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      So Help Me God review: Mike Pence’s tortured bid for Republican relevance

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      So Help Me God review: Mike Pence’s tortured bid for Republican relevanceTrump’s VP is surprisingly critical of the boss whose followers wanted him dead. But surely the presidency won’t be his too After four years at Donald Trump’s side, Mike Pence emerged as the Rodney Dangerfield of vice-presidents: he gets no respect. So Help Me God, his memoir, is well-written and well-paced. But it will do little to shake that impression.Cheney hits back as Pence says January 6 committee has ‘no right’ to testimonyRead moreAt the Capitol on January 6, his boss was prepared to leave him for dead. And yet the Republican rank-and-file yawned. Among prospective presidential nominees, Pence is tied with Donald Trump Jr for third. The GOP gravitates to frontrunners. Pence, once a six-term congressman and governor of Indiana, is not that.As governor, he was dwarfed by his predecessor, Mitch Daniels. On Capitol Hill, he was eclipsed by the late Richard Lugar, also from Indiana and chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, and Dan Coats, another Hoosier senator. On the page, Pence lauds all three. Say what you like, he is unfailingly polite.Coats became Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence and repeatedly pushed back against the president. That cost Coats his job. Pence pushed back less.The former vice-president is a committed Christian with sharp elbows but also a sonorous voice. He has struggled with the tugs of faith and ambition. Family is an integral part of his life. He takes pride in his son’s service as a US marine. Born and raised a Catholic, the 48th vice-president is now one of America’s most prominent evangelicals. So Help Me God is replete with references to prayer. Pence begins with a verse from the Book of Jeremiah and concludes with Ecclesiastes: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.”Trump picked him as a running mate at the suggestion of Paul Manafort. Unlike Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie, other possible picks, Pence could do “normal”.Time passes. On 3 November 2020, America delivered its verdict on the Trump presidency. Trump lost. By his own admission, Pence was surprised. He refused to believe the polls and mistook the enthusiasm of the base for the entire political landscape. He wrongly believed he would serve another four years, yards from the Oval Office, enjoying weekly lunches with the Man.Instead, two months later, at great personal peril, he accepted reality and abided by his conscience and the constitution. Like Richard Nixon, Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle (another hapless Hoosier) and Al Gore, Pence presided over the certification of an election he had lost.For Pence and those around him, it was a matter of duty and faith. They refused to subvert democracy. Yet along the way Pence flashed streaks of being in two minds politically – as he continues to do. He rebuffed Trump’s entreaties to join a coup but gave a thumbs-up to the turbulence. He welcomed the decision by the Missouri senator Josh Hawley to object to election results.“It meant we would have a substantive debate,” Pence writes. He got way more than that. His own brother, Greg Pence, an Indiana congressman, voted against certification – mere hours after the insurrectionists sought to hang his brother from makeshift gallows. As the mob raged, Greg Pence hid too. After it, the brass ring came first.Among House Republicans, Trump remains emperor. Rightwing members have extracted a pledge that the GOP-controlled House will investigate Nancy Pelosi and the justice department for the purported mistreatment of defendants jailed for invading the Capitol. Pence’s anger and hurt are visible.“The president’s words were reckless, and they endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol building,” he recently said. But in the next breath, he stonewalled the House January 6 committee. Pence told CBS it would set a “terrible precedent” for Congress to summon a vice-president to testify about conversations at the White House. He also attacked the committee for its “partisanship”.Bennie Thompson, the Democratic committee chair, and Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair, pushed back hard.“Our investigation has publicly presented the testimony of more than 50 Republican witnesses,” they said. “This testimony, subject to criminal penalties for lying to Congress, was not ‘partisan’. It was truthful.”From Pence, it was a strained attempt to retain political viability. Surely, that train has left the station.Pence’s memoir does deliver a perhaps surprisingly surgical indictment of Trump. The book catalogs Trump’s faults, errors and sins. From Charlottesville to Russia to Ukraine, Pence repeatedly tags him for his shortcomings and missteps.He upbraids Trump for his failure to condemn “the racists and antisemites in Charlottesville by name”, but then rejects the contention Trump is a bigot.Pence risks Trump’s wrath by piling on criticisms of ex-president in new bookRead moreAs for Putin, “there was no reason for Trump not to call out Russia’s bad behaviour”, Pence writes. “Acknowledging Russian meddling” would not have “cheapen[ed] our victory” over Hillary Clinton. On Ukraine, the subject of Trump’s first impeachment, Pence terms the infamous phone call to Volodymyr Zelenskiy “less than perfect”.But even as Putin’s malignance takes center stage, the Trumps refuse to abandon their man. Don Jr clamors to halt aid to Ukraine, the dauphin gone Charles Lindbergh. He tweets: “Since it was Ukraine’s missile that hit our NATO ally Poland, can we at least stop spending billions to arm them now?”These days, Pence leads Advancing American Freedom, a tax-exempt conservative way-station with an advisory board replete with Trump refugees. Kellyanne Conway, Betsy DeVos and Callista Gingrich are there, so too David Friedman and Larry Kudlow. If more than one of them backs Pence in 2024, count it a minor miracle.Rodney Dangerfield is gone. But his spirit definitely lives on – in Mike Pence, of all people.
