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      Kamala Harris on Trump’s conviction: ‘Cheaters don’t like getting caught’

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      Donald Trump has assailed the validity of his conviction in the criminal case involving hush-money payments to an adult film actor because “cheaters don’t like getting caught,” Kamala Harris said during a speech on Saturday.“Simply put, Donald Trump thinks he is above the law,” the vice-president told an audience at a dinner hosted by the Michigan state Democratic party. “This should be disqualifying for anyone who wants to be president of the United States.”Harris’s remarks in Detroit about the presumptive Republican nominee for November’s presidential election came after the former president has repeatedly disparaged the New York state judge who oversaw the trial culminating in Trump’s being found guilty on 30 May.Trump has tried to persuade the electorate into believing that the judge, Juan Merchan, is unfair and somehow conspiring with the Joe Biden White House to which Harris belongs, even though it was state-level prosecutors – not federal ones – who brought the recently concluded case against him.Trump’s rhetoric that his criminal trial in New York was “rigged” echoed his supporters’ justification for their attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, a desperate but failed attempt to keep him in power after his electoral defeat to Biden weeks earlier, Harris suggested on Saturday. She also alluded to how Trump and his allies have openly boasted about exacting retribution against those who are perceived to have crossed the former president and some of his aides.“He suggests the case could be a ‘breaking point’ for his supporters, hinting at violence. He spreads lies that our administration is controlling this case when everyone knows it was a state prosecution. And he says that he will use a second term for revenge,” Harris said.“You know why he complains? Because the reality is cheaters don’t like getting caught.”While there was a generally friendly audience for her comments about Trump on Saturday, she was heckled by a pro-Palestinian protester demonstrating against the Biden administration’s response to Israel’s ongoing military strikes on Gaza. Officials quickly removed the heckler as the vice-president said, “I value and respect your voice – but I’m speaking right now,” the local television station WJBK reported.That encounter wasn’t the only time over the weekend that Biden’s administration was reminded of public dissatisfaction with its handling of the war in Gaza, which the Israeli military launched in response to Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside the White House on Saturday. Though footage posted to social media showed police using pepper spray on demonstrators, the Republican US senator Tom Cotton – a vocal, far-right critic of the Biden administration – appeared on Sunday on Fox News and argued that the president goes too easy on such protests.“Joe Biden thinks that these pro-Hamas, anti-American lunatics should be guiding American policy towards Israel,” Cotton said.Harris took aim at Trump on Saturday as the former president and Biden are essentially tied nationally as well as in key battleground states, at least according to a new poll by CBS News.That stalemate exists even after Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments delivered to Stormy Daniels, the adult entertainer who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with the Republican before he successfully ran for the Oval Office.He still faces 54 other pending criminal charges accusing him of 2020 election interference as well as improper retention of classified materials after his presidency, allegations contained in two federal prosecutions and one state case in Georgia.In civil court, Trump has been grappling with multimillion-dollar penalties for business practices deemed fraudulent as well as a rape accusation that a judge has determined to be substantially true.Republicans, meanwhile, have sought to embarrass Biden over the fact that his son, Hunter, had spent the previous several days standing trial on federal gun charges in Delaware. More

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      in US Politics

      Could RFK swing enough votes from Trump and Biden to decide the election?

