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      He’s beaten his Republican rivals and is ahead in the polls. But Trump is vulnerable | Jonathan Freedland

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      You’d think a week spent in the snow and ice of New Hampshire, watching Donald Trump stroll to a double-digit victory over his last remaining Republican rival, would have left me filled with angst about the presidential election in November. Sure enough, given that a second Trump presidency would have a truly disastrous impact on the US and the world, the fact that the now near-certain rematch of Trump and Joe Biden remains a “coin flip”, in the private assessment of one of America’s foremost electoral analysts, still makes my palms go clammy.But to my surprise, I left the frozen American north-east not hopeful, exactly, but lifted by the thought that Trump is weaker, and Biden stronger, than this week’s headlines – or the latest polls showing the current president six points behind the previous one – might suggest. Now when I hear the words “coin flip”, I react like Jim Carrey’s character in Dumb and Dumber, when told that the odds of him winning over the woman of his dreams are one in a million: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance.”Of course, the causes for gloom have not gone away. Biden’s age remains the biggest single obstacle to his re-election: even Democrats worry that he might just be too old to serve a second term, which would see him leave his Oval Office desk at the age of 86. Inflation has hurt him: a pair of 18-year-olds at Bedford High School told me they had cast their first vote for “Donald J Trump”, as they reverentially put it, in part because of high petrol prices. And too many voters blame Biden for the fact that “the world is on fire”, to quote Trump’s challenger, Nikki Haley. They see wars in Ukraine and in Gaza, hear Trump boast that there was no such trouble when he was in charge, and blame Biden.That aversion to overseas conflict, and fear of the US getting sucked in, is now loud in the once hawkish Republican party, but anti-war sentiment among Democrats poses its own danger to Biden. He is struggling to hold his party together. The left, and younger voters especially, are appalled by his support for Israel in its fight against Hamas – a sentiment that will only harden after the international court of justice’s ruling on Friday demanding that Israel ensures acts of genocide are not committed in Gaza. Young voters were a bedrock for Biden in 2020, but he can rely on them no longer. Those teenagers for Trump I met in Bedford were not the only ones.And yet, there are encouraging signs. In New Hampshire, Trump’s win over Haley was assured by his three-to-one lead among registered Republicans. His overall margin narrowed because she beat him convincingly among undeclared or independent voters, who under New Hampshire’s rules are allowed to take part in a party primary. I spoke to dozens of them, and few were motivated by admiration for the former US ambassador to the UN. On the contrary, their driving purpose was to stop “that man”, many expressing plain disgust for Trump.In the race for his party’s nomination, those views were easily swept aside by the Maga, or Make America Great Again, majority. But in a general election, independents can make the difference between victory and defeat. That they so heavily rejected Trump – 58% backing Haley – spells trouble for the former president. Those are voters Biden should be able to win over, but there are seams to mine among dissident Republicans too. In New Hampshire, about 25% of them could not stomach voting for Trump. Even if most Republicans eventually fall in line, it would take only a small slice to defect to Biden or stay home to deny Trump a second term.That may not be so hard to achieve. For the presumptive nominee remains as repellent as ever. His victory speech on Tuesday was a reminder of his talent for obnoxiousness. He humiliated one-time rivals who now back him and, as if setting out to alienate the suburban female voters who often form a decisive swing bloc in US elections, nodded along as the crowd chanted the nickname he’s given Haley – “birdbrain” – while he mocked the outfit she had worn at her own event earlier that evening: “I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy.”The macho boor stuff works well inside the Maga bubble, where the devotees love it, but it will do Trump no favours over the course of an exceptionally long general election campaign, which began, in effect, this week and will stretch to November. Paradoxically, Trump may have benefited from his post-6 January spell of enforced exile from most social media platforms, limiting how much Americans saw him. Now the spotlight is back on – and it is rarely flattering.That is especially true of his multiple and continuing court cases. Among the Republican base, the 91 felony charges against him are a badge of honour, proof that he’s a victim of the liberal deep state; among the wider US electorate, they don’t play so well. Note that even among those who voted for Trump in New Hampshire, 13% believe that, were he convicted of a crime, he would not be fit to be president. A verdict may not come in time for 5 November, but it’s further proof of Trump’s vulnerability.What of Biden’s strength? There was no real Democratic primary in New Hampshire, but there was a challenger, a perfectly competent congressman called Dean Phillips. Even though the president was not on the ballot, he crushed Phillips, thanks to a drive to get Democrats to “write in” Biden’s name. That suggests