits that Johnson stayed out of the picture; that Humphrey rode a late surge based on his call for an unconditional bombing halt in Vietnam; and that Nixon employed questionable methods to win, from a “southern strategy” targeting racist white voters to trying to sabotage peace talks in Vietnam.Nichter questions this entire account, often on the basis of evidence he uncovered, whether in Graham’s diaries or in a conversation with a former Humphrey adviser, Vic Fingerhut. He even spoke to Anna Chennault, the Washington socialite at the heart of the Chennault affair, in which she was accused of encouraging the South Vietnamese to avoid peace talks, based on promises of better treatment under Nixon.“I sort of assumed it was true,” Nichter reflects. “A lot of people have reported it over the years.” Yet, he says, “the first thing I noticed right away as a red flag was that nobody I talked to actually interviewed Chennault or the South Vietnamese. I’m not a journalist, but a historian. I’m trained to look at dusty records in archives. But all of this didn’t make sense.”Nichter does have extensive experience in the subject area, not only as the author of multiple books but as the editor of the nixontapes website, where the public can access 3,000 hours of secret recordings. A member of the Freedom of Information Act advisory board, Nichter has conducted hundreds of hours of research in the US and Vietnam, calling the latter one of the friendliest destinations an American can now visit.The Year That Broke Politics germinated from a conversation with Walter Mondale in December 2017. Between 1977 and 1981, Mondale was vice-president to Jimmy Carter. In 1968, he was Humphrey’s campaign co-chair. To Nichter, he hinted that LBJ had leaned toward Nixon.The following February, Graham died at 99. Nichter traveled to the evangelist’s alma mater, Wheaton University, outside Chicago. He gained access to Graham’s diaries, a trove of information about conversations with presidents from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. Nichter calls the diaries “a potential whole new window on the entire American presidency”, with “content that’s not in the National Archives or any presidential library”.Graham enjoyed relationships with all four principals in the 1968 campaign – Johnson, Humphrey, Nixon and Wallace – while professing an apolitical stance. When Johnson decided not to run, Graham asked if he could let Nixon know in advance and got the OK to do so. When Nixon wanted to send Johnson his September proposals, he entrusted Graham with the message.At the chaotic Democratic convention, while protesters and Mayor Richard Daley’s police fought outside, Graham reportedly had a fateful behind-the-scenes influence, talking the Texas governor, John Connally, out of being Humphrey’s running mate, promising a cabinet role under Nixon. Had Connally accepted Humphrey’s offer, it “might have been enough to deny Nixon a victory, divide the conservative vote [and] balance the ticket geographically”, Nichter says.By the fall, Humphrey was struggling. On 30 September, in a speech in Salt Lake City, he promised to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. Although this speech is widely credited for Humphrey’s revival, it didn’t close the gap in the polls, Nichter says. What proved more persuasive, Nichter finds, were appeals to traditional Democratic domestic issues from jobs to social security, and a get-out-the-vote push from organized labor that siphoned blue-collar voters from Wallace.These late moves by Humphrey narrowed the gap, but not enough. Nixon, once vice-president to Dwight Eisenhower, completed a remarkable comeback. On the campaign trail, he had promised to essentially continue LBJ’s Great Society programs. Nichter notes that many of Nixon’s policy achievements – visits to China and the USSR, the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency – were initially considered under Johnson.As for Wallace, he showed surprising strength, topping out at 23% in the polls, making the ballot in every state and finding support among disaffected working-class white voters that set a precedent for future populists.“His 1968 message was more sophisticated,” Nichter says. “Race was folded into a broader set of grievances. He got a little Trump-like: anti-elite, anti-media, anti-establishment. He never used the words ‘drain the swamp’. If it had occurred to him, he probably would have.“I think all populist candidates on both sides of the aisle, Democrat or Republican – more recently, clearly Republican, because of Trump – have brought Wallace’s rhetoric [and] message [to] target voters [from the] blue-collar, lower-middle class.“Trump is the most aggressive to go after them. The most fascinating takeaway for 2024, the thing to watch for, is who is going to be the preferred candidate of this voting bloc.”
