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      How Texas Republicans are catering to election deniers in this county

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      On 22 November 2020, Heider Garcia, the elections administrator for Tarrant county, Texas, was awake in his living room until around 3am, unable to sleep over fears that a stranger might show up at his house, he recalled.An account had posted his family’s home address on Twitter during weeks of false conspiracy theories and death threats about his role in the 2020 election. Donald Trump’s supporters refused to believe that Tarrant county, a major, diverse county that encompasses the cities of Fort Worth and Arlington, had broken its Republican voting patterns for Joe Biden.Garcia spent Thanksgiving break installing security cameras – but he didn’t quit his job or stay quiet in the wake of the threats. Rather, as he detailed in his 2022 Senate testimony, his office devoted the next 18 months to championing transparency, from releasing public records to speaking with skeptics.Garcia “has an open door, he would answer the phone, and he would walk people through the process”, said Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College and the director of the elections and voting information center. “A lot of election officials are not willing to be as open and transparent as that.”But after weathering attacks from the outside, Garcia was driven to quit in April by events closer to home. His resignation letter alluded to differences with a Republican county judge who has catered to election deniers. The judge helped set up a taskforce focused on investigating and prosecuting election crimes, which critics view as doing little but feeding the anxious climate around elections.Across the US, conservative officials who entertain Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election have raised alarms about voter fraud, despite a dearth of evidence that it’s a problem. Some election skeptics have sought positions that influence how local elections are run, persisting even as their attempts to win and interfere with elections have mostly failed.Tarrant county exemplifies the fallout of this movement in one of the most populous counties in the country. Democrats have asked the US justice department to intervene to protect voters of color in Tarrant county from intimidation. The county judge has dismissed their concerns as “partisan” and “pathetic”.After Garcia resigned, the hiring process to replace him included a candidate who, as an election “integrity” activist, went to a voter’s home to deliver a letter questioning their choice of polling place.Garcia declined to comment on his resignation. But he said that politicians who focus on election integrity like to play the hero, and it will continue as long as they are rewarded for it. “There is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing anywhere,” he said. “Yet it seems that there’s still a quest to find a villain.”Meanwhile, the taskforce, which handles complaints through the sheriff’s criminal investigations division and is part of the public integrity unit in the DA’s office, reports no filed cases. But Texas Democrats see it as part of a bigger problem.State representative Chris Turner, a Democrat in Tarrant county, called it “one more element in a years-long Republican strategy at the national, state and local level to undermine the confidence in our elections, to provide a pretext for disputing the results of elections when they don’t go your way”.A new taskforceTarrant county has over 2 million people, about half of whom are Black, Latino or Hispanic, according to the 2022 census estimate. Republicans have maintained their long hold on the county, even as voters slimly rejected Trump in 2020. Democrats paint last year’s election of county judge Tim O’Hare, a former Tarrant county Republican party chair, as an ideological shift to the right.O’Hare campaigned on finding voter fraud, though an audit of the 2020 election by Republican state leadership determined that the county’s election was “quality” and “transparent”. He has fanned doubts about voting methods and echoed allegations that his opponent, the county’s former Democratic party chair, led “a sophisticated vote-harvesting operation”. She called the allegations “libelous”, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.O’Hare did not respond to requests for comment.In February, after the election, O’Hare, the county sheriff, Bill Waybourn, and the district attorney, Phil Sorrells, also elected Republicans, announced the taskforce focused on election fraud.The county already had a way to submit election complaints through the secretary of state’s office, but Republicans said the taskforce would give people a central place to file complaints and bolster confidence in elections.The taskforce began printing a non-emergency number for the sheriff’s office on voting receipts, as recently as the June runoff election.The Tarrant county commissioner, Alisa Simmons, a Democrat, said she fielded a few calls about the phone number. “People were confused by it and uncomfortable with it,” she said.The taskforce is “a publicity stunt”, said Kat Cano, who previously served as the alternate judge of the ballot board and central counting station, and the Democratic member of the public testing board, which together conduct elections oversight.“They wanted to look like they were doing something about elections integrity,” she said.Julie McCarty, CEO of the True Texas Project, which boosted false claims about the 2020 election and has ties to O’Hare, questioned why Democrats were so concerned about the unit. “I can only assume it’s because it thwarts their plans to cheat,” she wrote in an email.As of the 6 May election, the sheriff’s office had received seven complaints in the days before the election, ranging from rude poll workers to a candidate being too close to a polling station entrance; all were closed with no criminal activity found, a spokesperson wrote in an email. The DA’s office has two incidents under investigation and no cases filed, according to their spokesperson.“The taskforce is working as designed,” Sorrells wrote in an email. “Legal and fair elections encourage more people to vote because they know their vote counts.”In other states, Republicans have announced election integrity units in a climate where Trump has sought to undermine elections for his own benefit, despite the lack of evidence that voter fraud is a serious issue. Many have little to show for their efforts, or, as is the case in Florida, are prosecuting people with felony convictions who mistakenly thought they could vote.Criminalizing and investigating voting has long been used as a tool of intimidation, voting rights experts say, especially of voters of color. Crystal Mason, a Black woman, was sentenced in Tarrant county to five years in prison for mistakenly casting a provisional ballot in 2016 when she was on federal supervised release.The taskforce’s orbit is also broader than voters. Democrats say the 2021 election restrictions in Texas already made it more difficult to recruit election workers, who are nervous about making a mistake, and the taskforce heightens that concern.In May, someone posted an anonymous YouTube video of Cano from 2022, doing what she called “normal work” with the ballot board, but insinuating that she was manipulating ballots. (In the video, a sheriff’s deputy appears to almost always be in the room.)With the atmosphere around the taskforce, she said, “any kind of accusation then becomes a sort of exercise in paranoia”.She didn’t know if she was actually reported. But the fear, along with concerns about public perception, contributed to her decision to resign at the time, she said. “I didn’t know whether they were going to try to make an example of me the way they made an example out of Crystal Mason.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA resignationGarcia submitted his letter of resignation in April, just under three weeks after he testified in Austin on behalf of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators. They opposed a bill to eliminate countywide polling locations, which has been a focus for election fraud activists.“Judge O’Hare, my formula to ‘administer a quality transparent election’ stands on respect and zero politics; compromising on those values is not an option for me,” he wrote. “You made it clear in our last meeting that your formula is different, thus, my decision to leave.”O’Hare, in response, said that supporting the creation of the taskforce was “all about quality, transparent elections”.Garcia, who had held his position since 2018, had over a decade of experience working for Smartmatic, a voting technology company in the private sector, a position that put him in direct opposition to election denialism.John Scott, who served as the interim Republican Texas attorney general, told Votebeat that Garcia was the “prototype” for an election administrator.“We defended Garcia on a regular basis to [those] who came to us so upset,” said McCarty.Elections administrators are the “stewards of democracy”, who work on everything from making sure citizens have access to the ballot to serving as the first point of contact for voter registration, said Gronke.“It is very disturbing when Garcia, who has shown such openness to talking with everyone, felt that his position was simply just not tenable any more,” he added.A poll of local election officials published by the Brennan Center for Justice in April found that 30% had been “abused, harassed or threatened” because of their roles. And it’s not just voters they are concerned about: more than half were somewhat or very worried about political leaders interfering with how they do their jobs in the future. As recently as June, an elections director in Arizona resigned, citing attacks from Republican officials.In Tarrant county, Democratic officials highlighted both Garcia’s resignation and the taskforce in their May letter requesting an investigation from the justice department. “O’Hare has consistently challenged Mr Garcia’s efforts to uphold the integrity and racial fairness of our elections,” they wrote.O’Hare responded to their letter in a statement that did not mention Garcia. “Let me be clear: this ‘letter’ is a political document. It alleges no actual wrongdoing or facts,” he wrote.‘Strange times’O’Hare was part of the commission picking Garcia’s replacement. One candidate who advanced was Karen Wiseman, a Republican poll watcher who hand-delivered a letter to a lawful voter questioning their address during the fall 2022 election according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and challenged a contract renewal for instrumental elections software that was needed for the June runoff.Garcia told Votebeat in a text message that he wasn’t surprised to see a partisan candidate in the mix. There is “an expectation that the [elections administrator] will play politics”, he said. (Wiseman did not respond to requests for comment.)The vast majority of elections officials treat their jobs as non-partisan, according to elections experts. Some people, however, view “these positions not [as] umpires, but as players”, said Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Brennan Center’s elections and government program.“They have some role to play, not in just following the rules, but in helping to determine the outcome.”It’s still a “tiny minority”, he emphasized. But some of the problems he has seen range from giving improper access to election equipment to refusing to certify elections.Ultimately, in Tarrant county, another candidate, Clinton Ludwig, who was chosen for the job, definitively said “no” when asked if he had any reason to doubt the results of the 2020 election, according to Allison Campolo, the departing Tarrant county Democratic party chair who was on the hiring commission.O’Hare picked people who were “to me, very highly partisan”, she said, though she ultimately felt the hiring process was fair.“I don’t think he’s a partisan individual,” she said of Ludwig.Simmons, the Democratic commissioner, expressed concern that Ludwig has no experience in elections administration. “Everybody should be concerned about that,” she said.Ludwig declined to comment in an email, noting he hadn’t started his job yet. But in a statement, he pointed to his 20 years of experience in the Marine Corps. “You can trust that I will further Tarrant county’s legacy of conducting free and fair elections,” he wrote.Campolo and O’Hare both praised Ludwig.But the taskforce – and the environment around it – only adds to “how difficult it is to do an election administrator’s job”, Campolo said.“We’re in strange times,” Garcia said.Sam Levine contributed reporting More