      So Help Me God is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      ‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on the criminality of Donald Trump

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      Interview‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on the criminality of Donald TrumpDavid Smith in Washington The great Washington Post reporter has published 20 interviews he conducted with the then president – who is now running againJust when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. Donald Trump is running for president again. That was not a prospect Bob Woodward had to deal with when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, after Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein cracked open the Watergate scandal.“Our long national nightmare is over,” declared Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, and it was. Nixon faded into jowly retirement. But Trump yearns to regain the crown.The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s chilling warning for US democracyRead moreWoodward spoke to the Guardian by phone six hours before the disgraced one-term, twice-impeached president took the stage at Mar-a-Lago, his gaudy personal Xanadu in Florida, to announce what might or might not be the greatest political comeback of all time.Does Woodward, who at 79 has written about nine American presidents, think Trump can win again? Or is Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, hammer of wokeness, now the man to beat?“Who knows? Trump’s got tens of millions of supporters. DeSantis is the flavour of the month. DeSantis may be the one. Maybe not. I remember in 1990, before the ’92 presidential election, with a bunch of friends making a list of the 50 people who might be the next president. [Bill] Clinton was not on the list [though] he would have put himself there. So who knows? You can’t record the future.”But you can revisit the past. Trump pulled off an unlikely victory in 2016 in what many saw as an indictment of the media. While there was some fine reporting that left America in no doubt about what it was getting, there was also wall-to-wall cable news coverage and a constant pressure for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to respond to Trump’s latest unhinged tweet. Are there lessons to learn?Woodward says: “If you look back on 2016, there was a lot of good coverage but it was never enough. He was able to sell himself as a successful, wealthy businessman. What do we know about him now that we didn’t know in 2016? There is a lot of evidence, good reporting, investigations by some committees on the Hill, that actually he was not a successful businessman, he’s not wealthy. What’s the lesson from all that? Dig deeper and then, when you dig deep, dig deeper more and more and more.”His image burnished by the reality TV show The Apprentice, the Trump of 2016 was able to essay the role of political outsider and swamp drainer. Now the novelty has worn off, he faces federal, state and congressional investigations and his four years in the Oval Office are a matter of record.Woodward has contributed a trilogy of books – Fear, Rage and Peril (the last written with Robert Costa) – and now an audiobook, The Trump Tapes, presenting his 20 interviews with the president. The Guardian’s Lloyd Green called it “a passport to the heart of darkness”.Woodward continues: “Now he’s going to run again and we in our business need to focus on what he did as president. That’s the office he’s running for. Yes, it’s a political office, and you see all the stories now about the politics of Trump running, people abandoning him, people sticking with him and so forth – that’s an important story.“But the real scorecard is what he did as president and on foreign affairs, dealing with Kim Jong-un or [Vladimir] Putin or all this stuff that’s on the tapes. He made it personal. He ran it on instinct.”Woodward describes the tapes as a “laboratory” for understanding Trump’s presidency. “My conclusions are very severe. He failed as president, failed to do his constitutional, moral, practical duty, and I think, not all, but most of the reporting should be on his presidency.”Woodward cites the example of Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, estimated to cost $1.9tn over a decade, criticised as a handout to the rich and corporations at the expense of working families.“I fault myself on this. I’ve not seen – maybe I’m not aware – of some really good reporting on the tax cut, how it happened exactly, who benefited. I wrote in one of my Trump books, Fear, that Gary Cohn engineered and drove it. The former president of Goldman Sachs benefited from that and you can surmise but I’d like to see my own paper or the Guardian or anywhere say: this is really who benefited from this.”Nineteen of the Woodward/Trump interviews happened in person or by phone between autumn 2019 and August 2020, amid research for Rage.This period included the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests. Woodward suggested to Trump that both had benefited from white privilege. The president was having none of it. He sneered: “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow.”This chapter of Trump’s tenure was also defined by the coronavirus, which emerged in China in late 2019 but which he downplayed, claiming it would vanish over the summer. Now, more than a million Americans have died of Covid-19.In The Trump Tapes, Woodward interviews Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser who warned Trump the virus would be “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency”, and his deputy, Matthew Pottinger, who likened it to the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 650,000.Woodward adds: “I discovered they issued this warning 28 January. I was as shocked as I’ve ever been as a reporter.”By April, Woodward could not resist pushing Trump to meet the moment, telling him experts were saying he needed to mobilise the country, coordinate with intelligence agencies and work with foreign governments. Woodward argued: “If you come out and say, ‘This is a full mobilisation, this is a Manhattan Project, we are going – pardon the expression – balls to the wall’, that’s what people want.”Had he crossed a line? His wife, Elsa Walsh, also a journalist, thought so. He recalls: “I did these interviews on speakerphone so I could record them with Trump’s permission. She was there many times and Trump knew that and then afterwards she said I was yelling at Trump and that I shouldn’t be doing that. I’m just supposed to ask questions. She berated me for this. It’s on the tape.”But he insists: “It wasn’t an advocacy position. Trump had these coronavirus meetings and had virus deniers there and so the whole atmosphere was one of ‘Let’s not listen to the experts’. I knew some of these people and found out what they said and they were very specific and it had a logic to it, namely that overall Trump needed a world war two-style mobilisation to deal with this.