organisational muscle.And he can press at least two issues that have a proven record of winning elections for Democrats. The first is abortion, following the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2022 Dobbs case to end the constitutional protection of abortion rights. Trump brags that he’s “proud” of that, because it was he who appointed three rightwing judges to the court. But it’s not a popular position. On the contrary, Republicans have repeatedly lost at the ballot box since the court’s ruling, whether in elections or state-level referendums. “Dobbs may have broken the Republican party,” says the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who accurately predicted his party’s success in the 2022 midterms and is bullish about Biden’s chances now.The second issue is the core anti-Trump argument: that the man who tried to overturn the 2020 election is a would-be dictator who poses a threat to democracy. Add to that some healthy economic numbers and rising consumer confidence, and you can see the outline of a winning message.To be sure, the messenger remains flawed, though the veteran Republican consultant Mike Murphy thinks there’s a line Biden could use to deal with the age issue, one that would draw the contrast with his opponent: “We’re both old – but he’s old and crazy.” There’s peril, too, in third-party candidacies who would split the anti-Trump vote. The point is, no one could possibly be complacent about a Biden victory and Trump defeat in 2024. Like the man said, it’s a coin flip – but the evidence is telling us there’s a chance.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump abruptly leaves court during closing arguments in E Jean Carroll trial

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      As E Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial against Donald Trump neared its final stage Friday morning in New York, proceedings quickly took a turn for the absurd with the judge threatening his lawyer with “lockup” and the ex-president leaving about 10 minutes into the former Elle writer’s closing argument. Trump returned to court for his defense’s closing.Trump’s abrupt departure came as Carroll’s lead attorney, Roberta Kaplan, was delivering her closing argument – shortly after she noted that he had continued to defame the columnist during this very trial. Trump left.Kaplan had provided a chronology of the harm endured by Carroll due to Trump’s attacks in advance of the remark that appeared to trigger him.“Donald Trump’s denials and vicious accusations were all complete lies. That has already been proven, right in this courtroom, by a jury,” Kaplan said.“This case is also about punishing Donald Trump for what he has done and for what he continues to do,” Kaplan said, adding shortly thereafter: “This trial is about getting him to stop, once and for all.”Kaplan noted that he started to smear Carroll within a day of her last court victory, which found that he had defamed her. “Donald Trump, however, acts as if these rules and laws just don’t apply to him” and pointed out that he spent “this entire trial” attacking Carroll with nefarious posts.It was right about this time that Trump walked out of court.“Excuse me,” Judge Lewis Kaplan said. “The record will reflect that Mr Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom.”At the end of her closing, Roberta Kaplan urged jurors to hold Trump accountable – and insisted that the only way to make him follow the law and stop defaming Carroll would be a hefty penalty.“The one thing Donald Trump cares about is money,” she said. “While Donald Trump may not care about the law, while he certainly does not care about the truth, he does care about money.“The question for you as a jury is this: given Donald Trump’s insistence on continuing to defame Ms Carroll and considering his immense wealth, how much will it take to make him stop?“He thinks the rules that govern everyone else don’t apply to him,” Kaplan added.Trump’s lead attorney in this case, Alina Habba, started delivering her closing around 11.15am and quickly blamed Carroll for the backlash and suggested the former president was the victim.Habba said: “There is no one that can truly express the frustration of the last few years better than my client, the former president of the United States.”Habba then played a video that had been introduced by Carroll’s team in which he doubled down on his denials, in a way her camp contended was defamatory.“I have absolutely no idea who this woman is. The verdict is a disgrace, a continuation of the greatest witch-hunt of of all time,” Trump said in this video clip.“You’re right that’s how he feels. Can you imagine a world where someone can accuse you of a terrible accusation and you defend yourself, respond to reporters on the south lawn as the sitting president?” Habba said.“The president has been consistent. She’s right, he has said this same thing over and over and over again and do you know why he has not wavered? Because it’s the truth,” Habba said, prompting an objection from Carroll’s team.She then started to attack Carroll’s credibility, which appeared to edge toward breeching Kaplan’s prohibition on litigating the facts.“If you violate my instructions again, Ms Habba, you may have consequences,” he warned.