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      Manchin appearance with third-party group fuels speculation over 2024 run

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      The West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, who for years has held an outsized degree of power within the Democratic party, is set to appear on Monday at an event held by a political group exploring a third-party presidential bid. Manchin’s appearance has fueled speculation that he is considering a run for the presidency, a scenario that has alarmed Democrats as it could weaken President Joe Biden’s candidacy.Manchin will appear at the group No Labels’ town hall meeting on Monday night, alongside Republican former Utah governor Jon Huntsman. They will co-headline the organization’s “commonsense” policy platform release, the first in a series of events that the group says it will hold as the 2024 presidential election takes shape.Manchin, a 75-year-old senator who is facing re-election next year, has not ruled out running for the presidency instead of seeking another term in the Senate. If he does run as part of a bipartisan and centrist ticket, polling shows that it would likely be doomed to fail while sapping voters away from Biden. Democratic groups have been working to quell attempts at running third-party spoiler candidates, warning that it could hand Trump the presidency.“It’s pretty clear that a No Labels candidate would help re-elect Donald Trump, and I hope anybody who considers it recognizes that that’s a very possible outcome,” Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen told the Hill.Manchin is in a familiar position as a potential spoiler to Biden’s ambitions. As one of the most conservative Democrats and a key swing vote in the Senate, Manchin has blocked action on climate change, repeatedly criticized Biden’s policies, and derailed the administration’s efforts to pass major legislation.No Labels sees Manchin as a potential candidate for its centrist platform, and the senator joined in at least one conference call with the group, according to Politico. Although No Labels has stated it will not field a candidate if their platform does not gain traction or if it appears it would swing the vote in favor of one party, the group has been actively fundraising and is seeking to get on ballots across the country.Manchin also praised No Labels during an interview last month on Fox News, in which the senator deflected questions about a potential third-party candidacy and said he was “not ruling anything out”.While No Labels has heavily promoted its vision of centrist governance – “America must strike a balance between protecting women’s rights to control their own reproductive health and our society’s responsibility to protect human life” is one example from its policy booklet – but it has been silent about who is funding their efforts. A Mother Jones investigation last month found dozens of wealthy contributors that included many who backed conservative and Republican causes. Another investigation from The New Republic found that Harlan Crow, the conservative billionaire and supporter of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, donated over $130,000 to the group.Polling shows that a third-party candidate would most likely be a threat to Democrats. Several surveys over the past few months show that in a contest between Biden and Trump, the presence of a third party candidate – including Manchin or the progressive activist Cornel West – shifts vote percentages toward Republicans. A poll commissioned by Democratic and Republican strategists this month showed that the presence of a “moderate, independent third-party candidate” would gain around 20% of the vote and result in an electoral victory for Trump. More

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      White House condemns Robert Kennedy Jr’s Covid claims as ‘vile’ – live