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      View image in fullscreenThe Kennedy name looms large over American politics. John F Kennedy, despite serving only twoand a half years as president before his assassination, is frequently ranked among the top 10 US leaders; his brother, Robert F Kennedy, seemed set for his own spell in the White House until he too was killed in 1968.Enter: Robert F Kennedy Jr, nephew of the former, son of the latter and increasingly, persona non grata of the surviving Kennedy clan.Part-time environmental lawyer, full-time conspiracy theorist, an animal enthusiast who owned a pet lion at his elite boarding school and who, in his telling, had part of his brain eaten by a worm, Kennedy entered the 2024 presidential race as a Democrat running against Biden, before switching to an independent in October last year. The 70-year-old, who also has a history of associating with white supremacists, is an unknown quantity in the 2024 election race, with both parties worried about the havoc he could wreak.Five months out from perhaps the most consequential election in recent US history, Biden and Trump continue to be unpopular with the American public. Kennedy’s ability to be neither of those men, and his willingness to lean into his family name, have positioned him as a spanner in the works of American democracy.Both Democrats and Republicans fear that Kennedy, who is polling at about 10% nationally, could pull votes away from their men. Even a few Biden or Trump voters hopping on to the Kennedy train could be enough to influence what is expected to be a tight race. In an indication of the threat he poses, Trump has gone from praising Kennedy as a “very smart person” a year ago to recently posting a four-minute video attacking him on Truth Social.Plenty of people try to be president. In 2020 alone, 1,212 people filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission saying they were running for the White House. Yet it is Kennedy who is drawing all the coverage.Would he be getting as much attention – and pulling in millions of dollars in donations, some of it from former Trump supporters – if he had a different last name? Probably not.The world was introduced to RFK Jr early. His father, a supporter of Israel, was killed by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian man, as Kennedy Sr campaigned for president in Los Angeles. A 14-year-old Kennedy Jr was a pallbearer at his funeral: black and white photos from the funeral show a shaggy-haired Kennedy at the head of the coffin, looking numb and out of place among a crowd of grown men.Kennedy was the third of 11 children (the Kennedys were prodigious breeders), born to his father and Ethel Kennedy – a Chicago-born daughter of a coal magnate who remained a public presence way into the 1990s. Ethel made an appearance on the sitcom Cheers and was even named a tough tennis opponent in a Seinfeld episode.If Kennedy benefited from the family name, he benefited from the family wealth, too. Kennedy was raised in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, at the Kennedy compound – where his mother lives to this day.He studied at Millbrook school, a private boarding school in New York. At Millbrook, Kennedy was not universally liked, Jerry Oppenheimer wrote in a biography of the future presidential candidate.“[Kennedy] was viewed by some fellow students as egotistical and irresponsible for strutting around the campus and on the sidelines at home football games with a potentially dangerous young lion on a leash,” Oppenheimer wrote.Millbrook’s headmaster eventually banished the lion, who was called Toto, from campus, and the then 130lb big cat went to live at a safari park in Florida.Other interests, Oppenheimer reported, included “getting stoned” and, oddly, falconry. Kennedy was in a gang too: the Hyannis Port Terrors, who apparently “ran around and stole alcohol” during the summer months.(Kennedy’s parading around with a lion had apparently been forgiven by 1998: that year, he was the commencement speaker at the school.)His teenage years were difficult. In an interview in 2023, Kennedy said he started taking heroin when he was 15 years old, saying he “had a big empty hole inside”, and in 1983, when he was 29, Kennedy was charged with heroin possession after he “became ill”, the New York Times reported, “in the washroom of an airliner” which stopped in Rapid City, South Dakota.“All of a sudden everybody knew I was a drug addict and it gave me the freedom to get help,” Kennedy told an interviewer. “I could just be who I was and be honest.”Kennedy had hidden his addiction while graduating from Harvard University and earning a law degree from Pace University in New York, and after he had completed two years’ probation as a result of the heroin charge, he embarked on a career in environmental law.He worked for Riverkeeper, an organization which protects New York’s Hudson River, and sued polluters in an effort to protect waterways; his work earned him a place on the front cover of New York Magazine in 1995, which described him as “The Kennedy who matters”.But Kennedy – who during his campaign has criticized Biden for overspending on environmental issues – would become better known in the US as a conspiracy theorist.Kennedy spent years claiming, loudly and wrongly, that vaccines cause autism, while in 2023 alone Kennedy stated that wifi causes “leaky brain”, linked antidepressants to school shootings and said that chemicals in water were making children transgender.His history of embracing conspiracy theories meant Covid-19 was a perfect storm for Kennedy. His already-existing anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense became “an influential force that spreads false and misleading information”, Associated Press reported, with the group publishing books that falsely claim the Covid-19 vaccine caused a spike in deaths. A report in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2022 named Kennedy’s Twitter account as “the top superspreader” of misinformation about Covid-19.Kennedy was particularly criticized for a speech he gave at a rally against mandatory Covid vaccines in Washington in January 2022. Standing at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Kennedy told an animated crowd that unnamed figures were trying to control the American population in a way never seen before.“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy said.