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      As Trump’s star wanes, rivals signal presidential nomination campaigns

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      As Trump’s star wanes, rivals signal presidential nomination campaignsRepublicans vying for the party’s nomination have taken the ex-president’s midterm losses as a sign for them to step up Potential rivals to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination will this week be reading the runes of political fortune with their families ahead of the New Year – typically the time that nomination contenders begin to make themselves formally apparent.January 6 report review: 845 pages, countless crimes, one simple truth – Trump did itRead moreAmid a lackluster start to Trump’s own campaign and a string of scandals and setbacks to hit the former US president due to his links to far-right extremists and his own legal problems, a field of potential rivals is starting to emerge for a contest that only a few months ago many thought was Trump’s alone for the taking.They include multiple ex-members of Trump’s own cabinet, including his own former vice-president, his former UN ambassador and his former spy chief. Adding to that are a raft of rivals with their own political power bases, such as Florida’s increasingly formidable right-wing governor, Ron DeSantis.Now the hints of ambitions to taking on Trump are coming thick and fast, especially in the wake of the defeat of a host of Trump-backed candidates in November’s midterm elections which have triggered a reckoning with Trump’s grip on the Republican party.“I can tell you that my wife and I will take some time when our kids are home this Christmas – we’re going to give prayerful consideration about what role we might play,” former vice-president Mike Pence, 63, told CBS’ Face the Nation last month.Maryland’s term-limited Republican governor Larry Hogan, and Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s former governor and US ambassador to the UN, have said the holidays would also be a time for deliberation.“We are taking the holidays to kind of look at what the situation is,” Haley said in November. Hogan, a fierce critic of Trump, told CBS last week “it won’t be shocking if I were to bring the subject up” with his family during the break. Come January, he said, he would begin taking advice to “try to figure out what the future is”.“I don’t feel any pressure or any rush to make a decision … things are gonna look completely different three months from now or six months from now than they did today,” Hogan, 66, added.Others in the running are also readily apparent. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s team has reached out to potential campaign staff in early primary states, the Washington Post reported over the weekend. “We figured by the first quarter next year, we need to be hard at it if we’re going to do it,” Pompeo, 58, said in an interview with Fox News.Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson is reportedly talking to donors to determine his ability to fund the 18-month “endurance race” of a nomination process. Hutchinson has said that Trump’s early declaration, on 15 November, had “accelerated everyone’s time frame”.“So the first quarter of next year, you either need to be in or out,” the outgoing, 72-year-old governor told NBC News earlier this month.New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, 48, said this week he doesn’t believe Trump could win in 2024. He’s voiced concerns that the Republican party could repeat the nomination experience of 2016, when he was a contender, when a large, divided field allowed Trump’s “ drain the swamp” insurgent candidacy to triumph.“We just have to find another candidate at this point,” Sununu told CBS News. While Trump could be the Republican nominee, he added, he’s “not going to be able to close the deal”.Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, 56, has said he’s “humbled” to be part of the 2024 discussions but in the convention of most candidates, he’s focused on his day job.Youngkin telegraphed his fiscal conservative credentials to wider Republican big-money interests by pushing $4bn in tax cuts through the Virginia legislature and meeting with party megadonors in Manhattan in June.“2024 is a long way away,” he recently told Fox News. “We’ll see what happens”.Helping to break the gender-lock on potential candidates is also South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. Her name has emerged as a potential Trump running mate, but she recently said he did not present “the best chance” for Republicans in 2024.“Our job is not just to talk to people who love Trump or hate Trump,” Noem, 51, told the New York Times in November. “Our job is to talk to every single American.”The biggest dog in the potential race – aside from Trump himself – is by far Florida’s DeSantis, who recently won re-election in his state by a landslide. Some of the Republican party’s biggest donors have already transferred their favors from Trump, 78, toward the 44-year-old governor.Republican mega donor and billionaire Ken Griffin, who moved his hedge fund Citadel from Chicago to Miami last year, described Trump as a “three-time loser” to Bloomberg a day after the former president’s declaration.