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      Republican brandishes private arsenal in House hearing on gun reform

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      Republican brandishes private arsenal in House hearing on gun reformGreg Steube displays succession of firearms he says would be banned under bill being debated in response to mass shootings A Republican congressman used a House hearing on gun control in the aftermath of multiple mass shootings to show off his own collection of guns and brandishing them via remote video link.A Democrat, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, interjected and said: “I hope the gun is not loaded.”Massie’s gun collection: ‘They shouldn’t be in the hands of civilians’Read moreBut Greg Steube replied: “I’m in my house, I can do whatever I want with my guns.”The hearing on the Protecting Our Kids Act, an omnibus bill backed by House Democrats, was held amid calls for meaningful reform after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York (10 dead); Uvalde, Texas (21 dead, including 19 children); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (four dead).Joining the hearing from his Florida home, Steube complained about proposals to ban high-capacity magazines.“The Glock 19 was the highest-sold handgun in the United States,” he said. “It comes with a 15-round magazine. That gun would be banned.”Then he held up a weapon.“Right in front of you I have a Sig Sauer P226. Comes with a 21-round magazine. This gun would be banned. Here’s a 12-round magazine. This magazine would be banned under this current bill, it doesn’t fit as this gun was made for [a] 21-round magazine. This gun would be banned under this bill.”He showed another gun.“Here’s a Sig Sauer P320. It takes a 20-round magazine. Here’s a 12-round magazine that would be banned. It doesn’t fit. Because it would be banned. This gun would be banned under this bill.”And another.“Here’s a gun I carry every single day to protect myself, my family, my wife, my home. This is an XL Sig Sauer P365, comes with a 15-round magazine. Here’s a seven-round magazine which would be less than what would be lawful under this bill … it doesn’t fit. So this gun would be banned.”Steube is a former US army lawyer who supported Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. He voted against awarding the congressional gold medal to police officers who defended the Capitol from rioters on 6 January 2021.On Thursday, he refused requests to yield from the Democratic committee chair, Jerry Nadler of New York.The shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde and Tulsa happened within two weeks. More mass shootings, widely defined as events in which four or more people not including the shooter are injured or killed, occurred around the US during the Memorial Day weekend.The Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit, says there have been 232 mass shootings in the US this year – substantially more than one a day.Republicans remain opposed to gun reform, although senators from both parties have said talks initiated after the Uvalde shooting have shown promise.On Thursday, two Democrats on the House judiciary committee, Sylvia Garcia of Texas and Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, read the names of the 19 children killed in Uvalde.Garcia argued Republicans were “complicit” in such mass shootings because they have refused to countenance gun reform.Her voice shaking, Dean asked: “Where is their outrage over the slaughter of 19 fourth-graders and their two teachers? Why don’t they feel an urgency to do something?“This is on our watch.”TopicsUS gun controlHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Peter Navarro, Former Trump Aide, Gets Grand Jury Subpoena in Jan. 6 Inquiry

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      The subpoena, the latest indication of an expanding inquiry by federal prosecutors, seeks Mr. Navarro’s testimony and any records he has related to the attack on the Capitol last year.Peter Navarro, who as a White House adviser to President Donald J. Trump worked to keep Mr. Trump in office after his defeat in the 2020 election, disclosed on Monday that he has been summoned to testify on Thursday to a federal grand jury and to provide prosecutors with any records he has related to the attack on the Capitol last year, including “any communications” with Mr. Trump.The subpoena to Mr. Navarro — which he said the F.B.I. served at his house last week — seeks his testimony about materials related to the buildup to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and signals that the Justice Department investigation may be progressing to include activities of people in the White House.Mr. Navarro revealed the existence of the subpoena in a draft of a lawsuit he said he is preparing to file against the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Matthew M. Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.Mr. Navarro, who plans to represent himself in the suit, is hoping to persuade a federal judge to block the subpoena, which he calls the “fruit of the poisonous tree.”The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment.The grand jury’s subpoena, Mr. Navarro said, builds on a separate subpoena issued to him in February by the committee. That subpoena sought documents and testimony about an effort to overturn the election nicknamed the “Green Bay Sweep,” and a Jan. 2, 2021, call that Mr. Navarro participated in with Mr. Trump and his lawyers in which they attempted to persuade hundreds of state lawmakers to join the effort.Mr. Navarro has refused to cooperate with the committee. He was found in contempt of Congress, and the House referred the contempt case to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. In his draft lawsuit, he called the committee’s subpoena “illegal and unenforceable.”Mr. Navarro said the grand jury subpoena was directly related to the contempt of Congress referral. Asked if he planned to comply and appear on Thursday to testify, Mr. Navarro responded, “T.B.D.”The subpoena is the latest sign the Justice Department’s investigation into the attack has moved beyond the pro-Trump rioters who stormed the Capitol. Federal prosectors have charged more than 800 people in connection with the attack.The subpoena sent last week to Mr. Navarro is the first known to have been issued in connection to the department’s Jan. 6 investigations to someone who worked in the Trump White House. But it follows others issued to people connected to various strands of the sprawling investigation of the Capitol attack and its prelude.In April, Ali Alexander, a prominent “Stop the Steal” organizer, revealed that he had been served with his own grand jury subpoena, asking for records about people who organized, spoke at or provided security for pro-Trump rallies in Washington after the election, including Mr. Trump’s incendiary event near the White House on Jan. 6.Mr. Alexander’s subpoena also sought records about members of the executive or legislative branches who may have helped to plan or execute the rallies, or who tried to “obstruct, influence, impede or delay” the certification of the 2020 presidential election.Last week, word emerged that the same grand jury, sitting in Washington, had more recently issued a different set of subpoenas requesting information about the role that a group of lawyers close to Mr. Trump may have had played in a plan create alternate slates of pro-Trump electors in key swing states that were won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.The lawyers named in the subpoena included Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani; Jenna Ellis, who worked with Mr. Giuliani; John Eastman, one of the former president’s chief legal advisers during the postelection period; and Kenneth Chesebro, who wrote a pair of memos laying out the details of the plan.Those subpoenas also requested information about any members of the Trump campaign who may been involved with the alternate elector scheme and about several Republican officials in Georgia who took part in it, including David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.Mr. Navarro’s subpoena, by his own account, was issued by a different grand jury.In the draft of the suit he said he intends to file, he argues that only Mr. Trump can authorize him to testify. He asks a judge to instruct Mr. Graves, the U.S. attorney in Washington, to negotiate his appearance with Mr. Trump. Mr. Navarro cites Mr. Trump’s invocation of executive privilege over materials related to the attack on the Capitol.“The executive privilege invoked by President Trump is not mine or Joe Biden’s to waive,” Mr. Navarro writes. “Rather, as with the committee, the U.S. attorney has constitutional and due process obligations to negotiate my appearance.”An effort by Mr. Trump to block release of White House materials related to the Jan. 6 attack on the grounds of executive privilege was rejected by a federal appeals court in January, and the Supreme Court denied Mr. Trump’s request for a stay of the decision.Mr. Navarro, who helped coordinate the Trump administration’s pandemic response through his role overseeing the Defense Production Act, has insisted that the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not part of the plans he backed, which he said included having Vice President Mike Pence reject electors for Mr. Biden when Congress met in a joint session to formally count them.In a book, Mr. Navarro wrote that the idea for the “Green Bay Sweep” was for Mr. Pence to be the “quarterback” of the plan and “put certification of the election on ice for at least another several weeks while Congress and the various state legislatures involved investigate all of the fraud and election irregularities.”Mr. Navarro also wrote a 36-page report claiming election fraud as part of what he called an “Immaculate Deception.” In an interview with The New York Times, he said he relied on “thousands of affidavits” from Mr. Giuliani, and Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York police commissioner, to help produce the report, which claimed there “may well have been a coordinated strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence ticket.”There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and the Jan. 6 committee described the claims in Mr. Navarro’s report as having been “discredited in public reporting, by state officials and courts.”Mr. Navarro said that he made sure Republican members of Congress received a copy of his report and that more than 100 members of Congress had signed on to the plans. (Ultimately, 147 Republican members of Congress objected to certifying at least one state for Mr. Biden.)An aide to Mr. Navarro was also in contact with a group of Trump allies who were pushing for the former president to order the seizure of voting machines. More

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      Maloney vs. Nadler? New York Must Pick a Side (East or West)