“I couldn’t talk to him so I passed it on and made it clear this is not me but this is my reporting from what the experts are saying. As I said to my wife, we’re in a different world. It’s the reporter who’s on the street and sees somebody shot. Go help them as a human being and then you phone in the story. This is of the magnitude that 1.1 million people died in this country because of the virus.”By the summer, the scale of Trump’s failure and the price in death and grief were clear. In the tapes, Woodward asks: “Was there a moment in all of this last two months where you said to yourself, ‘Ah, this is the leadership test of a lifetime?’”Trump replies, with dead finality: “No.”Woodward reflects: “Even then, let alone now, it was the leadership test of a lifetime and just, ‘No’. It’s tragic. Not only did he conceal what he knew and deny it but it’s a crime. It’s a moral crime to know all this and not tell the people. I once asked him the job of the president and he said, ‘To protect the people.’ I’ve never heard about or read anywhere in my own reporting or in history where a president was so negligent.”The last long interview took place on 21 July 2020. Woodward said things were bad. Trump did not understand so Woodward had to point out that 140,000 people had died. The president claimed to have Covid under control. Woodward asked, “What’s the plan?” Trump said there would be one in 104 days. Woodward wondered what he was talking about. Then he realised: the presidential election was 104 days away.Such exchanges are damning and ensure that more than eight hours of conversations, by his own words shall Trump be condemned. Why, then, did he agree to talk? As the comedian Jimmy Kimmel put it: “Why are you agreeing to do 20 interviews on tape with the guy who took down Richard Nixon with tapes? With tapes!”Trump campaign announcement deepens Republicans’ civil warRead moreOne answer is ego. Trump can be heard flattering “a great historian” and “the great Bob Woodward”. Woodward suggests: “I had been sceptical of the Steele dossier and the Russian investigation and had said so publicly. [Senator] Lindsey Graham, [Trump’s] supporter from South Carolina, had told him I would not put words in his mouth, which was true, and so he agreed to do these interviews.”On the other side of the coin, this is a rare opportunity to hear the Woodward method. The Washington Post, where he has worked for half a century, observed that The Trump Tapes “offers a surprising window into the legendary investigative reporter’s process – a perennial focus of both mystique and critique”.At times, Woodward indulges Trump’s streams of consciousness, airing of grievances and pathological narcissism. At others he cajoles, challenges or confronts. Woodward says: “He’ll talk and talk and talk but I ask questions, very specific questions. What are you doing about the virus? Tell me about Putin.”He did miss one opening. He asked if, in the event of a close election in November, Trump would refuse to leave the White House. The president declined to comment.“It was the only question he didn’t answer in eight hours – 600 questions – and I should have followed up. I should have said, ‘Wait a minute, why isn’t he answering that?’ I didn’t.”Re-listening to all 20 interviews, and finding it such a different experience from reading the transcripts or listening to snatches on TV or the internet, convinced Woodward to release the recordings – a first in his long career. Raw and unfiltered, this is one instance where Trump does not benefit from a reporter “tidying up” his quotations to make him sound more lucid and less repetitive than he actually is.“To be frank, it’s very surprising and it’s a learning experience at age 79, having done this so many years, that there’s something about hearing the voice that gives it an authenticity and power,” Woodward says. “Especially Trump. He doesn’t ever hem and haw, he doesn’t go hmm. He just is right out of the box.”Fifty years since the Watergate break-in, he sees a parallel with the secret White House recording system that caught Nixon.“The Nixon tapes didn’t just come out as transcripts. They came out so you could hear it and this is a version of that. It’s the same problem of appalling criminal – I can’t use any other word for it – behaviour for a sitting president to look away.“There’s a statement that Henry Kissinger once made: ‘What extraordinary vehicles destiny selects to accomplish its design’. I’m not sure destiny exists, but what an extraordinary vehicle.”TopicsBooksBob WoodwardDonald TrumpPolitics booksRepublicansTrump administrationUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Trump campaign announcement deepens Republicans’ civil war

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      Trump campaign announcement deepens Republicans’ civil war Republicans are now soul searching over how they lost a very winnable Senate and bracing for two tumultuous years in the House – and many blame TrumpMike Lindell was full of passionate intensity. Wandering the white and gold ballroom of the Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, the mustachioed pillow-maker predicted that Donald Trump’s candidacy for the White House would clear the Republican field.“After he announces today, I think [Florida governor] Ron DeSantis will end up just endorsing him,” Lindell, a rabid Trump cheerleader and conspiracy theorist, told the Guardian early on Tuesday evening. “I can’t imagine anybody wasting the time, effort and money of the people. We need to unite our country and there’s only man who can do that and he’ll be up on that stage. Period.”It did not work out that way.Could Trump’s 2024 campaign keep his legal troubles at bay?Read moreIn fact Trump’s lethargic primetime speech beneath crystal chandeliers and the stars and stripes had the opposite effect, conveying the impression to many of a Yesterday’s Man who has lost his swagger, more vulnerable than ever to DeSantis and other would-be challengers in 2024.Far from a coronation, it also deepened what Democrats gleefully called “an all-out civil war” engulfing the Republican party in the wake of midterm elections where, despite economic discontent and historical headwinds, forecasts of a red wave were scaled down to a pink splash.Republicans are now soul searching over how they lost a very winnable Senate and bracing for two tumultuous years in the House of Representatives, where their wafer-thin majority is likely to enflame divisions and empower the far right.Many point the finger of blame at Trump and his false claims of voter fraud, noting the underperformance of candidates he endorsed for the Senate and the near total wipeout of election deniers who ran for statewide office.It is perhaps an unflattering insight into human nature that Republicans who were willing to tolerate Trump’s misogyny, racism