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      The Democrats are gaining because Americans want jobs, not Capitol mobs | Lloyd Green

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      The Democrats are gaining because Americans want jobs, not Capitol mobsLloyd GreenThe supreme court’s abortion decision, a drop in gas prices, and Trump’s legal dramas have all helped strengthen Biden’s ratings – and Democrats’ chances this fall Can the Democrats make the formerly Republican slogan “jobs, not mobs” their midterm mantra?They just might get away with it. In politics, jiujitsu is fair play – and these days Republicans are less the party of “law and order” and more the party that denies the outcomes of democratic elections and attacks the US Capitol.The Republican party has reason to fear the midterms | Lloyd GreenRead moreOn Thursday night, President Joe Biden launched a frontal assault on Donald Trump and the right’s embrace of creeping authoritarianism. Twelve hours later, the government reported 315,000 new jobs added in August and stunning prime-age labor force participation.Along the way, Trump said he would “very, very seriously” consider January 6 pardons if re-elected, and bragged of giving financial assistance to some of the insurrectionists. As each day passes, the Republican nexus to law, order and democracy grows more tenuous. Meanwhile, the summer’s special elections and the latest polls portray the Democrats with the wind in their sails.Alaska announced the election of Democrat Mary Peltola to Congress and the defeat of Sarah Palin, the state’s former governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee. A week earlier, a Democrat pulled off an upset for a vacant House seat in rural upstate New York.The supreme court’s evisceration of abortion and privacy rights, a sharp drop in gasoline prices, and Trump’s latest legal drama have resurrected Biden’s ratings and the Democrats’ chances. The latest Quinnipiac poll gives them a four-point edge on the generic ballot, placing Nancy Pelosi within striking distance of retaining control of the speaker’s gavel.A separate Wall Street Journal poll showed Democrats now leading among independents.Earlier this year, “Republicans were cruising, and Democrats were having a hard time,” Tony Fabrizio, a Trump pollster told the Journal. “It’s almost like the abortion issue came along and was kind of like a defibrillator to Democrats.”As if to prove his point, Republicans are now scrapping references online to Trump and abortion. Blake Masters, the Republican Senate challenger in Arizona, removed language from his website in which he described himself as “100% pro-life”.For the record, Masters garnered Trump’s endorsement during the Republican primary and a bucketful of bucks from Peter Thiel. Thiel once publicly lamented extending voting rights to women and minorities.“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron,” he wrote in 2009.In a similarly benighted spirit, Herschel Walker, another Trump favorite, branded inflation a women’s issue. “They’ve got to buy groceries,” Walker, a Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, said. On top of his Heisman trophy and football rushing records, Walker holds a record of alleged domestic violence.Also count on Trump’s mishandling of top secret and classified documents to grab headlines in the run-up to election day. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican would-be Senate majority leader and would-be House speaker, respectively, cannot be happy.According to the inventory filed with the court, the FBI search netted dozens of empty folders with “Classified” banners, together with seven documents marked “Top Secret”. Whether Trump retained copies of the President’s Daily Briefing, one of the crown jewels of the intelligence community, is an active and open question too.To be sure, Trump caught a break on Labor Day. A federal judge granted his motion to appoint a special master to weigh claims of executive and attorney-client privilege. The court also enjoined prosecutors from proceeding with their review of documents.At the same time, the court made clear that it would not interfere with the assessment being conducted by the director of national intelligence. An appeal by the government is likely – as is ensuing delay.And then there is Newt Gingrich. He’s back. The disgraced former House speaker may have played an outsized but behind-the-scenes role in Trump’s efforts to cling to power, according to the January 6 committee.“Some of the information we have obtained includes email messages that you exchanged with senior advisers to President Trump and others, including Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, in which you provided detailed input into television advertisements that repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election,” Bennie Thompson, the committee chairman, wrote Gingrich.Once upon a time, Gingrich, a former Georgia congressman, was in the line of presidential succession, right behind vice-president Al Gore. According to the Federal Elections Commission, the Gingrich 2012 campaign remains more than $4.6m in debt. As Business Insider put it, “No presidential campaign from any election cycle owes creditors more money.”“Don’t be measuring the drapes,” Representative Tom Emmer, head of the national Republican campaign committee, recently advised colleagues. “This isn’t the typical midterm that we’re talking about.”