“Today the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide.”The remarks caused uproar, not least from the Auschwitz museum, which tweeted: “Exploiting of the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany – including children like Anne Frank – in a debate about vaccines & limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay.”Kennedy later apologized for saying that people who wished to remain unvaccinated had fewer freedoms than Anne Frank. But he continued to dabble in Covid-19 misinformation, writing in a 2021 book that Anthony Fauci, the top US public health expert during the pandemic, had conspired with Bill Gates to suppress alternative medicine treatments for Covid-19.View image in fullscreenGiven his history, Kennedy’s declaration, as he announced his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in April 2023, that he was “not an ideal presidential candidate for normal times”, could seem like an understatement. But people barely had a chance to get to grips with his candidacy before, in October, he scrapped the idea of running as a Democrat, and announced an independent campaign, this time claiming that the “two-party establishment” was “leading us all over a cliff”.As an independent choice, Kennedy represents a still quite old, but not as old as Biden or Trump, candidate. He would be 71 by the time he took office, but Kennedy presents as younger than his two rivals: less jowly, more robust and with a more convincing head of hair. At a campaign stop in June 2023, he stripped to the waist to lift some weights at a gym in Los Angeles, revealing a fairly impressive physique.On the campaign trial, Kennedy looks the part: that thick silver hair, those big white teeth, that perma-tan. His voice, then, comes as a surprise. Kennedy has a strained, halting tone, owing to spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition which affects his voice.That condition is far from Kennedy’s only brush with ill health. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on a deposition Kennedy had given during his divorce from his second wife, Mary Kathleen Richardson Kennedy. In the deposition, given in 2012, Kennedy said he had experienced memory loss, which “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”.“I have cognitive problems, clearly,” Kennedy said. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”After the Times article was published, Kennedy tweeted that he was willing “​​to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate”.Richardson Kennedy died by suicide in 2012, leaving behind her four children with Kennedy. Before Richardson Kennedy, Kennedy had two children with his first wife, Emily Black, one of whom is called Robert F Kennedy III. In 2014, Kennedy married Cheryl Hines, an actor best known for playing Larry David’s wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The pair live in Los Angeles.Hines, 58, has sought to distance herself from her husband’s campaign. She said in an interview with Fox News earlier this year that she did not always agree with Kennedy’s politics: “We’ve learned to talk through it. Talk it out. Listen to each other. Sometimes, agree to disagree or say: ‘Oh, I’m going to think about that and I hear what you’re saying,’ or: ‘I don’t like the way you’re saying it. I wish you’d say it in a different way.’”The fear for Biden and Trump is that Kennedy could be a Ralph Nader figure. Nader ran as the Green party candidate in the 2000 presidential election, and some Democrats still believe that it was his performance in Florida that swung the election away from Al Gore and towards George W Bush.Early predictions suggested Kennedy – as a scion of the most famous Democratic family in history – would draw support from Biden. Trump and other Republicans certainly seemed to think so, and spent months extolling his virtues – there was even suggestions among rightwing media that Kennedy could be a good vice-president to Trump.But conservatives might come to regret pumping him up. Polls have shown that Trump supporters are more drawn to Kennedy – with his vaccine skepticism and hardline policies on the border particularly popular – than Biden.Republican donors have flocked to Kennedy, too. Timothy Mellon, a Wyoming-based billionaire who has previously donated to groups supporting Trump, has given $25m to the Kennedy campaign, while Rolling Stone reported that other donors include regular Republican donors like John Schnatter, the disgraced former CEO of Papa John’s Pizza, and a financier who briefly supported Ron DeSantis’s bid for the Republican nomination.The support is enough for Kennedy to potentially make a nuisance of himself in terms of pulling votes away from Biden or Trump. But that doesn’t mean Kennedy is popular.Like Biden and Trump, more people dislike Kennedy than like him. According to FiveThirtyEight, 42% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Kennedy, with just 35% seeing him favorably: a favorability rating of -7%. (Trump has a favorability of -12%, Biden -16%.)He’s a bit less unpopular than his two main opponents, then, which can only be a good thing. But Kennedy has already shown himself to be a problematic figure on the campaign trail.Last July, he caused controversy when a video recording showed him falsely claiming that the Covid-19 virus had been “ethnically targeted” at Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people had greater immunity.Members of the Kennedy family roundly criticized the candidate after his remarks were made public: Jack Schlossberg, a grandson of President Kennedy, called his cousin’s campaign “an embarrassment” in a video.Other family members have made it clear that they oppose their namesake’s candidacy. In April, more than a dozen members of the Kennedy family, including six of Kennedy’s siblings, endorsed Biden for president.That should be galling for Kennedy, who on the campaign trail repeatedly mentions his family history. His Kennedy 2024 website frequently references his uncle, who despite his short term ranked as the ninth best president in a 2022 Siena College poll of historians, and 10th in a similar survey of 154 historians and presidential experts this year. (Biden was placed 14th, Trump came last.)Kennedy’s uncle president may even have influenced his decision to run as an independent. In a speech in Maryland in 1958, when he was still a senator and was two years away from becoming the 35th president of the US, John F Kennedy said:“Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past: let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”Kennedy is hoping that Americans will agree with that quote – or at least the bit about not seeking Republican or Democratic answers – come November. More