and lies, and even his attempted coup against the government, have declared “enough is enough” when they discovered him to be a loser.The Axios website reported that Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, won huge applause at an annual meeting of Republican governors after arguing that Trump had cost the party dearly for three elections in a row. Voters had “rejected crazy”, Christie said.Media proprietor Rupert Murdoch also appears to be deserting the sinking ship. His New York Post newspaper covered his presidential announcement with an article buried on page 26 under the headline “Been there, Don that.” The story was teased at the bottom of the front page with: “Florida man makes announcement.”Republican donors who previously backed Trump are out too. Ken Griffin, a billionaire founder of the Citadel hedge fund, has endorsed DeSantis for president. Stephen Schwarzman, of the private equity firm Blackstone, said he would support one among a new generation of leaders in the Republican primary.And the conservative Club for Growth, once a staunch ally of the former president, released a polling memo that showed him trailing DeSantis in several crucial states. Even Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, is staying away this time. Is the writing on the wall at last?Mark Sanford, a former Republican governor of South Carolina, said: “There’s a shelf life to every political figure. We do have expiration dates, and in military terms, at some point people outrun their supply lines. It has that feeling of desperation.”Trump’s potential rivals can smell blood in the water. DeSantis, Christie, former vice president Mike Pence – currently promoting a memoir – and ex-secretary of state Mike Pompeo have all dropped hints about running for president in 2024. Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, Nikki Haley, a former UN ambassador, and Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Tim Scott of South Carolina could also be in the frame.Sanford added: “If Trump has been perceived as the alpha dog in the room and now he may be faltering, there are going to be a lot of people nipping at his heels.“Politics is constructed in a very Darwinian level and, the moment you start to show a little bit of weakness, you got 10 people coming at you fast, and I think there are going to be 10 people coming at Trump in fairly short order based on both real and perceived weaknesses that are beginning to now show.“Frankly, the only thing that he really had going for him, and this was the tagline in 2016, was ‘I’m a winner and you’re going to get so tired of winning’. He’s always been about the perception of winning and, once that mirror begins to crack, there is no there there.”But Trump is hardly likely to surrender without a fight. A crowded primary could turn into a bare-knuckle political brawl peppered with insults and name-calling, reminiscent of the 2016 campaign when Trump deployed terms such as “low energy”, “Lyin’ Ted” and “Little Marco”.For a party that became a cult of personality around one man to then attempt decoupling from him could trigger something of an identity crisis. Nowhere will that be more evident than on Capitol Hill, where Trump has branded Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, “an old crow”.On Wednesday McConnell was challenged for the leadership for the first time in 15 years amid post-election recriminations from the hard right. He prevailed by 37 votes to 10 over Rick Scott, the outgoing chair of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, in a secret ballot.Republicans in the House, meanwhile, offered initial support for Kevin McCarthy of California to serve as speaker but, given their narrow majority, the job may prove akin to herding cats. Each member will have huge sway over the conduct of business, raising the spectre of partisan battles and legislative gridlock with pro-Trump extremists gaining huge leverage.To secure the speakership, the Washington Post reported, McCarthy has promised to restore committee assignments for Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona. The former was removed for endorsing violent behavior and conspiracy theories; the latter for posting an animated video that depicted him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.Rick Wilson, cofounder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “McCarthy is the Sino – he’s the speaker in name only. Marjorie Taylor Greene runs the House caucus. Marjorie Taylor Greene has more control over the caucus than Kevin McCarthy does. That symbolic vote was very clearly sending him a signal: do what we want or we’ll blow you out. They will if he does not obey them.”“So we’re going to have endless investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop. We’re going to have endless ‘Did Anthony Fauci brew up the virus in a Chinese lab?’ All this crap is coming down the pike and that’s because Kevin cannot resist the power they have over him. He is going to be the weakest speaker in the history of the US House.”Some prominent Republicans, including House conference chair Elise Stefanik of New York, have already endorsed Trump for president in 2024. Others are sitting on the fence or calling for change. Asked whether she would back Trump, Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, one of the most conservative states in the country, replied: “I don’t think that’s the right question. I think the question is who is the current leader of the Republican party. Oh, I know who it is: Ron DeSantis.”Trump faced opposition from Republican donors and establishment figures in 2016, when his insurgent campaign energised the grassroots and ultimately made the party capitulate. But this time, aged 76, he lacks novelty value, shock value or a Twitter feed. And his four-year record in the White House is there for all to see.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “He starts out in a weaker position than he did in 2016 in that voters are very familiar with the Trump show both in government and out of government. Not enough of them are willing to buy the tickets to the show to get him to the nomination or get him to the presidency.“If the mega-donors are already cutting ties it means they’re open for business for alternative candidates and they’re going to want to get behind some of those candidates pretty early to fill the vacuum, which nobody did after January 6. Republicans have now seen the electoral consequences of not filling the vacuum after January 6.”But many analysts and pollsters suggest that Trump still commands absolute loyalty from around a third of Republican voters. These “Make America great again” (Maga) fans display quasi-religious fervour at his campaign rallies, vow to stick with him through thick and thin and adopt his “big lie” about the 2020 election as an article of faith.