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Florida shooting: ‘White supremacy has no place in US,’ Biden says after killings
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 August 2023, 20:40
Joe Biden declared on Sunday that “white supremacy has no place in America” after three people were killed in a racist shooting in Florida and it emerged that the gunman had been turned away from a historically Black college or university (HBCU) campus moments before opening fire at a discount store.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, on Sunday called the gunman in the attack a “hateful lunatic” and said “we will not allow HBCUs to be targeted”.The FBI is investigating Saturday’s shooting as a hate crime after officials said the attack at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, was racially motivated, and community leaders also expressed horror.A white man, armed with a high-powered rifle and a handgun and wearing a tactical vest and mask, entered the store just before 2pm on Saturday and shot and killed two men and one woman, before fatally shooting himself. All three victims were Black.Waters on Sunday afternoon named the victims, saying that the gunman was caught on video shooting Angela Michelle Carr, a 52-year-old woman, in her car outside the Dollar General. He then entered the store where he shot and killed 19-year-old Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr and Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, 29.Sherri Onks, special agent in charge of the Jacksonville FBI office, said federal officials had opened a civil rights investigation and would pursue the incident as a hate crime.“Hate crimes are always and will always remain a top priority for the FBI because they are not only an attack on a victim, they’re also meant to threaten and intimidate an entire community,” Onks said.Waters, also on Sunday, named the gunman as Ryan Christopher Palmeter, 21, who bought his guns legally and had no criminal history. He lived with his parents in a suburb of Jacksonville and left a suicide note.Palmeter legally purchased his guns despite having been involuntarily committed for a mental health examination in 2017, the Associated Press reported.According to Waters, Palmeter purchased the weapons in April and June, and the dealer had followed all necessary laws and procedures including background checks.Because Palmeter was released after his mental health examination, it would not have appeared on his background check.Waters had already stated on Saturday that the shooter “hated Black people” and left behind “several manifestos” detailing such hatred.“The manifesto is, quite frankly, the diary of a mad man,” Waters said. “He was just completely irrational. But with irrational thoughts, he knew what he was doing. He was 100% lucid.”It emerged that Palmeter had been noticed on Saturday at a private, historically Black college, Edward Waters University (EWU), in Jacksonville, near the library. He was questioned by security there after refusing to identify himself, and turned away, EWU said in a public release. The man drove away and the university said the encounter was then reported to the Jacksonville sheriff’s office.“He had an opportunity to do violence at [Edward Waters] and did not. There were people in very close proximity,” the Associated Press reports Waters saying.EWU announced it would hold a prayer vigil on Sunday evening for the college community “particularly our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and all those impacted by yesterday’s heinous act of racial violence”.The US president, who is a moderate Democrat, issued a statement from the White House on Sunday saying that while many details about the crime were still unknown: “Even as we continue searching for answers, we must say clearly and forcefully that white supremacy has no place in America.”It continued: “We must refuse to live in a country where Black families going to the store or Black students going to school live in fear of being gunned down because of the color of their skin. Hate must have no safe harbor. Silence is complicity and we must not remain silent.”Biden also noted that the shooting had occurred on the same day as a huge demonstration in Washington DC that marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have A Dream speech, which the president called “a seminal moment in our history and in our work towards equal opportunity for all Americans”.He added of Saturday: “But this day of remembrance and commemoration ended with yet another American community wounded by an act of gun violence, reportedly fueled by hate-filled animus and carried out with two firearms.”DeSantis, a candidate for president in the 2024 election on Saturday, called the shooter a “scumbag” and denounced his racist motivation, also calling him a coward for killing himself “rather than face the music”.Speaking at a press conference in Tallahassee on Sunday, DeSantis also said that he promised EWU’s president that the the state will ensure that the school has adequate security.“Perpetrating violence of this kind is unacceptable, and targeting people due to their race has no place in the state of Florida,” DeSantis added.On Sunday, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said that the justice department is “investigating this attack as a hate crime and an act of racially motivated violent extremism”.Speaking to CNN on Sunday morning, Arndrea Waters King, president of the progressive thinktank Drum Major Institute and the wife of Martin Luther King III, said: “Yesterday, the same day when we had almost 200,000 people gathering together to stand for democracy in our country, we saw what happens with hate.”She added: “And for a lot of people that question of why are we coming back together and how different are things from 1963, it unfortunately gave the demonstration of the work and why we are, and where we are, in 2023 compared to 1963, which is not far at all.” More
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America on trial: the charges against Trump will decide the fate of a nation | Martin Kettle
by Evelyn Reynolds 23 August 2023, 16:50
History teaches us few wider lessons. But there are rare exceptions. One of these is that for a nation to put its former leaders on trial is never straightforward. Although such cases are rare, when they do occur they frequently involve the pushing of pre-existing legal boundaries and the reshaping of constitutional norms and assumptions. The evolution of the doctrine of crimes against humanity after the Nuremberg trials in 1945 is the most significant modern example of this.Both at the time they occur and subsequently, the arguments that surround trials of this kind are almost inescapably political to a significant degree. That was true of the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, an event that divided England then; and some of those divisions of the 17th century can still be felt today. But it will unquestionably also be true of the trials of the former US president Donald Trump, of which the latest step is due to be taken in Atlanta on Thursday.It is important to see that this stubborn political reality applies just as much in the Trump cases as in Charles I’s. In part, this is because many will go out of their way to deny it. Trump’s prosecutors – and many of his political critics – will undoubtedly argue that Trump is simply a defendant like any other, and that their cases are designed to show that no one, not even a former president and commander-in-chief, is above the law. They will be adamant that this is not a political trial, and that it is not Joe Biden’s revenge.In some very fundamental senses, they are right about that. The law is not being altered in order to prosecute Trump. The investigations have followed long-established rules. The verdicts are not foregone conclusions. This is neither a witch-hunt nor a show trial. Yet, however true these points and however honourably such claims are made, they cannot be quite the whole story. The two cases are very different, yet in both 1649 and 2023, the indictments against the king and the president take a stand on behalf of a conception of the nation against a leader set on subverting it.Four separate cases against Trump are now on course for trial. The first three sets of allegations cover: falsification of business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money case; withholding of classified federal documents in his Florida home; and attempting to prevent the US Congress from validating Biden’s 2020 election. This week’s case alleges that Trump tried to interfere with the counting and validation of Georgia’s vote for Biden. All four cases are due in court in the first half of 2024, before the presidential election in which Trump aims to be a candidate.All of these cases also contain multiple allegations. Two – the Florida document cases and the US Congress case – will be heard in federal courts. The others have been brought at state level by New York and Georgia. All the charge sheets are extremely detailed. In the documents case, for instance, the indictment now stretches to 60 pages, with Trump facing 40 separate charges. In the 6 January case, the indictment stretches to another 45 pages, and centres on four separate charges.Like it or not, though, these carefully crafted cases take the US into new legal territory. That is not simply because Trump is the first serving or former American president in the nation’s history to face criminal charges. Nor is it even because, being Trump and still running for office, he will treat the courtroom as a political platform. It is also because a large number of the charges, and the way in which the judges and juries will be asked to test them, relate umbilically to his roles as head of state and upholder of the constitution. These cases are a test of the constitution and, in the broadest sense, of the nation.All of these points repeatedly echo aspects of cases from the past. The Trump cases are still, in the end, an attempt to hold a past leader to account and judge him for the way he handled his office. That was also what the cases against earlier rulers were ultimately about too. The indictments against Charles I for his “crimes and treasons” or against Louis XVI of France for having “plotted and formed a multitude of conspiracies to establish tyranny in destroying liberty” are maybe not a world away from those against Trump, after all.Nor is it a world away from the much more recent example of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s trial for treason after the liberation of France in 1945. Pétain was charged with treason for his role as head of the collapsing French government in 1940, when he signed an armistice with Hitler’s invaders, and then as head of the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Germans until the allied victory in 1945. Pétain was tried and convicted in Paris that same summer. His death sentence was immediately commuted to life imprisonment by Charles de Gaulle.As described in Julian Jackson’s masterly recent book, France on Trial, the Pétain case has many differences from those facing Trump, but also some similarities. Pétain was put on trial after a war, not an election. His was an unashamedly political trial. The jury was stacked against him, and the outcome a foregone conclusion.But at the same time it was also the trial of a nation, its recent history, its dilemmas and its sense of itself. It was, in the end, a moment of catharsis for postwar France. It was a trial that had to happen, and it was vitally important for the future of France that the former leader in the dock was not acquitted. For all the many differences between the two cases, the exact same applies to the US on the eve of the Trump trials.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist More