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      Trump to escalate blame on trial judge Juan Merchan if sentenced to prison

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      Donald Trump is determined to avoid jail, but if he does get handed a prison sentence after his conviction on 34 felony counts in New York last week, the former president’s inner circle is certain he will lay the blame squarely at the judge’s feet, sources familiar with the matter said.The precise way Trump might blame the judge, Juan Merchan, remains unclear because Trump has been avoidant of the issue and the matter was not resolved when he huddled with his top advisers at a Trump Tower meeting immediately after the verdict on Thursday, the sources said.But Trump is likely to double down on his attacks against Merchan, directing his supporters at rallies and in Truth Social posts to take up their grievances with the judge, one of the sources added.The consequences of Trump’s likely rhetoric are difficult to predict. Trump has been railing against Merchan for months as being unfair and in conspiracy cahoots with the Biden administration to prevent him from campaigning – and nothing concrete has happened.Still, Trump’s supporters have a history of making threats against judges Trump has assailed, including death threats to Tanya Chutkan, the US district judge who is presiding in his federal 2020 election interference case, and to the chambers of the New York judge who oversaw his civil fraud trial.Trump believes – correctly – that the ultimate decision with sentencing rests with Merchan, who has wide discretion to sentence him to fines or probation on the low end, to a carceral sentence on the high end, regardless of what prosecutors might request.That reasoning would be the basis for Trump to hold the judge responsible for any fallout, in the event he hands down a jail term days before the Republican national convention – even if the sentence would almost certainly be stayed pending appeal.Trump has already spent weeks railing against Merchan, taking advantage of the fact that the judge himself is not protected by the gag order. Both before and during the trial, Trump slammed the judge’s rulings as unfair and biased, and falsely suggested he was trying to stop him campaigning.Just one day after the trial, Trump appeared to open a new front against Merchan in freewheeling remarks at a news conference at Trump Tower, where he suggested Merchan looked like an “angel” but was really the “devil”.If a jail sentence does come, one of the sources said, they expected Trump to lash out in anger. But Trump has also been careful to not explicitly threaten or make foreboding warnings against Merchan to stave off prison.On Fox News Sunday, Trump said the public would not stand for him being sent to prison. “I’m not sure the public would stand for it. I think it would be tough for the public to take. At some point, there’s a breaking point”, he said, though the campaign was quick to clarify he was talking about the election.To some degree, Trump has managed to put Merchan exactly where he wants him.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump was in effect found guilty of using an unlawful hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, which means if Merchan sentences him to anything less than jail, it could spark backlash that it did not encapsulate the gravity of Trump’s criminal conduct.But if Merchan does actually sentence Trump to jail, the judge would be thrust forward by Trump as responsible for any fallout and any unrest from his supporters who have a history of engaging in political violence merely on the former president airing grievances.At sentencing, Merchan will have the additional decision of whether to punish Trump not just for the conviction but also his clear lack of remorse and his repeated violations of the gag order, which would be reflected in Trump’s pre-sentencing report.In New York, defendants convicted of felonies or serious misdemeanors are required to meet with a probation officer, who conducts a lengthy investigation and compiles a pre-sentencing report that the judge uses to determine what sentence to issue.The pre-sentencing report is typically one major opportunity that defendants have to make a good impression on the judge, including by expressing contrition. Trump has suggested none of that since his conviction, including by attacking the verdict the very next day. More