“I don’t know what he’s going to do. It’s a huge personal decision,” Griffin said of DeSantis. “He has a tremendous record as governor of Florida, and our country would be well-served by him as president.”Similarly, Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of private-equity giant Blackstone, told Axios he was withdrawing his support from Trump for 2024 but stopped short of backing DeSantis. “America does better when its leaders are rooted in today and tomorrow, not today and yesterday,” he said. “It is time for the Republican party to turn to a new generation of leaders.”DeSantis has yet to rule a run in or out, but has signaled his interest by beginning to plant ads on Google and Facebook that target an audience beyond Florida.But in the post-midterm political environment, with Trump-backed candidates performing poorly in most contests, and the former president besieged by investigations and questions about his associations, the running is open.Maryland’s Hogan has described Trump as vulnerable, and “he seems to be dropping every day”. Hutchinson has said “you never know when that early front-runner is going to stumble”. Polls suggest Trump trails DeSantis in a nomination head-to-head, but leads over Pence and Haley.Other potential names in the pot include Texas governor Greg Abbott, 65; Florida senator Rick Scott, also 65; former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, 60; and Texas senator Ted Cruz, 52, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2016.In a provocatively titled “OK Boomers, Let Go of the Presidency” column last week, former George W Bush advisor Karl Rove warned that 2024 may resemble 1960 when voters were ready for a generational shift. In that year, they went for the youngest in the field, John F Kennedy, aged 43.“Americans want leaders who focus on the future,” Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “The country would be better off if each party’s standard bearer came from a new generation … It’s time for the baby boomers and their elders to depart the presidential stage. The party that grasps this has the advantage come 2024”.TopicsRepublicansDonald TrumpRon DeSantisUS politicsNikki HaleyMike PompeoMike PencefeaturesReuse this content More

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      Republicans lead charge to ban noncitizens from voting in local elections

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      Republicans lead charge to ban noncitizens from voting in local electionsEight states have passed laws against ballot access, even as some progressive cities are extending local voting rights Louisiana voters recently approved a constitutional amendment barring anyone who is not a US citizen from participating in elections, becoming the eighth state to push back against the growing number of progressive cities deciding to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.Conservative donors pour ‘dark money’ into case that could upend US voting lawRead moreWhile noncitizens are prohibited from voting in federal elections and no states allow noncitizens to vote for statewide office, ambiguous language in constitutions has allowed localities to pass statutes legalizing noncitizen voting in local or school board elections. A short but expanding list of cities include two cities in Vermont, almost a dozen in Maryland, and San Francisco.Other cities are trying to join that list, including Boston and Washington DC, where the latter city’s council in October passed legislation allowing noncitizens who have lived in the city for at least 30 days to vote in local elections. New York City’s council also passed a measure in December to allow close to 900,000 green card holders and those with work authorization to vote in local elections, but a state trial court struck it down in June, finding it violated the state constitution. The ruling is currently being appealed.The potential for major cities like DC and New York to expand their electorates prompted backlash from Republican lawmakers.“This vote sends a clear message that the radical election policies of places like San Francisco, New York City and Washington, DC have no place in Louisiana,” Kyle Ardoin, the Republican secretary of state, said in a statement after the passage of the constitutional amendment, which he said will “ensure the continued integrity of Louisiana’s elections”.Louisiana law already prohibits anyone who is “not a citizen of the state” from voting, so voting rights advocates say the new amendment is an effort by Republicans in the state to limit voting based on false allegations that noncitizens are committing voter fraud by participating in elections.Louisiana’s amendment made it on to the 10 December ballot after it was passed by both chambers of the state legislature. Over 73% of Louisiana voters approved it, making Louisiana the latest in a series of states moving to explicitly write bans into their constitutions.Before 2020, just Arizona and North Dakota specifically prohibited noncitizens from voting in local and state elections, but voters in Alabama, Colorado and Florida all approved constitutional amendments in 2020 and Ohio approved one in November.Ohio’s amendment came after one town in the state, Yellow Springs, passed an initiative in 2019 to allow noncitizens to vote, giving voting rights in local elections to just a few dozen people in the small town. A few years later in 2022, Republican lawmakers proposed what would eventually become the constitutional amendment banning the practice and revoking the right from noncitizens in Yellow Springs.Fulvia Vargas-De Leon, senior counsel at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a New York-based immigrant rights group, said the movement for ballot amendments is just one way that some lawmakers are trying to restrict voting rights.