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      Netanyahu: Trump must ‘condemn’ antisemitism after Kanye and Fuentes dinner

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      Netanyahu: Trump must ‘condemn’ antisemitism after Kanye and Fuentes dinnerLikely future Israeli PM, who has repeatedly praised Trump, says dinner with rapper and white nationalist ‘unacceptable and wrong’ Donald Trump should be “condemning” antisemitism following his meeting with the rapper Ye and Nick Fuentes, Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.Trump had dinner with two avowed antisemites. Let’s call this what it is | Francine ProseRead moreThe former and likely future Israeli prime minister told NBC’s Meet the Press the former president’s recent dinner with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who has repeatedly made antisemitic remarks, and Fuentes, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier, was “not merely unacceptable, it’s just wrong”.Netanyahu was prime minister of Israel during Trump’s time in power and is expected to return to power in the coming weeks. He has repeatedly praised Trump for his support of Israel, which included controversially recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Speaking to NBC, Netanyahu also praised Trump for formally recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a move global and regional leaders said could destroy the peace process and strengthen extremists.But he criticized Trump’s November dinner with Ye and Fuentes.“On this matter, on Kanye West and that other unacceptable guest, I think it’s not merely unacceptable it’s just wrong. And I hope he sees his way to staying out of it and condemning it,” Netanyahu said.Trump met with Ye and Fuentes on 22 November at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort where he now lives. The former president has said he did not know Fuentes was attending, but has not condemned either Ye or Fuentes’ antisemitic views and statements.Asked if Trump’s apparent embrace of antisemitism would “wipe away anything good he did for Israel”, Netanyahu said: “If it’s systemic and continues, and I doubt that it will because I think he probably understands that it crosses a line.”Netanyahu won a majority in November, aided by ultra-Orthodox parties and an alliance with the far right. He is in the process of forming a government. He was previously prime minister from 1996 to 1999 and again from 2009 to 2021.Trump and Netanyahu were close allies but the relationship – at least from Trump’s side – has soured since he left the White House.In 2021, Trump reportedly told a reporter that Netanyahu “made a terrible mistake” in congratulating Joe Biden on his election win.“I haven’t spoken to him since,” Trump said of Netanyahu, according to Axios. “Fuck him.”Last week Netanyahu said in an interview with journalist Bari Weiss: “I condemned Kanye West’s antisemitic statements. President Trump’s decision to dine with this person I think is wrong and misplaced. He shouldn’t do that. I think he made a mistake. I hope it’s not repeated.”TopicsBenjamin NetanyahuDonald TrumpThe far rightAntisemitismUS politicsKanye WestnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden rebukes Trump for saying constitution should be ‘terminated’

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      Biden rebukes Trump for saying constitution should be ‘terminated’Former president must be ‘universally condemned’ for comments, says White House The Biden White House rebuked Donald Trump after the former president said the US constitution should be “terminated” over his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign booksRead moreAndrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, said: “Attacking the constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and should be universally condemned.”Bates called the constitution a “sacrosanct document”, saying: “You cannot only love America when you win.”Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, by more than 7m votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result he called a landslide when it was in his favour in 2016, against Hillary Clinton.Trump continues to claim that Biden won key states through electoral fraud, a lie that fuelled the deadly attack on the US Capitol by his supporters on 6 January 2021. Nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including suicides among law enforcement. More than 950 people have been charged. This week, two members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia were convicted of seditious conspiracy. Other members of far-right, pro-Trump groups face similar charges.Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the Capitol attack. He has not yet returned to the latter, despite its new owner, Elon Musk, saying he is free to do so. On Saturday, Trump used his own social media platform, Truth Social, to say of the 2020 election: “A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the constitution.”Trump also said an “unprecedented fraud requires an unprecedented cure”.He was writing after Musk claimed he would show that Twitter was guilty of “free speech suppression” by releasing evidence of how the platform responded to requests from campaigns in the 2020 election.Trump is the only declared candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 but he has faced increased criticism from Republicans and Republican-supporting media since midterm elections in which many of his endorsed candidates were defeated, including election deniers running for governor and key elections roles in battleground states. Republicans took the House, but only by a narrow majority, and failed to retake the Senate.On Saturday, Trump also criticised the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and “all of the weak Republicans who couldn’t get the presidential election of 2020 approved and out of the way fast enough”. Even