      The Year That Broke Politics is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      AOC leads call for federal ethics investigation into Clarence Thomas

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      Five House Democrats led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York wrote to the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, to demand a federal investigation of the conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, over his acceptance of undeclared gifts from billionaire rightwing donors.“We write to urge the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into … Clarence Thomas for consistently failing to report significant gifts he received from Harlan Crow and other billionaires for nearly two decades in defiance of his duty under federal law,” the Democrats said.As well as Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive popularly known as AOC, the letter was signed by Jerrold Nadler of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee; Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a professor of constitutional law; Ted Lieu of California; and Hank Johnson of Georgia.This week saw publication of a bombshell ProPublica report which said Thomas had taken 38 undeclared vacations funded by billionaires and accepted gifts including expensive sports tickets.The report followed extensive reporting by ProPublica and other outlets including the New York Times regarding Thomas’s close and financially beneficial relationships with Crow, a real-estate magnate, and other influential businessmen.Thomas, 75, denies wrongdoing, claiming never to have discussed with his benefactors politics or business before the court. He has said he did not declare those benefactors’ gifts, over many years, because he was wrongly advised.Ethics experts say that Thomas broke federal law by failing to declare such largesse.Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics rules as all federal justices but in practice govern themselves.The chief justice, John Roberts, has rebuffed requests for testimony in Congress. Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee have advanced supreme court ethics reform but it will almost certainly fail, in the face of Republican opposition.Calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached and removed have proliferated but are also almost certain to fail. Confirmed in 1991, Thomas is the most senior of six conservatives on a nine-member court tipped dramatically right by three justices installed during the presidency of Donald Trump.In their letter to Garland on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Democrats noted that Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, is “a far-right activist who often champions conservative causes that come before the court”.They were addressing, they said, “a matter of critical importance to the integrity of our justice system”.Outlining reporting about Thomas, the representatives said his “consistent failure to disclose gifts and benefits from industry magnates and wealthy, politically active executives highlights a blatant disregard for judicial ethics as well as apparent legal violations.“No individual, regardless of their position or stature, should be exempt from legal scrutiny for lawbreaking … as a supreme court justice and high constitutional officer, Justice Thomas should be held to the highest standard, not the lowest and he certainly shouldn’t be allowed to violate federal law.”Refusing to hold Thomas accountable, the Democrats said, “would set a dangerous precedent, undermining public trust in our institutions and raising legitimate questions about the equal application of laws in our nation.“The Department of Justice must undertake a thorough investigation into the reported conduct to ensure that it cannot happen again.” More

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      Merrick Garland appoints special counsel in Hunter Biden investigation

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      The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, sent shockwaves through American politics on Friday when he announced the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, the president’s son, ahead of the 2024 election.Garland named David Weiss, the US attorney in Delaware who has been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, as special counsel.In remarks to reporters in Washington, Garland said Weiss told him on Tuesday that “in his judgment, his investigation has reached a stage at which he should continue his work as a special counsel, and he asked to be appointed.“Upon considering his request, as well as the extraordinary circumstances relating to this matter, I have concluded it is in the public interest to appoint him as special counsel.”It was a momentous move from the usually cautious attorney general. Special counsel investigations of Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner to face Joe Biden in next year’s election, are ongoing, having produced multiple criminal charges and the prospect of trials in an election year.Special counsels are appointed in cases in which the attorney general believes the justice department faces a conflict of interest. Special counsels report to the attorney general but operate with independence.In the investigations of Trump, the special counsel Jack Smith has overseen indictments regarding the former president’s retention of classified information and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.Another special counsel, Robert Hur, is investigating the retention of classified information by Biden after he left the vice-presidency in 2017. It was widely reported on Friday that negotiations are active about terms for a Biden interview.Hunter Biden, 53, is the president’s surviving son, after the former Delaware attorney general Beau Biden died in 2015, aged 46. Hunter Biden has been a lobbyist, lawyer, banker, consultant and artist. He has admitted to struggling with substance addiction.He is accused of failing to pay taxes on more than $1.5m in income in 2017 and 2018. He is also charged with unlawfully owning a firearm while addicted to and using a controlled substance.Last month, after a federal judge in Delaware said she needed more time to review a proposed deal to avoid the felony gun charge, Biden pleaded not guilty to the tax charges. The collapse of the plea deal was unexpected.On Friday, Weiss, who was appointed US attorney by Trump, said in a court filing plea deal negotiations were at an impasse and a trial was in order.Republicans in Congress are pursuing their own investigations of Hunter Biden’s business dealings, including in Ukraine and China, as part of a longstanding effort to generate political headaches for his father. They have so far turned up little of substance.In New Mexico on Thursday, Joe Biden generated headlines when he reacted testily to a Fox News reporter who asked about his son’s business dealings and whether Hunter ever put his powerful father on speakerphone when dealing with clients.