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‘It’s a beast’: landmark US climate law is too complex, environmental groups say
by Evelyn Reynolds 23 August 2023, 13:00
When President Joe Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act a year ago, Adrien Salazar was skeptical.The landmark climate bill includes $60bn for environmental justice investments – money he had fought for, as policy director for the leading US climate advocacy coalition Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJA).But after much discussion, the grassroots group realized they did not have the resources to chase after IRA funding. It would have to hire new staff and develop a specific program to apply for grants to access those funds. The coalition is stretched thin as is: organizing local and state campaigns, leading community engagement, and planning youth programming. GGJA decided it would not apply to funding opportunities at all.“It is not within our capacity to try to build a program that helps our members access federal funding. We just don’t have the capacity to do that,” Salazar said. Many employees lack the time or knowhow to take on grant opportunities.“We’re a national organization. How can we imagine a small organization that’s doing neighborhood, grassroots-level door-knocking to have the capacity to also navigate the federal bureaucracy?”Indeed, many of the small, community-based organizations that would benefit from funding the most are facing hurdles to competing for these investments.Together, their experiences tell a story that echoes other environmental justice experts’ concerns about the IRA – that the monumental spending package won’t assist the communities that need the money the most.Last year, advocates speaking to the Guardian criticized the bill for its many concessions to the fossil fuel industry: “This new bill is genocide, there is no other way to put it,” said Siqiñiq Maupin, co-founder of the Indigenous-led environmental justice group Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic. Salazar felt similarly: how could he trust the federal government to allocate those billions of dollars to communities of color when it still fails to protect them from polluters?Now, a second major criticism has emerged: some groups simply don’t have the time or resources to navigate the complicated bureaucratic process of applying for funding.A year after the law’s passing, various grant deadlines for funding have already come and gone, representing key opportunities many groups may have missed.Applying for funding opportunities – which is no guarantee of success – requires local community groups that are often run by volunteers to prepare an enormous amount of documentation.Lakiesha Lloyd, an organizer who lives and works in Charleston, West Virginia, is still educating herself on how the application process works. She sees the historic climate bill as a lifeline for her predominantly Black community on the West Side where concrete highways crisscross the neighborhood and poor air quality reigns.“We’ve never seen this kind of investment toward climate in our nation’s history,” said Lloyd, who works as a climate justice organizer for the national veterans rights group, Common Defense.Still, she has a lot to learn until she can tap in herself. Instead, she’s relying on a peer partner to help navigate the federal grant-making process.Morgan King, a climate campaign coordinator in West Virginia who has worked with Lloyd, said applying for grants is often easier said than done.“It’s not something that someone can just sit down alone and write within a several-hour time gap,” she said. “The grant application, especially for federal grants, is a beast and requires basically to set aside a week or two of time just focused on it.”This year, King worked with several non-profits to prepare an application for a public health-focused grant program.They had hoped to develop a pilot program on Charleston’s West Side to provide indoor air monitors to income-eligible households. With this data, local advocates could educate community members and engage them in citizen science while also building a case for electrifying homes that currently run on gas.Ultimately, the groups working with King weren’t able to develop an application that felt competitive before the grant deadline hit.“I think had we had a grant writer or more time, we could’ve gotten it there,” King said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn light of these challenges, some critics of the IRA have said their concerns about the spending bill have only deepened.Maria Lopez-Nuñez, a member of the White House environmental justice advisory council, remains wary of whether the money set aside for environmental justice priorities will outweigh the damage done by the legislation’s further investment in fossil fuels.“On one hand, there’s incredible amounts of money out there for communities to actually deal with the issues at hand,” said Lopez-Nuñez. “On the other hand, there are even larger investments in climate scams that are going to hit communities fast and hard,” she added, referring to IRA money set aside for carbon capture and sequestration, as well as hydrogen projects.With more funding, these types environmental harms are exactly the kinds of problems locals groups would be more effective at combating – if only they could access such grants. The federal government has taken notice of this irony and proposed a solution.In April, the Environmental Protection Agency announced the formation of over a dozen regional hubs – better known as TCTACs (pronounced like the mint) – that will aid local community groups attempting to access IRA money.“We know that so many communities across the nation have the solutions to the environmental challenges they face,” said the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, in a statement. “Unfortunately, many have lacked access or faced barriers when it comes to the crucial federal resources needed to deliver these solutions.”In the New York and New Jersey region, for instance, the EPA is funding the national advocacy group We-Act for Environmental Justice, which plans to hire a specialist in government funds and offer grant-writing training and workshops.“Across the federal government, there is no central place you can go to [learn] about the funding opportunities that are available,” said Dana Johnson, senior director of strategy and federal policy for We-Act.Although these hubs are meant to offer more specialized, regional assistance to groups, there are still some concerns as to whether they will be successful owing to the demands that will be made of them; the hub that covers the south-eastern US includes a mammoth territory of eight states.“It’s too soon to know if the IRA will be in any way successful, but it is very clear that the problems that were baked into it are very real and impacting people now,” said Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, a national climate strategist and founder of Climate Critical, an organization working to undo the harm and trauma many climate advocates carry.For Lloyd, the work of unlocking funding sources will continue with or without additional support from the federal government.Since March, she’s been working with King to meet with West Side neighbors and inform them about the IRA – and most importantly, dream with them about the types of projects they want to see emerge from the law’s investments. Together, they have come up with ideas for LED street lights, renewable energy development, green spaces and a farm-to-market grocery store.She’s looking forward to grants opening up and connecting with the technical assistance centers to figure out how to access them. Lloyd remains an optimist. “Optimism is really all we have sometimes,” she said. More
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Joe and Jill Biden land in Hawaii to survey wildfire devastation – live
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 August 2023, 21:39
From 20m agoJoe and Jill Biden have landed on Maui to survey the devastation wrought by recent wildfires. The Bidens are accompanied by Deanne Criswell, the administrator of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Femas).While on the island, the first couple will also meet with first responders and be briefed by state and local officials about the response.Stay tuned to the Guardian’s live blog for updates on the Bidens’ visit.Federal prosecutors are objecting to the April 2026 trial date proposed by lawyers for Donald Trump in the case accusing the former president of scheming to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the Associated Press reports.Defense lawyers said that the far-off date was meant to give prosecutors time to review the 11.5m pages of potential evidence. But prosecutors said much of that material includes duplicate pages or information that is already public like Trump’s social media posts.Prosecutors wrote:
In cases such as this one, the burden of reviewing discovery cannot be measured by page count alone, and comparisons to the height of the Washington Monument and the length of a Tolstoy novel are neither helpful nor insightful; in fact, comparisons such as those are a distraction from the issue at hand – which is determining what is required to prepare for trial.