“It is a response to the expansion of the right to vote, and our concern is that since 2020, we’ve seen such attacks on the right to vote,” she said, adding that the pushback was coming because of an anti-immigrant sentiment “but also a larger effort to try to ban who has access to the ballot”.The United States allowed noncitizens to vote for much of its early history. From the founding of the country through 1926, noncitizens could vote in local, state and federal elections. But anti-immigrant sentiment led to lawmakers in most states to push for an end to the practice.“Resurgent nativism, wartime xenophobia, and corruption concerns pushed lawmakers to curtail noncitizen voting, and citizenship became a voting prerequisite in every state by 1926,” William & Mary professor Alan H Kennedy wrote in a paper published in the Journal of Policy History this year.In 1996, Congress passed a law prohibiting noncitizens from voting in federal elections, making illegal voting punishable by fines, imprisonment and deportation.But on the local level, the subject has re-emerged as a topic for debate in recent decades, as the populations of permanent noncitizen immigrants has grown in many cities.Advocates for noncitizen voting argue that documented immigrants pay taxes and contribute to their local communities and should have their voices heard when it comes to local policy.“We should have a representative democracy, where everyone who is part of the fabric of the community, who is involved, who pays taxes, should have a say in it,” said Vargas-De Leon, whose group intervened in the New York litigation and has filed the appeal.But conservative groups say that allowing noncitizens to vote dilutes the votes of citizens. Republican strategist Christopher Arps started the Missouri-based Americans for Citizen Voting to help states amend their constitutions to explicitly say that only US citizens can vote. He said that people who want to vote should “at least have some skin in the game” by completing the citizenship process.“We’ve been hearing for the past five, six years about foreign interference, Russia and other countries,” he said. “Well to me, this is a type of foreign interference in our elections.”It would also be a “bureaucratic nightmare”, he said, for states to have to maintain two separate voter rolls for federal and local elections, and could lead to illegal voting if noncitizens accidentally vote in a federal election.Though noncitizen voting still has not been signed into law in DC, Republicans in Congress have already introduced legislation to block it. One bill, introduced by the Texas senator Ted Cruz last month, would bar DC from using federal funds to facilitate noncitizen voting.“Allowing noncitizens and illegal immigrants to vote in our elections opens our country up to foreign influence, and allows those who are openly violating US law or even working for hostile foreign governments to take advantage and direct our resources against our will,” Cruz said in a statement.But Vargas-De Leon pointed to the benefits of expanding the electorate to include the country’s 12.9 million legal permanent residents and other documented immigrants.“All we’re trying to do here is ensure that everyone has a say in our government,” she said.TopicsUS newsThe fight for democracyUS politicsLaw (US)LouisianaOhioFloridaVermontfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Florida governor seeks grand jury investigation into Covid vaccines

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      Florida governor seeks grand jury investigation into Covid vaccinesRon DeSantis asks state supreme court to investigate undefined ‘wrongdoing’ related to vaccinations The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said on Tuesday he will petition the state supreme court to convene a grand jury to investigate “any and all wrongdoing” with respect to Covid-19 vaccines.The Republican governor, often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2024, did not say what wrongdoing the panel would investigate, but he suggested it would be in part aimed at jogging loose more information from pharmaceutical companies about the vaccines and potential side effects.A mutated virus, anti-vaxxers and a vulnerable population: how polio returned to the USRead moreHe made the announcement following a roundtable with the Florida surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, and a panel of scientists and physicians.“We’ll be able to get the data whether they want to give it or not,” DeSantis said. “In Florida, it is illegal to mislead and misrepresent, especially when you are talking about the efficacy of a drug.”Vaccine studies funded by pharmaceutical companies that developed Covid vaccines have been published in peer-reviewed journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, and government panels reviewed data on the safety and effectiveness of the shots before approving them for use.Statewide grand juries, usually comprising 18 people, can investigate criminal activity and issue indictments but also examine systemic problems in Florida and make recommendations. Recent such panels have tackled immigration issues and school safety.DeSantis noted that Florida recently “got $3.2bn through legal action against those responsible for the opioid crisis. So, it’s not like this is something that’s unprecedented.”That money came largely through lawsuits and settlements with drug makers, retailers and distributors.DeSantis said he expected to get approval from the supreme court for the statewide grand jury to be empaneled, probably in the Tampa Bay area.