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      New congressional lines have put two stalwart Manhattan Democrats on a collision course in the Aug. 23 primary. Barney Greengrass is staying neutral.As he sat in the shade of Riverside Park on a sparkling recent weekday morning in Manhattan, Representative Jerrold Nadler tried to make sense of how two powerful allies suddenly found themselves at war.A court-ordered redrawing of New York’s congressional district lines had combined the East and West Sides of Manhattan into a single district for the first time since World War II, putting Mr. Nadler and Representative Carolyn Maloney, a longtime colleague, on a potentially disastrous collision course in the Aug. 23 Democratic primary.Attempts to broker a peace settlement were made, but Mr. Nadler, over a chilled Diet Coke, acknowledged that they were somewhat halfhearted.He recalled telling Ms. Maloney in a private conversation on the House floor in Washington a few days earlier that he would win, suggesting she run for a neighboring seat.“She said basically the opposite, and so it was an impasse,” Mr. Nadler said, “and we left it at that.”On an island known for Democratic infighting, Mr. Nadler, 74, and Ms. Maloney, 76, have managed to coexist more or less peacefully for three decades.They built parallel political machines and accumulated important committee chairmanships. Along the way, they had become powerful stalwarts — if not political mascots — in their districts: Ms. Maloney, a pathbreaking feminist and the widow of an investment banker, represents an East Side district so wealthy it was once christened the silk-stocking district; Mr. Nadler, a proudly opinionated old-school progressive, holds down the West Side.But their long truce came to a shattering end last week, when a state court imposed a significant revision on New York’s congressional map. The new lines have roiled Democrats across the state, but perhaps nowhere has the change been more disruptive than Manhattan.“I’d say it’s sad,” Ms. Maloney said in an interview near her Upper East Side home. “It’s sad for the city.”The primary matchup between Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney may be one of the most bruising political spectacles in living memory, a crosstown clash between two respected party elders in the twilight of their careers. And it will play out in one of the most politically influential pockets of the United States — home to financiers, media titans and entertainers, and the source of millions of dollars in campaign donations each election cycle.Not since Bella Abzug challenged fellow West Side representative William Fitts Ryan in a 1972 race pitting two liberal icons against each other has New York City faced a primary contest with the potential to be quite so fraught.“No one ever forgot that,” Harold Holzer, a historian and former aide to Ms. Abzug, said of the primary contest. “Maybe this will be more heartbreaking than it is infuriating. But for those who lived through the first one and remained pained by it for years, it’s history repeating itself.”Representative William Fitts Ryan beat Representative Bella S. Abzug in a 1972 primary. He died two months later.Stanley Wolfson/World Telegram & Sun, via Library of CongressAfter Mr. Ryan’s death, Ms. Abzug defeated his wife to retain a seat in the House.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesAnd yet neither Mr. Nadler nor Ms. Maloney has wasted any time working the phones to pressure union leaders, old political allies and wealthy donors — many of whom the two have shared for years — to pick sides.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.Allies of Ms. Maloney whispered doubts about Mr. Nadler’s health. (His aides say his health is good.) Mr. Nadler’s associates circulated old news articles about Ms. Maloney’s obsession with pandas, and suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is officially neutral in the race, really preferred him.For all their superficial differences, Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney have had broadly similar career arcs.Both came up through local New York City politics in the 1970s. Mr. Nadler was a precocious young lawyer who started a group of self-styled reformers, the West Side Kids, and won a State Assembly seat in 1976. Ms. Maloney, a former teacher, was a top legislative aide in Albany before winning a City Council seat in 1982. She was the first Council member to give birth while in office and the first to introduce legislation giving rights to same-sex couples.They arrived in Congress within two months of each other in the early 1990s. Mr. Nadler inherited his safely Democratic West Side seat when the incumbent died of a heart attack on the eve of the primary. Ms. Maloney had to work harder for hers, upsetting a long-serving liberal Republican, Bill Green, to win the East Side seat once held by Mayors John V. Lindsay and Edward I. Koch.Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney are among the House’s most progressive members and both lead prestigious committees. Ms. Maloney is the chair of the Oversight and Reform Committee, which most recently oversaw an overhaul of the Postal Service. Mr. Nadler leads the Judiciary Committee, a role that earned him national attention during President Donald J. Trump’s two impeachments.Neither lawmaker grew up in Manhattan. Ms. Maloney is from Greensboro, N.C. Mr. Nadler, the son of a one-time chicken farmer, was mostly raised in Brooklyn. Both have strongly rebuffed pleas to retire.