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    Trump makes last effort to keep hidden January 6 case evidence before election

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    Donald Trump’s lawyers made a last-ditch effort on Tuesday to limit the amount of evidence that could become public that special counsel prosecutors collected during their criminal investigation into the former US president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The prosecutors last week filed under seal a brief, which may be as long as 180 pages, to presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan that defends the viability of the charges against Trump even after the US supreme court’s presidential immunity ruling.Simultaneously, the prosecutors asked the judge to allow them to file a public version of the secret brief with quotations and references to grand jury testimony from some of Trump’s closest aides, such as his former chief of staff, and his former vice-president, Mike Pence.To protect the integrity of proceedings and to protect lesser-known witnesses, the prosecutors said they intended in their public filing to redact specific names and use job titles to give context to the information being referenced.The kinds of identifiers being proposed by prosecutors include, according to their filing: “Campaign Manager”, “Arizona’s Governor”, “Senior Campaign Advisor”, “executive assistant”, “the Defendant’s Chief of Staff”, “Georgia Attorney General” and “Chairwoman of the Republican National Committee”.View image in fullscreenOn Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers bitterly complained that the redactions were so specific that it would make public identification of the witnesses easy, accusing prosecutors of trying to damage Trump’s presidential campaign with fewer than five weeks until election day.“In numerous instances, the redactions and pseudonyms proposed by the Special Counsel’s Office fail to meaningfully mitigate the privacy and safety issues the Office references in the Motion and has previously discussed at length,” the Trump lawyers wrote.Trump’s lawyers also claimed that prosecutors were adopting a double standard over redactions: in the case they brought against Trump in Florida over his retention of classified documents, which has since been dismissed, prosecutors pushed for no identifying information whatsoever.“Use of functionally impotent redactions is flatly inconsistent with the Office’s approach to other filings here and in the Southern District of Florida, where they sought to anonymize even ‘Ancillary Names’ based on privacy concerns,” the Trump lawyers wrote.The situation reflects a role reversal for Trump and the special counsel. When it was more expedient for Trump to have witnesses identified in the documents case, so they could complain about the case in public, Trump pushed for looser redactions.But now that it is against Trump’s interests to have the identities of former officials who testified against him become public, Trump has sought for more restrictive redactions that would make public scrutiny of his plot to overturn the 2020 election harder.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe special counsel’s filing and Trump’s objections come in the aftermath of the supreme court conferring broad immunity from criminal prosecutions to former presidents for actions that related to their official duties in office.As part of the decision, the court’s conservative supermajority ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could remain and proceed to trial.The special counsel’s opening brief was the first round of that process that could take months to resolve and involve hearings to decide what allegations should be kept. Much of the evidence Smith uses to make his case come from sensitive sources, such as grand jury testimony, which are secret.Chutkan has the power to decide how much of the indictment should be kept as well as how much of the special counsel’s evidence can be unsealed to make her determination, although much of the evidence became public knowledge during the House January 6 committee’s hearings two years ago. More

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      The Alito flag scandal and the supreme court’s ethics problem – podcast

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      Reports surfaced a few weeks ago that the supreme court justice Samuel Alito had flown an upside-down US flag outside his home days after insurrectionists flew similar flags when they stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Alito has blamed his wife, saying he wanted her to take down the flag down after a dispute with neighbours.
      Democrats want Alito to recuse himself from any supreme court case involving 6 January, but he has refused to do so. Jonathan Freedland speaks to Amanda Marcotte of Salon about whether this latest scandal is proof that the supreme court is incapable of being unbiased

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      Ex-Trump adviser must report to prison on 19 March for defying January 6 panel

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      Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro must report to prison on 19 March to begin a four-month sentence for defying the House January 6 committee, his lawyers said.Navarro, 74, is an economist turned trade adviser who became closely involved in attempts to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election, attempts that culminated in the deadly attack on Congress of 6 January 2021.Navarro openly boasted of his role in an election subversion plot he called the “Green Bay Sweep”. The House committee subpoenaed him. He refused to co-operate, claiming executive privilege covered interactions with Trump as president.Held in contempt by the House, Navarro was charged by the Department of Justice and found guilty last September. He was sentenced in January this year.“You are not a victim, you are not the object of a political prosecution,” the judge in the case said then. “These are circumstances of your own making.”Navarro asked to be spared jail while appealing his sentence, a request the judge denied.Late on Sunday, an attorney for Navarro said in court papers he had been “ordered to report to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, FCI Miami, on or before 2pm ET on March 19, 2024”.The lawyer referred to his client as “Dr Navarro”, highlighting an academic career which saw Navarro rise to prominence as a China hawk but also be exposed for extensively quoting a source, Ron Vara, that turned out to be an anagram of his own name.The lawyer wrote: “Dr Navarro respectfully reiterates his request for an administrative stay … should this court deny Dr Navarro’s motion, he respectfully requests an administrative stay so as to permit the supreme court review of this court’s denial.”The filing said Navarro was still citing executive privilege as reason not to comply with Congress. The justice department has called his arguments “meritless”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf Navarro does report to prison, he will be the most senior aide to Trump – who faces 91 criminal charges himself – yet to sit behind bars.The former Trump campaign chair and White Houses strategist Steve Bannon was given his own four-month sentence for contempt of Congress, for refusing to co-operate with the January 6 committee.A fedeal court is considering Bannon’s appeal. More