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionProceedings appeared poised to be rocky before they started.Within less than 10 minutes of Trump’s arrival to the courtroom, as both sides were discussing items they wanted to include in their closings before jurors entered, the judge threatened Habba, with punishment when she tried to interrupt him, saying: “You are on the verge of spending some time in the lockup. Sit down!”As closings unfolded, Trump continued to go on the attack against Carroll, with several posts appearing on his Truth Social account, including one calling her account a “hoax”.Closings came one day after Trump – whom Carroll sued for defamation over his denials of her rape allegation in 2019 – testified for less than five minutes, as the judge had limited what his lawyer could ask him, and what he could say.The judge had previously ruled that jurors’ findings in Carroll’s first trial against Trump – that he sexually abused her around late 1995 and when she came forward in 2019, defamed her – would apply in this trial. This ruling meant that the ex-president couldn’t re-litigate her claims and, as a result, jurors are only weighing damages in the ongoing proceedings. Trump did not attend the first trial.One of the questions Habba was allowed to ask was: “Do you stand by your testimony in the deposition?”, during which he denied Carroll’s claim.“One hundred per cent, yes,” he replied.“Did you deny the allegation because Ms Carroll made an accusation?” Habba pressed.“That’s exactly right. She said something, I consider it a false accusation. No difference,” he said, prompting an objection from Carroll’s team. Kaplan ordered that everything after “yes, I did” would be stricken.“Did you ever instruct anyone to hurt Ms Carroll in your statements?”“No. I just wanted to defend myself, my family, and frankly, the presidency,” Trump answered, prompting yet another objection. Kaplan ordered that everything after “no” be stricken, meaning jurors were directed to disregard his commentary.The jury started deliberating at 1.40pm local time. More

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      Biden hopes abortion will keep him in the White House. But has he done enough to protect rights?

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      Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has made a big bet that outrage over abortion will keep the president in the White House come November.Over the last several days, the Biden administration has unleashed a blitz of ads and events to spotlight the devastation wrought by the overturning of Roe v Wade. Biden met with a reproductive health task force, while his vice-president, Kamala Harris – who he has entrusted to lead this effort – embarked on a national tour to talk about abortion. They even devoted their first joint campaign stop of 2024 to the issue. From the podium, Biden promised to sign any bill that would codify Roe’s protections into law and to fight back efforts by Congress to diminish abortion access.“Donald Trump and Maga Republicans, including the speaker of the House, are hellbent on going even further,” Biden said, a reference to the hard-right Republican speaker, Mike Johnson. “As long as I have power of the presidency, if Congress were to pass a national abortion ban, I would veto it.”Congress is unlikely to ban or protect abortion anytime soon. Not only is Congress largely frozen – it passed just 27 bills last year – but both political parties seem wary of tackling national legislation around a third-rail topic like abortion.Now that Roe is gone, the question of if and how to regulate abortion access is largely up to state governments to answer. But the executive branch of the US government still maintains several powers to protect abortion access – and undermine it.What has Biden done to protect abortion access?The Biden administration’s ability to enforce remaining federal laws that touch on abortion is perhaps its greatest weapon in the fight over the procedure. Shortly after Roe’s demise, the Biden administration announced that it believed a 1986 federal law that protects people’s access to emergency care at hospitals also applies to emergency abortions. The administration later sued Idaho, arguing that the state’s near-total abortion ban flew in the face of that law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala).That case has now made its way to the US supreme court. The supreme court justices are also set to hear arguments in a case involving the availability of a major abortion pill – a case in which the Biden administration is, once again, arguing in favor of abortion access.“Being a check on the supreme court is pretty significant,” said Mary Ziegler, a University of California Davis school of law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. The US supreme court is dominated 6-3 by conservatives. “If the supreme court says that you can or should enforce rules against abortion providers, I don’t think a Biden administration is going to do that.”Since Roe fell, anti-abortion activists have also begun to argue that the federal government could enforce a de facto national abortion ban through the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials.However, the Biden administration has issued guidance declaring that they do not believe the Comstock Act can or should be used to enforce a national abortion ban. According to the Biden administration, as long as someone does not intend to break the law when they mail abortion-related materials, they are not violating the Comstock Act.What more could Biden be doing?The answer depends on who you ask. Abortion rights advocates have long been dissatisfied with Biden’s approach to the procedure; Biden has supported Roe’s protections but also said that, as a Catholic, he is personally not “big on abortion”. During his campaign and the first several months of his presidency, he seemed wary of even saying the word “abortion”, leading reproductive justice advocates to