after the Capitol riot, 147 Republicans in Congress objected to results in key states.Senior Republicans have recently criticised Trump over his decision to have dinner at his home in Florida with Nick Fuentes, a known white supremacist and antisemite. But though the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has surged in polls regarding possible 2024 contenders, few in the party have broken decisively with Trump and those who have have largely been forced out.On Saturday, Brian Schatz, a Democratic US senator from Hawaii, pointed to such hard political reality, saying: “Trump just called for the suspension of the constitution and it is the final straw for zero Republicans, especially the ones who call themselves ‘constitutional conservatives’.”One such conservative is Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader battling to become House speaker. Not long before Trump said the constitution should be terminated, McCarthy said that when his party took control in January, it would demonstrate its constitutionalist bona fides by reading “every single word” of the hallowed document on the floor of the House.On Sunday, Hakeem Jeffries, the newly elected Democratic leader in the House, told ABC’s This Week Trump had made “a strange statement, but the Republicans are going to have to work out their issues with the former president and decide whether they’re going to break from him and return to some semblance of reasonableness or continue to lean in to the extremism, not just of Trump, but of Trumpism”.‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreTrump and Trumpism are becoming more and more of a headache for McCarthy, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and other senior Republicans.On Saturday, Mehdi Hasan, who hosts a show on the TV channel MSNBC, tweeted: “Do you support Donald Trump’s demand to ‘terminate’ the constitution? Doesn’t his demand disqualify him for running for the presidency? Two questions that every single Republican member of the House and Senate needs to be asked, again and again, in the coming days.”Hasan also pointed to Trump’s dinner at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, with Nick Fuentes, saying that in just two weeks the former president had “said or done things that would be lifelong scandals for other politicians … he truly knows how to flood the zone”. Trump critics on the political right did condemn the remark.John Bolton, George W Bush’s UN ambassador who became Trump’s third national security adviser, said: “No American conservative can agree with Donald Trump’s call to suspend the constitution because of the results of the 2020 election. And all real conservatives must oppose his 2024 campaign for president.”TopicsDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS politicsUS elections 2020US elections 2024RepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      Joe Biden condemns antisemitism following Kanye West’s remarks: ‘Silence is complicity’ – as it happened

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      Kanye West’s suspension from Twitter after the rapper posted an image blending a swastika with a star of David, following an interview in which he praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust, appears to have caught the eye of Joe Biden.The president tweeted his own response on Friday morning, not directly addressing West, who now goes by the name of Ye, but saying he wanted “to make a few things clear”.I just want to make a few things clear:The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure. And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity.— President Biden (@POTUS) December 2, 2022
      “The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure. And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity,” he wrote.His tweet alludes to Republican leaders who either chose to not to speak our, or offered only tepid criticism of Donald Trump hosting West and fellow Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes at a dinner at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.Read more:Kanye West suspended from Twitter after posting swastika inside Star of DavidRead moreThanks for joining us today, and through the week, for the US politics blog. We’re closing it now for the day.
      Joe Biden had a busy Friday. He’s currently in Boston, where he’s talking with Prince William about the climate emergency.
      The president has been speaking out about antisemitic hate speech in a forthright tweet condemning political leaders whose silence, he says, equals “complicity”. It comes after Twitter suspended the account of rapper Kanye West for inciting violence with offensive, anti-Jewish posts.
      Closing arguments in the criminal tax fraud trial of the Trump Organization have wrapped up in New York. Former president Donald Trump is not on trial, but prosecutors say he was fully aware of an illegal scheme perpetrated by top executives of his real estate company. Jurors will deliberate next week.
      Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel, was spotted entering the grand jury area of the US district court in Washington DC on Friday, CNN reported, in the justice department’s January 6 case.
      Democrats voted to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024. The move was championed by Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate.
      Biden said the US had dodged an “economic catastrophe” after Congress approved legislation averting a nationwide rail shutdown on 9 December. The president signed a law imposing a labor settlement on rail workers that did not include paid time off that unions had demanded.
      A 15-year-old canvassing for Georgia senator Raphael Warnock was shot through the door of a house he knocked at on Thursday, according to police in Savannah. The youth was hit in the leg, and is expected to survive. A 42-year-old man was arrested.