“I never talked business with anybody,” the president said. “I knew you’d have a lousy question … because it’s not true.”Republicans have long claimed Weiss was being blocked from becoming a special counsel in the matter of Hunter Biden, a claim Weiss and the US justice department denied. On Friday, with Weiss appointed as a special counsel, Republicans still reacted with public displays of anger.In a statement, Republicans on the House oversight committee, which has been piloting congressional investigations of Hunter Biden and pushing for impeachment proceedings against his father, claimed the appointment of Weiss was “part of the DoJ’s efforts to attempt a Biden family cover-up in light of our committee’s mounting evidence of President Joe Biden’s role in his family’s schemes selling ‘the brand’ for millions of dollars to foreign nationals”.A Democrat on the committee, Jared Moskowitz of Florida, said such a reaction to getting what Republicans wanted showed the oversight chair, James Comer of Kentucky, had “no credibility” on the matter.But Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House speaker, also had complaints.“This action by Biden’s DoJ cannot be used to obstruct congressional investigations or whitewash the Biden family corruption,” McCarthy said. “If Weiss negotiated the sweetheart deal that couldn’t get approved, how can he be trusted as a special counsel?”Aaron Fritschner, a staffer for the Virginia Democratic congressman Don Beyer, noted the theatricality of such Republican anger: “Half of the House Republican conference wrote to Merrick Garland last year asking him to appoint a special counsel in the Hunter Biden case. Now that he’s done it they are acting mad.”Liz Harrington, a Trump spokesperson, said: “Crooked Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and the entire Biden crime family have been protected by the justice department for decades even though there is overwhelming evidence and credible testimony detailing their wrongdoing of lying to the American people and selling out the country to foreign enemies … for financial gain.”Trump leads Republican primary polling by vast margins despite facing 78 criminal charges regarding hush-money payments to a porn star, retention of classified records and attempted election subversion. Further charges relating to election subversion are expected in Georgia next week.Polling shows both Biden and Trump to be historically unpopular with the voting public.Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      ‘Affirmative action for the privileged’: why Democrats are fighting legacy admissions

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      In the aftermath of the supreme court’s decision to strike down race-conscious admissions at universities in June, progressive Democrats have turned their outrage into motivation. They are now using their fury to power an impassioned campaign against a different admissions practice that they consider unjust and outdated: legacy admissions.The century-old practice gives an advantage to the family members of universities’ alumni, a group that tends to be whiter and wealthier than the general pool of college applicants. Critics argue that legacy applicants already enjoy an unfair leg up in the admissions process and that university’s preference toward those students exacerbates existing inequalities in higher education.As the country adapts to a post-affirmative action world, progressives are ramping up the political and legal pressure on universities to scrap their use of legacy admissions. A Democratic bill, introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Congressman Jamaal Bowman of New York, and a civil rights inquiry at the Department of Education could represent a serious threat to legacy admissions.“Though the supreme court gutted race-conscious college admissions, make no mistake, affirmative action is still alive and well for children of alumni and major donors, and taxpayers shouldn’t be funding it,” Merkley told the Guardian.The origins of legacy admissions policies date back to the 1920s, when Jewish and immigrant students began attending America’s elite universities in larger numbers. Concerned over this growing trend, college leaders implemented a range of admissions preferences, such as legacy status, designed to benefit the white Protestant applicants who had populated university classrooms for centuries.Despite the ignominious roots of legacy admissions, the practice persists at many of the country’s most prestigious universities, including every member of the Ivy League. Colleges defend the practice as beneficial for building strong alumni communities across generations and encouraging financial contributions, even though one analysis found “no statistically significant evidence that legacy preferences impact total alumni giving”.Progressives have mocked legacy admissions as “affirmative action for the privileged”, and the supreme court’s decision against race-conscious admissions has reinvigorated their efforts to end the widely unpopular practice altogether. According to one Pew Research Center survey conducted last year found, 75% of Americans believe alumni relations should not be considered in the admissions process.“Many of the legacy kids simply would not have gotten in had they not had legacy [preference],” said Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice group Color of Change. “This is the result of a system that was designed to operate exactly the way it’s operating.”Last month, Merkley and Bowman reintroduced their bill, the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, to prohibit universities participating in federal student aid programs from giving an admissions advantage to the relatives of alumni or donors. Noting the financial advantages legacy students often enjoy in the college admissions process, Merkley suggested those applicants do not require additional assistance to gain entry to elite universities.“As the first in my family to go to college, I know the struggles facing students whose parents have never been through the process,” Merkley said.According to an analysis conducted by the Harvard research group Opportunity Insights, legacy students were only slightly more qualified than the average applicant to elite private colleges, but were nearly four times more likely to be admitted than those with the same test scores. The boost appears to disproportionately harm students of color, as one study found that white students account for 40% of Harvard’s total applicant pool but nearly 70% of the university’s legacy applicants. Opportunity Insights’ research also concluded that legacy applicants are more likely to come from wealthy families, giving them more access to resources like private education and preparation courses for standardized tests.