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There is a split in the Republican party between the Trump populists who want to savage the existing electoral and political system – we see that with the extraordinary number of election deniers out there – and a group of people who are committed to governing and the constitution and believe they can achieve conservative ends through those existing means. That’s a very fundamental split. I don’t see it going away.”For Democrats, the sight of Republicans at each other’s throats offers respite from scrutiny of their own internal divisions. Journalists with a taste for alliteration are fond of using the phrase “Democrats in disarray”. But with Trump looming large, Republicans could be facing years of Maga meltdown.Drexel Heard, a Democratic strategist based in Los Angeles, said: “Donald Trump put Republicans in disarray and that is what that campaign is going to be like. Do I think Donald Trump has a chance to win? Absolutely not. It’s going to further erode the Republican party. It’s going to split them. Ron DeSantis can’t out-Trump Donald Trump but he’s certainly going to try.”Heard added: “Democrats, as you saw in this midterm, did a pretty good job of holding the line across the country. My question is, why is it always ‘Democrats in disarray’ because of a small internal fight when you’ve got three major levers of the Republican party going at it?”TopicsRepublicansDonald TrumpUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      What is a special counsel and why will one investigate Donald Trump?

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      ExplainerWhat is a special counsel and why will one investigate Donald Trump?Jack Smith will oversee investigations into Trump – but why did the attorney general take this step against the ex-president? On Friday, when announcing the appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel overseeing investigations of Donald Trump’s alleged election subversion and retention of White House records, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the selection would ensure “independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters”.So why did Garland take this step against the former president?What is a special counsel?Special counsels are usually highly experienced federal prosecutors. According to justice department regulations, a special counsel is appointed when an attorney general “determines that criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted” but “investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States attorney’s office or litigating division of the [justice department] would present a conflict of interest … or other extraordinary circumstances”.An attorney general must therefore determine that it is “in the public interest to appoint an outside special counsel”.Have those tests been met?Garland says they have.Trump’s attempts to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, including inciting the Capitol attack on 6 January 2021, have been exhaustively documented. His retention of White House records, many classified, has been established through an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago resort, among other incidents.But such matters are certainly politically sensitive. Citing “recent developments” including Trump’s announcement that he is running for president again and Biden’s “stated intention to be a candidate as well”, Garland said he had “concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a special counsel”.This, Garland said, would “underscore the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters. It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law”.How do special counsels work?Outlining how Smith will work “quickly and completely”, Garland quoted from department regulations: “Although the special counsel will not be subject to the day-to-day supervision of any official of the department, he must comply with the regulations, procedures and policies of the department.”Are special counsels completely independent?No. Regulations also state that the attorney general can request explanation of any step taken and direct it not be pursued. If that happens, the attorney general must notify Congress. Special counsels and their staff are also subject to department disciplinary procedures.Who can fire a special counsel?Regulations say a special counsel “may be disciplined or removed from office only by the personal action of the attorney general”. He or she can do this “for misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest or for other good cause, including violation of departmental policies. The attorney general shall inform the special counsel in writing of the specific reason”.Wasn’t Robert Mueller a special counsel?He was. Appointed in May 2017, the former FBI director investigated “Russian government efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election and related matters”, including links between Trump and Moscow.Didn’t Trump try to fire him?Trump did. But only the attorney general can do so, so it didn’t work. Attempts to get rid of Mueller featured among examples of potential obstruction of justice which Mueller laid out.Wasn’t there another special counsel?Yes. Trump’s second attorney general, William Barr, appointed John Durham to investigate justice department activities which gave rise to the Russia investigation. Durham’s work now appears to be winding down, without having produced major indictments. The two cases he took to trial ended in acquittals.What happens when a special counsel is done?The attorney general decides how to proceed. In Mueller’s case, critics charge, Barr misrepresented the special counsel’s findings in order to let Trump off the hook. Whether he wriggles off it this time will be up to Garland.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsMerrick GarlandexplainersReuse this content More

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      US attorney general names special counsel to weigh charges against Trump