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      From 2h agoWhite House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has taken the chance to condemn remarks made by presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy Jr after a video surfaced of him making false claims that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain ethnic groups.Kennedy, the infamous conspiracy theorist, famous scion and rogue candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination hit the headlines at the weekend after it emerged that he said at a press event in New York City last week that the coronavirus is a genetically engineered bioweapon that may have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, the New York Post reported at the weekend.Kennedy is garnering loud and swift criticism, including from members of his own family. The White House was asked about it during the press briefing today and Jean-Pierry called Kennedy’s remarks not just “false” but also “vile”.The briefing is ongoing. Oh! It just wrapped up.Close Kennedy family members weighing in reflects the growing outrage at Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Jr’s words, which he tried to disavow on Monday in a statement sent to the Guardian by his campaign staff.The statement reads:
      The New York Post story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the Covid-19 virus was engineered to ‘spare Jews,’ and I unequivocally reject this disgusting and outlandish conspiracy theory.
      New York Post reporter Jon Levine exploited this off-the-record conversation to smear me as an antisemite. This cynical maneuver is consistent with the mainstream media playbook to discredit me as a crank – and by association, to discredit revelations of genuine corruption and collusion.
      Separate messages sent to the Guardian purportedly from Kennedy’s personal email address cite Wikipedia links to press articles about the plausibility of ethnically-targeted bioweapons.“The study is solid, and not at all controversial,” one of the messages says of a research paper by the British Medical Association, reported by the Guardian in 2004, that “rogue scientists” could develop bioweapons designed to target certain ethnic groups based on their genetic differences.An Iowa judge has temporarily blocked the state’s new abortion ban from taking effect on Monday, just days after Governor Kim Reynolds signed the measure into law.Polk County District Court Judge Joseph Seidlin ruled that a lawsuit by abortion providers is likely to succeed, and the temporary injunction will remain in place for the duration of the lawsuit.The move restores access to abortion in Iowa for up to 20 weeks of pregnancy while the courts assess the new law’s constitutionality.Last week, Iowa lawmakers passed a six-week ban on abortion in a rare special legislative session, called by Governor Reynolds, who signed the bill on Friday afternoon.The law would ban almost all abortions once cardiac activity can be detected, which is usually six weeks into a pregnancy and before many women know they are pregnant. Prior to the law, abortion was legal in the state up to 22 weeks of pregnancy.West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin is speaking at an event hosted by the moderate group No Labels, fueling speculation that he could run on a third-party ticket for the presidency.Manchin has not declared whether he will run, but it’s difficult to see how his flirtation with No Labels would amount to a serious candidacy, according to a Vox report.
      It’s true that many Democrats don’t want Biden to run again, and many Republicans say the same of Trump, who is the current GOP frontrunner. But while 2024 may shape up to be the rematch no one asked for, third-party candidates don’t have a successful track record in the US, and there’s no indication a third-party candidate would be able to launch a credible challenge to either party’s nominee this time. If Manchin or another third-party candidate runs, they would probably lose badly.
      They might, however, get enough support among moderates to derail Biden in states that he narrowly won in 2020, despite No Labels co-chair Joe Lieberman’s assurances that his group is not looking to get in the race for a “spoiler.”
      The White House’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, described Robert F Kennedy’s comments that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people as false” and “vile”.“The claims made on that tape is false,” she said during a press briefing earlier this afternoon.
      It is vile, and they put our fellow Americans in danger.
      She declined to discuss Kennedy directly, citing the legal constraints on the administration’s ability to address campaign matters. But she warned that the presidential candidate’s remarks amounted to encouraging racist theories around the virus.
      If you think about the racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories that come out of saying those type of things, it’s an attack on our fellow citizens.
      And so it’s important that we essentially speak out when we hear those claims more broadly.
      She also cited a statement from the American Jewish Committee that called Kennedy’s claims “deeply offensive” and reflective of “some of the most abhorrent antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout history.” Jean-Pierre added:
      This is something that this president, and this whole administration, is going to stand against.
      Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who is due to speak at this evening’s No Labels event in New Hampshire, has insisted it is “not a campaign”.Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds dodged a question about whether she would be Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s running mate if he won the Republican presidential primary.DeSantis, at a fundraising event on Saturday, told reporters that he would consider Reynolds as a pick for vice president if he won the GOP nomination.Asked about DeSantis’s comments, Reynolds told Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt:
      I appreciate the comments. But look, I’m so focused. We are implementing a boldest universal school choice plan in the country. I just called a special session last week. This last week we passed the fetal heartbeat bill, and I actually cut state government and I cut 21 agencies from my Cabinet and we’re implementing our alignment bill.
      She added:
      So I’m busy working on being governor of the great state of Iowa and I’m already working on cutting taxes again next year. So that’s my focus right now.
      Donald Trump last week expressed his frustration with Reynolds for declining to endorse a candidate early in the race. In a post to Truth Social, Trump wrote:
      I opened up the Governor position for Kim Reynolds, & when she fell behind, I ENDORSED her, did big Rallies, & she won. Now, she wants to remain ‘NEUTRAL.’ I don’t invite her to events! DeSanctus down 45 points!
      DeSantis, speaking on Saturday, also dismissed Trump’s criticism of Reynolds, saying:
      I thought the attacks on her were totally, totally out of hand and totally unnecessary.
      Joe Kennedy III, a former congressman from Massachusetts and nephew of Robert F Kennedy Jr, has publicly distanced himself from his uncle’s latest comments.Robert F Kennedy’s sister, Kerry Kennedy, has also sharply criticised his remarks about Covid.A leading environmental group has hit out at US climate envoy John Kerry over comments he made rejecting calls for the US to pay climate reparations to developing countries affected by climate-change fueled disasters.On Friday, at a congressional hearing on the state department’s climate agenda, Kerry said that “under no circumstances” would the US meet reparations demands. However, the US has previously committed to contributing to a “loss and damages” fund for developing countries that does not involve statements of liability.“We are disappointed and angered by this news, but not surprised, because John Kerry’s words are just the latest example of Kerry and the US refusing to back up their vague claims for US support in global climate progress with real, substantive action,” said Jeff Ordower, North America director of the climate advocacy group 350.0rg.Ordower added that Kerry and president Biden “have tried to walk a tightrope of limited culpability: they talk a big game about “interconnected nations” and “the need for a fossil fuel phasedown,” but shied away “when it comes to “put their words into practice.”The criticism comes as Kerry met with Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua in Beijing to urge joint action to cut methane emissions and coal-fired power.“In the next three days we hope we can begin taking some big steps that will send a signal to the world about the serious purpose of China and the United States to address a common risk, threat, challenge to all of humanity created by humans themselves,” Kerry said, according to Reuters.“It is toxic for both Chinese and for Americans and for people in every country on the planet.”The US climate envoy’s comments came as temperature records in the US, Europe and China are coming close to being broken this week, alongside intense rain and flooding in other areas that are collectively pushing climate change issue to the top of the global political agenda.