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      Liz Cheney: potential Trump running mate Elise Stefanik is ‘a total crackpot’

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      Elise Stefanik of New York, a top House Republican and a leading contender to be Donald Trump’s presidential running mate, is “a total crackpot”, the former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney said.Cheney threw the barb on Tuesday, in response to a statement in which Stefanik called the House January 6 committee on which Cheney was vice-chair “illegitimate and unconstitutional” and claimed it “illegally deleted records”.Cheney said: “This is what Elise Stefanik⁩ said, in a rare moment of honesty, about the … attack on our Capitol.”Cheney posted Stefanik’s statement from 6 January 2021, the day Trump supporters stormed Congress after he told them to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden, a riot now linked to nine deaths; she added: “One day she will have to explain how and why she morphed into a total crackpot. History, and our children, deserve to know.”In her original January 6 statement, Stefanik lamented “truly a tragic day for America” and “condemn[ed] the dangerous violence and destruction that occurred today”. The perpetrators, she said, “must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”.Stefanik also “prayed” that “colleagues on both sides of the aisle, their staffs, and all Americans … remain safe”, and thanked police, the national guard and Capitol staffers for “protecting the People’s House and the American people”.Trump was impeached for inciting the riot, with the support of 10 House Republicans, but acquitted at trial in the Senate when only seven Republicans voted to convict. He currently faces 91 criminal charges – 17 for election subversion – as well as civil suits and attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection. Regardless, he dominates presidential primary polling.Stefanik is chair of the House Republican conference, the fourth-ranking Republican position.Earlier this month, she declined to commit to certifying the 2024 election and told NBC she had “concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages”, referring to the more than 1,200 people arrested over the riot, of whom hundreds have been convicted.Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who sat with Cheney on the House January 6 committee, put the “hostages” remark down to Stefanik’s ambition.“Does she no longer believe violence is ‘unacceptable’ and ‘must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law’?” Raskin asked. “Does her change of heart have anything to do with wanting to be Trump’s running mate?”Cheney – Stefanik’s predecessor as conference chair – was one of two Republicans who defied party leaders to join the January 6 committee. The other, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, retired. Cheney lost her position and then her Wyoming seat to a Trump-backed rival.Notwithstanding her status as the daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, membership of the Republican establishment and strongly conservative views, she has not come back to the fold.On Tuesday, Stefanik did not immediately comment on Cheney’s “crackpot” remark. More

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      Special counsel to disclose Trump’s phone data at election interference trial

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      Special counsel prosecutors indicated on Monday they will call three expert witnesses at Donald Trump’s trial over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election who could potentially show how January 6 rioters moved on the Capitol in response to the former president’s tweets.The witnesses, according to a three-page filing, involve two experts on geolocation data to show the crowd’s movement during and after Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, and an expert on cellular phone data to testify about when and how Trump’s phone was being used, including over the same time period.Expert 3 will testify that they extracted data from official government phones belonging to Trump and one unnamed individual, how the phones were used in the post 2020 election period, including the websites visited, and when Trump’s phone accessed Twitter during January 6.The fact that the special counsel, Jack Smith, had obtained warrants for Trump’s phone and Trump’s Twitter/X account was disclosed in unsealed court filings. But the description of the anticipated testimony suggested they gathered more granular information than previously known.The notice of expert testimony in Trump’s federal 2020 election interference case – he is also facing a 2020 interference case in Fulton county, Georgia – also reveals how prosecutors intend to deploy the evidence they amassed during the criminal investigation at trial.In recent weeks, prosecutors have made it increasingly clear that they want to make the case that Trump sought to obstruct the January 6 congressional certification of the election results with the rioters by tying him to Capitol attack, as well as through political means.The notice about the subject of the expert witness testimony suggests prosecutors also intend to make the case that Trump – through his action and inaction – simultaneously advanced the physical obstruction of Congress as the Capitol attack progressed.Testimony from the first two geolocation experts will help to “aid the jury in understanding the movements of individuals toward the Capitol area during and after the defendant’s speech at the Ellipse”, the filing said.Still, the filing stopped short of claiming that the experts could definitely say who used the phones at any given moment, likely because Trump often used other people’s phones and had aide Dan Scavino compose tweets for him – something Trump’s defense lawyers are almost certain to focus on.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionProsecutors previously said in the 45-page indictment that they had evidence Trump knew of the significance of impeding the vote certification when he pressured his vice-president, Mike Pence, to interfere, saying he otherwise could not remain president.Trump took steps to obstruct the certification through political means by imploring Pence to accept fake slates of Trump electors to delay proceedings or reject the Biden slates, and asked senators to keep delaying the certification after it was interrupted by the riot. More