launch a website devoted to answering the question “Did Biden Say Abortion Yet?” (He has now said it multiple times.)The Biden administration has pursued several cases under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or Face Act, a federal law that penalizes people for threatening, obstructing, or injuring someone who is trying to access a reproductive health clinic, or for vandalizing a clinic. But abortion providers have long complained that the law is not being enforced enough.Abortion rights supporters have also proposed a litany of other, experimental ways to protect abortion access, such as by leasing federal land to abortion providers or advocating for the repeal of the Comstock Act. Biden could also loosen regulations around abortion pills, although Ziegler cautioned that such actions run the risk of politicizing the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to a dangerous degree. Abortion rights advocates have also said that the Biden administration could take steps to lessen the impact of the Helms Amendment, a decades-old law that has been used to block the use of federal funding to pay for abortions. Advocates have accused Biden of inappropriately over-enforcing the Helms Amendment, to the point that the US Agency for International Development in 2021 cancelled a conference session on the provision of safe telemedicine abortion.However, in Ziegler’s view, the threat of the supreme court tamps down on Biden’s ability to innovate. Rather than pursuing novel, national ways to protect abortion access and run the risk of litigation, the administration may want to stay out of federal court entirely.“I think Biden has been really cautious,” Ziegler said. “But I do also think that had he not been as cautious, it could have ended up the same or worse anyway, just because the supreme court is so conservative.”What could Donald Trump do to further restrict abortion?If Trump wins the presidency in November 2024, he may reverse course on many of the Biden administration’s decisions around how and if to enforce federal abortion law. He could try to implement the Comstock Act to ban abortion in some form, including in states that haven’t passed bans. He could also decrease Face Act prosecutions, or tighten regulations on mifepristone.Unlike Biden, he likely wouldn’t worry about politicizing the FDA, Ziegler said. “There’s a lot of asymmetry that hurts Democrats, but also Democrats do value some of these institutional separations that Republicans don’t.”Trump’s first four years in the White House also offer a blueprint for how he may further dismantle access to both abortion and contraception if he returns to power.Since the 1980s, whenever a Republican becomes president, he has implemented what is known as “the Mexico City policy” or the “global gag rule”, as abortion rights supporters call it. This policy typically blocks foreign NGOs that receive US family planning funding from providing abortion-related services or even advocating for increased access to the procedure. (Historically, whenever a Democrat replaces a Republican as president, he has rescinded the Mexico City policy.)Trump, however, turbocharged the Mexico City policy during his presidency. Rather than stripping funding only from family planning assistance, in 2017 his administration expanded it to apply to all US global health assistance. Rather than impacting $600m worth of funding, by 2018 it impacted $12bn, according to estimates by the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights.As president, Trump also implemented a “domestic gag rule”, which blocked members of Title X, the nation’s largest family planning program, from even referring people for abortions. Rather than comply with this rule, a quarter of Title X-funded health centers simply left the program. Six states were left with zero Title X providers, who offer low-cost access to family planning services like birth control.If Trump wins in 2024, he will likely reinstate this rule, said Robin Summers, vice-president and senior counsel for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. And that’s just the beginning of Summers thinks he might do.“I think it only gets worse,” Summers said.Trump could, Summers suggested, legally label certain forms of hormonal birth control – such as IUDS – as abortifacients, suggesting that they cause abortions. (Medical experts widely believe that they do not.) The US supreme court has previously supported a similar move. In a 2014 decision, issued when the court’s makeup was far less conservative, the justices ruled that a corporation did not have to cover certain forms of birth control for employees because the corporation’s religious owners believed them to be abortifacients.“The bottom line here is that advocates sounded the alarm for years that Roe was at significant risk of being overturned. And we were dismissed by many as catastrophizing the whole thing,” Summers said. “And look where we are.” More

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      Indictments fueled extremists’ support for Trump, survey finds