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      US attorney general names special counsel to weigh charges against Trump‘Extraordinary circumstances’ require appointment of Jack Smith to determine whether charges should be brought, Garland says01:39Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, has appointed a special counsel to determine whether Donald Trump, the former president, should face criminal charges stemming from investigations into his alleged mishandling of national security materials and his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.The politically explosive move comes just three days after Trump announced he is running for the White House yet again, despite a disappointing Republican performance in the midterm elections, especially among candidates backed by the ex-president.US attorney general appoints special counsel in Trump DoJ investigations – liveRead more“Based on recent developments, including the former president’s announcement that he is a candidate for president in the next election, and the sitting president’s stated intention to be a candidate as well, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a special counsel,” Garland told a press conference on Friday.Garland named Jack Smith, a veteran prosecutor, to the post, which will deal with justice department investigations into Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election victory for Joe Biden, and also the discovery of confidential documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.Trump attacked the appointment within hours, in an interview with Fox News’s digital arm.“For six years I have been going through this, and I am not going to go through it any more,” Trump said. “It is not acceptable. It is so unfair. It is so political.”The appointment of a special counsel reflects the sensitivity of the justice department overseeing the two most hazardous criminal investigations into Trump, and an increased possibility of charges being brought over either matter.Special counsels are semi-independent prosecutors who can be installed for high-profile investigations when there are conflicts of interest, or the appearance of such conflicts, and provide a mechanism for the justice department to insulate itself from political considerations in charging decisions.“I strongly believe that the normal processes of this department can handle all investigations with integrity,” Garland said. “And I also believe that appointing a special counsel at this time is the right thing to do. The extraordinary circumstances presented here demand it.”The attorney general added: “I will ensure that the special counsel receives the resources to conduct this work quickly and completely. Given the work done to date and Mr Smith’s prosecutorial experience, I am confident that this appointment will not slow the completion of these investigations.”Smith, a graduate of Harvard law school, from 2010 to 2015 served as the chief of the public integrity section at the justice department, which handles government corruption investigations, a role not dissimilar to his new position as special counsel.Since 2018, he has been a special prosecutor to The Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo, having joined the international criminal court from the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of New York in Brooklyn, where he helped prosecute a police brutality case that drew national attention.During his time at the justice department in Washington, Smith oversaw the corruption cases against former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, ex-Arizona congressman Rick Renzi and New York assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, though convictions against McDonnell and Silver were later overturned.He oversaw the prosecution of a CIA agent for disclosing national defense information and obstructing justice – crimes that echo potential charges against Trump.And Smith has also investigated Trump before, in the 1970s, over potential fraud charges during his tenure as a prosecutor in New York. The roughly six-month investigation ultimately yielded no charges, after which Trump complained about the investigation.Politico reported that Smith was registered to vote as a political independent, not a Democrat or a Republican.In a statement released by the justice department, Smith said: “I intend to conduct the assigned investigations, and any prosecutions that may result from them, independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice.“The pace of the investigations will not pause or flag under my watch. I will exercise independent judgment and will move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate.”The appointment of a special counsel will be a familiar dynamic for Trump, who was the subject of Robert Mueller’s investigation shortly after he took office, examining ties between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. Later, Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, appointed special counsel John Durham to investigate allegations of FBI impropriety in the Russia investigation.Trump has already spent months since the FBI seized 103 documents marked classified from Mar-a-Lago accusing the justice department under Joe Biden of pursuing him for political reasons – a tension likely to become more biting as the 2024 election draws nearer.It was to allay those concerns, Garland said at the news conference, that he chose to appoint Smith to run the investigations. “Appointing a special counsel at this time is the right thing to do,” Garland said. “The extraordinary circumstances presented here demand it.”The appointment of a special counsel could indicate that the justice department has already accumulated substantial evidence of potential criminality by Trump and his allies. Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan law school professor and former US attorney, said: “One thing that is significant is this suggests that they think there’s a very real possibility of charges. If they were going to close the case, it would be closed by now.”But some criticised the move as inadvertently buying Trump time and allowing an over-cautious Garland to duck responsibility. Jill Wine-Banks, a legal analyst and former Watergate prosecutor, tweeted: “Garland has named a Special Counsel to investigate Trump #MAL and parts of Jan6. I think it’s a waste of time and money, insults the prosecutors at DOJ and gains nothing. No Trump supporter will see anyone as independent or fair to Trump.”The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, tweeted: “The announcement of a special counsel to investigate Trump in light of the abundance of clear and convincing evidence of his crimes unfortunately delays accountability. However, justice will come eventually & he will not be able to evade the consequences of his actions forever.”The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said Biden had not been given any advance notice of Garland’s announcement. “No, he was not aware, we were not aware,” she said at a delayed press briefing. “The department of justice makes decisions about criminal investigations independently. We are not involved.”Jean-Pierre added: “We were not given advance notice. We were not aware of this investigation.”TopicsDonald TrumpMerrick GarlandUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

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      US attorney general appoints special counsel in Trump criminal investigation – video

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      US attorney general Merrick Garland has named Jack Smith as special counsel who has the job of determining whether Donald Trump will face charges as part of any Department of Justice investigations. The politically explosive move comes just days after the former US president announced he was running for the White House again.