“I’ve never been more effective,” Ms. Maloney said.Mr. Nadler, the city’s only remaining Jewish congressman, was even more direct: “No. No. No. No. No. No.”Ms. Maloney, center, at a 1992 reception for her and other incoming female House members.Laura Patterson/CQ Roll Call, via Getty ImagesMr. Nadler campaigning in the Bensonhurst section in 1994, when the area was in his district.Donna Dietrich/Newsday, via Getty ImagesMs. Maloney enters the contest with an apparent, if slight, demographic edge: She already represents about 60 percent of the voters in the new district. The spread narrows among Democratic primary voters, according to data complied by the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center.Political analysts are warning that the outcome may depend on who casts ballots in a primary in late August, when many residents of the Upper East and West Sides decamp to the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley.A third Democrat, Suraj Patel, is also running. His premise is that it is time to give a younger generation a chance to lead. He came within four percentage points of beating Ms. Maloney in the primary two years ago. (Mr. Nadler, by contrast, has not had a close election in nearly 50 years.)“If you are satisfied with the state of New York, the country or the Democratic Party, they are your candidates,” Mr. Patel, 38 said.For now, predictions about which candidate will win appear to correlate with proximity to the Hudson and East Rivers.“The West Side votes heavily, that’s to our advantage,” said Gale Brewer, a former Manhattan borough president who now represents the area on the City Council. She added of Mr. Nadler, whom she is backing: “He’s got a brain that is frightening.”Rebecca A. Seawright, an assemblywoman from the Upper East Side supporting Ms. Maloney, said that the congresswoman has “endless energy” and an innate understanding of women’s priorities that her allies believe will resonate with voters in a year when the Supreme Court may strike down Roe v. Wade.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Kevin McCarthy refuses to comply with House Capitol attack panel subpoena

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      Kevin McCarthy refuses to comply with House Capitol attack panel subpoenaThe Republican minority leader sent an 11-page letter appearing to demand materials from the committee related to his questioning Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, indicated on Friday to the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack that he would not cooperate with a subpoena unless he could review deposition topics and the legal rationale justifying the request.The California congressman’s response adopts an adversarial position similar to other subpoenaed Republican Congress members, and it sets a conundrum for the panel over whether to entertain the requests that also challenge the January 6 inquiry’s legitimacy.McCarthy appeared to tell the select committee in an 11-page letter through his lawyer that he would not consider complying with the subpoena until House investigators turned over materials that would reveal what the panel intended to use in questioning ahead of a deposition.Rudy Giuliani stonewalls Capitol attack investigators during lengthy depositionRead moreThe House minority leader also asked the panel to give him internal analyses about the constitutional and legal rationales justifying the subpoena, and whether the panel would adhere to one-hour questioning between majority and minority counsel, according to the letter.McCarthy’s references to the minority counsel amounted to a thinly veiled attack at the investigation, which Republicans have called illegitimate because the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, refused last year to appoint some of McCarthy’s picks for the Republican minority.The accusations, however, are to some degree disingenuous: it was McCarthy who pulled all Republican participation, incensed at Pelosi’s refusals, rather than name different members. Pelosi later added Republican congressmembers Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to the panel.McCarthy’s requests also appeared phrased in a manner expecting the select committee to decline his requests, with the letter accusing the panel of issuing unprecedented subpoenas to five House Republicans in an illegal and unconstitutional manner.“The select committee is clearly not acting within the confines of any legislative purpose,” the letter said. “It is unclear how the select committee believes it is operating within the bounds of law or even within the confines of any legislative purpose.”The response from McCarthy largely mirrored the response from Ohio congressman Jim Jordan on Wednesday. In the letter, obtained by the Guardian, Jordan said he would consider complying only if the panel shared material that put him under scrutiny.Like with Jordan, it was not immediately clear how McCarthy might act if the select committee refused his requests. The investigation’s standard operating procedure to date has been not to share such materials with witnesses, according to a source familiar with the matter.The panel’s next move could have significant ramifications for both its inquiry and Congress. If the panel refused the request and the five subpoenaed House Republicans in turn declined to cooperate, it could leave large unanswered questions about the Capitol attack.But it could also set a problematic precedent for Republicans themselves, who might like the idea of subpoenaing Democrats in partisan investigations should the GOP take control of the House – as Capitol Hill widely expects – after the 2022 midterm elections.A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment.The resistance from McCarthy came as he and Jordan denounced the investigation as