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      Don’t be fooled – Trump’s presidential run is gaining more and more momentum | Lloyd Green

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      The Republican field swells but the 45th president’s commanding lead holds. Like Jeb Bush – another Florida governor and defeated Trump rival – Ron DeSantis has demonstrated himself inadequate to the task. By the numbers, DeSantis trails Trump nationally and in the Sunshine state. DeSantis was born there. Trump only recently moved there. To be the man you gotta beat the man, and right now DeSantis is going nowhere fast.Ill-at-ease and plagued by a pronounced charisma deficit, DeSantis can’t even decide how to pronounce his own surname. He is 44 years old. That’s plenty of time to nail down this personal detail.Following his botched campaign rollout on Twitter, a perpetual scowl creases DeSantis’s face. He does not relish the task at hand. Presidential races are marathons, and he does not appear built for endurance.Trump administration alums fare no better. Both Mike Pence, the hapless former vice-president, and Nikki Haley, the forgettable UN ambassador, have generated little enthusiasm. They are stalled in the doldrums of single digits despite years in the public eye. Both come with the word “sell” stamped atop their foreheads.Pence’s near martyrdom on January 6 has earned few plaudits from the Republican base – a passel of enmity is more like it. His religious devotion elicits yawns and his unalloyed social conservatism in the face of modernity hurts more than it helps.On that note, Trump packed the supreme court with three justices who helped overturn Roe v Wade. He proved his point, takes credit, but is cagey about what may follow. Pence, by contrast, announces that “ending abortion is more important than politics”.That’s a losing strategy. In reliably conservative Kansas and Kentucky, voters scotched attempts to strip abortion of constitutional protections. In poker and politics, you have to know when to say “enough”.As for Haley, a former South Carolina governor, she trails Trump and DeSantis in her home state – never a good sign. Back when he was running for president, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s second secretary of state, derided her tenure at the UN as inconsequential. Plenty of Republicans seemingly concur.If any South Carolina Republican has a chance of making it on to a national ticket, it is Tim Scott, the state’s junior senator and one of three African Americans in the upper chamber. Unlike Haley, he does not evoke mockery. He projects unstudied calm; his eyes don’t glow from ambition overload.Like most Republican wannabes, however, he opposed the deal over the debt ceiling. On Thursday night, he cast his lot with the likes of socialist Bernie Sanders and progressive Elizabeth Warren and voted against raising the ceiling.Regardless, for Scott’s poise to matter, Trump would need to badly stumble. The former guy is already under felony indictment in Manhattan and stands adjudicated of sexually abusing E Jean Carroll, none of which has dented his intra-party standing.Indeed, the pending criminal charges look like a gift. Trump’s rivals fell into line. DeSantis and Pence reflexively attacked Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s district attorney. The base wouldn’t have it any other way.Whether Jack Smith, the special counsel, indicts Trump is the looming unanswered question. Still if past is prelude, the ever-growing Republican field stands to effectively boost Trump if and when he comes under increased legal fire.Going back to 2016, no allegation or bombshell proved powerful enough to sink him. In the end, all rallied around the flag. Beyond that, a bloated field stands to dilute opposition to Trump.Chris Christie is set to announce his candidacy next week. The former New Jersey governor brings backing from Wall Street in the person of Steve Cohen, owner of the New York Mets. By itself, that won’t be enough to win hearts and minds. According to a recent Monmouth poll, Christie is underwater among Republicans, 21% favorable to 47% unfavorable. He is the only challenger with unfavorable ratings.But that is not the end of the story. An ex-prosecutor, Christie is also a skilled debater. In his last run, he eviscerated Senator Marco Rubio even as he demolished his own campaign in the process.Whether Trump agrees to appear on the same debate stage later this summer is unclear. Between his huge lead and a shifting legal landscape, he could well balk on the advice of counsel.The Democrats should not mistake Trump’s legal woes as a glide path to their re-election. Joe Biden is singularly unpopular, questions about his physical and mental acuity abound, and inflation’s scars remain ever-present. His on-stage fall on Thursday at the Air Force Academy will raise further doubts.At the same time, Hunter Biden, his surviving son, is getting plenty of unwanted attention. Like Trump, he too could be indicted.Against this backdrop, the president possesses little room to maneuver. His margin for error is close to nil.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