“That will come with legal processes that will be able to get more information and to bring legal accountability to those who committed misconduct,” DeSantis said.DeSantis also announced that he was creating an entity called the public health integrity committee, which will include many of the physicians and scientists who participated in the roundtable on Tuesday. The group includes prominent opponents of lockdowns, federal vaccine mandates and child vaccinations.He said that over the course of the pandemic some people had lost faith in public health institutions, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The governor has frequently spoken out against CDC directives, including mask and vaccine mandates, and filed lawsuits to stop many from taking effect in Florida.Additionally, the governor announced that Ladapo would conduct research through the University of Florida to “assess sudden deaths of individuals in good health who received a Covid-19 vaccine”.DeSantis also said the Florida department of health would utilize disease surveillance and vital statistics to assess such deaths.TopicsRon DeSantisFloridaVaccines and immunisationCoronavirusHealthUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      First Gen Z congressman says he was rejected from Washington DC housing

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      First Gen Z congressman says he was rejected from Washington DC housingFlorida Democrat Maxwell Frost says he incurred debt from his campaign and was recently denied an apartment for poor credit Maxwell Frost, the Florida Democrat who made history last month as the first Gen Z congressman-elect, made waves on social media Thursday morning with a tweet in which he said he was struggling to find somewhere to live in Washington.First Gen Z member elected as midterms could usher in a more diverse CongressRead moreFrost wrote: “Just applied to an apartment in DC where I told the guy that my credit was really bad. He said I’d be fine. Got denied, lost the apartment and the application fee. This ain’t meant for people who don’t already have money.”He later added: “For those asking, I have bad credit cause I ran up a lot of debt running for Congress for a year and a half. Didn’t make enough money from Uber itself to pay for my living.“It isn’t magic that we won our very difficult race. For that primary, I quit my full-time job cause I knew that to win at 25 yrs old, I’d need to be a full-time candidate. 7 days a week, 10-12 hours a day. It’s not sustainable or right but it’s what we had to do.“As a candidate, you can’t give yourself a stipend or anything till the very end of your campaign. So most of the run, you have no $ coming in unless you work a second job.”Democrat New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went through something similar, Frost said, adding: “I also recognize that I’m speaking from a point of privilege cause in 2 years time, my credit will be okay because of my new salary that starts next year. We have to do better for the whole country.”In September, in Guardian interview with Frost, he described how he was financing his run for Congress, including driving an Uber, and described how he had been living with his girlfriend and sister. When they were priced out of their apartment in October, he said he was couchsurfing and sleeping in his car for a month before finding a new place.‘I’ve been Maced, I’ve been to jail …’ Can 25-year-old Maxwell Frost now be the first Gen Z member of Congress?Read more“I couldn’t go back home because my 97-year-old grandmother lives there, and this was in the middle of the Delta variant,” he said at the time.Today’s news, that Frost is struggling to secure a place to live in Washington, will likely add to his determination to address the affordable housing crisis afflicting young people in many parts of the US. After all, as journalist Andrew Lawrence wrote a few months ago: “So when he talks with urgency about the affordable housing crisis, it’s real.“There’s still a lot of barriers for working-class people to run for office,” he says. “I want to be the voice who shows how messed up it is and help demystify the process.”TopicsFloridaUS politicsUS housing and sub-prime crisisUS economyReuse this content More

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      Trump lawyers find two more classified documents at Florida storage unit

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      Trump lawyers find two more classified documents at Florida storage unitDiscovery appears to confirm DoJ’s suspicions that former president possessed additional government records, sources say Donald Trump’s lawyers found at least two more documents bearing classification markings inside boxes at a storage unit in Florida when they searched through items that were brought from the White House at the end of his administration, one source familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.The new discovery could exacerbate the former president’s legal exposure after the FBI seized 103 documents marked classified at his Mar-a-Lago resort in August as part of the justice department’s criminal investigation into the possible unauthorized retention of national security information and obstruction of justice.The presence of documents marked classified in a second location beyond Mar-a-Lago, earlier reported by the Washington Post, appears to confirm the justice department’s suspicions, communicated to Trump’s lawyers in October, that Trump possessed additional government records.Trump’s lawyers found the documents after the former president retained an outside firm to search four locations after a federal judge ordered his legal team to conduct a more thorough search to make sure all documents marked classified had been returned to the government.The outside firm ended up searching a number of Trump’s properties, according to another source, including Trump