      Lloyd Green served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionJoe BidenDemocratsUS CongressBiden administrationDonald TrumpcommentReuse this content More

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      Pressure on Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark as ex-DoJ colleague works with prosecutors

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      Pressure on Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark as ex-DoJ colleague works with prosecutors Cooperation from Ken Klukowski could spur charges against Clark, who schemed with Trump to overturn election results in GeorgiaLegal pressure on Jeffrey Clark, the former justice department lawyer who schemed with Donald Trump and others to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and other states, is expected to rise with the cooperation of another ex-DoJ lawyer who worked with him, say former prosecutors.FBI materials seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home included 90 empty foldersRead moreThe cooperation from the ex-lawyer, in tandem with other evidence obtained by prosecutors, could help spur charges against Clark – a close ally of then president Trump – and benefit prosecutors as they go after bigger targets.Clark, then an assistant attorney general, played a key role at the DoJ towards the end of the Trump administration, which overlapped with plotting by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman and Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows to persuade Georgia and other states to use “fake electors” for Trump, instead of ones that Joe Biden won.In Trump’s desperate efforts to block Biden’s win, he turned to Clark for help at the suggestion of congressman Scott Perry, who had also touted him to Meadows, according to emails revealed by the House January 6 committee investigating the Capitol riot by Trump supporters.Trump met Clark alone in mid-December, and for a few weeks talked about replacing acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen with Clark, until Trump was told bluntly at a raucous White House meeting by Rosen and his deputy, plus White House counsel Pat Cipollone, that doing so would spur mass resignations at the department and in the counsel’s office.Clark, whose cellphone and other electronic equipment was seized by federal agents in a June search on his home, worked with former DoJ lawyer Ken Klukowski, who is now cooperating with prosecutors, on a draft letter to top Georgia state legislators and the governor which falsely claimed that department had “significant concerns” about election fraud there and in other states.The letter, which was never sent despite Clark’s efforts, also suggested that legitimate Biden electors be replaced with ones for Trump.Other potential evidence against Clark could surface in cellphones that the FBI seized over the summer that belonged to Eastman and Perry, both of whom have filed lawsuits to block investigators from accessing their phones.Moreover, Cipollone, who witnessed and was appalled by Trump’s idea of installing Clark to replace Rosen, according to testimony by a top DoJ official to the January 6 panel, testified on 2 September to a grand jury in Washington looking at Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and the Capitol attack.While the substance of Cipollone’s testimony is unknown, other evidence about his views of Clark and Trump’s flirtation with promoting Clark to lead the DoJ could add to legal pressure on Clark.Former federal prosecutor Michael Zeldin said Klukowski’s cooperation with prosecutors may help make cases against other top Trump loyalists, as well as Clark.“When pursuing conspiracy cases, prosecutors look for ‘weak links’ among the co-conspirators, to wit, people willing to cooperate. The closer to the hub of the conspiracy, the better,” Zeldin told the Guardian.“In the case of the Georgia false electors scheme, the two people who jump out as logical witnesses are Ken Klukowski and Jeffrey Clark. Both appear to have been intimately involved in the scheme, and both have a great deal to lose if convicted of a crime.”Zeldin said Klukowski’s cooperation with federal prosecutors could be “very bad news” for Clark, Giuliani, and Eastman, who were involved in the “fake electors” schemes in several states, including Georgia.Zeldin added: “Beyond these immediate probable targets, Klukowski may have insight into the role Mark Meadows is said to have played in orchestrating Trump’s efforts to set aside the Georgia election results.”Similarly, Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for Eastern Michigan, told the Guardian that “Clark may find himself in serious legal jeopardy with the seizure of phones as well as the reported cooperation of Ken Klukowski … Clark would be the most significant wrongdoer here, and so it seems likely that efforts to flip other witnesses would focus on him.”If Clark is charged with a crime, McQuade added, “he might find it appealing to cooperate. Reports indicate that he met alone with Trump to discuss efforts to undermine election results. He could potentially be a valuable witness. This up-the-chain approach is the kind of strategy prosecutors use in organized crime cases.”McQuade noted in particular that “Clark may be helpful to investigating the fake electors scheme in light of his draft letter to state legislatures suggesting they convene to appoint alternate slates of electors. “The letter that Clark wanted to send to top Georgia legislators and the governor, which Klukowski helped draft, was cited at a hearing of the House January 6 panel in late June, by vice-chairman Liz Cheney.The letter stated falsely that “the Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States” and that the DoJ had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states including the state of Georgia”.Former attorney general William Barr, and Rosen, who succeeded Barr in December 2020 as acting attorney general, had rejected claims by Trump and his allies of significant voting fraud in 2020.However, former acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue told the House January 6 panel that Clark pursued his own investigations and that, despite failing to find evidence of widespread fraud, Clark pressed ahead with drafting a baseless letter which both Donoghue and Rosen had flatly rejected signing and sending.Donoghue testified he repeatedly told Clark that his actions boiled down to using the DoJ to meddle in the presidential election. Donoghue recalled that Clark responded, “I think