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      DNC targets Trump campaign rally with ‘convicted white-collar crook’ billboard

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      Democrats will target Donald Trump’s first full-scale campaign rally since his criminal trial with a billboard that brands him “a convicted white-collar crook”.The ad, paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is the latest indication that the party is ready to become more aggressive in capitalising on last month’s guilty verdict in New York.“Trump was a disaster for Nevada’s economy,” says the billboard, which will be displayed in Las Vegas, where Trump is due to speak on Sunday. “Now he’s back. A convicted white-collar crook. Coddling billionaires, leaving workers behind.”A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in his hush-money criminal trial, making him the the first former US president to be convicted of a felony. Judge Juan Merchan set a sentencing hearing for 11 July.But Democrats have been unsure how far to go in hammering home the verdict to voters in this year’s presidential election campaign. Some fear it could fuel a narrative that the trial was politically motivated and backfire by generating sympathy for the presumptive Republican nominee.View image in fullscreenHowever, this week there have been signs of a more direct approach. On Monday, at a campaign reception in Greenwich, Connecticut, Joe Biden referred to his opponent as a “convicted felon”.The Las Vegas billboard attempts to tie Trump’s criminal record to his economic one, portraying him as a “white-collar crook” who ripped off Nevada’s working class when he was president. The phrase also has echoes of the “Crooked Hillary” label that proved effective for Trump during the 2016 campaign.Stephanie Justice, a DNC spokesperson, said: “As Donald Trump returns to Nevada this weekend for the first time as a convicted felon, voters will remember this crook left Nevada’s workers out to dry as president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“After promising to take care of Nevada’s middle class, he implemented a tax scam that made the ultra-wealthy and corporations wealthier off the backs of working families, repeatedly attacked unions and sat back as Nevada bled tens of thousands of jobs.”Justice added: “Now he’s promising tax handouts to his billionaire donors instead of putting the interests of working Nevadans first. Nevada voters know that Trump is too corrupt and unfit to serve, and will reject him again in 2024.”The political impact of Trump’s conviction remains uncertain, but a post-verdict analysis of nearly 2,000 interviews with voters who previously participated in New York Times/Siena College surveys found that Trump’s lead over Biden narrowed from three points to just one point. More

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      Revealed: Trump ally Kari Lake gave speech in front of Confederate flag

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      The Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake addressed supporters with a Confederate flag displayed behind her during a campaign event at a Trump merchandise store in Arizona last week, where she repeated false claims about election fraud.In footage obtained by the Guardian, Lake is seen speaking into a microphone, surrounded by a group of supporters, at the Trumped Store in Show Low, Arizona. Behind her, a Confederate battle flag and a yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” flag are affixed to the wall. Both flags are available for purchase on the website of Trumped Store, which sells an array of merchandise with the former president’s name and likeness.Writing on X last week, Lake described the event as a “magical day”.“So many incredible patriots in Heber-Overgaard, Show Low and the White Mountains,” she said. “America is stepping up. Arizona is stepping forward. It’s time to save this great Republic. I’m honored to be in this fight with all of these amazing patriots.”The Confederate flag has long been condemned as a symbol of racism and slavery, and a number of institutions have sought to distance themselves from it in recent years. In 2020, the Mississippi governor, Tate Reeves, a Republican, signed a law to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag, making Mississippi the last state to do so.Reached for comment about the video, a spokesperson for Kari Lake told the Guardian: “The Kari Lake campaign does not respond to British propaganda outlets. We stopped doing that in 1776.”In the video, Lake is heard repeating her baseless accusations of widespread election fraud in the 2022 gubernatorial race, which she lost to the Democrat Katie Hobbs. When a supporter told Lake that she actually won the 2022 election, she replied: “Of course we did. They stole our government.”In the months after the 2022 election, courts repeatedly dismissed Lake’s legal claims challenging the results of the gubernatorial race, and her lawyers were sanctioned for making “false factual statements”. In April, the US supreme court dismissed Lake’s lawsuit challenging Arizona’s use of electronic voting machines. At the Trumped Store event, Lake indicated she planned to reopen her appeal in the voting machines case, which she confirmed on Friday.“We’re trying to get rid of these damn machines that are corrupt,” Lake told supporters last week.Lake went on to repeat the false claim that Trump won the 2020 presidential election, presenting her belief in election fraud as an asset in the Senate race. If Lake wins the Republican primary on 30 July, as she is widely expected to do, she will go on to face the Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego in November.“I’m the only person running for US Senate – either Republican or Democrat – who truly believes there was fraud in the election in 2020,” Lake said to applause from attendees. “Anybody believe there wasn’t fraud in 2020? Anybody believe Joe Biden really, truly got 81 million votes?”Courts rejected dozens of Trump’s lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election, and the former president has failed to produce substantive evidence corroborating his claim that widespread fraud tainted the results in battleground states. A group of Trump’s supporters later attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the certification of Biden’s victory in the election, and some carried Confederate battle flags into the building.Lake appeared at the campaign event alongside Steve Slaton, the Trumped Store owner and Republican state legislative candidate who has attracted controversy over allegations that he inflated his military record. On his campaign website, Slaton claims to have served in Vietnam as a “crew chief/co-pilot on an AH-1G Cobra Attack Helicopter”. But military records obtained by the Mountain Daily Star indicate that Slaton was stationed only in Korea, primarily serving as a helicopter repairman, and did not even join the army until after the last US troops left Vietnam.Slaton’s campaign website also includes a photo of him standing in front of a Confederate battle flag at the Trumped Store. A photo, posted to X by the Arizona state senator Wendy Rodgers, shows Lake and Slaton posing together at the campaign event last week. More