Tower in New York, Trump Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, the Mar-a-Lago resort and the external storage unit in West Palm Beach, Florida, which has been understood to have been controlled by a federal agency.According to emails released by the General Services Administration, a government agency that assists in presidential transitions, Trump used a storage facility in West Palm Beach to hold some materials that were packed up from the White House and had been temporarily held in Virginia.That storage facility was used to hold at least three pallets of boxes that had been packed up by Trump White House staffers and the GSA initially transported to an office space in Virginia before sending them to Florida in September 2021, the emails show.The contents of the boxes in the pallets do not appear to have ever been catalogued, the second source said. It was not clear whether the storage facility referenced in the emails was the same storage unit where the new documents were found – but it was the place from where Trump’s lawyers sent two dozen boxes to the National Archives earlier this year.The justice department declined to comment. A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Trump’s lawyers were ordered in recent weeks to conduct a more thorough search of items in the former president’s possession by Beryl Howell, the chief US district court judge for the District of Columbia, in a sealed order issued as part of a closed-door court battle.The order capped a weeks-long process that started after the justice department expressed concern that Trump still had additional documents marked classified in his possession, potentially at other properties, after the FBI seized thousands of materials at Mar-a-Lago on 8 August.Trump was served with a grand jury subpoena in May demanding the return of all government records – bearing classification markings or otherwise – in the possession of the “45 Office”, to which his lawyers responded by turning over a double-taped folder containing responsive documents.The double-taped folder contained documents found by Trump attorney Evan Corcoran in a basement storage room at Mar-a-Lago, the second source told the Guardian, and got another Trump attorney Christina Bobb to sign a caveated attestation certifying compliance with the subpoena.But in the following months, the justice department developed evidence that other sensitive materials remained at Mar-a-Lago, and the FBI retrieved 103 documents marked classified in Trump’s office and in the basement storage room, according to the unsealed search warrant affidavit.The justice department then developed suspicions that Trump potentially was in possession of still more government records he should no longer have access to, and eventually asked Howell to intervene and order a second search of Trump’s belongings, the second source said.Former Florida solicitor general Christopher Kise, who had by then been added to Trump’s legal team, had suggested retaining an outside firm to conduct another search even before the court order, though that idea was initially rejected by some of the more bullish Trump lawyers on the team.But when the court order necessitated a more thorough search, Trump engaged the outside firm. The FBI is understood to have been invited to observe the search of at least one of the properties, but declined the offer, as is typical for searches not done by law enforcement, the source said.TopicsDonald TrumpFloridaFBIUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Before He Takes On ‘Woke Capitalism,’ Ron DeSantis Should Read His Karl Marx

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      With their new majority, House Republicans are planning to take on “woke capitalism.”“Republicans and their longtime corporate allies are going through a messy breakup as companies’ equality and climate goals run headlong into a G.O.P. movement exploiting social and cultural issues to fire up conservatives,” Bloomberg reports. “Most directly in the G.O.P. cross hairs is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is under pressure from the likely House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to replace its leadership after the nation’s biggest business lobby backed some Democratic candidates.”I wrote last year about this notion of “woke capitalism” and the degree to which I think this “conflict” is little more than a performance meant to sell an illusion of serious disagreement between owners of capital and the Republican Party. As I wrote then, “the entire Republican Party is united in support of an anti-labor politics that puts ordinary workers at the mercy of capital.” Republicans don’t have a problem with corporate speech or corporate prerogatives as a matter of principle; they have a problem with them as a matter of narrow partisan politics.That the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, railed this week against the “raw exercise of monopolistic power” by Apple, for example, has much more to do with the cultural politics of Twitter and its new owner, Elon Musk, than any real interest in the power of government to regulate markets and curb abuse. (In fact, DeSantis argued in his book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” that the Constitution was designed to “prevent the redistribution of wealth through the political process” and stop any popular effort to “undermine the rights of property.”)Nonetheless, there is something of substance behind this facade of conflict. It is true that the largest players in the corporate world, compelled to seek profit by the competitive pressures of the market, have mostly ceased catering