a “kangaroo court” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “For House Republican leaders to agree to participate in this political stunt would change the House forever,” they wrote.With McCarthy’s refusal to appear for a deposition without first receiving materials from the select committee, at least four of the five Republicans subpoenaed to testify about their roles in the events of 6 January have now declined to comply without some sort of negotiation.The current chairman of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, Scott Perry, and its previous chairman, Andy Biggs, have both sent letters to the panel refusing to cooperate, CNN reported. It was not clear whether the fifth Republican, Mo Brooks, would comply.TopicsUS Capitol attackRepublicansHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Kevin McCarthy refuses to comply with January 6 attack panel subpoena

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      Kevin McCarthy refuses to comply with January 6 attack panel subpoenaThe Republican minority leader sent an 11-page letter appearing to demand materials from the committee related to his questioning Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, indicated on Friday to the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack that he would not cooperate with a subpoena unless he could review deposition topics and the legal rationale justifying the request.The California congressman’s response adopts an adversarial position similar to other subpoenaed Republican Congress members, and it sets a conundrum for the panel over whether to entertain the requests that also challenge the January 6 inquiry’s legitimacy.McCarthy appeared to tell the select committee in an 11-page letter through his lawyer that he would not consider complying with the subpoena until House investigators turned over materials that would reveal what the panel intended to use in questioning ahead of a deposition.Rudy Giuliani stonewalls Capitol attack investigators during lengthy depositionRead moreThe House minority leader also asked the panel to give him internal analyses about the constitutional and legal rationales justifying the subpoena, and whether the panel would adhere to one-hour questioning between majority and minority counsel, according to the letter.McCarthy’s references to the minority counsel amounted to a thinly veiled attack at the investigation, which Republicans have called illegitimate because the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, refused last year to appoint some of McCarthy’s picks for the Republican minority.The accusations, however, are to some degree disingenuous: it was McCarthy who pulled all Republican participation, incensed at Pelosi’s refusals, rather than name different members. Pelosi later added Republican congressmembers Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to the panel.McCarthy’s requests also appeared phrased in a manner expecting the select committee to decline his requests, with the letter accusing the panel of issuing unprecedented subpoenas to five House Republicans in an illegal and unconstitutional manner.“The select committee is clearly not acting within the confines of any legislative purpose,” the letter said. “It is unclear how the select committee believes it is operating within the bounds of law or even within the confines of any legislative purpose.”The response from McCarthy largely mirrored the response from Ohio congressman Jim Jordan on Wednesday. In the letter, obtained by the Guardian, Jordan said he would consider complying only if the panel shared material that put him under scrutiny.Like with Jordan, it was not immediately clear how McCarthy might act if the select committee refused his requests. The investigation’s standard operating procedure to date has been not to share such materials with witnesses, according to a source familiar with the matter.The panel’s next move could have significant ramifications for both its inquiry and Congress. If the panel refused the request and the five subpoenaed House Republicans in turn declined to cooperate, it could leave large unanswered questions about the Capitol attack.But it could also set a problematic precedent for Republicans themselves, who might like the idea of subpoenaing Democrats in partisan investigations should the GOP take control of the House – as Capitol Hill widely expects – after the 2022 midterm elections.A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment.The resistance from McCarthy came as he and Jordan denounced the investigation as a “kangaroo court” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “For House Republican leaders to agree to participate in this political stunt would change the House forever,” they wrote.With McCarthy’s refusal to appear for a deposition without first receiving materials from the select committee, at least four of the five Republicans subpoenaed to testify about their roles in the events of 6 January have now declined to comply without some sort of negotiation.The current chairman of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, Scott Perry, and its previous chairman, Andy Biggs, have both sent letters to the panel refusing to cooperate, CNN reported. It was not clear whether the fifth Republican, Mo Brooks, would comply.TopicsUS Capitol attackRepublicansHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Bill de Blasio Knows He Isn’t Loved