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has taken the chance to condemn remarks made by presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy Jr after a video surfaced of him making false claims that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain ethnic groups.Kennedy, the infamous conspiracy theorist, famous scion and rogue candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination hit the headlines at the weekend after it emerged that he said at a press event in New York City last week that the coronavirus is a genetically engineered bioweapon that may have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, the New York Post reported at the weekend.Kennedy is garnering loud and swift criticism, including from members of his own family. The White House was asked about it during the press briefing today and Jean-Pierry called Kennedy’s remarks not just “false” but also “vile”.The briefing is ongoing. Oh! It just wrapped up.The US is not in a position to attribute the overnight attack that damaged the road bridge linking Crimea to southern Russia, the White House has stated on Monday.The White House daily media briefing is still underway and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is taking questions now. But a little earlier, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was at the podium and his part of the briefing mainly focused on foreign policy and overseas news.Kirby was not prepared to commit to naming the perpetrator of the attack on the bridge. We’ve been covering this topic in our Ukraine war live blog, but that is closing now. It will be back on Tuesday.Russian president Vladimir Putin has attributed the overnight attack to Ukraine and said that his forces are preparing a response.You can read the Guardian’s full report on this topic here.Robert F Kennedy’s sister is among those who have sharply criticised his remarks about Covid.Kerry Kennedy wrote on Twitter: “I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting.”Democrats were quick to distance themselves from presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy Jr after a video surfaced of him making false claims that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain ethnic groups.Kennedy’s comments included “reprehensible anti-semitic and anti-Asian comments aimed at perpetuating harmful and debunked racist tropes, the Democratic congressional campaign committee said in a statement. The Democratic presidential candidate’s attempt to repurpose fringe-right conspiracy theories is not new for his candidacy, the Washington Post reported. The paper compares Kennedy’s remarks to how Donald Trump offered a conspiratorial right-wing worldview to Republican primary voters in 2015.
      It’s not surprising that the party’s institutions and leaders would take this tack; the Democratic Party is keenly attuned to racist stereotypes and antisemitism. But it is also not much of a burden. Kennedy’s support in the primary is not particularly robust relative to the incumbent president, and his long-standing conspiratorial rhetoric has not been effective at building a constituency. The party is certainly eager that it doesn’t.
      Compare the response here with the Republican Party’s response to Donald Trump in 2015. The chairman of the party then, Reince Priebus, didn’t excoriate Trump’s repeated rhetoric about criminal immigrants on social media. The party doesn’t appear to have done so either […] For the GOP, Trump’s controversial comments were already accepted by a large segment of its base, which is why his candidacy quickly gained traction.
      There is an interesting question inherent to the Kennedy situation for the Democratic Party: How accountable is it for the espoused views of one of its candidates for the presidential nomination? What is it about Kennedy that demands a response at all? Is it his name? Because he’s getting more than zero percent in polls? Is it simply that Kennedy affords Democrats an opportunity to reinforce who they are relative to what he presents?
      West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who is set to headline the No Labels event in New Hampshire later today, is arguably the most conservative Democratic senator.Manchin has not declared yet whether he will run for reelection to his Senate seat. He has told reporters that he will wait until late this year before announcing whether he will run.Should Manchin seek another term, he would face a serious challenge from Governor Jim Justice, who is seeking the Republican nomination in the Senate race. West Virginia has been leaning heavily Republican, having overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.Manchin has at times complicated legislative initiatives being pushed by his party leaders, Reuters reported. But Democratic leaders have treaded softly as Manchin also has been key to the party holding on to its Senate majority.Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr faced widespread criticism over the weekend after a video surfaced of him making false claims that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain ethnic groups while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.The New York Post on Saturday originally published a clip of Kennedy’s conspiracy theory comments, made during a recent dinner in New York City. In the recording, Kennedy can be heard making a series of false and misleading claims, including saying:
      Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.
      Kennedy is also heard saying:
      We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.
      Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, said Kennedy’s comments are “deeply offensive and incredibly dangerous” in a tweet on Saturday.The Anti-Defamation League told multiple outlets that Kennedy’s comment “feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about Covid-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”Democratic national committee chair Jaime Harrison condemned Kennedy’s remarks and said they do not reflect the views of the party.Joe Biden has invited Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Washington for an official visit, according to a statement from Netanyahu’s office.The two leaders shared a “long and warm” conversation where they discussed curbing threats from Iran and its proxies and strengthening the alliance between the two countries, the Israeli statement said.The invitation comes more than seven months after Netanyahu was sworn in as prime minister. The delay was viewed as a major snub from Biden, as most Israeli prime ministers had already received an invitation to the White House this far into their terms.The phone call between the two leaders took place as Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, is traveling to Washington for meetings with Biden and to address a joint address to Congress.Ohio secretary of state Frank LaRose formally announced his candidacy for US Senate today, becoming the third prominent Republican hoping to challenge Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in 2024.“It’s official: I’m running,” LaRose said on Twitter.
      I’m on a mission to give back to the state that has given me so much. To continue to serve the country I love and fight to protect the values we share. That’s why I’m running to serve as your next United States senator.
      LaRose, Ohio’s secretary of state since 2019, is the third major candidate to jump into the primary to take on Brown. He follows Bernie Moreno, a businessman running with Donald Trump’s encouragement, and state senator Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team.Ohio’s Senate race looks to be one of the most competitive in the country next year, alongside races in Arizona, Montana and West Virginia. The state backed Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections.New York mayor Eric Adams has appointed Edward Caban as the first Hispanic officer to lead the city’s police department in its 178-year history.Adams announced the appointment of Caban, 55, in a morning news conference outside the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx, where Caban began his career as an officer in 1991.Caban had been instrumental to the NYPD’s efforts to decrease crime after the Covid-19 pandemic, Mayor Adams said, noting that major crimes are down across the city this summer. He added:
      Commissioner Caban is truly one of New York’s finest, a leader who understands the importance of both safety and justice.
      Caban stepped in as acting police chief after the surprise resignation of Keechant Sewell, the first woman to lead the department, last month.Florida governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has reduced campaign staff as his campaign has struggled to meet fundraising goals.Fewer than 10 staffers were laid off, according to an anonymous staffer, reported Politico. The staffers were involved in event planning and may be picked up by the pro-DeSantis super Pac Never Back Down. Two senior campaign advisers, Dave Abrams and Tucker Obenshain, left the campaign this past week to assist a pro-DeSantis nonprofit group.Sources within the campaign reported an internal assessment that the campaign hired too many staffers too early.“They never should have brought so many people on; the burn rate was way too high,” said one Republican source familiar with the campaign’s thought process to NBC News. “People warned the campaign manager but she wanted to hear none of it.”More shake-ups within the campaign are expected in the coming weeks after two months on the presidential campaign, with DeSantis still lagging substantially in second place behind former president Donald Trump.Even in DeSantis’s home state of Florida, Trump still has a 20-point lead over the governor, according to a recent Florida Atlantic University poll. More