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      Mike Johnson to publicly release 44,000 hours of sensitive January 6 footage

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      House speaker Mike Johnson said Friday he plans to publicly release thousands of hours of footage from the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, making good on a promise he made to far-right members of his party when he was campaigning for his current job.“This decision will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials,” Johnson said in a statement.The newly elected speaker said the first tranche of security footage, around 90 hours, will be released on a public committee website Friday, with the rest of the 44,000 hours expected to be posted over the next several months. In the meantime, a public viewing room will be set up in the Capitol.For the last several months, the GOP-led House Administration Committee has made the video available by appointment only to members of the media, criminal defendants and a limited number of other people. The video shows some of the fighting up close and gives a bird’s-eye view of the Capitol complex – one that visitors rarely see – as hundreds of president Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the building, violently attacking police officers and breaking in through windows and doors.By expanding this access to the general public, Johnson is fulfilling one of the pledges he made last month to the most conservative members of his party, including the representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who orchestrated the ouster of the former speaker, Kevin McCarthy. Both Gaetz and Trump – who is currently running for re-election as he faces federal charges for his role in the January 6 attack – applauded Johnson’s decision.In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump congratulated the speaker “for having the courage and fortitude” to release the footage.The move by Johnson will grant the general public a stunning level of access to sensitive and explicit January 6 security footage, which many critics have warned could endanger the safety of staff and Congressmembers in the Capitol complex if it gets into the wrong hands. The hours of footage detail not only the shocking assault rioters made on US Capitol police as they breached the building but also how the rioters accessed the building and the routes lawmakers used to flee to safety.A request for comment from Capitol police was declined.Johnson said Friday that the committee is processing the footage to blur the faces of individuals “to avoid any persons from being targeted for retaliation of any kind”. He added that an estimated 5% of the footage will not be publicly released as it “may involve sensitive security information related to the building architecture”.Gripping images and video from the Capitol attack by Trump supporters have been widely circulated by documentarians, news organizations and even the rioters themselves. But until this year, officials held back much of the surveillance video from hundreds of security cameras stationed in and around the Capitol.In February, McCarthy gave then Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to the footage, a move that Democrats swiftly condemned as a “grave” breach of security with potentially far-reaching consequences.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe conservative commentator aired a first installment to millions of viewers on his prime-time show in the spring, working to bend perceptions of the violent, grueling siege that played out for the world to see into a narrative favorable to Trump.It is all part of a larger effort by Republicans to redefine the narrative around the deadly insurrection after the findings of the House January 6 committee last year. The select committee of seven Democrats and two Republicans spent months painstakingly documenting, with testimony and video evidence, how Trump rallied his supporters to head to the Capitol and “fight like hell” as Congress was certifying his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.The committee’s final report released last December concluded that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol.The panel passed their investigation to the justice department, recommending that federal prosecutors investigate the former president on four crimes, including aiding an insurrection. In August, Trump was indicted on four felony counts for his role in the attack as the justice department accused him of assaulting the “bedrock function” of democracy. More

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      Cassidy Hutchinson left DC amid ‘security concerns’ after January 6 hearings