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      Murdoch v Trump: Rupert’s papers kick Donald, but Fox won’t play ball

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      Murdoch v Trump: Rupert’s papers kick Donald, but Fox won’t play ballSome think the media mogul has made a clean break with ‘Trumpty Dumpty’, but his TV channel may find it hard to let go Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers don’t do subtlety when it comes to political attacks.Over the last week, readers of his US titles have been informed that Donald Trump is “Trumpty Dumpty”, the “biggest loser” in Republican politics, and the man who meant the “red wave” never crested in the US midterm elections.The New York Post marked Trump’s latest bid for election with something more damning: outright mockery.Under the headline: “Florida Man makes announcement,” the formerly pro-Trump newspaper directed readers to a story deep inside the newspaper on page 28.“With just 720 days to go before the next election, a Florida retiree made the surprise announcement Tuesday night that he was running for president,” said the deadpan news report.The tabloid’s print edition has a dwindling readership but the former US president is still said to be a regular reader – which means it probably hurt when they mocked his Mar-a-Lago home – raided by the FBI in August – as a “classified documents library”.Yet while the newspaper editorials have led to suggestions that Murdoch has completed a clean break with the former US president, this misses the more positive reaction on Murdoch’s Fox News television channel.“Murdoch has very little control over his most important outlet, which is Fox,” said Michael Wolff, the media commentator who has written three books on Trump.“Let’s assume Murdoch was giving a message to the Post … he can’t do that at Fox. And Fox is the all-important thing.”Although there has been criticism of Trump on Fox News in recent weeks, several presenters such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson have their own loyal audiences who have been fed pro-Trump material for years. A rapid U-turn may be too much for them to take, especially if the network is accused of betrayal.As Wolff puts it: “Each of the voices at Fox is going to be motivated by their own ratings – and if their own ratings are dependent on Trump then they’re not going to deviate. Hannity does not seem to have deviated one increment off his absolute fealty to Trump. Tucker likewise.”In the background is Murdoch’s attempt to reunite two parts of his business empire and ultimately hand over control to his 51-year-old son, Lachlan. The family’s main media interests are separated into two businesses as a result of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, which saw the legally troubled outlets separated.The core business is the US-focused television business Fox, while the newspaper assets – including its UK titles – are controlled by News Corp.Combining the two makes little business sense but would tidy up family succession planning, according to the media analyst Alice Enders: “It’s not about Rupert being back in charge, it’s about Lachlan taking over and pursuing the same traditional classic conservative agenda.”She said that it would be hard for Fox News to find a way to let go of Trump without risking some of the hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising that flows to the network.“Fox is the jewel in the crown. The influence that the Murdochs want to exercise is through Fox News. What’s super interesting is they want to maintain their currency as the go-to news channel for conservative voters – and they have to do that in a way that balances the Trumpistas against everyone.”The focus on US politics also reflects a physical change in Rupert Murdoch’s location.He has spent a substantial time in the UK in recent years alongside his now ex-wife Jerry Hall and his daughter Elisabeth.During the Covid pandemic they were based at an Oxfordshire mansion, where he took the decision to sign up Piers Morgan for the launch of TalkTV and went to get his Covid vaccine – at the same time that his US media outlets were casting doubts on its effectiveness.Now the recently divorced nonagenarian is increasingly based at a newly acquired ranch in rural Montana, a remote state favoured by billionaires. Official documents show that last month he paid £13,000 to fly the former prime minister Boris Johnson there for a meeting, while corporate filings suggest he is running his business empire from the ranch and has permission to hold board meetings there.This raises the question of which Murdoch is now calling the shots: 91-year-old Rupert or Lachlan, who is managing part of the business from his family home in Australia – working late into the night on video calls due to the time difference.Could Trump’s 2024 campaign keep his legal troubles at bay?Read moreThe Trump years weighed heavily on Murdoch, with Fox News facing a $1.6bn lawsuit over claims it amplified Trump’s false allegations about fraud at a voting machine company after his election defeat. Murdoch’s son James has left the family business and had made barely coded criticisms of Fox News, which hit hard according to Wolff.“In terms of Rupert himself, he has always detested Trump. Trump has been the cross to bear in his life, and the Trump effect at Fox has essentially broken up his family.”Trump, banned from Twitter and struggling to get airtime, has not taken his ostracism lightly, whining that they were favouring Florida governor Ron DeSantis.“NewsCorp – which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal and the no longer great New York Post – is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious,” Trump said.But as Enders puts it: “Murdoch doesn’t back losers. Trump is a loser.”TopicsRupert MurdochDonald TrumpNews CorporationFox NewsUS politicsFoxMedia businessfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Could Trump’s 2024 campaign keep his legal troubles at bay?