a lot of people meddled in this election.”Donoghue also told the House panel in a deposition that Cipollone had warned Trump that the draft letter falsely stating that DoJ had significant concerns about fraud was like a “murder- suicide pact” which would “damage everyone who touches it” if it were sent to Georgia officialsClark’s draft letter was rife with false statements about the election and his actions at DoJ to help Trump prompted the DC bar to file ethics charges against him alleging that his draft letter to Georgia officials represented dishonest conduct and breached legal ethics.Rachel Semmel, a spokesman for Center for Renewing America, where Jeff Clark is the Director of Litigation, blasted the DoJ inquiries involving Clark and others. .”Biden’s DoJ has made its focus attacking Americans, including attacking the legal qualifications of one of the only top lawyers at the DOJ who had the interests of the American people at heart.”Former DoJ prosecutors say Klukowski’s cooperation in conjunction with evidence that prosecutors seem to have obtained about Clark’s role pushing Trump’s false election claims at DoJ, could be quite useful.“ If Klukowski can help deliver the goods on Clark, you may be on your way to Perry and Meadows who promoted Clark to Trump, possibly to Giuliani and Eastman, and ultimately Trump,” said former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut.Likewise, McQuade sees potential bonuses for prosecutors as they probe Clark and the fake electors schemes.“Working up the chain, prosecutors could potentially flip Clark and Perry to get to Meadows, and Meadows to get to Trump,” McQuade said “Each link in the chain would seem to have information that could be useful to prosecuting the next link up.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Enabling a demagogue: a new film traces Republicans’ capitulation to Donald Trump

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      InterviewEnabling a demagogue: a new film traces Republicans’ capitulation to Donald TrumpDavid Smith in WashingtonMichael Kirk’s documentary Lies, Politics and Democracy is a chilling study in how Trump subdued the Republican party Michael Kirk has been making documentary films for more than half a century. He has chronicled the peaks and troughs of US politics, winning every significant broadcast journalism award along the way. But nothing prepared him for the scale of the threat now facing American democracy.“There’s never been a film I made where I was more anxious, unhappy to make it, unwilling to discover the things we were discovering,” Kirk, 74, says of his latest project for PBS’s investigative series Frontline. “‘Worried’ is not a strong enough word for how I feel about where we are as a country and I don’t think I’m alone.”Lies, Politics and Democracy tells the story of how, like a colonial army of occupation, Donald Trump subdued the Republican party with a combination of brute force and manufactured consent. It is a chilling character study in how, one after another, party leaders ignored, acquiesced, collaborated and enabled a demagogue while fearing his fervent fanbase.The film draws on more than 30 interviews with former government officials, political journalists and experts. Like the congressional January 6 committee hearings, it provides a compelling narrative of half-forgotten turning points that, viewed in totality, resemble a Greek tragedy hurtling towards the inevitable and deadly climax of 6 January 2021.It is striking, for example, that three of Trump’s most oleaginous loyalists have also, at various stages, suffered the harshest blowback for defying him. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was publicly humiliated at the 2016 Republican National Convention after pointedly refusing to endorse the party nominee. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was heckled as a “traitor” by furious Trump supporters after appearing to disown the president on January 6. Lesson learned, he was soon back on board. Vice-President Mike Pence, who for four long years remained unswervingly loyal, may have been hanged if the mob had their way after he refused to overturn the 2020 election.Lies, Politics and Democracy – which will be broadcast on PBS on Tuesday at 9pm – complements a growing body of literature tracking the Republican party’s capitulation that includes It Was All a Lie by Stuart Stevens, American Carnage by Tim Alberta, Insurgency by Jeremy Peters, Why We Did It by Tim Miller and Thank You for Your Servitude by Mark Leibovich.It has a heartbreaking opening for anyone who cherishes democracy: graceful concession speeches from Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, John McCain, John Kerry, Al Gore and other defeated presidential candidates going back decades. Cut to Donald Trump in 2020 falsely claiming, “Frankly, we did win this election.”Kirk explains: “The one non-negotiable rule in American politics is peacefully transfer the thing. It’s just too tenuous otherwise. Around the inauguration, there’s always some news anchor who says, ‘Here it is again, the thing that makes us the strongest country in the world: the peaceful transfer of power.’ It says everything about where we are.”The documentary recalls how, during his reality TV days, Trump claimed that the Emmy awards were rigged when his show The Apprentice was beaten by The Amazing Race. So it was hardly surprising that, when he lost the Republican caucuses in Iowa in February 2016, he tweeted that Cruz “cheated” and should be disqualified.Speaking via Zoom from a book-lined room in Brookline, Massachusetts, Kirk reflects: “You see so obviously what his method is and that he is this kind of rich guy: ‘I didn’t get the table I wanted in the restaurant, I’m going to trash the restaurant. Or I didn’t win an Emmy for my show, The Apprentice; I’m going to trash the Emmys and all the competition.’”In probably the nastiest primary in history, Trump insulted Cruz’s wife’s looks and implicated his father in the assassination of President John F Kennedy. The defeated Cruz was a speaker at the convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and agonised with his team for days over whether to support the strongman nominee.Alberta, who along with fellow journalist Jelani Cobb worked with the film’s producers, says on camera: “He tells them his decision, that he’s not going to endorse Donald Trump in his speech, and they ask him why and Cruz looks at them and he says: ‘History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket.’”The convention floor was not kind to Cruz, however. As he urged Republicans to vote their conscience, the crowd turned on him with boos, jeers and shouts of “Get out!”, “Pull the plug!” and “Get off the stage!” To view their snarling expressions with seven years’ hindsight is to witness the “Make America great again” base emerge screaming from the womb.Kirk, who was in the arena that day, says: “It felt like a potent moment for sure when it happened, but to see it again now, all these years later, and to see the faces of the people – and I was really determined to try to show who’s complaining; it’s not Nazis; it’s Mr and Mrs Republican complaining about Ted Cruz of all people, booing him off stage – I said, there’s the Maga party right there.