As part of the agreement, Donald Trump “shall perform no act to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a codefendant or witness”, the court filing shows.The former president cannot make a “direct or indirect threat of any nature” against any codefendant, including through “posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media”.Trump is also prohibited from communicating about the case with any codefendants in the Georgia case except through his lawyer.Donald Trump’s bond in the sweeping Georgia racketeering case has been set for $200,000, according to court filings at Fulton county court.From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Tamar Hallerman:Donald Trump’s legal team has arrived at the Fulton county courthouse where they are expected to meet with district attorney Fani Willis’s office, CNN reported, citing sources.Trump’s lawyers Todd Blanche, Jennifer Little and Drew Findling will be doing the negotiating, according to one source.Trump and several of his codefendants in the Georgia racketeering case are expected to work out the terms of their bond today with the Fulton county DA’s office, the report said.Court filings show Willis has reached a $100,000 bond agreement with former Trump lawyer John Eastman, and a $10,000 bond for bail bondsman Scott Hall.Texas senator Ted Cruz, a former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, appeared on Monday to fall for one of the oldest internet hoaxes, sharing a supposed picture of a shark on a flooded highway in Los Angeles with the remark: “Holy crap.”California does indeed face potentially catastrophic flooding thanks to Storm Hilary, but users of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, were swift to point out that the image Cruz reposted is in fact wholly crap.Had Cruz checked Snopes before posting his remark, he might have noted the site’s description of previous uses of the shark-on-a-highway picture, including in relation to his own state.Cruz did not delete his post. Hours later, he wrote:
I’m told this is a joke. In LA, you never know … And everyone please stay safe from the storm or otherwise.
It was not Cruz’s first flirtation with social media ridicule. In 2017, the senator’s account on the service then known as Twitter “liked” a tweet showing pornographic material. Cruz appeared to blame a staffer.“It was not me, and it’s not going to happen again,” he said.Donald Trump holds a commanding lead over his Republican primary rivals, according to the latest Morning Consult poll, with the former president beating his closest rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, by 44 points.Scott Hall, a bail bondsman who was charged with racketeering and six criminal conspiracy counts relating to a scheme to access voting machines and data in rural Coffee county, has reached a bond agreement with Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, court filings show.In a “consent bond order” listed on the Fulton county court website, Hall agreed to a $10,000 bond, that he will “report to pre-trial supervision every 30 days” and that is barred from communicating with the other 18 defendants in the case.Hall, Cathy Latham and Misty Hampton “aided, abetted, and encouraged” employees from the data solutions firm SullivanStrickler to access voting equipment inside the Coffee county board of elections registration office, according to the indictment handed down by Willis.Donald Trump plans to introduce sweeping new restrictions on immigration and the border if he wins the 2024 presidential election, according to a report.During his tenancy in the White House, Trump built part of a border wall, established strict wealth and health tests for prospective immigrants, and limited asylum. But the former president’s plan would go much further, potentially making it tougher for millions of foreigners to enter or stay in the US, Axios writes.Under Trump’s plans, ideological screening would be ramped up for people legally applying to come into the country, the report says. US law has blocked communists from entering for decades, but it has rarely been enforced, and Trump wants to enforce the law to reject applicants who are deemed “Marxists”, Axios says. Trump would also expand his “Muslim ban” idea to block more people from certain countries from entering the US, according to the report.Under a new Trump administration, the US Coast Guard and Navy would be sent to form a blockade in the waters off the US and Latin America to stop drug-smuggling boats, it says. He will also designate drug cartels as “unlawful enemy combatants” to allow the US military to target them in Mexico, it says, and extend the floating barriers along the Rio Grande.The former president intends to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrations, according to the report. He would also allegedly seek to complete his border wall.Trump adviser Stephen Miller told Axios:
For those passionate about securing our immigration system …… the first 100 days of the Trump administration will be pure bliss – followed by another four years of the most hard-hitting action conceivable.
Donald Trump has already recorded an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the former president plans to use as counterprogramming for the first Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday, NBC News reported, citing sources.It is unclear how and when the interview will be aired. Carlson has been releasing interviews on X, formerly known as Twitter, since he was fired from Fox News earlier this year.Trump senior campaign adviser Jason Miller told the news channel that the former president will be at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, the night of the debate, which will air at 9pm eastern time on Wednesday.John Eastman, a former adviser to Donald Trump who was charged for his alleged role in helping the former president try to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, has agreed to a $100,000 bond in the case, court filings show.In a “consent bond order” listed on the Fulton county court website, Eastman and prosecutors agreed to a $100,000 bond on the charges Eastman is facing, which include racketeering, criminal conspiracy and filing false documents. Eastman’s $100,000 bond order is the first to appear on the Fulton county court website.Under the terms of the order, Eastman “shall report to pre-trial supervision every 30 days”, and “shall perform no act to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a codefendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice”.From CNN’s Kaitlan Collins:In Montana, a judge ruled in favor of young people who allege that the state’s promotion of fossil fuels violates their right to a “clean and healthful environment”, which is guaranteed in the state’s constitution.This case is one of several constitutional climate lawsuits filed on behalf of young people and brought by the nonprofit law firm Our Children’s Trust. There are also four pending lawsuits in other states. One of those cases, brought by Hawaii youth plaintiffs, is set to go to trial in June 2024, attorneys announced this month.The judge’s ruling, if upheld, will compel Montana to consider climate change when deciding whether to approve or renew fossil fuel projects. But it will not stop the state from allowing new fossil fuel infrastructure.Read the entirety of the Guardian’s explainer on the Montana decision here.Donald Trump’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination reacted in mostly muted fashion to his declaration that he will skip all the party’s primary debates, not just the first in Milwaukee on Wednesday.Andrew Romeo, a spokesperson for Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest if distant rival, insisted:
No one is entitled to this nomination, including Donald Trump. You have to show up and earn it.