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      New York’s former mayor is running for Congress in a newly drawn district, where distaste for him is epic. He’s sure he can change that.A few days after Bill de Blasio announced that he was running for Congress — a comparatively humble ambition when you think about his attempt at the presidency and his flirtation with the idea that he might govern the state of New York — I sat down for breakfast with him, mostly to ask: Why?We were in a nearly empty diner in Park Slope, where the former mayor has lived since the early 1990s and where theoretically affections for him should run high. Not too long into our conversation, a guy who appeared to be in his 30s, wearing a knit cap, walked passed a few feet away and took out his phone to get a picture. It seemed as if he was about to voice admiration or maybe ask for a photo. Instead he looked directly at Mr. de Blasio, informing him that he was “the worst mayor New York has ever had.”The moment all too perfectly distilled the problem that Mr. de Blasio faces: He seems to have little understanding of how he is perceived, even in a neighborhood he knows intimately, where he once served on the local school board and the City Council. But in fact, he has every understanding.“When it comes to being unpopular, I’m unfortunately somewhat of an expert,” he wrote in an essay earlier this month. The man who served two terms as the mayor of the nation’s biggest city, proudly indifferent to what you thought of him, now wants you to know that the bubble of City Hall was oppressive, that he found it hard to be his authentic self and that, as he put it to me, “the person you’re seeing right now is the person I am.”The person I was seeing was lighthearted and amiable. Bill de Blasio 2.0 is a rapid-response politician, a man seemingly engaged in self-reflection and comfortable with regret. Could we talk about his latest political gambit? “Sure,” he quickly wrote back, when I got in touch. We could meet in person — in fact that was his preference — and we could share a meal. Subsequent texts included exclamation points.While a journalist and a political candidate sitting down to egg-white omelets is not ordinarily noteworthy, the previous version of Bill de Blasio, the one we last checked in with at the end of the year when he was polling behind even the disgraced Andrew Cuomo, was as likely to offer himself to the press as Anna Wintour would be to mow your lawn.Despite the success of Mr. de Blasio’s major initiatives — universal prekindergarten, paid sick leave — the hallmark of his mayoralty was his talent for alienating people who were inclined to like him and largely agreed with his policymaking. His defining imperiousness bred distaste across constituencies. Almost nowhere was that distaste felt more viscerally than in brownstone Brooklyn, which, in addition to much of downtown Manhattan, makes up a large swath of the newly outlined 10th District, lending a kind of masochism to his current effort.On the way home from our breakfast, a few miles away but still within the territory he would represent, I ran into a neighbor in Brooklyn Heights who delivered a more measured appraisal than the one I witnessed two hours earlier at the diner, an evaluation that included the prospect that she would “almost vote for a Republican over Bill de Blasio.”Like so many others in the area, she had been an early supporter. We stood on a corner for about 10 minutes as she went through her grievances, beginning with Mr. de Blasio’s abandonment of a campaign promise to save Long Island College Hospital from real-estate developers and ending with his drive to incentivize Covid vaccinations in low-income neighborhoods — where resistance was a matter of entrenched distrust — with the promise of free Shake Shack French fries.Mr. de Blasio believes his last year in office was his most successful, and that his administration’s management of the pandemic, one that became a model for other cites, will matter to voters. Leaving aside that parents of schoolchildren who were stuck at home with them for much of last year may well feel differently, in the current news cycle, eight or 10 months ago can feel like a quarter-century; emotion can stick forever. “I came across as aloof,” the former mayor told me, understating things. “I needed to help people see me.”In many ways, Mr. de Blasio has spent the past five months since he left office living the creative-class Brooklynite fantasy — renovating a townhouse, writing, delivering commentary on “Morning Joe.” He thought about teaching. But none of this called to him for the long term. Then on Monday, May 16, after lunch with a friend in Greenwich Village — you don’t get to linger over a meal when you are governing eight million people — he arrived home to find emails about the newly created district, and he knew what he would do next. Little deliberation was necessary. “It was sweet to be connected to family,’’ he said of his brief reprieve from politics. “The writing was rewarding, but it pales in comparison to public service.”In the past, a seat in the House of Representatives has been a steppingstone to the mayoralty of New York and not an Act II. John Lindsay and Ed Koch both served in Congress before they managed City Hall. The precedent for going in the other direction is not glorious. Fernando Wood returned to Congress after his three-term tenure as mayor in the mid-19th century; he was known as a corrupt autocrat and Confederate sympathizer.The idea of Bill de Blasio, at 61, having held one of the most prestigious and challenging political offices available to mankind, then going to Washington as a freshman congressman, living with fellow representatives a generation younger