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      Donald Trump and Fox News play it safe in town hall as network faces lawsuit

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      Donald Trump and Fox News played it safe on Thursday with a town-hall event in Iowa that swerved past the former US president’s election lies and liability for sexual abuse.The uncharacteristic omissions were a striking contrast to Trump’s recent town hall on rival network CNN and likely a source of relief for both his own lawyers and those of Fox News.In April, the beleaguered network agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787m to avert a trial in the company’s lawsuit over its promotion of Trump’s debunked claims about the 2020 election.The case had already embarrassed Fox News over several months and raised the possibility that its founder, Rupert Murdoch, and stars such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity would have to testify publicly. Fox News still faces a defamation lawsuit from another voting technology company, Smartmatic.But Thursday night’s town hall with Trump in the Des Moines suburb of Clive was pre-taped, giving Fox News the option of editing out egregious lies about the 2020 election in general, or Dominion and Smartmatic in particular, before it was broadcast.The choice might have been informed by CNN’s fateful decision last month to go live with a Trump town hall from New Hampshire. The ex-president repeated a fusillade of bogus election claims and insulted writer E Jean Carroll a day after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against her; Carroll now intends to go back to court to seek additional damages.Fox News’s version, hosted by Hannity before a partisan pro-Trump crowd, managed to avoid references to either the stolen election conspiracy theory or the Carroll case. Instead, via soft questions and rambling answers, it took aim at Joe Biden and Republican primary election rivals such as Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor.Hannity began: “Unlike fake news CNN, it’s not my job to sit here and debate the candidate. We are going to ask him about the issues of the day that matter to the people – the voters who will also have their questions as well.”Despite this promise, Hannity launched the event by showing film of 80-year-old Biden suffering a fall at a US Air Force Academy graduation ceremony earlier on Thursday. Republicans and Fox News have long sought to make the president’s age an election issue.After Trump had entered to whoops, cheers and chants of “USA! USA!”, Hannity asked him to comment on the incident. “Not so good,” said Trump, 76, wearing his usual dark suit, white shirt and long red tie, perched on a tall chair opposite a tieless Hannity. “It’s sad, it’s sad. They’re representing – we are all representing the country when you become president – and you’re sort of not allowed to do that.“But it’s happened. It’s happened and it’s happened pretty badly. We won’t go into it, but we all know the ones and they count those acts, you know, they never forget. But that was a bad fall.”Hannity went on to suggest that Biden is “cognitively not there”. Trump replied that he had urged Hannity not to joke about the matter, for example by referring to Biden needing a “sippy cup”. He added “This is the most dangerous time in the history of our country because of the power of the weaponry and we have somebody that doesn’t understand what’s happening.”Later Trump also went on the offensive against his Republican primary rivals, whose names elicited boos from the crowd. He dismissed DeSantis’s claim to be a better candidate because he can theoretically serve two terms. “I heard ‘DeSanctis’ say, ‘Oh, I get eight years, he gets four.’ You don’t need four and you don’t need eight. You need six months.”The former president mocked Chris Christie’s approval rating in his native New Jersey, branded Asa Hutchinson as “Ada” Hutchinson and suggested that DeSantis will soon no longer be his main challenger: “I really go after the one who second and I think the one who second is going down so much and so rapidly that I don’t think he’s going to be second that much longer. I think he’s going to be third or fourth. He had a very bad day today. He got very angry at the press.”As the audience chuckled, Trump added: “At the fake news, he got angry.”Just as in the CNN town hall, Trump stressed his role in appointing supreme court justices who helped overturn Roe v Wade, the supreme court precedent that enshrined the constitutional right to abortion, but warned against alienating voters by taking an extreme position on the issue. DeSantis recently signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida.Trump said: “I did something that nobody thought was possible. I got rid of Roe v Wade and by doing that, it put pro-lifers in a very strong negotiating position. Now they’re negotiating different things and I happen to be of the Ronald Reagan school in terms of exemptions, where you have the life of the mother, rape and incest. For me, that’s something that works very well and for probably 80, 85%, because don’t forget, we