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      The criminal charges against Donald Trump have fueled increased radical support for the former president while his efforts to paint the government and Democrats as a threat to democracy have convinced more people to distrust democratic institutions.New survey results from the University of Chicago’s Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPOST) shows increased violent support for Trump aligns with the indictments, as did the erosion of support for democratic norms. Court cases using the 14th amendment to try to keep Trump off the ballot could further erode confidence in the political system, regardless of how the supreme court rules on the issue, the survey found.Support for democratic norms has gone from “bad to worse”, said Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who directs CPOST. The two ideas are connected: The more a person believes the system is corrupt or rigged, the more likely they are to support using violence instead of the political system.“Once you think you live in a corrupt political system, then you give up on politics as a solution and you go for violence,” Pape said.While 50% of survey respondents said Trump was a threat to democracy, now 36% said the same of Democratic president Joe Biden. That means Trump’s attempt to twist messaging is working: the former president has repeatedly attacked Biden in recent months as Biden warns of the threat Trump poses to democracy after Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Trump has called Biden a “threat to democracy” and a “destroyer” of democracy.Effectively, Trump has turned a losing issue for himself, the future of democracy, into much less of a liability, particularly among Republicans.“His new argument … is that the institutions of government are unfairly targeting him,” Pape said. “And what this data is showing is that he is actually persuading significant numbers of people on this issue.”Support for violence has also increased across the political spectrum, a sign of intense polarization and weakened beliefs in the political system. The percentage of people who believe using force would be justified to keep Trump from being president again is higher, at 9.6%, than the percentage of people willing to use force to restore Trump to the presidency, at 6.5%.Through the 2024 election, CPOST will be releasing new survey data tracking continued dangers to democracy every quarter. The data will be published first with the Guardian.The survey results cut across various questions about the state of American democracy. Now, 50% of survey participants said political elites, both Republicans and Democrats, are the most immoral and corrupt people in America, up from 42% a year ago. And 63% said they agreed that a small group of elites controls all the levers of power and enriches themselves at the cost of normal Americans, up from 54% last January.Support for conspiracy theories has increased during that time as well: 22% now believe Biden stole the 2020 election, up from 21%; 30% believe the Democratic party is trying to replace the current electorate with more obedient voters from the third world, up from 21%; and 14% believe a secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is ruling the US government, up from 11%.They are also more likely to support the use of violence to achieve political goals now compared with one year ago. 16% said the use of force is justified to coerce Congress, up from 9%, while 6.5% said force would be justified to return Trump to the White House, compared with 4.5% last January. On abortion rights, 9% said force would be justified to restore them, up from 8%.Supporters of Trump who also believe in using violence to achieve their political goals are statistically much more likely to believe democratic institutions are deeply corrupt: 68% of that subgroup believe the 2020 election was stolen; 56% say their party has virtually no chance of winning elections in 2024 because the system is rigged and 81% think the prosecutions of Trump are intended to hurt his electoral prospects this year.Those radical Trump supporters are the most likely to move toward violence if they don’t achieve their goals through the political process, Pape said. And depending on how Trump himself fares politically, he could instigate or orchestrate violence as well, he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“If Trump is put in jail, in prison, then his radical support is likely to go up,” Pape said. “And that’s where political violence is most likely to happen from the right.”The 14th amendment cases, where left-leaning groups have filed lawsuits seeking to remove Trump from the ballot for violating the 14th Amendment by participating in an insurrection while an officer of the US, could exacerbate the political violence problem, no matter which way the case is decided by the US supreme court.There’s an extreme partisan divide on the issue. For Democrats, 78% support disqualifying Trump from the ballot. For Republicans, 72% believe removing him would be an assault on democracy, with 16% of Republicans saying it would justify the use of force to restore him to the White House.“There’s a real risk that whatever the supreme court decides is going to be viewed as illegitimate by one side or the other in the 14th amendment controversy,” Pape said.There’s a subset of Republicans, 14%, that support disqualifying Trump. Of that group, 24% already plan to vote for Biden, while 71% said they wouldn’t vote for Trump. The group is heavily college-educated. Pape said this group is “enough to swing 2024” and serves as a “critical vulnerability for Trump” that his opponents could target in key states.In order to subdue any claims of illegitimacy, the court itself should work to publicly explain its reasoning and make the case that its decision was based on the facts of the case, Pape said.“This is why democracies fade into authoritarianism. These are the issues, ” he said. More

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      Mitt Romney: Trump’s call to stonewall Democrats on immigration ‘appalling’