      Please join us again next week for a consequential week in the US Senate. The runoff election between Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker is on Tuesday, and victory for the incumbent would give Democrats a 51-49 advantage in the chamber.Democrats voted Friday to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024, the Associated Press reports.It is a dramatic shakeup championed by Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate.BREAKING: Democrats voted to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024, a dramatic shakeup championed by President Biden to better reflect the party’s diverse electorate. https://t.co/3gKEcLOpPQ— The Associated Press (@AP) December 2, 2022
      The Democratic National Committee’s rule-making arm made the move to strip Iowa from the position it has held for more than four decades after technical meltdowns sparked chaos and marred results of the state’s 2020 caucus. The change also comes after a long push by some of the party’s top leaders to start choosing a president in states that are less white, especially given the importance of Black voters as Democrats’ most loyal electoral base.Read more:Biden tells Democrats to revise primary calendar to boost Black voters’ voicesRead moreDemocrats are poised to shake up the way in which they nominate presidential candidates, after Joe Biden said the primary process should better represent the party’s non-white voters, Adam Gabbatt writes.Biden has reportedly told Democrats that Iowa, the state that has led off the Democratic voting calendar since 1976, should be moved down the calendar, with South Carolina instead going first.The move would see New Hampshire, which has technically held the nation’s first primary since 1920 (Iowa uses a slightly different system of caucuses, or in-person voting), shunted down the calendar.Both Iowa and New Hampshire are predominantly white states. Clamor has been growing inside and outside the Democratic party for a different state, with a population more representative of the US as a whole, to be given the first go.Associated Press reported that Biden had written to the Democratic National Committee regarding the proposal. The DNC’s rules committee is meeting on Friday to vote on the primary calendar.“For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” Biden wrote.“We rely on these voters in elections but have not recognized their importance in our nominating calendar. It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”Read the full story:Biden tells Democrats to revise primary calendar to boost Black voters’ voiceRead moreJoe Biden has welcomed the Prince of Wales to Boston, where they will have a discussion about the climate emergency at the John F Kennedy presidential library and museum.The president and Prince William exchanged a warm handshake and posed briefly for photographs before heading inside.The Prince and Princess of Wales, who earlier visited the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University, are on the third and final day of what has been a turbulent visit to the US.Before meeting with Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard, the Princess of Wales greeted crowds in Harvard Square pic.twitter.com/NVWgjj2UV1— Harvard University (@Harvard) December 2, 2022
      They are seeking to end the trip on a high note at an award ceremony later for award ceremony for Prince William’s environmental Earthshot prize.Read more:William and Kate seek to end US trip on positive note after turbulent weekRead morePolice in Savannah, Georgia, have charged a 42-year-old man they say shot a teenage canvasser for incumbent Democratic senator Raphael Warnock.Authorities say the youth was on the campaign trail when he was wounded, and was shot through the front door of a house he had knocked at.Today is the final day of early voting ahead of next Tuesday’s Senate runoff, in which Warnock holds a narrow polling advantage over Republican challenger Herschel Walker. More than 1.5m votes have already been cast.The incident took place on Thursday. The 15-year-old was shot in the leg and sustained non life-threating injuries.#NewsRelease SPD Arrests Suspect in Hartridge Street Shooting https://t.co/8GsECFjjeH— Savannah Police Department (@SavPolice) December 2, 2022
      A press release from the Savannah police department says “at this point, there is no indication the shooting was politically motivated”.But it adds: “According to the preliminary investigation, the teen was campaigning for Raphael Warnock for the upcoming run-off election when the incident occurred. While at the front door of one of the residences on Hartridge Street, the suspect fired a shot through the closed door, striking the teen.“Officers quickly identified and located the suspect, Jimmy Paiz, at the residence. Paiz was booked into the Chatham County jail on charges of aggravated assault and aggravated battery.”In her Air Force One mini-briefing, Karine Jean-Pierre was pressed on how Joe Biden intended to secure paid leave for all workers. During his signing earlier today of legislation averting a nationwide rail shutdown, which did not include such a provision for rail workers, the president said he would be “coming back at it”.It seems there’s no specific plan. The White House press secretary said:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}He’ll continue forcefully advocating for Congress and employers to extend paid sick leave to all workers. That’s what’s important. As you can tell from his remarks this afternoon, the president’s focus remains, again, on getting Congress to act.Biden won’t, however, be returning to Congress to fix the “glitches” in the Inflation Reduction Act he conceded yesterday, during a visit by President Emmanuel Macron of France, had upset European countries.The president said Thursday they were fixable. When asked on Friday how, Jean-Pierre responded:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}We don’t have any plans to go back to Congress for legislative changes. There is a complex implementation and process which is actively underway at federal agencies, but… we’re not going to be addressing any glitches.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been expanding on Joe Biden’s earlier tweet calling out antisemitic hate speech.It follows Twitter’s decision to suspend the rapper Kanye West for making offensive posts, including an image of a swastika blended with a Star of David.“It doesn’t matter who [says it],” Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One as the president headed to Boston to meet the Prince and Princess of Wales. “What the President is trying to say is being silent is complicit. And when we see this type of hatred when we see the some type of antisemitism, we need to call it out.”Jean-Pierre was asked several times who Biden was addressing, and whether it was a direct response to West’s message.She added: “The president is standing with the Jewish community. The common theme of all forms of bigotry is that hate doesn’t go away, it only hides the grotesque poison of antisemitism.