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      Republicans have their most diverse primary slate ever – yet they’re still denying racism exists

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      An African American man whose grandfather dropped out of school to pick cotton. A daughter of Indian immigrants raised in the Sikh faith. A son of Cuban immigrants, an Indian-American entrepreneur, a Black talk radio host and a former undercover CIA officer who is mixed race.A casual observer might assume that these candidates for the White House in 2024 must be from the same Democratic party that produced Barack Obama. In fact, they are all contenders in the Republican presidential primary field – the most diverse in the party’s history.But what should be an important breakthrough for a party long criticised for racist dog-whistling is overshadowed by some significant caveats. First, the opinion polls are dominated by Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, two white men whose words and deeds have alienated many Black voters.Second, they are, critics say, seeking to benefit from identity politics and deny the existence of racism at the same time. Senator Tim Scott, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, Miami mayor Francis Suarez, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, conservative radio host Larry Elder and ex-congressman Will Hurd refer to their own struggles but are reluctant to acknowledge a wider social and historical context.“It’s great to see the quality and diversity of the candidates who have emerged and are emerging,” said Michael Steele, who was the first Black chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC). “It does matter what they say and how they sound and how they represent not just Republican values but the values of the communities they come from, and that’s always been where the wheels start to come off. You can’t be authentically you if you’re parroting what white Republicanism is.”Steele’s elevation to RNC chairman after the 2008 election of Obama, America’s first Black president, implied that the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had finally recognised the need to broaden its appeal. There was early vindication in 2010 when Steele successfully backed Haley for governor of South Carolina, Scott for Congress in the same state and Susana Martinez for governor of New Mexico.But the following year, Steele lost his re-election bid to Reince Priebus, a white man from Wisconsin who would later become Trump’s White House chief of staff. When Republicans were defeated by Obama again, the RNC produced an “autopsy report” that urged them to diversify or die. Yet in 2016 Trump effectively tore that up with attacks on immigrants and Muslims that were cheered by white nationalists. He lost the popular vote but won the electoral college.There have been gains and setbacks since then. In last year’s midterm elections, the RNC said its lineup of candidates was more diverse than ever: 32 Latinos, 22 Black candidates, 11 Asian Americans and two Native Americans. Among them was Herschel Walker, who denied the existence of racism and lost a Senate race in Georgia to Raphael Warnock, a Democrat steeped in the civil rights legacy of Martin Luther King.Now the presidential primary candidates vying to take on Joe Biden, an 80-year-old white man, seem unwilling to discuss racial politics, except in the past tense or with an individual anecdote rather than a societal diagnosis. Haley, the first Asian American woman to compete for the Republican nomination, has described the discrimination that she and her family suffered as immigrants in the south while rejecting the idea of systemic racism.Launching his presidential campaign, Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate, spoke of feeling angry and disillusioned until a mentor “told me in the most loving way possible to look in the mirror and to blame myself”, leading Scott to choose “personal responsibility over resentment. I became the master of my fate.”It was a message that implied: if Scott could live the American dream, any Black person can. He accordingly likes to frequently swipe at the left with lines such as, “My life disrupts their narrative. The truth of my life disrupts their lies,” – even though has in in the past described incidents in which he was racially profiled by police, including US Capitol police.Steele, for one, is not impressed. He said: “Tim knows me, he knows I’m not going to sugarcoat shit; I’m going to be straight up. That’s just playing to a white audience because that’s not his own experience. He’s the one who told us of the time he was profiled as a member of Congress. So what are you talking about?“You can be aspirational about your own story and your own future while at the same time being honest and recognising the history of your story as it’s related through your parents, grandparents, neighbours, friends, who I would probably argue with Tim would not necessarily view their experience with America as exclusively, ‘I did all this by pulling myself up by my bootstraps and white America appreciated me as an American’. That’s just not how that narrative plays out.”Republicans have taken pains to reject the New York Times’s 1619 Project and the concept of slavery being part of America’s origin story. A fashionable reflex is to selectively quote King’s “I have a dream” speech about a nation where children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” in an effort to justify colour blindness. This is seen by critics as disingenuous cherry picking from a civil rights leader who also highlighted police brutality and systemic poverty.Like previous Black Republican candidates, such as Herman Cain and Ben Carson, this year’s field has little incentive to dwell on the party’s divisive past and risk being accused of going “woke”. Leah Wright Rigueur, a political historian at Johns Hopkins University, told the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast: “There is no reward for calling the party out on racism or bigotry. There’s none for Black Republicans.“In fact, we have documented evidence that the Black Republicans who get support from within the party … are the ones who either support the party uncritically, who echo whatever the party’s standard bearer is saying, or who find this space to carve out where they don’t alienate their audience while also adhering to certain conservative principles.”Rigueur, author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican, added: “The latter is where Tim Scott is, and so that’s why you hear him say things like, ‘I have experienced racism on an individual level but I don’t believe America is a racist place.’ And so it becomes something which alleviates the conscience of the base, where they can say, well, it doesn’t affect me, that’s something he experienced, that’s his individual experience. That can be true, but it has nothing to do with me, and I can feel OK in this moment.”Although the current Congress has more Black Republicans than at any point since 1877, the number is still only five. Efforts to recruit diverse candidates and appeal to voters of colour have been repeatedly undermined by party leaders and allies. Trump, the runaway leader in primary polls so far, dined last year with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and racist.Last month, the former president’s appointees to the supreme court were instrumental in ruling against affirmative action in colleges and universities. Scott told Fox News that it was “a good day for America”; Haley tweeted, “Picking winners & losers based on race is fundamentally wrong”; Ramaswamy told Politico: “Affirmative action is the single greatest form of institutional racism in America today.”This week Tommy Tuberville, a senator for Alabama, gave several media interviews in which he repeatedly declined to describe white nationalists as racist before finally backing down. And Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction, said teachers should tell students that the Tulsa race massacre was not racially motivated.Tara Setmayer, a political commentator who received a torrent of online racist abuse following a recent TV interview, argues that the diversity of the Republican primary slate will not address the deeper malaise. “The irony in this is that the diversity is on paper and the party that claims that they’re so against affirmative action is seemingly intent on putting up racial numbers to show, look, we’re not racist, we have diversity. You can’t have it both ways.“Taking away the rights of women, the rights of minorities – these are all issues that are being advocated by a Republican party that wants to laud itself for ‘diversity’? They’re perfectly OK with a governor of a major state like Ron DeSantis banning diversity and inclusion programmes. They’re OK with book-banning on Black history. It doesn’t make sense.Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project and former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, criticised Haley, Scott and others for denying that systemic racism has an impact on Black communities.“To try to whitewash that, I’m embarrassed for them, because you cannot tell me that they don’t go home at night and watch the news, read the newspaper, look at the bills and the laws that are being passed in their own states and the experiences of people of colour in this country and not acknowledge privately that, guess what, racism still exists in America.“It’s so disingenuous for them to say that, and Tim Scott more infuriatingly, given that he’s a Black man in the south, who himself claims he was racially profiled as a senator, but turns around and denies that there is still a problem with race in this country when he’s speaking in front of predominantly white audiences. He’s not going to go to the NAACP convention or the Urban League convention or speak in front of the Congressional Black Caucus saying those things.”The Democratic party remains more diverse by every measure. Some 80% of racial and ethnic minority members in the current Congress are Democrats. A new Pew Research Center analysis of last year’s midterm elections shows that 93% of Black voters supported Democrats while just 5% backed Republicans.Hispanic voters favoured Democratic candidates by a 21-point margin in 2022 – but that was a sharp drop from the 47-point margin they enjoyed in 2018. Such shifts give Republicans hope that they will continue to make inroads next year – with or without a Black nominee.Antjuan Seawright, a party strategist based in Columbia, South Carolina, said: “That word diversity means different things to different people and for us as Democrats, not only have we talked the talk when it comes to diversity, but we walk the walk with age, race, gender, geographics and demographics.“The browning of America is happening right before all of our eyes and, truth be told, is that Republicans have not given any voters of colour a reason to even think about joining their chorus.” More

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      DeSantis reduces staff as campaign struggles to meet fundraising goals – report

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      Florida governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has reduced campaign staff as his campaign has struggled to meet fundraising goals.Fewer than 10 staffers were laid off, according to an anonymous staffer, reported Politico. The staffers were involved in event planning and may be picked up by the pro-DeSantis super Pac Never Back Down. Two senior campaign advisers, Dave Abrams and Tucker Obenshain, left the campaign this past week to assist a pro-DeSantis nonprofit group.Sources within the campaign reported an internal assessment that the campaign hired too many staffers too early.“They never should have brought so many people on; the burn rate was way too high,” said one Republican source familiar with the campaign’s thought process to NBC News. “People warned the campaign manager but she wanted to hear none of it.”More shake-ups within the campaign are expected in the coming weeks after two months on the presidential campaign, with DeSantis still lagging substantially in second place behind former president Donald Trump.Even in DeSantis’s home state of Florida, Trump still has a 20-point lead over the governor, according to a recent Florida Atlantic University poll.“Early state voters are only softly committed to the candidates they select on a ballot question this far out – including many Trump supporters,” read an internal campaign memo obtained by NBC News as the DeSantis campaign is refocusing resources on early primary states. “Our focus group participants in the early states even say they do not plan on making up their mind until they meet the candidates or watch them debate.”The DeSantis campaign raised $20m since launching his presidential campaign, but over one-third of the donations were received during the first 10 days of his campaign, and financial fundraising data shows his campaign has been reliant on wealthy donors who have already reached their maximum permitted individual contributions. His campaign has spent significantly on a payroll of 90 staffers and fundraising efforts, including over $900,000 on merchandise, $883,000 on digital consulting, $867,000 on media placements and $730,000 on direct mail.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDeSantis faced scrutiny this week following an investigation by the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times reported several veterans resigned and reported abuse within Florida’s state guard training, likening training to a militia for the civilian disaster relief force. The governor reactivated the state guard in 2022 after it had been dormant since the end of the second world war.In May, DeSantis signed a bill to expand the state guard and make it permanent, expanding the group from 400 to 1,500 members and expanding its budget from $10m to $107.6m. More