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      Clarence Thomas discloses travel paid for by rightwing billionaire five years later – as it happened

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      Clarence Thomas, the conservative supreme court justice, has belatedly acknowledged that he went on two trips paid for by rightwing billionaire Harlan Crow, NBC News reports.The admission comes in an amended financial disclosure covering 2019:Last year, ProPublica broke the story of the entanglements between Thomas and other conservative supreme court justices, including Samuel Alito, and rightwing figures with interests before the court such as Crow.It drew objections from Democrats, who called for the supreme court to adopt an enforceable ethics code. But their efforts to hold the conservative-dominated body to account have been stymied by a lack of cooperation from the justices, and the fact that they do not have the votes to pass legislation addressing the court.In a speech on the Normandy coastline, Joe Biden honored the US soldiers who stormed the strategic Pointe du Hoc on D-day, and likened the war against Nazi Germany to today’s struggle against Vladimir Putin. The day before, Biden gave a rare sit-down interview to ABC News, and hit back at Donald Trump’s comment that his executive order on immigration was “weak and pathetic”. “Is he describing himself?” Biden quipped. In Washington DC, supreme court justice Clarence Thomas returned to the news when he belatedly disclosed that he had gone on two trips with conservative activist Harlan Crow – which generated much controversy among Democrats when they were first revealed last year.Here’s what else happened today:
      Trump raked in big bucks at a fundraiser hosted by tech figures in San Francisco.
      Late-night hosts cracked wise about Biden’s age as the president visited D-day veterans who were even older than him.
      The supreme court may issue more opinions next Thursday. Trump’s immunity petition and two major abortion cases remain pending before the conservative-dominated court.
      Rudy Giuliani is looking to sell his apartment as he goes through bankruptcy.
      More GOP senators are pledging not to work with the Democrats over Trump’s felony convictions.
      Meanwhile, the ranks of Republican senators who have signed a pledge vowing not to work with Democrats on issues like spending bills and confirming judges in protest of Donald Trump’s conviction have grown.Eight Republicans initially signed on after a jury found Trump guilty of felony business fraud charges last week, and the number has now grown to 14, Utah’s Mike Lee announced:Donald Trump’s felony conviction may have been a boon for his fundraising, but as the Guardian’s Joan E Greve reports, it may be costing him support in his general election rematch against Joe Biden:After a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts last week, Republicans rallied around the former president, insisting the verdict would only damage Joe Biden’s standing in the presidential election.But some new polling data casts doubt upon that argument, as a small but crucial number of Americans in key voting blocs appear to be moving toward Biden in the aftermath of the verdict.According to a post-verdict analysis of nearly 2,000 interviews with voters who previously participated in New York Times/Siena College surveys, Trump’s advantage over the president has narrowed from three points to one point. That shift may seem insignificant, but it could prove decisive in a close presidential election, as is expected in this year’s contest. In 2020, just 44,000 votes across three battleground states prevented a tie in the electoral college.Perhaps more worrisome for Trump is the specific areas where he appears to be bleeding support. According to the Times analysis, disengaged Democratic-leaning voters and those who dislike both Trump and Biden were more likely to say that the verdict made them reconsider their options in the election.Donald Trump may be raking in the dough, but the same cannot be said for some of his closest allies.His attorney Rudy Giuliani is moving to sell his Manhattan apartment, after he late last year filed for bankruptcy:Giuliani’s financial woes intensified in December, when two Georgia election workers won a massive defamation judgment against him after he falsely claimed they tampered with ballots in the swing state after the 2020 election:San Francisco is known for its liberal politics, but Donald Trump yesterday brought in $12m from a fundraiser in the city hosted by tech and crypto entrepreneurs friendly to his campaign to the White House, Reuters reports.Trump has seen a fundraising surge following his conviction last week on felony business fraud charges in New York. Here’s more from Reuters about how yesterday’s fundraiser, which brought Trump-flag waving supporters to San Francisco’s chilly, foggy streets, came about:
      Venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, as well as Sacks’ wife Jacqueline, held the reception and dinner with Trump at the Sacks’ swanky mansion in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, according to an invitation seen by Reuters.
      The gathering – where top tickets were $500,000 per couple – was sold out, a source with knowledge of the fundraiser told Reuters. It raised some $12 million, according to Republican National Committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon and another source.
      While San Francisco is heavily liberal – Democrat Joe Biden won 85% of the city’s vote in the 2020 election against then-President Trump – a growing number of high-profile local venture capitalists and crypto investors have thrown their support behind Trump ahead of his November rematch against Biden.
      “President Trump is relaxed, happy, and cracking jokes about AI,” Dhillon, a conservative lawyer, posted on X from the event.
      Executives from crypto exchange Coinbase, crypto investor twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and other crypto leaders were in attendance, Dhillon added. Trump talked about how Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has warned about crypto being used by scam investors and criminals, is “going after crypto,” according to Dhillon.
      Biden last week vetoed what he described as a Republican-led resolution that would “inappropriately constrain the SEC’s ability to set forth appropriate guardrails and address future issues” relating to cryptocurrency assets.
      Trevor Traina, a San Francisco-based tech executive and former Trump ambassador to Austria, said business regulations implemented during Biden’s presidency had alienated some people in the tech industry.
      Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has just released a television advertisement slamming Donald Trump for comments it characterizes as derogatory towards the US military and its veterans.Its release comes after the president spent the last couple of days marking the 80th anniversary of D-day, including with a speech earlier today about the importance of democracy. See the ad here:The supreme court may issue another batch of opinions on Thursday, 13 June, when it will next convene for a non-argument session.The conservative-dominated body has a number of high-profile matters it has yet to weigh in on. These include Donald Trump’s petition for immunity from federal prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election, and two cases dealing with abortion access. One deals with whether abortion pill mifepristone can remain available, and the other over whether the Biden administration can require federally funded hospitals carry out abortions in emergencies, even in states with bans on the procedure.And despite the demands of Democrats, conservative justice Samuel Alito is poised to consider Trump’s immunity case, even though reports emerged that flags supporting rightwing causes were displayed at his properties.Other justices cashed in on book deals.Conservative justices Brett Kavanaugh, collected $340,000 in royalties from the Javelin Group and Regnery Publishing for a book that has not yet been published and Neil Gorsuch, reported $250,000 from royalties for his book “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” which will be published by HarperCollins.Also included in newly released annual reports of the finances of the supreme court justices are details surrounding Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who collected nearly $900,000 last year for her upcoming memoir and was gifted four Beyoncé concert tickets by the singer valued $3,700.Thomas belatedly reported the trips paid for by Crow, including a hotel room in Bali, Indonesia as well as food and lodging in Sonoma County, California, a region known for its fine wine.Thomas’s amendments to include Crow’s gifts are part of the financial disclosures of almost all nine supreme court justices that were released on Friday. (Justice Alito received a nearly three-month extension to release his).Clarence Thomas’s acknowledgement of travel with conservative billionaire Harlan Crow comes after Democrats recently demanded supreme court justice Samuel Alito recuse himself from cases dealing with the 2020 election after two flags linked to rightwing causes were reported to have flown at his properties. Last week, Alito declined to that, the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington reports:Justice Samuel Alito is rejecting calls to step aside from supreme court cases involving the former president Donald Trump and January 6 defendants because of the controversy over flags that flew over his homes.In letters to members of Congress on Wednesday, Alito says his wife was responsible for flying an upside-down US flag over his home in 2021 and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey beach house last year.Neither incident merits his recusal, he wrote.“I am therefore duty-bound to reject your recusal request,” he wrote.The court is considering two major cases related to the 6 January 2021 attack by a mob of Trump supporters on the Capitol, including charges faced by the rioters and whether the former president has immunity from prosecution on election interference charges.Alito has rejected calls from Democrats in the past to recuse on other issues.The New York Times reported that an inverted American flag was seen at Alito’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, less than two weeks after the attack on the Capitol.Clarence Thomas, the conservative supreme court justice, has belatedly acknowledged that he went on two trips paid for by rightwing billionaire Harlan Crow, NBC News reports.The admission comes in an amended financial disclosure covering 2019:Last year, ProPublica broke the story of the entanglements between Thomas and other conservative supreme court justices, including Samuel Alito, and rightwing figures with interests before the court such as Crow.It drew objections from Democrats, who called for the supreme court to adopt an enforceable ethics code. But their efforts to hold the conservative-dominated body to account have been stymied by a lack of cooperation from the justices, and the fact that they do not have the votes to pass legislation addressing the court.In attendance for Joe Biden’s speech earlier at Pointe du Hoc was John Wardell, a 99-year-old veteran who came ashore about a week-and-a-half after D-Day.For late-night talkshow hosts, Biden’s visit with World War II veterans was the perfect opportunity to crack wise about the president’s advanced age. Here’s our round-up of their zingers:Before he began speaking at Pointe du Hoc, Joe Biden was given a tour of the site by its superintendent, Scott Desjardins.The White House pool reporter covering the president today spoke to Desjardins, who said Biden was impressed by the bravery of the US army rangers that scaled the promontory and fought off German counter attacks for two-and-a-half days.“He was impressed of course. This is an impressive story. It’s hard not to be impressed,” said Desjardins, who noted Biden saw a link to the importance of Nato:
      He made it very clear that this is required. No one can go at this alone anymore.
      Joe Biden spoke from atop a former German bunker at Pointe du Hoc, a promontory that was a site of a fierce battle on D-Day:Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan spoke from the very same spot:When it comes to marking D-day’s anniversary, times have certainly changed, as C-SPAN points out.Joe Biden’s speech today was mostly about the importance of democracy, though he did name drop Vladimir Putin, and liken the threat he poses to Europe to that of the Nazis.Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy joined Biden and other western leaders for the commemoration in France, but when Barack Obama marked the occasion 10 years ago, Putin was in attendance: More