“Just yesterday he and President Macron [of France] recognized the hundreds of thousands of Americans who gave their lives to overcome the horror of Nazism and keep us free. And so he believes as president is important to speak up.”Prosecutors resumed closing arguments Friday in the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud trial, promising to share previously unrevealed details about Donald Trump’s knowledge of a tax dodge scheme hatched by one of his top executives, the Associated Press reports.“Donald Trump knew exactly what was going on with his top executives,” assistant Manhattan district attorney Joshua Steinglass told jurors on Thursday during the first half of his closing argument, adding: “We will come back to that later.”Trump himself is not on trial, but the company that bears his name, through which he manages real estate holdings and other ventures, faces fines of more than $1m if convicted of helping executives avoid paying income taxes on company-paid perks such as Manhattan apartments and luxury cars.The tax fraud case is the only trial to arise from the three-year investigation of Trump and his business practices by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The company has denied wrongdoing.Steinglass told jurors that two executives involved in the scheme, longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg and controller Jeffrey McConney, were “high managerial” agents entrusted to act on behalf of the company and its various entities.The defense has alleged that Weisselberg came up with the tax dodge scheme on his own without Trump, or the Trump family knowing, and that the company didn’t benefit from his actions. Weisselberg testified that Trump didn’t know, but that the Trump Organization did derive some benefit because it didn’t have to pay him as much in actual salary.“Their entire theory of the case is a fraud,” Steinglass said, insisting the former president had full knowledge of everything that occurred.Jurors are expected to deliberate next week.The Colorado secretary of state has ordered a recount in the congressional race where extremist Republican Lauren Boebert led Democrat Adam Frisch by just 550 votes in an unexpectedly tight race.The Associated Press has declared the race too close to call and will await the results of the recount. The recount, which was expected, was formally announced Wednesday.One week after the polls closed, Boebert claimed victory and Frisch conceded. Frisch, a former city councilman from Aspen, acknowledges a recount is unlikely to change the results, the AP says.In a virtual press conference announcing his concession, Frisch argued that the thin margin is its own small victory after his campaign was largely considered futile by the political establishment. He added that he hasn’t ruled out another bid for the seat in 2024.It’s been a lively morning in US politics news and there’s more to come. We’ll shortly have a post on closing arguments in the Trump Organization trial in New York.Joe Biden’s on his to Boston to meet Britain’s Prince William and his wife, Kate, the princess of Wales, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will gaggle aboard Air Force One around the half hour (if the White House is on stated schedule, which is rarely.)Here’s where things stand:
      Joe Biden used Twitter to condemn antisemitism and political leaders who fail to call it out, following Ye’s suspension from Twitter after the rapper formerly named Kanye West posted an image blending a swastika with a star of David, following an interview in which he praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust.
      Pat Cipollone, former White House counsel for Donald Trump, was spotted entering the grand jury area of the US district court in Washington DC on Friday, CNN is reported, in the DoJ’s January 6 case.
      Biden said the US has dodged an “economic catastrophe” after Congress approved legislation averting a nationwide rail shutdown on 9 December. The president was speaking at the White House before signing legislation that was approved in the Senate on Thursday and which imposes a labor settlement on rail workers who were poised to strike in a dispute over pay and conditions. More

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      January 6 panel mulls criminal referrals as Trump sees setback in Mar-a-Lago case – live

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      The January 6 House panel investigating the Capitol attack, and Donald Trump’s insurrection, is set to meet in private on Friday as it prepares to mull criminal charges against the former president.The “walls closing in on Trump” headline has been written often, but this time with an elevated degree of peril for a man who recently announced his third run at the White House as a Republican.A subcommittee formed in October to make recommendations will present its report to the full panel today, according to NPR, and a determination on recommending any particular action will follow in short order.“We’ll just accept the report, and probably one day next week, make a decision one way or another,” Mississippi Democratic Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, told the network.The committee is expected to release its final report around the middle of this month, and it is expected to focus heavily on Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack and his potential culpability.The Guardian reported last week that it has provoked something of a rift between panel members, with some believing it concentrates too much on Trump himself, and not enough of alleged intelligence failures by the FBI that resulted in the Capitol being overrun by supporters he incited.New: Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson tells me the full committee will receive the subcommittee’s recommendations tomorrow at 8:30a but likely wont make a decision on referrals and what to do about subpoenaed GOP members until next week.— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 1, 2022