do have to win elections.”The issue had energised Democrats in last year’s midterm elections, he noted. “When you didn’t have the exceptions, they went after the people viciously – the ads – and those people generally speaking didn’t do very well in terms of election.”The former president also railed against multiple criminal investigations into his conduct (“If my poll numbers went down, it would all end”), insisting that everything he did in handling classified documents was “right” and making false assertions about the quantity of documents found in Biden’s possession. He made racist comments about Washington’s Chinatown district and claimed that he could settle the war between Russia and Ukraine “in 24 hours”.Ammar Moussa, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said: “In what was mostly an incoherent, rambling appearance full of recycled lies on Fox News, Donald Trump told the truth at least once in his safe space – no one did more to pave the way for abortion bans across the country than him.“Whenever Trump is given a platform, he reminds America not only how much of a failure his presidency was, but just how extreme and dangerous he is. While President Biden focuses on continuing to deliver historic results for working families and protecting Americans’ hard-won freedoms, all Trump does is remind the American people why they rejected him and his failed presidency.”DeSantis, aiming to recover from a glitchy campaign launch, was touring New Hampshire on Thursday. In Laconia, he took a dig at former reality TV star Trump by remarking that “leadership is not about entertainment”. Former vice-president Mike Pence and former New Jersey governor Christie are expected to join the race next week. More

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      Trump repeats his usual lies in Fox News town hall – but the big lie is missing

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      Fox News hosted a town hall event in Iowa with Donald Trump on Thursday night, allowing the president to repeat his well-worn grievances and lies. But remarkably, the pre-taped hour-long prime-time special hosted by Sean Hannity excluded any mention of Trump’s conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him.The first installment of the broadcast came just two weeks after CNN broadcast a chaotic, lie-laden town hall with the former president that has been harshly criticised by journalists within and outside the network.Here are our main takeaways from the night.Fox News pre-taped the event, allowing the network to edit out lies that could provoke further lawsuits. And notably the hour-long special didn’t include a single reference to Trump’s election conspiracy theories.Fox has good reason to tread carefully. The network recently agreed to a $780m settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over its broadcasting of Trump’s election lies, and it is still facing a defamation lawsuit from another voting technology company, Smartmatic.The network plans to air more footage from the town hall Friday evening, but Thrusday’s broadcast steered Trump away from the 2020 election, instead directing him to discuss Joe Biden’s mental acuity, the border wall, and a host of other topics that reliably rile up Fox views and Trump’s base.The night stood in stark contrast to the CNN event, during which Trump repeatedly, baselessly claimed that the 2020 election was rigged against him, and that “millions” of votes were stolen from him. On that night, Trump also disparaged author E Jean Carroll, prompting her to seek “very substantial” additional damages soon after he was found liable in a civil case for sexually abusing her.On Thursday, Trump’s very strong tendency to compound his own legal troubles by repeating lies and conspiracy theories that have already landed him in trouble were tamped by Hannity’s gentle questioning and redirection – and perhaps some strategic editing.The night showed just how much Fox News and Trump still depend on each other.Fox helped launch the former president’s political career, readily backing and promoting his most extreme views. For years, Trump would call in to the rightwing news channel seemingly whenever he wanted to. But the relationship appears to have frayed over the past year. The network began to host Trump less often, while the former president disparaged hosts who proffered even mild critiques.Then the Dominion lawsuit aired out Fox executives’ and hosts’ private disdain and mockery of Trump and his allies, even as the network continued to air interviews with them.Still, with Trump still leading among Republican candidates, Fox has continued to offer him more coverage than any other major network, even as some hosts hedge their bets on his rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Trump, meanwhile, needs Fox – the only network that is likely to offer him largely unchecked access to a nationwide audience of supporters. Smaller rightwing networks like Newsmax still have nowhere close to as much reach.As Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), said earlier this year: “It’s a toxic relationship” – but evidently, or