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      Obscure Iowa non-profit produces new flyer calling Trump ‘trailblazer for trans’

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      An obscure non-profit political group in Iowa that has been attempting to portray Donald Trump as an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community is doubling down on its unlikely claim, producing a second flyer condemning the former president for “fighting conservatives” over trans rights.The mailer repeats the messaging from the original communication that the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for next year’s election is a “trailblazer for trans”.The new missive, reported on Saturday by the Iowa political blog Bleeding Heartland, introduces a rainbow-colored heart to the mix, and says Trump “opposed conservative members of Congress when they tried to strip the US Mexico Canada agreement of language protecting sexual orientation and gender identity”.Conversely, a 2019 analysis by the Yale law journal notes that the Trump administration, which it said was “hostile to transgender people”, had watered down such protections in the language of the agreement, but was unable to eliminate it entirely despite its best efforts.The flyer was published by a group called Advancing Our Values, a Des Moines-based non-profit that registered with the secretary of state’s office only two weeks ago. Renewed efforts by the Guardian to reach the group were unsuccessful.The fresh attack on Trump, which Bleeding Heartland said was sent as a mass mailing to an unknown number of households in Iowa, also states he “stood strong” against bathroom bills that deny access to toilets based on declared gender identity instead of that assigned at birth.While Trump has delivered contradictory messages on LGBTQ+ rights, saying he was “fine” with same-sex marriage during the 2016 campaign then rolling back protections for transgender patients as president, and overruling his own education secretary in 2017 to rescind protections for trans students.“It’s an odd piece of advertising,” David Peterson, a professor of political science at Iowa State University, told the Guardian after the first flyer was published.The origins of Advancing Our Values are unknown, although its agenda would seem to align with those opposing Trump for the Republican nomination.The campaign of rightwing Florida governor Ron DeSantis recently took down a “homophobic” video attacking Trump for his alleged support of trans rights, which he initially defended in the face of a wave of outrage.According to the group’s incorporation papers posted online, it registered as a section 501(c)(4) non-profit – a status that allows it to “engage in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office” as long as its activity is not the main fundraising arm for any candidate’s campaign.A person named Kyle Adema, of Nebraska, is listed as its chairperson. The Guardian was unable to reach Adema for comment.The Bleeding Heartland blog, which has been researching the group, says it has “not found any link to operatives for … DeSantis”, but points out its objectives are the same: “To diminish support for Trump among potential Iowa Republican caucus-goers”.According to the blog author Laura Belin: “Discrimination against transgender people is popular in GOP circles, and presidential candidates often receive applause or ovations in Iowa for rhetoric opposing inclusive policies.” More

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      In America’s ‘Voltage Valley’, hopes of car-making revival turn sour

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      When Lordstown Motors, an electric vehicles (EV) manufacturer in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, declared bankruptcy last month, it was the latest blow to a region that has seen decades of extravagant promises fail to deliver.The 5,000 new jobs executives vowed to create in 2020 generated fresh hope for the shuttered General Motors Lordstown plant, which once functioned as an economic engine for the area and a critical piece of the nation’s industrial heartland.Local leaders rebranded Mahoning Valley “Voltage Valley”, claiming the EV revolution would revive the region’s fortunes. Donald Trump, then the president, trumpeted a major victory. “The area was devastated when General Motors moved out,” he said. “It’s incredible what’s happened in the area. It’s booming now. It’s absolutely booming.”But Lordstown Motors’ failure and its decision to sue its major investor, the electronics giant Foxconn, over a soured investment partnership, have dented Voltage Valley’s fortunes. Years of similar failures have given some residents here “savior fatigue” and have largely given up hope that the Lordstown plant can ever be fully rebooted.“I really want the plant to do well and succeed, but we’ve experienced so many ‘Hey we’re gonna come in and save the day’ promises that never happen,” said David Green, the regional director of United Auto Workers (UAW), who started working at Lordstown in 1995.Green said he was especially skeptical of Foxconn. The company has put up nets to prevent workers fromkilling themselves at one of its Chinese plants, he said, and has failed to live up to other promises of job creation across the US: “This is the savior company? I don’t have warm feelings toward them.”Still, some local leaders are optimistic. They insist Foxconn, which is attempting to scale up autonomous tractor production at Lordstown and lure a different EV startup, will save the plant.“I think Foxconn will be successful,” said Lordstown’s mayor, Arno Hill. “They are fairly confident they are going to be here for a while.”Hill and other leaders said Lordstown Motors was not the only new employer in town. GM partnered with LG Corporation to build an EV battery plant that employs about 1,300 people next door to Lordstown, and a new TJX warehouse has hired about 1,000 workers. A new industrial park is planned in the region, as are two gas plants.The feelings of those not in the business of promoting the region are more nuanced. In nearby Warren, where many Lordstown employees have lived since GM originally opened the plant in 1966 opening, mentions of Foxconn saving Lordstown or the Mahoning Valley drew a mix of eye-rolls, scoffs and blank looks from residents in the city’s downtown.