to the particular tastes and preferences of the more conservative and reactionary parts of the American public. To borrow from and paraphrase the basketball legend Michael Jordan: Queer families buy shoes, too.Republicans have discovered, to their apparent chagrin, that their total devotion to the interests of concentrated, corporate capital does not buy them support for a cultural agenda that sometimes cuts against those very same interests.Here it’s worth noting, as the sociologist Melinda Cooper has argued, that what we’re seeing in this cultural dispute is something of a conflict between two different segments of capital. What’s at stake in the “growing militancy” of the right wing of the Republican Party, Cooper writes, “is less an alliance of the small against the big than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.” It is the patriarchal and dynastic capitalism of Donald Trump against the more impersonal and managerial capitalism of, for example, Mitt Romney.To the extent that cultural reactionaries within the Republican Party have been caught unaware by the friction between their interests and those of the more powerful part of the capitalist class, they would do well to take a lesson from one of the boogeymen of conservative rhetoric and ideology: Karl Marx.Throughout his work, Marx emphasized the revolutionary character of capitalism in its relation to existing social arrangements. It annihilates the “old social organization” that fetters and keeps down “the new forces and new passions” that spring up in the “bosom of society.” It decomposes the old society from “top to bottom.” It “drives beyond national barriers and prejudices” as well as “all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproduction of old ways of life.”Or, as Marx observed in one of his most famous passages, the “bourgeois epoch” is distinguished by the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.” Under capitalism, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at least compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”In context, Marx is writing about precapitalist social and economic arrangements, like feudalism. But I think you can understand this dynamic as a general tendency under capitalism as well. The interests and demands of capital are sometimes in sync with traditional hierarchies. There are even two competing impulses within the larger system: a drive to dissolve and erode the barriers between wage earners until they form a single, undifferentiated mass and a drive to preserve and reinforce those same barriers to divide workers and stymie the development of class consciousness on their part.But that’s a subject for another day and a different column.For now, I’ll simply say that the problem of “woke capitalism” for social and political conservatives is the problem of capitalism for anyone who hopes to preserve anything in the face of the ceaseless drive of capital to dominate the entire society.You could restrain the power of capital by strengthening the power of labor to act for itself, in its own interests. But as conservatives are well aware, the prerogatives of workers can also undermine received hierarchies and traditional social arrangements. The working class, after all, is not just one thing, and what it seeks to preserve — its autonomy, its independence, its own ways of living — does not often jibe with the interests of reactionaries.Conservatives, if their policy priorities are any indication, want to both unleash the free market and reserve a space for hierarchy and domination. But this will not happen on its own. The state must be brought to bear, not to restrain capital per se but to make it as subordinate as possible to the political right’s preferred social agenda. Play within those restraints, goes the bargain, and you can do whatever you want. Put differently, the right doesn’t have a problem with capitalism; it has a problem with who appears to be in charge of it.There is even a clear strategy at work. If you can stamp out alternative ways of being, if you can weaken labor to the point of desperation, then perhaps you can force people back into traditional families and traditional households. But no matter how hard you try, you cannot stop the dynamic movement of society. It will churn and churn and churn, until eventually the dam breaks.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Matt Gaetz friend handed 11-year prison term in US sex trafficking case

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      Matt Gaetz friend handed 11-year prison term in US sex trafficking case Former tax collector Joel Greenberg apologizes in court for ‘shameful conduct’ after pleading guilty to six federal crimes A former Florida tax collector whose arrest led to a federal investigation into the US congressman Matt Gaetz has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for sex trafficking of a minor and other offenses.Joel Greenberg, former tax collector for Seminole county, was accused of stalking a political opponent, public corruption, making fake licenses and scheming to submit false claims for a federal loan.He pleaded guilty to six federal crimes, including identity theft, stalking, wire fraud and conspiracy to bribe a public official. Prosecutors said he paid at least one girl to have sex with him and other men.Trump had dinner with two avowed antisemites. Let’s call this what it is | Francine ProseRead more“Nothing justifies my actions. My conduct is so shameful. I feel remorse for what I’ve done,” Greenberg said on Thursday before US district judge Gregory Presnell sentenced him in an Orlando courtroom.Greenberg also directly apologized