necessarily, a committed one.Though Fox may have edited out any defamation, they left in several lies and exaggeration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump town halls have overwhelmed and exhausted factcheckers for years. Thursday night’s carefully stuctured and edited broadcast wasn’t an exception – Trump certainly embellished personal grievances and accomplishments.The former president repeated outlandish claims about abortions, including the allegation that doctors want to continue “killing” babies after they are born and lamented that the military wasn’t learning to fight because of “wokeness”. Some of the lies were a bit b-side – he deflected discussion of the investigation into his handling of national security materials and obstruction of justice approaches with niche allegations that Biden stored documents in Washington DC’s Chinatown.Still, the pace of Trump’s falsifications, and his tendency to run away with a conspiracy theory had largely been tamed by the event’s produces and editors.Hannity reprised his role as Trump’s promoter.The Fox News host was one of Trump’s first and strongest champions and advisers – but his relationship with the former president was tested after he testified under oath that he never believed Trump’s 2020 election falsehoods.At the town hall in Clive, Iowa, Hannity served Trump a series of softball questions, gently directing him to speak to his strengths. The event began with Hannity asking about Joe Biden’s mental and physical fitness to serve, and replaying footage of the president taking a tumble at an event earlier in the day. When Trump referred to his own stumble down a ramp, Hannity helpfully chirped: “You were coming down a ramp didn’t have a rail. You had dress shoes on like you have now, which are very slippery.”He raised the newly publicized recordings of Trump discussing classified documents, but accepted the former president’s response: “I did everything right.” More

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      Republicans love to make up fake crises. Here are five of the biggest | Robert Reich

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      Republican leaders have mastered the art of manufacturing crises to divert the public’s attention from the real crisis of our era – the siphoning of income, wealth and power from most Americans by a small group at the top.Consider the fake fears they’ve been whipping up:1. WokenessFlorida’s governor (and now Republican presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis has declared a “war on woke”.Immediately after the mangled launch of his presidential campaign, DeSantis claimed on Fox News that “the woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism”.What?What exactly is “woke”? The term gained popularity at the start of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, when many Americans – including white Americans who were seeing the extent of the problem for the first time – awoke to the reality of police brutality against the Black community.DeSantis’s own general counsel has defined “woke” as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them”.He’s right. We all need to be woke.2. Trans peopleFormer president Donald Trump says that one of his top priorities if he’s re-elected in 2024 will be a “sweeping federal rollback of transgender rights”.DeSantis and other Republican governors have signed a stream of laws in recent months aimed at transgender rights.At least 10 states have banned gender-affirming care for minors and another 21 have introduced bills to do so, even as multiple studies have found access to gender-affirming care reduces the risk of depression and suicide for trans children.Other bills target gender-affirming care for adults. Some ban drag shows.Why have Republican lawmakers targeted transgender people as dangers to the public? There’s not a shred of evidence that trans people are threats to anyone.But targeting trans people is a way to court evangelicals. It’s also a way to stir up the base against people who are different, making trans people the sort of scapegoats that historically have fueled fascist movements.3. Critical race theoryVirginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s “day one” executive order banned the teaching of critical race theory. DeSantis and Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, have also banned it from schools.Here again, though, there’s no evidence of a public threat. CRT simply teaches America’s history of racism, which students need to understand to be informed citizens.Banning it is a scare tactic to appeal to a largely white, culturally conservative voter base.4. Couch potatoesIn the fight over raising the debt ceiling, Kevin McCarthy’s House Republicans added work requirements to food stamps and welfare, arguing that too many “couch potatoes” collect government benefits.Like Ronald Reagan’s claim about so-called “welfare queens”, the “couch potato” myth is a cruel racial dog whistle. Work requirements will burden many people who often have difficulty finding work that pays enough to live on.The plain fact is that most poor recipients of public benefits