“There are words, but I have seen no action,” said Leslie Dunlap, owner of the FattyCakes Soap Company, and several other Warren businesses, as she worked at a farmers’ market. “People here have lost faith in big companies.”Warren’s fortune is tied to that of the plant – when the latter’s employment numbers dipped, “people stopped spending money here, started selling houses, walking away from properties,” Dunlap said.Residents on a recent Tuesday afternoon said they were “cautiously optimistic” about the region’s economic future. Warren’s downtown shopfronts are full. But the city also bears the scars of rust belt decline with vacant industrial buildings and blighted neighborhoods.A few miles down the road at Lordstown, the lots around the well-kept offices where a few hundred Foxconn employees work are repaved. But the rest of the 6.2m sq ft factory looks like a depressing relic. Weeds sprout from the cracked pavement of the vast, unused blacktop lots surrounding it.Lordstown employed 11,000 people at its peak, but between the mid-1990s and 2016, the workforce in Trumbull county, where Lordstown sits, dropped by 63%. Just a few thousand remained when Lordstown closed in 2018.Some still hold a shred of hope that GM will repurchase the plant – it is nextdoor to an EV battery factory, and batteries are expensive to ship. It makes sense, said Josh Ayers, the bargaining chairman for UAW 1112.“I have a pit in my stomach every time I drive past Lordstown,” he said. “Foxconn is in there but I don’t see a future for them.”Regardless of the plant’s potential, local labor leaders say they have largely moved on and trained their attention on GM’s nearby Ultium electric-vehicle plant. A small explosion, fires and chemical leaks at the plant recently injured employees who work there, for as little as $16 per hour – less than the amount the local Waffle House offers, and low enough that some employees need government assistance, Ayers noted.Some local leaders tout the region’s job openings. Ayers said they exist because turnover is high. “People used to run through walls to work at Lordstown,” he said. “Nobody is running through walls to work at Ultium.”It is not the first time that a politician’s promises have left locals disappointed.‘This plant is about to shift into high gear’As the Great Recession battered the nation in late 2009, Barack Obama traveled to General Motors’ mammoth Lordstown plant to promise laid-off autoworkers a brighter future.Obama’s 2009 GM bailout became a lifeline: ramping up production of the Chevrolet Cobalt would bring back over 1,000 workers, the president told the anxious crowd.“Because of the steps we have taken, this plant is about to shift into high gear,” Obama bellowed over loud cheers. The plan soon fizzled, however, and by 2019 GM had shed the plant’s workforce and sold it to Lordstown Motors.In 2014 Obama declared Youngstown the center for 3D-printing technology, though the industry has brought few jobs. The failure to revive the area, in part, helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.Mahoning Valley was once steel country, and residents here trace their economic troubles back to 1977’s Black Monday, when two steel plants abruptly closed and 5,000 workers lost their jobs. Since then, the promises to pull the region out of its slow tailspin have been plentiful.An eccentric businessman from nearby Youngstown briefly revived the Avanti car company until slow sales and poor management killed it by 1990, leaving its workforce jobless.A glass company that recently received tax incentives to build a large plant “never made one fuckin’ bottle”, UAW’s Green said.Perhaps most infamously, Trump, in a July 2017 Youngstown speech, promised residents auto jobs “are all coming back. Don’t move, don’t sell your house.” A year later, GM idled the plant and, as residents here are keen to highlight, it did so after receiving billions in taxpayer assistance, including $60m in state subsidies in exchange for a promise to keep the plant open through 2027.In 2019, Trump tweeted that he had been “working nicely with GM to get” the Lordstown deal done. But Lordstown Motors floundered almost from the start, suffering from scandals over inflated sales figures and battery range. By 2022, a new savior arrived: Foxconn. It agreed to buy the plant and a 55% stake in Lordstown Motors for $230m. That relationship soured, and Foxconn quit making the payments this year. The deal collapsed.In a sign of how little impact this “booming” transformation has had, the name “Foxconn” hardly registered with some Warren residents. They squinted as they tried to recall where they had heard it. Others pointed to other ventures they felt could have more impact – a proposed science-fiction museum and businesses at the farmers’ market.Outside the county courthouse, an employee who did not want their name printed said they knew of the Lordstown Motors collapse, but it was not top of mind for anyone they knew: “Lordstown is not where the money is. I don’t know where it’s at.”‘Foxconn didn’t come through’About 450 miles from Lordstown, in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, Foxconn in 2017 promised to build a hi-tech factory campus that would employ 13,000 people in exchange for $4.5bn in tax incentives. Residents were forced from their homes to make way for the factory, but very little was built.Kelly Gallaher is among those who fought the project, and she sees a replay in Lordstown as Foxconn promises big things while its deal falls apart. Mount Pleasant residents tried to warn Lordstown on social media when Foxconn showed interest in the plant, she said.“Lordstown needed a savior angel, and they weren’t in a position with any other backup choices. But it isn’t a surprise that Foxconn didn’t come through,” Gallaher said.Guy Coviello, the chief executive of the Youngstown/Warren Chamber of Commerce, dismissed such concerns. Foxconn is not asking for incentives or making big promises, he said, claiming that the problems in Wisconsin were largely “political ballyhooing”.The idea that autonomous tractors will save Lordstown is not landing with many residents. But one thing everyone around Lordstown seems to agree on is the notion that the region’s manufacturing heyday is never returning – for no other reason than automation has made it impossible. Manufacturers simply don’t need the labor force they once did.Mahoning still has much to offer. Its population loss is stabilizing, the cost of living is low, it is near other major population centers and it offers a huge workforce, Ayers said.Those selling points may bring more investment. But after so many broken promises, any floated idea is met with skepticism. Reflecting on Obama’s speech, Green said the president’s reassurance was a “great feeling that day”.“What a stark contrast to 10 years later.” More