in a three-bedroom rental in Dupont Circle, wondering whose turn it is to bring home a half-gallon of oat milk, is absurd enough to leave you wondering if a reality show isn’t the actual play. It is not. He wants to provide a voice for an urban agenda otherwise lacking in the federal government.That he believes he can build a winning coalition, which he has successfully done before, to get there overlooks certain difficult truths. In addition to all the disgruntled white professional-class voters he would represent, the new district also includes Chinatown and Sunset Park, where predominantly Asian voters, many low-income, did not take well to the former mayor’s position on ending the entrance exam for specialized high schools and his wish to phase out gifted and talented programs.When I asked him about this, he said that he did not fully realize the special place these schools and classes held in the culture. “I should have engaged leaders from the Asian community,” he told me. “I’m upset because I naïvely assumed there would be consensus.”It is hard to imagine living in New York for decades, driving past so many test-prep centers in Queens and not fully appreciating the vaunted status schools like Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech — which Mr. de Blasio’s son, Dante, attended — hold in these communities.There is also the matter of who else will be entering the race, in a constellation of neighborhoods where voter-information levels are unusually high and name recognition might not matter much. Mondaire Jones, who serves in another district, grew up in Section 8 housing and made his way to Stanford and Harvard, has also announced his candidacy. Should Daniel Goldman enter the field, he is likely to raise a lot of money based on his popularity as the House Democrats’ lead counsel during the first Trump impeachment proceedings and the fact that he lives in TriBeCa. Mr. de Blasio is energized for a summer of knocking on doors. More

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      Rudy Giuliani stonewalls Capitol attack investigators during lengthy deposition

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      Rudy Giuliani stonewalls Capitol attack investigators during lengthy depositionTrump lawyer testified to panel Friday but declined to discuss involvement of Republicans in bid to overturn election Donald Trump’s onetime attorney Rudy Giuliani testified to the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack at length on Friday but declined to discuss the involvement of congressional Republicans in efforts to overturn the 2020 election result, according to sources familiar with the matter.The move by Giuliani to refuse to give insight into Republican involvement could mean his appearance only marginally advanced the inquiry into his ploy to have the then vice-president, Mike Pence, unlawfully keep Trump in office after he lost to Joe Biden.However, he did potentially pique the committee’s interest by discussing two notable meetings at the White House involving Trump that took place just weeks before the Capitol insurrection.‘You are a jackass’: video of Rudy Giuliani rant at Israel parade goes viralRead moreGiuliani asserted privilege and the work-product doctrine to decline to respond when asked to detail the roles played by House and Senate Republicans in the scheme to stop Congress’s certification of Biden’s victory on 6 January 2021, the sources said.The panel was not expecting Giuliani to divulge damning information against Trump, since committee counsel had agreed with Giuliani in advance that he should not have to violate legitimate claims of privilege he might have as the former president’s attorney.But Giuliani’s refusal to engage with questions about House and Senate Republicans frustrated the select committee, the sources said, not least because Giuliani personally urged them to object to Biden’s victory to delay its certification.One thing that the former president’s attorney did discuss – at length – was a contentious Oval Office meeting on 18 December 2020, the sources said, when the former Trump campaign lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell lobbied Trump to authorize the seizure of voting machines and appoint her special counsel to investigate election fraud.The former president did not advance Powell’s proposal, the Guardian has previously reported, after Giuliani cut off her access to Trump and instead proposed at a separate White House meeting with congressional Republicans on 21 December 2020 to have Pence help return Trump to office.Giuliani spent the remainder of the virtual deposition – conducted by investigative counsel and the select committee members Peter Aguilar, Jamie Raskin and Zoe Lofgren – arguing about the debunked claims of election fraud which underpinned Trump’s allies’ push to return him to power, the sources said.The extended back-and-forth via Cisco Webex video conference centered on the select committee’s lawyers investigating whether Giuliani could truly believe the claims of election fraud even though the justice department found no such evidence, the sources said.Giuliani told the select committee that he disagreed with the justice department and that the evidence for election fraud was incontrovertible, the sources said, seemingly making the case that his belief meant he could not have acted with criminal intent to obstruct Congress.The question of what Giuliani truly believed extends to Trump, former US attorney Joyce Vance said.As Vance put it: “What prosecutors are driving at here is proof Trump knew or should have