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      The former Donald Trump White House aide who became a pivotal January 6 witness remembers wanting to make a last-minute run for it before delivering her crucial testimony about the US Capitol attack that the defeated president’s supporters staged.But Cassidy Hutchinson kept her nerve, and the cost of breaking ranks with Trump and his fanatical supporters was steep.“Security protocols and … concerns” forced her out of her Washington DC apartment and into hiding after testifying, she said in an interview airing Sunday at 9am ET.“My life changed – the way that I was living my life – for a while,” Hutchinson told CBS News Sunday Morning. “I could not go back to my apartment. I ended up moving down to Atlanta for several months.”Hutchinson, who was working forMark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, when January 6 occurred, also told CBS that she continues to consider herself a Republican. But she said she is not supporting Trump’s efforts to win the Republican nomination and return to the Oval Office in 2024 as he grapples with more than 90 criminal charges, many stemming from his attempts to overturn his electoral loss to Joe Biden weeks before the Capitol attack.“I would … like to make clear – I would not back the former president of the United States,” Hutchinson remarked to CBS News Sunday Morning’s Tracy Smith during the interview. “He is dangerous for the country. He is willing – and has showed time and time again willingness – to proliferate lies, and to vulnerable American people, so he could stay in power.“To me, that is the most un-American thing that you can do.”Hutchinson gave some of the most dramatic testimony about the Capitol attack during live congressional hearings in the summer of 2022. One key moment she described was how Trump accosted a secret service agent and lunged for the steering wheel of the car the then-president was in when he was told he would not be driven to the Capitol.The Capitol attack carried out by supporters whom Trump had told to “fight like hell” was a desperate but failed maneuver meant to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory over him. The riot has been linked to nine deaths – more than 1,100 people have been charged in connection with the attack, and the majority of them have either pleaded guilty or been convicted by judges or juries.Hutchinson explained Sunday how it was a grueling decision to testify at the January 6 hearings conducted by a special House committee.“I almost ran out of – there’s a little hold room outside the Committee room – that we were about to walk in, and I almost darted,” Hutchinson told the program. “I heard the door click open, and I turned around and I looked at my attorney and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ And I started to walk, and he gently pushed my shoulders. And he said, ‘You can do this.’ And then we walked out.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHutchinson’s interview was meant to promote her memoir Enough, which was published by CBS’s sister company Simon & Schuster and is scheduled for release Tuesday.Enough has already attracted worldwide headlines after the Guardian reported that in it Hutchinson wrote about how she was groped by Rudy Giuliani – the Trump lawyer and former New York City mayor – on the day of the Capitol attack. The book mainly tracks the 27-year-old’s journey from Trump believer to disenchantment with him, echoing some of the comments Hutchinson made to CBS in Sunday’s interview.Giuliani and Trump have pleaded not guilty to charges that they illegally sought to overturn Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory in the state of Georgia. The pair are among 19 people charged in the case brought against state prosecutors based out of Atlanta.Those charges are contained in one of four criminal indictments filed against Trump this year. The others charge him for his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels and other efforts to nullify his 2020 defeat that culminated in the January 6 attack.Trump has denied all wrongdoing and enjoys commanding polling leads over other candidates pursuing the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. More

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      Perverse as it sounds, Donald Trump in a prison cell may be the worst possible outcome | Emma Brockes