Among Trump’s Republican rivals, notwithstanding a warning from the rank outsider Will Hurd that “kissing his butt is not going to help you win”, reaction to Trump’s debate avoidance plans remained muted at best.Mike Pence, formerly vice-president to Trump, echoed the chairperson of the Republican National Committee when he told ABC News:
One thing I realised about him is it’s not over till it’s over. So I’m actually still hoping he shows up.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who has gone from wide outsider to contender for second place, aimed a warmup barb at DeSantis when he said:
We don’t need another career politician beholden to the donor class sitting in the White House. Cronyism leads to corruption. The choice for GOP primary voters: Do we want Super Pac puppets? Or patriots who speak the TRUTH?
According to Axios, James Uthmeir, DeSantis’s new campaign manager, used a memo to donors and supporters to warn that the Milwaukee debate would be other candidates’ “biggest chance yet to grab headlines by attacking the governor, so we know they will try their best”. Uthmeir also offered a touch of optimism.“We all know why our competitors have to go down this road,” he said.
Because this is a two-man race for the Republican nomination between Governor DeSantis and Donald Trump.
Donald Trump Jr confirmed he will travel to Wisconsin to attend the first Republican presidential primary debate, even though his father, Donald Trump, said he will not be there.The Trump campaign told the Hill that Trump Jr will be in Milwaukee as a “surrogate” in support of his father’s reelection bid.Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland, said No Labels would “very likely” launch a third-party “alternative” if Donald Trump and Joe Biden are the nominees for their parties in the 2024 presidential election.“f Trump and Biden are the nominees, it’s very likely that No Labels will get access to the ballot and offer an alternative,” Hogan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
If most of the voters don’t want A or B, we have an obligation to give them C, I mean, for the good of the country.
An “overwhelming majority” of Americans are “completely fed up with politics”, said Hogan, who serves as the national co-chairman of No Labels.
They think Washington is broken. And so, even though this normally is not something that we consider and talk about seriously because it hasn’t happened in the past, this is something that could happen.
Today is the cutoff for required set by the Republican national committee (RNC) for candidates who want to take part in Wednesday’s primary debate.To qualify for the 23 August debate, candidates need to have reached at least 1% in three high-quality national polls or a mix of national and early-state polls, between 1 July and 21 August, and a minimum of 40,000 donors, with 200 in 20 or more states. Candidates must also sign a pledge promising to support the party’s ultimate nominee.At least nine candidates appear to have made the cut so far for the first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee, according to a New York Times tracker. Seven candidates have definitely qualified, and they are:
Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota
Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey
Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina
Mike Pence, former vice president
Tim Scott, senator for South Carolina
Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur
Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, said on Sunday that had also met the qualification criteria. Donald Trump, who has said he will not take part in the debate, could qualify but he has not signed the loyalty pledge.But there are two candidates, Miami mayor Francis X Suarez and the businessman Perry Johnson who have said they met the criteria but whose claims have not been corroborated by the RNC.Joe Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, are currently on the way to Maui to comfort survivors of the devastating wildfires that ripped through the western part of the Hawaiian island nearly two weeks ago.The Bidens, who are pausing their vacation in Lake Tahoe, will take a helicopter tour of the burned-out areas. They will then visit Lahaina, a historic town of 13,000 people that was virtually destroyed by the flames, to see the wildfire damage first-hand and meet with first responders.The president will deliver remarks “paying respects to the lives lost and reflecting on the tragic, lasting impacts of these wildfires on survivors and the community,” a White House official said.“I know how profoundly loss can impact a family and a community and I know nothing can replace the loss of life,” Biden said in a statement ahead of the trip.
I will do everything in my power to help Maui recover and rebuild from this tragedy. And throughout our efforts, we are focused on respecting sacred lands, cultures, and traditions.
Biden has faced criticizm among some Republicans and others for his initial response to the Maui fires, after he went several days without speaking about the tragedy while on vacation at his Delaware beach house. The White House said Biden has been leading a “whole of government” effort to help Hawaii recover.Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants in a sprawling racketeering case have until this Friday to surrender to authorities in Atlanta and to be booked at the notorious Fulton county jail, also known as “Rice Street”.The sprawling detention center has a reputation for troubled conditions for inmates. Last month, the justice department launched a civil rights investigation into dilapidated and unsanitary conditions at the jail, as well as violence against detainees. The investigation was sparked in part by the death of LaShawn Thompson, who according to his family was found “eaten alive by insects and bedbugs” in a filthy cell in September 2022.The Fulton county jail suffers from problems with overcrowding, overflowing toilets and faulty air conditioning, according to the Washington Post. Fulton county sheriff Patrick Labat, who oversees the jail and has pushed for funding to replace it, said:
What you’ll see in these wheelbarrows are shanks. Right now, they total over 1,100 shanks. These are pieces of the building that have been ripped apart, fashioned into knives, fashioned into deadly weapons.
Trump and his co-defendants, including Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for the ex-president and former New York City mayor, and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, will be treated like everyone else should they surrender there, according to the local sheriff.That means they will undergo a medical screening, be fingerprinted and have mug shots taken, and could potentially spend time in a holding cell at the jail, according to a New York Times report.Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy said Donald Trump’s decision to skip the first GOP primary debate this week could benefit Joe Biden.“Unfortunately by skipping the debates, Donald Trump may actually be helping Joe Biden because he’s giving Joe Biden an excuse for not debating Donald Trump,” Doocy said on the Fox News program.
That’s one of the things that [Republican National Committee chairwoman] Ronna McDaniel told the former president when she was trying to get him to do the first debate. But he said, ‘Nope, not going to do it.’”