known he had lost the election. His state of mind is where a prosecution would rise or fall.”Giuliani’s lawyer declined to comment on the deposition.Rudy Giuliani backs out of interview with Capitol attack committeeRead moreGiuliani’s transcribed deposition, which was conducted under oath and bisected by a break during which he hosted his hour-long afternoon radio show, came a fortnight after he abruptly pulled out of a scheduled interview because the panel refused to allow him to video the session.He later dropped his objection and rescheduled his appearance after the select committee implicitly threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena issued earlier this year demanding documents and testimony, an order which he immediately denounced as illegal.Giuliani made a formal complaint at the start of the deposition challenging the legality of the panel and the subpoena, the sources said. Earlier, he shared some documents with House investigators but did not create a “privilege log” of documents he was withholding, as is standard, the sources said.TopicsRudy GiulianiUS Capitol attackUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesnewsReuse this content More

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      Giuliani Meets With Jan. 6 Committee for Over 7 Hours

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      The onetime Trump lawyer was central to the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — Rudolph W. Giuliani, who helped lead President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election as his personal lawyer, sat on Friday for a lengthy interview with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to people familiar with the closed-door interview.Mr. Giuliani’s interview, which was virtual, lasted for more than seven hours, the people said. The interview was transcribed, and he was under oath. He took a break in the middle of it to host his hourlong afternoon radio show.It was unclear what Mr. Giuliani told the committee, but his centrality to Mr. Trump’s various attempts to subvert the election made him a potentially pivotal witness for the panel, with knowledge of details about interactions with members of Congress and others involved in the plans.Mr. Giuliani, whose interview was reported earlier by CNN, had negotiated with the panel about testifying for months, and he reached an agreement to speak about matters other than his conversations with Mr. Trump or any other topic he believed was covered by attorney-client privilege.Earlier this month, he abruptly pulled out of a scheduled interview with the committee after the panel refused to let him record the session. He later dropped that objection and agreed to testify after the panel threatened to use its “enforcement options,” an implied referral to the Justice Department for criminal contempt of Congress, the people said.The committee has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and has recommended criminal contempt of Congress charges against four of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, who have refused to cooperate fully.Mr. Giuliani was one of the last major witnesses the committee had pressed to interview in the final weeks before it begins holding public hearings in June. Others include more than a half-dozen Republican members of Congress, such as Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader.The panel has not yet made final decisions about whether to call Mr. Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence or Virginia Thomas, a right-wing activist who pushed to overturn the 2020 election and who is the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. The chairman of the panel, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, recently indicated the committee might not ultimately summon any of the three.Mr. Giuliani was a key figure in Mr. Trump’s attempts to stave off electoral defeat and was involved in plans to disrupt the normal workings of the Electoral College by persuading lawmakers in contested swing states to draw up alternate slates of electors showing Mr. Trump as victorious in states actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Giuliani was also instrumental in vetting a plan to use the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines and examine the data housed inside them for supposed evidence of fraud. At Mr. Trump’s direction, Mr. Giuliani asked a top homeland security official if the department could legally take control of the machines — a notion the official shot down. Mr. Giuliani later opposed an even more explosive proposal to have the military seize the machines.Mr. Giuliani was subpoenaed with other members of a legal team that billed itself as an “elite strike force” and pursued a set of lawsuits on behalf of Mr. Trump in which they promulgated conspiracy theories and made unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the election.The committee’s subpoena sought all documents that Mr. Giuliani had detailing the pressure campaign that he and other Trump allies initiated targeting state officials, the seizure of voting machines, contact with members of Congress, any evidence to support the conspiracy theories he pushed and any arrangements for his fees.On Jan. 6, speaking to a crowd of Trump supporters before a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol, Mr. Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” Later, after the building was under siege, both he and Mr. Trump called lawmakers in an attempt to delay the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory. More