      Members of the subcommittee, which is chaired by Democrat Jamie Raskin, and includes Republican Liz Cheney alongside other Democrats Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, all have a legal background, or, in Schiff’s case, prosecutorial experience.As well as making recommendations on criminal charges, the subcommittee was also tasked with resolving how to respond to Trump’s lawsuit against his subpoena.Read more:January 6 report expected to focus on Trump’s role and potential culpabilityRead moreLate on Thursday, a federal appeals court delivered a major blow to Donald Trump by knocking down the appointment of a special master to look at documents seized by the FBI from the former president’s Florida resort.The court also sternly rebuked Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge who assigned the special master, for meddling in a justice department investigation. Here’s my colleague Hugo Lowell’s report:A federal appeals court on Thursday terminated the special master review of documents seized from Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago property, paving the way for the justice department to regain access to the entirety of the materials for use in the criminal investigation surrounding the former president.The decision by the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit marked a decisive defeat for Trump in a ruling that said a lower-court judge should never have granted his request for an independent arbiter in the first place and is unlikely to be overturned in the event of appeal.“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote in an unanimous 23-page opinion. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”The ruling removed the lower-court judge’s order, allowing federal prosecutors to use the unclassified documents – in addition to the documents marked classified they previously regained in an earlier appeal – in the criminal investigation examining Trump’s mishandling of national security materials.Trump can only appeal to the US supreme court, according to local rules in the 11th circuit, though it was not immediately clear whether he would do so. The former president has lost multiple cases before the supreme court, most recently including whether Congress can get access to his tax returns.In a statement, a Trump spokesman said: “The decision does not address the merits that clearly demonstrate the impropriety of the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted raid on Mar-a-Lago. President Donald J Trump will continue to fight against the weaponized Department of ‘Justice.’”Read the full story:US court strikes down appointment of special master to review Trump recordsRead moreWhile we’re looking at the machinations of the January 6 House committee, we’re certainly not the only ones. Republicans, already committed to shutting down the panel when they assume control of the House next month (assuming it hasn’t done so itself by then) appear dead set on investigating the investigators.MSNBC’s MaddowBlog, from the Rachel Maddow show, takes a closer look at would-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s role in the plan, in an article published Friday.The House minority leader, if he wins enough party support to get the gavel of course, appears eager not to find answers about the 6 January Capitol attacks, or Donald Trump’s desperate efforts to retain the presidency despite his defeat by Joe Biden.Instead, he wants to cast shade on the integrity of the bipartisan panel. In a letter last week, reported by the New York Times, he wrote to the committee chair Bennie Thompson, ordering him to preserve all documents, including transcripts of more than 1,000 interviews. It’s being seen purely as a political display, as it’s something the panel would have to do anyway.This from a man who resolutely refused to cooperate with the panel last year when he received a subpoena.According to MSNBC, the tactics of McCarthy and the Republicans are “intended to discredit probes they consider politically inconvenient”. You can read the MSNBC report here.The January 6 House panel investigating the Capitol attack, and Donald Trump’s insurrection, is set to meet in private on Friday as it prepares to mull criminal charges against the former president.The “walls closing in on Trump” headline has been written often, but this time with an elevated degree of peril for a man who recently announced his third run at the White House as a Republican.A subcommittee formed in October to make recommendations will present its report to the full panel today, according to NPR, and a determination on recommending any particular action will follow in short order.“We’ll just accept the report, and probably one day next week, make a decision one way or another,” Mississippi Democratic Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, told the network.The committee is expected to release its final report around the middle of this month, and it is expected to focus heavily on Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack and his potential culpability.The Guardian reported last week that it has provoked something of a rift between panel members, with some believing it concentrates too much on Trump himself, and not enough of alleged intelligence failures by the FBI that resulted in the Capitol being overrun by supporters he incited.New: Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson tells me the full committee will receive the subcommittee’s recommendations tomorrow at 8:30a but likely wont make a decision on referrals and what to do about subpoenaed GOP members until next week.— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 1, 2022
      Members of the subcommittee, which is chaired by Democrat Jamie Raskin, and includes Republican Liz Cheney alongside other Democrats Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, all have a legal background, or, in Schiff’s case, prosecutorial experience.As well as making recommendations on criminal charges, the subcommittee was also tasked with resolving how to respond to Trump’s lawsuit against his subpoena.Read more:January 6 report expected to focus on Trump’s role and potential culpabilityRead moreThe White House has announced that Joe Biden will deliver live remarks at 10.15am as he signs legislation averting a national rail strike.The Senate voted 80-15 on Thursday to progress an imposed settlement on rail workers, one day after the House did the same.Biden, who became known as Amtrak Joe for his days riding the railroad to and from the Capitol when he was a senator, is likely to praise the speed at which Congress moved to avoid the planned 9 December shutdown. Biden’s pushing of the settlement, however, is not without controversy. Read more here:Biden just knifed labor unions in the back. They shouldn’t forget it | Hamilton NolanRead moreGood morning politics blog readers, and happy Friday. It’s a big day for the January 6 House committee investigating Donald Trump’s insurrection as it meets to mull potential criminal referrals for the former president, and those in his inner circle.The bipartisan panel’s closed-doors meeting follows a massive setback late on Thursday for Trump’s tactics of obstructing a parallel justice department inquiry into his improper handling of classified documents at his Florida resort. A federal appeals court struck down the assignment of an independent special master reviewing the documents, and delivered a direct rebuke for the Trump-appointed judge who engaged him.We’ll have plenty more about those developments coming up.Here’s what else we’re watching Friday on what promises to be a busy day:
      Joe Biden has picked up an unexpected fan in the form of Republican firebrand Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker who says the president is getting things right and enjoyed one of the best first-term midterm elections in history.
      Biden will meet the Prince and Princess of Wales later today at the John F Kennedy presidential library in Boston.
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at lunchtime aboard Air Force One en route to Boston.