“I don’t know how that would be, though. How could Joe Biden rationalize not going against Donald Trump?” asked co-host Brian Kilmeade.Doocy replied:
Because if Donald Trump says, ‘Everybody knows me, I don’t need to do it,’ then Joe Biden does, ‘Everybody knows me! I’m the president.’ More
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The Camp David summit signals a new cold war – this time with China | Observer editorial
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 August 2023, 05:02
If it sounds like a new cold war and looks like a new cold war, then it probably is a new cold war. For what other interpretation is to be placed on US president Joe Biden’s latest ramping up of diplomatic, economic and military pressure on China?Western officials tend to avoid the term, recalling as it does decades of hair-trigger confrontation with the former Soviet Union. They talk instead about enhanced security and defence cooperation and the importance of a free and open Indo-Pacific region. But such bland generalisations belie the fact that Biden is now pushing back hard at a repressive, authoritarian regime in Beijing that he and many Americans believe is determined to overthrow the international democratic, geopolitical and legal order safeguarded by the US. Last week’s groundbreaking Camp David summit hosted by Biden for Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, and South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, perfectly fitted this agenda. It produced a series of measures aimed squarely at China and its “dangerous and aggressive behaviour”.They include a trilateral mechanism to deal with perceived security threats; expanded military exercises; and increased ballistic missile cooperation – despite the risk that China could retaliate in like fashion or use economic sanctions, as in the past, to punish export-dependent Tokyo and Seoul.For Japan, the Camp David agreement marks another significant stage in its journey away from postwar pacifism towards becoming a fully fledged, fully armed member of the US-led western democratic alliance. It will add to Tokyo’s sense of growing confrontation with China.For South Korea, the trilateral pact may come to be seen as the moment it finally moved on from the bitter feud with Japan over the latter’s 20th-century colonisation of the peninsula. Credit is due to Yoon, who has taken to describing Tokyo as a “partner” with shared values and interests.Biden’s success in bringing old enemies together is a notable achievement, too. He is hoping to pull off a similar feat with Israel and Saudi Arabia. The contrast with Donald Trump’s fatuous attempts to woo Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s nuclear-armed dictator, is striking.Improved three-way cooperation in facing down the threat posed by Pyongyang may be another benefit of Camp David. Defying UN sanctions, Kim has stepped up his intimidatory missile “tests” this year. China, disappointingly, has done little to stop him. Beijing’s ally, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, is positively encouraging him.While US officials are careful how they frame the new agreement, China is in no doubt it is aimed directly at itself. It follows Biden’s upgrading of the so-called Quad, which groups the US, India, Japan and Australia; the creation of Aukus, a security pact with Australia and the UK; and a raised US naval and air force profile in the Philippines, South China Sea and around Taiwan. In another message to Beijing, Biden will visit India next month.The numerous, ill-judged actions of President Xi Jinping’s regime have brought much of this down on its own head. Nevertheless, Beijing blames the west whose nefarious aim, it says, is containment designed to stifle China’s development. State media described Camp David as the launch of a “mini Nato” that will threaten regional security and exacerbate tensions.US officials reject the analogy. But the claim brings us back to the question of a new cold war. China evidently believes one has already begun. Is this really what Biden, the UK and regional allies want? If that is the case, they should have the courage to say so in terms – and explain what they plan to do if it turns “hot”. More
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US hails ‘new era’ of Asia Pacific relations as Biden hosts historic summit with Japan and South Korea – live
by Eliana Willis 18 August 2023, 15:06
From 40m agoJoe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries amid a recent thaw in ties between Japan and Korea.The US has promised to usher in a “new era” in relations with its most important allies in Asia, as the region struggles to address the threat posed by an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.The leaders are also expected to detail plans to invest in technology for a three-way crisis hotline and offer an update on the progress the countries have made in sharing early-warning data on missile launches.Kishida, before departing Tokyo for Washington on Thursday, called the summit a “historic occasion to bolster trilateral strategic cooperation based on our stronger-than-ever bilateral relations with the United States and South Korea”.US officials are confident that its two main allies in the region, Japan and South Korea, share Washington’s view on most global issues, although a joint statement is expected to stop short of directly referring to China to reflect South Korean reservations about openly criticising Beijing.“Japan and South Korea are core allies – not just in the region, but around the world,” the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said this week, adding that Biden’s summit would “mark what we believe is a new era in trilateral cooperation”.Blinken said he expected a continued focus on North Korea “given the endless provocation it’s taken” but added that the meeting would address a “much more expansive agenda”.China has denounced the summit, saying it “opposes relevant countries forming various cliques and their practices of exacerbating confrontation and jeopardising other countries’ strategic security.”Foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said this week:
We hope the countries concerned will go with the trend of the times and do something conducive to regional peace, stability and prosperity.
A standalone summit bringing together the leaders of Japan and South Korea would have been almost unthinkable just over a year ago, when the north-east Asian neighbours were embroiled in disputes over their bitter wartime legacy.Bilateral ties were at a low point before the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, took office in May 2022, due to compensation claims by Koreans over Japan’s use of forced labour during its 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula, and the longstanding controversy over Korean women who were coerced into working in Japanese military brothels.Yoon, a conservative, and the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, appear to have resolved the forced labour dispute and established a warm relationship that has included a joint visit to a memorial to Korean victims of the Hiroshima atomic bombing when the city hosted the G7 summit in May.This week, Yoon described Japan as a “partner” with shared values and interests, as his county marked the 78th anniversary of its liberation from 35 years of Japanese colonial rule.The thaw in ties has been greeted with relief in Washington as it attempts to present a united regional front against Chinese military activity near Taiwan and North Korea’s development of more powerful weapons of mass destruction in defiance of UN-led sanctions.“Suffice it to say, this is a big deal,” National security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Friday shortly before the formal start of the daylong summit.
It is a historic event, and it sets the conditions for a more peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific, and a stronger and more secure United States of America.
Friday’s summit will be the first time Joe Biden has used Camp David to host international leaders.Joe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries amid a recent thaw in ties between Japan and Korea.The US has promised to usher in a “new era” in relations with its most important allies in Asia, as the region struggles to address the threat posed by an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.The leaders are also expected to detail plans to invest in technology for a three-way crisis hotline and offer an update on the progress the countries have made in sharing early-warning data on missile launches.Kishida, before departing Tokyo for Washington on Thursday, called the summit a “historic occasion to bolster trilateral strategic cooperation based on our stronger-than-ever bilateral relations with the United States and South Korea”.The US justice department is seeking 33 years in prison for Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy in one of the most serious cases to emerge from the attack on the US Capitol to block the transfer of presidential power in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump in the White House after he lost the 2020 election, according to court documents.The sentence, if imposed, would be by far the longest punishment that has been handed down in the massive prosecution of the riot on 6 January 2021. The Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in a separate case, has received the longest sentence to date – 18 years.Tarrio, who was not at the Capitol riot itself, was a top target of what has become the largest justice department investigation in American history. He led the neo-fascist group – known for street fights with leftwing activists – when Trump infamously told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his first election debate with Democrat Joe Biden.During the months-long trial, prosecutors argued that the Proud Boys viewed themselves as foot soldiers fighting for Trump as the Republican spread lies that Democrats stole the election from him, and were prepared to go to war to keep their preferred leader in power.“They unleashed a force on the Capitol that was calculated to exert their political will on elected officials by force and to undo the results of a democratic election,” prosecutors wrote in their filing on Thursday.
The foot soldiers of the right aimed to keep their leader in power. They failed. They are not heroes; they are criminals.