“Children of donors and alumni may be excellent students, but they are the last people who should get reserved seats, enabling them to gain admission over more qualified students from more challenging backgrounds,” Merkley said.The battle over legacy admissions has now also attracted the attention of the Department of Education. Last month, the department opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard’s use of legacy admissions following a complaint filed by the group Lawyers for Civil Rights on behalf of three racial justice organizations. The complaint accused Harvard of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by giving an admissions edge to the children of donors and wealthy alumni.“We know that schools like [Harvard] set students up for success – and for great success – and introduce them to new innovative ideas and a great network,” said Michael Kippins, a litigation fellow with Lawyers for Civil Rights. “They should reflect the type of diversity that we see in our communities the same way that we would want fair access for anything else.”Olatunde Johnson, a professor at Columbia Law School, viewed lawsuits against colleges’ legacy admissions policies as somewhat inevitable after the supreme court’s decision on affirmative action.“The supreme court opened the door to that challenge by leaving legacy and donor preferences untouched while it got rid of race-conscious affirmative action, so it made it kind of an easy target,” Johnson said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe predicted other universities would be closely watching the outcome of the civil rights inquiry into Harvard as they reconsider their own legacy admissions policies.“People might wait to see how this challenge is resolved because some of the broad contours of this complaint are going to mirror what people would do in future cases,” Johnson said. “Whatever kind of ruling there is, it’s going to have implications more broadly for other institutions, even without separate complaints or lawsuits.”Some colleges aren’t waiting on the federal government to make the change. The liberal arts college Wesleyan University announced last month that it would scrap its legacy admissions policy, joining other private institutions like Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University. The practice is already prohibited at a number of public colleges, including all schools in the University of California and the California State University systems.The trend of abandoning legacy admissions policies may accelerate in the face of mounting criticism from political leaders, including some Republicans. After the supreme court’s decision in June, South Carolina senator and Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott praised the ruling and simultaneously suggested universities needed to revisit their legacy preferences.“I think the question is, how do you continue to create a culture where education is the goal for every single part of our community?” Scott told Fox News. “One of the things that Harvard could do to make that even better is to eliminate any legacy programs.”Robinson is somewhat skeptical that a bipartisan coalition will materialize to meaningfully challenge legacy admissions, and the Republicans in control of the House have so far shown little appetite to take up Merkley and Bowman’s bill.But even if legacy preferences do come to an end, Robinson believes much more will need to be done to build a truly just college admissions process. After all, he said, the practice of legacy admissions is only one piece of a much broader system that disadvantages students of color.“Racism is like water pouring over a floor with holes in it. It will always find the cracks. So, yes, we should deal with legacy admissions. But I want to make sure that we don’t think that this is some sort of silver bullet,” Robinson said.“We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that those who are working every day to shut the doors of opportunity and access to those who have been excluded are not going to find other ways to to hold the side door open for people who look like them.” More

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      Green investment boom and electric car sales: six key things about Biden’s climate bill

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      The US’ first serious legislative attempt to tackle the climate crisis, the Inflation Reduction Act, is hitting its first anniversary both lauded for turbocharging a seismic shift to clean energy while also weathering serious attack from Republicans.Joe Biden hailed the bill, which despite its name is at heart a major shove towards a future dominated by renewable energy and electric vehicles, as “one of the most significant laws in our history” when signing it on 16 August last year.And the White House is trying to use the first year marker to extol it as a pivotal moment in tackling the climate emergency.“It’s the largest investment in clean energy in American history, and I would argue in world history, to tackle the climate crisis,” John Podesta, Biden’s chief clean energy advisor, told the Guardian. “With any legislation it takes time to get traction, but this is performing above expectations.”Podesta said there has been an “enormous response” in take-up for the tax credits that festoon the $369bn bill, directed at zero-carbon energy projects such as solar, wind and nuclear, grants for bring renewables manufacturing to the US and consumer incentives to purchase electric cars, heat pumps and electric stoves.Here are the key points to know about the impact of the act so far as it approaches its anniversary on August 16:1A boom in clean energy investmentThere has been around $278bn in new clean energy investments, creating more than 170,000 jobs, across the US in the first year of the Inflation Reduction Act, according to an estimate by the advocacy group Climate Power. The White House claims that there will be twice as much wind, solar and battery storage deployment over the next seven years than if the bill was never enacted, with companies already spending twice as much on new manufacturing facilities as they were pre-IRA.