to the residents of Seminole county, his family and a schoolteacher he smeared when the educator decided to run against him.Presnell said that in his 22 years as a federal judge, he had never experienced a case like Greenberg’s and “a defendant who has committed so many different types of crimes in such a short period of time”.Greenberg’s attorney had asked for leniency, saying that his client had assisted in investigations of 24 people, including eight for sex crimes. Defense attorney Fritz Scheller said that Greenberg’s cooperation had led to four federal indictments, and that he believed additional ones were expected in the coming month.Greenberg’s cooperation could play a role in an investigation into his friend Gaetz over whether he paid a 17-year-old girl for sex. Gaetz has denied the allegations and previously said they were part of an extortion plot. No charges have been brought against the Republican congressman, who represents a large part of the Florida Panhandle.Greenberg has been linked to other Florida politicians and their associates. So far, none has been implicated in the sex trafficking investigation.After the hearing, Scheller called Greenberg’s sentence just.Scheller said he was shocked that Greenberg’s cooperation had not yet resulted in more prosecutions and that Greenberg had been in communication with federal investigators in the past three months. When asked whether he thought others would be charged with sex crimes, the defense attorney said, “I do.”“There should be, and I think part of my frustration is that I have a pretty good insight into the evidence in this case,” Scheller said.TopicsFloridaUS politicsUS CongressRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Ron DeSantis book announcement a clear sign of presidential ambition

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      Ron DeSantis book announcement a clear sign of presidential ambitionFlorida governor expected to challenge Trump for Republican nod in 2024 will publish The Courage to Be Free in February In the clearest signal yet that Ron DeSantis is preparing a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, it was announced on Wednesday that the rightwing governor of Florida will publish a campaign-style book, mixing memoir with policy proposals.Republican Nikki Haley to decide on presidential bid over Christmas holidaysRead moreThe Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Renewal, will be published by Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins, on 28 February.The governor, his publisher said, will offer readers “a first-hand account from the blue-collar boy who grew up to take on Disney and Dr Fauci”.DeSantis has not announced a 2024 run, but he is widely reported to be considering one. His victory speech after a landslide re-election this month met with chants of “Two more years!”The cover of the governor’s book shows him smiling broadly in front of a US flag.With Donald Trump under fire over disappointing midterms results, looming indictments and a controversial dinner with a white supremacist, possible Republican opponents are rapidly coming into focus.Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, has released a campaign-focused memoir, seeking to balance appeals to Trump’s supporters with distancing himself from the violent end to Trump’s time in office.Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, will release a book in the new year. Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador who released a memoir in 2019, is also edging up to the starting line.Announcing DeSantis’s book, HarperCollins signaled a focus on the culture-war issues and theatrically cruel policy stunts that have propelled the governor to the front rank of potential candidates, alongside Trump in polls and sometimes ahead, prompting the former president to lash out.DeSantis clashed with Disney, a large employer in Florida, over legislation regarding the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues in schools, which was branded “don’t say gay” by critics.DeSantis’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, through which Anthony Fauci has advised two presidents, remains highly controversial. Florida has recorded nearly 83,000 deaths, third among US states in a national death toll approaching 1.1m.HarperCollins said DeSantis would “reveal” how he “accomplished more for his state” than any other “American leader”. Citing DeSantis’s graduation from Yale and Harvard, service in Iraq – as a navy lawyer – and election to Congress in 2012, the publisher said “in all these places, Ron DeSantis learned the same lesson: he didn’t want to be part of the leftist elite.”01:41“Since becoming governor of the sunshine state, he has fought – and won – battle after battle, defeating not just opposition from the political left, but a barrage of hostile media coverage,” it added.The announcement – which echoed numerous rightwing talking points on hot button social issues like Covid-19 and education – echoed DeSantis’s strident speech in Tallahassee earlier this month, after his easy win over the Democrat Charlie Crist, in which he proclaimed Florida the state “where woke goes to die”.HarperCollins also promised to “deliver something no other politician’s memoir has before: stories of victory”.That might seem to some a curious claim, given, for just one recent example, the publication just two years ago of A Promised Land, Barack Obama’s memoir of his rise to the presidency, significan legislative victories and preparations for his second presidential election win.TopicsBooksRon DeSantisUS elections 2024US politicsRepublicansFloridanewsReuse this content More