A judge declared Donald Trump had filed a “frivolous” appeal from his decision not to dismiss the first of writer E Jean Carroll’s two defamation lawsuits against him.US district judge Lewis Kaplan criticized the former president’s “delay” tactics, writing in a 17-page ruling:
This case was largely stalled for years due in large part to Mr Trump’s repeated efforts to delay, which are chronicled in the Court’s prior decisions.
Donald Trump said he had canceled a press conference scheduled for next week in which he claimed he would release a report containing new “evidence” of fraud in the state of Georgia during the 2020 presidential election.The former president, who was charged in Georgia last week with conspiring to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, said on Thursday that his lawyers would prefer putting his allegations in court filings instead.Trump, posting on his social media platform, Truth Social, wrote:
Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings.
Trump had claimed on Tuesday that he would publish a 100-page report at the event, which was due to be held on Monday in Bedminister, New Jersey, that would exonerate him.No compelling evidence of wide-scale fraud has emerged in the two-and-a-half years since the election in Georgia or elsewhere, despite Trump’s baseless claims.Twice impeached and now indicted in four cases: Donald Trump faces serious criminal charges in New York, Florida, Washington and Georgia over a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election, his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.As Trump prepares for those cases to go to trial, the former president is also confronting a verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E Jean Carroll. A New York jury awarded Carroll, who accused Trump of assaulting her in 1996, $5m in damages.Here is where each case against Trump stands:Lawyers for Donald Trump asked the judge overseeing his federal election interference trial to push back the start date to April 2026, nearly 18 months after the next presidential election.The lawyers filed the request to US district court judge Tanya Chutkan, after Trump was indicted earlier this month on charges that he conspired to defraud the United States, conspired to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructed an official proceeding and engaged in a conspiracy against rights.Federal prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith had proposed to schedule the trial for the start of January 2024, saying there was a significant public interest in expediting the prosecution.“A January 2 trial date would vindicate the public’s strong interest in a speedy trial,” prosecutors wrote.
It is difficult to imagine a public interest stronger than the one in this case in which the defendant – the former president of the United States – is charged with three criminal conspiracies.
In their court filing on Thursday, Trump’s attorneys argued a years-long delay was necessary due to the “massive” amount of information they will have to review and because of scheduling conflicts with the other criminal cases Trump is facing.
If we were to print and stack 11.5 million pages of documents, with no gap between pages, at 200 pages per inch, the result would be a tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky. That is taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Lawyers for former president Donald Trump asked the judge presiding over his federal 2020 election interference case to schedule his trial for April 2026 – more than two and a half years from now.In a 16-page filing on Thursday, the lawyers argued that putting Trump on trial this coming January – as federal prosecutors have requested – would mark a “rush to trial” that would violate his constitutional rights and be “flatly impossible” given the extraordinary volume of discovery evidence they will have to sort through. Trump’s lawyers wrote:
The government’s objective is clear: to deny President Trump and his counsel a fair ability to prepare for trial.
Special counsel Jack Smith is expected to oppose the April 2026 start date, which would put the trial long after the 2024 presidential election, in which Trump is the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination. US district court judge Tanya Chutkan has said she wants to set a trial date at her next scheduled hearing on 28 August.Meanwhile, Joe Biden will welcome his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David today for the first-ever trilateral summit with the three countries, as the US hopes to cement ties with its two most important allies in Asia amid an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.Washington’s ties with Tokyo and Seoul are “stronger than they have been at any point in modern memory”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at a Friday briefing, as he confirmed the US will announce “significant steps to enhance trilateral security cooperation” including new collaborations on missile defence and technology when the three leaders meet for their first standalone summit.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
11am: Joe Biden will welcome the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, to Camp David for a trilateral summit.
3pm: Biden, Yoon and Kishida will hold a joint press conference.
6pm: Biden will leave Camp David for Andrews, where he will fly to Reno
The House and Senate are out. More
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Trump’s latest indictment leads to fears of rise in calls for violence – live
by Eliana Willis 17 August 2023, 14:55
After news broke on Monday night of Donald Trump’s indictment in Fulton county, Georgia, attention quickly turned to the possible spectacle of a trial unfolding on television as a former president attempts to rebut charges of racketeering and conspiracy over his efforts to overturn the results of an election.But before the district attorney Fani Willis can have the opportunity to make her case against Trump with the cameras rolling, she must first clear a key procedural hurdle to keep the case in Fulton county.Trump’s legal team is expected to rely on a little known legal statute to argue the case should be moved to federal court, and that jurisdictional question could delay a trial for months. The stakes of that procedural fight will be high, as a conviction in Fulton county would leave Trump facing years of prison time with no clear pathway to a pardon.Read the full story here.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, dismissed the suggestion that she is running in the 2024 GOP presidential race in order to become the vice president.In an interview with Politico, Haley said:
I think everybody that says, ‘She’s doing this to be vice president,’ needs to understand I don’t run for second.
That’s something that I hear all the time, and I’ll tell you that, look, we have a country to save, and I don’t trust anybody else to do it.
Donald Trump’s legal advisers have urged the former president not to hold a press conference next week in response to his latest indictment, according to an ABC report. Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Tuesday that he would present a “report” to refute the allegations in the indictment handed up by the Fulton country district attorney’s office from his home in Bedminster, New Jersey.But the press conference, originally scheduled for 11am Monday, is now very much in doubt, multiple sources told ABC.
Sources tell ABC News that Trump’s legal advisers have told him that holding such a press conference with dubious claims of voter fraud will only complicate his legal problems and some of his attorneys have advised him to cancel it.
The names, photographs and home addresses purportedly belonging to members of the Fulton county grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and 18 of his co-defendants this week are circulating on social media.The grand jurors’ purported addresses were posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC reported on Wednesday.The indictment issued on Monday includes the names of all the grand jurors who served on the 26-member panel in Fulton county, but not their addresses or other personal information.Websites where the purported photographs, social media profiles and home addresses of the grand jurors included pro-Trump forums and sites that have previously been linked to violent extremist attacks, according to a CNN report. In some cases, users have posted social media profiles of different people who have the same name as some of the grand jurors, while some addresses appear to be wrong, the report said.The rightwing extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has not made up her mind about running for Senate in Georgia – in part because she hopes to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.“I haven’t made up my mind whether I will do that or not,” Greene told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, about a rumoured challenge to the current governor, Brian Kemp, in a Georgia Senate primary in 2026.
I have a lot of things to think about. Am I going to be a part of President Trump’s cabinet if he wins? Is it possible that I’ll be VP?