“It’s been more impactful than I or other observers would’ve thought,” said James Stock, a climate economist at Harvard University.Stock said that while the Inflation Reduction Act won’t by itself eliminate planet-heating emissions in the US, it is the “first substantive step” towards doing so and should help propagate the next generation of hoped-for clean fuels, such as hydrogen, in its 10-year lifespan. “As the tax credits are uncapped, too, we will see a lot more invested than we expected,” he said. “We could easily see $800bn to $1.2tn.”2More people are buying electric vehiclesThe Inflation Reduction Act includes rebates of up to $7,500 for buying an electric vehicle, and this incentive appears to be paying off – EV sales are set to top 1m in the US for the first time this year. Moreover, over half of US drivers are considering an EV for their next purchase, polling has shown.This transition isn’t without its hurdles, however – there has been a shortage of key parts in the EV supply chain, many models still remain prohibitively expensive and unions have been unhappy at the lack of worker protections for many of the new plants that are popping up. Climate advocates, meanwhile, have questioned why similarly strong support hasn’t been given to public transit or e-bikes to help get people out of cars altogether.3It will slash US emissions, but not by enoughThe US is the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the Inflation Reduction Act is widely forecast to slash these emissions, by as much as 48% by 2035, from 2005 levels, according to one analysis.These forecasts have a relatively wide range of estimates due to uncertainties such as economic growth but even in the most optimistic scenario the US will require further measures if it is to get to net zero emissions by 2050, as scientists have said is imperative if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate impacts.“Even though we passed the IRA you ain’t seen nothing yet,” said Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, in promising a fresh climate bill recently. But given the riven nature of US politics, the prospects of such legislation is remote in the near term.A more likely way to bridge the emissions gap will be a raft of regulatory actions by the Environmental Protection Agency, such as new standards to cut pollution from cars, trucks and power plants, as well as progress by individual states. “We basically need everything to go right,” said John Larsen, a partner at Rhodium group, an energy analysis organization4The IRA has so far escaped Republican cuts – but Biden is fighting to get creditThe legislation was a breakthrough moment following decades of obfuscation and delay by Congress despite increasingly frantic warnings by climate scientists over global heating, with the bill itself borne from months of torturous, comprise-laden negotiations with Joe Manchin, the coal baron senator from West Virginia who held a swing vote for its passage.But the legislation has already faced the threat of repeal from Republicans, who universally voted against it, with the GOP’s first bill after gaining control of the House of Representatives this year gutting key elements of the Inflation Reduction Act. This is despite the majority of clean energy investments flowing to Republican-led districts.Biden has also faced the ire of climate progressives for somewhat undercutting his landmark moment with an aggressive giveaway of oil and gas drilling leases on public land, including the controversial Willow oil project in Alaska, and for incentivizing the use of technologies such as carbon capture that have been criticized as an unproven distraction at a time when the world is baking under record heatwaves.“Biden has an atrocious track record on fossil fuels, and that needs to change,” said Jean Su, an attorney and climate campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity who called on Biden to declare a climate emergency. There needs to be a “sea-change in this administration’s approach” on the climate crisis, according to Jeff Merkley, a Democratic senator. “No more green lighting fossil gas projects. No more stalling on a climate emergency. Now is the time for us to live up to the full promise of the Inflation Reduction Act.”Polling shows the majority of American voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the climate crisis and only three in 10 have heard that much about the Inflation Reduction Act at all. Such perceptions will need to be turned around if the US president is to help secure the legacy of the bill in next year’s election.“We are going at a record clip to try to address this climate crisis,” said White House adviser Podesta. “I know people want us to hurry up and I wish we could produce a net zero economy immediately but this is a global transition that’s never occurred in human history. We need to get this job done.”The IRA act has not pleased leaders in the EU who have attacked it for being “protectionist” though some have argued they should instead be investing along similar lines.Clean energy investment has gone to red statesNo Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act but most of the investment that has been triggered by the bill has been funneled into projects in GOP-held Congressional districts. An emerging ‘battery belt’ is forming in the US south, with battery and electric vehicle plants popping up in states such as Georgia, Tennessee and Texas.“The IRA has been absolutely critical for us in terms of giving market certainties to go bold and big in our investment,” said a spokeswoman for QCells, a solar manufacturer that has embarked upon a major expansion in Georgia.5Renewables are booming – but there’s a transmission bottleneckIf the future wasn’t renewables before the IRA, it certainly is now – more than 80% of new electricity capacity this year will come from wind, solar and battery storage, according to federal government forecasts. The framers of the legislation hoped it will create a sort of virtuous circle whereby more renewable capacity will push down the cost of already cheap clean energy sources, seeding yet further renewable deployment.Solar panels may be dotting California and wind turbines sprouting off the east coast, but without the unglamorous build-out of transmission lines much of the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act may be lost.Not only is there a lack of physical poles and wires to shift clean energy from one part of the country to another, many clean energy projects are facing interminable waits, lasting several years, to be connected to the grid at all. There is more than 1,250 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity actively seeking grid connection, which is about equal to the entire existing US power plant fleet.“Something’s going to have to change to get this deployment online,” said Larsen. “Beyond that it will be about building stuff at scale, very, very quickly.” More

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      Prosecutors ask for 2 January start date for Trump 2020 election interference case – as it happened

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      From 3h agoFederal prosecutors asked a judge to set a 2 January trial date for former president Donald Trump in the case related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.In court documents, prosecutors with special counsel Jack Smith’s team said they want the case before US district judge Tanya Chutkan to move to trial swiftly in Washington’s federal court. Prosecutors estimate that it will take four to six weeks to present their case.