“It’s growing right before our eyes because that was probably the purest manifestation even for Trump. He’s been seeing it in crowds out around America but right there among the Republican establishment, he had them. Boy, that sent a powerful message. I promise you it wasn’t lost on Mitch [McConnell] or Kevin [McCarthy] or any of the other establishment leaders.”Cruz proved spineless and went on the campaign trail for Trump in an effort to stay politically relevant. Meanwhile Pence had agreed to be Trump’s running mate, a decision that did much to normalise and legitimise the nominee, giving Christian conservatives permission to support him.Kirk continues: “This is the way authoritarians rise. They get the collaboration. Sometimes even the collaborator doesn’t really know that they’re collaborating. They also have their own agenda. They want to win. They want to get a heartbeat away from the presidency.“Pence [then governor] was in deep electoral trouble in Indiana so sure, why not? ‘I’ll get on that train. I’ll get on TV 500 times over the next six months. I’ll stay there and wave and he’s not going to win anyway but it will rejuvenate me and I can run in four years.’“There he is making a political calculation and not understanding that what he’s conferring on someone like Donald Trump to Pence’s own base, evangelical Christians and the right wing, is his power. Trump – no fool in any way about all of this stuff – knows how to use something like that and he sure did.”Trump stunned the world by beating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Republican leaders thought that he would be a useful idiot, easy to manipulate, only to find themselves manipulated in turn. They enjoyed policy wins, for instance on tax cuts, and instinctively defended him when Democrats attacked. But under constant pressure from Fox News and other rightwing media, they willfully ignored Trump’s authoritarian impulses.Bill Kristol, a conservative commentator and former White House official, tells the film: “Rationalisation is a very powerful force, it turns out, in human psychology. It was a funny kind of choice, though, because you read history books and it’s like, ‘this is the moment’ and you choose this or that. But there are also ways in which you choose gradually and incrementally and the choice is more of an accommodation and a rationalisation and an enabling.“It’s not a sort of, ‘I’m standing up here and choosing this path’. Some did that but an awful lot went along and they kept on going along and then they had to rationalise where they were going along so they became sort of enthusiastic about going along. You can rationalise your way into a series of choices, which becomes a very damaging and dangerous choice.”That said, Kirk highlights an inflection point when Republican leaders could have said enough is enough: a 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned violent and resulted in the death of the civil rights activist Heather Heyer. Trump insisted there were “very fine people on both sides”. Paul Ryan, the House speaker, seemed ready to disavow the president but ultimately bit his tongue.Kirk says: “That seemed like a real moment for Ryan and obviously a dramatic moment for the Republican party and what they were enabling in such an obvious racist act. It seems to fly in the face of who the Republicans used to be in Reconstruction in America after the civil war.“They were the heroes in so many ways and, for the Republican party after Charlottesville to be where it found itself, either silence from somebody like Mitch, or shrinking back in a way like Ryan did, it’s just tragic to watch.”If Charlottesville failed to break the fever, and if the heavy-handed clearance of protesters outside the White House for a photo op in 2020 also failed, then surely the big lie of a stolen election and the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol would do it? For a while, it seemed that way. Graham announced that he was done. McCarthy said Trump bore responsibility for the riot.But as Lies, Politics and Democracy recounts, when Trump relinquished the presidency on 20 January, he had one more ace up his sleeve. From his last flight on Air Force One, he reportedly called Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, and threatened to quit and form his own party – a potentially devastating split.Kirk goes on: “That threat – that I’m going to create my own party, I’ve got the voting lists, I can wreck your Republican dream of a midterm in ’22 and a new president in ’24 – was Trump’s maximum moment of humiliation and loss and also his last great threat. And it worked.”Sure enough, soon McCarthy was making a pilgrimage to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to kiss the ring once more. Graham was playing golf with him again. Republican senators could have banned Trump from running for office in future but acquitted him at an impeachment trial. It was, despite everything, still Trump’s party.He has always boasted that he can identify an opponent’s weakness and exploit it. Kirk’s take: “It’s possible that he’s not a master strategist but it is very possible that the guy is a street fighter at the highest magnitude. This is somebody who seems to know how to intimidate, how to strike fear, how to manipulate.“It’s always an astonishing thing to me. How does he get people like [former attorney general] Bill Barr to do his bidding when there’s nothing about it that would make them do it if they wanted to keep their legacy? They go along. What is it about him? That may be at the heart of this film.