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      Donald Trump’s directive to congressional Republicans to not agree to a deal with Democrats on immigration and border control is “appalling”, Mitt Romney said.“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump,” Romney, the Republican senator from Utah, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday.“And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame [Joe] Biden for it is … really appalling.”Having won in Iowa and New Hampshire and with only the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley still in the race, Trump is the clear favourite for the Republican presidential nomination to face Biden in November.His progress has not been impeded by 91 criminal charges, attempts to remove him from the ballot for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress and assorted civil trials.It was widely reported this week that Trump has sought to dynamite Senate talks for an immigration deal long linked to prospects of a new aid package for Ukraine.Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, reportedly acknowledged that Trump’s opposition makes it highly unlikely immigration talks will succeed, given hardline Republicans’ hold on the House and its speaker, Mike Johnson, a far-right congressman from Louisiana.Romney is a former Massachusetts governor who became the Republican nominee for president in 2012 before winning a Senate seat in Utah in 2018.Though he flirted with working for Trump when he won the White House, Romney has since emerged as a constant opponent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe sole Republican to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial, for seeking political dirt in Ukraine, Romney was one of seven senators to find Trump guilty in his second such trial, for inciting the January 6 insurrection.On Thursday, Romney said: “The reality is that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border, and someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved, as opposed to saying: ‘Hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’” More

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      Trump seeks to disqualify Fani Willis from prosecuting him in Georgia

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      Donald Trump joined a motion on Thursday seeking to disqualify the Fulton county district attorney prosecuting him over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia after her recent remarks decrying allegations of an affair with one of her deputies.The filing, submitted to Fulton county superior judge Scott McAfee on Thursday, adopted and added to an earlier motion to have the district attorney Fani Willis and her entire office thrown off bringing the case.At issue is an explosive complaint from Trump’s co-defendant and former 2020 campaign election day operations chief Michael Roman, asking Willis to be relieved because her alleged relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade created a conflict of interest.The filing itself included no concrete evidence that might give rise to a disqualification. But exhibits in related filings – notably Wade’s divorce proceeding – has shown that Wade paid for trips with Willis to California and Florida.Willis has not formally responded to the complaint to date, though she addressed some of the claims in a speech delivered earlier this month at a historic Black church in Atlanta, suggesting the claims were in part racially motivated.“How come, God, the same Black man I hired was acceptable when a Republican in another county hired him and paid him twice the rate?” Willis said in her remarks, in a thinly veiled effort to defend the hiring of Wade without specifically naming him.In the new filing joining Roman’s motion, Trump lawyer Steve Sadow contended for the first time that Willis’s remarks, in addition to coming outside of proper court channels, were themselves improper.“The DA’s provocative and inflammatory extrajudicial racial comments, made in a widely publicized speech at a historical Black church in Atlanta, and cloaked in repeated references to God, reinforce and amplify the ‘appearance of impropriety’ in her judgement and prosecutorial conduct,” Sadow wrote.The district attorney’s office is expected to file a response before 2 February, ahead of an evidentiary hearing set for 15 February before McAfee in Atlanta.The relationship between Willis and Wade threatens to undercut the Georgia election interference case against Trump and his allies because a finding of a conflict of interest could see the entire district attorney’s office disqualified from continuing with the prosecution.The transactions from Wade’s credit card statements attached as an exhibit show that Wade paid for at least two trips during the criminal investigation into Trump that named Willis as a travel companion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe first trip, dated 4 October 2022, involves a flight from Atlanta to Miami. Wade paid for a ticket for himself and for Willis. Separately, on the same date and without any names attached, the statement shows Wade’s credit card was used to make two purchases with Royal Caribbean Cruises, for $1,284 and $1,387.The second trip, dated 25 April 2023, involved a flight from Atlanta to San Francisco. Wade again paid for a ticket for himself and for Willis. Separately, on 14 May 2023, Wade’s credit card was used to make two purchases of $612 and $228 at a Doubletree hotel in Napa Valley, California.Roman’s motion claimed Willis personally profited from the contract. Wade was paid at least $653,000 and potentially as much as $1m for legal fees as one of the lead prosecutors on the Trump case, and the filing alleged Wade then paid for trips he took with Willis to Napa Valley and the Caribbean. More