      This trial date, and the proposed schedule outlined below, would give the defendant time to review the discovery in this case and prepare a defense, and would allow the Court and parties to fully litigate any pre-trial legal issues.
      The team added:
      Most importantly, a January 2 trial date would vindicate the public’s strong interest in a speedy trial—an interest guaranteed by the Constitution and federal law in all cases, but of particular significance here, where the defendant, a former president, is charged with conspiring to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election, obstruct the certification of the election results, and discount citizens’ legitimate votes.
      Hello again, US politics live blog readers, it’s been a lively day in political news, which we do our best to bring you as it happens. There will be more live coverage on Friday but, for now, this blog is closing.Here’s where things stand:
      Donald Trump has lodged an appeal against the dismissal of his defamation lawsuit against the New York writer E Jean Carroll.
      The US supreme court has agreed to hear a challenge by Joe Biden’s administration to the legality of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement that would shield its owners, the Sackler family, from lawsuits.
      The Biden administration asked Congress for $13bn in emergency defense aid to Ukraine and an additional $8bn for humanitarian support, plus money to replenish the US federal disaster funds and fortify the US-Mexico border, in a package worth $40bn.
      The House oversight committee intends to subpoena Joe Biden and Hunter Biden amid its ongoing investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings.
      Federal prosecutors asked a judge to set a 2 January trial date for former president Donald Trump in the case related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
      Joe Manchin, West Virginia’s Democratic US Senator, said he’s “thinking seriously” about becoming an independent.
      Donald Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, pleaded not guilty in Florida court to conspiring with the former president to obstruct the investigation into his possession of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
      Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas received ‘unprecedented’ number of gifts from billionaire friends, according to a new report detailing even more largesse than previously revealed that has been showered upon the bench’s most conservative member.
      Donald Trump has lodged an appeal against the dismissal of his defamation lawsuit against the New York writer E Jean Carroll, Reuters reports.The development comes just three days after the former US president lost his counterclaim for defamation against E Jean Carroll, the writer against whom he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and fined $5m.Carroll also continues to pursue a separate defamation case against him.The US supreme court has agreed to hear a challenge by Joe Biden’s administration to the legality of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement that would shield its owners from the Sackler family from lawsuits over their role in the country’s opioid epidemic, Reuters reports.The court also paused bankruptcy proceedings concerning Purdue and its affiliates and said in a brief order that it would hold oral arguments in December in the administration’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling upholding the settlement. The court’s new term begins in October.Purdue’s owners under the settlement would receive immunity in exchange for paying up to $6bn to settle thousands of lawsuits filed by states, hospitals, people who had become addicted and others who have sued the Stamford, Connecticut-based company over its misleading marketing of OxyContin.At issue is whether US bankruptcy law allows Purdue’s restructuring to include legal protections for the Sackler family, who have not filed for personal bankruptcy.Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from creditors in 2019 to address its debts, nearly all of which stemmed from thousands of lawsuits alleging that OxyContin helped kickstart an opioid epidemic that has caused more than 500,000 US overdose deaths over two decades.The Biden administration on Thursday asked Congress to provide more than $13bn in emergency defense aid to Ukraine and an additional $8bn for humanitarian support through the end of the year, another massive infusion of cash as the Russian invasion wears on and Ukraine pushes a counteroffensive against the Kremlin’s deeply entrenched forces, the Associated Press writes.The package includes $12bn to replenish the US federal disaster funds at home after a deadly climate season of heat and storms and funds to bolster the enforcement at the southern border with Mexico, including money to curb the flow of deadly fentanyl. All told, it’s a $40bn package.While the last such request from the White House for Ukraine funding was easily approved in 2022, there’s a different dynamic this time.A political divide on the issue has grown, with the Republican-led House facing enormous pressure to demonstrate support for the party’s leader, Donald Trump, who has been very skeptical of the war. Meanwhile, American support for the effort has been slowly softening.White House budget director Shalanda Young, in a letter to House speaker Kevin McCarthy, urged swift action to follow through on the US “commitment to the Ukrainian peoples’ defense of their homeland and to democracy around the world” as well as other needs.The request was crafted with an eye to picking up support from Republicans, as well as Democrats, particularly with increased domestic funding around border issues – a top priority for the GOP, which has been highly critical of the Biden administration’s approach to halting the flow of migrants crossing from Mexico.Still, the price tag of $40bn may be too much for Republicans who are fighting to slash, not raise, federal outlays.Senate majority leader and New York Senator Chuck Schumer said:
      The latest request from the Biden administration shows America’s continued commitment to helping Americans here at home and our friends abroad. We hope to join with our Republican colleagues this fall to avert an unnecessary government shutdown and fund this critical emergency supplemental request.”