already work extremely hard.In addition, evidence shows that work requirements don’t lead to long-term increases in employment or to more stable jobs. Most people subject to work requirements remain poor. Some become poorer.5. Out-of-control government spendingIn fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product (from 11% to 6.3%).Lately, rising deficits have been driven by social security and Medicare (which is to be expected, as boomers retire). They’ve also been driven by defense spending.But a major culprit for the US’s soaring debt is George W Bush’s and Donald Trump’s huge tax cuts that mostly benefited the wealthy and big corporations – and that will have added $8tn and $1.7tn, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year.House Republicans are even proposing to cut funding for the IRS, which would make it harder for the tax agency to go after rich tax cheats and thereby reduce the debt.All five of these so-called crises have been manufactured by the Republican party. They’re entirely made up.Why? To deflect attention from the near record share of the nation’s income and wealth now going to the richest Americans.As the super-wealthy and big corporations pour money into politics – especially into the Republican party – they don’t want the rest of America to notice they’re rigging the economy for their own benefit, that their unrestrained greed is worsening the climate crisis and that they’re also undermining democracy.The game of the Republicans and their major donors is to deflect and distract – to use scapegoating, racism and outright lies to disguise what’s really going on.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Months of distrust inside Trump legal team led to top lawyer’s departure

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      Donald Trump’s legal team for months has weathered deep distrust and interpersonal conflict that could undermine its defense of the former president as the criminal investigation into his handling of classified documents and obstruction of justice at Mar-a-Lago nears its conclusion.The turmoil inside the legal team only exploded into public view when one of the top lawyers, Tim Parlatore, abruptly resigned two weeks’ ago from the representation citing irreconcilable differences with Trump’s senior adviser and in-house counsel Boris Epshteyn.But the departure of Parlatore was the culmination of months of simmering tensions that continue to threaten the effectiveness of the legal team at a crucial time – as federal prosecutors weigh criminal charges – in part because the interpersonal conflicts remain largely unresolved.It also comes as multiple Trump lawyers are embroiled in numerous criminal investigations targeting the former president: Epshteyn was recently interviewed by the special counsel, while Parlatore and Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran testified to the grand jury in the classified documents inquiry.The turmoil has revolved around hostility among the lawyers on the legal team who have come to distrust each other as well as their hostility directed at Epshteyn, over what they regard as his oversight of the legal work and gatekeeping direct access to the former president.In one instance, the clashes became so acute that some of the lawyers agreed to a so-called “murder-suicide” pact where if one got fired, others would resign in solidarity. And as some of the lawyers tried to exclude Epshteyn, they withheld information from co-counsel who they suspected might brief him.The infighting eventually reached the point at which some of the lawyers started to believe the biggest impediment to defending Trump might just be the distrust and interpersonal conflict, rather than someone like Parlatore deciding to cooperate with prosecutors.In fact, the legal team is said to be confident that Parlatore will not flip on Trump after he told the grand jury hearing evidence in the case last year that Trump gave him free rein to search for any remaining documents at his properties last year, according to a transcript of his testimony.But an eventual attempt to remove Epshteyn from the case ended in failure, and Epshteyn remains a trusted member of Trump’s inner circle. The months of worsening relations that led to that moment were described to the Guardian by six people familiar with the situation.In a statement, a Trump spokesperson said: “This is completely false and is rooted in pure fantasy. The real story is the illegal weaponization of the Justice Department and their witch-hunts targeted to influence an election in order to try and prevent President Trump from returning to the White House.”The lawyers named in this story either declined to comment or did not respond to calls for comment.West Palm Beach dinner foreshadows divisivenessThe animosity inside the Trump legal team started almost immediately after the FBI seized 101 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago last August, when Trump’s lawyers asked a federal judge to appoint a special master to review the materials for any privilege protections.The legal team, at the time, was composed of former federal prosecutors Jim Trusty