Despite a string of controversies over voicing conspiracy theories, aggressive behaviour towards Democrats and progressives and recent squabbling with her fellow House extremist Lauren Boebert, and despite being “kicked out” of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Greene remains influential in Republican ranks, close to the speaker, Kevin McCarthy.She told the AJC she would consider it an “honour” to be picked as Trump’s running mate to take on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris next year. She would consider such an offer “very, very heavily”, she said.Trump has encouraged Greene to harbour higher ambitions, saying in March he would “fight like hell” for her if she ran for Senate.Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, has personally appealed to the former president to pay his ballooning legal bills, according to a CNN report. The former New York mayor traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in late April, along with his lawyer Robert Costello, where they had two meetings with Trump to discuss Giuliani’s seven-figure legal fees, the report said, citing a source.Giuliani and Costello made several pitches about how paying Giuliani’s bills was ultimately in Trump’s best interest, but the former president did not seem interested, the source said.The source said Trump verbally agreed to help with some of Giuliani’s bills but did not commit to any specific amount or timeline. He also agreed to attend two fundraisers for Giuliani, a separate source said.Giuliani is facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills and sanctions amid numerous lawsuits related to his work for Trump after the 2020 election.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges against Donald Trump in the 2020 Georgia election subversion case were made public on Monday night.The former president’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton county commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago.
I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe.
As Willis’s investigation approached its climax, Trump intensified his personal attacks on her through social media. He has accused her of prosecutorial misconduct and even of being racist herself.Willis, who on Wednesday said she wants to take the case to trial in March 2024, has rebuffed Trump’s claims as “derogatory and false”.Trump has also unleashed a barrage of vitriol against Jack Smith, the special counsel who earlier this month brought four federal charges against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has referred to the prosecutor, who is white, as “Deranged Jack Smith”.Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would be exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.“They never went after those that Rigged the Election,” Trump wrote.
They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!
Willis is African American. So too are the two New York-based prosecutors who have investigated Trump, the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted him in April over alleged hush-money payments, and Letitia James, the state attorney general who is investigating Trump’s financial records.Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case, warned the former president last week to refrain from making statements that could intimidate witnesses or prejudice potential jurors.Just a day before Abigail Jo Shry allegedly left a voicemail message threatening to kill Chutkan, Trump had posted on his social media platform, Truth Social: writing “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”Trump has specifically posted about Chutkan since she was randomly assigned to oversee his 2020 election case. On Monday, the former president said she “obviously wants me behind bars” and described her as “very biased and unfair”.Chutkan has reportedly been assigned extra security by the US marshals service in recent weeks, and CNN reported observing more security detailed to the judge around the Washington DC federal courthouse.A Texas woman was arrested on charges that she threatened to kill US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the prosecution of former president Donald Trump on allegations that he tried to overturn the 2020 election.Abigail Jo Shry, 43, of Alvin, Texas, called the federal courthouse in Washington DC on 5 August and left the threatening voicemail message, using a racist slur, according to court documents.In the call, Shry told the judge: “You are in our sights, we want to kill you,” according to the documents. Prosecutors allege Shry also said: “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you.”Investigators traced the phone number and Shry later admitted to making the threatening call, according to a criminal complaint.Shry is charged with Transmission in Interstate or Foreign Commerce of any Communication Containing a Threat to Injure the Person of Another. She is being held in detention pending trial, according to court documents, and a bond hearing has been set for 13 September.Good morning, US politics blog readers. A Texas woman has been charged with threatening to kill the federal judge presiding over former president Donald Trump’s criminal case in Washington DC over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.Abigail Jo Shry, 43, left a voicemail at US district judge Tanya Chutkan’s chambers on 5 August in which she used a racial slur and threatened her, saying “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch”, according to a court document. She also allegedly threatened to kill “all democrats in Washington DC and all people in the LGBTQ community”, according to the court filing.On the day before the threatening phone call, Trump had posted on his social media platform, Truth Social: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” The former president has intensified attacks against those individuals involved in the many indictment against him, including Chutkan and Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who is prosecuting him over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word. Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms, and Willis – who is African American – has faced a flurry of racist online abuse.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges were made public on Monday night. The purported names and addresses of members of the Georgia grand jury that indicted Trump and 18 of his allies were posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC News reported.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
10am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will get his daily intelligence briefing.
11.25am: Biden will leave for Andrews, where he will fly to the Wilkes-Barre Scranton Airport.
12.35pm: Biden will travel to Avoca, Pennsylvania, where he will pay respects to the state’s former first lady Ellen Casey in advance of a viewing.
2.10pm: Biden will fly to Hagerstown, Maryland, for Camp David.
The House and Senate are out. More
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Biden says landmark climate bill is winning against special interests – as it happened
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 August 2023, 20:14
From 2h agoPresident Joe Biden has started his speech marking the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, which he described as “one of the most significant laws … of taking on a special interest and winning”.Biden begins thanking Vice-President Kamala Harris and members of Congress who played a “pivotal” role in getting the bill passed. “Everyone was telling us there’s no possibility with the divided Congress the way it was,” he said.Here’s a recap of today’s developments:
President Joe Biden used the first anniversary of his signature Inflation Reduction Act to pitch the landmark clean-energy law as an economic powerhouse to an American public that remains largely unaware of its contents. Speaking at a White House ceremony, Biden said the legislation has already created 170,000 clean energy jobs and will create some 1.5m jobs over the next decade, while significantly cutting the nation’s carbon emissions.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Maui on Monday to survey damage from the deadly wildfires that ravaged the resort town of Lahaina last week. The Bidens will meet with survivors of the fires, as well as first responders and other government officials, the White House said.
Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has proposed a trial commencement date of 4 March 2024 for Trump and his 18 co-defendants. That would have Trump in court mid-campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Willis is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word. Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges against Trump in the Georgia case were made public on Monday night.
Former vice-president Mike Pence said the Georgia election was not stolen in 2020 and that “no one is above the law” after Trump was indicted in the state’s election subversion case. Pence’s remarks were his first since the indictment was handed down on Monday, and mark a new full-court press in recent days surrounding his certification of the 2020 election results.
Trump’s dubious defense that he was exercising his free-speech rights in response to a four-count federal criminal indictment charging him with pushing illegal schemes to overturn his 2020 election loss is prompting ex-Department of Justice officials and scholars to criticize such claims as bogus and as threats to the rule of law.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election obtained a trove of direct messages that the former president sent to others privately through his Twitter account, according to newly unsealed court documents. A court filing last week showed federal prosecutors obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant. The social media platform delayed complying, prompting a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.
Americans are deeply divided along party lines in their views of Trump’s actions in the most recent criminal cases brought against him, according to a new poll.
We reported earlier that the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has proposed that Donald Trump’s trial on election interference charges start on 4 March 2024.Willis’s suggested date is just one day before Super Tuesday, when 15 states are scheduled to hold primaries or caucuses to select their 2024 candidates.Willis submitted her recommendation in a court filing which also requested arraignment for the defendants charged in the Georgia election case to take place during the week of 5 September.Trump is set to be on trial in New York on 25 March 2024 on separate charges connected to a $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels, a porn star, with whom he is alleged to have had an extramarital affair.He is also set to go on trial in Florida in May on charges of retaining classified documents after leaving office.The US has faced some tough times in recent years, Biden says. Despite this, he says the economy is stronger and better than any other industrial nation in the world right now.He accuses Republicans of having repeatedly tried to repeal key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, and of taking credit for private investments and the jobs coming into their states. “That’s OK,” he says. “I’m proud of the historic law my administration passed, but it’s not about me. It’s about you.”