      Continuing on the issue of Jack Smith requesting a 2 January 2024 trial date for Donald Trump over the former president’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election while he was still in office:On Thursday in a court filing, the government also noted that Trump’s legal team had known about the facts of the case for at least a year after prosecutors first contacted them in June 2022 and one of the lawyers involved in that initial outreach, presumably Evan Corcoran, was at Trump’s arraignment.It also argued that Trump’s lawyers were wrong to characterize the Speedy Trial Act, which broadly mandates criminal cases to go to trial promptly, as existing for the benefit of the defendant and therefore allowing Trump to seek delays if he chooses.The speedy trial rules in fact exist to protect the rights of the public as well as the defendant, prosecutors wrote, citing an opinion from United States v Gambino that found: “The public is the loser when a criminal trial is not prosecuted expeditiously, as suggested by the aphorism, ‘justice delayed is justice denied’.”But the draft schedule proposed by the government, that would see evidence turned over to Trump through discovery completed by the end of August and jury selection at the start of December, is almost certain to be delayed because of complicating factors.The prosecution unexpectedly disclosed in a footnote that they intended to use classified information at trial, which means his case will be tried according to the time-consuming steps laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa.Cipa essentially requires the defense to disclose what classified information they want to use at trial in advance, so the courts can decide whether to add restrictions. If the government feels the restrictions aren’t enough, they can decide whether they still want to continue with the case.While Cipa established a mechanism through which the government can safely charge cases involving classified documents, the series of steps that have to be followed means it takes longer to get to trial compared with regular criminal cases without national security implications.In asking the judge overseeing the criminal case against Donald Trump over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election to schedule the trial for the start of January 2024, the written filing from prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith set an aggressive timeline.Trump’s lawyers are expected to seek substantial delay, according to a person close to the former president.“A January 2 trial date would vindicate the public’s strong interest in a speedy trial,” prosecutors wrote. “It is difficult to imagine a public interest stronger than the one in this case in which the defendant – the former President of the United States – is charged with three criminal conspiracies.”The eight-page filing submitted to US district court judge Tanya Chutkan, who will hear arguments from both sides about the scope of the protective order in the case on Friday, argued it gave sufficient time to Trump to prepare a defense.Last week, Trump pleaded not guilty to charges filed in federal district court in Washington that he conspired to defraud the United States, conspired to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructed an official proceeding, and engaged in a conspiracy against rights.Among other things, the government said Trump’s legal team already appeared to know what arguments they intended to make at trial and what pre-trial motions they intended to file and therefore were in a position to quickly go to trial.The prosecutors, for instance, sought to use the television appearances from Trump lawyer John Lauro – where he discussed potential legal defenses and the possibility of filing a motion to change the trial venue to West Virginia – against him.“It appears that defense counsel is already planning which motions the defendant will file,” prosecutors said in one footnote. “On CBS’s Face the Nation on August 6, 2023, Mr Lauro stated, ‘We’re going to be identifying and litigating a number of motions that we’re going to file.’”More of this report in the next post.James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee, said his committee will eventually move to subpoena Joe Biden and Hunter Biden amid its ongoing investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings.Comer, speaking on Fox Business on Thursday, said:
      This is always going to end with the Bidens coming in front of the committee. We are going to subpoena the family.
      He added:
      We know that this is going to end up in court when we subpoena the Bidens. So we’re putting together a case and I think we’ve done that very well.
      His comments came a day after the House oversight committee issued a memo laying out their intention to accuse Joe Biden of corruption even without direct evidence that he financially benefited from foreign business dealings by his son. The memo outlined millions of dollars in foreign funds paid to Hunter Biden and his former associates while his father was vice-president, but it did not show a direct payment to Joe Biden.National security council spokesperson Adrienne Watson confirmed that the five Americans detained by Iran had been moved to house arrest, and said negotiations for their release were continuing.Watson described the transfer as “an encouraging step” – but adding that they should never have been detained in the first place. She said:
      We will not rest until they are all back home in the United States. Until that time, negotiations for their eventual release remain ongoing and are delicate. We will, therefore, have little in the way of details to provide about the state of their house arrest or about our efforts to secure their freedom.