      It’s the last day of early voting ahead of next Tuesday’s crucial Senate run-off in Gerogia. Latest polls give Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock a 3-4% lead over Republican challenger Herschel Walker. More

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      Trump had dinner with two avowed antisemites. Let’s call this what it is | Francine Prose

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      Trump had dinner with two avowed antisemites. Let’s call this what it isFrancine ProseA 2024 candidate broke bread with Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, and Ye, who has praised Hitler. Don’t normalize this Let’s be clear about what happened and what didn’t happen on 22 November at Mar-a-Lago.A former president of the United States, a self-declared candidate for reelection in 2024, had dinner with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, whose antisemitic public statements have grown increasingly extreme, along with Nick Fuentes, who is among the nation’s most vocal Holocaust deniers. One of the rare white supremacists with popular name recognition, Fuentes has suggested that Jews leave the country and that the military be sent into Black neighborhoods. When, at dinner, Fuentes advised Donald Trump to go off-script and ad-lib more often during his campaign speeches, the candidate reportedly told the other guests: “I really like this guy. He gets me.”Texas schools are being told to teach ‘opposing views’ of the Holocaust. Why? | Francine ProseRead moreThat’s what happened. Here’s the part I find staggeringly hard to believe: that Trump had never, as he has claimed, heard of Nick Fuentes; that his staff knew only that Ye was bringing some friends to dinner, and no one had the faintest idea who they were. The reason it seems to me unlikely is that Trump’s staff is presumably paid to make sure that nothing like this ever happens – that no hostile journalists, prominent socialists or political rivals show up to share an intimate meal with the boss. We can assume that Trump’s employees are familiar with the internet, and that one or two mouse-clicks would have red-flagged the mystery dinner guest.Trump must have spent every waking moment of the last month on the golf course if he hadn’t heard that his friend Ye threatened to go “death con 3” on Jewish people. Wouldn’t most hosts (or those with a conscience) have found an excuse to cancel dinner? (“Sorry, Ye, something’s come up…”) That is, unless the host’s idea of a friend and ideal guest is a celebrity who flatters him when he’s not making nasty racist threats.Antisemitic incidents and hate speech have grown more common in recent years. Fuentes, Ye and company have returned to a playbook dating from long before the Nazis – tropes that portray Jews as conspirators, as “globalists” driven by greed, plotting control of the world – to which they’ve added the more modern slur that Jews run the media and the entertainment industry. “The Jewish community,” said Ye, “especially in the music industry, they’ll take us and milk us till we die”. On Thursday, while on Alex Jones’s Infowars show, West proceeded to praise Hitler.Fifteen years ago, at a cocktail party in Rome, an American woman told me and two friends that her son couldn’t get a job in Hollywood because Jews controlled the entertainment industry. She was serious. All these years later, I can still remember our shock at what she’d said, and at the fact that we’d said nothing in response.In his 12 November monologue on Saturday Night Live, Dave Chappelle began with a few wink-wink remarks about Ye and “the Jews”. Then he said: “I’ve been to Hollywood and – no one get mad at me – I’m just telling you … it’s a lot of Jews. Like, a lot.” He joked about the “show business rules of perception … If they’re black, then it’s a gang. If they’re Italian, it’s a mob. If they’re Jewish, it’s a coincidence, and you should never speak about it.”We know what was supposed to be funny: the familiar trope, the undying zombie of Jewish media control. It’s not all that surprising. But what was surprising was how readily the studio audience laughed.Laughing at an antisemitic joke in a TV studio, or anywhere, is pretty much the definition of normalization. And normalization is the Petri dish in which the virus of racial and religious hatred grows, which it inevitably does. One of the bleaker lessons of history is how regularly the hatred of the other spills out of the culture medium and erupts into mass violence.Kanye West’s voice is just one in a rising chorus of antisemitismRead moreObviously, the gap between Chappelle’s monologue and the Nuremberg laws is a huge one. But it’s been bridged before. In a 1934 issue of Julius Streicher’s pro-Nazi propaganda tabloid, Der Stürmer, based in Nuremberg, there’s a “humorous” cartoon of six Jews (fat, well-dressed, gigantic bulbous noses) riding on an airplane emblazoned with a Jewish star, searching the landscape, with telescopes, for a corner of the earth where no one reads Der Stürmer.One way to resist antisemitism – and resist its normalization – is by being clear about what is happening. Some of Trump’s Jewish supporters might approve of his stance on Israel but wonder if, in the future, they want to be expelled from an all-Christian judenfrei American theocracy and forced to emigrate to Tel Aviv. We need to overcome the impulse to go along with the group or to be polite and let things slide instead of telling the woman in Rome not to blame Jews for her son’s unemployment problems.Let’s be clear about one more thing: if a politician refuses to condemn Donald Trump for hanging out with Ye and Fuentes, if a public figure mealy-mouths that “no one should have dinner with an antisemite” without naming Donald Trump, there are only two explanations.One: they themselves are antisemitic.Or two: they have no conscience, no sense of right and wrong, no decency. The only thing that drives them is the fear of losing supporters and of risking the goodwill of a candidate whom someday they might need to ask for help.