“It may just be that politicians are a different breed and for them the purity and the simplicity of right and wrong is very fungible. Their calculus about somebody is all about them. I was talking to somebody when we were making this film and they said, ‘The definition of a politician is somebody who wants to get reelected’. Say no more.”Internal critics, such as Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have been purged. Many received vile abuse and death threats from the angry Maga base seeking to intimidate them and influence their votes – another intimation of authoritarianism.But not even Trump is immune. Last year he was booed for telling his supporters to get vaccinated against the coronavirus and again for revealing that he had received a booster shot. There have been moments during this year’s Republican primary elections when the base has appeared to take on a life of its own.Alyssa Farah Griffin, former White House director of strategic communications, says in the film: “The biggest misunderstanding of the Trump era is that he leads the base and the base goes where he does. I actually think that he’s created a monster that he doesn’t even control and he is actually very much driven by the base, not other way around.”That implies Trumpism will survive Trump; even when the man has gone, his dangerous anti-democratic movement will thrive and metastasise. With polls showing that a majority of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was illegitimate, is there any hope that the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower can be saved?It was a question that Kirk put to many people in the party and many scholars who study it. “Something really fundamental has happened and all the old paradigms don’t fit,” he says. “The invasion of Donald Trump may have really, really changed the Republican party in a way that it’s hard to see how the current players remake it, if that’s what they try to do.”Kirk and his team have made more than 15 documentaries seeking to understand Trump’s impact on American politics, including Trump’s American Carnage, The Choice 2020: Trump vs Biden and Trump’s Takeover. This latest film, showing days after Joe Biden gave a prime-time speech about the battle for the soul of the nation, is a portrait of a democracy more fragile than he ever imagined.“Every single person we talked to, even among very conservative Republicans, you’re not finding any kind of, ‘Hey, it’s going to be OK, hey, it’s all right,” he says bleakly. “I am very, very concerned about where we find ourselves right now and I don’t know how it fixes itself. I don’t know what happens.”TopicsRepublicansDocumentary filmsDonald TrumpUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Trump considered hiring heavyweight Jones Day law firm during Russia inquiry, book says

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      Trump considered hiring heavyweight Jones Day law firm during Russia inquiry, book saysEx-president said to have wanted ‘someone a bit more bombastic’, writes New York Times reporter David Enrich Donald Trump considered but rejected hiring the law firm Jones Day to represent him during the Russia investigation, a new book says.Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book saysRead moreThe news that Trump could have hired a heavyweight firm for his personal defence but chose not to – preferring “someone a bit more bombastic”, according to senior partners – comes after the former president appointed a new lawyer in his battle with the Department of Justice over the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida for classified White House documents.In his many brushes with the law as president and after, Trump is widely seen to have struggled for quality representation.Jones Day, a huge international firm, advised Trump’s campaign in 2016 and played a major role in his administration from 2017 to 2021, most publicly through the work of Donald McGahn, a partner, as Trump’s first White House counsel.The firm’s talks about doing more personal work for Trump are described in Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice, a book by the New York Times reporter David Enrich that will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.According to Enrich, at the outset of the Trump administration, McGahn “wanted to be spending his time in the White House filling the judiciary with [conservative] Federalist Society judges and, to a lesser extent, dismantling the ‘administrative state’”.The White House counsel enjoyed great success on the judges issue, piloting a process that installed hundreds of judges and saw three conservatives put on the supreme court.But, Enrich writes: “What McGahn increasingly found himself and his team spending time on was Trump’s personal legal problems.”McGahn, Enrich writes, thought Trump should have “his own, competent counsel” to deal with investigations of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow, and Trump’s firing of the FBI director James Comey.That, Enrich says, led to Trump having at least two Oval Office meetings with Stephen Brogan, managing partner of Jones Day.Enrich reports that some at Jones Day thought such a deal would tie the firm too closely to Trump as his presidency pitched into controversy and chaos. Brogan was advised to pull back but pushed to land the client.“In the end, Brogan didn’t get the job,” Enrich writes, adding that it “went instead to John Dowd. The feeling among some senior Jones Day partners was that Trump wanted someone a bit more bombastic than Brogan as his defender-in-chief.”Trump’s pick had ramifications for the rest of his presidency and beyond. Dowd, a former US Marine, resigned in March 2018, his conduct of Trump’s response to the Russia investigation widely seen as a failure. McGahn, who cooperated with the special counsel Robert Mueller quit five months later.The Russia investigation bruised Trump but he escaped impeachment. He did not escape it over approaches to Ukraine involving withholding military aid while seeking dirt on rivals including Joe Biden.Because enough Republican senators stayed loyal, Trump was acquitted in his first Senate trial and in his second, for inciting the deadly Capitol attack of 6 January 2021, in his attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat.But throughout such travails, Trump was represented by lawyers widely seen as not up to the task, including Bruce Castor, a former district attorney from Pennsylvania who gave a rambling presentation in the second impeachment trial.Two Trump lawyers could be witnesses or targets in FBI investigationRead moreThroughout his wild post-presidency, Trump has continued to struggle to hire top talent. Regarding the Mar-a-Lago search last month, critics suggest Trump’s lawyers have made life easier for the DoJ with moves including demanding details of the related affidavit and warrant be made public.Writing for The Intercept last week, the reporter James Risen said: “Even [Trump’s] cultishly loyal lawyers have become radioactive with prosecutors, angering the justice department with their efforts to politicise the case. In a court filing … the justice department said that Trump’s lawyers have leveled ‘wide-ranging meritless accusations’ against the government.”Two Trump attorneys, Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran, may be in danger of becoming targets of an obstruction investigation, given their roles liaising with the DoJ over records stored at Mar-a-Lago.Last week, in a move widely seen as a play for better representation, Trump hired Chris Kise, a former Florida solicitor general who has won cases before the US supreme court.