      The Iranian Americans include businessmen Siamak Namazi, 51, and Emad Shargi, 58, as well as environmentalist Morad Tahbaz, 67, who also has British nationality, said Jared Genser, a lawyer who represents Namazi. The identity of the other two US citizens has not been made public.Freeing the five would remove a major irritant between the US and Iran, though the nations remain at odds on issues from the Iranian nuclear program to Tehran’s support for Shia militias in nations such as Iraq and Lebanon.Namazi, who in 2016 was convicted of espionage-related charges the United States has rejected as baseless, has been detained by Iran for more than seven years. His father, Baquer, was allowed to leave Iran in October for medical treatment after being detained on similar charges also rejected by Washington.Tahbaz was arrested in 2018 and sentenced to 10 years in prison for “assembly and collusion against Iran’s national security” and working for the United States as a spy. Shargi was convicted of espionage in 2020 and also sentenced to 10 years.Iranian Americans, whose US citizenship is not recognized by Tehran, are often pawns between the two nations, which are at odds over issues including Iran’s expanding nuclear program.In February, NBC News reported Washington and Tehran were holding indirect talks exploring a prisoner exchange and the transfer of billions of dollars of Iranian funds in South Korean banks currently blocked by US sanctions. If transferred, those funds could only be spent for humanitarian purposes.Any transfer could draw Republican criticism that Joe Biden had effectively paid a ransom for the US citizens and that Iran using that money for humanitarian purposes could free up funds for its nuclear program or to support militias in nations such as Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.Donald Trump is likely to oppose the schedule proposed by special counsel Jack Smith in the latest court filing.The former president’s lawyers have already suggested they will try to slow things down, citing the complexity of the case and Trump’s crowded legal and political schedule.Trump’s legal team is due to respond by next Thursday. US district judge Tanya Chutkan has indicated she will make a decision on the trial date at a 28 August hearing.Federal prosecutors asked a judge to set a 2 January trial date for former president Donald Trump in the case related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.In court documents, prosecutors with special counsel Jack Smith’s team said they want the case before US district judge Tanya Chutkan to move to trial swiftly in Washington’s federal court. Prosecutors estimate that it will take four to six weeks to present their case.
      This trial date, and the proposed schedule outlined below, would give the defendant time to review the discovery in this case and prepare a defense, and would allow the Court and parties to fully litigate any pre-trial legal issues.
      The team added:
      Most importantly, a January 2 trial date would vindicate the public’s strong interest in a speedy trial—an interest guaranteed by the Constitution and federal law in all cases, but of particular significance here, where the defendant, a former president, is charged with conspiring to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election, obstruct the certification of the election results, and discount citizens’ legitimate votes.
      West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, who has yet to decide whether to run for reelection next year or wage a long-shot third party bid for president, said he’s “thinking seriously” about becoming an independent.“I’m thinking seriously,” Manchin told West Virginia radio host Hoppy Kercheval on Thursday. He added:
      I have to have peace of mind, basically. The brand has become so bad. The D brand and R brand … You’ve heard me say a million times, I am not a Washington Democrat.
      Asked how seriously he was about becoming an independent, Manchin said he has “been thinking about that for quite some time” and that he wanted to “make sure that my voice is truly an independent voice”.Manchin, who earlier this year described himself as an independent Democrat, has been dropping hints for months that he might switch to become an independent. On Thursday, he said he was not yet ready to make an announcement about his future with the Democratic party immediately. “When I get ready to make a decision, I’ll come see you,” he told Kercheval.The US and Iran have reached an agreement to win the freedom of five imprisoned Americans in exchange for several jailed Iranians and about $6bn in Iranian government assets blocked under US sanctions, according to reports.Five Iranian-Americans were transferred from prison to house arrest, according to a lawyer for one of the prisoners. Jared Genser, counsel to Siamak Namazi, told CNN the move was an “important development”, adding:
      While I hope this will be the first step to their ultimate release, this is at best the beginning of the end and nothing more.
      In addition to Namazi, Emad Sharghi, Morad Tahbaz, and two others whose names have not been made public, were moved from Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, and are anticipated to be held at a hotel under guard by Iranian officials, until they are allowed to board a plane.The Biden administration has been engaged in negotiations to try to secure the release of the Americans from Iran, a country with which it does not have diplomatic relations. More