and Evan Corcoran – whose search for classified documents in response to a subpoena later proved incomplete – former Florida solicitor general Chris Kise and lawyer Lindsey Halligan.The lawyers presented a united front as they argued to US district court judge Aileen Cannon that she should grant a special master, which she did – a strategic win for Trump that enabled him to delay the criminal investigation and prosecutors’ ability to review the documents.But Trusty, who played a leading role in the special master litigation, was already frustrated with how things were going.Trusty’s private frame of mind emerged over dinner with Halligan and Corcoran at the five-star Breakers hotel in West Palm Beach, Florida, hours after the special master court hearing. The conversation was overheard by this Guardian reporter who happened to be sitting at the table next to them.Trusty’s main irritation with Epshteyn, as he recounted, was having to run his legal decisions by him even though he did not consider him a trial lawyer and objected to how, in his eyes, he gave more priority to Trump’s perceived PR problems than to genuine legal problems.He criticised Epshteyn for trying to “troubleshoot” those problems before they could reach Trump, instead of allowing him to straightforwardly brief the former president himself. The entire situation meant the lawyers were having to play “a game of thrones nonsense” that he found distracting.Trusty then discussed legal strategy, suggesting Kise was “too apologetic” in opening remarks to the judge and questioned the validity of the FBI warrant for Mar-a-Lago. He also said he had no interest in talking to reporters from the publication Lawfare or the New York Times on account of their coverage.Lawyers split over further searchesTrusty’s annoyance with Epshteyn for inserting himself into legal deliberations came to be shared by Parlatore several weeks later, when the justice department told the Trump legal team in October that it believed the former president still possessed classified documents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe deliberations over how to respond to the department’s accusations split the legal team. Epshteyn and Kise were not in favor of doing voluntary searches of the Trump properties, while Parlatore and Trusty suggested a more proactive approach that involved new searches.Epshteyn and Kise for weeks were unconvinced. But Parlatore and Trusty reasoned that if they did find more classified documents but immediately returned them to the justice department, it would make it harder for prosecutors to say that Trump wilfully retained classified material.New searches of Trump’s properties did take place, though in Parlatore’s retelling of the deliberations to CNN last week, Epshteyn was reluctant to allow a search of Trump’s Bedminster golf club. Later, Trump lawyer Alina Habba was booked on CNN to dispute Parlatore’s account.But the episode also precipitated new distrust among the lawyers themselves, not just with Epshteyn. When the news about the justice department’s suspicions were reported, Parlatore and Trusty were surprised to see Kise portrayed as having always sought a cooperative approach with prosecutors.To Parlatore and Trusty, while Kise ultimately supported further searches, he was hardly the leading voice. And when Kise pulled out of arguing before the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit to keep the special master with 24 hours’ notice, they had him exiled to the civil litigation team.Lawyers stage Mar-a-Lago interventionWith Kise gone from the team defending Trump in special counsel matters, Parlatore and Trusty’s interpersonal conflicts with Epshteyn reached new levels as they grew increasingly annoyed at what they considered their inability to directly consult Trump without having to go through Epshteyn.The pair chafed that when they spoke to Trump on the phone, Epshteyn was typically also on the line. At other times, they sniped that Epshteyn would give overly rosy outlooks to Trump and, in March, travelled to Mar-a-Lago to seek Trump’s permission to exclude him from future deliberations.It was not clear whether the issue was actually resolved. Parlatore came away from the meeting content that he no longer needed to speak to Epshteyn. However, Epshteyn remained Trump’s in-house counsel and the legal team’s liaison with the Trump 2024 campaign.Around that time, Parlatore and Trusty also started withholding information from Corcoran because they worried that Corcoran was too close to Epshteyn and was briefing him behind their backs.That meant that as the special counsel intensified the documents investigation, after prosecutors convinced a US appeals court to force Corcoran to turn over his notes to a grand jury, at least two members of the legal team had little to no visibility into what the other two lawyers were doing unless they found out another way.Personal conflicts explode publiclyAround that time, Trump advisers and lawyers started to hear murmurs about whether Parlatore and Trusty should continue in their roles. When the pair heard about his inquiries, they resolved that if one of them actually