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      It seems a long time ago, but there was a brief period, after Joe Biden’s inauguration and before the 6 January hearings and the start of campaigning for next year’s presidential election, when it was possible to avoid Donald Trump for days at a time. He was still there, obviously, wandering the corridors at Mar-a-Lago, Gloria Swanson-style, and posting screeds to Truth Social. But there was no real reason to think about him and, for that short period, he was returned to his essential state: just another person posting unhinged rants online.This is not where Trump is now – in the US, at least. Thanks to a raft of legal actions, culminating earlier this month in the justice department’s arraignment of the former president for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election result, Trump is not only front and centre every day, but in danger of ascending to a new position in the news cycle: political martyr and victim of a witch-hunt. Given the preposterousness of the events leading up to this moment – only recently, a jury found Trump liable for defamation and sexual abuse – it seems inevitable we should find ourselves here.Trump, of course, is keenly aware of the potential in his superficially dire situation and has already leaned fully into it. In campaign stops across the US, and with the threat of jail hanging over him, he is doing the thing we know from experience to be the man’s absolute forte: siphoning the heat and energy from any given charge against him and refracting it back on his enemies. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you,” he told a crowd in New Hampshire on Tuesday. As the New York Times pointed out this week, his new campaign message for the 2024 election is: “I’m being indicted for you”. (A woman at the New Hampshire event told the reporter, nonsensically but with heart: “What, am I next?”)It is an exceedingly weird and insoluble problem. From experience we know that the only blows that land on Trump are either ridicule – recall his face when Obama mocked him, all those years ago, during the White House correspondents’ dinner – or ignoring him. Of the two, only the latter really promises results. In the shocked days after Trump’s election in 2016, I recall that Obama’s moment of mockery was singled out as an example of precisely the kind of leftwing self-indulgence that dislodged the first pebble in Trump’s psychology, and ended in his run for the White House. It is a mistake to take the man seriously; indicting him on four criminal counts of allegedly attempting to overturn a democratic election is the very definition of taking someone seriously. And yet, in a functioning democracy, how on earth might one let this pass?As such, the unfolding of the latest and most serious legal action against Trump highlights a stark divide between the political and judicial rationales for pursuing him. As has already been observed, Trump is on exceedingly thin ice with Moxila A Upadhyaya, the judge who set the terms of his conditions for release pending trial. In the last week, Trump posted what might be construed as vague threats in the direction of any prospective juror (“If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”), raising the possibility of a scenario in which he is yanked to jail and campaigns for the presidency from his cell.There is, in the current climate in the US, nothing pleasing about this image. In fact, with every passing day, and with a perversity no amount of exposure to Trump can ever quite normalise, Trump in jail seems like the worst possible outcome. Campaigning from a prison cell would lend Trump a righteousness exceeding even his present grandiose narrative, and widen the sweep of his supporters by offering them a wildly romantic and dramatic cause to join.What remains so hard to grapple with is that in spite of the deadly seriousness of the events that got us here – it is easy to forget, sometimes, that people died on 6 January – as ever with Trump, one senses the wink behind every gesture. When he tells supporters, as he did in March, “I am your retribution”, his language is like a biblical script with Mel Gibson behind it, a hokey narrative that serves two purposes: it offers a genuine cause for aggrieved supporters to latch on to and, simultaneously, it extends an invitation to join him in a cosmic joke against everyone else. One imagines Trump in jail, his demeanour unchanged, which is to say that of an after-dinner host, smirking and shrugging and rolling his eyes as he says: “I’m like Jesus Christ at this point.”
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York
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      The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s new indictment: America needs this trial | Editorial

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      The indictment served on Donald Trump on Monday marks the beginning of a legal reckoning that is desperately required, if American democracy is to properly free itself from his malign, insidious influence. Mr Trump already faces multiple criminal charges relating to the retention of classified national security documents and the payment of hush money to a porn star. But the gravity of the four counts outlined by the special counsel, Jack Smith, is of a different order of magnitude.Mr Trump stands accused of conspiring, in office, to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Following Joe Biden’s victory, the indictment states, Mr Trump “knowingly” used false claims of electoral fraud in an attempt “to subvert the legitimate election results”. A bipartisan congressional committee report last year came to similar conclusions and provides much of the basis for the charges. But this represents the first major legal attempt to hold Mr Trump accountable for events leading up to and including the storming of the Capitol by a violent mob on 6 January 2021.The stakes could hardly be set higher. Democratic elections and the peaceful transfer of power are the cornerstones of the American republic. The testimony given to Congress indicates that Mr Trump used his authority to try to bully federal and state officials into supporting his claims that the election had been “stolen” from him. Repeatedly told that his assertions were baseless, he then mobilised a hostile crowd on 6 January to intimidate lawmakers charged with ratifying Mr Biden’s victory.It is inconceivable that Mr Trump should not be made to answer for actions that imperilled the constitutional and democratic functioning of the United States. The prosecutors’ case will hinge on their ability to prove that he knew his claims of a stolen election were bogus. But beyond the trial itself, it would be foolish to underestimate Mr Trump’s ability to turn even this situation to his own political advantage.The legal fronts on which Mr Trump is now engaged will drain his financial resources. But a narrative of victimhood and persecution has become, and will remain, the galvanising theme of his campaign. Two previous criminal indictments saw his poll ratings lift, helping him to establish a huge lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination for 2024. Whatever the evidence to the contrary, a sizable proportion of American voters will continue to back Mr Trump’s self-serving version of reality.One of the most dangerously polarising elections in US history thus looms as, over the next 15 months, Mr Trump uses political cunning to evade the legal net that is closing around him. Through his lawyers, he will do all he can to delay matters, hoping eventually to dictate the course of events from the White House. For his part, Mr Smith said on Monday that the justice department will seek “a speedy trial”.It is in the interests of American democracy, to which Mr Trump represents a clear and present danger, that the justice department gets its wish. A healthy body politic cannot allow its founding values and core principles to be trashed with apparent impunity. Prosecutors will need to proceed with care and be alert to the complex political dynamics. But this climactic reckoning in court needs to take place before Mr Trump gets the chance to besmirch the country’s highest office all over again. More