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      US border policy deal within reach despite efforts by Trump to derail it, senators say

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      Congressional negotiators said a border deal was within reach on Thursday, despite efforts by Donald Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill to derail the talks.With the fate of US aid for Ukraine hanging in the balance, the outlook for border compromise had appeared grim following reports on Wednesday night that the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, was walking away from a compromise that he suggested could “undermine” Trump’s chances in a November general election against Joe Biden. But by Thursday afternoon, senators involved in the discussions were insisting that the opposite was true: an agreement was within reach and legislative text could be released in the coming days.Referring to Trump as the “nominee”, McConnell reported told Republicans in a closed-door meeting on Wednesday night that “politics on this have changed”, according to a report in Punchbowl News. With Trump as their likely standard bearer, he suggested that it would be unwise to move forward with a bipartisan immigration bill that could possibly neutralize one of Biden’s biggest vulnerabilities. “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” McConnell said, referring to Trump.“That’s like parallel universe shit,” Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican of North Carolina involved in the negotiations, fumed to reporters on Thursday. “That didn’t happen.”It would amount to a surprising about-face for McConnell, a strong supporter of sending aid to Ukraine and no friend of the former president, who has leveled racist broadsides against McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, and mercilessly disparaged the Republican leader as an “old crow”.Walking through the Capitol on Thursday, McConnell told Bloomberg News that the immigration talks were “ongoing”. Later he reportedly assured his confused conference that he was “fully onboard” with the negotiations, and brushed off reports that suggested otherwise.The proposal under discussion in Congress would have changed immigration policy to discourage migration. It would include major concessions from Democrats on immigration in exchange for Republican support on passing military assistance to Israel and Ukraine, a country whose cause the party’s far right has turned against.But the politics of a deal have only become more challenging as Trump consolidates support from Republican officials in what many view as his inevitable march toward the GOP nomination.On social media, Trump implored Mike Johnson, the arch-conservative House speaker, not to accept a deal “unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions and Millions of people”.Failure to strike a deal would have global implications, with the Pentagon warning that Ukrainian soldiers on the frontlines of its grinding war with Russia risk running out of ammunition. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has said the “future of the war in Ukraine” and the “security of our western democracy” depend on Congress reaching an agreement.Biden had requested tens of billions of dollars from Congress to send aid to Ukraine and Israel as well as to allies in the Asia Pacific region. But the funding package has been stalled for months in Congress amid Republican demands for dramatic changes to border policy.View image in fullscreenSenate Republicans who support the border talks said the party should seize the opportunity to address the record rise of people arriving at the US southern border, a situation both parties and the White House have described as a crisis.“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump,” the Utah senator Mitt Romney, a Republican who has pressed his party to approve military aid for Ukraine, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday. “And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.”He continued: “The reality is that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved as opposed to saying: ‘Hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven in less contentious times, immigration remains one of the thorniest issues in American politics, and efforts to reform the nation’s outdated system have failed repeatedly. But as an unprecedented number of people fleeing violence, poverty and natural disasters seek refuge at the US-Mexico border, the issue has become top of mind for many Americans who overwhelmingly disapprove of the Biden administration’s handling of the matter.Trump has already made immigration a central issue of his campaign, outlining a draconian vision for his second term that includes mass raids, detentions camps and more funding to build his long-promised wall along the border with Mexico.Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill have argued that a bipartisan deal would only serve to give Biden political cover without actually solving the problem. Others argue that the Senate plan was designed to force the hand of the Republican-controlled House, where the speaker is under pressure from the far-right flank of his party not to compromise on the issue.At a press conference earlier this week, the Texas senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, denounced the proposal, the details of which have not yet been released, as a “stinking pile of crap” that “represents Senate Republican leadership waging war on House Republicans”.Cruz alleged that the negotiators involved cared only about supporting Ukraine and not fixing the issues at the southern border.If a deal falls apart, Schumer and Biden will be forced to look for alternative legislative paths to approving aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. But with Republicans demanding border security measures in exchange for their votes, it remains far from certain that tying the aid to must-pass spending bills or bringing it to the floor as a standalone measure would garner the necessary 60 votes in the Senate.The world will likely know soon whether a deal is possible, the Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, one of the Democratic negotiators, told reporters on Thursday.“I think the Republican Congress is going to make a decision in the next 24 hours as to whether they actually want to get something done or whether they want to leave the border a mess for political reasons,” he said. More

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      Ex-Trump adviser Peter Navarro sentenced to four months in prison

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      Peter Navarro, a top former Trump administration official, was sentenced to four months in federal prison and fined $9,500 after he was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol attack.The sentence imposed by Amit Mehta in federal district court in Washington was lighter than what prosecutors recommended but tracked the four-month jail term handed to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who was similarly convicted for ignoring the panel’s subpoena.“You are not a victim, you are not the object of a political prosecution,” the US district judge said from the bench. “These are circumstances of your own making.”Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September of two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to produce documents and testimony in the congressional investigation into the Capitol attack, claiming that executive privilege protections meant he did not have to cooperate.The committee took a special interest in Navarro because of his proximity to Trump and his involvement in a series of efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including to have members of Congress throw out the results in a plot he named “the Green Bay Sweep”.But Navarro’s subpoena defiance prompted a criminal referral to the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which brought the charges and ultimately asked for six months in jail because he brazenly ignored the subpoena even after being told executive privilege would not apply.“He cloaked his bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt behind baseless, unfounded invocations of executive privilege and immunity that could not and would never apply to his situation,” prosecutors wrote of Navarro in their sentencing memorandum.Within hours after the judge handed down the sentence, Navarro’s lawyers John Rowley and Stanley Woodward filed a notice of appeal to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit. As with Bannon, Navarro is expected to have his punishment deferred pending appeal.Navarro’s lawyers had asked for probation, saying the judge himself seemed to acknowledge at one point that Navarro genuinely believed Trump had invoked executive privilege, a separation-of-powers protection aimed at ensuring White House deliberations can be shielded from Congress.The privilege, however, is not absolute or all-encompassing. The January 6 committee had sought both White House and non-White House material, the latter of which would not be included, and the judge concluded in any case at a hearing that Trump had never formally invoked the privilege.Regardless of what Navarro may have believed, the judge found, he failed to prove the existence of a conversation or communication from Trump that explicitly instructed Navarro not to cooperate with the January 6 committee’s subpoena specifically.That proved to be the central problem for Navarro.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBefore charging Navarro, prosecutors decided not to bring charges against two other Trump White House officials – Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff , and Dan Scavino, former deputy chief – even though they also did not cooperate with the January 6 committee and were referred for contempt.The difference with Meadows and Scavino, as the record later appeared to show, was that they had received letters from a Trump lawyer directing them not to respond to subpoena requests from the panel on executive privilege grounds.Navarro received a similar letter from Trump directing him not to comply with a subpoena from around the same time issued by the House committee that investigated the Covid pandemic. But he was unable to produce an invocation with respect to the later January 6 committee.“Had the president issued a similar letter to the defendant, the record here would look very different,” the judge said at a hearing last year.The January 6 committee completed its work last January, writing in its final report that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the results of the 2020 election, conspiring to obstruct Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States.Last year, the US justice department charged Trump on four criminal counts related to his efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat and impede the transfer of power. Trump was also charged in Georgia for violating the state’s racketeering statute for election interference efforts there. More