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpLaw (US)US politicsRepublicansPolitics booksnewsReuse this content More

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      Judge grants Trump’s request for special master to handle seized documents

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      Judge grants Trump’s request for special master to handle seized documentsFederal court accepts ex-president’s call for official to set aside materials potentially subject to privilege protections A federal judge has granted Donald Trump’s request to have a “special master” appointed to review documents the FBI seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate that could be subject to privilege protections in the investigation into unauthorized retention of government secrets.The order from the US district court judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, also temporarily barred the justice department from reviewing the documents for its criminal inquiry until the special master completes its work, in a decision that marked a procedural victory for the former president.What is a special master and why does Donald Trump want one? Read moreCannon wrote in her 24-page ruling, however, that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) could continue to review the seized materials for its separate inquiry into whether Trump’s retention of documents with classified markings at Mar-a-Lago risked national security.Cannon gave Trump’s legal team and the DoJ until Friday to file a proposed list of special master candidates.The DoJ is likely to appeal the decision to the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit, officials said, though in the meantime it will almost certainly delay the investigation into potential violations of the Espionage Act and potential obstruction of justice.Still, the ruling does not change the underlying facts of the investigation that led to the FBI executing a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago last month – that Trump was in unauthorized possession of highly sensitive government documents that could yet result in criminal charges.Cannon disagreed with the DoJ’s opposition to appointing a special master on several points, including its main argument that Trump lacked standing for such a motion because he had no “possessory interest” in White House records since he was no longer president, according to the filing.The judge wrote that she believed the government had misinterpreted the appellate court precedent, writing that Trump did not need to conclusively prove ownership of the seized property, but only that he had a colorable right, or plausible legal claim, to possess some of the materials.Cannon also disagreed with the DoJ’s argument that another review of the seized materials by a special master was unnecessary after the FBI’s so-called filter teams screened the documents for potentially privileged material in the two weeks it took Trump’s lawyers to file their motion.The judge, as she previewed in court last week, noted that the DoJ’s investigative team had inadvertently seen potentially privileged material on at least two occasions that she said raised questions about the adequacy of the FBI’s filter team review.Cannon additionally wrote that she disagreed with theDoJ’s argument that Trump could not seek a special master to set aside documents potentially protected by executive privilege from an investigation being conducted by the DoJ, part of the executive branch.The judge wrote she believed the government was overstating the law, saying – as she corrected the DoJ’s lawyer in court – that in the landmark case of Nixon v General Services Administration 1977, the US supreme court left open the concept that a former president’s assertion of executive privilege might be stronger than a current president’s waiver of it.In this case, Cannon’s ruling referred to the possibility of Trump asserting executive privilege over certain documents and preventing the DoJ from using them in its investigation, even if Joe Biden, the current president, declined to assert privilege. The law over what happens in such a dispute has not been conclusively settled.“Even if any assertion of executive privilege by Plaintiff ultimately fails in this context, that possibility, even if likely, does not negate a former President’s ability to raise the privilege as an initial matter,” Cannon said in her decision. William Barr defends FBI and justice department over Mar-a-Lago searchRead moreBut the judge also made no mention of the Presidential Records Act mandating the documents belong at the National Archives.Cannon gave the DoJ and Trump’s lawyers until Friday to submit a joint filing for candidates to serve as the independent arbiter, known as special master – typically a retired lawyer or judge – to weed out any attorney-client or executive-privileged documents from the evidence cache.A special master was used, for instance, to review materials seized in the searches of the homes and offices of two of Trump’s former attorneys – Rudy Giuliani and Michael Cohen.The DoJ had opposed Trump’s motion, arguing that it would delay its criminal investigation, and in a court hearing last week in West Palm Beach, Florida, sounded alarm that a special master process could give Trump access once more to highly sensitive and classified documents.Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, also called the special master request a “waste of time”, adding: “Even if they are subject to executive privilege, they still belong to the government.“And any other documents that were seized … those were seize-able under the warrant,” Barr said.In a reaction posted on Twitter, Neal Katyal, former US acting solicitor general, wrote that the appointment of a special master wouldn’t derail the federal investigation but that this decision “sets a terrible precedent”.“Even though this judge’s order appointing a special master won’t stop the very serious Trump stolen docs investigation, having been the decider of whether DOJ should appeal various cases in the past, I think DoJ has to appeal here,” Katyal tweeted, adding: “That’s what I’d do.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsFBIMar-a-LagonewsReuse this content More