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      Could Trump’s 2024 campaign keep his legal troubles at bay?Trump’s declaration that he is once again a candidate changes nothing under the law – but the political element could weigh on prosecutors’ success The law is clear. The politics less so.If Donald Trump’s third run for the White House is propelled by large doses of narcissism and revenge, the former US president must also be hoping that a high-profile political campaign may help keep his myriad legal problems at bay before they bury him.January 6 subcommittee to examine criminal referrals it might make to DoJRead moreProsecutors from New York to Georgia and Washington DC have spent months digging into an array of alleged crimes before, during and after Trump was president. Some of those investigations are coming to fruition with indictments expected to follow within months, possibly weeks, on charges that potentially could see Trump become the first former US president to go to prison.His declaration that he is once again a candidate changes nothing under the law. Legal minds broadly agree that while a sitting president is protected from prosecution in office, that immunity disappears when they leave the White House.But then there is the politics of a prosecution against a presidential candidate who has already dismissed the investigations of his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the hoarding of top secret documents, and allegedly fraudulent business practices, as “politically motivated” and a Democratic “witch-hunt”.Donald Ayer, a former US deputy attorney general under President George HW Bush, said the political element will weigh on prosecutors only to the extent that it affects their ability to persuade a jury to convict him.“Donald Trump declaring his candidacy certainly doesn’t make his prosecution legally impossible or inappropriate, but its impact on the prosecution’s success must be considered. One ultimate judgment the justice department must make – it is specifically set out in the justice manual – is whether it is probable that they can convict by proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.“Ultimately, I don’t think that the confusion and uncertainty that Trump is trying to generate with this step will end up being a reason that the government declines to go forward. It is just one more effort to mislead people, and it does not change the extent of his culpability or the urgency of holding the worst perpetrators of these crimes accountable.”Still, justice department officials have discussed whether to appoint a special counsel to take over the Trump investigations in order to head off accusations that any criminal charges are politically driven because the attorney general, Merrick Garland, was appointed by a Democratic president, Joe Biden. But even then the special prosecutor would ultimately answer to Garland.There is plenty of precedent for prosecutors to investigate and indict election candidates. Trump’s opponent in 2016, Hillary Clinton, was under investigation by the FBI through the primaries and again in the days before the general election over her use of a private email server.Candidates can even run with a prosecution hanging over them. Last week, a Trump-backed Republican won a seat in the Texas legislature while under indictment for impersonating a public servant.Four years ago, several candidates won seats in Congress while facing criminal charges. They included two Republicans, Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California. Collins later pleaded guilty to insider trading and resigned his seat. Hunter admitted using campaign funds on extramarital affairs and also gave up his seat although he was saved from prison by a pardon from Trump.The Texas attorney general and Trump loyalist, Ken Paxton, has been re-elected twice while under criminal indictment for securities fraud but the trial has been repeatedly delayed.The justice department has a practice of not bringing criminal charges against a candidate within 60 days of an election, but it’s not written into law. The way the criminal investigations against Trump are unfolding, he faces the prospect of multiple trials long before the 2024 presidential election reaches its climax.Federal investigators are building a case against the former president for keeping classified documents, including some marked top secret, at his Mar-a-Largo mansion in Florida after leaving the White House. The potential charges include breaches of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice.The justice department is also investigating Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and his part in instigating the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol in Washington.Ayer said he expects both investigations to result in charges.“Of the two federal investigations, I think the one that focuses on the outright stealing of the election is the most important one. What’s at stake there is hard to overstate. But the documents case is also very serious because of the national security considerations. Because it is narrower and less complicated to prove, it could be ready for prosecution sooner,” he said.Trump is also facing the threat of serious charges by a local prosecutor in Atlanta, Georgia. The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has assembled a “special purpose grand jury” that has spent months focused on Trump’s multi-faceted attempt to turn defeat into victory by pressuring officials to overturn his loss in the key swing state.Willis has been building a substantial body of testimony from some of Trump’s closest allies and Republican officials who witnessed the defeated president’s actions. They include the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who was questioned about a call he received from Trump demanding that he “find” enough votes to erase Biden’s victory.Ronald Carlson, a leading Georgia trial lawyer and professor at the University of Georgia’s law school, said the Fulton county investigation “continues to be the most dangerous threat” to the former president.“President Trump continues to denigrate and dismiss this as political theatre. It would be a serious mistake to underestimate what’s going on. It seems to me highly likely this grand jury will report that criminality occurred and we should not be surprised to see an indictment. Remember, Georgia is the only place where the president himself is on tape saying to the [Georgia] secretary of state, ‘Brad, please find me 11,780 votes.’”Carlson does not think the state attorney general’s office will be deterred by political pressure from charging the president, possibly early next year.“They’ve given no sign up to this point of being afraid, and I don’t think they will be,” he said.Carlson believes Willis, a Democrat, is building a case with overwhelming evidence against Trump so that it cannot be dismissed as political. She also needs a watertight case to persuade a jury in a largely Republican state.Ayers said Garland was equally determined to press ahead with charges if the evidence is there.“I believe that the attorney general is highly motivated to secure accountability at the highest levels if it can be proven, and to do so as soon as reasonably possible, consistent with assembling a strong case showing guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. He knows that a failure to achieve a high degree of accountability, meaning criminal prosecution, will send a bad message that the United States of America can’t be counted on to enforce its laws prohibiting these most serious offences of all against the country,” he said.Charges are one thing. Getting to a trial, and securing a conviction is another.Even if Trump is charged, could his lawyers stall any trial until he once again has immunity as president, as he hopes? Debra Perlin, a former Department of Homeland Security attorney who is now policy director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, says not.“Let’s be honest, Trump has played a delay game from the very beginning on every challenge that’s come his way. But I don’t think that they are able to delay those trials. Although I’m sure that there would be a lot of pre-trial filing that his team would make, we are far outside of them being able to delay up until the election,” she said.TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2024US politicsLaw (US)featuresReuse this content More