Bidenomics is just another way of saying restore the American dream.
Biden says the US is investing more than $50bn to build up resilience to the impacts of climate change. He vows to cut carbon pollution by half by 2030.The Inflation Reduction Act is helping families save thousands of dollars in energy bills every year, he says. Consumers will save an estimated $27bn in electric bills between now and 2030, he says.
When I say climate means jobs, I mean good paying union jobs.
Biden says his administration is also boosting the nation’s energy security after years in which China dominated the clean energy supply chains.He says the time is over in which the answer has been to find the cheapest labor, and then to import the product from abroad. “Not any more,” he says. “We are building it here and sending the product over here.”The Inflation Reduction Act is projected to help triple wind power and increase solar power eightfold by 2030, he says.Biden says the Inflation Reduction Act is bringing jobs back to the US.
We’re leaving nobody behind. We’re investing in all of America, in the heartland and coast to coast.
The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has proposed a trial commencement date of 4 March 2024 for Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case.Willis also asked to schedule arraignments for the defendants for the week of 5 September, according to a court filing.Biden says more jobs have been created in the two years since he took office than any administration has in a single four-year term.The US has more jobs than before the pandemic, he says, and workers are finding better, higher-paying and higher-satisfaction jobs.Meanwhile, unemployment and inflation are down, he says. He attributes inflation falling to “corporate profits coming back down to earth”.President Joe Biden has started his speech marking the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, which he described as “one of the most significant laws … of taking on a special interest and winning”.Biden begins thanking Vice-President Kamala Harris and members of Congress who played a “pivotal” role in getting the bill passed. “Everyone was telling us there’s no possibility with the divided Congress the way it was,” he said.As we wait for Joe Biden to take the stage, here is some lunchtime reading on the Georgia election investigation.As part of Georgia district attorney Fani Willis’s delivery of a 41-count indictment against former president Donald Trump and 18 others, the racketeering charge also lists 30 “unindicted co-conspirators”.Here is the Guardian’s explainer on those individuals and their involvement in the alleged 2020 presidential election fraud:President Joe Biden is set to deliver an address at approximately 2.30pm on the anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act.We will bring you the latest updates of Biden’s remarks.It is the nature of conspiracy theories to turn tragedy into grist, to transform grief and human suffering into an abstract game. The latest horrifying example came out of news late July that Barack Obama’s chef Tafari Campbell had drowned in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard.What was a terrible accident and a tragic loss for Campbell’s family and friends was almost immediately seized upon by the paranoid corners of the internet as proof that somehow Barack and Michelle Obama had been involved in an assassination.It was not the first time that conspiracists have seized on a senseless death as proof of a deeper plot: the 1993 suicide of Vince Foster, lawyer in the Clinton White House, and the murder of the DNC staffer Seth Rich during the 2016 presidential campaign were both used as proof of a “Clinton body count” by the right wing, a playbook that was immediately resurrected as news of Campbell’s death broke. The difference was that those earlier conspiracy theories were focused almost entirely on the Clintons, while the current iteration is far more diffuse and its targets far more wide-reaching.Campbell’s death, these conspiracists claim, is not just proof of the Obamas’ criminality but of a massive network of treasonous child sex traffickers – an elaborate and convoluted narrative all too well known to us now as QAnon. QAnon appeared in 2017 and quickly spread through the far right, before beginning to wane in the wake of Joe Biden’s inauguration.But it hasn’t disappeared entirely, and understanding the conspiracy theory’s rise and fall – and the awful legacy it has left us – reveals a great deal about the modern landscape of partisan paranoia. It also offers some clues on how best to fight back.Read the full story here.Donald Trump is testing the limits of what the federal judge presiding over his 2020 election subversion case will tolerate after warning the former president against making inflammatory remarks.US district court judge Tanya Chutkan last week admonished Trump against violating the conditions of his release put in place at his arraignment, warning that inflammatory remarks from the former president would push her to schedule the trial sooner.Trump immediately tested that warning by posting on Truth Social messages that largely amplified others criticizing Chutkan. “She obviously wants me behind bars. VERY BIASED & UNFAIR,” Trump wrote on Monday.Trump has waged a similarly defiant campaign against others involved in criminal cases against him, including special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, the New York Times reported.
Some lawyers have said that if Mr. Trump were an ordinary citizen issuing these attacks, he would be in jail by now. The question is whether Mr. Trump will face consequences for this kind of behavior ahead of a trial.
‘He is absolutely in my view testing the judge and testing the limits, almost daring and taunting her,’ said Karen Agnifilo, who has a three-decade legal career, including as the chief assistant in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Ms. Agnifilo added that Mr. Trump is so far benefiting from his status as a candidate for office, facing fewer repercussions from the judges in the cases than other vocal defendants might.
Trump could be found in violation of the conditions of his release, which could entail a fine or even being sent to jail, the report writes.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges against Donald Trump in the Georgia case were made public on Monday night.Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia, and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton county commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago. She said:
I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe.
As Willis’s investigation approached its climax, Trump intensified his personal attacks on her through social media. He has accused her of prosecutorial misconduct and even of being racist herself.Willis has rebuffed his claims as “derogatory and false”.Trump has also unleashed a barrage of vitriol against Jack Smith, the special counsel who earlier this month brought four federal charges against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has referred to the prosecutor, who is white, as “Deranged Jack Smith”.The judge in the federal case, Tanya Chutkan, has warned him to be careful not to make inflammatory public comments about the proceedings, saying she would “take whatever measures are necessary” to prevent intimidation of witnesses or contamination of the jury pool.Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.“They never went after those that Rigged the Election,” Trump wrote.
They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!
Willis is African American. So too are the two New York-based prosecutors who have investigated Trump, the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted him in April over alleged hush-money payments, and Letitia James, the state attorney general who is investigating Trump’s financial records.Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.The attorney representing Donald Trump in his Georgia case once donated to the campaign of Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who filed charges against the former president on Monday.Drew Findling, who is on the team of lead Trump attorneys fighting against Rico charges in Georgia, has backed several Democrats, including donating $1,440 to Willis’ successful primary campaign in July 2020, Federal Election Commission records obtained by Rolling Stone reveal.Findling also donated $8,400 to Joe Biden’s winning campaign, records show.Findling is an attorney who has represented rap artists like Gucci Mane, Migos and Cardi B. He also has tweeted critically of Trump, calling him in 2018 “the racist architect of fraudulent Trump University”. More

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