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      Donald Trump’s legal team urges Georgia court to block 2020 election investigation – as it happened

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      From 3h agoLawyers for former US president Donald Trump are asking Georgia’s highest court to prevent the district attorney who has been investigating his actions in the wake of the 2020 election from prosecuting him and to throw out a special grand jury report that is part of the inquiry, the Associated Press reports.AP writes:
      Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been investigating since early 2021 whether Trump and his allies broke any laws as they tried to overturn his narrow election loss in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden. She has suggested that she is likely to seek charges in the case from a grand jury next month.
      Trump’s Georgia legal team on Friday filed similar petitions in the Georgia Supreme Court and Fulton County Superior Court naming Willis and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury, as respondents. A spokesperson for Willis declined to comment. McBurney did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
      Trump’s legal team — Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg — acknowledged that the filings are unusual but necessary given the tight time frame. Willis has indicated she will use the special grand jury report to seek an indictment “within weeks, if not days.” Two new regular grand juries were seated this week, and one is likely to hear the case.
      “Even in an extraordinarily novel case of national significance, one would expect matters to take their normal procedural course within a reasonable time,” the filings say. “But nothing about these processes have been normal or reasonable. And the all-but-unavoidable conclusion is that the anomalies below are because Petitioner is President Donald J. Trump.”
      Republicans and Democrats in Congress are on a collision course after rightwing lawmakers inserted provisions targeting Pentagon policies on abortion access, transgender care and diversity into a must-pass defense spending bill that cleared the House this morning. Democrats are outraged that the GOP used the measure, which usually attracts bipartisan support, to push culture war goals, but there’s no word yet on what will become of the legislation when it arrives in the Senate, where Joe Biden’s allies rule the roost and are unlikely to support attempts to prevent service members from accessing abortions services or gender-affirming care. Expect to hear lots more about this in the days to come.Here’s what else happened today:
      Tucker Carlson might be unemployed, but that apparently has not changed his views on US support to Ukraine, as he made clear in an exchange with GOP presidential contender and senator Tim Scott.
      Mike Pence tried to explain to a rightwing crowd in Iowa why he did not go along with Donald Trump’s wishes on January 6. It did not go well.
      Speaking of Trump, his lawyers are trying to stop Atlanta-area prosecutor Fani Willis’s investigation of his campaign to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia.
      A federal appeals court panel blocked a judge’s ruling that prevented some Biden administration officials from holding talks with social media companies intended to fight misinformation.
      Four House Democrats from swing districts crossed party lines to support the defense funding bill, while four conservative Republicans opposed it, with one saying it was too expensive.
      Former US vice president Mike Pence earlier at the Tucker Carlson-anchored event in Iowa, reiterated his disapproval of Donald Trump’s encouragement on January 6, 2021, of protesters to seek the overturning of the 2020 election results.Having already defended his refusal to block the certification by the US Congress of Joe Biden’s victory, Pence gladly repeated for the highly-pro-Trump crowd his assertions that he’s made before that Trump’s exhortations (and tweets) on January 6 exhorting the crowd to take action to keep him in office were reckless.“Trump’s words that day were reckless…whatever his intentions in that moment, it endangered me, my family and everyone else in the Capitol,” Pence said.He added, as the audience remained eerily quiet: “The law will hold him accountable.”He later added, perhaps in a desperate attempt to win more warmth from the crowd: “And Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024.”The now-stayed federal judge’s ruling restricting how some Biden administration officials may interact with social media companies was evidence of a “weaponization of the court” that benefits pedalers of misinformation, an expert on combating such lies told the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington earlier this month:Restricting the ability of the Biden administration to work with social media companies in countering online conspiracy theories is a “weaponisation of the court system” that could devastate the fight against misinformation ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a leading expert has warned.Nina Jankowicz, a specialist in disinformation campaigns, told the Guardian that an injunction imposed by a federal judge on Tuesday against key federal agencies and officials blocking their communication with tech platforms could unleash false information in critical areas of public life. She said that election denialism and anti-vaccine propaganda could be the beneficiaries.“This is a weaponisation of the court system. It is an intentional and purposeful move to disrupt the work that needs to be done ahead of the 2024 election, and it’s really chilling,” she said.A federal appeals court has stayed a judge’s ruling from earlier this month that put limits on how certain White House officials could interact with social media companies, Reuters reports.The lower court’s ruling in response to a lawsuit from Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri complicated efforts by the Biden administration to work with platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to address misinformation around elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.Here’s Reuters reporting from when the lower court’s ruling was first handed down on what it means for the fight against conspiracy theories:
      The ruling said US government agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI could not talk to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech” under the free speech clause of the first amendment to the US constitution.
      A White House official said the US justice department was reviewing the order and will evaluate its options.
      The order also mentioned by name officials, including the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in its restrictions.
      Judge Terry Doughty, in an order filed with the US district court for the western district of Louisiana, made some exceptions for communications between government officials and the companies, including to warn about risks to national security and about criminal activity.
      The injunction was first reported by the Washington Post.
      Tuesday’s order marks a win for Republicans who had sued the Biden administration, saying it was using the coronavirus health crisis and the threat of misinformation as an excuse to curb views that disagreed with the government.
      US officials have said they were aiming to tamp down misinformation about Covid vaccines to curb preventable deaths.
      Democratic and Republican lawmakers have plenty to say about the defense spending bill that just passed the House, with one GOP congressman saying his party wanted to use the legislation to align the military’s policies with “traditional America”.Here are Tim Burchett’s comments to CNN:Then there’s the ever-puzzling Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina who does not seemed pleased with the bill’s provisions barring the Pentagon from paying for service members to travel for abortions, but voted for it anyway:Donald Trump’s attorneys are attempting to disrupt Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into the campaign to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia days after she impaneled two grand juries specifically tasked with deciding who should face charges in her inquiry. Here’s coverage from the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly of that development, from Tuesday:A grand jury selected in Georgia on Tuesday is expected to say whether Donald Trump and associates should face criminal charges over their attempt to overturn the former president’s defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.The district attorney of Fulton county, Fani Willis, has indicated she expects to obtain indictments between the end of July and the middle of August. Trump also faces possible federal charges over his election subversion, culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.Trump already faces trials on 71 criminal charges: 34 in New York over hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels and 37 in Florida, from federal prosecutors and regarding his retention of classified documents after leaving office.Lawyers for former US president Donald Trump are asking Georgia’s highest court to prevent the district attorney who has been investigating his actions in the wake of the 2020 election from prosecuting him and to throw out a special grand jury report that is part of the inquiry, the Associated Press reports.AP writes:
      Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been investigating since early 2021 whether Trump and his allies broke any laws as they tried to overturn his narrow election loss in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden. She has suggested that she is likely to seek charges in the case from a grand jury next month.
      Trump’s Georgia legal team on Friday filed similar petitions in the Georgia Supreme Court and Fulton County Superior Court naming Willis and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury, as respondents. A spokesperson for Willis declined to comment. McBurney did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
      Trump’s legal team — Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg — acknowledged that the filings are unusual but necessary given the tight time frame. Willis has indicated she will use the special grand jury report to seek an indictment “within weeks, if not days.” Two new regular grand juries were seated this week, and one is likely to hear the case.
      “Even in an extraordinarily novel case of national significance, one would expect matters to take their normal procedural course within a reasonable time,” the filings say. “But nothing about these processes have been normal or reasonable. And the all-but-unavoidable conclusion is that the anomalies below are because Petitioner is President Donald J. Trump.”
      The sound of silence. Or, to be fair, the whisper of sporadic applause. That’s what just greeted Mike Pence when he again defended his refusal on January 6, 2021, to refuse to block the certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.The presidential candidate did not impress the right-wing crowd at Tucker Carlson’s event when he said: “I did my duty” and upheld the US constitution, after thousands of extreme Trump supporters had invaded the US Capitol in a deadly insurrection as they tried to overturn Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.A few hands clap. This is hardly surprising, but very interesting to hear live.“It’s important that we hold those accountable that perpetrated acts of violence in our nation’s Capitol,” he said, to almost total silence in the hall. He quickly added that there needed to be more vigor in prosecuting people who ended up rioting during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. That drew cheers.Carlson asked Pence: “Do you think the last election was fair?”In short, Pence indicated he did. He noted that there were some irregularities and that changes made by states to voting procedures as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic undermined public confidence in the system. But he noted that there were recounts and lawsuits and in the end, in terms of the votes “states certified and courts upheld and ultimately we were able to establish that” nothing “would change the outcome of the election in any way,” adding: “I knew I had to do my duty that day” when he endorsed the certification of Biden’s victory, in the early hours of January 7, 2021.Former US vice president Mike Pence has taken the stage at the event in Iowa hosted by Tucker Carlson, as he eyes a comeback after being fired from Fox News, a forum together with Blaze Media feature Republican presidential candidates Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchinson.Pence begins by slamming Biden economic policy, Biden policies at the US-Mexico border and celebrating the Iowa legislature passing a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, when many people don’t even know they’re pregnant.Pence noted the bill will be signed into law later today by Iowa governor Kim Reynolds.Now Pence is talking about the insurrection by extremist supporters of Donald Trump at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. More in a moment.Hello again, US politics live blog readers, it’s been a lively morning and there is more action to come, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.Here’s where things stand:
      Tucker Carlson has been one of the most prominent public skeptics of America’s support for Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion, and he’s carrying on in this bent at the event he’s hosting today. “Why not force a peace?” he asked GOP presidential candidate Tim Scott today.
      The House approved the annual defense bill that rightwing Republicans packed with culture war amendments, including provisions blocking the Pentagon’s policies on abortion, gender-affirming care and diversity.
      The White House today announced it had forgiven $39bn in student loan debt held by 804,000 borrowers after making fixes to a program intended to provide relief for certain people who had been paying for 20 years or more.
      House Democrats accused GOP of ‘extreme and reckless legislative joyride’ in defense bill. In a joint statement, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, whip Katherine Clark and caucus chair Pete Aguilar encouraged their members to vote against the NDAA, saying “extreme MAGA Republicans have chosen to hijack” legislation that is typically passed with bipartisan support.
      After House conservatives packed it with culture war amendments, this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed by a party line vote – with a few exceptions.Democrats generally opposed the legislation, while Republicans approved it, except for the following crossover votes, as compiled by CNN:The four Democrats who voted for it all hail from swing districts, while the four Republicans who opposed it are generally seen as belonging to the party’s right wing.Among the Republican opponents was Colorado’s Ken Buck, who in a statement cited the legislation’s price tag as the reason he voted against it: More