got fired, the other should also resign.The animosity had also been increasing as the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, prepared to charge Trump in the hush money case and Parlatore insisted to Epshteyn that celebrity lawyer Joe Tacopina – whom he detested related to a prior case – should not be on the team defending the former president.Epshteyn suggested it was not in his control because Tacopina was recommended by others in Trump’s orbit, including Kimberly Guilfoyle – which Parlatore interpreted as a snub.Parlatore also had a misstep when he and Trusty last month urged Congress in a letter to tell the justice department to “stand down” its criminal investigation in the documents matter, laying out a detailed defence that claimed in part that responsibility lay with aides instead of Trump himself.The 10-page letter was sent to Trump and they believed it had the former president’s approval. But Trump was furious days later when he saw that the language in the letter cast doubt on his previous public statements about how White House and classified documents ended up at Mar-a-Lago.Parlatore had also decided against giving Epshteyn advance warning about the letter, which some on the Trump campaign used as an example of why the legal team needed his supervision.But the proximate cause of Parlatore’s departure was a row over discussing the letter on CNN. Parlatore had made a point of appearing on the network because he figured the attorney general, Merrick Garland, was more likely to watch CNN than a conservative network like Newsmax.Exactly who ordered Parlatore’s appearance to be cancelled remains unclear, though the Trump 2024 campaign later told the lawyers it was because he criticized Tacopina the last time he was on CNN. As the special counsel investigation neared its end, Parlatore told Trump he had enough and quit. More

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      Special counsel reportedly examining Trump’s firing of cybersecurity official

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      The US special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat is examining his firing of a cybersecurity official whose office said the vote was secure, the New York Times said.Jack Smith, who is also investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents, has subpoenaed former Trump White House staffers as well as Christopher Krebs, who oversaw the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) under Trump, the Times said, citing unnamed sources.Trump fired Krebs in November 2020, days after Cisa issued a statement calling the 3 November election “the most secure in American history”, as the then-president made his unsupported accusations that the vote was rigged.Cisa, part of the Department of Homeland Security, works to protect US elections. Krebs told associates at the time he expected to be fired.Representatives for Smith declined to comment on the New York Times report. Representatives for Krebs and Trump could not be reached for comment.The frontrunner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, Trump has persisted in making unfounded claims of widespread election fraud and promised pardons for supporters who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a failed effort to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory.Smith is leading a grand jury investigation into Trump’s actions. A special bipartisan House committee last year urged the Department of Justice to charge Trump with crimes including inciting or aiding an insurrection.In Georgia, a county prosecutor is investigating alleged interference in the 2020 election, with charging decisions expected by 1 September.Trump faces several other legal threats, including Smith’s investigation of classified documents found at Trump’s residence in Florida after he left the White House.In March, a New York grand jury indicted Trump for falsifying business records related to a hush money payment to a porn star before the 2016 election. The New York attorney general has sued Trump and his company for alleged fraud. In a civil trial in New York, Trump was found liable for sexual assault and defamation, relating to an allegation of rape.Trump denies all allegations and accuses prosecutors of a political “witch-hunt”. More

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      Ron v Don / Britain’s numbers game: Inside the 2 June Guardian Weekly