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      Trump plots capture of DoJ in renewed assault on US justice system

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      Donald Trump is planning an assault on the American justice system should he win re-election to the White House, in which he would seek to destroy the independence of the justice department and turn it into an attack machine for his Make American great again (Maga) movement.At the heart of his plans is the desire to impose his will on the individual prosecutorial decisions taken by the Department of Justice. The move, if successful, would end half a century of accepted practice that prevents presidents from politically interfering with specific cases.It would allow Trump in his second term to eradicate the federal prosecutions currently being pursued against him as well as against insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 whom he has championed as “hostages”. It would also free him to instigate legal investigations as acts of revenge against his perceived political enemies, including Joe Biden and family.“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump said last year.No evidence has been presented linking Biden to any crime, though his son Hunter Biden did go on trial on Monday accused of falsifying a firearms license application.Trump repeated the threat that he use the justice system to go after his opponents on Tuesday, telling Newsmax that the prosecutions against him had set a “terrible precedent” that he implied he would turn against Democrats should he win in November. “It’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to, and it’s very possible that it’s gonna have to happen to them.”In his first White House term, Trump made clear that he aspired to total control of the DoJ. He failed in that attempt, largely because of the resistance of top justice officials.Trump’s determination to overcome the norm is now much more advanced than it was four years ago. His disdain for the fundamental building blocks of the justice system was on full display following his New York conviction last week on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up an affair with the adult actor Stormy Daniels.In comments widely echoed by senior Republicans, Trump denounced the trial as “rigged” – an echo of his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.“His message is that whenever anything comes out in a way that isn’t positive for me, it’s illegitimate,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a law professor at New York Law School. “If people start to believe that, then really, you don’t have any rule of law.”Independence and impartiality were baked into the justice department in the wake of Richard Nixon’s abuses in the 1970s Watergate scandal, ensuring that while presidents can appoint the attorney general who heads the DoJ, as well as set general law enforcement priorities, they cannot influence individual cases.View image in fullscreenThat norm has held steady for 50 years, but it remains vulnerable to attack. Roiphe co-authored a study into whether presidents can control the justice department, concluding that while DoJ independence has become a cornerstone of American democracy, it is not so secure that “it couldn’t be dismantled by a president who was firmly committed to doing so”.Trump allies have been busy in recent months in laying down legal arguments for why he should be permitted to wield absolute power over federal legal decisions. The most significant work has been done by Jeff Clark on behalf of the Center for Renewing America, the rightwing thinktank led by Russ Vought.Vought, Trump’s former budget director, is considered a contender for White House chief of staff in a second term. He is a central participant in Project 2025, a mammoth effort by a coalition of rightwing groups to prepare a blueprint for a renewed Trump presidency.In an article titled “The US Justice Department Is Not Independent”, Clark argues that the practice of avoiding direct contact between the White House and the attorney general that has pertained since the Carter administration must be swept away. “Under the constitutional system as it stands, DoJ independence does not exist,” he wrote.This quasi legal doctrine has been dubbed the “unitary executive theory”, signifying the sole power of the president over all federal government affairs.Clark was at the center of Trump’s most egregious attempt to seize control of DoJ decision-making during his first term. In January 2021, at the climax of the “stop the steal” campaign, Trump tried to make Clark acting attorney general in place of Jeffrey Rosen who was refusing to play along with his election denial conspiracy.Clark, a relatively unknown justice official, was only stopped after several senior DoJ officials threatened to resign.He has written the roadmap that would allow Trump to demand a halt to the federal prosecution for his role in January 6 in which Clark himself is an unnamed co-conspirator.As Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief White House strategist, put it on his War Room podcast, the DoJ would be purged and restructured to “get rid of lots of personnel”.A key early move would be choosing an attorney general open to the idea of the unitary executive theory. Problems with senate confirmation, which is designed as a check on presidential power, could be overcome at least in the short term by appointing an acting attorney general who can operate without congressional approval.Early moves on the part of the new attorney general would include dismissing the current special counsel Jack Smith. That in turn would pave the way for the termination of Smith’s two federal prosecutions against Trump – the January 6 case and the charges relating to Trump’s hoarding of confidential documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort.The former president has also proposed forming a taskforce to review the cases of what he has called “every political prisoner who has been unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration”. The trawl would likely be directed at pardoning January 6 rioters.Trump has indicated that he would deploy prosecutorial powers against Democratic foes, but he also has Republicans in his sights. The Washington Post reported that in private he has expressed a desire for revenge even against leading figures in his first administration who have since become critics. They include his former chief of staff John Kelly, former attorney general Bill Barr and ex-attorney Ty Cobb.Roiphe said that the structure of the criminal justice system, including grand juries and trial procedures, would stand in the way of any attempt to prosecute innocent people. But she warned of the possible corrosion of faith in the system that could ensue, with potentially dire long-term consequences.“That’s what happens in authoritarian states – there is a semblance of a legal system, but it becomes useless,” she said. “If that happens here it would be extremely troubling. We’re not there yet. But I do think a second term could cause significant damage that may or may not be permanent.” More

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      How to spot a deepfake: the maker of a detection tool shares the key giveaways