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      The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump

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      The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump Dana Milbank of the Washington Post does not fall victim to false equivalency. He knows the GOP is a threat to democracyAfter Joe Biden’s fiery speech in defense of democracy last week, most of the Washington press corps responded with another stream of fatuous false equivalencies.Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book saysRead more“The Two Parties Finally Agree on Something: American Democracy Is in Danger”, was the headline in the New York Times. A Washington Post editorial declared the president was “wrong to conflate upholding the rule of law with his own partisan agenda, which he called ‘the work of democracy’”.In his brilliant new book, Dana Milbank, a Post columnist, does not offer any of the squishy-soft judgements to which most of his Washington colleagues have become sadly addicted.He comes straight to the point that eluded the authors of that Times story and that Post editorial: “Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy. There’s a perfectly logical, if deeply cynical reason for this. Democracy is working against Republicans” who have only carried the popular vote once in eight presidential elections since 1988.As America “approaches majority-minority status”, Milbank writes, “… white grievance and white fear” have driven “Republican identity more than any other factor – and drive the tribalism and dysfunction in the US political system”.Working as a political columnist for the last 16 years, Milbank has had “a front-row seat for the worst show on earth: the crack-up of the Republican party, and the resulting crack-up of American democracy”.The book has four roughly equal sections: about the Clinton presidency (“defined by the slashing style of [Newt] Gingrich”), the George W Bush presidency (“defined by the dishonesty of Karl Rove”), the Obama presidency and the era of Trump.This is meticulous history, showing how the Republicans have spent a quarter of a century “hacking away at the foundations of democracy and civil society”, conducting “their war on truth, their growing exploitation of racism and white supremacy, their sabotage of the institutions … of government, and their dehumanizing of opponents and stoking of violence”.Milbank traces the Republican love affair with racism back to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign, and dates the beginning of government dysfunction to the four disastrous years from 1995 to 1999 when Gingrich did as much as he could to blow up the federal government when he was speaker of the House.By showing with minute detail “how extensively Republicans and their allied donors, media outlets and interest groups have been pulling at the threads of democracy,” Milbank makes it clear that the Trump presidency was far from an aberration. It represented the real Republican party, without any of the camouflage of compassionate conservatism.There was nothing new about Donald Trump’s 30,573 documented lies as president. Gingrich’s Republicans were “saturated with wild, often unsubstantiated allegations. Whitewater. Troopergate. Travelgate. Filegate. Furnituregate. Fallen Clinton aide Webb Hubbell fathered Chelsea Clinton … commerce secretary Ron Brown’s death in a plane crash … was a Clinton-arranged hit”. And so on.It was Gingrich, the Clinton special prosecutor Ken Starr, his aide Brett Kavanaugh, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh who showed Trump “the political power of an endlessly repeated lie”.The crassness also started with Gingrich.“I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” Gingrich told college Republicans way back in 1978. “You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power.”Eleven years later, Gingrich told the reporter John Harwood (who last week left CNN after calling Trump a “demagogue”) Democrats were “grotesque”, “loony” and “stupid”.Milbank is especially strong about Ralph Reed, “a crucial figure in the perversion of the religious right into an entity more ‘right’ than ‘religious’.” There is also a long recounting of the gigantic lobbying scandal centered on Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, a former top aide to House majority leader Tom DeLay. Scanlon and Abramoff “defrauded Indian tribes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars” by telling them they were promoting their casinos. They also got Reed to mobilize evangelical Christians to oppose gambling projects that competed with his own gambling interests.Another long section reminds us that the administration of George W Bush actually did even greater damage than Trump, by promoting the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and leading America into the completely unnecessary and utterly disastrous war in Iraq.Milbank’s book is in the fine tradition of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, the 2012 book by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann which was the first to point out the uselessness of the Washington press corps’ attempts to be “fair” to both parties.‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book saysRead moreMilbank quotes from it: “The Republican party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”Herein lies the tragedy of Washington journalism. Ten years after Ornstein and Mann made those astute observations, Milbank is one of just a handful of reporters who have incorporated their wisdom into his work. As a result, he is almost alone in treating the pronouncements of the Republican party with the contempt they invariably deserve.As Ornstein tweeted on Saturday: “Tragically our mainstream media have shown that they are either AWOL in this battle or have opted on the side of the authoritarians by normalizing their behavior and minimizing their intentions.”