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      Whether DeSantis has it in him to wrest Republican playground bragging rights from Trump remains to be seen, as David Smith reports from Washington.The Guardian Weekly has a split cover this week, depending where in the world you get the magazine.Our North America edition puts the cover focus on the US race for the Republican presidential nomination. Ron DeSantis finally confirmed his candidacy, despite a nightmare launch on social media platform Twitter, which means the Florida governor is already playing catch-up with his arch-rival, Donald Trump.To capture the schoolyard-rumble feel of the race, illustrator Neil Jamieson tried to channel his 10- and 13-year-old kids who, he says, love to press each other’s buttons. “This cover leans in to the work of my hero George Lois, the legendary American creative director of Esquire whose acerbic wit and eye for composition redefined the American magazine cover in the 1960s,” adds Neil.Whether DeSantis has it in him to wrest the Republican playground bragging rights from Trump remains to be seen, as David Smith reports from Washington.For readers elsewhere, the cover reflects the record figures of people migrating to Britain – a subject that affects the lives of many around the world, more recently from countries such as Hong Kong, India and Ukraine, to name but a few.As our big story explores, one of the main talking points is not that the numbers are so high but why, when migration is such a dynamic and enduring reality of the modern world, successive Conservative governments have perpetuated the simplistic notion that UK immigration can easily be reduced.Home affairs editor Rajeev Syal breaks down the figures, while south Asia correspondent Hannah Ellis-Petersen finds out why Indians studying abroad are so keen on British universities. Finally, Daniel Trilling outlines how the UK’s controversial policy to stop small migrant boats crossing the Channel is partly inspired by Greece’s hardline crackdown, one area in which post-Brexit Britain seems happy to emulate its European neighbours.If you’ve wondered what inspires people to stand on one leg blindfolded for hours, or to attempt the loudest burp, don’t miss Imogen West-Knights’ long read on how the weird and wonderful Guinness World Records is still thriving in the digital age.In Culture, as the TV series Succession ended this week, writer Jesse Armstrong discusses the show’s genesis and the real-life characters who inspired its fearsome media mogul protagonist, Logan Roy.Get 12 issues of the Guardian Weekly magazine for just £12 (UK offer only) More

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      Texas attorney general impeached by Republican-led House in historic vote

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      Texas’ Republican-led House of Representatives impeached state attorney general Ken Paxton on Saturday on articles including bribery and abuse of public trust, a historic rebuke of a GOP official who rose to be a star of the conservative legal movement despite years of scandal and alleged crimes.Impeachment triggers Paxton’s immediate suspension from office pending the outcome of a trial in the state Senate and empowers Republican governor Greg Abbott to appoint someone else as Texas’ top lawyer in the interim.The 121-23 vote constitutes an abrupt downfall for one of the Republican party’s most prominent legal combatants, who in 2020 asked the US supreme court to overturn president Joe Biden’s electoral defeat of Donald Trump. It makes Paxton only the third sitting official in Texas’ nearly 200-year history to have been impeached.Paxton, 60, decried the move moments after many members of his own party voted to impeach, and his office pointed to internal reports that found no wrongdoing.“The ugly spectacle in the Texas House today confirmed the outrageous impeachment plot against me was never meant to be fair or just,” Paxton said. “It was a politically motivated sham from the beginning,”Paxton has been under FBI investigation for years over accusations that he used his office to help a donor and was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, though he has yet to stand trial. His fellow Republicans had long taken a muted stance on the allegations, but that changed this week.“No one person should be above the law, least not the top law enforcement officer of the state of Texas,” David Spiller, a Republican member of the committee that investigated Paxton, said in opening statements. Another Republican committee member Charlie Geren said without elaborating that Paxton had called some lawmakers before the vote and threatened them with political “consequences”.Lawmakers allied with Paxton tried to discredit the investigation by noting that hired investigators, not panel members, interviewed witnesses. They also said several of the investigators had voted in Democratic primaries, tainting the impeachment, and that they had too little time to review evidence.“I perceive it could be political weaponization,” Tony Tinderholt, one of the House’s most conservative members, said before the vote.Paxton is automatically suspended from office pending the Senate trial. Final removal would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, where Paxton’s wife, Angela, is a member.Representatives of the governor, who lauded Paxton while swearing him in for a third term in January, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on a temporary replacement.Before the vote on Saturday, Trump and senator Ted Cruz came to Paxton’s defense, with Cruz calling the impeachment process “a travesty” and saying the attorney general’s legal troubles should be left to the courts.“Free Ken Paxton,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, warning that if House Republicans proceeded with impeachment, “I will fight you.” More