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      You – a human, presumably – are a crucial part of detecting whether a photo or video is made by artificial intelligence.There are detection tools, made both commercially and in research labs, that can help. To use these deepfake detectors, you upload or link a piece of media that you suspect could be fake, and the detector will give a percent likelihood that it was AI-generated.But your senses and an understanding of some key giveaways provide a lot of insight when analyzing media to see whether it’s a deepfake.While regulations for deepfakes, particularly in elections, lag the quick pace of AI advancements, we have to find ways to figure out whether an image, audio or video is actually real.Siwei Lyu made one of them, the DeepFake-o-meter, at the University of Buffalo. His tool is free and open-source, compiling more than a dozen algorithms from other research labs in one place. Users can upload a piece of media and run it through these different labs’ tools to get a sense of whether it could be AI-generated.The DeepFake-o-meter shows both the benefits and limitations of AI-detection tools. When we ran a few known deepfakes through the various algorithms, the detectors gave a rating for the same video, photo or audio recording ranging from 0% to 100% likelihood of being AI-generated.AI, and the algorithms used to detect it, can be biased by the way it’s taught. At least in the case of the DeepFake-o-meter, the tool is transparent about that variability in results, while with a commercial detector bought in the app store, it’s less clear what its limitations are, he said.“I think a false image of reliability is worse than low reliability, because if you trust a system that is fundamentally not trustworthy to work, it can cause trouble in the future,” Lyu said.His system is still barebones for users, launching publicly just in January of this year. But his goal is that journalists, researchers, investigators and everyday users will be able to upload media to see whether it’s real. His team is working on ways to rank the various algorithms it uses for detection to inform users which detector would work best for their situation. Users can opt in to sharing the media they upload with Lyu’s research team to help them better understand deepfake detection and improve the website.Lyu often serves as an expert source for journalists trying to assess whether something could be a deepfake, so he walked us through a few well-known instances of deepfakery from recent memory to show the ways we can tell they aren’t real. Some of the obvious giveaways have changed over time as AI has improved, and will change again.“A human operator needs to be brought in to do the analysis,” he said. “I think it is crucial to be a human-algorithm collaboration. Deepfakes are a social-technical problem. It’s not going to be solved purely by technology. It has to have an interface with humans.”AudioA robocall that circulated in New Hampshire using an AI-generated voice of President Joe Biden encouraged voters there not to turn out for the Democratic primary, one of the first major instances of a deepfake in this year’s US elections.

      When Lyu’s team ran a short clip of the robocall through five algorithms on the DeepFake-o-meter, only one of the detectors came back at more than 50% likelihood of AI – that one said it had a 100% likelihood. The other four ranged from 0.2% to 46.8% likelihood. A longer version of the call generated three of the five detectors to come in at more than 90% likelihood.This tracks with our experience creating audio deepfakes: they’re harder to pick out because you’re relying solely on your hearing, and easier to generate because there are tons of examples of public figures’ voices for AI to use to make a person’s voice say whatever they want.But there are some clues in the robocall, and in audio deepfakes in general, to look out for.AI-generated audio often has a flatter overall tone and is less conversational than how we typically talk, Lyu said. You don’t hear much emotion. There may not be proper breathing sounds, like taking a breath before speaking.Pay attention to the background noises, too. Sometimes there are no background noises when there should be. Or, in the case of the robocall, there’s a lot of noise mixed into the background almost to give an air of realness that actually sounds unnatural.PhotosWith photos, it helps to zoom in and examine closely for any “inconsistencies with the physical world or human pathology”, like buildings with crooked lines or hands with six fingers, Lyu said. Little details like hair, mouths and shadows can hold clues to whether something is real.Hands were once a clearer tell for AI-generated images because they would more frequently end up with extra appendages, though the technology has improved and that’s becoming less common, Lyu said.We sent the photos of Trump with Black voters that a BBC investigation found had been AI-generated through the DeepFake-o-meter. Five of the seven image-deepfake detectors came back with a 0% likelihood the fake image was fake, while one clocked in at 51%. The remaining detector said no face had been detected.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenLyu’s team noted unnatural areas around Trump’s neck and chin, people’s teeth looking off and webbing around some fingers.Beyond these visual oddities, AI-generated images just look too glossy in many cases.“It’s very hard to put into quantitative terms, but there is this overall view and look that the image looks too plastic or like a painting,” Lyu said.VideosVideos, especially those of people, are harder to fake than photos or audio. In some AI-generated videos without people, it can be harder to figure out whether imagery is real, though those aren’t “deepfakes” in the sense that the term typically refers to people’s likenesses being faked or altered.For the video test, we sent a deepfake of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy that shows him telling his armed forces to surrender to Russia, which did not happen.The visual cues in the video include unnatural eye-blinking that shows some pixel artifacts, Lyu’s team said. The edges of Zelenskiy’s head aren’t quite right; they’re jagged and pixelated, a sign of digital manipulation.Some of the detection algorithms look specifically at the lips, because current AI video tools will mostly change the lips to say things a person didn’t say. The lips are where most inconsistencies are found. An example would be if a letter sound requires the lip to be closed, like a B or a P, but the deepfake’s mouth is not completely closed, Lyu said. When the mouth is open, the teeth and tongue appear off, he said.The video, to us, is more clearly fake than the audio or photo examples we flagged to Lyu’s team. But of the six detection algorithms that assessed the clip, only three came back with very high likelihoods of AI generation (more than 90%). The other three returned very low likelihoods, ranging from 0.5% to 18.7%. More