      Francine Prose is a former president of Pen American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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      Republicans delete tweet that appears to support Kanye West after he praises Nazis

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      Republicans delete tweet that appears to support Kanye West after he praises NazisHouse judiciary committee account contained cryptic post – ‘Kanye. Elon. Trump’ – that seemingly expressed support for Ye Leading Republicans in the US Congress have deleted a tweet that seemingly expressed support for Ye, a rapper formerly known as Kanye West, after he praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.Since October, a Twitter account run by Republicans on the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee has contained a cryptic post that said: “Kanye. Elon. Trump” – apparently claiming Ye, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and former president Donald Trump as their own.A day after the tweet was issued, Ye, who is Black, issued a post on Instagram – since deleted – in which he said he would go “death con 3” on Jewish people. He went on to make antisemitic remarks in interviews and dined with Trump and white supremacist Nick Fuentes at the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.Milo Yiannopoulos claims he set up Fuentes dinner ‘to make Trump’s life miserable’Read moreStill, the short Republican tweet remained up. In the end, it took a diatribe from Ye that expressed admiration for Hitler and earned widespread opprobrium for it to be quietly removed.Shielded behind a face mask, Ye appeared alongside Fuentes on InfoWars, a show hosted by far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, known for pushing lies around events such as the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012.The rapper said: “I see good things about Hitler … Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”Even Jones, outflanked on his right for perhaps the first time, looked uncomfortable and said: “The Nazis were thugs.” Ye insisted: “But they did good things too. We gotta stop dissing the Nazis all the time.”Later he added: “I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis.”Jones tried to give Ye an opportunity to back down but he remained adamant: “There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler. A lot of things.”The comments could hardly have come at a worse time for Trump, whose recent dinner with Ye and Fuentes cast a shadow over his latest campaign to win the White House. Long criticised for giving succour to white nationalism, the former president has stated that he did not know Fuentes or his views but has not apologised for hosting Ye.Kanye West is paying $200,000 a month in child support. Where did that number come from?Read moreYe’s outburst also suggested that Republicans’ effort to align themselves with one of the world’s most popular musicians in a bid to woo young and Black voters has backfired.Democrats on the judiciary panel used Twitter to point out that the tweet had been deleted and to take aim at Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the committee. “Why hasn’t @Jim_Jordan condemned these comments instead?” they wrote. “And where is he on the Nick Fuentes dinner?”Norm Coleman and Matt Brooks, leaders of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said in a statement: “We vehemently condemn those comments and call on all political leaders to reject these messengers of hate and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.“Given his praise of Hitler, it can’t be overstated that Kanye West is a vile, repellent bigot who has targeted the Jewish community with threats and Nazi-style defamation. Conservatives who have mistakenly indulged Kanye West must make it clear that he is a pariah. Enough is enough.”Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted: “Saying you ‘like Hitler’, ‘love the Nazis’, and spending all your time with a white supremacist makes one thing clear: Ye is a vicious antisemite. His comments today on InfoWars are not just vile and offensive: they put Jews in danger.”Ye has lost lucrative deals with companies such as Gap and Adidas in recent months. On Thursday, it was announced that Ye’s deal to buy Parler, a conservative social media app, had also been called off. TopicsKanye WestAntisemitismDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      US court strikes down appointment of special master to review Trump records

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      US court strikes down appointment of special master to review Trump recordsDecision marks decisive defeat as judges opine the request should never have been granted in the first place A federal appeals court on Thursday terminated the special master review of documents seized from Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago property, paving the way for the justice department to regain access to the entirety of the materials for use in the criminal investigation surrounding the former president.Democrats get Trump tax returns as Republican House takeover loomsRead moreThe decision by the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit marked a decisive defeat for Trump in a ruling that said a lower-court judge should never have granted his request for an independent arbiter in the first place and is unlikely to be overturned in the event of appeal.“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote in an unanimous 23-page opinion. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”The ruling removed the lower-court judge’s order, allowing federal prosecutors to use the unclassified documents – in addition to the documents marked classified they previously regained in an earlier appeal – in the criminal investigation examining Trump’s mishandling of national security materials.Trump can only appeal to the US supreme court, according to local rules in the 11th circuit, though it was not immediately clear whether he would do so. The former president has lost multiple cases before the supreme court, most recently including whether Congress can get access to his tax returns.In a statement, a Trump spokesman said: “The decision does not address the merits that clearly demonstrate the impropriety of the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted raid on Mar-a-Lago. President Donald J Trump will continue to fight against the weaponized Department of ‘Justice.’”The decision handed down by the 11th circuit was not surprising given the extent of skepticism expressed by the three-judge panel led by the chief appellate judge William Pryor about the legality of the