      The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, is published in the US by Doubleday
      TopicsBooksRepublicansDonald TrumpNewt GingrichGeorge BushRichard NixonThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

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      Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book says

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      Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book saysNew York Times reporter David Enrich also says White House counsel Donald McGahn once called senior Trump aides ‘morons’ Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer he owed $2m with a deed to a horse.‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book saysRead moreThe bizarre scene is described in Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice, a book by David Enrich of the New York Times that will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Enrich reports that “once he regained the capacity for speech”, the lawyer to whom Trump offered a stallion supposedly worth $5m “stammered … ‘This isn’t the 1800s. You can’t pay me with a horse.’”Accounts of Trump refusing to pay legal and other bills are legion. In New York, his business and tax affairs are the subject of civil and criminal investigations.Trump’s reluctance to pay legal fees also featured in his attempt to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, which has landed him in further legal jeopardy.In another forthcoming book, Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, Andrew Kirtzman reports that in January 2021 Rudy Giuliani’s girlfriend sought $2.5m from Trump, for the former New York mayor’s legal work on the attempt to block Joe Biden’s win and for “defending you during the Russia hoax investigation and then the impeachment”.Maria Ryan, Kirtzman writes, made the request in the same letter in which she requested that Giuliani receive a “general pardon” and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Ryan was not successful. The New York Times has reported that Trump told advisers Giuliani “would only get ‘paid on the come’, a reference to a bet in the casino game craps that is essentially payment on a successful roll of the dice”.Enrich’s book places particular focus on Trump’s relationship with Jones Day, a giant US law firm, and the role played by Donald McGahn, a partner, in Trump’s 2016 campaign and then in the White House.It was not all plain sailing. Enrich quotes an unnamed Jones Day associate as saying that in the early days of the campaign, after a Trump Tower meeting with Corey Lewandowski and Alan Garten, close Trump aides, McGahn said: “These guys are morons.”McGahn, Enrich writes, “disputed the quotes attributed to him, particularly the word ‘moron’”. He has, however, previously been reported to have called Trump “King Kong” behind his back.McGahn was Trump’s first White House counsel. A member of the rightwing Federalist Society, he worked with the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, on an unprecedented stacking of the federal judiciary with conservative hardliners, which ultimately included three supreme court picks.McGahn resigned in 2018, after it was revealed he cooperated extensively with Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.Enrich describes Trump’s “reputation for short-changing his lawyers (and banks and contractors and customers)” but says that in the case of Jones Day, “against all odds, Trump paid and paid again”.In contrast to the description of the alleged “morons” remark, Enrich’s story about Trump trying to pay a debt with a horse does not identify the attorney involved.Trump is reading my memoir, Kushner claims of famously book-shy bossRead moreDescribing “a lawyer at a white-shoe firm” who worked for Trump in the 1990s, Enrich writes: “The bill came to about $2m and Trump refused to pay.“After a while, the lawyer lost patience, and he showed up, unannounced, at Trump Tower. Someone sent him up to Trump’s office. Trump was initially pleased to see him – he didn’t betray any sense of sheepishness – but the lawyer was steaming.“‘I’m incredibly disappointed,’ he scolded Trump. ‘There’s no reason you haven’t paid us.’“Trump made some apologetic noises. Then he said: ‘I’m not going to pay your bill. I’m going to give you something more valuable.’ What on earth is he talking about? the lawyer wondered. ‘I have a stallion,’ Trump continued. ‘It’s worth $5m.’ Trump rummaged around in a filing cabinet and pulled out what he said was a deed to a horse. He handed it to the lawyer.”Enrich describes the lawyer’s stunned and angry response, in which he threatened to sue.Trump, Enrich writes, “eventually coughed up at least a portion of what he owed”.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpLaw (US)US politicsRepublicansPolitics booksnewsReuse this content More

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      January 6 committee assumes Mike Pence will testify, Jamie Raskin says

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      January 6 committee assumes Mike Pence will testify, Jamie Raskin saysCongressman says of former vice-president, ‘I would assume he is going to come forward and testify voluntarily’ The January 6 committee assumes the former vice-president Mike Pence will testify before it, a panel member said on Sunday.Trump calls FBI, DoJ ‘vicious monsters’ in first rally since Mar-a-Lago searchRead more“I would assume he is going to come forward and testify voluntarily,” Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, told CBS’s Face the Nation.Raskin also said Ginni Thomas, a rightwing activist married to the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, “has relevant testimony to render [and] should come forward and give it”.After the 2020 election, Ginni Thomas contacted Republicans in Arizona and Wisconsin, pushing them to overturn Joe Biden’s victories in the key swing states.Members of the January 6 committee including Liz Cheney, the vice-chair and one of two Republicans on the panel, have said Thomas could face a subpoena. But none has been forthcoming.Clarence Thomas was the only justice to say Donald Trump should not have to surrender records to the committee as it investigates Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat and the deadly attack on Congress it inspired.It subsequently emerged that Ginni Thomas was in contact with the Trump White House as it attempted to nullify electoral results in key states.Pence presided over the certification of electoral college results at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, which the mob Trump told to “fight like hell” was attempting to stop.Pence refused to stop certification, as advisers to Trump claimed he could. Some rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and erected a gallows. The vice-president narrowly escaped contact with some who breached the Capitol.In testimony to the January 6 committee, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House staffer, said Trump told senior aides Pence “deserved” such treatment.Sticking to his lie that Biden’s win was the result of electoral fraud, Trump said this week the 2020 election should be re-run.Raskin – a professor of constitutional law – told CBS: “Well, first, if he’s saying that the election should be rerun, which is something he’s been saying from the beginning, that’s totally outside of the constitution.“There is no procedure for the military just to seize the election machinery and run a new election, which is one of the things that [Trump’s] disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn was pushing and we know was part of the January 6 plot.“And look, more than 60 courts rejected every claim of electoral fraud and corruption which Donald Trump advanced. He’s had the benefit of more than 60 courts, including eight courts where he appointed the judges to office, look[ing] at all those claims, and they were all rejected. It was rejected in the states and he lost the election.”Raskin was also asked about Republican anger over Biden’s primetime address in Philadelphia on Thursday, in which the president warned that Trump and his supporters posed a threat to American democracy.Raskin said: “Two of the hallmarks of a fascist political party are one, they don’t accept the results of elections that don’t go their way, and two, they embrace political violence.“And I think that’s why President Biden was right to sound the alarm this week about these continuing attacks on our constitutional order from the outside by Donald Trump and his movement.”TopicsMike PenceJanuary 6 hearingsUS politicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More