extraordinary injunction against the department during oral arguments last week.Trump sought the appointment of a special master to examine the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago – including 103 bearing classified markings – shortly after the FBI searched the resort on the basis that some of the materials could be subject to potential privilege protections.The requests were granted by US judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, who gave exceptional deference to Trump on account of his status as a former president and decided he satisfied elements of the four-part Richey test used to determine whether to intervene in a criminal investigation.But the 11th circuit ruled that Cannon should never have appointed a special master, writing that she did not have the authority to prevent the department from using the seized materials – a move that is also without legal precedent.The only instance in which US district courts could restrain an executive branch criminal investigation, the 11th circuit wrote, was if there was some exceptional circumstance that satisfied the four-part Richey test to justify the intervention.Trump did not meet any of the four tests under Richey, particularly the first test about whether he suffered “callous disregard” to his constitutional rights as a result of the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, which the 11th circuit ruled was the most important of the Richey standards.Cannon herself had found that Trump did not meet the “callous disregard” threshold, but intervened after deciding he had satisfied other tests. But the 11th circuit pointedly disagreed.Trump did not meet the second “possessory interest” test in the seized materials because he could not articulate which documents he needed, the 11th circuit said, and Trump did not meet the third test about whether he would be irreparably harmed if the materials were not returned.“Plaintiff’s task was to show why he needed the documents, not why the government did not,” the 11th circuit wrote.Trump also failed to meet the fourth test about whether he could seek recourse besides judicial intervention, the 11th circuit wrote, rejecting his argument that he needed the injunction because some of the seized materials might have been outside the scope of the search warrant.“The status of a document as personal or presidential does not alter the authority of the government to seize it under a warrant supported by probable cause. The Department of Justice has the documents because they were seized with a search warrant,” the three-judge panel wrote.Throughout the ruling, the 11th circuit repeatedly emphasized that US district courts should intervene in criminal investigations before charges have even been filed only if there is some exceptional circumstance given the separation of powers between the judicial and executive branches.Trump’s lawyers had suggested in court that it was Trump’s status as a former president that made the case unique, but the 11th circuit disagreed with that argument, saying there was no such precedent and it would not create new precedent for former presidents to receive special treatment.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Democrats get Trump tax returns as Republican House takeover looms

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      Democrats get Trump tax returns as Republican House takeover loomsDemocratic-led House ways and means committee does not have long to decide what to do, with majority to change in January A US House of Representatives committee has a little more than a month to decide what to do with six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns, after a years-long court fight ended late on Wednesday with the records handed to Congress.Milo Yiannopoulos claims he set up Fuentes dinner ‘to make Trump’s life miserable’Read moreThe supreme court ordered the release of Trump’s returns to the House ways and means committee last week, rejecting the former president’s plea. Trump has consistently accused the Democratic-led committee of being politically motivated.The committee had been seeking returns spanning 2015 through 2020, which it says it needs in order to establish whether the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is properly auditing presidential returns, and whether new legislation is needed.A treasury spokesperson said the department “has complied with last week’s court decision”, though it declined to say if the committee had accessed the documents.According to CNN, Democrats on the panel were due to be briefed on Thursday on the “legal ramifications on section of the tax law that … Neal used to request Trump’s tax returns” but would not immediately see the returns.Neal “declined to say if he has seen” the returns himself, CNN said. Asked if Democrats would release the returns to the public, Neal said: “The next step is to have a meeting of the Democratic caucus.”The House will soon slip from Democratic hands, although the party has retained control of the Senate. On Wednesday an aide told Reuters that Democrats on the Senate finance committee, the counterpart to the House ways and means, were considering their options on any action relating to Trump’s tax returns.One House Republican indicated he expected the returns to become public one way or another. Tory Nehls of Texas, a member of the hard-right, Trump-supporting Freedom Caucus, tweeted: “The IRS just gave six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns to the House ways and means committee. How long until someone ‘leaks’ them?”The House committee first requested Trump’s returns in 2019. Trump, who on 15 November began his third consecutive run for the presidency, dragged the issue through the court system.It was long customary, though not required, for major party presidential candidates to release their tax records. Trump was the first such candidate in four decades not to do so.Financial and taxation practices at the Trump Organization are now under scrutiny in criminal and civil cases in New York. On Thursday, attorneys began closing arguments in the criminal tax fraud case.Earlier this month, the editorial board of the Washington Post said Trump’s records should be released because “voters should expect to know what financial conflicts of interest [candidates for president] might bring to the job.“And in Mr Trump’s case … in addition to his tax records, he should have provided a detailed accounting of his holdings and interests. His refusal to do so became glaring as [he] pressed to reform the tax code in 2017. Americans could only guess how its provisions might personally enrich the president and his family.” More